Inglourious Basterds: A German Fantasy, Not a ‘Jewish’ One
Allusions to the “Old Testament” character of Israeli behavior and knowing citations of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” are likewise entirely commonplace. See, for instance, this article from the German weekly Der Spiegel, which is titled “Israel Declares War on Terror Groups” and which appears under the heading “Auge für Auge”: “An Eye for an Eye.” The same “lust for revenge” is, incidentally, commonly attributed by German media commentators and intellectuals to America and Americans: notably in connection with the American response to the 9/11 attacks. (For an example from only two days after the attacks, see here.)
But, it will be objected, the Germans who are mutilated and murdered by the Jewish-American “Basterds” are Nazis, after all. Shouldn’t we all rejoice in seeing them get their just deserts in Quentin Tarantino’s signature blood-splattering detail? Well, I suppose it can be left to everyone’s individual conscience whether they enjoy seeing anyone have his head smashed in with a baseball bat or a swastika carved on his forehead with a hunting knife. But the fact of the matter is that most of the victims of the Basterds’ brutality and sadism are precisely not Nazis. They are members of the Wehrmacht: the regular German armed forces.
The point is even highlighted in the film. Thus, “Sgt. Donny Donowitz” notices a medal on the uniform of a Wehrmacht officer and asks him, “Get that for killing Jews?” “No,” the man coolly replies, “bravery.” Donowitz proceeds then to smash the officer’s head in. Many of the other Germans who are slaughtered and/or maimed by the “Basterds” are simple enlisted men. What possible satisfaction could be taken in that?
Moreover, the depiction of the German characters in the film does nothing to render such savagery any more understandable. On the contrary, far from being classical villains, most of the German characters are presented in a sympathetic light. The only unambiguous exceptions are Hitler and the ever smarmy Goebbels. By contrast to the caricatures of the Nazi leaders, the purely fictive German characters seem human and are as a rule even more-or-less likeable. They include not only the jovial enlisted men in the barroom scene, but also, for instance, a celebrated and lovelorn sharpshooter who openly regrets his military exploits. Even the “Jew-hunting” SS officer Hans Landa is clearly not all bad.
The nuance of the German characters has been appreciatively noted in the German reviews of Inglourious Basterds. What has as a rule not been noted is the utter superficiality and one-dimensionality of the Jewish-American “Basterds.” Indeed, though Inglourious Basterds is ostensibly about them, they are in fact barely more than extras in the film. When they are not slicing and dicing their German victims, they are only rarely on screen and they have hardly any dialogue — especially when compared to the German-language gab fests. Only Eli Roth’s skull-crushing “Donowitz” plays a marginally more substantial role.
Moreover, to the extent there is anything in Inglourious Basterds that is recognizable as an intended joke, it is the Germans that tell the jokes and the Americans/Jews who are the butt of them. These include, for instance, a snobbish gag about the Americans’ lack of knowledge of foreign languages and even a “joke” about the small stature of one of the “Basterds.” The tongue-tied Americans attempting to pass themselves off as Italians cut sorry, buffoonish figures as compared to the sophisticated and multilingual Landa.
There is even one major “joke” on America itself. Thus, in the film’s concluding sequence, Raine and two of his “Basterds” arrive at a Parisian cinema in order to carry out “Operation Kino.” Hitler, Goebbels, and various other Nazi dignitaries will be attending a film premiere and the plan is to use the occasion to kill them. A comic book-like special effect reveals that under their cloths the two “Basterds” are strapped with explosives à la Hamas or al-Qaeda. The “Basterds” will subsequently detach their explosives, but as far as we know they are still in the cinema when the subsequent conflagration takes place. The Jewish-American plot to bring down the Third Reich is, in effect, a suicide attack.
The cinema scene gives Tarantino a chance to send up the films made under the auspices of the Propaganda Ministry of Dr. Goebbels. But perhaps (were it but possible) Tarantino should not be so smug. His own film, after all, is based on an idea that comes from none other than … Dr. Goebbels — and it was made with millions of euros in support from the contemporary German “Ministry of Culture and Media” no less! But surely the hip, post-modern “auteur” could not be suspected of making propaganda. Could he?
There does seem a vicious and ruthless quality that is being developed and cultivated in the modern Jewish character that was kept noticeably absent and sanitized from the media and popular culture in the later half of the last century and in the wake of the trauma of the Holocaust. I wonder what it exemplifies.
Most of it arises from the opportunistic eccentricities and brutish qualities of movie moguls and entertainment management offices (From Goldwyn to Weinstein to Grossman to Grauman)….It is also beginning to become mirrored in the Israeli political stance. Is it psychological compensation from victimization….or is it a more towards projection….to instill a domain and aura of power in burgeoning audiences?
That being said:
I’ve yet to see any film that examines the relations and business dealings of Jewish communities in Germany prior to the rise of Nazi Socialism…For some reason I get the feeling it would not come across as being too sympathetic with the Jewish disposition. I do not have the blind faith that the Jewish settlers, (especially those that would jeopardize their communities favor) were of sterling demeanor in their acquisitions, there and then as much as I have had to endure their conniving and contrivances as a community here in modern American ethos and entitlement….
Ultimately, “War” is an act of self defense….the climatic apex of many accumulated transgressions.
Discuss…
Unfortunately, I can’t comment on such ludicrous statements that are both anti-Semitic and without any reference to any slice of reality, to any specific time, or to any specific place on this planet. I think you’ve very cleverly skated through the commenting guidelines, violating the spirit of each one, and you seem to have gotten away with it.
“A vicious and ruthless quality…in the modern Jewish character”? What the heck are you talking about?
Then we have; “The opportunistic eccentricities and brutish qualities of movie moguls and entertainment management offices (followed with all Jewish names)…beginning to become mirrored in the Israeli political stance”? Again; what the heck are you talking about?
Then we have; “…the relations and business dealings of Jewish communities in Germany prior to the rise of Nazi Socialism…For some reason I get the feeling it would not come across as being too sympathetic with the Jewish disposition.”
And the ominous closing words: “Ultimately “War” is an act of self defense…the climatic apex of many accumulated transgressions.
Could you maybe give us some clue what on earth you’re talking about? I assume the last part about war being self defense against “many accumulated transgressions” is a crypto-claim that the holocaust was justified, but as I don’t move in neo-Nazi circles I don’t understand all the code words and phrases you folks use.
I will leave the flowery discourses on supposed Jewish shortcomings-the ability of said jewish people to effectively deal with their enemies instead of passively accepting whatever evil is directed at them- and deal with the matter at hand:Inglorius Basterds. Can anything by tarentino and starring pitt be worth a crap? Not bloody likely.
# 1 you are clearly of an anti Jew bent and your command of English does little to disguise this obvious flaw in your character. I wonder if you perhaps despise colored people as well or just the Jews?
well, seems tha movie was appreciated in the US : 37,6 millions dollars for the first week-end of exploitation
I wouldn’t say that Tarantino inspiration came from Göbels, but rather from his knowledge of Cinema history, and Enzo G. Castellari (the new “cru” of Tarantino is more or less a remake of “Inglorious Bastards” 1978 also of “the dirty douzen”… plenty of referrences from the cinema anthology : http://qc.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/090817/arts/20090817_commando_batards ), were more likely his referrence.
Now, in Cannes the movie was booed
I couldn’t suspend my disbelief with all the comic book elements and walked out when the theater plot was being planned. Bashing in heads and mutilating German soldiers who were likely draftees made several in the audience laugh. That’s the Tarantino we know. No stretch for Pitt to resurrect his native Okie accent, but the descendant of Jim Bridger is not likely to hail from the Smokey Mtns. Overload of cuteness all the way. Let’s ask the Germans to fund a movie about the IDF tracking down and killing Hamas and Hezbollah. Those are Jewish heroes we can believe in. Leave it to Hollywood to make Germans the victims of the Jews. Thanks to John R. for exposing the sordid nature of the film.
It would appear that Mr. Rosenthal is unfamiliar with Tarantino’s approach to a story and to the making of a movie. It’s likely part of Tarantino’s angle/commentary to have the avenging Jews hunting and brutally killing Nazis who are in fact regular Wehrmacht. Isn’t it the typical stereo-typical American thought process that all German foes from WWII were in fact Nazis?
This article is itself a perfect example of the kind of cultural-political mendacity it claims to decry. From the insinuation that any monies from the (current) German government are akin to a payoff from Dr. Goebbels himself, to the grossly disingenuous implication that the “average viewer” *ever* tends to differentiate between W-SS and regular Heer/Wehrmacht soldiers (they don’t, nor do directors), to the description of the Morgenthau Plan as “restricting German industry following occupation” (like saying the Holocaust was a bureaucratic maneuver designed to “reorganize Jewish demography in Europe”) to the implication that the movie is somehow unfair because the German cultural references are well thought-out and often at the expense of other nationalities (as if 99% of American films don’t do that as a matter of course).
His review makes it sound like an overblown version of the scene in “Saving Private Ryan” where the Jewish soldier (I forget his name) holds up his necklace with a Star of David in the faces of German POWs—was that too a German fantasy?
