Stories, real and imagined, from WW2

[heliopausa]

This first is very, very sad, but it is also a true story, of a woman who died as part of the struggle against Nazism.  I'm putting it up not that I've anything much to say except how hideously sad war is, and how amazing this woman was.  And that her story needs to be more widely known. (But seriously, not a post to be reading if you're not feeling robust.  It can wait.)

And I watched recently a fictional story- the film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (UK, 1943) which I had seen praised as giving a sympathetic picture of honourable Germans in wartime.  I found it not impressive on that score - how inept and foolish would it be to portray all the members of the other side in war as irredeemably evil, especially when there's been a long history of social and cultural crossover between combatants?  In fact, I found it very straight-down-the-line in terms of what I'd think a wartime propaganda film would be - it's targeted at British (especially the middle class?) with qualms about actions like the destruction of the French navy, or worse.  And I won't go into that here. 

Instead, I was interested in the film as historical document.  It opens in 1902, and thus shows the London and Berlin of that time as reconstructed by people who had actual memory of those locations then.  So the hansom cab bit is how calling up a hansom cab worked, the 'Turkish bath' (ie for gentlemen, in London) is how a 'Turkish bath' was, the German gymnasium is how the German gymnasium looked, and the duel is how the duels worked.  There's plenty of written documentation of those things, of course, but there's so many incidental details that are second nature to those who've lived through something but which are never actually written down - like where the seconds stand in the duel, or the costume of the bath attendant.  The whole movie a classist propagandist fantasy, pretty much, but still based on the real memories of real locations.  So... interesting.  :)

Comments

[pulchritude]

What a neat way of looking at the film! I'll have to remember that old films can be used for historical research purposes as well :)

[autumnia]

I have heard of Noor Inayat Khan! There's been several news articles about her life this year, especially with the larger focus of World War 2 in part due to the 70th Anniversary of D-Day.

She was definitely a very brave woman and it's a shame she (like so many other brave women of the time) did not live to see the end of the war. Some months back, one of my local tv stations aired a special about her life.. let me see if I can find that info. Aha, here it is. I watched most of it but I couldn't bear reaching the end and seeing a visual interpretation of her last hours.