Munich Film Quotes

Only if this were a film would I consider it real

Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty—or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne’s thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or ‘Eurocentric’; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the ‘radical’; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly ‘committed’. Traditionally then, or tediously as some will think, I saw no reason to discard the Orwellian standard in considering modern literature. While a sort of etiolation, tricked out as playfulness, had its way among the non-judgemental, much good work was still done by those who weighed words as if they meant what they said. Some authors, indeed, stood by their works as if they had composed them in solitude and out of conviction. Of these, an encouraging number spoke for the ironic against the literal mind; for the generously interpreted interest of all against the renewal of what Orwell termed the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’—tribe and Faith, monotheist and polytheist, being most conspicuous among these new/old disfigurements. In the course of making a film about the decaffeinated hedonism of modern Los Angeles, I visited the house where Thomas Mann, in another time of torment, wrote Dr Faustus. My German friends were filling the streets of Munich and Berlin to combat the recrudescence of the same old shit as I read: This old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do. not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone avails, humanistic science, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being. [italics mine] The path to this concept of enlightenment is not to be found in the pursuit of self-pity, or of self-love. Of course to be merely a political animal is to miss Mann’s point; while, as ever, to be an apolitical animal is to leave fellow-citizens at the mercy of Ideolo’. For the sake of argument, then, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between.

She had always thought history was made up of grand gestures, as recent, momentous events seem to demonstrate. The British Prime Minister kowtowing to the Nazi Fuehrer at Munich, the quarter-million troops landing on D-Day, the two atomic bombs that ended World War II. But now she knew better. History could be judged grand even if the event was, on the surface, small. For here, right in front of her, was history in the flesh, history that would be immortalized in print and film. The city council and mayor had surrendered, and evidently so had the biggest department store in town.

We took perhaps the greatest step in the inner order. Everything else in innumerable areas is now connected to it. And here I’d like to return to the starting point of my remarks, namely, to the concept of “worldview”. I said that worldview is nothing more than the consideration of the entire world in its phenomena from a uniform standpoint of the latest scientific discoveries, serious discoveries. And I went after all other problems in the same way. We solved our economic questions, gentlemen, when all the so-called experts claimed they couldn’t be solved. We solved our cultural problems. What didn’t they say earlier! They said, “What? You want to eliminate the Jews? Ha ha! Then you won’t have any more money, you won’t have any more gold”. As if the Jews were a gold-producing element! Gold only has any meaning when it represents value. Values are not created by Jews, but rather, by people who have invented valuable things, or produced them. The Jew simply inserts himself between the inventor or producer and the consumer. He is a valve that restricts the flow. I built a valve which can cut off the flow when needed or let it flow again, at will. When I was young I often went to the German Museum in Munich. That was the first great technical museum at that time. I had a tremendous interest in it – almost the entire inventiveness of the human race is represented there. What was ever invented by Jews? The Jews, who rule everything, the whole economic system, our industrial life, they rule everything! – What did they ever invent? Where are the Jewish inventors? There’s not a single one there! Not one! You can raise the same question in cultural life. People have said to me, “So when you kick out the Jews, you can say goodbye to the theatre! But who really founded our culture? Was it the Jews? Who were our Jewish composers? Who were our great poets? Were our great thinkers [illegible] Jews, perhaps? How do the Jews suddenly succeed in inserting themselves into the production of the same goods that were created by the greatest Germans, or the discoveries that originated with the greatest Germans? Experiment showed that I was right. I removed the Jews; German theatres are full as never before. German film is flowering as never before. German literature, the German press, is being read as never before, better than ever before. Much better! We swept away vulgarities in innumerable fields, without ever falling victim to a prudery of the past. Since here we know a principle, namely, the maintenance of our race, our species. Everything that serves this principle is correct. Everything that detracts from it is wrong. The Führer's talk to Generals and Officers on May 26, 1944 at the Platterhof in Obersaltzberg