It’s a shame to see a jewish fella go down the same whiny-ass, conspiratorial, victicrat road as a cliched black race-whore.
Grow a pair, man. It’s a movie FFS.
Is seansarto peddling the usual anti-semetic claptrap, and actually suggesting that the Jews somehow brought the Holocaust on themselves by their business dealings? (As if this somehow justifies genocide? As if anything could justify genocide?)
Does it also seem likely that Mr. seansarto knows very little about history? (anti-semetism has a loooooong history; it had been going on before Germany. There’s also the matter of the eugenics movement’s influence on how Jews, and other “inferior” races were viewed.)
Discuss. . .
I suspect if you’d told any American soldier, circa WWII, that he was to go out and kill Nazis with a baseball bat, and scalp them, he’d have taken his (Politically incorrect) cigarette from his lips, stared at you in shock for a moment, then said something along the lines of “What are ya, NUTS?” (A Jewish soldier might have said you were “meshuggah”, crazy.)
Is WWII being re-written by hacks like Tarantino, and those who’d like to blame the Holocaust on the Jews themselves? Wouldn’t it be nice is WWII were treated with a bit more respect, and historical accuracy? Wouldn’t it also be nice if we could drop all the anti-semetic revisionism? (Also, the blame the allies revisionism?)
Please do feel free to discuss. . .
Its just a movie you say but unfortunately the general American public is so dumbed down they cant tell the difference between a movie and real life. Thats why a moron like the Obamanation got elected they believed the STORY not REALITY.
Ever hear of Samson? He died to save the Jewish people and is pretty famous for it.
I went to the film expecting the worst, Tarantino and WWII was a potentially toxic mix. Instead I was astonished and pleased. The film was about justice. It did break the mold of the stiff German robots of every WWII movie before. The German characters were real personalities with dimension and range.
At some level the film is just a vehicle for Tarantino to do what he does well, reference with sound and image dozens even hundreds of scenes from movies and real life. The Last Metro shouted from almost every scene in the theater.
Lastly, the Americans were the heroes in this, in the ultimate war to save humanity, they cast all aside to win at any cost for the American people. Think of the courage it would take to operate behind enemy lines for a long period of time much less to walk into a theater filled with the Nazi high command, much less a Jew.
US troops were admonished by Patton to kill the enemy every and anyway possible to take the fight to them and destroy the Nazis will to fight. The Germans of the film are cultured and intelligent but they are amoral murderers that the Basterd antiheroes need to to destroy to save the world.
But, it will be asked, what could possibly be German about a film that has been described as a “Jewish revenge fantasy,” in which Brad Pitt’s “Aldo Raine” and his band of Jewish “basterds” brutally kill and mutilate evil Nazis, cutting off their scalps as trophies? Hasn’t every Jew dreamt of bashing in the heads of Germans with a baseball bat à la Eli Roth’s “Sgt. Donny Donowitz”?
You can’t explain why it would be or not be “German”. Your cowboys and indians view of “Germans” and “Jews” is at odds with the fact that there are Jewish Germans living in German. And that there are still Jews in the world who identify as having German heritage. As always, you’re simply looking for a way to link criticism against Israel emanating from Germany as anti-semitic. That’s cowardly and anti-intellectual bs. This article is a travesty of logic and discourse.
Do we dare to face up to Historical facts or it’s better to re-write them?
The Communist takeover by Rosa Luxemburg in the Weimar Rep., Bela Kun in Hungary, the aggressive Bolshevik expansionism by Trocky preceded Hitler’s ascent to power.
However it’s is not Politically Correct to delve into the origins, history and bloody unfolding of the Communist revolution from Marx all the way to Saul Alinsky whose roots were from Russia too.
Any reference to ethnicities constitutes a grave offense;- so we better learn how to speak in codes; recommended reading:
Cryptic Language and the Art of Communication
© Donna L. Quesinberry
“Who could possibly think such a thing? The answer is not hard to find. The “avenging Jew” is indeed a kind of stock character of the German political imagination.”
As is the “not-avenging Jew” who allegedly went “to the gas chamber like sheep to the slaughterhouse”. Proof positive of the fact that Jews were and are not hated for anything they did or do, but for what they ARE. Or rather: because they exist at all.
Here is an audio-review from DLF. Burkhard Müller-Ullrich makes a couple of good points, but men who faint at the sight of CINEMA-blood go on my nerves no end.
Reposted from my previous post:
Moho is back! Ha, ha, ha!
This guy is attracted to anything Jewish like the circling green flies to a heap of animal dung. Watch when he starts the RACIST mantra, the vulgar, crass slandering of other posters by calling them “idiots”, “dumb-asses”, etc. Unless one belongs to the “R:96,G:57,B:17″ skin tone one will be berated along with the “Pesky Jews” mercilessly while spitting foam from his drooling mouth.
He became an Antisemitic gadfly bashing every Israeli post yet cannot distancing himself from these posts.
Play the “Nazi” card…
#1
Hey, I don’t write anyone a blank check…If I show anyone courtesy, kindness an’ consideration…an’ they then screw me over, cheat, steal, an’ lie to me then act all superior for doin’ it by running into their enclaves…Shove ‘em. They owe me.
That has been my experience…
But Hollywood’s been pushin’ Jewish martyrdom dope fer the last fifty years to general audiences while displaying the same politics and discrimination in policies and practices that the Nazi’s demonstrated in their own brief place in history…It’s just the Nazi’s used the desires and sympathies of their own rubes instead of other people’s…I think Spike Lee pointed that out when he asked why films like “Menace to Society” have more of an impact in “white” audiences then black ones…An’ in case you didn’t know it, show-biz is pretty front-loaded with the so-called “Jewish” consensus…I say “so-called” because if they are “Jewish” they are the equivalent to jihads or crusaders as far as promoting their own secular agenda and prosperity…that is they are somehow free to act outside the tenets of their proclaimed faiths…But #5, in terms of doin’ “business”, I agree the “colored” an’ “Jewish” coalition makes a logical collusion for milkin’ an’ bilkin’ the Anglo-Protestant/Catholic sentiment for all it’s worth. Christians hold faith in “forgiveness”, the gift that keeps giving…
You’d have to be pretty much of an idiot not to ask yourself at some point, “Gee, What made the Nazi’s hate the Jewish population so much?”
Don’t know about you, but I’m not buyin’ that it was “Aryan” BS alone…If you do buy that; it kinda just implies yer sayin’ that German people are stupid an’ inferior.
So when it gets down to it, what am I talkin’ about?
I’m referrin’ to the shylocks, hustlers, crooks, scumbags an’ worse that hide behind supposed Jewish faith or black skin….The ones who’d change on a dime an’ jest use those costumes for protection or advantage over others. Snake skin.
The language I’m usin’? …Granted, might seem strange to some ears…Might jest depend on how dirty the hole is the words are goin into (“ears” is the allusion, yer free to take it otherwise)…Might not come across as too clear…A good swabbin’ might help….but my language is a little different then jest Queen’s English…maybe a bit more Revolutionary…a bit more breakaway… more U.S.A….not so sure anymore though.
But there’s jest one last thing I got to say,
an’ this is the only important bit:
I’m wonderin’….
Am I talkin’ ‘bout you?
Do something.
German bashing based on a Hollywood film, directed by an American?
Give me a break.
Editrix, yes, if the avenging Jew is a stock characterin the German political imagination, it probably has more to do with German guilt (and fear of some kind of retribution?) than with the actions of actual Jews, who died in the gas chambers and didn’t take vengeance on their murderers.
Jews are hated for what they are, not for what they actually do. After the fall of Berlin, the Russians actually did take horrible vengeance on the Germans—but you’ll rarely find them called on it.
This guy is attracted to anything Jewish like the circling green flies to a heap of animal dung.
Thomas. Take a deep breath and read this again. You are apparently comparing Jews to animal dung. If I’m the fly in this metaphor, I’m getting off pretty light compared to “Jewishness”. You need to take a look at your own anti-semitism here, my friend.
#5 dmgold, well, no need to discuss anymore—looks like he does despise blacks as well as Jews.
Also, what’s with the Jed Clampett/ pseudo-hillbilly lingo?
#4, Rick, yes, I’ve got to agree with you about Tarantino. Let’s just be grateful he didn’t put in a female quadruple amuptee assassin, wielding prosthetic assault rifles, or Ninja, Samurai sword swinging cuties in skintight outfits—or maybe he’s saving those for “Inglorious Basterds II—Nazi Robots from space!”
He’s basically a 50′s B-movie producer, with a bigger budget and critical approval.
wow, the author john rosenthal has a talent to pervert the facts, great job
It’s a Tarantino film with cartoonish-violence. That’s all it is.
Some of you need to lighten up, some of you need to get your nose out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and get your head checked.
It seems that the anti-Semites just don’t understand what it is with the Jews. Jews “are like everyone else but more so.” Read the Israel Test by George Gilder to get a better idea of why Jews are at the forefront of every thing. Jews are the best capitalists, communists, scientists, scholars, writers, politicians, and yes, amongst the most fervent anti-Semites (Chomsky,Soros,Friedman, and etc.).
