“I wash my hands of this.”

The mainstream media will spend ten days losing their ever-loving minds blaming a Sarah Palin campaign map a killer never saw for that killer’s actions, but this news about a confessed terrorist admitting that a clip from Brian De Palma’s “Redacted” “prompted” him to murder two American airmen gets buried at the bottom of a Salt Lake City newspaper article:

Uka gave a teary confession as his Frankfurt state court trial opened in August, saying that the night before the attack he had seen a video on Facebook that purported to show American soldiers raping a teenage Muslim girl. It turned out to be a scene from the 2007 Brian De Palma anti-war film “Redacted,” taken out of context.

Uka told the court the video prompted him to do anything possible to prevent American soldiers from going to Afghanistan. Under German law, the court is still required to hear all evidence in the case, even though Uka has confessed.

The defendant had already killed two U.S. airmen when he turned his pistol on Brewer, a 23-year-old from Gray, Tennessee, who was on the bus waiting with others to be taken to nearby Ramstein Air Base to fly to Afghanistan.

Remember how, during the lead up to the release of the “Passion of the Christ,” the leftist media was on high alert waiting for synagogues and crosses to be burned? And yet, not a word in the national media about how this particular Hollywood film “prompted” the murder of two American servicemen.

Buried. Memory-holed. Never happened. Carry on.   (more…)

As a World War II veteran of five campaigns in France, Belgium, and Germany, and then more recently in 2006, taking up a new “career” in filmmaking, I have produced two documentaries, Let Freedom Ring: The Lesson Is Priceless and Let Freedom Ring: Memories Of France.

These were filmed in 2006 and 2007 with young high school history teachers and combat veterans who served respectively in Belgium (Battle of the Bulge) and in France (D-Day, Normandy Invasion).

This new “career” that started at age eighty-one and has been ongoing for five years, is for the purpose of fulfilling my mission to reach young students with the message of the importance of freedom and the consequences of losing one’s freedom.

I am now seeking funding to distribute these films at no cost, which are in DVD format, primarily into the high schools in California where I live.

Now, a third documentary is planned. It is a film about the Eighth Air Force operations from England on daring daylight raids on German targets. Twenty-six thousand men were killed, more than the Marines in the Pacific. (more…)

As a WW II veteran of five campaigns in France, Belgium and Germany, I have seen much death on the battlefields in Europe — thousands of dead G.I.’s and Germans, as well. It has been determined that our company, the 607th Graves Registration Company, initiated seventeen temporary cemeteries, two of the sites became permanent later after the war. It is estimated that we buried 75,000 soldiers, American and German.

I was just one man of a hundred and twenty five officers and enlisted men of the 607th Graves Registration Company. As a PFC, Private First Class, I and my buddies had the gut wrenching, solemn task of gathering the dead, starting on the Normandy Beach Head at age eighteen, weighing one hundred fifteen pounds… and very immature.

Our company was divided into four platoons, some landing on Omaha Beach on D Day and others on Utah Beach. We gathered the dead every day for eleven months from D-Day until the end of the war in Germany, May 8,1945.

The last cemetery, from which we operated in Eisenach, Germany, was disinterred by us the day after Memorial Day,1945. The war had ended for ALL of us on May 8,1945. For the dead, the true HEROES, it was anti-climatic. I will never forget them! For all too many, the graves bearing Crosses and Stars of David are just THAT. But to me each marker represents a real person, a soldier who gave his life at a young age. A face goes with each Cross or Star of David. A young face.

We had Germans digging the graves to be disinterred, as we re-identified the remains of American soldiers that were transported back to France, Belgium or Holland where they were again buried in temporary cemeteries, as no American soldier would be left in Germany.

(more…)

So over Thanksgiving I went to Berlin, which is in Germany. I went there strictly for fun, for it had nothing to do with hormonal treatments. Those ended years ago. Anyway, the high point was the DDR museum, otherwise known as The Museum of the German Democratic Republic.

There you could experience a sad moment in history – when East Germany existed (if you could call it an existence).

The museum offers the visitor a typical day in socialism, featuring real artifacts from clothes to coffee. You can sort through closets, walk through a concrete slab living room, fiddle with a lonely pressure cooker on a stove.

