This week I finished:
Gates of Fire, by podcast guest Steven Pressfield: The moment I finished listening to this novel, I restarted from the beginning and I’m a third of the way through my second time. I loved it, especially about halfway through, when the Spartan characters, way of life, and values start coming through.
I loved The War of Art, but didn’t cross over into Steven’s fiction until a few months ago with The Arcadian and Man at Arms. I wrote about a section that hit me in Wounded Warriors, by Steven Pressfield, and Ourselves.
Gates of Fire treated fear, love, duty, honor, masculinity, femininity, and other values in a way I don’t know how to describe, but I’d say both subtly and head on. He broke a lot of rules of writing I try to follow like avoiding big words or calling attention to the language, yet I liked the style of language.
Most of all, I saw people working hard to live by their values, finding the reward in the work, in the relationships formed in working with others working hard. The set pieces describing the battles were vivid and filled with details that made them feel alive. Though few alive today could speak with experience of what happened in these battles, they were still human and we can learn from them.
Nuremberg, written, co-produced, and directed by James Vanderbilt, based on the book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist by Jack El-Hai: I wrote about the book last week and the movie was faithful to the most important themes: that the top Nazis weren’t fundamentally different humans than the rest of us.
I found the movie compelling. Russell Crowe took on a daunting task to play Hermann Göring, not as a monster but an affable person, and Rami Malek as someone who found him likeable.
Something I didn’t get from the book was that the Nuremberg trials weren’t something to take for granted, which I did. I grew up figuring after wars, if there were crimes against humanity, you tried the perpetrators. The movie starts by showing how long of a shot that idea was.
Read last week’s post for my thoughts on the big themes. The movie dramatized some parts, like the role of the press, that look like they didn’t happen so strongly, and Kelley’s role in the trials, which I understand he had left shortly after they started, but seeing the interaction between Kelley and Göring was more than enough reason to see it.
The Eternal Jew, directed by Fritz Hippler, ordered by the Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels: Regular readers know when I like a piece of media, I read and watch hours of relevant documentaries, conversations with authors, actors, directors, etc. In learning about Göring and Kelley, I saw this propaganda movie by Nazis demonizing Jews.
I don’t like watching propaganda or antisemitism, but I’d rather learn from history than be doomed to repeat it.
There’s nothing redeeming about it except to see what people actually did, especially in the context of understanding the people who did it not as monsters unlike the rest of us, but as humans like us in a different context. If we think we’re different, we have to explain why generations of psychological research show that people like you and me in contexts like they were in tend to do what they did.
If we don’t face our common humanity, I don’t see how we can stop repeating what others did. We have to pay attention to situations. Future problems won’t come from people acting like Hitler, but will have common attributes.
Quoting Wikipedia:
The Eternal Jew is a 1940 German antisemitic Nazi propaganda film, presented as a documentary. The initial German title was Der ewige Jude, the German term for the character of the “Wandering Jew” in medieval folklore. Directed by Fritz Hippler at the insistence of the Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, the screenplay is credited to Eberhard Taubert and narrated by Harry Giese; it consists of feature and documentary footage combined with materials filmed shortly after the Nazi occupation of Poland. At this time, Poland’s Jewish population was about three million, roughly ten percent of the total population.
Background
Hitler and Goebbels believed that film was a vital tool for molding public opinion. The Nazis first established a film department in 1930 and Goebbels had taken a personal interest in the use of film to promote the Nazi philosophy and agenda. Soon after the Nazi takeover, Goebbels insisted in speeches that the role of the German cinema was to serve as the “vanguard of the Nazi military”.
The Goebbels film appears to have been intended as a virulently antisemitic remake of the 1933 British film The Wandering Jew, which argued that Jews were victims of relentless persecution throughout history. Saul Friedländer suggests that Goebbels’ intent was to counter three films: Jew Süss, The House of Rothschild, and The Wandering Jew. These three films, all released in 1933–34, showed that Jews were persecuted throughout history; the Goebbels films presented the opposite message.
The Wikipedia page covers a lot of detail, revealing about intent, themes, and more.