To all you anti-Semites who comment on this sight remember that it is always the lead dog that has teeth marks on its behind. Get over it, someday you may need a job from one of those lead canines.
More like a Hollywood/pitt version of World war two.
Germans (and many others) are attracted to this for the same reason that they’re attracted to the Palestinian narrative: they want desperately to believe that the Jews really are bad, and thus kinda-sorta deserving of the Holocaust. So when the Al-Dura libel is shown in France, the media establishment circles its wagons, and when Swedes hear some libelous rumor about Israelis harvesting organs, they uncritically print it as fact.
There’s a huge market out there for anything that might suggest that the Holocaust really wasn’t that bad, or that maybe there was some sort of justification. Whether from Pallywood, or Hollywood, there’s a ready market.
Yah, that’s right! If we all weren’t brainwashed by the Protocols, we’d all lurve Tarantino, and cartoonish violence!
Once again, it’s all the Jooooos fault!
/Sarc. Of course.
@26. Morry Rotenberg:
Do you read mainstream Israeli papers? – I do.
Would you look into this?
“Stalin’s Jews – Israel Opinion, Ynetnews”
http://www.ynet.co.il/english/articles/0,7340,L-3342999,00.html
Did you actually watch the movie?
Did you miss that Brad Pitt’s character, Aldo Raine, was not Jewish?
Did you miss him being the one to carve swastika’s on the heads of the Nazi soldiers they released? (You obviously missed the memo about claiming the entire Wehrmacht was filled with people who were not “really” Nazis.)
Did you miss that the majority of the people killed were the Nazi leaders in the theater at the end?
Did you miss the poor, innocent, regretful, Nazi sniper going to rape the woman he was innocently pursuing out of his sweet puppy love and mutual cinema admiration? (When not coming up with better ideas for advancing Nazi cinema or signing autographs that is. And of course your missed him murdering said woman when she expressed actual pity and remorse.)
Did you miss the “Jew Hunter” taking pride in his nickname when browbeating the French farmer into betraying his Jewish neighbors?
Did you miss his enthusiasm when strangling the German actress for her treason?
Did you miss his banal attitude towards his own treason while trying to save his own life? (The way he understood how Jews had the survival instincts of rats, thus enabling him to better hunt them no doubt.)
Did you actually watch this movie rather than just look for a way to leap into Ghetto Jew mentality to assure the world that when wronged Jews would never even imagine wanting to avenge?
Haven’t seen it yet but judging by The Reader and Valkryie, there is a movement to minimize the role and whitewash the guilt of the “ordinary” German where it comes to WWII and the holocaust. I’m sorry Tarantino, if true, has become part of the narrative to not only forgive and but to pull for the “Good” Germans against the bad Germans. What nonsense! They all knew what was going on. Even the “good” ones.
This is sounding like Ghandi. Lots of Indian money spent on a Hollywood movie in order to whitewash history.
I don’t think it’s a movement to whitewash the guilt, but rather to reveal that there were indeed anti-nazi Germans, and some that actually spoke out. You had groups like the Edelweiss Pirates who actually fought street battles against nazi goons. Also there was indeed elements of anti-nazi sentiment within the Wermacht.
If anything needs to be brought to more attention, it’s the level of non-German support the Nazis received from other Europeans. Each European state basically had a SS Division representing them with men from those areas, and all of them joined voluntarily and with great enthusiasm. I might be mistaken, but by the end of the war I believe only 1 in 4 members of the SS were ethnic Germans. Why did the non-Germans get off scot free?
First, I doubt half the people reading this article have actually seen Inglourious Basterds, given that few of the comments actually make reference to segments of the movie outside the trailer or nuances missed in the Wikipedia summary. Always watch a movie before you critique it.
Everyone needs to relax this is a Quentin Tarantino movie not a Ken Burns documentary. Tarantino wanted to set a spaghetti western in World War II, so he did. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, there doesn’t need to be a deep inner meaning – especially not with Tarantino films. Also, it’s laughable that most comments are attacking the unrealistic depiction of Jew during the Holocaust as being angry and violent, instead of attacking the films climax, where a Nazi turncoat allows Brad Pitt’s crew to gun down and kill Hitler and Goebbels at a movie premier (for those of you unfamiliar with basic history, this is not what happened). Of course, in order for one to be aware of this unfaithful, but surprising and cathartic plot element, one would need to watch the movie beyond the trailer, which I again doubt many of the people attacking it’s “message” have actually done.
Fair points and we all know there were initially many who didn’t support the Nazis and others who just shut up but when they rewrite history as in Valkyrie to make it look like major players like Stauffenberg and company were “good guys”, it’s a little hard to stomach. They wanted to make a truce with the western allies, alright, so they could continue their war against the Russians who were kicking their butts out of Eastern Europe. They expected or at least hoped to hold whatever land they had already conquered and negotiate a separate peace. Thankfully the western allies responded, “Nuts!”
The major difference between the “good” Germans like Stauffenberg et al, seems to be that they thought that Hitler and his extermination plans were hindering the war effort. Let’s win the war and THEN kill the jews wasn’t exactly a moral stand.
On a lighter note don’t miss this!
An Israeli made musical (Ivrit langu.) with English subtitles ridiculing the Dead Fish – R. Emanuel – as the Obama KAPO. 2 min. 41 sec only.
It is a keeper, a breath of fresh air after the Axelrod, Soros, Alinsky sewer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dG93iKvB1iM
“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”
Hmmm, but how do you know that wasn’t Freud’s idea of Jewish humour, to sum up what is nonetheless implied to be a paradoxical difference between thing and sign?
I mean, he must have been aware on some level that what makes us human is our minds’ constant oscillation between contemplating the material thing – a cigar – and the human sign – “cigar”. We are always trying to understand the difference and in doing so never satisfying ourselves because we only become more, not less, aware of the paradoxical difference between our representation of reality and reality itself which we only “get” with aid of our representation.
I haven’t seen the film, but I think it’s naive to say that Tarantino was just doing Tarantino and there is no bigger message about the Jews in that. Any artist should know that symbols are powerful and that he will be held variously to account for his playing with symbols, with representations of “reality”, or with representations of representations of representations of some kind of human phenomenon/reality, even if can’t foresee exactly how other people will see what it is he is doing. It is a well-established principle that the meaning of a work of art does not belong solely or largely to the artist and his professed or supposed intent. The artist tries to make something meaning-full because that is how others will take interest in him. Everyone is interested in Judeophobia but how many are really interested in getting to the root of it in our shared humanity?
Before reading this review I had very little desire to see the Inglourious Basterds. Having read it, I have less. The German Landa sounds like a fascinating character, but that’s about it.
What’s really fascinating, as it turns out, is that this blockbuster for profit venture got millions in German welfare dollars. Got to love those Europeans! I should make a movie there.
I can’t believe that people are actually willing to defend or minimize the wicked Morgenthau plan.
This is the worst review I’ve ever read. It’s full of lies (did you actually watch the movie?), inaccuracies, and nonsense.
Grats to wasting your time to type such a long article in which you put, I dunno, all the non-understanding and raging falsities you could come up with?
The German Film Fund has actually a economical factor in Germany and it supports filmmaking in general. If you make a movie in Germany and you employ a certain amount of people from there you can lend money from the fund to produce the movie. If the movie is earning money afterwards you have to pay it back and a certain percentage rate more. So more movies can be made and the filmmaking employees have a more or less steady job.
It does not depend on the content of the movie.
It is nessessary because Germany is not that big and has therefore a relativly small audience. If a movie is a big success it may earn 15-25 million Euro. Without a fund it would hardly be possible to produce a movie with a higher production budget. The average German movie may get 3 Millions out of it. If the movie is produced for a international audience maybe 10 Million, but in the world of movie making it is not really a large amount of money than more a economical support.
>> That is the total amount of subsidies that Quentin Tarantino received from German public sources for his Inglourious Basterds.
That’s normal. That kind of program goes to many movies. No propaganda scheme behind it.
>> the historical revisionist thriller Valkyrie
Revisionist? what??
>> Tarantino’s German collaborators appear to have also made a very considerable contribution to the story and dialogue
Yea, because Tarantino let’s people tinker with his dialogue. Sounds reasonable to assume in the case of such a wilful man.
>> Moreover, the scenes in German abound with cultural references that only a native German or an expert in German studies would even get
Sure, one Winnetou reference. Abound. Of course.
>> Hasn’t every Jew dreamt of bashing in the heads of Germans with a baseball bat à la Eli Roth’s “Sgt. Donny Donowitz”?
>>Well … no. And by the way: Who could possibly think such a thing? The answer is not hard to find.
>> The “avenging Jew” is indeed a kind of stock character of the German political imagination.
Tarantinos idea. Are you actually saying Tarantino is continuing Goebbels’ propaganda? Preposterous.
>> But the fact of the matter is that most of the victims of the Basterds’ brutality and sadism are precisely not Nazis. They are members of the Wehrmacht
Ever since when are Wehrmacht soldiers not Nazis? Being a member of the Nazi party is usually the indicator – or merely believing in Hitler. And there ARE SS men dying, let alone the cinema burning 300 Nazis in it? Hello?
