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Yahoo
6 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
German neo-Nazi deported from France over Hitler salute
A German neo-Nazi has been detained and deported after giving the Hitler salute at a far-right march in Paris. The German man was taken into police custody for "glorifying crimes against humanity" and for "rioting" on the fringes of a far-right march in Paris on May 10, French broadcaster BFMTV reported on Friday, citing the police. Two days later, the Paris police prefect ordered the deportation of the German with the aim of "removing him very quickly." Wearing clothing "reminiscent of the Hitler Youth" and with "neo-Nazi insignia," the German was observed "raising his hand and striking his heels together in a Nazi salute," BFMTV quoted a decision by the Paris Administrative Court as saying. The court rejected an appeal by the man against his expulsion from France. His behaviour was "a serious incident that endangers democracy and, due to the hate messages and discriminatory statements, poses a threat to the maintenance of public order," the court found. The German was taken into custody and deported. He is not allowed to return to France for a period of two years.
RTÉ News
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
New film at Cannes holds mirror to Germany's past
German-Turkish director Fatih Akin's new film Amrum, which follows a Hitler Youth member on a remote German island towards the end of World War Two, is meant to hold a mirror up to German society, he told Reuters at the Cannes Film Festival. Amrum, which premiered out of competition, marks Akin's return to the festival in southern France eight years after his last competition entry In the Fade, starring Diane Kruger - the Best Actress winner at Cannes in 2017 for her performance. Amrum takes place in 1945, said Akin, but the questions raised about how to handle Germany's past remain unresolved. "We (Germans) had to be bureaucratic with everything. Also with handling the past," said Akin. "We're so slow." The process of "denazification" imposed by the Allies at the end of the war made it seem like Germany had stripped its population of Nazi ideologies, which isn't true, said Akin. "To realise that, to look in the mirror - you know, there's a German angst to look in the mirror. My film is a mirror." Set on the North Sea island of the same name, Amrum is based on the experiences of Akin's 85-year-old mentor and co-writer Hark Bohm, himself a director who decided to hand the project off due to his age. The film follows 12-year-old Nanning, played by newcomer Jasper Ole Billerbeck, after his mother, a staunch Nazi supporter, falls into a depression upon learning about the death of Adolf Hitler the day she gives birth. The Hitler Youth member sets off to find the only thing his mother doesn't refuse to eat - white bread with butter and honey. Those ingredients are in short supply due to the war, which otherwise feels far removed from the isolated island. Kruger teamed up with Akin again for Amrum, in the role of Tessa, a potato farmer opposed to Hitler who is reported to the local Nazi authorities for traitorous talk for discussing the inevitability of the war's impending end. To cast Nanning, Akin decided to search outside of urban centres and found Billerbeck at a sailing school, he told Reuters. "Big city kids, they can't handle nature," he said.
Spectator
08-05-2025
- General
- Spectator
For most of the world, VE Day did not mean peace
While drinking, dancing and laughter were the order of the day in Britain on the VE Day, things were not so hunky dory in Germany. At the liberated Belsen concentration camp situated 65 miles to the south of Hamburg, nurse Joan Rudman cut a depressed and lonely figure. She recalled: 'One could hardly think of peace when there's so much human misery here.' Meanwhile for many Germans, there were mixed feelings. Relief that the war was ended combined with bitterness and a sense of humiliation. These were feelings that led to most Germans blotting out their memories of this period. In Germany is known as Tag der Befreiung (day of liberation), in other words liberation from Nazi rule. However, during the many years I spent in Germany I cannot recall anyone ever celebrating VE day, just as I never met a German who admitted to having been a Nazi or having a Nazi relative. Claus Gunther, a 14-year-old member of Hitler Youth, who had been evacuated to a Bavaria recalled: 'There was a weight off my heart because I would not have to do military service.'