Imagine crawling through Sean Penn’s brain.

You can steer an actual Trabant, possibly the worst car ever made. Legend has it, that there was no such thing as a new Trabant. A dead one was just patched back up and sent out on the road. Like Joan Rivers.

And of course, there’s GDR’s first and only attempt at creating a microchip. It cost 100 times more than ours, which was already an antique by then. East German leaders beamed with pride over the prototype, while the actual chip NEVER got made.

The museum is worth the long flight, for it is not simply a wry commentary on life without aspirations, but a salute to capitalism, a salute to us. From every corner of the museum, the displays told the viewer why their economy failed, why nothing worked, and how a desperate people dreamed of western goods. (more…)

—–

Jonah Goldberg put it best: Oh, Dear Lord.

The musical debuted in Germany back in January:

Barack Obama and his dramatic ascent to power has inspired a raft of books and articles. Now a German musical is set to pay an all-singing, all-dancing tribute to the world’s most powerful man. Hope! will soon premiere in Frankfurt.

Wearing a knitted cardigan and crooning into his microphone, Barack Obama paces around the stage, wooing Michelle with a love song. In another number, now clad in a suit, Jimmie Wilson who plays Obama, struts up and down, clasping his mike and leading a euphoric gospel chorus of “Yes We Can.”

No word on whether or not ”Hope!” is still playing or if there have been any updates to the musical with Michelle singing “Life as First Lady is Hell.” Or the somber ballad “We Know We Promised 8%,” the show-stopper “My Negatives Are as High as an Elephant’s Eye,” or the Faustian closing number “Welcome to ObamaCare.” (more…)

“In Dachau we were forced to look at the so-called gassing installations. They really put on a great show for us there…They showed us normal shower installations that were supposed gassing installations. They showed us two ovens used for 6,000 people who were supposedly gassed.  But there were enough people in prison who knew Dachau intimately.  Who told us that this was all a big show intended to generate a conspiracy of hatred towards Germany.  In Dachau people worked.  In Dachau no one was gassed.  The two ovens were there to burn those who had died naturally.  There were several thousands in the camps and it did happen sometimes.  The whole business was laughable to us and proved to us it was just a show going on.

“In any case, it was never intended to kill the Jews.  This was a development which came when the war was at its peak–which cannot be justified and God help us, it made many enemies for us after the war.  The result?  Hardly anyone nowadays thinks of the positive accomplishments brought to Germany and Europe by Hitler.” –Anonymous Munich citizen, 1974 

“I would say that if we were not all guilty of crimes, then we were at least accomplices.” –Ostheer Soldier Roland Kiemig, 1991 

“We cannot and should not be allowed to win this war.” –Oberstleutnant Helmuth Groscurth in  letter to wife after execution of 90 orphaned Jewish children, 1941    (more…)

Almost fifty years ago, in the film journal Sight and Sound for Winter 1964/65, critic Roger Hudson wrote that the talent of motion picture production designers “is often overlooked, except where it is the greatest element in a film’s success, as it is in Goldfinger.”

The greatest element — that’s a bold claim, considering the hot competition among the movie’s other collaborators. But in hindsight, few would argue that the marvelous sets, vehicles, and spy gadgets of Goldfinger, masterminded by production designer Ken Adam, are any less iconic than Ian Fleming’s novel, Sean Connery’s performance, or John Barry’s musical score.

Production design is a largely unsung art. Both the script and the need for historical accuracy tend to serve as harsh governors on the dreams and fantasies of the people charged with designing a movie’s sets and props. But the Bond films, Adam says, “are done so loosely that the script isn’t the Bible that it is in most films. It changes all the time, and the whole process of writing is like some democratic debating society.”

