Television under the Swastika
I happened
upon Television
under the Swastika, a documentary concerning Nazi television.
It’s pretty interesting stuff: cabaret acts, political interviews,
cooking shows—all designed to show the greatness of the Party and
its benevolent
Leader.
Watching stuff like that always gets me wondering about that lost world. It’s not a sense of nostalgia, of course—the Nazis were one of the great evils of the 20th century—but one does wonder what it was actually like to live in that world.
It’s also strange to see actual pictures of the era, as opposed to movie interpretations. In the movies, everyone is a blond-haired, clean-shaven Aryan stereotype, but in the films one sees a lot of old-fashioned Imperial Germans with their forked beards and dark hair.
I also wonder about what was going on underneath the surface. The barbers being retrained as hairdressers, for example: did they ask for the retraining, or did the party simply tell some quota of barbers that they had to submit for retraining? What dark secrets lay behind the sunny scenes?
