01.30.13
War, reporting and entertainment
Yesterday I was reading Howard K. Smith’s “Last Train from Berlin,” published in 1941 before this country entered the war. It’s an exceptional piece of reporting on the Nazi capitol just as it was beginning to sink in to the people of Germany that Hitler was not going to win the war and the day of reckoning, when it arrived, would be terrible. It eloquently captures the bleakness of Nazi Germany and a growing fear among its citizens.
Entertainment died in Nazi Germany because the best of it involves telling the truth. But truth was forbidden. And most of the country’s artistic talent had either been driven out, imprisoned or killed.
This caused a crash in movie attendance. Smith writes about German movies made to glorify the war effort. And one he picks to describe has some resonance when compared with the US taste for war movies during the last decade — which is nonexistent. The recent thing involving the good guys (or woman) torturing a bad guy and the hunt for bin Laden.
Wrote Smith:
The [German propaganda films] can be exhaustively described by a five-letter word. Lousy. Take the one called “Stukas.” It was a monotonous film about a bunch of obstreperous adolescents who dive-bombed things and people. They bombed everything and everybody. That was all the whole film was — just one bombing after another. Finally the hero gets bored with bombing and lost interest in life. So they took him off to the Bayreuth music festival, where he listened to a few lines of Wagnerian music, his soul began to breathe again, he got visions of the Fuhrer and guns blazing away, so he impolitely left right in the middle of the first act and dashed back and started bombing things again, with the old gusto.
That’s wonderful writing. And the entire piece is like that.
Americans no more want to see movies from Iraq, Afghanistan, wherever, than the people of Berlin wanted to see “Stukas” in the autumn of 1941. What, a real movie called “Day of the Drones,” showing the remote pilots between flying missions in a windowless building and returning to their tract homes in the suburbs, would have an audience?
And it made me think about why I also detest the journalism that has evolved to cover the war on terror and the technology of America’s national security industry. Because it’s all like “Stukas” must have been. Deadening and stupid.
Even when its young reporters work in some pallid snark, between the lot they never come up with anything even remotely as supercilious or appropriate as what’s in Last Train from Berlin.
The reasons for that have always been fairly obvious. They can’t have the natsec biz and the Pentagon thinking they’re combative.
“The only things that are not trash are their guns, which are handsome and terrifying,” writes Smith of the arms in Berlin. “The biggest and handsomest [are] anti-aircraft cannon mounted on a tower which, itself looks like a fantastic monstrosity from a lost world, or another planet. It is huge and positively frightening just to look at (Nazis like to hear it described this way; they are specialists in fright propaganda. But the world has now advanced beyond the stage of being frightened in any decisive way by anything the Nazis do or create.)”