Rocketman: Inside Elton John

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20th Century America, 20th Century Europe, Elton John, Homosexuality, Rocketman, Taron Edgerton

This past semester has just been exhaustingly busy, so I haven’t watched a lot of historical films, much less had any time to blog about them. But I did get an opportunity to watch Rocketman (2019, dir. Dexter Fletcher) recently and found its approach to historical storytelling interesting. So I wanted to make a quick post about it.

The film focuses on the life of Elton John from his childhood in post-war Britain to his getting sober in the 1980s. Between those two point, he of course became one of the biggest musical artists of the century (he is currently the fourth-best-selling performer, behind the Beatles, Rihanna, and Michael Jackson). The film opens with John (Taron Edgerton), dressed in a devil stage costume, walking into something like an AA meeting (but with a therapist). His conversation (mostly a monologue, really) in the group serves as the frame-tale for his life story, told in roughly chronological order. It doesn’t shy away from either his drug use or his sexuality. (In fact, the film contains the first full-out gay sex scene ever included in a major Hollywood film.)

The film, which John himself worked to bring to screen, does something quite refreshing for an historical biopic. While the film broadly sticks to the fact of John’s life and career, it doesn’t really try to present them in a standard factual narrative. Instead, at key emotional and career moments, John and the characters around him start singing his music, sometimes turning songs into duets, dance numbers, and the like.

The result is a film that tries to convey not precisely the facts so much as what it felt like to be Elton John. John’s childhood is expressed through “I Want Love”, sung by young John (Kit Connor), his rather self-centered mother Shiela (Bryce Dallas Howard), his distant and cold father Stanley (Steven Mackintosh) and his more attentive grandmother Ivy (Gemma Jones), who recognizes his talent and helps him get a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music. His first performance at an English pub when he’s 15 turns into the Bollywood-inspired dance number “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting.” When he gives his first American performance, “Crocodile Rock”, both he and the audience levitate off the ground, giving a sense of the transcendent feeling a great rock performance can create. “Rocketman” is used to convey his sense of profound unhappiness and isolation at the height of his stardom. His eventual sobriety is marked at the end of the film with “I’m Still Standing.” The result is a biopic that is more like a stage musical than a conventional Hollywood biopic.

Although the film roughly follows the facts, it departs from chronology in one very important way. The songs performed bear no chronological relationship to the moments they are used to illustrate in the film. For example, “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” was released in 1973, but is used to depict John’s first public performance in 1962. His first American performance was in 1970, but “Crocodile Rock” wasn’t written until 1972. “I’m Still Standing” was not written while he was in rehab. So the film subordinates the chronology of John’s music to the goal of expressing John’s inner life, which is sometimes larger than life and sometimes deeply lonely.

Some of the people in John’s life have objected to the film’s characterization of key characters. His half-brothers have objected to John’s depiction of Stanley as cold and distant, asserting that Stanley had a much better relationship with John in his teen years than the film offers. The film depicts Sheila as basically too self-centered to appreciate her son’s remarkable musical talents, when in fact she was consistently supportive of him. But if the film is seeking to express John’s inner life rather than the strict objective facts these deviations are less problematic. John may have felt unloved even if his father was more loving than the film presents him as.

The film also does something quite nice during the closing credits. Throughout the film John performs in a range of increasingly outrageous outfits, including as Queen Elizabeth I. The closing credits include side-by-side comparisons of the film’s version of various outfits with photos of the actual outfits they were based on. While the film exaggerates the outfits slightly, in general the costumes hew fairly closely to the facts.

Taron Edgerton in one of the film’s more flamboyant costumes

Overall, Rocketman takes a clever and insightful approach to a work-horse genre and finds something rather new in it. It does a good job conveying the spirit of John’s music and is definitely worth a look.

Want to Know More? 

Elton John’s autobiography is Me: Elton John

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Babylon Berlin: The Black Reichswehr

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20th Century Europe, 20th Century Germany, Babylon Berlin, Black Reichswehr, Erich Ludendorff, Fritz Thyssen, Military Stuff, Weimar Republic

One of the major plots in the second season of Babylon Berlin is a plot to overthrow the Weimar Republic and return Kaiser Wilhelm II to power. It revolves around a coterie of military and former military officers who are working with a wealthy industrialist to build a covert air force in the Soviet Union. Is there any basis for any of this?

Yes, quite a bit.

 

The Shadow of the Great War

The German military in the 1920s struggled to make peace with its defeat in the Great War. Many of the officers had far more loyalty to their old emperor than they did to the new democratic government. Convinced that the German military was the best in the world (which arguably it was at the start of the war), it was far easier to place the blame for Germany’s defeat on the civilian population than on its own mistakes, Kaiser Wilhilm’s ineptitude, and on the simple fact that by the end of the war it was fighting all the other major industrialized powers almost single-handedly. When defeat became inevitable, the military sought to protect Wilhelm II from the humiliation of defeat by persuading him to abdicate. That way the new Weimar Republic would have to shoulder the burden of surrender. Having thus engineered the surrender of the new government, the military then turned around and blamed the government for surrendering.

The surrender wasn’t just humiliating. It was also shocking. Like all the belligerent nations, the German government had aggressively controlled its press and propagandized the population into believing that the war was someone else’s fault but that nevertheless Germany was just about to win the war. Defeat was not considered possible, so when it came, the population was shocked and confused. If we were winning just a few months ago, why did we surrender?

These forces gave rise to the idea of the Dolchstoß, the ‘Stab in the Back’ theory. This idea maintained that Germany had been defeated from within, that someone somewhere inside the government had betrayed Germany and engineered the defeat of the military. This idea was appealing because it explained Germany’s military failure in a way that freed the military from any blame for what had happened.It created a sense of victimization that festered in German culture throughout the 20s and 30s, especially after the terrifying hyperinflation of 1923. Ultimately, Hitler blamed the Dolchstoß on the Jews, drawing imaginary lines between actual Jews in the Weimar government and a fictitious ‘International Jewish Conspiracy’ that supposedly encompassed bankers, industrialists, politicians, and communists, among others.

To make things a little bit worse, when the Spartacist League staged an uprising in Berlin, the young government turned to the military to suppress it and continued doing so later in the decade, thus legitimizing the idea that the military had a role to play in civilian political affairs. Just a few years later, both the Kapp Putsch and the Beer Hall Putsch included military elements, demonstrating that there was a taste for anti-democratic politics within the German military. The civilian government abandoned all efforts to reconcile the military with the new democratic principles that were supposedly guiding Germany.

A crowd during the Kapp Putsch

Adding to the military’s resentment was the Treaty of Versailles. In addition to staggering reparations payments to France and Britain that undermined the Germany economy, the Treaty also sought to eliminate the possibility of a future German threat to France and Britain by imposing strict limits on the German military. The German military was allowed to have a total of 100,000 soldiers (three units of cavalry and seven of infantry), with no more than 4,000 officers. The navy could have no more than 15,000 men, six battleships, six cruisers, six destroyers, and 12 torpedo boats. Civilians were not to receive military training and the manufacture and import of weapons and poison gas were prohibited. For a nation that had prided itself on the power of its military, these requirements were deeply unpopular. So it’s no surprise that the military made regular efforts to evade them.

 

The Black Reichswehr

In 1921, General Hans von Seeckt established the illicit Sondergruppe R, a secret group of military leaders who were tasked with evading the Treaty of Versailles’ limits. Sondergruppe R quickly reached an agreement with the Soviets in which the Germans would provide the Soviets with technology and training for the Soviet arms industry in exchange for Soviet assistance in evading the enforcement of the Treaty. The Sondergruppe established a series of shell corporations known as the GEFU, whose purpose was to funnel German funds into the Soviet Union for the creation of tanks, aircraft, poison gas, and other contraband weapons.

One example of this was the creation of the Lipetsk Air Base in the Soviet Union. In this arrangement, the Germans trained Soviet pilots in exchange for the Soviets allowing the construction of a secret air force. In the show, Inspector Rath (Volker Bruch) is sent in an airplane to get evidence of this illegal arrangement by flying over Lipetsk so that photographs can be taken. Although Rath’s efforts to expose this fall apart by the end of the season, the existence of the Lipetsk airbase was eventually exposed in 1931 in an article in the Weltbühne, the same newspaper that Samuel Katelbach (Karl Markvocics) edits in the series.