>> Many of the other Germans who are slaughtered and/or maimed by the “Basterds” are simple enlisted men. What possible satisfaction could be taken in that?
Um… simple enlisted men committing war crimes. In saying the Wehrmacht was not Nazi, and merely “enlisted men”, you’re repeating the excuses of millions of Nazis apologetics after WW2. Grats!
>> On the contrary, far from being classical villains, most of the German characters are presented in a sympathetic light
This is an outright lie! Wth??
>> the purely fictive German characters seem human and are as a rule even more-or-less likeable. They include not only the jovial enlisted men in the
>> barroom scene, but also, for instance, a celebrated and lovelorn sharpshooter who openly regrets his military exploits. Even the “Jew-hunting” SS
>> officer Hans Landa is clearly not all bad.
The “jovial men” are drinking, obnoxious occupiers. The sharpshooter is a convinced Nazi and tries to rape a woman! And he does NOT openly reget his exploits, he regrets only not being able to score with the girl because of his exploits!
And Hans Landa??? He is the most despicable criminal in the whole movie! He does NOTHING amiable!
>> to the extent there is anything in Inglourious Basterds that is recognizable as an intended joke, it is the Germans that tell the jokes and the
>> Americans/Jews who are the butt of them
Germans getting maimed, and Americans/Jews have a joke made about them. That’s awful! Poor Americans/Jews! The move is clearly pro-German!
>> These include, for instance, a snobbish gag about the Americans’ lack of knowledge of foreign languages
>> The tongue-tied Americans attempting to pass themselves off as Italians cut sorry, buffoonish figures as compared to the sophisticated
>> and multilingual Landa
ALLE people in the movie are baffoons next to Landa. That’s the entire point of this character! Ein smart polite sophisticated psychopath!
>> Tarantino should not be so smug. His own film, after all, is based on an idea that comes from none other than … Dr. Goebbels — and it was made with millions of euros in support from the contemporary German “Ministry of Culture and Media” no less! But surely the hip, post-modern “auteur” could not be suspected of making propaganda. Could he?
This really is enough to piss me off royally. Your allegations are unfounded, ridiculous, and totally preposterous.
Worst review ever.
stop fantasize !
Tarantino was in the vein of “Pulp fiction”, not more, if Germany put money on the movie, may-be they have a sense of businesses that can’t be found anymore in the US, cuz, apparently, the movie is a popular success.
It’s not my cup of tea though, but I don’t want to see “inexisting” signs of antisemitism in it ! but an author film, that always played with his knowledge of this art, and not with REALITY
test, where is my post ?
Why all this attention to the work of a fey, neurotic weasel like Tarantino, the most derivative film director of all time?
He’s a fourteen-year-old boy trapped in an ugly man’s body; just another celebrator of the grotesque that seems to entrance far too many people these days. With Michael Jackson and Ted Kennedy out of the way, I guess the Tarantinos and the Maddonnas have to pick up the slack.
There are those who have written reviews of “Basterds” alleging that the nihilistic Tarantino took essential plot points from a well-known Neo Nazi novel and inverted them. And that uber-film geek Tarantino, adrift from any moral code but his own desire to transgress, basically copied Goebbels propaganda techniques and films, in a desire to be “shocking” and subversive.
NOT that Tarantino in any way shares or likes Nazi philosophy or goals, but that devoid of believing in anything but his own ego/talent, he thought he would “tweak” the Weinstein Company and polite society by “sneaking something in.” There are also parallels with “Southern Revenge Fantasies” and Tarantino is of course a native Tennessean with deep Southern roots.
What I get is the complete emptiness of Tarantinos movies: talky bits where dialog just drags on and on and on, and then mindless and emotionally meaningless violence.
Hollywood is incapable of making a real Jewish revenge movie — not even Spielberg could take the real life drama of the hunt for the architects of the 1976 Munich Massacre, the initial successes in hunting down the organizers of the killers, hubris leading to the tragic mistake of identifying a Palestinian waiter in Norway as one of the plotters, and his killing, panic and then re-organization to take down the last plotter, the polygamous and debauched “Red Prince” in Beirut, with future Israeli PM (and then commando) Ehud Barak in a dress posing as a very ugly Beiruti woman. Instead we get obvious comparisons to the effort to track down AQ killers with the ending shot of the Twin Towers.
Real life handed Spielberg the conventional three act structure, all he had to do was make it, but instead he chose to mix “the Ice Storm” with “Rescue at Entebbe” to produce a film every bit as bad as Avatar.
This is what happens when your only god is your own ego.
Leaving the movie aside – so the German government pays millions to attract movie productions to the Babelsberg studios? Sounds like a very bad deal for the taxpayer. Obama would like it, though.
I agree that the Basterds themselves are almost an afterthought. But if the dumb Americans are such a big joke, how come they ended the war overnight and pulled one over on the urbane, sophisticated, unsufferably smug German? Who stood over who in the very last shot, admiring their handiwork?
42. ShuShu:
There are over 100 million German speakers in Europe. If that doesn´t support a film industry, then how did Hollywood come to be? In 1920, when Hollywood was already thriving, there were only 107 million US citizens.
Fact is, every industry likes subsidies. That doesn´t mean you have to parrot their line.
Excellent comment, Lessing (#43). You are spot on. The only thing I would mention is that it really is a little unfair for Tarantino to scalp regular German soldiers so gleefully, as the majority of them weren’t war criminals. But this is beside the point.
Tarantino makes movies about movies, and that’s what this is. “Inglourious Basterds” is not interested in any of the actual history of WWII, only the movie version of that history. It is as unrelated to actual history as “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” is as unrelated to the actual American West. In fact, I contend that “Basterds” can be understood as a deliberate cross between “The Good, etc.” and “The Dirty Dozen.” The huge number of Western movies fictionalized and mythologized the real historical West, creating an iconic place filled with dusty, one-street towns, lone gunman, and blazing shootouts at high noon. Sergio Leone took these iconic themes and ideas and distilled them to their essence, then presented them in their largest, most over-the-top depictions ever, with extra-wide long shots, super-close-ups, wailing music, and every pistol cracking with the sound of a rifle. Tarantino loved this, and actually ranked “the Good, the bad, and the Ugly” as the greatest film of all time.
Over the years, WWII has been fictionalized and mythologized to a similar extent. Many, many action movies have been set during the war with little or no relationship to history. These include The Great Escape (based on a true story), Where Eagles Dare, The Guns of Navarone, Kelly’s Heroes, the original Inglorious Bastards, and The Dirty Dozen. Tarantino decided to create a movie in the tradition of these, taking their classic and/or cliched moments and making them mythic and highly stylized in his own unique way. Hence he starts out “Once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France.” He includes the man-on-a-mission, the tough-as-nails, straight-talking American officer, the sophisticated evil Nazi officer, the urbane British officer with the stiff upper lip, the Jewish girl whose family was killed by Nazis, the infiltration of a Nazi officers gathering, etc. He takes all these elements and gives them an ultra-violent Pulp Fiction-stye exuberance, and makes the war turn out the way he wants it.
This is not motivated by any agreement with Nazis or politics of any kind, but by a desire to parody, pay tribute to, and discuss classic cinema and action movies. The Jewish Basterds kill regular German soldiers because Tarantino knows that German soldiers have become synonymous with Nazi; in movie language, there is no distinction between recruits and SS, and none is shown in say, Indiana Jones, either. The reason some of the soldiers are depicted somewhat sympathetically is because Tarantino knew the Basterds would be criticized for their scalping and torturing, and he wanted to show he was not a monster or extemely anti-German. Most Jews may not have dreamed of bashing in Nazi heads with a baseball bat, but Tarantino apparently did, and while this does not speak well of his sadistic tastes, it is not political or anti-Semitic.
This article is confused and overly paranoid. You can dislike Tarantino for his violence and pop postmodernism, but you shouldn’t underestimate his research and intelligence (for the record, I noticed the 3-finger thing right off, and I’ve never been to Germany), or exaggerate and/or distort his views on race and politics just because you don’t like him.
“A vicious and ruthless quality…in the modern Jewish character.”
Fighting or resisting islam will drive a society to the wall. Muslims will attack and kill any member of socity. If an Israel school bus blew up killing 20 kids the Palistains would be in the streets handing out candy. How can people be so blind to the amoral force Isreal faces.
Don’t forget those in Western society and History who succeded resisting Islam. Ivan the terrible, Vlad the impaler, Richard the lionheart, Charles the Hammer and Reconquest era Spanish. I can’t think of one secular humanist who held islamic forces at bay.
say the guy isn’t a conservative so he is an ugly moral relativist
he is a film maker like any cartoonist or any serie B parodist, he is just too “educated” to be instinctive, and his works are all referrences to other works, like it is fashonable by the artistic middle nowadays, the message is “no message” but a delirium of a well trained “intellectual”
stop drink your holy water !
