Two nights ago, I showed two friends of mine the film "The Producers," with Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder, Dick Shawn, Lee Meredith & Co., written and directed by Mel Brooks. It's a film with a concept so proposterous, that a show could close in one night, so that the producers can keep all of the money collected for the production (Zero Mostel, as Max Bialischtach, collects a huge amount of money by sell thousands of per cent of the show to "little old ladies") of a musical called "Springtime for Hitler, a Romp with Adolf and Eva in Bergesgarten." The film is in such bad taste, that is comes off as a hilarious comedy, and became a cult film, after it opened to lukewarm reviews, and made little money in 1968.
Many of you know the Broadway musical version, which won about 10 Tony Awards in 2000, and stared Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane. It ran until last Spring, and a movie was made of that version, which also did not do well, and got fair reviews.
The original, with Zero Mostel, is the classic. However, many groups have been critical of it for making fun of such a serious topic as the life of Adolf Hitler, and Jewish groups picketed the theater when the Broadway musical first opened. However, people were willing to pay $500 and more for the preferred tickets to the Broadway musical, and it ran for about seven years.
A German bookseller friend, who lives in Lisbon, couldn't see the original film, when Portugal had censorship of films that the government felt were not "politically correct." I got him a 33 rpm with the soundtrack of the film, and he memorized it. When he finally got to see the film in the late 1970s, he memorized that too. He had left Germany as a child, when Hilter was coming to power.
If you have never seen the film, it is something to see, but be forwarned, it is in many cases in very bad taste, and besides making a mockery of Hitler and everything he stood for, but it also makes fun of the gay director and his gay secretary, the gay beatnik-type, played by Dick Shawn, who is cast as "Hitler" in the musical within the film. The song "Springtime for Hitler" is performed with chorus girls, like there would be in Los Vegas, or the Follies Bergère, and there are dancing and singing Nazis and storm troopers. The author of the play, Max Liebkin, dresses with a German war helmet, and raises pigeons on the roof of his tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. In order to buy the script from him, Mostel and Wilder have to put on Nazi arm bands, sing German beer hall songs, and listen to Max talk about Hitler's wonderful qualities, as opposed to those of Winston Churchill, who only made the "V" sign, and smoked big cigars." He says that Hitler "loved children and dogs, and was a great dancer." Max says that The Fuhrer could "dance the pants off of Churchill." Hitler was also a vegetarian, didn't smoke, and was supposed to very charming to many that he met socially.
Of course, we know that he was a paranoid-schizophrenic.
Sincerely, Bruce J. Ramer
Bruce J. Ramer Experimenta Old and Rare Books 401 East 80th Street, Suite 24-J New York, NY 10075 Phones: 212-772-6211 & 772-6212 Fax: 212-650-9032 e-mail: bjramer@mindspring.com Member of the ABAA and ILAB Established in June 1980 You can always go to my database of about 430 items on the website of the ILAB: <ilab-lila.com>, put my name in when you click on "our booksellers" and then click on "go to database."
On Jan 16, 2008, at 1:27 AM, John Barton wrote:
I should have qualified my statement; it concerned the type of English material commonly available in typical small provincial public libraries in the UK and commonwealth countries. I'm sure much more relevant books, as quoted, are available - but my point was that the average small-town library which is likely to be a student's first place of call, is likely to stock insipid titles which the accession librarian is comfortable, not queasy, about, and considers will have wide appeal. I would also think that leaving a flood of publications involving new research on such a topic for 40 years, indicates a distrust on the part of authors of the public's interest in the contemporary real world - a sad, disillusioned public more willing to read fictional P.O.W.escape stories or watch insultingly unfunny TV programmes such as 'Hogan's Heroes' or ''Ello, 'ello!', until such time as reality has safely passed.
John Barton
----- Original Message ----- From: <rwturtleisland@AOL.COM> To: <EXLIBRIS-L@LISTSERV.INDIANA.EDU> Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2008 4:32 PM Subject: Re: [EXLIBRIS-L] Archive.org and nazi propaganda
Putting a small oar into the swirling waters of this discussion.? Mr. Barton is sadly out of date on the WWII/Nazi books available in libraries. Throughout the 90s there was small flood of books, new research, ?on the causes of the rise of Nazism, the lulling of the German populace, the Versailles Treaty that fueled the the Depression of the Weimar era, and the "good Germans" who did "nothing?" the tactics of the Gestapo, etc. As far back as the 1960s/70, the landmark book, The Destruction of the East European Jews, a massive tome, gave much space to the causes of the"success" of the Nazis.? There are hundreds?of films,books and journals?published in Germany (and not yet translated) in the last 20 years on the topic, etc. ? On a library list, one would expect a better bibliographic knowledge on display. I've more nothing more to say on the topic.
Roger Wicker
-----Original Message----- From: John Barton <bartonlander@FREE.NET.NZ> To: EXLIBRIS-L@LISTSERV.INDIANA.EDU Sent: Tue, 15 Jan 2008 4:12 pm Subject: Re: [EXLIBRIS-L] Archive.org and nazi propaganda
I would suggest that the most serious type of censorship is one which provokes no reaction, and is not so considered by most. To wit, 'dumbing down' of anything which might offend.? For those to whom WW2 was not 'history' but real life, it is evident that what needs to be remembered, apart from the horrors, is the politics of the pre-war events and prevalent attitudes which made the actual physical war not only inevitable but almost superfluous.? The young student today (in contrast to immediately after 1945) will find in public libraries only two types of war book. Either the purely tactical ones with battle-line maps, or that filled with rationing woes, the morale-boosting NAAFI girls supplying cups of tea, women knitting gloves for the war effort, post-war frienship with 'the enemy', and so on. Censorship of atrocities, lootings, concentration camps, taking place in whatever country, on the grounds that it might offend someone, is far more serious than that of ugly ideology. There were many popular myths during the war (that Hitler was a carpet-chewing maniac of no culture and small intelligence; and an almost complete lack of interest in the holocaust), but many remain (or have emerged) since. The most subtle of these is an attempt to reduce responsibility for the whole war to this single man, now conveniently dead, in spite of his having been perhaps the best of a very bad bunch.? If instead of the Nuremburg Trials, the culprits had been incarcerated in Spandau, most would have been long ago released. But the price paid for revenge, even just revenge if there is such a thing, is that history is interred with the corpses.? If anything is to be learnt from books about war, it is that the word 'glory' has no place on cenotaphs; that victory has little to do with success; that retribution and revenge have no value compared with speculation and remembering reality; and that forgiveness must never lead to forgetfullness.? ? John Barton
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