 

Sondergruppe R almost immediately began creating illegal paramilitary units, known as the Black Reichswehr. These were civilian recruits of nearly 20,000 who received illegal military training based in Küstrin in what is today western Poland. Because they did not officially exist, the German government could deny all knowledge of them while using them for its own ends. Between 1923 and 1925 France occupied the Ruhr Valley, one of Germany’s industrial centers, to enforce reparations payments in the form of coal and timber. The Occupation of the Ruhr was understandably unpopular in Germany, the Black Reichswehr engaged in sabotage efforts against the French. The Black Reichswehr were also used to commit a series of Feme Murders, a form of vigilante justice directed against those accused of helping enforce the Treaty’s provisions in which vigilante courts would convict someone in absentia and then sentence them to death by assassination. An effort by the Weimar government to enforce the Occupation triggered the Küstrin Putsch, in which the local Black Reichswehr tried to seize control of the city. The Putsch was thwarted by the regular army and the Küstrin paramilitary was disbanded.

But there were numerous other Freikorps groups that fall under the general banner of the Black Reichswehr. These groups appealed to veterans who were worried about the direction the country was moving in, who were hostile to Socialism, or who resented the treatment of the army after the war. The Black Reichswehr also developed ties to numerous more legitimate groups. For example, the Stahlhelm (Steel Helmet) was a veterans organization numbering around 500,000 that helped veterans find jobs and housing. After 1929 it became active in anti-Republican politics. Initially it was a rival to the Nazi Party for leadership of the nationalists in Germany, but in 1933, the Nazi Sturmabteilung (itself the Nazi Freikorps) raided the Stahlhelm’s organization and eventually forced it to merge with the SA and dissolve itself.

In the show, the industrialist Alfred Nyssen (Lars Eidinger) is actively working with Major General Kurt Seegers (Ernst Stötzner) to fund these efforts and import a train-load of phosgene gas from the Soviet Union to help the coup that is being planned. Neither character is a real person, but Nyssen is clearly modeled on Fritz Thyssen, an anti-communist industrialist who increasingly supported and funded Hitler’s efforts, including dismissing all of his Jewish employees, until he broke with Hitler in 1938 and fled the country. Seegers seems loosely based on nationalist general Erich Ludendorff, who led the German army in the second half the Great War. He was active in anti-Republican efforts throughout the 1920s. He participated in both the Kapp and Beer Hall Putsches, and was a vocal proponent of the Dolchstoß theory. He supported Hitler and ran as the Nazi Party candidate for president in 1925, with little success. He eventually broke with Hitler as well.

Ernst Stötzner as Kurt Seegers

 

This review was made possible by a generous donation from one of my loyal readers. Peter, I hope you feel you got your money’s worth! If you would like me to review a specific film or series, please make a generous donation to my PayPal account and let me know what you would like me to review. If I can get access to it and think it’s appropriate for this blog, I’ll be glad to review it.

 

Want to Know More? 

Babylon Berlin is available on Amazon if you want to own it, and by streaming on Netflix. The novels by Volker Kutscher are also available: Babylon Berlin, The Silent Death, and Goldstein.

If you’re interested in the Weimar Republic, a good place to start would be with Eric D. Weitz’ Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy.

Babylon Berlin: Commies!

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20th Century Europe, 20th Century Germany, Babylon Berlin, Berlin, Bloody May, Communism, Leon Trotsky, Netflix, Volker Kutscher, Weimar Republic

In the first season of Babylon Berlin (which on Netflix is just the first 8 episodes), Communists play a fairly prominent role, so I thought I’d spend a post sorting through the complex tangle of Communists, Trotskyites, and White Russians. Understanding Soviet politics isn’t really necessary to enjoy the story, but I think it does help.

Spoiler Alert:If you haven’t watched the first season and intend to, this post is going to give away a couple important plot twists.

 

Who Was Trotsky?

 In October 1917, the Bolsheviks seized control of Petrograd and established a Soviet, a committee of factory workers and soldiers for the running of the city. Although Vladimir Lenin was the leader of the Bolsheviks, Lenin was not actually in Russia at the time. The coup was substantially orchestrated by Leon Trotsky, one of Lenin’s closest allies. He immediately turned to arranging peace with the Germans and in February of 1918 he finalized the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which took the young Soviet Union out of the Great War, thereby breaking the stalemate that had dominated the war for the past three years. Trotsky was reluctant to actually conclude the Treaty, since he hoped to see a Communist uprising in Germany, but bowed to Lenin’s decision to accept the Treaty. He then took charge of efforts to establish a more functional Red Army.

Leon Trotsky

 

By 1918, Russia was already embroiled in a civil war. The Soviet Red Army was fighting to establish Lenin’s vision of a fully-Communist Russia. They were opposed by the White Russians, a loose coalition of factions opposed to the Soviets. This group was broadly nationalistic, fighting for a patriotic Russian identity (as opposed to the Soviets, who rejected nationalism as ideology and saw Communism as a literally international movement). They included aristocratic monarchists who wanted a re-establishment of the tsarist government, bourgeois liberals who wanted to establish a democratic republic of some sort, and Karenskyite socialists who wanted a less aggressive form of social democracy. A third faction, the Green Army, represented peasants who advocated for agrarian socialism and resented Bolshevik efforts to requisition supplies but were otherwise non-ideological. This war continued for 4 years, but ultimately Trotsky’s Red Army won the field. He listened to the advice of military specialists, established both concentration camps and compulsory labor camps, and aggressively worked to suppress property owners, all of which contributed to the Soviet triumph. Many Russian aristocrats and intellectuals fled the country by the end of the war.

However, just as the Soviets were achieving dominance, Lenin suffered a series of strokes that left him barealy able to communicate by March of 1922. That created a power vacuum within the Communist Party. Trotsky was the obvious man to succeed Lenin, having engineered both the success of the October Revolution and the victory in the Civil War. However, Josef Stalin used his position as chairman of the Communist Party to pack the party with his own supporters and he built alliances with two other key Bolshevik leaders, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, persuading them that Trotsky was a threat to them. Whereas Trotsky was a revolutionary of burning fervor, Stalin was essentially a pragmatist and therefore a less threatening figure to others in the Party. While Trotsky was eager to export communism to other countries, Stalin was essentially content to use Communism to establish his own power in the Soviet Union. (Such, at least, is the traditional reading of Stalin. I understand that some historians are beginning to reassess that picture of him, but I’m not familiar enough with the scholarship on the issue, so I’m going to go with the traditional picture.) As a result, opposition to Stalin, known as the Left Opposition, congealed around Trotsky (among others).

By the time Lenin died in January of 1924, Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev had largely undermined his support within the Party. Zinoviev and Kamenev orchestrated Trotsky’s removal as head of the Red Army a year later. By 1926, Zinoviev and Kamenev had broken with Stalin and sided with Trotsky and the Left Opposition, but by that point Stalin was ascendant. In October of 1927, Stalin expelled Zinoviev and Trotsky from the Communist Party; two months later Kamenev and most of Stalin’s other opponents were evicted as well. Kamenev and Zinoviev submitted to Stalin, but Trotsky refused and was sent into exile in Kazakhstan in 1928. In February of 1929, he was exiled to Turkey, where he remained until 1933, when France agreed to grant him asylum. In 1935, he was forced to relocate to Norway. A year later, Stalin put Zinoviev and Kamenev on trial, along with Trotsky in absentia, and found them all guilty of plotting to kill him. Zinoviev and Kamenev were executed, but Trotsky remained a thorn in Stalin’s side, writing copiously against him even after being forced to relocate to Mexico City. Stalin made at least three attempts to have Trotsky killed. The third attempt finally succeeded when Spanish Communist Ramón Mercader wounded him severely with an ice axe (not an ice pick, as is commonly reported).

Trotsky and Kamenev at Brest-Litovsk

 

By 1930, Trotsky had founded the International Left Opposition to oppose Stalin within the Communist Party, but by 1933, it had become clear that Stalin had complete control over the Party, so the ILO evolved into an organization that operated outside the Soviet Union. In 1938, its members founded the Fourth International in Paris to foment what they considered true Communist revolution.

 

Babylon Berlin’s Trotskyites

The first episode shows a conspiracy to smuggle of a trainload of phosgene gas from the Soviet Union into Germany. Unbeknownst to the people who smuggling the gas, a group of Trotskyite rebels in the Soviet Union have attached a single train-car filled with gold bars to that train. The Trotskyite leader in Berlin, Alexei Kardakhov (Ivan Shvedoff) wants to get his hand on that gold to send it to Istanbul to help fund Leon Trotsky’s struggle against Josef Stalin. That gold is the fortune of a dead White Russian whose daughter, Countess Svetlana Sorokina (Severija Janusauskaité), is working with Kardakhov. He thinks she’s a loyal Trotskyite, but actually, she’s just using the Trotskyites to get the gold out of Russia for her own purposes. The phosgene and the gold act as MacGuffins throughout the first two seasons.

The treacherous Svetlana

 

As soon as the train arrives in Berlin, Svetlana contacts the Soviet ambassador and rats out the Trotskyites. The ambassador sends a couple of thugs to their hideout, where they are running an underground printing press, and massacres everyone except Kardakhov, who survives by hiding in a latrine. He spends the rest of the season on the run, desperately trying to find a safe hiding place, not realizing that Svetlana has sold him out until it’s too late.