When Dr. No went into production in 1961, Adam got a mere 14,000 pounds (out of the movie’s total budget of 350,000) with which to design all of the interior sets for this “tongue-in-cheek spectacular,” including the casino in the opening scene, Bond’s apartments, M’s office, and the sprawling, futuristic lair of the villainous doctor himself. He performed his task in England while the rest of the cast and crew were off filming exteriors in Jamaica, and when they returned they were stunned by what they saw: (more…)

In November 1974, Werner Herzog received a most distressing phone call. Lotte Eisner, the beloved doyenne of German cinema, was dying. Part film historian, part published critic, part heroic preservationist, and part muse to the filmmakers struggling to piece together the broken shards of German culture left in the wake of the Nazis, Eisner was a legendary figure in Herzog’s eyes, and had inspired him to persevere through a decade of near-poverty as a struggling director. Now, at seventy-eight years old, she was deathly ill and not expected to survive.

Herzog was in Munich, Eisner in Paris, and their mutual friends implored the thirty-two-year-old director to fly to France post-haste so that he might say his goodbyes while there was still time. But Herzog would have none of it. “This must not be,” he remembered thinking. “German cinema could not do without her now. We would not permit her death.” And so, suddenly afire with what he once called in another context “the fervor and woe of pilgrims and prayers and hopes,” Herzog made a momentous decision: he would set out from his apartment in Munich and walk the five-hundred miles to Paris “in full faith, believing that she would stay alive if I came on foot.”

Days stretched into weeks as he trod alone through the winter sleet, sometimes breaking into barns or empty cottages to survive the cold nights and taking only a single detour, “to the town of Troyes, because I wanted to walk into the cathedral there.” Finally he arrived exhausted at Eisner’s Paris apartments to find her “still tired and marked by her illness,” but recovering against all odds. She would live nine more years, until at last, “when she was nearly blind, could not walk or read or go out to see films,” she called Herzog back to Paris and told him, “Werner, there is still this spell cast over me that I am not allowed to die. I am tired of life. It would be a good time for me now.” Herzog recalls that, “Jokingly I said, ‘OK, Lotte, I hereby take the spell away,” and three weeks later Lotte Eisner died. (more…)

The same country that brought us Leni Riefenstahl is now set to deliver Hope: The Obama Musical.  I’m serious, they are really doing this.  The musical is set to open in Frankfurt on Jan. 17th and, in all fairness, it would be wrong for me to give any kind of opinion on the quality of this show before John Nolte flies me out to Germany to see it (John?  I’m waiting…hello?  Is this thing on?) [Ed. Note: Absolutely! Just bring back all your receipts and, uhm, I'll get to them when I can.]

Luckily, the press office for this soon-to-be classic has assembled a slick little YouTube video highlighting all of the big moments of the show.  Believe it or not, this video is meant to inspire you to buy a ticket.

Great, terrific, perfect…  um…  a couple things. (more…)

Oliver Stone’s latest desperate grasp at relevance is a new cable series that, among other things, promises to finally place der Furher into der context.  Now, this is where I’m supposed to be outraged, but I’m just not feeling it.  Ollie, I know you’d like us to believe that this isn’t just a pathetic stunt, that this brainstorm was inspired by some peyote-spawned fire demon’s whisperings inside your drug-addled cerebellum and that if we’re truly edgy we won’t dare ignore your remarkable vision.  But I think you’re once again just trying to freak out the squares and this square, for one, is mighty bored.

Stone’s scripts for Midnight Express and Scarface blew our collective minds with staggering violence and raw language.  Then he directed Platoon – an awesome film if you dig sophomore-level meditations on the duality of good and evil leavened with gunfire.  JFK came along and demonstrated that Kennedy was murdered not by the commie misfit who actually did it, but a conspiracy made up of big business, the government, the military, the Trilateral Commission, the Knights Templar, Prince Olaf of South Ruritania, and everyone else on Earth except Lee Harvey Oswald and JFK himself – or was he in on it too?  After that, Stone was ready to completely abandon the constraints imposed by concepts like “story,” “characters” and “coherence.”  Natural Born Killers was the result, the perfect Oliver Stone film – all controversy, great visuals, and nothing that made anything remotely like sense. (more…)

For most non-Teutons the idea of German rock is not very appealing. The fatherland of Bach and Beethoven may well have produced many interesting experimental groups (Kraftwerk,  Einstürzende Neubauten etc) but on a global, top 40 level it’s an entirely different matter. Consider: 

1) The Scorpions- hair metal popular in the 80s, approximately as good as Winger.

