Adolf Has A Birthday - And A Pin In His Cushion

Yes, today is Der Fuhrer's birthday. We remember him solely as the last century's foremost mass murderer, challenged only by Mao Zedong, and followed by runners-up, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Pol Pot. Perhaps this day will remind us that our president is pandering for votes from his party's Jew hating faction as they chant "Death to Israel" and equally disturbing, "Death to America". Already, analysts are saying the group could easily cost him the presidential election in November. It reminds me that our national experience today walks uncomfortably close to that of Weimar Germany, the breeding ground for the rise of Adolf and his National Socialist party to victory in 1933. Given the Holocaust and World War II that followed we cannot associate Adolf and his party with any kind of win. 

We could remember Der Fuhrer by listing his atrocities which remain well documented and commemorated in western culture. I choose to build on that foundation through the forms of humor we know as satire and parody. Both have been described as the most effective forms of ridicule by far and a staple in public discourse and entertainment beginning with the Greeks 2500 years ago. Therefore, I present to you the Adolph Hitler Pin Cushion, a most popular item in American households during World War II. The fine specimen pictured below comes from my great aunt's home.

In our time the film industry has produced some wonderful examples of humor applied to Der Fuhrer. For some individuals and groups it is difficult to understand. In a 2018 National Public Radio interview, Mel Brooks, the comic who brought us The Producers (1967 and 2005) and many other masterful comedies, explained his motivations for making the original film:

. . . Listen, get on a soapbox with Hitler, you're gonna lose — he was a great orator. But if you can make fun of him, if you can have people laugh at him, you win. . . . The comedy writer is like the conscience of the king . . . . He's got to tell him the truth. And that's my job: to make terrible things entertaining.

I would add the terrible things not only become entertaining but also allow us to survive, understand, and accept their reality. Yes, there is healing in this humor.

Here are four examples of satire and parody at work from Charlie Chaplin's, The Great Dictator (1940) where Hitler meets Italy's Mussolini; Mel Brooks's, The Producers (1967); and the British Ministry of Information's Schichlegruber Doing The Lambeth Walk (1942).

Horrible voice, bad breeding, vulgar manners, you have everything you need to be a politician.

          from The Knights, a play by Aristophanes, 424 BCE





Sources

Photos and Illustrations:
Hitler pin cushion figurine, World War II era, OTR personal collection

Text:
NPR Morning Edition interview with Susan Stamberg, April 26, 2018, https://www.npr.org/2018/04/26/605297774/mel-brooks-says-its-his-job-to-make-terrible-things-entertaining

Obama Lola Lola

As OTR sits gazing across the early fall pastels in his woods, he thinks of the incredible seduction of the American voter by Barack Obama and the Democratic Party in 2008. How could the electorate make such a poor decision? Emotions and unrealistic expectations? Yes. Looking back, it's almost laughable how easily people can be deceived. But we live dangerously without reason and practicality. The great German director Josef von Sternberg captured this to perfection in his 1930 film classsic, Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel).

Der Engel is a cabaret featuring the stunningly beautiful Lola Lola - Marlene Dietrich - as its star performer. She encounters an accidental - and most innocent - patron, Professor Immanuel Rath - Emil Jennings - whose infatuation with her leads him to a sad end.
The following scene - Lola's flirting, Rath's almost child-like behavior - is a perfect analogy to Obama's 2008 performance and the voter response:

Downright sleazy, wasn't it. Just like the campaign rhetoric, in hindsight.

This performance - like Obama's - was star-quality. Fortunately, Dietrich's talents were such that she went on to a fifty year career as one of the world's most cherished entertainers.  Not so for Obama. Perhaps he could have a future if the Chautauqua movement, less its religious accessory, spontaneously revived.

More Weimar History Repeats Itself

A festival in Hanover, Germany was interrupted today when Arab youths stoned a Jewish dance group. The politics may be different, but the very act and message are hauntingly like the Germany we saw almost a century ago. John Hinderaker has some comments and a link to the full story here.




"Marxism [communism] is the guardian angel of capitalism." - Nazi propaganda poster, 1932

That Old 1930s Feeling

OTR has referenced what he calls the "Weimar Effect" and the 1930s in several posts. Again, those themes appear in two thought provoking posts, The Forgotten Rachels, at Powerline, and It's the Thirties all over again - time to blame the Jews, a Pajamas Media post linked by Instapundit.

The rise and celebration of extremism, weak leadership in the face of ominous threats, world-wide economic malaise, emotion outweighing reason, broad interpretation of law and constitutional authority, and anti-Semitism. All of these elements were present in the 1930s and they are with us today. The coincidence bears watching.

