Roberto Rossellini, the director and writer of Germania Anno Zero, portrayed the hardships and consequences the German people faced after World War II and the lifestyle of a collapsed state. From actual footage of Berlin reduced to rubble to the questionable choices that had to be made in order to ensure the survival of their family or themselves, these remarkable scenes are a sharp contrast to the message behind Hitlerjunge Quex which showed the valor and superiority of those who followed Hitler. Rossellini showed us various comparisons and contrasts between Germania Anno Zero and Hitlerjunge Quex with the portrayal of his main character, Edmund, with that Heini that accompanies other subtleties. From these similarities and differences, I am convinced that Rossellini reinforced these characteristics to show that the “help” that the people were …show more content…
Both boys became part of the Hitler youth during both controversial points in Hitler’s reign while being tempted by alcohol and women to corrupt their established innocence. For Edmund in Germania Anno Zero, the temptation was Christl who seemed to be more of the groups’ property, while in Hitlerjunge Quex Heini was tempted by Gerda who was just trying to be his “friend”. Neither child was shown having any real group of friends nor did they have a well-developed understanding of the world at the time. In the end, after betraying their fathers, who were both unemployed and veterans of World War I, unfortunately, shared the same fate and died at the end of each film. Edmund’s father figure was replaced with Herr Henning who led him to the Hitler youth and indirectly convinced him to commit patricide. For Heini, the Bannführer replaced his father and, like Herr Henning, led the boy into the Hitler youth group just before his
On Hitler’s Mountain is a memoir of a child named Irmgard Hunt and her experiences growing up in Nazi Germany. She herself has had many experiences of living during that dark time, she actually met Hitler, had a grandfather who hated Hitler's rule, and had no thoughts or feelings about the Nazi rule until the end of WWII. Her memoir is a reminder of what can happen when an ordinary society chooses a cult of personality over rational thought. What has happened to the German people since then, what are they doing about it today and how do they feel about their past? Several decades later, with most Nazis now dead or in hiding, and despite how much Germany has done to prevent another Nazi rule, everyone is still ashamed of their ancestors’ pasts.
Roberto Benigni, the director of Life is Beautiful (1997), explores the sacrifice of people during war . Through the use of Foreshadowing, Mood, and Characterization, film audiences are challenged to Imagine the struggles of the those in the holocaust.
By 1945 over 6 million Jews were killed as a result of the genocide launched by Nazi Germany. The Holocaust has been documented and depicted by various visual images revealing the atrocities of this tragic period. The film posters of Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful produced in 1997 and Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List produced in 1993 utilize various rhetorical appeals to present starkly different visual arguments about the Holocaust. For the purpose of this rhetorical analysis, viewing these images from the standpoint of a viewer who is exposed to these posters for the first time, with the acute knowledge that these posters are related to the holocaust is necessary. From this standpoint, it is clear to see how images that depict that
In Primo Levi’s Survival In Auschwitz, an autobiographical account of the author’s Holocaust experience, the concept of home takes on various forms and meanings. Levi writes about his experience as an Italian Jew during the Holocaust. We learn about his journey to Auschwitz, his captivity and his ultimate return home. This paper explores the idea of home throughout the work. As a concept, it symbolizes the past, the future and a part of Levi’s identity.
Multiple historians have touched on the change in government during Fascist Italy’s reign in World War II. In Italian Fascism: Its Origins and Development, Alexander De Grand clarifies the many promises Benito Mussolini fabricated for the Italian people in order to get them to join his cause such as the improvement on poverty with the rise of a new Roman Empire. De Grand also gives an opposite view, with some citizens seeing Fascism as a “model of efficiency.” In Melton S. Davis’ Who Defends Rome?, t...
7 May 2010 “Fascism in Germany and Italy.” Online Essays. 10 July 2007. 7 May 2010 “Italian Fascism.” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia.
Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 film Inglourious Bastards entails a Jewish revenge fantasy that is told through a counterfactual history of events in World War II. However, this story follows a completely different plot than what we are currently familiar with. Within these circumstances, audiences now question the very ideas and arguments that are often associated with World War II. We believe that Inglourious Basterds is a Jewish revenge fantasy that forces us to rethink our previous understandings by disrupting the viewers sense of content and nature in the history of World War II. Within this thesis, this paper will cover the Jewish lens vs. American lens, counter-plots within the film, ignored social undercurrents, and the idea that nobody wins in war.
Bartoletti, Susan Campbell. Hitler Youth [growing up in Hitler's Shadow]. New York: Random House/Listening Library, 2006. Print.
