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Holocaust Denial, Softcore
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Holocaust Denial, Softcore
If you’re not aware that there is a new Amazon series about a group of Nazi hunters (called, in fact, “Hunters”) in the 1970s, then let me assure you that this is, in fact, your worst nightmare if, like me, you care a little bit about history. You can read about the series elsewhere – my colleague Prof. Bill Niven has written a great review of it for “History Extra,” the BBC’s history magazine. Here, I want to suggest why a series about the Holocaust that invents titillating, fantastical horrors about what happened during the Holocaust might be a bad idea.
When I was in graduate school in the 1990s, we talked about our hope that the aging generation of Holocaust deniers would soon die, and we could stop worrying about Holocaust denial. I know! We were very optimistic after the Berlin Wall for a good decade. The internet wasn’t really a big part of anyone’s normal life then, but I suspect that even without it, a new generation of Holocaust deniers would have appeared on the landscape anyway.
Yet Holocaust denial has long stopped being actual denial; deniers are no longer interested in actual hardcore denial. What they do care about is what I would call softcore denial – what if it was bad, but wasn’t that bad? What if … What if… What if… and on and on until we arrive at an Amazon series that decides that the Holocaust wasn’t that bad at all. After all, the horrors of the mass murder of Jews and Roma, and the persecution of other ethnic, religious, and political groups, weren’t enough: Amazon had to invent a chess game in a killing center that never happened. This is the definition of softcore denial, and I use a pornography phrase here intentionally. The series is intended to shock and horrify and excite viewers; there is no attempt here to discuss actual suffering. If atrocities can be used to create a series “inspired by” rather than about the Holocaust, then they lose their status as atrocity and become fantasy horror.
I used to teach George Perec’s 1975 novel W, or The Memory of Childhood, and I could never quite decide what to think about it. This series reminds me a bit of Perec’s attempt to re-interpret the Holocaust as fantasy, but he never let the reader forget that the actual Holocaust was what the true horror was. Perec’s mother died in a killing center, and he spent his life trying to come turns with her suffering. I want to revisit Perec – I still own the French copy I read in college in Alan Astro’s seminar on memory – and think some more about why that novel moved me, whereas the Amazon series infuriates me.
Losing a Guardian Angel
The film poster for “Bockshorn”
What would you do if a creepy man in a bar claimed that he had sold your guardian angel – but could get it back to you for a price? If you are Mick, the older of the two boys living on the street, you might be wise to this trickster “Landolfi” and tell him to get lost. If you are the young Sauly, you might be confused that he knew your name (Mick’s “He overheard it!” does not convince you) and begin to wonder whether you had been living without a guardian angel all this time. It would explain a lot for two homeless boys trying to figure out how to get to the beach. Sure, they’re pretty clever and know how to survive – but is that enough?
Mick and Sauly (filmportal)
Frank Beyer‘s 1983 film Bockshorn (Taken for a Ride) – tells the story of two boys’ adventures hitchhiking through a fictive country that looks suspiciously like America and Cuba. They let themselves get tricked (ins Bockshorn jagen lassen) into Landolfi’s attempt to punish them for rejecting his favors. Although they had wanted to make it to the beach, Sauly becomes literally sick with the thought that he might be missing a guardian angel, so they go off to look for it in the town of Prince. Mick, trying to solve the riddle of this guardian angel story, tries desperately to find the Mr. Miller who supposedly bought the angel from Landolfi. The joke is on him, since everyone in the town is named Miller and no one has a clue about angels, real or imagined. The boys continue on their way, Sauly gets sicker and Mick is at his wits’ end. They track down Landolfi, but even his incredulity that they would have believed such an absurd story is not enough to turn their fate around. Sauly, still longing for a guardian angel, uses his last energy to try and attack Landolfi, but falls to this death.
