2024
- Speakers: Nancy Foner (City University of New York) and Carly Goodman (Rutgers University)
- Moderator: Tobias Brinkmann (Penn State University)
- German Historical Institute, Washington, DC, and Heidelberg Center for American Studies
- Recorded on October 15, uploaded on November 11
I watched “Passage to Marseille,” dir. Michael Curtiz (Warner Bros., 1944), this evening.
I forgot about the shocking scene in which Humphrey Bogart’s character machine-guns the surviving crew of the German plane he’d just downed at sea. The audience in 1944 was meant to sympathize with this act. After all, that crew had just tried to bomb the small civilian freighter. I don’t know if such a scene would have worked in a Hollywood film much earlier, but it did in 1944. Was this fictional atrocity an indication of American popular culture’s brutalization in World War II?
Movie poster image source: “Warner Bros. Pressbook” (1944), Internet Archive.
U.S. Government Caricature of Nazi Propaganda
This 1942 poster was designed to counter the effects of Nazi propaganda in the United States. It is fascinating in its own right, but parts of the text reveal startling similarities to Russian disinformation in our own time.
Accessibility: Description and full transcription of poster.
Europe's Changing Map in 1939 (Photo)
European situation spoils map on Post Office department floor. Washington, D.C., April 12. The huge map on the floor of the Post Office Department here is all out of kilter these days due to the aggression in Europe. Many are the embarrassing questions being asked officials about when Mr. Farley is going to do something about Ethiopia, Austria and Czechoslovakia. The answer so far has been - nothing. Probably the Post Office is waiting to see what will happen next on the continent. Miss Edna Strain is inspecting the damage done by the ambitious dictators. 4-12-39
Image and caption: Harris & Ewing Collection, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016875385/.
We’re getting some good snow tonight and tomorrow, but then, consistent with climate change, we’ll have a couple warmer days with lots of rain. I’m fortunate to have experienced the truly snowy winters here in the 1970s as a kid. Back then, sled dog races went right past our house.
🎙️ “Netanyahu and Trump’s ‘Creeping Authoritarianism’: ‘It Always Begins and Ends with Women’" – Allison Kaplan Sommer with Dahlia Lithwick and Yofi Tirosh (Haaretz) 43 min.
🎙️ “Timothy Snyder in Kharkiv: A Conversation about Freedom – with Volodymyr Yermolenko” (Explaining Ukraine / UkraineWorld) 54 min.
We often wonder why people follow leaders who are wildly self-centered, greedy, and hateful. But that can be the very essence of their power: they allow their followers to indulge in their most cruel and hateful impulses, even as they foster the illusion that they are part of a noble and courageous spiritual mission.
– Peter Pomerantsev, How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler (PublicAffairs 2024), chap. 2.
Adieu Assad
Oh dictator, take note –
when you order your image hung all over,
you offer an attractive target
for the hatred of everyone you wrong,
you offer a practical object
for the people to trample, shred, and burn.
🤖 This one is freaky: “OpenAI’s new model tried to avoid being shut down” by Shakeel Hashim (Transformer).
Started reading Peter Pomerantsev, How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler (PublicAffairs 2024).
My feel-good television series this past year: Elsbeth on Paramount+.
📺 Historical Background to U.S. Migration:
“The Bigger Picture: U.S. Migration Debates and Policies since 1965” – Online Panel Discussion (1 hour on Vimeo)
🙃 Unprecedented times?
It’s like being killed by a bear. Lots of people have been killed by a bear, and so that’s not at all unprecedented. But in this case, the bear is wearing a thong and he beats you to death with a dead, wet owl. The problem and outcome are the same – bear attack, death – but somehow, it all feels so, so much stupider.
– Chuck Wendig, “How to Write Words and Make Art in This Dire Era of Clowns and Cowards,” terribleminds.com.
This evening I watched “Orient-Express,” dir. Viktor Tourjansky (Germany, 1944). It’s a humorous murder mystery that takes place on a train somewhere in the Balkans. Created in wartime Germany as escapist entertainment, it contains no references to politics or the war.
🇰🇷 Fascinating read: “Why South Korea’s Leader Made Such a Fateful Decision” by Choe Sang-Hun (archived from NYTimes).
🥶 First morning of the season with frost on the inside of the car windows.
🇰🇷 This is bonkers. “PM Han overlooked as defense minister bypasses him on martial law declaration” (The Korea Times)
Prime Minister Han Duck-soo was completely unaware of President Yoon Suk Yeol’s martial law declaration. This was because Defense Minister Kim Yong-hyun, a former upperclassman of President Yoon in high school, bypassed the prime minister and communicated directly with the president.
🇰🇷 “South Korea Is Fighting for Democracy Again—And the World Needs to Know” by Heesoo Jang of UMass Amherst, who shared this on Bluesky prior to pitching it to a paper because of the speed of events.
The opening paragraph of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is a doozy:
Lost in the shadows of the shelves, I almost fall off the ladder. I am exactly halfway up. The floor of the bookstore is far below me, the surface of a planet I’ve left behind. The tops of the shelves loom high above, and it’s dark up there—the books are packed in close, and they don’t let any light through. The air might be thinner, too. I think I see a bat.
I tend to think that Biden’s pardon of his son was at least partly about safety. Given the son’s prominence in MAGA revenge fantasies, surrendering him to federal custody on the eve of Trump’s return to the White House was a nonstarter. Also, Biden’s old and has lost one son already.
Watching 'Citizen Kane' in late 2024
Last week I watched “Citizen Kane” (dir. Orson Wells, 1941) for the first time in more decades than I can remember. I didn’t really enjoy the experience, maybe because the initial premise (tearing a boy away from his home for a huge inheritance) is as misshapen as the psychological development of the lead role, Charles Foster Kane. There is also the crass materialism, the emptiness of Kane’s soul, and his insatiable appetite for the adoration of others. His unhappy loneliness in the end as the only occupant (not including servants) of a giant castle filled with statues and other valuable artifacts from Europe was presumably the point of this bleak story, one that might be construed as a moral tale.
I should have liked the references to newspaper moguls and opinion making to be less oblique, though that might have pushed one of them too far in real life. (Apparently William Randolph Hearst did what he could to suppress the film because it hit too close to home.) Or maybe this context was secondary to Kane’s personal development anyway. After all, this was an era when foreign correspondents reported on populists and dictators, and psychoanalysis was in vogue. Sure, it was an era of mass politics, but these masses had their great men, for better or worse.
None of this is a criticism of the film. I just didn’t enjoy it. Perhaps the biggest problem is how readily Kane can stand in for certain men in our own time. The film’s dark, fatalistic overtones reinforced this effect in my mind. Still, there is one external factor that helped me to contextualize “Citizen Kane” better this time around: I actually saw the Hearst Castle in 2018, a truly extraordinary monument, fascinating and unsettling at the same time.
Indoor Roman Pool at Hearst Castle