2) KMFDM- plodding industrial metal from the late 80s/early90s.

3) That Nena chick of ‘99 luftballons’ fame. 

In short, a roster of acts so unnecessary that we could safely consign them to the same dark abyss as Croatian thrash or Russian hip hop and the human race would be none the poorer for it. And yet fortunately for the glory of popular Deustche musik this is not the end of the story- for in the mid 90s what rough beast slouched towards Germany to be born? Breathing flames and reveling in death and all manner of deviancy, its name was Rammstein. 

Formed in the early 1990s by veterans of several crap East German groups, Rammstein consisted of six men in their 30s who had grown up under communism. They took their name from Ramstein, a US military base where a terrible disaster had occurred during an air show in 1988, adding an extra ‘m’ to dislocate it slightly. With the Berlin Wall fallen, the band was now liberated to steal as many sounds and ideas as they desired. These included elements of classic heavy metal, industrial metal and gothic synth pop such as Depeche Mode; not to mention liberal appropriations from Laibach, a Slovenian group fascinated by the links between mass culture, pop music and totalitarianism. (If you have a few minutes I recommend you watch Laibach’s reinterpretations of Queen’s One Vision and Opus’ Life is Life: the originals will never sound the same again.) (more…)

I did my teen-age years in World War II. War news was a constant. We kept the radio on in our house to hear Edward R. Murrow broadcasting from the rooftops of London, describing the blitz. Newsreel photographers, flying with Allied bombers over Europe, delivered raw footage to waiting planes at Heathrow Airport. The planes, flying dark rooms, would take off for America and fly overnight to New York. Technicians would edit and develop the film during the trans-Atlantic flight and Movietone News would have the footage ready for showing in movie theaters within hours. “Imagine,” we’d marvel. “These pictures were taken only two days ago!”

My high school pal Parker Swan and I would go to the Translux Theater in Boston which featured non-stop newsreel coverage of the war. When bombings of German cities were shown, we’d cheer. After V-E day, when the battle moved to the Pacific, newsreels featured G.I.s using flame throwers to dig Japanese soldiers out of their caves on Iwo Jima and Wake Island. When the enemy came screaming from his dugout, Parker and I would cheer. I sold newspapers, The Globe and Herald, in Harvard Square by the entrance to the subway station. When the A-bomb, about which we had been told nothing, was dropped on Hiroshima, the headline read New Kind of Bomb Devastates Japanese City. Everyone was elated. (more…)

Disclaimer: What you are about to read is fiction. It is a story about peace. Peace at any cost.

THE WORLD TODAY: A News Summary

May 2009

BONN (EU News) – The current CSPEU administration has decided to increase productivity by lowering the age that children are required to enter the workforce from nine to eight years of age. The EU Vice Minister for the Interior states the lowering of the work age is due to an increased shortage of youthful workers. “It’s a reflection of the ongoing fighting between our peaceful union and the obstinate Russians.”

Citizens and subjects in the 18-25 age bracket have seldom been seen in recent years. The Vice Minister commented on this by stating, “This temporary downturn in our youthful population is insignificant compared to the tremendous loss of life on the Russian side. Though our rockets delivering Vemork V weapons obliterated St. Petersburg and most of Moscow years ago, the Russians, though scattered and ill equipped, still choose to resist to this very day. It staggers the mind why they wish to continue their own misery. ” (more…)

Lest we forget, we are at war. 

Men and women at this very moment are fighting for their lives and for the lives of those they took an oath to protect and defend. 

There have been some recent films about war and what it means for the “average Joe” to be at war. A few of these are receiving deserving accolades for their realism. No, not the realism of blood and guts spilled, which is what war is, of course, but the realism of human behavior in adverse conditions, or as Hemingway put it, grace under pressure. This is the human condition that we all face, in one form or another, each and every day of our lives. Of course, most of us can face our pressures, make our decisions, get through our daily angst without wondering if a shell is going to go off five feet away, having the vehicle we’re riding in targeted for destruction or being exposed to combinations of chemicals not even named yet. No, we don’t have that extra worry. But some out there do.  (more…)