Sauly attacking Landolfi (filmportal.net)
If Sauly’s tragic death seems to be the result of a con man’s evil sense of humor, we would not be so moved by the poetics and larger moral tale of the film. In some ways, Sauly and Mick had both lost their guardian angels long ago when they wound up homeless. Although they try to look out for one another, they are ultimately only two children faced with a world that does not want them. Mick is not old enough to be a father figure for Saul and himself both; the few adults who want to help them turn out either to be scheming against them or not entirely trustworthy. In the family town of Prince, not a single Mr. Miller takes them in. On a farm, the family offers to let them stay in exchange for back-breaking work for Mick. The disappointment turns the film title’s warning into an ominous foreshadowing. There is no reason to think that Sauly would have lived happily ever after had he not been bullied about by Landolfi in the bar; the problem is that he and Mick were in a place where there was no one to care for them. It is more than a road movie, despite some characterizations of it as such. Hitchhiking is not child’s play, and their initial good luck at tricking adults out of money and food does not make them good candidates for the open road. They did not have a family or home, a situation they are confronted with at every turn when everyone else seems to have one, whether biological or a family of like-minded friends. That is the real tragedy, and one that is not new to the twentieth century. Homeless children are not safe in or from society, and there is nothing they can do but hope the next truck driver who stops for them is honest and will get them to the beach. They had been tricked long before they met Landolfi – they had no escape for a life in which the search for a guardian angel is their best hope of survival.
An East German Sherlock Holmes
“Sherlock Holmes” and “Dr. Watson”
In the 1985 delightful East German children’s film Operation Violin Case (Unternehmen Geigenkasten, dir. Gunter Friedrich), young Ole finds himself in a hospital bed with a broken leg after crashing during an attempt to fly using a kite as wings. His father begins to lecture him on the need for scientific theory: “You can’t just run off and try to fly like that!” he tells his son in exasperation. Ole, having heard too many of these speeches, turns to the hospital television and discovers a German-Austrian version of a Sherlock Holmes movie, the 1937 mistaken-identity comedy The Man Who was Sherlock Holmes (Der Mann, der Sherlock Holmes war, dir. Karl Hartl). Ole has found his next passion: solving crimes.
“Holmes,” theorizing about the case
Back home, he assigns his friend Andreas the role of Dr. Watson, and the two set of to solve mysteries – with the appropriate props, of course, including “Holmes’s” pipe, violin case and hat. It is not so easy to find crimes, though, with so many honest people around. Then they witness a bicycle accident, and Andreas notes that the harried cyclist not only refuses help but is also wearing a fake mustache. Clearly the man must be up to no good, a suspicion confirmed quickly when they find “Mr. Neumann” loading electronics into a van. The police meanwhile have put out a bulletin on a van full of stolen goods worth 10,000 East German Marks, and Ole and Andreas talk their classmates into skipping the first hour of school to help find the criminal. When that action fails, it is up to Holmes and Watson to solve the case, even if no one takes them seriously.
Neumann kidnapping Ole
They do, of course, catch Neumann in the act, but he sees them as well and kidnaps Ole. Andreas informs the police, finds his friend, and the police find Neumann. The two boys are sent home to their agitated parents, awaiting punishment for skipping the entire school day and acting outside of the law. In an attempt to teach his son a lesson and perhaps keep him busy and out of more trouble, Ole’s father has decided that violin lessons are in order. The irony of pushing his son further into the Holmes character is lost on the adults, but not on the boys or on the cinema audience. The police officer who arrives at the house deciders that further discipline is unwarranted. He warns against not involving the police in further “detective mysteries,” but then proclaims that the boys have helped protect socialist society against those who would undermine it and presents the boys with a medal.
Despite the clear nod to socialist values, including black market activity as one of the worst imaginable crimes against the state, the film is impressive in its universal appeal as well as its references to German filmmaking. No ones finds it odd that two boys decide to imitate characters in a film made during the Nazi era about two detectives pretending to be Holmes and Watson. This aspect of Operation Violin Case suggests that the 1937 film appeared on GDR television often enough to be an obvious reference and points to an acceptance of two British literary icons who lived a rather bourgeois lifestyle. The tension between judging individual actions against a responsibility to act as part of the socialist collective is also central to the film’s moral; here, again, a children’s film serves as a vehicle for communicating a socialist value system through the presumed innocence of children. Boys will be boys, after all, which is fine as long as they grow up into law-abiding socialist men.
Socialist Puppet States with Strings – Not a Fairy Tale
Rolf Herricht with Colleague Marie Gold.
Once upon a time, or rather 1955, after a few attempts in the first postwar years to make animation films in Babelsberg – whether silhouette, puppet, or what we think of as animation films – the DEFA Studio for Animation opened in Dresden. The film short A Fairy Tale Only (Nur ein Märchen, dir. Carl Schröder, 1963), perhaps better translated as “It’s Just a Fairy Tale,” is exemplary of the few puppet films made there, for children and, occasionally, adults.