This review smacks of a foregone conclusion. While, as a German, I would immediately agree that secondary anti-semitism (mostly disguised as so called ‘Israel-Kritik’) is unfortunately on the rise in Germany and often quietly condoned by mainstream segments of the public and the media, not everything that involves the portrayal of Jews or Jewish topics in Germany can be traced back directly to anti-semtitic motives.
The author of the review, however, bends over backwards in order to insinuate sinister reasons for the writing and funding of ‘Inglorious Basterds’ through German donators, constructs a ridiculously incoherent and even paranoid incentive for German members of the movie industry to participate in what is basically an American production AND indirectly suggests that the German state (via the German film fund) is sanctioning the dissemination of revisionist and ultimately anti-semitic stereotypes.
Of course, in order to make his ‘arguments’ hold water, he has to single out ‘Inglorious Basterds’ as an essentially ‘German’ movie – that is, unlike any other national or international production, one that can’t be void of any ambiguous agenda by default. Hence, the fact, that this movie was probably made by what could be considered the most American and the most control-obsessed director of our times, shall in no way interfer with the certitude that evil German producers and screen writers (ab)used Tarantino as a vehicle to propagate — ever so fiendishly — their anti-Jewish prejudices.
In order to support this idea, Mr. Rosenthal goes even so far as to assimilate the revisionist stance of some members of the German far right, who never tire in trying to cleanse the Wehrmacht of their involvement in crimes against humanity by claiming that the German victims in the movie are mostly members of ‘the regular armed forces’. I am sure many of today’s Neo-Nazis and remaining ‘Ewiggestrigen’ would subscribe in a second to such simplistic a white-wash, especially when they would learn that this is coming from a Jew.
Maybe, if Tarantino had decided to go down the way of Spielberg, and painted every Nazi a sadistic sterotype a la Amon Göth, Mr. Rosenthal wouldn’t have suspected any hidden motives in the funding. Never mind that survivors of the death camps such as Imre Kertesz have openly rejected ‘Schindler’s List’ on the grounds that you cannot possibly show ‘how it really was’, and only try to use artistic abstractions to approach such loaded a topic, which – surprise! – is exactly what Tarantino, and by extension his producers, have been doing.
As one of the commentators said further above, it is a quite regular procedure for the German film fund to invest in international movie projects, even more so – logically – when the topic of a production has to deal with Germany in one way or the other. The most important reason for such conduct isn’t any urge for ‘revisionism’ but simply the fact that the region (Berlin/Potsdam) is practically broke and needs every single Dollar/Euro flowing into the local economy. It would be outright ludicrous to reject a director of world-renowned standing just because one might run the danger of upsetting someone with too much fantasy who wants to smell a rat where there is none.
No I don’t buy your analysis at all. The Germans seemed very ‘real’, if they had been cardboard cut-out monsters they would not have seemed nearly as evil. I wanted to see them die horribly and I was glad when they did, all of them, and the Jewish commandos were definitely the good guys. I can see where you’re trying to go, but I just don’t buy it. As for the soldiers being killed being ‘just soldiers’, that’s ludicrous. As if the Wehrmacht was some organization unconnected with Nazi crimes and power. I’m sorry, that’s stupid. They were Nazis, they deserved everything they got.
As for modern Germany’s little foibles, to hell with them. The best that can be said of Germany it that it has been castrated, turned into a cringing nation of side-lines complainers and scolds, a contemptible country, but a vast improvement on what it used to be.
American and Russian violence did that, vast amounts of it, more savage and horrible than anything Tarantino could put on the screen.
I don’t like Tarantino, I think he’s a sociopath and a creepy violence fetishist, but I don’t mind him killing Nazis on the screen.
I watched the movie. It gave me the impression Tarantino wanted Americans to view the film as most other countries view American made films. Most of this movie was in German, so most Americans had to read the words coming across the screan. A mark of a true Globalist, and I suspect Tarantino wants to be seen that way, not an American.
The movie did have wit at the expence of Americans looking foolish. As you enjoy the movie, the movie is making fun of you. With as much wine, and dope in Tarantino, and Brad’s brain, who knows why they hate America so much.
If you try to not notice Hollyweird in the movie, you will enjoy it, and some simple individuals may even clap at the end.
“He does NOTHING amiable!”
What?!? He wins the war for the allies. True, he did it to save his own skin, but he did it. Essentially, he killed Hitler. Is that not amiable?
From what I know, Tarantino is the bridge between Bob an’ Harvey Weinstein…an’ basically the best pony in their stalls…All three of them have a boyish, giddy passion for film (to some extent I have that also)…Bob is the bread an’ potatoes producer, more somber then eccentric an’ makes the breadwinners, the “Scary Movie” series, Slasher flicks etc…Nuthin’ better to do stuff for Friday nights…Roger Corman’s ethic. Harvey on the other end, goes for the esteem pictures and strives to promote aesthetic and story in the industry…In a way, he is perhaps one of their last crusaders whose distinctions between art and profit are not so glaringly obvious…but he is a notorious tyrant who is known to ruthlessly intimidate his employees both physically and psychologically (until his recent bout with cancer took a little of the wind out of him…maybe he took his brutishness a little too far..)…And if Harvey Weinstein wants to make your movie, and he’s behind you, he’s the best guy you would ever want in yer corner, because he’s ruthless and he loves film….Harvey comes across as being the “no guts, no glory” lovable Sarge, and it sounds very much like Tarantino is paying homage to him here (I have not seen the film…just the trailer…but I would also add that Tom Cruise’s character in “Tropic Thunder” is very much rooted in Harvey Weinstein’s persona.). The Weinstein’s know their business. To knock German financing is a bit weird because basically the Weinstein Company put the deal together. Also I heard this film was inadvertently laughed at in Cannes….so there might be some retaliation going on for that….and in the US controversy pays…as long as the government lets it.
I like some of Tarantino’s films because they display that boyish love for Saturday serials that made Lucas and Spielberg what they are…..I do think the violence in Tarantino’s films is intentionally portrayed more “realistically”, (then the films that he plays homage to), partly because of the state of film technology, but also partly due to Tarantino representing “street cred” in Hollywood filmmaking. This is the damning sentiment about his films. It glorifies crime…or more so, accurate emulation of it…the trade-off being, it also glorifies the average innocent kid who loves and only wants to make movies for a living.
The Weinstein’s were astute enough to see how Tarantino’s potential to tap into the 70′s exploitation era would appeal to a new generation …They picked a winner….and in a time when the film industry was being bought out by foreign investment, they were quite a solitary American investment and entity.
Are there other filmmakers with the same potential and appeal as Tarantino…I would say, “Yes”, but the Weinsteins can be ruthless about keepin’ them kiboshed so their stud gets all the mares in the market. (Robert Rodriguez, in my opinion is pretty much of a hack but he showed Corman-like ambition with the low-budget “El Mariachi” and that translated into the Latino markets…It doesn’t really take a genius producer to know how to exploit that potential over the artistic merit of a Roger Corman film and to couch him as the sidekick to Tarantino’s appeal.) That has a negative impact on the markets too.
So anyways, this is kind of a wikipedia encapsulation of the Weinstein/Tarantino dynamic that goes into making these films…feel free to add to it… Or go to wikipedia…it’s good stuff to know…but I ain’t gettin’ paid for titin’ it….
Discuss…
Great comments, #31, #43, #51.
John:
Moreover, the depiction of the German characters in the film does nothing to render such savagery any more understandable.
I guess you were out buying popcorn during the entire first chapter, which sets up the movie. Natty, polite, multilingual, or not, Hans Landa is the embodiment of evil — what don’t you get here? The mental torture that he inflicts on LaPadite as he forces the man to give up his friends and then stand by as they are machine-gunned to death through the floorboards of his house is horrific. The cruelty, sociopathy, and banal racism, combined with a mannered dandiness make Landa a fitting symbol of Nazi Germany. I find it baffling that you don’t see this.
You failed to mention the flip side of the ‘vengeful Jew’ paradigm — the ‘passive Jew’ is equally despised. The willingness of Jews to walk meekly into the death camps makes them even more despicable, in the eyes of the Nazi. These dual judgments would seem to make any course of action by Jews indictable — by Nazis or malign movie reviewers.
Apparently you also missed all the signals that Fredrick Zoller wasn’t quite right in the head. His countenance screamed ‘psychopathic creep’ from the first moment we saw him emerge from the darkness. I really have to wonder about your inability to understand the language of cinema (and really, Tarantino’s dialect is neither subtle nor complex). Why all the confusion? Please go back and re-read #31 Sam’s comments. It will help you understand the movie better.
BBB
>>What?!? He wins the war for the allies. True, he did it to save his
>> own skin, but he did it. Essentially, he killed Hitler. Is that not amiable?
No, it isn’t amiable. If you like him only a iota more after he did that, something’s really wrong with you. How can any convinced, unrepentant mass murderer become amiable only because one of his actions (murdering 300 more people btw) happens to cause something you wished for? He doesnt give a damn whether his actions saved millions of people. He didn’t do it for the greater good. It’s just mere coincidence that it was.
just a side note: since there are so many musings about the german dialoge and their cultural references (many of whom seem routed in intimate or first-hand knowledge), I’d say it would be interesting to know that the end credits mention German director Tom Tykwer (“run lola run”, “the international”) for “German Dialogue Translation”.
