'Where Eagles Dare' -- a righteous bloodbath |
They always made me play the Nazi.
There was one thing all the boys in our neighborhood was
keen on in the 1960s – World War II. Our martial ardor was stoked by the flood
of film and television of the time replaying the war for us. We all tuned in to
“Combat!,” “Twelve O’clock High,” and “The Rat Patrol.” These took their cue
from the popularity of the popular war films of the time – “Battle of the
Bulge,” “The Guns of Navarone,” “The Longest Day,” “The Dirty Dozen.”
It wasn’t the propagandistic stuff made during the war,
although we could catch plenty of that on late-night TV. It was the propaganda
of the generation after. Already the Western, which dominated 1950s media, was
collapsing in popularity. It was time to culturally process the war through
mass media.
Each crop of surviving soldiers takes decades to work
through and integrate these experiences, and some never do. Men who had fought
the war were middle-aged fathers by now; the horrors they perpetrated and endured
were repackaged into entertainments, made largely bloodless, noble, and above
all necessary. Above all, these films featured scads and loads of
bucket-helmeted, gray-uniformed Jerries getting slaughtered in every way
imaginable.
This was our male paradigm. The warrior, reluctant to kill but grimly determined to defeat the enemy, ready to sacrifice his own life if need be. The G. I. Joe doll, Sgt. Rock, "Star Spangled War." The same archetype adored by the fanatics, the suicide bombers, the mass murderers. No cause is unrighteous in its own eyes. A fart has no nose.
This was our male paradigm. The warrior, reluctant to kill but grimly determined to defeat the enemy, ready to sacrifice his own life if need be. The G. I. Joe doll, Sgt. Rock, "Star Spangled War." The same archetype adored by the fanatics, the suicide bombers, the mass murderers. No cause is unrighteous in its own eyes. A fart has no nose.
As the youngest and scrawniest of my gang, and gifted quite
inadvertently with a Teutonic surname, I was volunteered to play the bad guy,
over and over again. I learned a few things – it is much more fun to play the
villain, for instance. But by and large it got old quick. I was tired of dying
a thousand different ways and coming home covered with the dust I’d bit all afternoon.
Oddly enough, the great-grandparent with the German name had
adopted it on arrival in the U.S. – we should rightly be named, like most good
Danes, Andersen. I’m not sure if this ever caused trouble for my Dad’s side of
the family, but I do know that my mother’s father, a good solid 100-percent
Kraut, knocked the umlaut off his moniker when the war broke out, rendering its
pronunciation a bit more un-German. He also volunteered for the U.S. Army
cavalry, and made it all the way to New York before peace broke out in November
1918.
Evidently, anti-German sentiment during World War I was
pronounced. I first ran into mention of it in Steinbeck’s remembrances – the
neighbors looked askance at his family until the war was over. Groucho Marx as
a young vaudeville comic had been playing a German-stereotype character,
already euphemized to “Dutch comic.” The night the Lusitania was sunk in 1915,
he changed his act.
“If I had come out as a German comic, they would have killed
me,” he recalls on his 1972 concert album “An Evening with Groucho.” He changed
his makeup “and now I was a Jew comic,” he continues. “I had never been a Jew
comic before!”
The threat was real. 4,000 German sympathizers were
imprisoned in the U.S. from 1917 through 1918. The Red Cross wouldn’t accept
volunteers with German surnames. Business names and street signs were changed;
they stopped teaching German in many schools. Sauerkraut became liberty
cabbage, dachshunds became liberty pups. German books were banned or burned. A
few men were killed by angry mobs.
Sound familiar?
Each rolling wave of immigrants to America has had to run
the gauntlet of prejudice. The Irish, the Germans, the Polish, the Italians,
the Mexicans, the Japanese, the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the Russians.
Suspected, disliked, stereotyped, and acted against. Now anyone vaguely Middle
Eastern is tagged as a Muslim and a violent one at that. A bit harder to hide a
complexion than a last name.
Of course, the Nazis were the perfect enemy. Evil personified. No problem killing them and anyone associated with them. Our polar opposite, we thought.
Of course, the Nazis were the perfect enemy. Evil personified. No problem killing them and anyone associated with them. Our polar opposite, we thought.
The lines of prejudice were redrawn after World War II. The
Germans, formerly one solid ethnic unit to despise, was now split in half.
Democratic Germans were good, Communist Germans were evil. The Red Menace was harder
to typify, differentiate, personify. The Cold War was fought by identical men
on each side, all wearing gray flannel suits, indistinguishable.
But . . . we still had memories of the perfect enemy, the Nazis.
Being seemingly perfectly inhuman, it was easy and guilt-free to kick their
asses in copious amounts in our fantasy lives. 1968’s “Where Eagles Dare” held
the record for decades for most German soldiers killed – here’s a funny video
tallying the count:
Steven Spielberg, that not-so-obscure filmmaker of my
generation, has related a fondness for this preposterous film. I wonder
sometimes if we all got desensitized to body counts in this manner. It certainly
seems like Spielberg follows in the wake of 1960’s World War II films when he
created the violent extravaganzas of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “Temple of
Doom.” Spielberg’s action films often mimic video games, with stage after stage
of peril to be run through and their inexhaustible supply of baddies to be
wasted. After Spielberg, the Matrix movies, Tarentino lately, and many other franchises and standalone
film sagas filled with mass, righteous killings.
So what’s the appeal? John Cleese has the most succinct
explanation of what shadow projection is:
When you come right down to it, most of our identity is
based on a set of imaginary constructs. Why should we let one set of illusions
prompt us to destroy lives that operate on a different set?
We shouldn’t have to blend in or hide. That’s why we came
here in the first place. Remember?
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