The puppet film is saturated in irony. The famous actor Rolf Herricht narrates. He appears on an empty set, informing the audience that he has been asked to tell a fairy tale in the interest of education and national cultural heritage “and all that,” and presents his selection of “Mother Hulda” (“Frau Holle,” sometimes known as “Gold Marie and Pitch Marie” or “The Good Sister and the Bad Sister”). He explains his reasons for the selection: It is ideologically unproblematic and well-known, and has been appropriately updated for a contemporary audience.
Mother Hulda (Frau Holle) with Rolf Herricht in “It’s Just a Fairy Tale.”
He starts off with “Once upon a …no, let us say once upon now,” and introduces the characters, all hand puppets: First comes Mother Hulda, who has since earned an additional degree to better herself (referring to the numerous attempts to push women to take advantage of continuing education); then Gold Marie (“no need for further explanation,”), and the equally infamous Pitch Marie, whom he regards with a bit of disapproval. He hesitantly notes that the evil stepmother is a bad pedagogical role model, so we will forget her. The next shot is of the People’s Collective “Brothers Grimm,” where the forewoman Mother Hulda is delighted to employ two new workers “from the people” in order to fulfill her production quotas. Socialist hilarity ensues.
Colleague Marie Gold arrives to work early, bakes tasty loaves of bread, and picks all the apples just as they are becoming ripe using a “climbing machine” (a ladder). An ideal socialist woman-worker, it is not surprising that she receives her daily wages of golden talers from Forewoman Hulda.
Colleague Pitch Takes a Power Break.
Colleague Marie Pitch, on the other hand, shows up late and must powder her nose while the bread burns, lazes about so that the over-ripe apples are fit only for jelly, and leaves her workplace untidy when the whistle blows: “Quitting time!” she yells with glee.Colleague Pitch receives the same wages for her poorly-executed work.
Rolf Herricht falls out of character as a narrator and walks on-screen, asking Forewoman Hulda whether both young women had earned the same pay for unequal work. “Yes,” responds Forewoman Hulda, “exactly according to law.” Herricht complains that it is supposed to be different, that hard work is to be rewarded and laziness punished. The puppet Mother Hulda leans back to get a better look at Herricht’s face and says dryly, “Right, in fairy tales!” Herricht gapes and turns the audience, shrugging his shoulders – socialism is no fairy tale, not even when puppets are involved.
Exotic-Erotic is in the Eye of the Beholder: Red-haired Sirens in Mongolian Fairy Tale Films
The Sea Princess begs Dawadorshi to accompany her to the Sea Lord’s underwater kingdom.
You don’t need to trot out Red Riding Hood or Snow White to find tropes of erotic desire and deception in fairy tales – look East, or at least East of the Iron Curtain. There you will find the 1961 East German and Mongolian co-production Die goldene Jurte (The Golden Yurt, dir. Gottfried Kolditz and Rabschaa Dordschpalam), which premiered in East Berlin as part of the celebrations to mark the fortieth anniversary of the People’s Republic of Mongolia.
The story drips with fairy tale fetishism with the enchanting other. Although it starts out as a nightmare of Orientalist stereotypes, it quickly turns into a defiant, albeit ambiguous, stance against nativist conceptions of self and, well, non-self – or just everyone else. In this East-meets-West adventure, the East rather roundly dismisses the West and its decadent (female vampish) ways and triumphs in a criticism of consumerist-laden modernity.
The fairy tale trope is familiar enough, even if it is nomadic tribes in yurts instead of poor peasants in cottages: The wise lama Arat has entrusted the shepherd Pagwa with a grave responsibility. Pagwa must guard a chest that holds the secret to keeping the region fertile. Although the shepherd believes that the chest is filled with gold, it actually has a pseudo-scientific function of channeling the far-off sea to bring water to the otherwise arid land. In typical fairy tale fashion, Pagwa has three sons; the older two decide to steal the chest and be rid of their guileless and hapless brother, Dawadorshi, by sending him on an impossible mission. With common sense and a good heart, though, Dawadorshi fulfills three key tasks: He saves his people from death, helps a beautiful blind girl regain her sight and heals his father’s heartbreak over his wicked older sons. The youngest son turns out to be not so unworldly, after all. He wins the beautiful girl Sendema for his betrothed, creates a yurt-palace for his family and reunites his rehabilitated brothers with their father.
The Golden Yurt: A palace for the shepherd Pagwa (center) with his three sons. Dawadorshi sits (r) next to his betrothed, Sendema.