Furthermore, here in Gemany, there was indeed alot of debate about the Wehrmacht in the recent 20 years. Although I consider your analysis of the movie highly interesting (though I have some differing opinion here and there), I really – really, really – stumbled about the “Wehrmacht is no Nazis” thing. This is precisely what the far and nationalistic right says in the whole Wehrmacht discourse over the last ten, twenty years. I really suggest re-considering this particular point of view.
“>> the historical revisionist thriller Valkyrie
Revisionist? what??”
Yes, revisionist. The real Stauffenberg was no saint- in fact, the only July 20 conspirator who was motivated by moral revulsion against the Nazi evil was von Treschkow. Stauffenberg was, like so many of his background, an old-fashioned militarist, a carry-over from the Kaiser’s army- one who had no problem at all with naked conquest, enthusiastically supported the Third Reich’s victories in the war’s early years, and held to a decided racialist contempt for Slavs, Jews, Frenchmen etc etc. Stauffenberg like many of the Junker caste eventually rejected the alliance of convenience they had made with the Nazis (petty-bourgeois parvenus, as they saw them) simply because they believed Hitler and Co were bungling the war effort and endangering “Sacred Germany.”
Tarantino is a “desensitizer”. Getting as many youth as possible trained for violence and anarchy. Gratuitous violence simply to desensitize and decivilate. It’s coming, work hard, get prepared, try to affect the 2010 elections.
>> Yes, revisionist. The real Stauffenberg was no saint
And how exactly was Stauffenberg in the movie portrayed as saint? He did not speak out against militarism or anti-Semitism at all in the movie. The movie depicts him as a driven nationalist who wants to get rid of Hitler in order to save Germany. And that’s who he was. How is the movie revisionist again? It does not show the entire Stauffenberg, I will give you that – but blame that on the target audience’s interests: to see a thriller.
And that’s what we got. An entertainment movie about Stauffenberg’s Putsch is not revisionistic because it does not encompass the entire person and history of Stauffenberg. A documentary on Stauffenberg would be revisionistic if it omitted something. A Hollywood blockbuster? You seem to have strange expectations in the willingness of Hollywood producers to compromise the movie they want to make in order to create something all-encompassingly historical accurate.
Ordinary Germans
There is a lovely fiction that ordinary Germans just did their duty and were not deeply enmeshed in the Nazi virus. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Germans knew what was going on and anyone who spent any time in the occupied territories was all to aware of the Rheich’s policy towards untermentchen. Poland and Russia were lawless zones in which unspeakable barbarism was common daily practice. From slave labor to death for the slightest infraction, no one should ever think the Wehrmacht was somehow immune from giving immoral orders and carrying them out as ruthlessly and as viciously as the SS. From shelling cities and civilian areas to shooting prisoners, selecting Jews and rolling over evacuating civilians in the path of their armored columns, Hitler decreed that the Russian war would be fought like no other war and it was.
The Wehrmacht never went to the extreme’s of the SS so the decision to prosecute on a case by case basis. For those who think the Wehrmacht were the boy scouts, I have only 2 words for you: Kurt Waldheim.
Postwar democratic Germany has redeemed itself in many ways. Like all societies, it has its flaws but they are decent citizens now. But, if they ever go fascist again, I would nuke them in a heartbeat.
Mr. Rosenthal writes:
(…)
Hasn’t every Jew dreamt of bashing in the heads of Germans with a baseball bat à la Eli Roth’s “Sgt. Donny Donowitz”?
Well … no. And by the way: Who could possibly think such a thing? The answer is not hard to find. The “avenging Jew” is indeed a kind of stock character of the German political imagination.
(…)
Are you really that ignorant, Mr. Rosenthal? Of course there were Jews after 1945 who were – understandably – taking revenge on Germans, it’s NOT just a “German fantasy” but a very human one. Have you never heard of Abba Kovner ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abba_Kovner ) and the Jewish Group called _Nakam_ ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakam )?
How could Jews in 1945 NOT have the urgent desire of avenging the death of six Million of their people?
>As for modern Germany’s little foibles, to hell with them. The best that can be said of Germany it that it has been castrated, turned into a cringing nation of side-lines complainers and scolds, a contemptible country, but a vast improvement on what it used to be.
Amos, Germany is a vibrant country full of intelligent people, a country whose political spectrum encompasses myriad differing views. It seems the biggest “cringing complainer/scold(?)” is you. Try exercising, it will alleviate some of your crankiness… that is unless you really hate all modern Germans.
Sadly, both the article and the follow up comments give too much of the plot away without a spoiler warning, so I had to skim instead of read. Not that I’ve ever actually wanted to pay money to see a Tarantino film in a theater, but this one does seem special.
Without yet seeing the film, I’d point out that Tarantino’s reality is cinema, not history, so I wouldn’t spend too much time analyzing the subtleties or lack thereof in this film.
As for Jews and revenge, I’d have thought the most obvious point is just how little this actually happened. Do germans really feel that there is a movement of Jewish avengers out for german blood? They should.
And yet, there is none. Other than Abba Kovner and the Nokamim, there is literally none. In germany not even nazi and SS headstones get vandalized, while Jewish ones occasionally do. And go german children today get blown up in pizzerias by avenging jews? Of course not. They never did. Even nostalgic nazis celebrating in beer halls never faced retribution.
No, what should be first and foremost in the minds of germans is the utter lack of revenge sought by Jews. But somehow I think that fact gets overlooked.
Re Seansarto’s comment on Jews’ activities before the rise of National Socialism.
History: Jews were very successful in pre-war Europe. Just an example: The father of singer Billy Joel owned a clothing factory that was just taken from him one day. No compensation was ever received by the Joel family.
There were Jewish lawyers and Jewish doctors. Jewish scientists including Albert Einstein and John von Neumann who between them essentially created our modern world. Teller, Szilard, Gabor, Polanyi (all Hungarian).
These physicists and physical chemists and mathematicians who escaped were instrumental in the success of America’s Manhattan Project, allowing America to acquire atomic weaponry before the Germans. The end of the war would have been quite different without these people.
From my readings and speaking with Holocaust survivors, my take on the matter is that the Europeans were envious as hell of their Jewish neighbors’ successes. I know of three well-documented cases – one in Poland, one in Hungary, and one in Germany – were Gentile neighbors finished the still-warm dinners that the Jews had prepared for themselves before being dragged away. There are entire books written about towns that killed any Jew returning to his property following the War. It is little wonder that envy was included among the seven deadly sins. Deadly for the object of the envy is closer to the truth.
I saw this film. It portrays Germans as they were, and Americans and Jews as they were not, and has WWII ending years ahead of time as a result.
Its interesting to see Moho and seansarto hover around anything Jewish like ‘turd’ sniffing dogs. You are what you are, nothing else needs to be said.
Hello Marie Claude and Thomas. Your posts are interesting as usual.
Hi Oscar! Luv…Luv…Kiss…Kiss…When did you get back from the Vineyard?
Thanks for the metaphor….Jest gonna run some circles round it here…
Watch me know!
Hold on…got to piss on yer stink…
Sure there’s a little dog in me…I like that…
Know the crooks when I smell ‘em…
I also know when I smell trash…
Yummy!Food fer thought….
Check out Weinstein’s attempt to manipulate the Democrats…Gee Oscar, who’s side ar you REALLY on?…
Don’t get scared now fella….jest sniffin’…
Check out the Weinsteins “Shanghai” picture bein’ booted out of Hong Kong…I think Italians an’ Chinese share a little somethin’ smarter then motion pictures…Ya know, I’m in China an’ it’s weird..I been workin’ on my own “Lady from Shanghai’ for quite some time…Since well, before Harvey felt “inspired”…
And I love it when Tarantino squeezes Weinstein’s balls (that’s what a good, talented Italian boy does…Unveils the shysters)…
Oh No!..Be critical of scumbags who declare Jewish faith and receive the wrath of BLOG! (“GOD”?)…Bark !..Bark!…Ouch yer scarin’ me…The Italian mafia bailed a lot of these flakes out to begin with…doesn’t take genius to smell dirty money…Hollywood is desperately managed because it is based in BS an’ cr*p….
Envy?
Gimme a break….I can make my own doo-doo….If you don’t believe me…I’ll leave a pile somewhere fer you ta take a flyin’ leap in…Hustler.
I don’t mind bein’ angry…part of bein’ human.
Weinstein is Tarantino’s mutt…(off topic: An’ when it comes to finances an’ rock and roll, Dylan an’ Jon Landau are Springsteen’s mutts), Weinstein and his ilk, don’t go near people like me…Why? It appears a lot like these chumps in their business dealin’s don’t want to break the law but they don’t want to follow it either….gutless, sniveling and pathetic….That’s why they make deals with drug dealers and neurotic psychopaths…Because rational people who have the virtue of kindness and courage on their side would bust their heads if they tried to threaten them and would have all the evidence in the world to show why was an act of self-defense…..(People like M. Night Shamlyan are naturally gonna be scared of him…They don’t have firm feet in the USA)…Rational people don’t give a damn about the movies when it comes to that. Only an idiot would in the US.