Herzog's Nosferatu The Vampyre

In a superb post at NRO, Andrew Stuttaford recommends Werner Herzog's 1979 production of Nosferatu the Vampyre for your holiday viewing pleasure. It is remake of Friedrich Murnau's masterpiece, Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922) and Stuttaford calls it "the grandest vampire movie of them all."

Here is the opening scene to whet - perhaps "wet" - the appetite of all vampire lovers in the blogosphere:

Hyper-Inflation

Here's a bit of instruction on the Weimar Republic's - Germany, 1919 to1933 - experience with hyper-inflation and some advice on surviving the money explosion should it occur in our near future. Source: Instapundit.

Dash Snow: Art Circle Jerk

Dash Snow caught the attention of the art world a few years ago with his headline collages, pictures of oral sex, nude girls, cocaine being snorted off body parts, and "making art by ejaculating on copies of The New York Post." His "art" soon caught on with the patrons who gladly paid five figures to have a Snow in the house. About two weeks ago, he died of a drug overdose at the age of 27, the quintessential up and coming artist.

The New York Times gave him a one-page obituary on July 15 followed by three pages on July 24 delving into his family, his world, his troubled last days, and his "contribution" to art. It reads like a parody. Susan Alexander's opera career comes to mind. It says as much about the state of the Times and the art world as it does about an immensely rich, overindulged, degenerate, angry, lost soul hellbent on self-destruction.

You may ask how 20th century art in the United States got to where it is today. In his wonderful little essay, The Painted Word, written in 1975, Tom Wolfe took art critics and modern art to the woodshed for a good thrashing. Obviously, it was not well received among art circles, but much of what he said has played out into reality in the past three decades.

Basically, his thesis described modern art as having lost all sense of art itself, emerging as theory represented by words spewing from a tight circle of critics. I don't agree with Wolfe completely. We still have "artists" expressing themselves, but it's another world:

"In the beginning we got rid of nineteenth-century storybook realism. Then we got rid of representational objects. Then we got rid of the third dimension altogether and got really flat (Abstract Expressionism). Then we got rid of airiness, brushstrokes, most of the paint, and the last viruses of drawing and complicated designs". After providing examples of other techniques and the schools that abandoned them, Wolfe concluded with conceptual art: "…there, at last, it was! No more realism, no more representation objects, no more lines, colors, forms, and contours, no more pigments, no more brushstrokes. … Art made its final flight, climbed higher and higher in an ever-decreasing tighter-turning spiral until…it disappeared up its own fundamental aperture…and came out the other side as Art Theory! [Wikipedia: The Painted Word]

I'm saddened by Snow's death and angered, first, that there was no successful intervention somewhere in his life, and second, that our society has devalued art so much that talent is no longer required. Today, art happens, anything goes. This is why I draw my Weimar Republic parallels you have read about earlier on OTR.

Credit my daughter with tipping me off to the Instapundit post and its link to Althouse where the comments are a must read.

More Thoughts On The Weimar Effect

In earlier posts, you've read my thoughts about something I've come to call the Weimar Effect. It is a process and product taken from the history of the Weimar Republic, a 24 year period in Germany beginning in 1919 and ending with the rise of Adolf Hitler. Although the arts flourished in those years, German society was wracked by almost constant political division, violence, hyperinflation and a loss of meaning among a once-proud people. The effect ends in pathology.

Yesterday, Shrinkwrapped completed a five part series addressing the effects of modernity on demographics. Much of what he writes about resembles the German experience during the Weimar years. It also applies to the present-day West and our conflict with radical Islam. Here is his summary statement:

I have suggested that the collapse of Communism led to a collapse of meaning in Russia and is contributory to Russia's demographic collapse. I have suggested that the collapse of meaning in the increasingly narcissistic (and solipsistic) West (the death of G-d and His replacement by secular religious beliefs, such as Anthropogenic Global Warming) is contributory to [the] West's demographic collapse. Islam has presented itself as the final ideology, the supplier of all meaning, yet two of the most ideological Islamic societies are in various stages of demographic decline.

The meaning offered by Islamism involves the idealization of death. A society that idealizes death cannot long survive once it[s] people gain the ability to make choices.

It remains an interesting and indisputable fact that the modern societies that continue to grow, that have children and are future oriented, are those societies that embrace life. It is American Christians and Orthodox Jews who still believe in large families. The implications of this are far reaching and should be thought provoking.

