I do mean it when I said in the previous post that I’m surrounded by the nuts and bolts of it all as H.o.p. has watched Pal’s “Tulips Shall Grow” about 100,000 times in the past week and has been constructing potential film stars out of his erector set. In the meanwhile, I try to educate him with a bit of history, telling him about how the Screwball Army in “Tulips Shall Grow” was Pal’s 1943 artistic attack on the goose-stepping wehrmacht. I try to inform him some on what this was all about without going too deep into horrifying detail, but trying to impress on him that Pal’s animation is not simply a fun little film. H.o.p.’s aware of war ongoing and wishes it would stop, but in a sense it is probably about as remote to him as the 1940s are worlds and worlds away from a child in 2007. Though I may be wrong and it may not be as remote as that. I know when I was seven and eight I was quite aware of Vietnam and distressed over it.
He wanted to see films then of the actual soldiers, so I did a search on the Wehrmacht on Youtube.
There are a number of films like the below one. I don’t know German but many appear to be put up by White Supremists reverencing the Wehrmacht and Hitler.
Funny (or not) what different people get out of watching this footage. Some see sterling heroism. I see the terrible machinery of war represented much like Pal showed it and it rips my heart out. I don’t know the history of the footage but no doubt it is propaganda that was shot in such a way to stir feelings of pride and invincibility, all those tanks plowing over the landscape as if there is no stopping them, and Pal depicted the Screwballs in much the same way as this footage of the Wehrmacht, the mechanical Screwballs seemingly invincible in their shielded metallic luster…
Until eventually they rust.
Using Pal’s “Tulips Shall Bloom”, H.o.p. and I have talked off and on about this the past week. I’ve talked a little about ghettos and concentrations camps. He knows enough of other atrocities that he’s able to make connections.
I try to make an impression but not overwhelm. Our talks on this are short. Then H.o.p. runs off to build more claymation figures.
And I, sitting at Youtube, continue clicking, looking at all the films of the Wehrmacht that have been loaded up. I look at brief clips from “Triumph of the Will”, a film I’ve not seen in many years. I while away a day doing this. Play a film and then sit and think and stare for a long while. Play another film. I return last night to find the link to the above film and end up whiling away more time.
I watch Hitler instruct his legions of fair-haired German youth:
We want our people to be obedient and you must practice obedience. We want our people to love peace but also to be brave. And you must be peace-loving…
I go to bed and scenes from “Triumph of the Will” play over and over in my mind. It takes me hours to get to sleep.
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