The show makes little effort to delve into the quarrel between Stalin and Lenin. That’s fair, since the gold is simply a MacGuffin and not really a key issue in the show’s plot, and even the Trotskyites other than Kardakhov are gone after the third episode. But as this blog points out, the show’s depiction of the Trotskyites and the Communists in general is rather backward. The only hint of their ideology is Kardakhov’s statement that he wants to save his country. So the show seems to think that Trotskyism is about the Soviet Union. But as we’ve seen, Trotsky was deeply concerned about fostering Communist revolution across Europe, whereas Stalin was largely disinterested in spreading communism outside the Soviet Union.

One of Stalin’s strategies for sidelining the original Bolshevik true believers in the later 1920s was to appoint them as ambassadors to other countries. That got them out of the Soviet Union, which reduced their ability to influence developments in the key Soviet institutions (like the Communist Party). For much of the 1920s, the Soviet ambassador to Germany was Nikolay Krestinsky, who was one of Trotsky’s supporters until 1927. I’m not clear whether he was still in that post in 1929, when the first season occurs. In the show, the ambassador is the fictitious Col. Trochin (Denis Burgazliev), who appears to be a loyal Stalinist. It seems a bit improbable that the Communists could have pulled off a bigger slaughter than the St Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago and then smuggle all the corpses out of the city without anyone noticing.

The soon-to-be-liquidated Trotskyites

 

In fairness to the show, the Trotskyites are trying to foster a revolution in Berlin with their underground pamphlets. They are printing pamphlets encouraging Berlin workers to support a Communist rally on May 1^stin favor of the Fourth International. Since the Fourth International isn’t even a concept in 1929, the show’s gotten its timeline wrong.

 

The Bloody May Incident

The show does a better job with its depiction of what became known as Blutmai, the Bloody May Incident. Leftist thought in Germany in the 1920s was broadly represented by two different political parties. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) had formed in the 1860s was a Socialist party focused on the rights of factory workers. The Communist Party of Germany (KPD) was an explicitly Communist party founded in December of 1918 after the suppression of the Spartacist uprising. Its founders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, had split from the SPD, which they came to regard as their archenemy. The SPD enjoyed considerable electoral success during the 1920s and was able to implement a range of legislation including welfare laws, veterans’ assistance, and regulation of working conditions. In Berlin, the SPD controlled the police force because one of their members, Karl Zörgiebel, was the police chief.

In contrast, the KDP was by the mid-1920s a pro-Stalinist organization and advocated for Communism fairly effectively. It too performed well at the polls, generally getting about 10% of votes. It maintained a paramilitary organization, the Rotfront, to protect KPD meetings from violence by the police and the Nazi Sturm Abteilung (the infamous SA or ‘brown shirts’). But because of its rivalry with the SPD, the two left-leaning parties were generally unable to organize a common opposition to the emerging Nazi Party.

In 1928, Zörgiebel banned public demonstrations in Berlin as a threat to public safety, since political demonstrations were usually accompanied by violence on the part of the Rotfront, the SA, or both. However, the KPD perceived this ban as an attempt by Zörgiebel to weaken the KPD, which was making electoral gains in the city. The KPD’s two major leaders, Walter Ulbrich and Ernst Thälmann, called for a major protest on May Day, the international Socialist/Communist holiday. They informed the police of their intended parade routes and rallying points, perhaps hoping for a confrontation that would give them grounds to push for a repeal of the ban on demonstrations.

A KDP poster promoting the protest

 

However, when May 1^st rolled around, most of the unions opted for demonstrations and rallies within their factories. Zörgiebel’s police kept an eye on the protestors, but comparatively little happened beyond the dispersal of a few parades until late in the day when the factory workers left the factories. The police, eager for a fight, waded in with truncheons and brawls broke out. The police retaliated with water cannons.

The conflict escalated on May 2^nd as workers erected barricades and the police began going door-to-door in working-class neighborhoods, arresting supposed troublemakers. The police responded to the barricades by sending in men with machine guns and armored vehicles, and running gun-battles ensued. When the smoke finally cleared on the 3^rd, 33 people were dead (none of them police) and 200 injured. Zörgiebel sought to depict the workers as the cause of the violence, but the evidence points to the police as the ones who brought most of the guns. The government banned the Rotfront and the rift between the SPD and the KPD became permanent. The violence, which was perceived to be between the two left-wing parties, give Hitler fuel for his argument that the Communists were a threat to social order.

People fleeing the violence during the riot

 

In the show, the police are prepared for the protest with a speech by Zörgiebel (I think) about the need to prevent anarchy. The protest takes the form of an enormous parade complete with Soviet flags and chants of “Berlin stays red!” The police are armed with truncheons. As the police march toward the parade, one of the protestors throws a rock and a large riot ensues in which the police are shown as being the real aggressors. Gereon (Volker Bruch) and his partner Bruno (Peter Kurth) are assigned to search nearby apartments for illegal firearms. They are shown breaking into apartments and tossing them indiscriminately for weapons, finding only one 18^thcentury musket.

The protest in the show

 

But then they stumble across barricades and are forced to take cover in a doorway as an armored car drives down the street firing indiscriminately. A group of protestors unfurl a large red flag from a third floor balcony and the police accidentally shoot two women standing on the second floor balcony just below it. Gereon rushes into the women’s apartment and after finding the women badly wounded, he goes to find a doctor, Dr Völcker (Jördis Triebel), who turns out to be a fiery Communist agitator. But it’s too late to save the women, both of whom die from their wounds. In later episodes, Dr Völcker leads protests about the violence, depicting the women as martyrs of police brutality and accusing the police of orchestrating a cover-up.

The police, desperate to point the finger at the protestors, find a police office who happens to have been accidentally shot in a completely unrelated incident and put him forward as proof that the protestors were seeking to kill police. Gereon eventually realizes this is untrue.

Just before the violence begins

 

The show’s depiction of the Bloody May Incident is essentially true, although it collapses three days of protests into a single day. I’m unsure whether the incident with the two women actually happened, and Dr Völcker is fictitious. I also don’t know if the details about the fake police victim of violence is true. But the show is correct that the worst violence came from the police, that they were indiscriminately searching apartments but failed to find much evidence of an armed plot, and that they were widely perceived as the aggressors and as covering up what actually happened.

In general, the show does a fair job of trying to capture the instability, tension, and violence that was coming to characterize Berlin in the late 20s. The Communists are a clear presence in the series and ever-present poverty helps the viewer understand why Communism was a popular ideology at the time. But the show makes only token efforts to explain actual Socialist and Communist ideology, assuming that the viewer will either understand the essential ideas or else not care about them too much. The Communists are generally presented sympathetically, especially Dr Völcker, who is one of the few characters who doesn’t seem to have a hidden agenda.

The show only provides glimpses at the bigger political picture around the events. There is no mention of the SDP at all, so the police appear to be representatives not of the Socialist movement but of the capitalist establishment. More seriously, the Nazis don’t appear until late in the second season and the viewer would be forgiven for thinking that Hitler hadn’t yet emerged as a political force in German politics. In reality, Hitler was a rising force by 1928 and the SA were a major factor in the street violence of the period.

 

 

Want to Know More?

Babylon Berlin is available on Amazon if you want to own it, and by streaming on Netflix. The novels by Volker Kutscher are also available: Babylon Berlin, The Silent Death, and Goldstein.

Babylon Berlin: Introducing the Weimar Republic

Tags

1920s, 20th Century Europe, 20th Century Germany, Babylon Berlin, Lisa Liv Fries, Volker Bruch, Volker Kutscher, Weimar Republic

Sorry I’ve been so long in updating this blog. The past couple of months have been hellishly busy with grading work. I’ve barely had time to get my work done, much less write any blog posts. But I’ve finally gotten through most of the grading and found time to start in on a show I’ve been working my way through, Babylon Berlin (German, with English subtitles), which one of my loyal readers has paid me generously to review.

Babylon Berlin is a 2017 tv production for German tv (reportedly the most expensive television show ever produced in Germany, and I can well believe it), based on a series of novels by Volker Kutscher. It is set in Germany in 1929, a period ripe with change, corruption, and conflict.

The main character, Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch) is a vice cop in Cologne who is sent to Berlin to track down a pornographic film that is being used to blackmail an important politician. A veteran of the Great War, Rath struggles with PTSD and is a morphine addict. He’s also in love with the wife of his brother, who has been missing in action since the end of the war but is not yet legally dead. In Berlin, as he searches for the film, he gets caught up in a conspiracy involving a Trotskyite underground press, a train-load of illegal phosgene gas, a cross-dressing cabaret singer, a shady vice cop of uncertain allegiance, a drug-addled pornographer, a group of Nationalist military officers, and a train car packed with Russian gold.