My grandfather’s worked in Schenectady, NY, at the factories that Hollywood dumpster dived to get its “salvation” from. Hollywood is Edison’s mutt…Talk about envy….Get over yerselves…
I’d like ta know what yer intent is at kickin’ at me…or implyin’ that I follow “Jewish” “success” around?…So here’s a little info for ya…Maybye yer one of those tired Hitler/ Mussolini criers…snivel…snivel….snivel…
Ten years ago or so, I was looking after the dog for a “Jewish” family in NYC who owned a textile factory. They were parents of a friend of a friend an’ pretty well-to-do. It was a mansion built in an Asian theme. Of course, they are Jewish. (Hmm…Envy?). Their son was a good guy, but I didn’t know the parents too well…but they gave an offer of free room an’ board for which I was grateful for after college. I took the deal and looked after the dog. It turns out they were definitely snobs who saw promise in me as a filmmaker and a musician, (or they just wanted to protect Bob Dylan)…and that’s about all, they didn’t really think of me as a rational human being. Ya see, I had a considerable debt from college that was accruing rapidly with ridiculous fines and I had no paying job. Before college I always worked for my way. This family did not pay me. It was continually impressed on me that in the movie “business” you had to “volunteer” to work and build up “associations” before getting paid to work in the industry. I thought that was complete and utter extortion in my view, seeing as I had gone to college for film production and was successful there. So I looked for any job every week in NYC, (McDonalds, Delivery, Waiter, anything)and was unsurprisingly unsuccessful after two months in the City after college. (Oddly enough before college, things were easier for me in the city and I lived a more fufilling life.)…So I explained the situation to my mother concerning my credit bills and rating and she offered that I come home and find a job. That made sense to me. People in my hometown appreciate good workers at the very least and they don’t try to hustle their neighbors.I knew I could find a job there easier and it was more important to me to honor my own commitments then gamble with them even though it was tempting being housed up with free room and board in a mansion in Brooklyn and hob-knobin’ with rich folks….The dog was no problem but it didn’t make sense for me to work 80 hours on a film set and bury myself in debt working for free…So I told The Fischers, that I would have to leave due to my financial situation…Guess how they reacted?
Or should I charge you?
“Pay me my money down” chump.
Lots of love…Merry Christmas!
German propaganda minister Goebbels was obviously overreacting by tens of millions when claiming that the Morgenthau plan would cost the lives of some 40 million Germans.
According to the UN paper, when former US president Herbert Hoover (31st President of the US) was sent on an investigative mission to Germany in 1947 (after 2 years of US occupation) he reported back:
“There is the illusion that the New Germany left after the annexations can be reduced to a ‘pastoral state’. It cannot be done unless we exterminate or move 25,000,000 people out of it.”
http://www.un.org/Pubs/chronicle/2008/webarticles/080103_marshallplan.html
I left the Ukraine and came to the United States not so long ago because of the very same reasons inglorious basterd Tarantino made me feel when I watched his movie (of course, my husband and I left in 15 minutes). My grandparents, uncles, practically all relatives either suffered the consequences of Holocaust, or, later, after the war, officially supported by the government, anti-semitism in the former Soviet Union. Are we back to Russia here? “America America…” Sigh… Jewish people have come to this country with the purpose of making it their home; of identifying themselves and their children with America’s future, to live under its protection. We became citizens, and love every minute of our life here giving to this country our energies, intelligence, and consider ourselves proud citizens of our new home.
Wake up, the movie is stupid in every aspect of it, and purely anti-semitic! But I don’t give a damn, because Tarantino and some of the people who commented above only represent a tiny ugly fraction of real American spirit.
“Now, in Cannes the movie was booed”
…………………………………
Not surprising given the pacifist, leftist nature of the eurotrash elite which doesn’t believe in confronting evil. This is why Europe is being overrun by islam.
It’s ridiculous to say the movie is anti-Semitic. It is what should be done to evil and what should have been done to nazis. And don’t tell me there was any difference between “regular” German soldiers and actual nazis. They were all fighting for the same thing.
To some people, the biggest sin is standing up to the bully and giving him a dose of his own medicine. The bully himself is excused by 1001 pop-psychological explanations.
ah Laura, how quick you deduct such a enlightenened statment ?
are conditionned like the Pavlov dogs ?
Now, the “Festivaliers” booed the movie, cuz they found it not enough “intelligent”, oops attention please, next Pavlov rection ‘s comin !
“But is it a masterpiece? Not exactly. Tarantino doesn’t reach those heights this time”
Hello mon petit Oscar, ya know I miss you !
Come more often
seansarto
Only a fool lets himself be exploited. Its a little too late to cry about it.
Lets take a look at you without name calling or anything like that. The length of your reply to my simple comment and your need to go off topic hints strongly at you’re being manic. That aside, I really feel for you, I’m not kidding. I’m sorry that something in life wounded you so deeply and that you are so hurt that you have to lash out so fiercely. Believe it or not, I only wish you the best.
“But is it a masterpiece? Not exactly. Tarantino doesn’t reach those heights this time”
………………………………………
I’m not claiming its a masterpiece, far from it. But I like the idea behind it and I’m quite certain the boos had to do with the subject matter rather than the movie’s artistry or lack thereof. The same reason why Michael Moore’s trash about Bush and 9/11 won an award at cannes. Was that movie some sort of artistic mastery or did it win because it reflected the political beliefs of the leftist cannes crowd?
In response to #15 and #30 by poor Thomas.
First Thomas writes this: “…The Communist takeover by Rosa Luxemburg in the Weimar Rep., Bela Kun in Hungary, the aggressive Bolshevik expansionism by Trocky preceded Hitler’s ascent to power….”
and then Thomas writes this: “…However it’s is not Politically Correct to delve into the origins…” – LOL. Presicely what I heard from many people in my former homeland: “Despite the fact that you’re Jewish, you’re a good girl…”
And then, Thomas, recommends the lowest-possible-class piece of content: “Stalin’s Jews – Israel Opinion, Ynetnews”
http://www.ynet.co.il/english/articles/0,7340,L-3342999,00.html
Thomas, did you look over the comments to this article that you recommend: “… this is the stupidest thing i’ve ever read…” – people comment… There is nothing in the article that is worth of anyone’s time. That’s how unbelievably inaccurate and arrogant this is.
Thomas, you just never got it, did you… it’s okay, don’t beat yourself up too much… “it” happens.
Well, Laura said it, that must be true
ever wonder why you’re actually in a big sh** ?
BECAUSE, you’re too sure of your MSM noises
now, I am not crying for people like you, cuz you deserve you fate
I am not sure that you will learn from it
in anycase, I don’t care
It’s simply the truth, not because I said it. Can you seriously deny that the film industry is on the political left and movies which have a left wing bent are much more likely to win awards?
Do you ever wonder why you are in such a big sh** marie? Because of your socialism and appeasement of muslims. I do not feel sorry for you because you deserve your future fate as an islamic nation. I honestly can’t stand the french.
Laura, I don’t need your sound-track, yawn,I’m getting asleep ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
note, that you’re, at least, effective for such an occupation,
I wonder if can make it for children too, oh no forget it, I am ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
#31
Sam, Let me tell you ’bout the birds and the bees:
15 minutes, and consider it a waste of my time.
Not everything’s about Jews. If you ever saw a real U.S Army officer, the psychopathic character represented by Brad Pitt looked nothing like American Lieutenant. Aldo Raine is stupid, brutal, ruthless idiot, and is an insult to the US Army’s officer.
Performing the above, plus, cutting out scalps, evokes nothing but sympathy for the Nazi victims. Such an inhuman act makes the Jewish squad yet another group of Nazis, not any different from fascists themselves.
What are you talking about – Ghetto Jew mentality? This along dives into the deep waters of historical anti-Semitism where you’re not any different. Should I tell you who stands behind Google and Facebook, and Wall Street, and Nobel Prize (37% of all US recipients are Jewish and half-Jewish)? Do they seem to you as those with deep complexes who don’t know how to stand out and take control? – You forced me…
Did you forget the 1972 murder of eleven members of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich. Do you even know anything about the Operation Wrath of God directed by Israel and the Mossad in assassination of individuals who have been directly or indirectly involved in the massacre.. They’ve been killed by bullets or the bomb blast, but not by cowardly cutting out the scalps off off possibly live people.
Oh yeah, I do support Vengeance when there are no options to negotiate, but don’t confuse Vengeance with Super Excessive Cruelty and Sadism.
Marie you make no sense. Anyway, up yours.
Oscar, ya know…All I can tell ya is the obvious…Try not ta insult people, it’ll catch up to ya….there’s quicker things in the world then pride.
This review misses the main point: the movie is NOT about the war as history, it is a about the war as it is imagined in today’s subconscious mind. This movie reveal more about the world of spirits and ethics than the actual events. During the historical war, German soldiers were obviously human beings, many of them unwilling conscripts, and killing and scalping them would have been unthinkable. But now, after decades of getting a clear picture of exactly what it was that they were fighting for, they have completely lost their humanity, in retrospect. Their lives have become meaningless.