Since the beginning of its existence as a country, Italy has faced enormous challenges in establishing itself as a unified political and social entity. The geographic, economic, and linguistic differences between its various regions and the artificial manner in which they were amalgamated created a legacy of internal divisions that continues to dominate the country's political climate to this day. Italy's numerous historical fiascoes, such as its disastrous involvement in the two World Wars and the rise of fascism, further escalated the domestic problems that had haunted it since the Risorgimento. At first, the anti-fascist Resistance movement, which dominated the end of World War II, seemed to bring Italy a ray of hope, promising a new era of freedom, reform, and democratic representation. However, this hope was quickly extinguished, as widespread poverty, government corruption, and deep divisions between regions and classes persisted and no true social reform was attained. These harsh conditions were depicted by a group of Italian film directors whose neorealist works have since been celebrated as masterpieces of world cinema. One of the most prominent of these is Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief. This 1948 film discusses the prevalent themes dominating Italy's social and political history, within the context of the unsettlingly poor post-War urban proletariat.
In this essay I will look at the film and the narrative techniques it uses, probing whether it portrays the East German nation as positive or negative, concluding that though many negatives are identified, some positives are deduced from Honecker's state. I will also consider why, in recent times, East Germans have come to regard their former state with nostalgia, or as the Germans would put it, nostalgia, an act of Goodbye Lenin! (2003) explores the. Not a doom laden, emphatically political treatise on the reunification of East and West Germany but a touching and sometimes comedic insight into the gargantuan changes impacting on the small scale, day to day life as experienced by an East German family, Christiane Kerner and her two children Alex and Ariane. Awaking from a coma, Alex fears his mother?s condition may worsen if she learns of re-unification, going to increasingly elaborate lengths in maintaining the illusion of the GDR?s omniscience.
Reich, J. and Garofalo, P. (ed.) (2002), Re-viewing Fascism: Italian Cinema, 1922-1943, Indiana: Indiana University Press.
Setting out with his arrest by the fascist militia in December of 1943, the text conforms to Primo Levi’s experience in the succeeding twelve months as an inmate in the National Socialists’ Monowitz- Buna concentration camp, seven kilometers east of Auschwitz. Upon arriving in the camp, the first-person narrator, Primo Levi, who holds a doctorate in chemistry, embarks on a world that renders him astonished; simply by making literary notes to Dante’s Inferno can he manage to draw its contours. After the degrading intake procedures, he actualizes that the objective of the place to which they have been brought is the psychological and physical devastation of the inmates. Inmate Levi, “Number 174517,” discovers more about the camp and the inhumane circumstances there....
During the 1970’s and 1980’s, great fear had been spread throughout Italy. A group known as the Brigate Rosse, or Red Brigade, had developed and left its mark on the Italian political scene. Fear was commonplace as bomb plots, kneecappings, and assassinations became the norm. As we go through this paper, the fascinating yet horrifying story, including the history, ideology, and current activity of the Red Brigade will be told.
A film bursting with visual and emotional stimuli, the in-depth character transformation of Oscar Schindler in Schindler’s List is a beautiful focal point of the film. Riddled with internal conflict and ethical despair, Schindler challenges his Nazi Party laws when he is faced with continuing his ambitious business ideas or throwing it all away for the lives of those he once saw as solely cheap labor. Confronted with leading a double life and hiding his motivations from those allegiant to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, Schindler undergoes numerous ethical dilemmas that ultimately shape his identity and challenge his humanity. As a descendent of a Jewish-American, Yiddish speaking World War II soldier who helped liberate concentration camps in Poland, this film allowed for an enhanced personal
Primo Levi was an Italian Jewish Anti-fascist who was arrested in 1943, during the Second World War. The memoir, “If this is a Man”, written immediately after Levi’s release from the Auschwitz concentration camp, not only provides the readers with Levi’s personal testimony of his experience in Auschwitz, but also invites the readers to consider the implications of life in the concentration camp for our understanding of human identity. In Levi’s own words, the memoir was written to provide “documentation for a quiet study of certain aspects of the human mind”. The lack of emotive words and the use of distant tone in Levi’s first person narration enable the readers to visualize the cold, harsh reality in Auschwitz without taking away the historical credibility. Levi’s use of poetic and literary devices such as listing, repetition, and symbolism in the removal of one’s personal identification; the use of rhetorical questions and the inclusion of foreign languages in the denial of basic human rights; the use of bestial metaphors and choice of vocabulary which directly compares the prisoner of Auschwitz to animals; and the use of extended metaphor and symbolism in the character Null Achtzehn all reveal the concept of dehumanization that was acted upon Jews and other minorities.