Gereon also befriends a bright young police clerk named Charlotte (Liv Lisa Fries) who moonlights as a prostitute and aspires to become a homicide detective and who slowly becomes his chief ally as he gets drawn further into the seedy side of Berlin. The show has a sprawling cast of morally-ambiguous characters: Communist workers, Armenian mobsters, homosexuals, Soviet diplomats, industrialists, and war veterans. Everyone has divided loyalties or a scheme they’re running, or a dirty secret to keep hidden. And over the whole thing hang two shadows, the long shadow of the Great War and the faint but looming shadow of the Third Reich.

 

The Weimar Republic

The Weimar Republic is the name given by scholars to Germany’s interwar democratic government, whose constitution was written in the city of Weimar. Prior to the Great War, the German government was a nominally democratic state but functionally one with a highly autocratic monarchy. Shortly before the end of the war, Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated and three months later in February of 1919, the Weimar constitution took effect, marking Germany’s first experiment with genuine democracy.

Unfortunately, the Weimar Republic was saddled with enormous problems. It had just lost the worst war in human history, suffering a staggering 1.77 million dead and 4.2 million wounded; of men between the ages of 15 and 38, 13% died during the war. The economy had been stretched to the breaking point by the war, and in defeat, things got worse. The Treaty of Versailles, which ended the war for Germany, imposed harsh annual reparations payments to France and Great Britain that hamstrung the young republic’s economy. In the period from 1919 to the end of 1923, the German Mark collapsed because the government was forced to constantly print new money. The result was hyperinflation, a situation in which prices inflate (or, seen from the opposite viewpoint, the value of the currency falls) on an hourly basis. In 1919, 1 US Dollar could purchase 4.2 Marks; in August of 1923, it could purchase 1 million Marks. This disaster destroyed people’s savings almost overnight and in places the economy reverted to barter. By 1923, the government had managed to bring inflation under control by scraping the old Mark and introducing a new one, the Rentenmark. But the damage had already been done. The Middle Class was traumatized and fearful.

Marks being used as fuel for a furnace

 

In the period after 1923, the economy began to recover, at least nominally, and by 1928, unemployment stood at a reasonable 6-7%. But by 1929 (when the Great Depression set in in the US), it had risen to 10% and was to climb to 30% by 1932, creating the economy crisis that allowed Adolf Hitler to rise to power.

The political situation was also unstable. It proven impossible to establish a long-lasting and stable governing party, and chancellors rose and fell repeatedly, few of them lasting more than two years. Many Germans distrusted their new government, which had been created out of the failure of Kaiser Wilhelm’s government, and many suspected that it had somehow been responsible for Germany’s defeat in the war. Starting in 1930, the President, Paul von Hindenburg, was forced to govern by emergency decree, undermining the government’s legitimacy and paving the way for Hitler’s rule.

This was also an era of plots and attempted coups. In December of 1918, the Spartacus League, a Communist organization, launched an uprising in Berlin that triggered smaller revolts across the country, but it was quickly suppressed by the army. In 1920, the right-wing Kapp Putsch sought to overthrow the Republic and establish a military government, but it collapsed in just four days after a general strike broke out. In 1923, Hitler and General Ludendorff attempted to seize control of the Bavarian government in the Beer Hall Putsch, but Bavarian authorities suppressed it and sent Hitler to jail for a year. After that, things stabilized, but agitation by both right-wing Nationalists, who were a powerful faction within and around the military and left-wing Communists, who were powerful among the factory workers and intelligentsia, continued to agitate and challenge the government in a variety of ways. The Bolshevik Revolution had just happened in Russia, and many felt that there was a very real chance that Communism might establish itself in Germany, while Nationalists dreamed of undoing Germany’s humiliation.

A German Communist poster from the period

 

But the instability also offered room for society to transform in other ways. Women enjoyed far greater rights than they had a decade ago and a large percentage of them had joined the workforce, either willingly or as a result of the economic problems of the period. There was a strong air of sexual liberation, especially in the big cities like Berlin, and many women turned to prostitution or other forms of sexualized entertainment out of financial necessity. There was a growing acknowledgement of homosexuality, and it was widely tolerated at least within Berlin underworld. Foreign culture was becoming popular, especially American jazz; the black American dancer Josephine Baker was revered in Berlin. German culture entered into a short-lived cultural flowering that produced masterpieces such as the expressionist cinema of Nosferatuand the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the irrational work of Dadaist artists like Hannah Hoch and its Surrealist successors such as Max Ernst, and the architectural style of Bauhaus, which was founded in Weimar in 1919. But this new openness to foreign culture was scary to many, and fed into Nationalism, which promised to ‘restore proper values’ and ‘return women to the home’.

Marlene Dietrich captures the sense of new opportunities in Weimar-era Germany

 

Babylon Berlin

The show makes excellent use of its setting. There are extensive scenes filmed outside existing Weimar-era buildings (although many key locations, such as the Berlin Police Headquarters, were destroyed during World War II). The show also constructed a massive backlot set used to represent a variety of neighborhoods around Berlin, including the exterior of the Moka Efti nightclub, a major location in the show. There are a lot of nice touches, such as the fact that the Police Headquarters uses a paternoster elevator system, which were popular in Germany at the time (and still are, to some extent). The show’s art and set direction are also quite good. There are numerous posters in a 20s style advertising musical acts and the like. The Art Deco Moka Efti club really captures something of the style of the period.

Bruch as Gereon Rath

The show definitely explores the influence of jazz in German culture. Gereon and Charlotte both love to dance and there are numerous scenes set in various bars and night clubs where the more free style of 1920s dance is demonstrate. No fusty old waltzes for the libidinous Berliners of the era. (One false note is the lack of the black performers who helped bring jazz to Germany, although Josephine Baker’s famous banana skirt is referenced.) Kurt Weil’s Threepenny Opera plays an important role in one episode.

A particularly memorable scene involves the singer Nikoros performing what is essentially the show’s theme song, “Zu Asche Zu Staub” at Moka Efti. The song’s lyrics are both hopeful and ominous and manage to capture the desperate optimism that was so widespread after the Great War. Like everyone else in the show, Nikoros has something to hide. Give it a watch (be advised, the dancers’ costumes border on NSFW). Brian Ferry also cameos in one episode as a singer.

But the show doesn’t exactly glamorize 20s Berlin. The pall of the Great War hangs over these characters. Gereon is haunted by his inability to rescue his brother during the war and his barely-managed PTSD is a major plotline in the show. One of the minor supporting characters is a doctor of psychology who is exploring the potential use of hypnosis to address PTSD, a condition that many people deride as mere cowardice and fakery. Men with missing limbs periodically appear in the background of various scenes, usually begging. Gereon’s partner Wolter (Peter Kurth) is part of a group of soldiers who resent German’s loss in the war and commemorate the dead as heroes, unable to draw the lessons about why Germany lost the war. Gereon’s landlady is a lonely young war widow.

Poverty is ever-present in this show. Charlotte’s family is quite poor; she lives with her mother, grandfather, two sisters, brother-in-law, another man whose relationship to the family I missed, and an infant nephew in what is essentially a two-room apartment. The family’s poverty is part of the reason she works on the side as a prostitute. At the Police Headquarters there is always a pack of young women looking for temporary work as clerks and the like. Charlotte’s old friend Greta (Leonie Benesch) is out of work and homeless when she bumps into Charlotte, who offers her work as a prostitute. This poverty helps the viewer understand the emergence of both Communist and Nationalist agitation as well as the thriving criminal underworld. Most of the characters seem aware that they are lucky to have jobs.

Fries as Charlotte Ritter

 

In my next post on the show, I’ll look into the Communist movement in more detail.

Want to Know More?

Babylon Berlin is available on Amazon if you want to own it, and by streaming on Netflix. The novels by Volker Kutscher are also available: Babylon Berlin, The Silent Death, and Goldstein.

If you’re interested in the Weimar Republic, a good place to start would be with Eric D. Weitz’ Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy.

Fall of Eagles: Communism

Tags

20th Century Europe, BBC, Communism, Fall of Eagles, Julius Martov, Karl Marx, Lenin, Patrick Stewart, Vera Zasulich

The one 19^th century ideology that Fall of Eagles addresses head-on is Socialism, or more properly the subset of Socialism that is Communism, obviously because it played such a huge role in the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty in Russia. So the series focuses on the Communists in two episodes, “Absolute Beginners” (episode 6) and “The Secret War” (episode 12). The former deals with Vladimir Lenin maneuvering to take control of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, while the latter sees Lenin and his followers smuggled into Russia during the Great War.