All of these accomplishments would be enough for most fairy tale films. When two directors with radically different approaches to filmmaking must work together, the tasks take on another layer of meaning. One of the film’s objectives was to show the beauty of the Mongolian landscape to East German audiences; not surprisingly, Dordschpalam wanted to showcase his country’s inhabitants, as well. It was not enough that most of the actors were Mongolian, apparently. If anyone in the audience was unsure that the Eurasian Steppe was home to people more virtuous, industrious and humane than their socialist brethren to the West, the Sea Lord (played by the classically-trained opera singer and actor Kurt Mühlhardt) and his red-haired vixen daughter (the model-actress Evelyn Cron) are clearly German. Western. East Germans as the West.
Dawadorshi gets entangled with these two creatures of questionable morals when he and his bride-to-be Sendema free a goldfish that has been trapped behind rocks in a lake. The fish commands Dawadorshi to follow it into the depths of the Sea Lord’s kingdom. His protests that he wants to return to his beloved stop suddenly as the camera zooms in on his eyes that glance up and down repeatedly at the fish’s new form. “What are you?” he stammers. “You were just a fish and now…?” The camera cuts to the hem of a sumptuous clingy golden gown and slowly follows its tight curves up the body of the beautiful sea princess with long red hair and enough exposed skin to show off her fair (Germanic) complexion.
The princess smiles enticingly at Dawadorshi, warning him that her father turns into a giant tortoise when he gets angry – a warranted fear, since she has been naughty for turning into a fish and swimming off to play without Daddy Sea Lord’s permission. The princess grabs Dawadorshi’s hand and brings him to her father with the stage-whispered plea to make him stay as her husband.The Sea Lord agrees and sends her away to put on her best dress and jewels.
Hedging his bets, the Sea Lord does not just offer Dawadorshi the reward of the sea princess; he commands him to take her. After pointing to her as she sashays teasingly in her bridal gown, the Sea Lord promises that she and all her playmates will obey the young hero and follow all his wishes before he can even utter them. Beautiful fair-haired sirens swim before Dawadorshi’s eyes, but he wants only to return to Sendema and his people.
The Sea Lord in his angry Sea Tortoise form
Angered, the Sea Lord turns into a giant tortoise, inhuman and inhumane. Dawadorshi’s insistence that he will not be cowed into obedience turns the Sea Lord back to his human form. He smiles approvingly at the young man’s successful passing of this “test,” and offers him help in his adventures.
The Sea Lord in his underwater kingdom.
The role of the sea princess seems primarily to serve as a spoiled plaything for other men. Even her own father uses her as bait to try and trick Dawadorshi into desiring her over his beloved Sendema. We can only assume that, had Dawadorshi chosen the sea princess, it would have been the wrong choice, one that he would regret the rest of his life. More important, it would have been the wrong choice in the eyes of the sea princess’ own father. The contrast between the flirtatious and sexualized (modern, German) princess-woman and the modestly-clothed (traditional, Mongolian) nomad-girl could not be greater – and the happy end of the story comes about because Dawadorshi rejected the other, or perhaps the anti-other.
So what of the sea princess? Her father values her beauty enough to employ her in the games that gods play, and is even angry when she runs – swims – off as a fish without his permission, suggesting he desires her company. But she is not a minor character in this story; Dawadorshi makes a life-changing decision for himself and his people in his loyalty to traditional ways and rejection of this temptress of civilization. Her feelings, though, are not explored beyond her apparent dismay that her father might be upset with her disobedience. Cast aside after being touted as her father’s grand prize for Dawadorshi, she will likely return to her former ways, playing with her friends until she gets bored enough to turn into a fish in the hopes of being rescued by another potential suitor. The decadent princess is thus the only victim of this tale, and it is a sobering moral. Modernity will not win out over tradition and heritage, and it cannot be rescued from itself. The brief G-rated peep-show of the sea princess’ attempt to seduce Dawadorshi is a brief highlight in her life, since she is otherwise doomed to a life of civilization.
Socialist Fairy Tale Dystopias: “Land Beyond the Rainbow”
Few tales provide a better staging for a “good versus evil” post-socialist fairy tale film than Herwig Kipping’s 1991 Land Beyond the Rainbow. Set in an imaginary village, Stalina, in the days leading up to and after the GDR’s brutally repressed 17 June 1953 uprising, or worker’s revolt, Kipping’s film draws on a number of East German film aesthetics – including fairy tale films. Kipping himself never suggested that the film should be read as a fairy tale, but it is hard to miss the reference, even if unintended. The bright colors and exaggerated characters allow for a multi-layered morality tale, but one that has been radically upended and shaken about. It is a fairy tale gone bad, one that shows the tragi-comedy of promises made with promises broken, where uncertainty and fear are in a precarious balance with hope.