When I spoke to you here the last time, my old party comrades, I did so fully conscious of victory as hardly a mortal has been able to do before me. In spite of this, a concern weighed heavily on me. It was clear to me that, ultimately, behind this war was that incendiary who has always lived off the quarrels of nations: the international Jew. I would no longer have been a National Socialist had I ever distanced myself from this realization. We followed his traces over many years. In this Reich, probably for the first time, we scientifically resolved this problem for all time, according to plan, and really understood the words of a great Jew who said that the racial question was the key to world history. Therefore, we knew quite well-above all, I knew-that the driving force behind these occurrences was the Jew. And that, as always in history, there were blockheads ready to stand up for him: partly spineless, paid characters, partly people who want to make deals and, at no time, flinch from having blood spilled for these deals. I have come to know these Jews as the incendiaries of the world. After all, in the previous years, you saw how they slowly poisoned the people via the press, radio, film, and theater. You saw how this poisoning continued. You saw how their finances, their money transactions, had to work in this sense. And, in the first days of the war, certain Englishmen-all of them shareholders in the armament industry-said it openly: “The war must last three years at least. It will not and must not end before three years.”-That is what they said. That was only natural, since their capital was tied up and they could not hope to secure an amortization in less than three years. Certainly, my party comrades, for us National Socialists, this almost defies comprehension. But that is how things are in the democratic world. You can be prime minister or minister of war and, at the same time, own portfolios of countless shares in the armament industry. Interests are explained that way. We once came to know this danger as the driving force in our domestic struggle. We had this black-red-golden coalition in front of us; this mixture of hypocrisy and abuse of religion on the one hand, and financial interests on the other; and, finally, their truly Jewish-Marxist goals. We completely finished off this coalition at home in a hard struggle. Now, we stand facing this enemy abroad. He inspired this international coalition against the German Volk and the German Reich. First, he used Poland as a dummy, and later pressed France, Belgium, Holland, and Norway to serve him. From the start, England was a driving force here. Understandably, the power which would one day confront us is most clearly ruled by this Jewish spirit: the Soviet Union. It happens to be the greatest servant of Jewry. Time meanwhile has proved what we National Socialists maintained for many years: it is truly a state in which the whole national intelligentsia has been slaughtered, and where only spiritless, forcibly proletarianized subhumans remain. Above them, there is the gigantic organization of the Jewish commissars, that is, established slaveowners. Frequently people wondered whether, in the long run, nationalist tendencies would not be victorious there. But they completely forgot that the bearers of a conscious nationalist view no longer existed. That, in the end, the man who temporarily became the ruler of this state, is nothing other than an instrument in the hands of this almighty Jewry. If Stalin is on stage and steps in front of the curtain, then Kaganovich and all those Jews stand behind him, Jews who, in ten-thousandfold ramifications, control this mighty empire. Speech in the Löwenbräukeller Munich, November 8, 1941

The play was performed often in Fürth, then at a film festival in Munich, and in 2002 in Zurich. And then in Czernowitz. On the anniversary of the world premiere the cast travelled to Selma's hometown, where it was put on in a theater very similar to the one in Fürth. As Jutta Czurda reported in a letter to me, both performances were almost sold out and the audiences were very enthusiastic: "Almost 1,000 people saw Selma …After the play we all signed countless programs and answered questions. And so for us, you, too, returned symbolically to Czernowitz with your voice, and built a direct bridge to Selma for the audience." She is right. Although German is not spoken in Czernowitz today, Selma and I came home somehow.

Only if this were a film would I consider it real.

Known as “Leni,” Helene Bertha Amalie Riefenstahl was born on August 22, 1902. During the Third Reich she was known throughout Germany as a close friend and confidant of the Adolf Hitler. Recognized as a strong swimmer and talented artist, she studied dancing as a child and performed across Europe until an injury ended her dancing career. During the 1920’s Riefenstahl was inspired to become an actress and starred in five motion pictures produced in Germany. By 1932 she directed her own film “Das Blaue Licht.” With the advent of the Hitler era she directed “Triumph des Willens” anf “Olympia” which became recognized as the most innovative and effective propaganda films ever made. Many people who knew of her relationship with Hitler insisted that they had an affair, although she persistently denied this. However, her relationship with Adolf Hitler tarnished her reputation and haunted her after the war. She was arrested and charged with being a Nazi sympathizer, but it was never proven that she was involved with any war crimes. Convinced that she had been infatuated and involved with the Führer, her reputation and career became totally destroyed. Her former friends shunned her and her brother, who was her last remaining relative, was killed in action on the “Eastern Front.” Seeing a bleak future “Leni” Riefenstahl left Germany, to live amongst the Nuba people in Africa. During this time Riefenstahl met and began a close friendship with Horst Kettner, who assisted her with her acknowledged brilliant photography. They became an item from the time she was 60 years old and he was 20. Together they wrote and produced photo books about the Nuba tribes and later filmed marine life. At that time she was one of the world's oldest scuba divers and underwater photographer. Leni Riefenstahl died of cancer on September 8, 2003 at her home in Pöcking, Germany and was laid to rest at the Munich Waldfriedhof.