Marx and Engels had developed the basics of Communist theory in the 1840s. In Marx’ view, history was driven by a process of class struggle. In various societies, the details differed, but there were always two social classes, an upper dominant class and a lower class oppressed by the upper class. Eventually the two classes would come into direct conflict and the upper class would make conditions for the lower class so oppressive that the lower class would revolt and overthrow the upper class. Then the lower class would restructure society with itself as the new upper class, while a new oppressed lower class would eventually emerge from the selfish actions of the new upper class. This cycle of oppression, overthrow, and restructuring was, for Marx, the engine of all historical change.

As Marx saw it, the French Revolution had put the ‘bourgeoisie’ on top, by which he meant the class of men who owned the factories, mines, railways, banks, and other elements of capitalist manufacturing. They controlled all the elements of industrial production except for the labor to run the mines and factories. The labor was provided by the ‘proletariat’, the manual workers, who were being horrifically oppressed by the brutal working conditions in 19^th century factories and mines (child labor, excessive hours, low wages, dangerous working conditions, and so on). Communist theory primarily makes sense in the context of the Industrial Revolution, which by the 1840s was in full swing across Western Europe.

Marx predicted that the next cycle of revolution would involve the proletariat rising up and overthrowing the bourgeoisie. They would seize control of the state, which would take over the running of the factories on behalf of the workers. Essentially, the workers would be running the factories they worked in. Because of that, the factories would no longer be oppressive to the workers, and because the workers were not oppressing themselves, there would be no new lower class. Thus the cycle of class struggle that had driven society since the beginning of history would come to an end because a classless society would be created.

Karl Marx

 

So much for the basic principles of Communist thought. For Lenin and his fellow Russian Communists, the big debate was how to apply this model to Russia, where the country just barely beginning the Industrial Revolution. The country’s economy was overwhelming agrarian in nature, with only a small number of extremely brutal factories having been established by 1900. Without the Industrial Revolution and an industrial proletariat, how could the Proletarian Revolution occur? Since Marx’ ideas were understood by his followers to be scientific the way that Newton’s Laws of Gravity were scientific, it appeared to many Russian Communists that things would have to get worse before they could get better; the Russian bourgeoisie would have to be encouraged to seize control of the Russian state and spread the brutality of the Industrial Revolution before there was a large enough proletariat to achieve the Proletarian Revolution. Ultimately, Lenin came to disagree with that view, arguing that it was possible to leapfrog the Industrial Revolution and achieve the Proletarian Revolution in a largely peasant society. His modification of Marx and Engel’s theories came to be called Leninism.

But the RSDLP was more than just Lenin, and many other Russian Communists had different ideas. Lenin’s chief position of influence in 1900 was as a member of the board of the RSDLP’s newspaper Iskra (‘Spark’), which was published somewhat sporadically because Lenin had to keep relocating because of pressure from various governments. By 1902, Lenin and Iskra was based in London, with an editorial staff that included Lenin, Julius Martov, Georgi Plekhanov, Vera Zasulich, and later Leon Trotsky. In 1903, this group was able to convene the 2^nd Congress of the RSDLP, first in Belgium and, when that meeting was broken up by the Belgian police, then in London.

Lenin

In London, a rift opened within Iskra’s board. In a debate over how to define ‘party member’, Lenin pushed for a definition in which a party member was a member of one of the party’s recognized organizations (and therefore under the party’s control), whereas Martov advocated for a somewhat looser definition of any person who was working under the guidance of the party (but not necessarily a formal member of any organization). While the difference was small, it represented something quite large. Lenin had a vision of a party of professional revolutionaries who were financially dedicated to the party with a large penumbra of less committed sympathizers, whereas Martov wanted a more broadly-based group of activists who were all moving in the same general direction but not necessarily completely in unison with the RSDLP’s theories. Lenin’s position allowed for the existence of a class-like group of guiding intellectuals, whereas Martov represented a more traditionally Marxist classless system. When the issue came to a vote, Martov’s position won out by a slim majority of 5 votes (out of a total of 51). But 7 of Martov’s supporters later walked out, mostly over the question of how to handle Jewish members (should they be grouped together as the Bund, their own branch of the party, or not?), giving Lenin the majority of 2 votes that he needed to establish his definition of party member.

This led to a rift between Lenin and Martov, who was backed by Zasulich, Trotsky, and eventually Plekhanov. Lenin ultimately labeled Martov’s faction the Mensheviks (‘the Minority’) and his faction the Bolsheviks (‘the Majority’), despite the fact that neither side had a consistent dominance over the party. However, when Lenin’s attempt to restrict the editorial board of Iskra to just three (himself, Lenin, and Plehanov) was defeated, Lenin left the paper, giving it over to the control of the Mensheviks.

 

Lenin in Fall of Eagles

Patrick Stewart is perfectly cast as the aggressively determined Lenin (more than a little of his later performances as Captain Picard shine through). Not only does he look a startling amount like Lenin, he perfectly captures the man’s moral certainty. “Absolute Beginners” focus closely on the debates around Iskra and the 2^nd Party Congress, so the episode appears set in 1903.

Stewart as Lenin

 

The episode doesn’t delve very deeply into the Marxist ideas at the root of the Communists’ goals. Perhaps the author assumed that the viewers already understand basic Marxist theory. Instead, we get a debate between Lenin and Zasulich (Mary Wimbush) over the question of whether the Russian peasantry can be combined with the proletariat or not. As Zasulich points out sarcastically, the peasantry will have to be involved in the revolution because there are too many of them for Lenin to massacre, but Lenin dogmatically insists that only the proletariat can be involved in leading the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Then an ugly incident occurs in which a messenger arrives with word about a party member, Nikolay Bauman. Bauman had gotten a married party member pregnant and then began spreading malicious rumors about her (which included a vicious satirical cartoon of her as a pregnant Virgin Mary). The woman committed suicide. Martov (Edward Wilson) is very upset about the incident, but Lenin refuses to even meet with the messenger because Bauman was a good party worker, which in Lenin’s mind means that they should overlook his “personal misdemeanor’. Zasulich is disgusted by Lenin’s decision and storms out. The episode presents this as the thing that triggered Martov’s eventual falling out with Lenin.

Wimbush as Zasulich

The Bauman incident certainly came to be seen as an ethical distinction between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, but moreso after the rift had occurred than as a cause of it. But the episode is very hostile to Lenin. He is depicted as hard and doctrinaire and essentially power-hungry; at one point, he has a fever dream in which he repeatedly says “I am the party!” When he learns that Martov has gone to Geneva to meet with Plekhanov (Paul Eddington), Lenin immediately suspects that Martov is maneuvering to betray him, so he goes to Geneva and plots with Plekhanov to seize control of the party.

The episode then devotes a full 15 minutes to the debate over the definition of ‘party member’ at the 2^nd Congress. Martov and Lenin lay out their differences quite clearly and Martov wins. It’s clear that Martov still regards Lenin as a friend and tries to soothe over their differences, but Lenin clearly regards him as an enemy. He manipulates matters to offend the Jewish delegates in order to get them to walk out (and blatantly locks Martov out of a key meeting in order to achieve that). He accuses Martov of betraying his principles in a scheme to achieve control, when in reality it’s clear that Lenin is the one who’s angling for power. He uses Martov’s desire to patch up their friendship to force Martov to denounce the Jewish Bund, leading to the walkout by the Jewish delegates. The impact of the walkout on the voting is never explained, so the emphasis here is mostly on Lenin being a dick to his former friends.

Then Lenin proposes reducing the Iskra board to himself, Plekhanov, and Martov, prompting Zasulich to denounce him and walk out, leading with her several more delegates. Martov rejects his nomination, having realized that Lenin is a vicious schemer. Trotsky (Michael Kitchen) also denounces him and walks out, while Lenin sits impassively watching the responses. By the end of the episode, Lenin is convinced of his own righteousness, but has alienated almost all of his previous friends.

Wilson as Martov

 

While this portrait of Lenin is not false, it is perhaps incomplete. It makes no attempt to show why Lenin was able to inspire such devotion among his followers, and his persuasiveness appears to be purely intellectual, not driven by his intense charisma. Stewart’s Lenin is not so much charismatic as overbearing, and it’s unclear why his wife Nadezhna (Lynn Farleigh) stays with him after he destroys Zasulich. In reality, he was deeply devoted to her, and passionately fond of children. (His love of children actually became an element of later Soviet propaganda.) But these more positive traits would detract from the view of Lenin the show is offering, and so they are disregarded. This is perhaps an artifact that Fall of Eagles was made during the Cold War, when Western culture had to cast Soviet figures in a negative light.