The Rainbowmaker tries to convince Marie that Hans (r.) is too violent for her.
Kipping shows few children in the film, but three children play the role of the protagonists. Two boys, Hans and the Rainbowmaker, and a girl, Marie, fend for themselves, at least when they are not being coerced by the grandfather/mayor into raising new memorials to Stalin, or when local hooligans – or are they latter-day partisans of uncertain loyalties? – harass the children. The adults bother only to notice the trio – of course the number three here, one of fairy tales’ magical numbers – when parents or other authority figures need something from one of them.
Mothers and fathers do not take care of their children in Stalina, and the children are not always nice to their parents. Land Beyond the Rainbow might be an updated Hansel and Gretel tale, where parents send their children out into the wild with benevolent neglect, rather than obvious malice. The children, rather than push the witch into an oven (or kill their parents, in an earlier Brothers’ Grimm version of the tale), are violent, with Hans blowing himself up in the middle of the village. Stalina makes a mockery of the GDR’s claim to be country where children were to be the future of socialism; it also dismisses any belief that children could even be manipulated for that purpose.
The Rainbowmaker tries to show a rainbow to Marie through a prism.
Children manipulate each other in Land Beyond the Rainbow. The witch in this re-telling has become a devil, or rather, the evil Hans. He has imprisoned Marie psychologically, forcing her to watch him crush baby chicks that she then buries. She cannot leave, believing, perhaps, that she can save him, or at least prevent him from further cruelty. The Rainbowmaker, the “good” boy, is a silent, effeminate character, with longish hair; the Rainbowmaker must wear a headband that keeps his bangs out of his eyes – forcing him to see. Marie completes the triangle of lovers as the girl who is torn between two suitors, playing both of them, yet afraid to lose either of them. The Rainbowmaker tries to convince Marie that she is too good for Hans; Hans walks over and yanks Marie away from the Rainbowmaker’s side. She turns back to look at the Rainbowmaker, but she does not protest as Hans pulls her along.
At a 2012 Modern Language Association session, the fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes once dismissed this film (and thus my reading of it) as “ekelhaft,” disgusting, one that he saw only as Kipping’s chance to get back at a system that wronged him. To be sure, the film can be disturbing: If senseless violence and greed were not enough to make the audience uncomfortable, then the practical violence of skinning a pig and pulling out its entrails is enough to make even village butchers avert their eyes. Still, fairy tales are not really fairy tales without an element of the horrific that fights against an element of goodness. Ultimately, Land Beyond the Rainbow is an apocalyptic fairy tale where love not only does not conquer all but exists only within the duality of love and hate.
Marie, poetic monologue on life.
This is the fairy tale of ages that is also the heart of this “disgusting” film: the three children, those three entities, function as one. Juliette, Paris, and Romeo; Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost; Adam, the serpent, Eve; Eve, Cane, and Abel; Joseph, Jesus, and the Virgin Mary. These three children are in passionate love, in all senses of the word, and it is up to us to keep our eyes open to watch and understand them and thus Kipping’s dystopian fairy tale, even when it offends our sensibilities.
Red Riding Hood Fights Back
Red Riding Hood with her father.
In the East German (DEFA) 1962 fairy tale film Little Red Riding Hood (Rotkäppchen, dir. Götz Friedrich), we meet some of Red Riding Hood’s friends – and enemies. Her best pals are the ever-worried Rabbit and the clumsy and rather childish Bear. The Big Bad Wolf finds a partner in crime, Fox, both of whom are out to get Red Riding Hood and co.
3 friends: Red Riding Hood, Bear and Rabbit
As in the original story, Red Riding Hood must bring Grandmother a basket – no wine this time, but rather a healthy pail of milk, some bread, and the time-honored remedy for colds, a bit off snuff. While the three friends stray from the path and play around, Bear accidentally knocks over the pail of milk. No problem – Rabbit runs home to bring a new pail of milk, only to return and find Bear and Red Riding Hood leaving the path for the forest again. The wily Fox has tricked Bear to go in search of honey, while Red Riding Hood goes to pick mushrooms for Grandmother. Rabbit’s hand-wringing and begging earns him Red Riding Hood’s anger, telling him not to be a Hasenfuß (a scaredy cat; literally, a rabbit’s foot).
