Nazis
Heather Neill
The mother, so often a sentimental figure in art, can be as tenacious and bold as any animal when protecting her young. Mark Hayhurst's play about Irmgard Litten, mother of Hans, a lawyer who cross-examined Hitler – and won – in 1931, celebrates the single-minded determination of a woman daring to take on Nazi might in the cause of her son. Hans was imprisoned in Sonnenburg "for his own protection" on the night of the Reichstag fire in 1933 and, after spending years in concentration camps, was found hanged in Dachau in 1938.Taken at Midnight, with Penelope Wilton as Irmgard, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Part of a series of programmes marking the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, The Eichmann Show was a 90-minute account of how the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the SS's most enthusiastic engineers of the Holocaust, became "the world's first ever global documentary series". The key men in making this happen were TV producer Milton Fruchtman and renowned documentary director Leo Hurwitz, the latter a victim of McCarthy-era blacklisting in the USA.It was a potentially interesting idea, but the notion of presenting the trial of one of the most heinous Nazi war criminals – Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It is 30 years since Shoah. In the filmography of the Holocaust Claude Lanzmann's document is the towering monolith. At nine-and-a-half hours, it consists of no archive footage at all, just interviews with witnesses unburdening themselves of memories. Of all those conversations, there was one in particular which Lanzmann held back. After the three and a half hours of The Last of the Unjust, it is clear why.Benjamin Murmelstein was a Viennese rabbi who in 1944 became the third and last Elder of Theresienstadt. Also known by its Czech name of Terezín, this was the so-called “model ghetto” with Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Alan Yentob’s culture programme, Imagine, returned for its autumn season with a two-part examination of one of the most potently disturbing episodes in the history of art, let alone culture. Even before the programme’s title, masterpieces by such as Kirchner, Beckmann and Klimt flashed before our eyes. Thus began an exploration into how Hitler – a failed art student -– acted out his hatred of the great art of the 20th-century avant garde, which he thought to be as sickly and degenerate as the Jews he was also determined to destroy.Yet it was German Jews who in the main collected and supported Read more ...
fisun.guner
And so, I finally come to write of Anselm Kiefer, and with something of a heavy heart, as heavy, I’d vouch, as one of his load-bearing canvases. In 2007, I was left breathless by the German artist’s new paintings at the White Cube gallery in Mayfair: huge, spectacular churned-up poppy fields, whose sweetly blushing poppy heads were drooping from blackened stalks erupting from deeply encrusted, scorched, scraped and furrowed earth. To make such grand statements about the piteous nature of war, about the recklessness and hubris of humanity, about the hope that only rarely deserts us, and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Against the background of the spectacular scenery of Patagonia, Argentinian director Lucia Puenzo creates a tight, subtly unnerving thriller in her third film Wakolda. Its American release title “The German Doctor” reveals its subject more immediately, which is the time spent by Nazi physician Josef Mengele (Alex Brendemuhl) in Latin America after his flight from Europe.But Wakolda is a very long way indeed from the other film that springs to mind on that subject, The Boys from Brazil. Instead it tells a chamber story of how Brendemuhl’s character, travelling under the name Helmut Gregor, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This German-made drama about World War Two scored huge ratings when it was shown in its homeland last year, but has also prompted scathing criticism. Chiefly, its detractors don't buy the series' portrayal of five photogenic young German friends as largely innocent victims of Nazism. Some are also outraged by the way Poles are shown to be even more anti-semitic than the Nazis, though that didn't occur in this first episode, A Different Time. The question of who knew what as the Führer led the Fatherland into a cataclysmic global war is impossible to answer with mathematical precision, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Derived from Markus Zusak's bestseller, director Brian Percival's movie is well cast and brimming with good intentions, but it's too long, too safe and too uneventful to do justice to its subject matter. The story charts the rise of Nazi Germany through the eyes of Liesel Meminger and her adoptive parents the Hubermanns, but the horrors are sanitised and the anticipated emotional punch is never delivered.The Hubermanns are struggling to make ends meet, and have adopted Liesel (luminously played by adolescent Canadian actress Sophie Nélisse) because state funding is available to foster parents Read more ...
Daniel Hope
In 1998, as I was driving home and flipping through the radio channels, a piece of music caught my ear. A string trio. With elements of Bartók , Stravinsky and maybe Janáček? And yet I was pretty sure none of these composers had written for this combination. I pulled over and sat transfixed by the side of the road until the announcer said: “that was a string trio by Gideon Klein”. Who?I googled Gideon Klein and learned a lot about a place called Theresienstadt (also known by its Czech name as Terezín), a garrison town 60 km north of Prague, the central collection point or ghetto Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We know, not least through her own account, of Marianne Faithfull's colourful progress as winsome Sixties pop star, lover of Mick Jagger, junkie on the streets of Soho and her artistic rebirth as gravel-throated chanteuse. Here, her frequently gruelling trawl through archives from the 1930s and '40s helped to explain how she became the artist she is, while throwing up some morbidly fascinating details about the inner workings of the Third Reich.At the core of the film was her mother Eva, whom the young Marianne first came to know while growing up inside her cramped little house in post-war Read more ...
Simon Munk
Fusing the intensity of first-person shooters like the Call of Duty series with top-down strategy games doesn't immediately seem a good fit. First-person shooters work because you respond viscerally to bullets flying past your face and the fear of the battlefield as you sprint through mayhem, dodging and weaving. Strategy games, even the realtime modern videogame versions, rely on a cerebral strategising – often sacrificing men as pawns in a broader scheme. Yet fusing these two ideas is exactly what Company of Heroes 2 tries to do and mostly succeeds at.Here, your World War II Russian forces Read more ...
Jasper Rees
One of the weapons deployed by Blighty in World War Two was humour. Stoical, deflating, relentlessly making light of the darkness, British wit refused to take the Third Reich as seriously as it took itself. The biggest cannon in our arsenal of laughter was PG Wodehouse, or it would have been if the creator of Jeeves and Wooster and, most pertinently, the pompous black shirt Roderick Spode hadn’t accidentally found himself on the other side, and apparently batting for them too.In 1940 Wodehouse and his wife Ethel were living as tax exiles in Normandy, and failed to make their excuses before Read more ...