This is my last post on Fall of Eagles. I’d like to thank my reader Stephen for pointing me toward this series, which I’d never heard of before. Hopefully you feel like you got your money’s worth from these reviews. If there’s a film or tv show you’d like me to review, please consider making a donation to my Paypal account; if I can track it down and think it’s appropriate for the blog, I’ll give it a review.

Want to Know More?

Fall of Eagles is available on Youtube. The series is available through Amazon, but if you decide to buy it, make sure you’re getting a format that will play on your DVD player; some versions only play British and European formats.

If you’re interested in Lenin, one of the best biographies of him is by Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography.

It’s sometimes criticized for its scholarly focus on small details, so if you want something a bit lighter, you might try Catherine Merridale’s Lenin on the Train, which deals with his role in the Great War and his fateful train journey into Russia in 1917.

Hugo: Cinema History Come to Life

Tags

20th Century Europe, 20th Century France, A Trip to the Moon, Asa Butterfield, Ben Kingsley, Gare Montparnasse Derailment, Georges Mélies, Hugo, L'Arrivée d'un train, Martin Scorsese, Paris, The Invention of Hugo Cabret

I know I promised to look at Empire, but I felt I needed a break from the Julio-Claudians. So last night I sat down and rewatched Hugo (2011, dir. Martin Scorsese, based on The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick).

It’s a charming film about an orphaned boy Hugo (Asa Butterfield) who lives in the Gare Montparnasse railway station in Paris at some point in the 1930s, where he maintains the station’s clocks and eludes the station’s inspector (Sasha Baron Cohen), who wants to send him to an orphanage. Hugo’s only possession is a broken automaton that his father was trying to repair when he died in a fire. He develops a complicated love/hate relationship with Georges (Ben Kingsley), who runs the station’s sweet and toy shop and from whom Hugo steals the parts he needs to fix the automaton. Eventually it’s revealed that Georges is actually Georges Mélies, one of the first commerical film-makers in the world. The automaton turns out to be something Georges created when he was a professional stage magician. But when his studio, Star Films, went bankrupt, Mélies lost the automaton as well as everything else except his mistress and later wife, Jeanne d’Alcy (Helen McRory), and was forced to make a living running his small shop in the train station.

Georges Mélies

Mélies (1861-1938) was one of the most important early film-makers, serving as screenwriter, director, actor, and producer, and churning out a staggering 500 films between 1895 and 1913, when bad business decisions left him bankrupt. The Great War put the last nail in the coffin of Star Films, and about 80% of Mélies’ oeuvre was melted down for silver and celluloid, destroying them forever.

Butterfield and Kingsley as Hugo and Georges

Prior to discovering the new medium of film, Mélies had worked as a stage magician, and he brought a magician’s eye to his work as a film-maker. So he specialized in films that told fantastic stories and often employed stage magic tricks. For example, in Robbing Cleopatra’s Tomb, considered one of the first horror films, Cleopatra’s mummy is chopped into pieces and then burned in a brazier, from which a woman emerges, while in The Famous Box Trick, a magician cuts a boy in half with an axe, producing two boys, whom he procedures to turn into other things. In his One Man Band, Mélies becomes seven different musicians playing a tune together.

He eventually moved up to telling stories with more complex plots. His most famous work, 1902’s A Trip to the Moon, tells the story of Professor Barbenfouillis, who builds a space-ship in the form of a bullet, which he fires at the moon, striking the Old Man in the Moon right in the eye. The crew nap until the goddess Phoebe causes it to snow on them, forcing them to take refuge in a cavern, where they are taken prisoner by the insect-like Selenites. Escaping, the crew climbs back into the bullet, which falls off a cliff and into the Earth’s ocean, where they are rescued and given a parade to celebrate their accomplishment.

In addition to being one of the first film-makers to tell narrative stories, Mélies also invented a number of simple special effects that he used repeatedly, including multiple exposure (filming something, rewinding the film, and then adding something to the scene, which is how Mélies become seven men playing instruments together), advancing the camera on a track to make something seem to grow in size, split-screen exposure, and dissolves. By putting a fish tank in front of the camera, he created the illusion that he was filming underwater. In his films, men and women turn into skeletons, butterflies, and other creatures, people explode in burst of smoke and sparks, travelers encounter fairies, aliens, and Satan, people take off their heads and argue with them, and many other delightful things happen.

The man was a visionary and for a period the most popular film-maker in the world, and he profoundly infuenced the development of all later film. In many ways, the film is Scorsese’s love-letter to Mélies, and an effort to make sure that this pioneer isn’t forgotten by modern audiences.

The film’s treatment of Mélies is pretty accurate. The middle portion of the film is a reasonably factual, though simplified, account of Mélies’ career. It omits the fact that his brother played an important role in his film company, and it condenses Mélies’ two wives into his second wife Jeanne (his first wife Eugenie having died young in 1913). He really did build an automaton that wound up in a museum where it was ruined. He really did go bankrupt (though less because of the Great War and more because of poor decisions) and wind up running a toy and sweet shop in the Gare Montparnasse. And he really did enjoy a final period in his life when film enthusiasts recognized his enormous contributions to the medium. It’s refreshing to see an historical film that actually tries to get the facts more or less correct.

Georges Mélies

The Train

But in addition to being a wonderful introduction to the work of Mélies, Scorsese has another point to make. Hugo was made in 3D, and Scorsese was trying to get away from the use of 3D to simply make the audience gasp, exploring its potential as a cinematic device. He plays with snow, steam, and a cloud of papers in a way that is reminiscent of the way Mélies played with his film tricks.

The film twice shows the famous early film L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, a brief 1895 film that simply shows a train pulling into a French train station. The film repeats as fact what is quite possibly an urban legend that when the audience saw the train approaching, they panicked because they were unable to distinguish the film from reality because the technology of film was literally brand-new and the audience was unfamiliar with it.

Later in the film, Hugo has a dream in which he finds himself on the train tracks of the Gare Montparnasse as a train is bearing down at him. The train runs him over, jumps the tracks, and plows through the station, plunging out of a window and down to the street below. This scene is noteworthy for two reasons. First, it recreates an actual train accident that happened at the Gare Montparnasse in 1895 (the same year L’Arrivée d’un train was first shown). So Scorsese cleverly conflates the train footage with an actual train crash the same year.

The 1895 Montparnasse derailment

But what I find even more clever about this sequence is that by doing it with the relatively new modern 3D technology, he gives 21st century audiences an experience not unlikely the one the audience in 1895 had, of having a train appear to come hurtling toward them in a way that unnerves the viewer. In a film about the early history of cinema, Scorsese has brilliantly given audiences a sense of what it might have been like to be one of those early film-goers, thus increasing our ability to understand the whole point of the film.

Hugo’s dream of the Montparnasse dereailment

This isn’t the only time Scorsese references early cinema in Hugo. At one point Hugo, fleeing from the station inspector, is forced to climb out onto the minute hand of the station’s largest clock in a scene that directly references Harold Lloyd’s famous stunt in Safety Last. There are also more subtle homages to Buster Keaton’s The General (1926) and Jean Renoir’s La Bete Humaine (1938). And throughout the film, Scorsese and his team tried to work in as many of the techniques that Mélies pioneered as they could, so that the film’s cinematography and special effects were as much an homage as the story.

Want to Know More? 

Hugo is available through Amazon, as is Selznick’s Caldecott-winning The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

You should totally watch Mélies’ A Trip to the Moon. It’s on Netflix, and also available through Amazon. Although its special effects are primative by modern standards, it really is a must-see. If you want to know more about Mélies, try Elizabeth Ezra’s Georges Mélies. It’s more a study of his films than a history of the man, but it treats him as a serious film-maker, not just a man playing around with special effects.

If you want to dig a little deeper in the film’s use of visual effects, here is a good page on the subject.

Downton Abbey: Why I Stopped Watching Downton Abbey

Tags

20th Century Britain, 20th Century Europe, Billy Crystal, Downton Abbey, Homosexuality, Hugh Bonneville, Jodie Dallas, Julian Fellowes, Lord Crawley, Rob James-Collier, The Children's Hour, Thomas Barrow, Three's Company

When Downton Abbey first appeared in the US, I have to admit that I got hooked along with half the country. That first season was such a great exploration of pre-Great War Britain, and even the credit sequence spoke to the rigidity of the great estates and the class system of the time. The acting was solid, the storylines were interesting (even poor Edith was interesting, despite being so useless that the show-runners couldn’t think of a realistic storyline for her in the second season), Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess was marvelous (a few months ago I had an image of her having to go through modern airport security, an utterly priceless idea) and above all, the show had Thomas.

Thomas Barrow (Rob James-Collier), the scheming homosexual second footman was absolutely the best thing about the show. But to understand my thoughts about him, we need to make a brief excursus into the history of homosexuality in film and television.