Red Riding Hood has chased away the evil Fox.
Predictably, it is a set-up: Fox and Wolf attack her, but they are no longer working together: Wolf hits Fox over the head with a stick and turns to snatch the girl, but Red Riding Hood has outsmarted him. She blows a handful of snuff in his face. He then sneezes so much that he must crawl away, with Red Riding Hood throwing stones after him. Fox has meanwhile finished off the rest of the basket’s goodies, but the exhausted Red Riding Hood is gleeful – she has outsmarted Wolf and does a little victory dance.
The jarring part of this scene is Red Riding Hood’s anger. She throws the stones not only to scare away Fox, but to hit him, that is, to hurt him. The fight has left her with dirt smeared on her face, her clothes disheveled, and a look of hatred that the camera captures in a close-up. What is the purpose of showing this new side of Red Riding Hood? She has defeated Fox, but the traditional fairy tale lesson is lost, since she once again wanders into the forest, allowing Wolf time to beat her to Grandmother’s. It is a turning point that is not really a turning point.
In a film that is otherwise careful to avoid outright violence (her hunter-father carries Wolf away to a place where he can do no more harm, his hunting rifle unused), Red Riding Hood’s reaction suggests a different kind of moral. Perhaps she will keep her promise to never stray from the path again, perhaps not. What is certain, though, is that the next time she encounters an evil-doer, she will know how to take care of herself.
Nazi Fairy Tale Films
The phrase “Nazi fairy tale films” seems like either a bad joke, or else yet another area that Nazis turned into propaganda. Yet, Nazi film adaptations of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales represent important examples of children’s films in cinematic and educational history. Although the film industry in Nazi Germany came under the purview of Josef Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda, he stated explicitly that children’s films should be free of Nazi symbols and ideology. It is time to lift the taboo of freely discussing Nazi filmmaking beyond the well-known overtly anti-Semitic and nationalistic films. After all, in 1940 alone, German film companies produced nine 35 mm feature films based on fairy tales, seven of them Brothers Grimm adaptations – almost half of the total nineteen fairy tale films intended for the Big Screen in Nazi Germany made between 1935 and 1944. From Puss in Boots to Red Riding Hood, Nazi fairy tale films offer us a unique glimpse into the values of good vs. evil that the Big Screen presented young cinema-goers – values that cannot be reduced to stereotypical Nazi slogans of the supremacy of the German race.
These films are not easy to come by, with rare exception, but I think this lack of access to films is part of the problem. What happens if Nazi fairy tale films were remastered as DVDs and made available through, for instance, the Goethe Institute or the German Center for Political Education – as many East German iconic films are? They would then become part of a clear socio-political framework that would situate them within German and cinema history. More important, they would not remain such a Big Secret, and more scholars than the few now writing about them could offer more interpretations than currently available.
Rumpelstiltskin, 1940
Let me give a small taste of some of these films, which I will be discussing in the weeks that come: Let’s start with the delightful Puss in Boots (Der gestiefelte Kater, dir. Alf Zengerling, 1935), which demonstrates the director’s successful transition from puppet films to live action films mixed in with the occasional costumed animal character and odd documentary film footage of animals (the lion jump cut is a bit odd, but the film still rates as one of my all-time favorites). And of course there is Red Riding Hood (Rotkäppchen, dir. Fritz Genschow and Renee Stobrawawhich, 1937), which smacks of Wizard of Oz (dir. Victor Fleming, 1939) Dorothy-in-Kansas reality (b/w) and dreams (bold color) of the fantasy world. Unfortunately, Red Riding Hood’s Nazi-era hunter is decked out in Nazi gear or else I would recommend it for any family film evening… maybe a bit of Film-Photo-Shopping could rescue it. Then there is The Rabbit and the Hedgehog (Der Hase und der Igel, dir. Alf Zengerling, 1940), interestingly particularly for the rabbit character, played by Paul Walker – a world-renowned actor of diminutive stature who, with Zengerling, managed to make a living in Nazi-era filmmaking, including starring in such classics as Rumpelstilskin (pictured above with the farmer’s daughter and the instruction to turn straw into gold, 1940). I lose trace of Walker after his last films in the 1940s – reason enough to open up the files and film-reel canisters and release Hitler’s celluloid princes, princesses, and all of their subjects to some scholarly scrutiny today.