War Orphans in Film – No Happy Endings

Of all of the post-World War II films that addressed the problems of orphaned children, the Hungarian film Valahol Európában (Somewhere in Europe, also known as It Happened in Europe, 1947) elicited the most shocked public outcry about the youngest victims of the war. Directed by Géza Radványi, who wrote the screenplay with writer Béla BalazsSomewhere in Europe continued with the filmic trope of pointing unrelenting, accusing fingers at the adults who had allowed the onset of a war (i.e. pretty much everyone) that continued to punish young people long after the last shots had been fired and bombs had been dropped in Europe. Unlike the films Somehwere in Berlin (Irgendwo in Berlin, dir. Gerhard Lamprecht, 1946, DEFA/Germany) or Germany in the Year Zero (Germania Anno Zero, dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1948, France/Germany/Italy), Radványi’s work focused on war orphans themselves, instead of employing children as part of a larger plot about societal renewal. Somewhere in Europe is a cry of anguish, not a lesson on shame or the politics of reconstruction.

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Screenshot of children attempting to hang the conductor in “Somewhere in Europe.”

Radványi positions a group of wandering children who find their way to an abandoned castle against the adults of the surrounding village who gleefully shoot at – and in one case kill – the “juvenile delinquents” who steal food and supplies in order to (barely) survive. He does not pretend that the children are innocents; indeed, he highlights the ways in which the war and its end pushed young people into criminal acts. Most haunting is perhaps the scene at the castle where the children decide to hang the once-famous conductor who also resides there. When the slightly older leader of the group, Peter, stops them from killing the older man, he asks what motivated them to want to execute another war refugee. The answer: “For fun.” These are children who have learned not only to fend for themselves, but to imitate the behavior of the adults they have encountered, and who abandoned them.

Radványi offers a supposedly happy end for everyone. The local villagers realize that they should be helping the children instead of treating them like the enemy; the children wash their dirty faces and put on suddenly clean clothes and happily wave from their castle – officially now theirs – to the conductor as he heads off across the green pastures of Hungary towards, one presumes, a rekindling of his musical career. I find this “happy ending” rather unhappy and troubling. Forgetting the fact that, in hindsight, the castle would likely have been nationalized in the next years, we are still left with a group of children who have no means of feeding themselves. There is no garden in sight, and the larder of meat left by the conductor will run out at some point. True, the villagers have recognized the errors of their ways. But for how long? There is no talk of caring adults looking after the children’s well-being, or even feeding them. When do the children start pillaging again? The castle is not an orphanage. It is at best a temporary solution, one well-suited to the needs of the time, that is, to find a place where children could be forgotten, at least temporarily.

Screenshot of wandering orphans in "Somewhere in Europe"

Screenshot of wandering orphans in “Somewhere in Europe”

I do not think that Radványi or Balazs intended for their audiences to take away this other message of accusation; the story of war orphans, however, had few happy ends in any postwar society. Somewhere in Europe, in this sense, unconsciously documents this second act of tragedy, in which adults learn to feel solace that children can be saved – from themselves and from their experiences. It is only a temporary salvation; not even a fairy tale would know how to fix this tragedy. If this reason is not enough to bring Somewhere in Berlin more fully into international scholarship and history and film studies classrooms (it has excellent English subtitles, since the United Nations supported the postwar international distribution of the film, helped along by such politicos as the then-French president Auriol Frack and his Dior-clad wife exclaiming that this was a “must-see” film), then the curious use of the nineteenth-century American melody of the folk tune “O Susanna” that the children sing-shout in the castle would surely peak anyone’s curiosity.

Nazis on the Dark Side of the Moon. Where else would they be?

If you have not seen Iron Sky (dir. Timo Vuorensola, 2012), march (there is no real goose-stepping in it or I would make that bad joke) to the nearest rental store or your favorite on-line streaming source and get it. Don’t read the negative reviews about it or go its Facebook site until you have seen the movie, or you will fall into the kind of Weltschmerz despair that will keep you from enjoying the ride. And what a ride it is: Nazis flee to the Dark Side of the Moon in 1945 and spend the next 75 years preparing their return to (yep, take over) Earth. The headquarters/fortress looks like the Pentagon, except it is in the shape of a swastika; a blonde beauty (Julia Dietze) renate_in_classroom-copywith perfect skin prepares her students for the message of friendship that National Socialists will bring with their invasion, err, triumphant home-coming; the African-American model/astronaut falls into the Moon Nazis’ hands and gets “albino_ized” – whitened –  against his will; two Nazi soldiers stare at the centerfold of an Earth porn magazine and try and figure out why the hair “down there” on women looks like “our great Führer’s mustache.” If there is a bad joke or science fiction film allusion or a scene in poor taste that the movie misses, it’s probably in the director’s cut. At least I hope so.

The movie was several years in the making, a Finnish-German-Australian co-production that relied heavily on Wreck-a-Movie – an early crowd-funding site that asked anyone and everyone for suggestions on what should be in the movie, and for donations while they were at it. It is a small wonder that the film is not the length of Wagner’s Ring Cycle (don’t worry, the reference makes it into the movie). So perhaps fans of an idea are not the best source of good filmmaking…but I fear that a critically-acclaimed version of a film on Moon Nazis would have been, well, either uncomfortable or boring. Maybe both. Reviewers’ complaints about bad acting and a failed plot line missed the rather tricky sleight-of-hand that it took to make a movie born of a persistent campy-fascination with Nazis that cinema audiences and an awful lot of people in general hang on to. Even a cult film like Starship Troopers (dir. Paul Verhoeven, 1997) only dared dance on the edge of Nazi allusions, with cinema-goers fighting for the right to be the first to point out the Gestapo-like uniforms here or the references to war propaganda movies there. cropped-movieironskyposterflickr.jpg

So, to summarize: Iron Sky is not subtle. Any jokes anyone has ever made about Nazis abound – but then the same goes for the films’ Americans, whose only positive contribution to humankind was apparently Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 The Great Dictator. Spoiler alert: The Moon Nazis don’t win, primarily because every country in the United Nations (except Finland) has a secret spaceship program ready to nuke any and all impending threats to Earth. Second spoiler alert: After defeating the Moon Nazis, the Earth’s nuclear powers turn on each other, a scene in outer space that it is not nearly as exciting as the fisticuffs action in the UN conference room after the U.S. lays claim to the vast, untapped resource of “helium-3” on the moon. The crowd-funded sequel to the movie, Iron Sky: The Coming Race assures me that all I need to know about it is the title. Nay-sayers might read the lack of a script, contracts for actors, or the general absence of a plan into that statement. I can’t think of a more winning combination.