A Brief History of Homosexuality in Film and TV
Homosexuality has been depicted in film literally from the birth of the medium. But in the early 20^th century, gay and lesbian characters were either pathetic objects of ridicule or threatening villains who had to be defeated for the good of society. By the mid-century, it was possible to depict gays and lesbians in a slightly more sympathetic light, although their sexuality could only be referred to obliquely. They had to be miserable and their stories had to end unhappily, but at least they weren’t inevitably villains. A good example of this is the 1961 adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour, in which two single schoolteachers are ruined by a malicious accusation that they are lesbians. Martha (Shirley MacLaine), who is actually a lesbian, commits suicide at the end when Karen (Audrey Hepburn) refuses to reciprocate her affections. But the accusation of lesbianism was so shocking to audiences at the time that it was never said on-screen, only referred to obliquely, despite being literally the center of the film’s plot.

By the late 1970s, gays and lesbians were starting to be seen in a more sympathetic light, as comic figures, although storylines often undercut their homosexuality or left them single and lonely at the end of the story. Billy Crystal first rose to national prominence playing Jodie Dallas on the 1977 sitcom Soap. But Dallas, often cited as the first openly homosexual character on network television, winds up having a heterosexual one-night stand and fathering a child. The early 1980s sitcom Bosom Buddies featured newcomers Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari as heterosexual men living as women in a women’s apartment building because they can’t find affordable housing elsewhere, while Three’s Company showed the heterosexual Jack Tripper (John Ritter) pretending to be gay so he could live in an apartment with two women. So in these shows, homosexuality was openly referenced, but primarily as a source of highly stereotyped humor and in a way that reasserted the superiority of heterosexuality.

By the 1990s films had begun to offer more positive characters such as the Gay Best Friend and the Tough as Nails Lesbian. But they were supporting characters, and rarely allowed to have their own romantic story-lines, unless those stories were about their lack of relationships. At the same time, gay and lesbian film-makers began making films centered on gay and lesbians characters, often giving them the happy endings (so to speak) and romantic successes that they were denied in main-stream cinema and television. And now, by the 2010s, we’ve reach an era where gay and lesbian characters turn up in many shows and films, and their sexual and romantic lives are about as central to their storylines as heterosexual romance is to their straight co-stars’ stories. Modern Family depicts a gay couple’s domestic life together on a roughly equal footing with the other families in the series.

Rupert Everett, the trope-namer in My Best Friend’s Wedding

 

Back to Downton

So why did I like Thomas Barrow so much? Precisely because he was one of the bad guys on the show. His homosexuality was an important feature of his character, but it wasn’t the whole story. He was a lower-class man scheming to advance in the class-ridden Britain of his day just as much as he was a closeted homosexual seeking a deeper connection with another man. He was a homosexual villain but his homosexuality wasn’t the cause of his villainy. He and O’Brien (Siobhan Finneran) were the Downstairs Malcontents, and O’Brien didn’t particularly care about his sexual preferences as long as he was a useful ally in her own quest for social advancement.

James-Collier as Thomas Barrow

So Thomas was a wonderfully well-rounded character, sympathetic and unlikable all the same time. His storyline was an exploration of the emotionally-corrosive nature of the Closet, and as such it was tremendously refreshing. I loved the third season because of the way O’Brien slowly set Thomas up for his total ruination over a petty falling out, precisely because it revealed just how precarious it was to be a lower class homosexual in 1920s Britain. O’Brien used the rampant homophobia of the period to set a trap that she knew the love-starved Thomas couldn’t resist and in the second-to-last episode of the season, Thomas is facing certain ruin after his homosexuality has been revealed, and I was overjoyed.

I wasn’t overjoyed because I wanted to see Thomas punished because he was homosexual. I was overjoyed because I wanted audiences to just how brutal Western society was to homosexuals in this period. I wanted viewers to watch just how viciously destructive the Closet can be to so many gays and lesbians, because it’s one of the best arguments for why society needs to accept gays and lesbians. I wanted people to have to think about what Straight Privilege really looks like.

Instead, the series suddenly took a maddening veer into utter fantasy. Despite Thomas being completely exposed as a criminal (since homosexuality was illegal in Britain in this period), Lord Crawley (Hugh Bonneville) intercedes with the police to cover up Thomas’ crime. That in itself is not implausible, because early 20^th century nobles frequently used their social and political clout to cover up scandals. But then he decides, purely out of the goodness of his heart, to allow Thomas to continue working at Downton, and in fact gives him what is essentially a promotion, despite pretty much everyone now knowing what Thomas is.

Hugh Bonneville as the eternally benevolent Lord Crawley

That is utter nonsense, in my angry opinion. Heterosexual nobles did not decide to overlook homosexuality in their servants, for the very simple reason that they couldn’t afford to do so. Their own reputation was very much at stake.

Here’s what would probably have happened in the real world. Word of Thomas’ homosexuality would have spread among the staff, if only because O’Brien is still angry. Eventually, word that Downton’s staff includes a known pervert would have spread to servants at other estates, because when the Crawleys have guests, the Downton servants would gossip with the visiting servants. The servants of the wealthy and powerful always gossiped with each other. This gossip was a complex phenomenon. Employers hated the fact their servants gossiped about them, but wanted to know what was going on at other estates, so they regarded this gossip as a two-edged sword. For the servants, gossip was a way to express displeasure toward harsh employers, and it represented one of their few forms of social leverage against the powerful men and women who employed and often exploited them. Reputation was a very important consideration in Edwardian England, and loss of reputation was a serious problem for the powerful.

So when Lord Crawley decides to forgive Thomas and continue employing him, even promoting him, inevitably word of this will get out. One of the servants will gossip at the bar or to a visiting servant and that news will start to circulate. People will wonder why Lord Crawley would protect a criminal and a pervert, and the answer is fairly obvious; Lord Crawley must be having sex with Thomas. So fairly quickly people will be whispering and joking about Crawley behind his back and his reputation is going to suffer serious damage.

Instead of exploring the real damage the Closet did to Thomas and thereby offering a demonstration of just how destructive Straight Privilege can be to homosexuals, Julian Fellowes instead resorts to a fantasy in which Lord Crawley gets to save Thomas by exercising both his Class and Straight Privilege and acting as a benevolent master. Crawley gets to be the hero because he’s upper class and heterosexual, so the message here is that the Closet really must not be so bad after all because the people at the top of the ladder won’t really ruin those beneath them. Fellowes has been accused of offering a view of the early 20^th century through rose-colored Conservative glasses (a charge he has to some extent admitted to), and this whole incident with Thomas demonstrates just how much the show’s take on the period fails to engage honestly with its subject matter.

The Red Baron: Something Every Historical Film Should Do

Tags

20th Century Europe, 20th Century Germany, Manfred von Richthofen, Nikolas Mütterschön, The Red Baron, World War I

So The Red Baron (2010, dir. Nikolas Mütterschön) is, overall, a rather mediocre film. Very little about it really stands out beyond the impressive dogfighting sequences, although Lena Headey turns into a pretty strong performance as Manfred von Richthofen’s nurse/love interest Käte Otersdorf.

At the end of the film, however, it actually does something I heartily commend. As with many biopics, it ends with an epilogue sequence telling us about the characters. In most biopics, that epilogue focuses on what happened to the characters after the end of the film. But given that Richthofen dies at the end of the film and many of his friends have already died, if the film did the normal thing, there wouldn’t be too much left to say.

Instead, for those characters who had already died by 1918, the film gives us a brief historical sketch of the real people behind the film, like so:

“Manfred von Richthofen

Credited with 80 kills, he remains WWI’s most successful fighter pilot.

Killed in action on the 21st of April, 1918 at age 25.

Buried in France by the Allies with full military honours.”

The Red Baron

“Werner Voss

Fighter ace with 48 victories and Richthofen’s closest friend and competitor until he was shot down on the 23rd of September, 1917.”

Werner Voss

In some cases, the text acknowledges the ambiguities it presented as narrative facts.

“Captain Roy Brown

Received the credit for shooting down Richthofen. Until today [sic], it is not proven who truly killed the ‘Red Baron’.

Captain Brown died in 1944 of a heart attack.”

Notice how the film completely avoids admitting the massive falsehood it presents, namely that Brown and Richthofen never met. But it does admit that there is debate about who shot down Richthofen.

Arthur “Roy” Brown

“Käte Otersdorf

No further records exist on her remaining life.”

In this case, what this means is that Mütterschön didn’t bother having anyone do any real research on Otersdorf beyond a quick internet search. While Otersdorf isn’t a famous person, I have no doubt that a professional scholar could track down the basic facts of her life through census records and the like.

But then the film does something that caught my attention, because I’ve never seen a historical film do this before.

“During WWI, many Jewish pilots fought for the German Empire. Many of them were highly decorated fighter aces. They are represented by the fictitious character of Friedrich Sternberg.”

