As a dictator, you need grandiose designs. Dictators are planning to upheaval on an enormous scale, are fixed on the image to get the masses of you and your projects – and nowhere to go to learn officially the craft stuff. No University per degree “rule offered by the use of violence and delusions of grandeur”. A powerful educational institution for the people as leader, however, offered the Film, of which the literary scholar and filmmaker, Peter Demetz told dense and alive.
With the overwhelming illusory space of the canvas, you could glorify leaders, enemies, demonize, and through the Kitsch and fun of everyday life distract you. As the first recognized Mussolini, the propaganda potential of the cinema. Week showed the Duce “on horseback, on a motorcycle, as neugebackener Pilot view, as a speaker, harvest workers (without a shirt), military leader, Diplomat, or, in contrast to Lenin, or Hitler, in swimming shorts on the beach”. Like Hitler on the Obersalzberg and in Berlin’s Reich Chancellery, had Mussolini in Rome and a private cinema room set up. In 1935, he left the film industry completely nationalize, he hoped with Cinecittà on a fascist counterpart to Hollywood, and politicized the Venice film festival.
Visual media for illiterate crowds
Peter Demetz, born in 1922 in Prague, in the year of Mussolini’s coming into power, is also dedicated to the Nazi propaganda Minister Goebbels, which – in the late Stalin similar – as a writer or Dramaturg in the scenarios of intervention and, moreover, Affairs with actor appreciated on the inside. As Goebbels instrument no other and abused the career of the cinematography for the Entertainment of the masses in the industrial society. However, he gave one of Hitler’s favorite films, not for the NS-movie: “Viva Villa”, an American Drama of 1934. In the course of the wutgetriebenen Mexican revolutionary leader and avenger Pancho Villa, a brutal leader of a Horde of nationalist revolutionary, will could Hitler reflect effortlessly. Goebbels, who had seen the movie with Hitler in private, had a suspicion of the broad impact of such emotion-charged incitement to riot, and quoted: “For us, not performable. It is too dangerous.“ Better services to acts of Leni Riefenstahl or Heinz Rühmann.
Also, Lenin had understood, how much Agitation through visual media was just for a largely illiterate crowds, however, continued, especially in technical educational films of the engineers on documentation, for example, to colonialism or to the misery of capitalism. To 1919/20 crossed Agit-trains, the country, and on the rivers Agit-steamer moved along, one of which is a cinema-Flowed with 800 seats in tow. Lenin, Demetz, “to his films, educational, functional, and conservative,” to him the patience for Fiction lacked. In Geneva exile, he fled to Stay in the evenings with his wife in the cramped, and they visited the cinema or to the theatre, broke, but, as his wife, mostly “in the middle of the idea” to walk to the lake. With great emotion, you could not come to Lenin, he preferred books, the word.
Great contrast: the theater of his growing up
Such Notes and tracks Peter Demetz pass the following as versioned, and with the wonderful narrative of freedom, has imbued his Subject so that it is supported by facts sure. In beautiful contrast to the cinema of the dictators Demetz told in the Preface by the cinema of the child that he was, in the Czech city of Brno, where he saw Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, Czech movies, and Brecht adapted the Threepenny Opera. As a Survivor of the Holocaust Demetz in 1958, emigrated to the USA and taught until his retirement in German studies and comparative literature at Yale University. The same time, My Prague,” the new edition of its much-vaunted memories now appears in Zsolnay “. Let the reader another facet of Peter Demetz discover, pour out a veritable cornucopia of experience and Knowledge.
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Mussolini-biography He could to the left and the right
Bernhard Schulz
Peter Demetz: dictators in the cinema. Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, Goebbels, Stalin. Zsolnay, Wien, 256 pages, 24 €, appears on 18. February
