My greatest memory from seeing for the first time, Hitler’s home movies by Eva Braun, was her giggling “strength through joy”.
What we get from Trump’s reality-TV fantasies of himself as a star and as we have seen, a “stable genius” using social media clumsily, is that same prosaic sense of the GOP’s authoritarian wet dreams.
We will supersede Godwin’s Law with Trump’s Law, if only to remind ourselves that America First was also a fascist front-group.
Lutz Becker, meanwhile, was discovering the limits to the public's appetite for the home life of Adolf Hitler. Taking the best of the Eva Braun footage, the documentary he worked on for Puttnam, entitled Swastika, was premiered at the Cannes Film festival in May 1973. The audience was outraged, booing and whistling at the screen, with cries of "Assassins!" The presentation of the Führer as a friendly uncle, a petit bourgeois figure in a suit and tie, popping in and out of a family gathering, was intolerable. The iron-clad image of Hitler so carefully shaped by Heinrich Hoffman still exerted a fierce grip on the public imagination.
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Becker is still tormented by the first reactions to Eva Braun's films. "I was punished for puncturing a negative myth. People saw something that was banal in action, and banal in its colour." He believes that many had become comfortable with the carefully composed, black-and-white propaganda images of the Nazis. "People hate it when you tinker with their mythologies," he says. Over a generation, however, perceptions have changed.
www.theguardian.com/...
What happened to Harding in the ice-skating world is just one example of that clash but you can see many others during the rise of Trump. One of the most telling was when Trump used the word “bigly” in a debate. “Elite” observers reflexively laughed – or sneered. Most journalists were in that camp. But many “non-elite” audience members quietly cheered (in fact, Trump’s staff later insisted that he’d said “big league”). If you do not have the education in America to be articulate, you feel a sense of almost daily humiliation.
To put it another way, the clash in modern politics is not just about the “haves” and “have nots” in an economic sense but between those who have control over the culture. Being “educated” creates snobbery, which is deemed acceptable among the elite, partly because it is presented in the language of meritocracy. Trump’s genius has been to tap into this resentment that so many felt – and feel.
I may be reading too much into this tale of ice-skating battles, but at a time when we all need more empathy, I would urge you to go and see I, Tonya. If it helps to melt away some prejudice about what it means to be an “unlikeable” sports star – or a “deplorable” voter – that would be a good thing. Particularly if you still find it strange that anyone could have voted for Trump.
www.ft.com/...