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What sort of stuff is your friend thinking of? 'The Eagle Has Landed', that kind of thing? Endless documentaries about how 'we' won?
If so, I can understand his exasperation - must the Second World War, as the last 'good' one, be re-fought nightly on the History channel? Especially as a tacit excuse for grubbier antics in Iraq, or wherever.
On the other hand though, the first really serious films about Nazi Germany are, arguably, only just starting to emerge. Something like 'Downfall', in which the great actor Bruno Ganz plays Hitler in the bunker as the experiment finally, disastrously, comes off the rails, probably couldn't have been made much before 2004.
There's enough distance, now, in a way there wasn't in the past, for the higher SS ranks to be treated, cinematically, or in novels, plays, etc, as the human beings they after all were. To dismiss them as monsters is to avoid the point. Which is, that it could quite easily happen again. And so on.
That's actually quite an obvious and boring point to make, but still, I'd highly recommend sitting your pal down in front of 'Downfall'. At three hours plus it's not an easy watch, but it is (my slightly facetious on-line persona aside) genuinely terrific. |
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