So the film actually acknowledges that Friedrich Sternberg is a composite character and not a real person. Instead of leaving the audience wondering if there really were Jewish fighter aces, or leaving them assuming that Sternberg is a real person, Mütterschön chooses to address the audience directly and clarify exactly what the situation with Sternberg is.

And that is an excellent idea. I entirely understand why filmmakers decide to collapse two or three real people into one fictitious one. The real story may be too complex or confusing to convey in a 2-hour film. Or perhaps the director realizes that introducing three characters will take up too much screen time. In situations like that, composite characters make sense. But they can also result in serious deviations from the facts and leave the audience with a fundamentally false picture of what really happened. For example, Elizabeth collapses the Ridolfi and Babbington Plots into one composite event that is essentially untrue in key ways. Elizabeth would have been a better film if it had admitted its manipulations of fact to the viewer.

From the text, it’s clear that Mütterschön wants the audience to know that there were Jewish fighter aces. Why he wants us to know this I’m less clear on. He doesn’t claim that Richthofen’s unit contained Jewish pilots or that Richthofen actually knew any of them, so Sternberg isn’t a typical composite character in that sense. Rather, my guess is that Mütterschön is trying to avoid looking like he’s glamorizing the Great War by indirectly acknowledging the anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany that lead to the Holocaust during World War II. If that’s what he wants, he’s doing it in a rather ham-fisted way. But perhaps he simply wants audiences to know that Jews made patriotic contributions to Germany in the Great War. Regardless of his motives for including the character, I applaud his choice to deconstruct the fiction in the film’s epilogue.

Want to Know More?

The Red Baronis available on Amazon.

If you want to know more, you could read The Illustrated Red Baron: The Life and Times of Manfred von Richthofen. Or you could read his ‘autobiography’ (written at the urging of the German government while he was at the height of his fame), The Red Fighter Pilot – The Autobiography of the Red Baron [Illustrated].

The Red Baron: Learning Not to Love War

Tags

20th Century Europe, 20th Century Germany, Joseph Fiennes, Lena Headey, Manfred von Richthofen, Matthias Schweighofer, Nikolai Müllerschön, The Great War, The Red Baron, World War I

One of the most well-known figures of World War I was the famous German biplane pilot Baron Manfred von Richthofen, widely referred to as the Red Baron. I ran across a modest biopic of him, uncreatively titled The Red Baron (2010, dir. Nikolai Müllerschön), on Netflix a couple weeks ago so I watched it for the blog. Unfortunately, I lost my notes somewhere between watching it and sitting down to write this post; hopefully that won’t hurt the accuracy of my review.

The Historical Red Baron

Manfred von Richthofen was a minor German noble (his title, Freiherr does translate roughly to ‘baron’, but it’s a title that all members of the family are permitted to use, not just the senior male) who was trained as a cavalry officer. The quick establishment of trench warfare, however, rendered his unit nearly useless, and as a result he pursued and received a transfer to the German Air Service. In 1915 he was trained as a fighter pilot. Initially he appeared to be a poor pilot, crashing his plane on his first mission as a pilot. But he quickly mastered flying and soon emerged as one of the best fighter pilots Germany had. He ultimately racked up 80 confirmed victories (downing an enemy plane), plus possibly as many as 20 further unconfirmed ones; in comparison the best French pilot had 75 confirmed victories (plus a possible 52 unconfirmed ones), while the best British pilot (Canadian actually) had 72. Unlike his brother Lothar, Manfred was not an impressive pilot, but he was an extremely skilled tactician as well as an excellent marksman; the combination made him a deadly opponent.

Manfred von Richthofen

In early 1917, after 16 victories, he received Germany’s highest military honor, the famous ‘Blue Max’ medal, and he was appointed to lead a squadron. At this point, he adopted the bold strategy of having his biplane painted red; although this made it stand out against the white clouds and blue sky, it also meant that he was crafting a reputation that would intimidate his opponents. It was this that led to him being nicknamed The Red Baron.

In July 1917, however, Richthofen was badly injured when he suffered a bullet wound to the head. The injury caused him problems with disorientation; he required numerous surgeries to remove bone splinters, and only returned to flying in September. But by that point he had become famous as a heroic flying ace in Germany; the German government actively promoted this legend, including circulating false claims that the British had created an entire squadron whose sole purpose was to find and kill him. The government began to worry about the effect his death might have on German morale, and asked him to retire, but he refused.

Richthofen’s red Fokker Dr. I

On April 21st, 1918, von Richthofen was shot down over the Somme River, taking a bullet to the heart and lungs that probably killed him before his plane crashed (although various stories claim he either died shortly after crashing or was stabbed by those who found him). There is controversy over whether he was shot down by fellow pilot Canadian Arthur Brown (who received credit for the kill) or by ground forces. It is possible that his head injury may have contributed to his death by disorienting him at a key moment. The British treated him with great respect and buried him with full military honors.

The Red Baron

The film basically follows the facts as I’ve outline them above, watching Richthofen (Matthias Schweighofer) as his career develops, and placing heavy emphasis on his relationships with various other fighter pilots, including his brother Lothar (Volker Bruch), Werner Voss (Til Schweiger), the Jewish pilot Friedrich Sternberg (Maxim Mehmet), and, rather improbably, Arthur Brown (Joseph Fiennes). The film depicts him shooting down Brown early on, rescuing him so that he can be nursed back to health by Käte Otersdorf (Lena Headey), and then Brown being released in a prisoner swap. Later he sees Brown crash-land in No Man’s Land and lands to help him, but damages his plane in the process. After sharing a drink, they hope they won’t meet again until after the war, but sadly Brown shoots him down at the end of the film. None of that is real; the two men never met.

Schweighofer and Fiennes as von Richthofen and Brown

One of the main subplots of the film is his relationship with Otersdorf. He first meets her when she helps tend to Brown’s wounds. She continues popping up throughout the film, pushing him to stop thinking of the war as a chivalric game; in a key scene, she takes him to a field hospital and introduces him to German amputees, which causes him to finally realize that war is hell. When he suffers his brain injury she is sent to tend him and she’s somehow there when he leaves on his last mission. Two weeks after his death, she inexplicably arranges for Brown to escort her to von Richthofen’s grave.

The reality behind this is murky. Von Richthofen was nursed by a woman named Käte Otersdorf after his injury, and there is at least one picture of the two of them together. Long after the war, when she was an old woman, she claimed that they had exchanged love letters. There were rumors that von Richthofen had a secret love that he planned to marry after the war, but it’s not clear that Otersdorf was actually that woman.

Otersdorf and von Richthofen

Perhaps more problematically, the film also seeks to present him as being more peaceful than he actually was. In the film he emphasizes the importance of shooting down the planes rather than killing the pilots; at one point he quarrels furiously with Lothar when the latter strafes a downed pilot. In reality, von Richthofen emphasized exactly the opposite strategy; he wanted his men to focus on killing the pilots and not worrying about the planes. Late in the film, he tries to persuade the German government to accept the necessity of surrender rather than fighting to the last man; he denies the idea that Germany is culturally superior to France or Britain. This too seems to be the film’s invention.

The problem here is that director Nikolai Müllerschön is wrestling with a deep-seated discomfort in Germany with depicting war as heroic. Since World War II, Germans have tended to view war very negatively, and they have worried that valorizing warfare might lead them toward championing men like Adolf Hitler. Müllerschön, however, wants von Richthofen to be a fairly traditional war hero who accomplishes feats of derring-do. His solution is to give von Richthofen a personal conversion moment when he realizes that his gallant activities are misdirected; thereafter he opposes war and wants to stop the slaughter of innocent Germans. So we get to have a valiant war hero in the midst of an ugly war. It’s not an entirely convincing depiction, and it was a quite controversial one when the film came out in Germany.

Another problem with the film is that it was filmed in English, not in German. The cast can’t seem to figure out what sort of accent to use. Schweighofer sounds German, Headey is using some weird German-French hybrid, and several of the supporting actors play Germans with formal British accents. It’s rather jarring.

Headey as Otersdorf

But the film does have two things going for it. The first is the aerial combat scenes, many of which are extremely well-done. The film makes a serious effort to help the viewer understand the reality of biplane dogfights, and it is these moments that are probably the best in the film. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a better depiction of aerial combat (not that it’s a subject I’ve seen lots of films about). I’ll get to the other thing I like about this film in my next post.

Want to Know More?

The Red Baronis available on Amazon.

If you want to know more, you could read The Illustrated Red Baron: The Life and Times of Manfred von Richthofen. Or you could read his ‘autobiography’ (written at the urging of the German government while he was at the height of his fame), The Red Fighter Pilot – The Autobiography of the Red Baron [Illustrated].