This means that it is OK to kill them in a film even if they are kind people, or if they have small children, or even if they are knowledgable and charming, or brave. None of that matters— the only thing that matters is the horrid side that they have chosen.
In QT films, respect and honor are important. When characters make promises, they keep them. But the only Germans which the Basterds keep their promises to are the traitors. Landa’s life is only spared at the end because he became a traitor himself. This is the ethical code of WWII as enshrined in film: the nazis and their Wehrmacht soldiers, by fighting for the German side, forfeit their humanity, and in the subconscious are unworthy of even the lowest level of respect.
It is for this reason that the Germans are humanized before they are killed. To show that even humanized Nazis can be killed without flinching.
To TarantinoFan:
“During the historical war, German soldiers were obviously human beings, many of them unwilling conscripts, and killing and scalping them would have been unthinkable.”
I beg to disagree, I suspect there was scalping, and worse, going on. Have you checked grandpas or grandmas cupboards? Found any dusty old letter-openers carved out of bone?
http://www.timelifepictures.com/source/search/details_pop.aspx?iid=50693116&cdi=0
Some American war poetry…
http://www.ppu.org.uk/learn/poetry/poetry_otherwars1.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/1495651/American-troops-murdered-Japanese-PoWs.html
Chapter 2 of this article would be good reading for some of the commentators here…
http://tmh.floonet.net/articles/nonatlserv.shtml
What a wonderful movie by Quentin Tarantino.
I watch and loved it from the beginning.
All characters are great, and Christopher Waltz are amazing.
I have a movie blog, you can take a look at this page..
http://www.watchonlinemovie.tv/inglourious-basterds-2009/
“Even the ‘Jew-hunting’ SS officer Hans Landa is clearly not all bad.”
This really wasn’t ‘clear’ to me at all – at first I thought thought the above quoted statement was false;
but then I noticed the author has a PhD in Philosophy, so he obviously knows what he’s talking about.
Please explain your view of this character to us Dr. Rosenthal.
The author makes some interesting points. In fact, Aldo Raine and his gang are entirely superfluous, and in fact a distraction, from the driving force of the movie, the cat and mouse game between Shoshanna and Landa, which gets shunted aside so we can spend more time with Aldo and his crew (but thankfully, NOT Aldo and his American crew, rather the actress and the Brit)
And the author missed that Donny and his compatriot do in fact blow themselves up. Landa removed Brad Pitt’s explosives, which he placed under Hitler’s chair (again, shades of Valkyrie). There is a quick shot at the end of the dynamite detonating on one of the Americans leg.
I do believe that Tarantino intended this movie in part as a rebuttal of sorts to Valkyrie. IB makes absolutely NO distinction between “Germans” and “Nazis” and grievously punishes the one Nazi who succeeds where Von Stauffenberg failed. And yet, Rosenthal is right, it is extremely curious that the Germans are so cultured while the Americans are brutish and dumb. Portraying Americans as decadent, depraved, and unlettered was a pervasive Nazi propaganda meme. One would imagine an American commando unit to consist solely of German or Austrian Jews who had fled the Nazis, but it appears that only one of them could speak German.
A much better movie is Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book
I’ve also watched the movie in the meanwhile, and I believe it is pure fantasy. It’s not only that things *did* not happen the way shown in the movie, the point is that they *could never* have happened that way. Hitler would never have gone to Paris in 1944, at the peak of war, only to attend a cinema. A German killing his own people like Hugo Stiglitz would have been executed right on the spot after his capture. No foreign brigade could just walk into a Nazi-prison, shoot the guards, free a captive and walk out of that prison together with that person. A French farmer in the 1940s certainly did not speak English on such a sophisticated level. But also very few Germans really were fluent in English or French, especially the simple soldiers (but also the higher ranks). And so on.
Tarantino might just as well make a movie in which Hitler is kidnapped by aliens in their UFO – it would certainly not be less unrealistic.
Greetings from Germany
Regarding the film’s reference to Winnetou and Karl May, Tarantino is well known to be a major fan of Spaghetti Westerns. Anyone with more than a passing interest in European produced Westerns will be very familiar with the Winnetou character.
I’m half jewish and this review and a certain portion of the “pro”-jewish commets make me feel dirty. Number 26 especially stands out. Disgusting. But that’s probably because I´m not jewish enough, some type of jealous mongrel.
I think the mistake the reviewer makes is in taking the film a bit too seriously. I think looking for either depth, conspiracy or propaganda in a Tarantino film is a bit futile. He makes entertaining films, is excellent at set pieces, and has a good touch with dialogue on the whole, but I think to critique his work in terms of meaning or influence is a bit pointless. I love watching Pulp Fiction time and time again, same with Reservoir Dogs, Jackie Brown was great, but none of those films really has a lot to say about society or even the human condition, they’re over-the-top, ultra-violent entertainment. Frankly, who cares what Tarantino thinks of Jews? He’s not a thoughtful enough film-maker for his thoughts to really matter. Don’t get me wrong, I really like his films, but they’re only important on a very superficial level.
Were no strangers to love
You know the rules and so do i
A full commitments what Im thinking of
You wouldnt get this from any other guy
I just wanna tell you how Im feeling
Gotta make you understand
* never gonna give you up
Never gonna let you down
Never gonna run around and desert you
Never gonna make you cry
Never gonna say goodbye
Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you
Weve know each other for so long
Your hearts been aching
But youre too shy to say it
Inside we both know whats been going on
We know the game and were gonna play it
And if you ask me how Im feeling
Dont tell me youre too blind to see
(* repeat)
Give you up. give you up
Give you up, give you up
Never gonna give
Never gonna give, give you up
Never gonna give
Never gonna give, five you up
I just wanna tell you how Im feeling
Gotta make you understand
I really do like Ron Rosenbaum, but this review is preposterous. Inglorious Basterds is a tribute to the spaghetti western genre set in World War II. The film at one point was to be called “Once Upon a Time in Nazi Occupied France”, which instead ended up as the title of the first “Chapter” of the film. Nearly everything in this review is a half-truth, or out right lie, and it’s obvious there was an agenda going in. That isn’t film criticism.
I believe this film is makes a mockery of the Holocaust. Tarantino grips us with the violence, but uses the smoke and mirrors of humor (to the point of hilarity)to make this a story about revenge; it is as if this film is an avenue for those who were victims, to find some kind of twisted revenge. The viewer lives vicariously through Lieutenant Aldo Raine, whose cowboy-like logic exaggerates what the Allies didn’t do, didn’t act like. As a result, we aren’t as interested in the fact that so many Jews died, as we are in how the American Basterds are going infiltrate and destroy the leaders of the Third Reich… they will do this in a sick and twisted (very funny)way of course. This film gives those victimized a new avenue of thought about the Holocaust; but, not a serious one. Because of this, I believe this film makes a mockery of the Holocaust.
RE #26. Jews always get a rap as being great at Math, but the best Mathematicians in history were all non-Jews. You’d have to go way down the list to find a Jew, and contrary to popular belief, Einstein was not so great at math… The tops, Newton, Gauss, Euler, Riemann, Poincare’, were German, French, and English, not Jewish. In fact, if there is one contributing factor to AMERICAN JEWISH success, it is the money they get from Germany out of German guilt, not an inherently superior talent.
And the rest of the world is waiting to make its contributions, from the 1.2 billion Chinese, or the 1 billion Indians, there are many great geniuses waiting to be found…
This movie is about the moral bankruptcy of America. The complete victory of sadism over compassion is akin to the rationalization and justification of torture and targeted killings. This is a film either highlighting America’s dismissal of human rights as a value or celebrating that dismissal. In either case, the effect is to demonize and de-humanize all Americans. The Jews are portrayed as particularly stupid and totally insane. The “scalping” of the Nazi’s is a representation of “blood libel”. And the forehead mutilation of the Nazis by the Jews, is akin to the marking Cain’s forehead according to the instruction of God. The implication is that the Jews have developed such a sense of omnipotence that they feel entitled to take on God like authority. This film is viciously anti-American and anti-Jewish. As a fantasy, it is something a 7 year old boy might find fun. This is not a Jewish revenge fantasy, this is a commentary on where American values have gone.
Jesus christ people….go mow the yard or something….
This article is itself a perfect example of the kind of cultural-political mendacity it claims to decry. From the insinuation that any monies from the (current) German government are akin to a payoff from Dr. Goebbels himself, to the grossly disingenuous implication that the “average viewer” *ever* tends to differentiate between W-SS and regular Heer/Wehrmacht soldiers (they don’t, nor do directors), to the description of the Morgenthau Plan as “restricting German industry following occupation” (like saying the Holocaust was a bureaucratic maneuver designed to “reorganize Jewish demography in Europe”) to the implication that the movie is somehow unfair because the German cultural references are well thought-out and often at the expense of other nationalities (as if 99% of American films don’t do that as a matter of course).
His review makes it sound like an overblown version of the scene in “Saving Private Ryan” where the Jewish soldier (I forget his name) holds up his necklace with a Star of David in the faces of German POWs–was that too a German fantasy?