Times
04-05-2025
- Times
One of last Hitler Youth soldiers: ‘It was a suicide mission'
In April 1945, Ingo Baldermann, a 15-year-old boy in the Hitler Youth, was handed a Panzerfaust anti-tank weapon along with a First World War rifle and five rounds of ammunition, and told to go and save Germany. 'We were divided into 'Panzer destruction squads' made up of three boys each with one Panzerfaust per squad,' he said. 'I remember the officer who was handing out the weapons said, 'which one of you is taking the Panzerfaust?' I said, 'I'll take it'. They were heavy and I was quite puny. But that's how eager I was.' The training consisted of watching the shoulder-launched missile being fired once into a stone sports stand to show its destructive force and being told to get as close to the
Yahoo
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
In this novel inspired by G.W. Pabst, Leni Riefenstahl is among the bit players
Daniel Kehlmann's latest novel, 'The Director,' an engrossing meditation on the exigencies of art and the dangers of artistic complicity, lands in the United States at a good time. Which is to say, a bad time, when both institutions and individuals must gauge the risks of free expression in an increasingly oppressive environment. The German novelist most recently authored 'Tyll,' shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize, and his translator, Ross Benjamin, has rendered his new historical fiction in idiomatic English prose. With a page-turning narrative that is both technically sophisticated and intellectually engaging, 'The Director' sits at the charmed intersection of commercial and literary fiction. In his acknowledgments, Kehlmann says the novel was 'largely inspired by the life stories of the historical G.W. Pabst and his family.' Among his inventions is a Pabst son, Jakob, an aspiring artist turned Hitler Youth member — someone whose perceptions, once astute, are polluted by circumstances. The same can be said of Pabst himself, whose monomaniacal devotion to his art inclines him to ugly compromises. Read more: A fresh look at a director who 'sinned' The politically tricky world of 'The Director' is off-kilter in a variety of ways. (The German title, 'Lichtspiel,' means both 'play of light' and 'film.') Disorientation is a pervasive theme, beginning with Pabst's attempt to establish himself, along with other expatriate film artists, in Hollywood. But language is a barrier, and the deference he demands conflicts with the movie capital's norms. Strangers confuse him with another Austrian-born director, Fritz Lang, and Pabst's American movie, 'A Modern Hero,' fashioned from a script he loathes, is a flop. The director's return to Austria, in part to help his aging mother, is poorly timed. (The book's three sections are 'Outside,' 'Inside' and 'After.') At Pabst's rural estate, the once submissive caretaker, Jerzabek, and his family, now Nazis, hold the whip hand. The wife cooks comically inedible food; the daughters terrorize Jakob. The Pabst family is caught in a real-life horror movie from which escape proves difficult. Trapped by the outbreak of war, Pabst agrees reluctantly to make movies — well-funded and ostensibly nonpolitical — for the Third Reich. His professional unease is echoed by the novel's gently surreal bending of time and space and its metaphorical conflation of life and film. The novel's first-person, postwar frame involves another absurdist twist: Franz Wilzek, a resident of an Austrian sanatorium, is corralled into a live television interview. Formerly a director and, earlier, an assistant to Pabst, Wilzek suffers from dementia, and the interview reveals his befuddlement. It is cut short after Wilzek denies the existence of a lost Pabst film, 'The Molander Case,' shot in World War II's waning days. 'Practically nothing is known about the circumstances of its shooting,' Kehlmann writes in the acknowledgments. That historical gap unleashes the novelist's imagination. Most of Kehlmann's narration is in the third-person, with constantly shifting perspectives that add to the book's off-kilter feel. At times we see the action through Pabst's eyes; at others, from the viewpoint of his wife, Trude; his son, Jakob; the actor Greta Garbo; and the Reich envoy Kuno Krämer. A captured British writer offers his first-person take on Pabst's 1943 film, 'Paracelsus.' Leni Riefenstahl turns up too, as both actor and director, a collaborator in every sense. So, too, does the actor Louise Brooks, depicted as the great love of Pabst's life. Read more: G.W. Pabst: The high art of lurid lives Over time, dreamscapes, film sets and Germany's crumbling, war-ravaged cities become indistinguishable. In films, Pabst reflects, 'the painted backgrounds looked real and unreal at the same time, like something out of the strangest dreams.' In Berlin, he observes that 'the edges of the houses seemed askew,' while 'the street down below rolled away very straight into an endless distance,' evoking 'how films had looked fifteen years earlier.' Similarly, when Pabst visits the Nazi propaganda ministry, its geometrically baffling corridors remind him of 'a trick he himself had used repeatedly in long tracking shots.' When he encounters the minister — an unnamed Joseph Goebbels — he sees him briefly as two distinct men. As Pabst moves toward the exit, the office door recedes. He finds that 'the room had folded over so that he was suspended from the ceiling, walking upside down.' The climactic (and amply foreshadowed) blurring of nightmare, film and reality occurs in Prague, during 'The Molander Case' shoot. A group of prisoners, gaunt and starving, are commandeered to serve as unusually cooperative movie extras. A stunned Wilzek, spotting a familiar face, reports that 'time had become tangled like a film reel.' Kehlmann gives Pabst's self-justifications their due. 'The important thing is to make art under the circumstances one finds oneself in,' the director says. An actor differs: 'One contorts oneself thousands of times, but dies only once … It's simply not worth it.' Later, Pabst declares, 'Art is always out of place. Always unnecessary when it's made. And later, when you look back, it's the only thing that mattered.' Perception, and what one chooses not to see, is another one of the novel's themes. 'Look closely,' Jakob insists, 'and the world recedes, becoming a mixture in which nothing is clean and everything runs together.' But is that true? Wilzek, the novel's unlikely hero, does look closely, and what he sees impels him to take a moral stand. Kehlmann's epigraph, from the Austrian Nazi writer Heimito von Doderer's 1966 short story collection 'Under Black Stars,' describes 'drifting along on a broad wave of absurdity, although we knew and saw it.' But 'this very knowledge was what kept us alive,' von Doderer writes, 'while others far better than we were swallowed up.' A post facto reflection on his times, it casts a troubling light on our own. Klein is the Forward's contributing book critic. Get the latest book news, events and more in your inbox every Saturday. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
