Le Vieux Fusil (1974): Another Movie Castrated for the German Audience

"Le Vieux Fusil" ("The Old Gun") is an excellent example of post-war film censorship in Western Germany. For the Western German version, additional scenes were shot and included while extremely brutal scenes were cut, inhuman dialogues were modified and diluted. There, the film had the harmless title "Abschied in der Nacht". In Eastern Germany, however, the title was "Das alte Gewehr" and the film was shown in cinemas in an uncensored version. Only in 2007, was this uncensored version released to the German market.



In France, on the other hand, it was immediately awarded the César for Best Film, more awards and nominations followed, and it attracted rave reviews. Years later, it received the "César des Cèsars". In Germany, the portrayal of Nazis was not appreciated, since Germans felt they had been degradated to caricatures, cowards and brutal persons. The film should have shown "real enemies", and, besides, it was not a "real" anti-war film, too little analyses of violence and murder had been done while showing too much focus on "primitive suspense" and bloodthirsty effects (via and via). This reaction and description is highly interesting when considering that the massacre shown in the film had really taken place killing hundreds of people...

Among the many, many atrocities committed during World War Two, the events at one French village stand out. (via)

On 10th of June 1944, troops of the 2nd Waffen-SS Panzer Division destroyed the village Oradour-sur-Glane in Nazi-occupied France killing 642 people within a few hours, among them 207 children, six of them less than six months old. More than 400 of them were herded into the village church which was soaked in petrol before being set on fire. Only seven villagers survived (via and via and via).

The SS men next proceeded to the church and placed an incendiary device beside it. When it was ignited, women and children tried to escape through the doors and windows, only to be met with machine-gun fire. 247 women and 205 children died in the attack. The only survivor was 47-year-old Marguerite Rouffanche. She escaped through a rear sacristy window, followed by a young woman and child.[3] All three were shot, two of them fatally. Rouffanche crawled to some pea bushes and remained hidden overnight until she was found and rescued the next morning. About twenty villagers had fled Oradour-sur-Glane as soon as the SS unit had appeared. That night, the village was partially razed.
Several days later, the survivors were allowed to bury the 642 dead inhabitants of Oradour-sur-Glane who had been killed in just a few hours. (via)

The massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane, committed by German SS troops 75 years ago, remains a symbol of unimaginable inhumanity and horror, even today. We bow in shame and deep sadness before the victims and their families.
Michael Roth, Germany's Minister of State for Europe

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- images via and via

More:
- Nazi massacre village Oradour-sur-Glane: Where ghosts must live on, The Guardian, link
- Oradour-sur-Glane: On the emergence of a glocal site of memory in France, ResearchGate, link
- The Oradour Massacre, European Journal, YouTube, link

What would Jesus say?

Markus Dröge is the bishop of the Evangelical Church Berlin-Brandenburg-Silesian Upper Lusatia and ambassador for the House of One in Berlin. He openly discusses what it means to be truly Christian and points out that being Christian is not about defending traditions but about having a social mission. Dröge is convinced that the church has to actively react to right-wing populism that is on the rise - he refers to Trump and the German far-right party "Alternative for Germany" (AfD) and what they have in common.



The church, according to Dröge, does not tell people who to vote for but communicates Christian values and sees itself as a sort of sparring partner. From all political parties that there are in Germany, he chooses the AfD to talk about. And there is a reason why. The AfD is the defender of "western Christianity". But their political agenda, according to Dröge, is not Christian when they reject homosexuality, when they only accept a conservative family image, when they aggressively protect unborn life without being able to differentiate, when they promote the so-called German Leitkultur (often a rather nationalist and monocultural vision of German society that tends to solve any problem with cultural assimilation), or when they reject Islam.
Last year, the AfD published a paper saying that the party had to be politically incorrect, that the party in fact needed to provoke. Dröge explains the mechanism: After the provocation, the party denies that it has ever provoked and says that it was only one member's opinion. By doing so, the party makes sure that it is always present in the media. Apart from that, the misanthropic ideas that are constantly repeated start being normalised after a while. Society gets used to them and finally a great many people do not realise that they find inhumane remarks normal.
Dröge asks the question what Jesus would say. Altruism, Christian love or Christian charity do not mean loving your own national traditions, your own family, your own native country, and people who share your religion. Christian love crosses cultural and religious borders. Dröge comes to the conclusion that the values of the church and the values of the AfD are incompatible.

Content from Markus Dröge's speech "Was haben wir Christen, was hat die Evangelische Kirche, dem wachsenden Rechtspopulismus entgegenzusetzen?, 25 March 2017, via

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photograph via

Narrative images: Warschauer Kniefall

"As I stood on the edge of the Germany's historical abyss, feeling the burden of millions of murders, I did what people do when words fail."
Willy Brandt



On 7 December 1970, German Chancellor Willy Brandt (1913-1992) visited a monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (about 13.000 Jews were killed by Nazis during the uprising in 1943, thousands more died in the Warsaw concentration camp that was established soon after the uprising or were executed in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, ...). Willy Brandt visited the monument, lay down a wreath ... and spontaneously fell to his knees. Brandt remained silently in that position - on his knees, head bowed low - for twenty or thirty seconds surrounded by people who were awe-struck. Polish politicians were astonished, Polish intellectuals have been admiring him ever since. But his kneeling in front of the monument also made him a target for hostility and hatred. For his gesture of humility and penance, Brandt received a great many letters from people saying they wished to see him hanged, that they would like to pinion him against a wall; he was called "traitor of the home country". The majority of Germans felt his humility was exaggerated (48%: "excessive", 41%: "appropriate", 11%: "no opinion"). In 1971, Willy Brandt was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (it is thought that his gesture in front of the monument was one of the reasons why he was awarded the prize). His landslide win in the 1972 elections showed that more and more people supported his "Ostpolitik" that was symbolised by his genuflection (via and via) and that communicated that Germany was no longer a country other nations had to be afraid of.

"I have been often asked what the gesture was all about. Was it planned? No, it wasn't."
Willy Brandt



"We have a strong tendency to view the year 1989 as the beginning of European development, basically, the beginning of our new political era. It's true that this is the turning point in Europe. If you open your eyes wider, the year 1970 was the turning point in Polish-German relations in the political sense."
Janusz Reiter, Poland's first ambassador to the reunified Germany



"Brandt walked forward, Scheel half a step behind him, and behind them both came a wreath of white carnations carried by two Polish civilians, who set it down in front of the monument. Brandt straightened out the red, black and gold German banner, on which was written 'The Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany'. At that moment he was the symbol of his title, his position, his country. He took a step back and stood still, without saying a word. Suddenly, he dropped to his knees and crossed his hands in front of himself, his face immobile. He stayed a long time in that position, the only thing audible was the clicking of cameras, the stifled sobs of an old woman in the crowd. No words were needed to understand that the Chancellor was begging forgiveness in the name of the German people for the crimes committed by their nation. As the Spiegel journalist Hermann Schreiber said, 'here is a man kneeling when he has no need to do so, in the name of all those who should kneel and do not.' That the gesture came from a German who had done nothing to be reproached for, and who had even fought against the Nazis' barbarism, made clear that it meant to 'accept the past' for post-Hitler Germany."
Miard-Delacroix (2016)

::: Short documentary in German; Brandt's genuflection at 6:15 and 7:55: WATCH

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- Miard-Delacroix, H. (2016) Willy Brandt. Life of a Statesman. London & New York: I.B.Tauris & Co.Ltd
- Photographs via and via and via