Tackling Shrinkwrapped's well-reasoned article will require attention and commitment. Read it and grow. Here is a link to the the first post. Others in the series can be accessed from that page, left column, under "Recent Posts." Read the comments for some significant first-person observations.

Leave Your Troubles Outside

Given the performance of the Obama administration over the last 60 days or so, I'm a bit worried about my exposure in the markets this week. Many of us have watched our retirement accounts cut in half over the last six months. I spent 20 years building mine. The chronic frustration wears one out after a while. In anticipation of what tomorrow may bring, I bring you instead a diversion based on an economic meltdown in the last century. The setting is Berlin and the Weimar Republic. The year is 1931. Take it all in, listen carefully, digest it and remember that we have been partying for a long time.



Cabaret (1972) is a historically significant film and one of my favorites. The opening scene you have just watched is one half of a bookend and one of the best in the history of film. That said, you have to watch the entire film to understand why. I trust your curiosity will drive you to add it to your Netflix queue or rush to the nearest library.

More Rumblings of the Weimar Culture

For about six years, beginning in the mid-sixties, I attended a large urban university frequented by several violent anti-war demonstrations. Although I never joined in those confrontations, the contempt that settled over American intentions in Vietnam led me to question many values that had been the bedrock of my upbringing. I turned both inward, exploring new spiritual paths, and outward working with the political system but on the radical edge. Unitarian ministers, blood-tossing priests, an assortment of Quakers, flower children in training, and amateur druggists crossed my path. Some of those folks probably held more than a passing interest in socialism, but I don't recall those sympathies outweighing their desire to see a war come to an end. Indeed, the war ended a few years later, as did my flirtation with "progressive" ideology.

Today, anti-war protests in the the West have some disturbing new ingredients. First, the socialists/anti-capitalists now march under the mantra of the environmental movement. Second, the communists, unhinged by the fall of the Soviet Union, join with the anarchists in search of profound "political" change. Third, and I believe the most disturbing, is the introduction of often violent religious opposition toward others. In an earlier post, I mentioned how our national experience could be taking on some of the qualities of the Weimar Republic in Germany during the years between World War I and the creation of the Third Reich in 1933. Other political bloggers seem to be noticing this trend; however, their observations are based on far darker elements of that culture. Could protests opposing the Iraq conflict and the current Israel-Gaza Strip fighting be a mere prelude to greater, wider unhappiness? Here is one "take" on that scenario from Gateway Pundit. Zombietime has the photo essay of the January 10 anti-war march in San Francisco. Does the call for putting Jews back in the ovens fall under the protection of free speech in America? This is a question we will face any day. The "oldest hatred" has had serious consequences for those pursuing such a course. Mark Steyn provides the enlightenment here.

To me, the behavior of today's anti-war protester has about it a pathology, an element of madness, that was not there in the 1960s. Did I overlook something? Was I on the wrong campus? Has wisdom set in with age? The answer will be of little consequence if we are indeed entering the Weimar of the West.

Old Tybee Ranger Predicts

So the word is that Obama is a poor finisher, always polling four to six percent more than the actual vote. I don't think that matters tomorrow. Barack Obama will become our President-elect in a close election. Come January, Obama and his leadership on Capitol Hill, may begin a dedicated move toward socialism, a failed economic philosphy that will lead the nation down the road to serfdom. On the other hand, he campaigned as a centrist, and could very well govern as one. Regardless, we will have four years to form an opinion before casting another presidential vote.

The one certainty in all of this is that the the nation and national conscience will endure through the political change. But this new politics and national introspection may lead the United States to embark on its own kind of cultural focus and revival much like that of Germany's Weimar Republic, 1918 -1933. Please understand that it is a loose parallel. I have no expectation whatsoever that the experience will devolve into national socialism, as in Nazi. Quite the opposite, I see it as a recovery of the innovative spirit we seem to have lost over the past ten to twenty years.

And so I'll put politics aside until 2008 - maybe 2012. I'm not going to let the outcome of tomorrow's election affect my world. Instead, I'll look forward to the cultural evolution. I'll also pour a glass of ice cold gin and, as I often do, look into history. My baby and I will darken the room, find some comfortable chairs at a small table, and listen to this:



The girls, the cars, the clubs, the hot jazz, the dancing. I can envision some couple at the Berlin Cabaret in 1930 thinking about the States and its Roaring Twenties and American jazz, enjoying it all, with no thought to the political future. Unlike them, I can watch the culture unfold knowing that it rests on two centuries of constitutional law and republican principles. Endurance is on my side, left, right, and center. We are really blessed by God with the privilege of choosing our leaders. Let us look forward and enjoy.