Nazi flight on the moon

[Dave Monroe]

Nothing like hunting through teevee listings in a language you don't 
understand.  If anybody can get me a German title for this ("Mond," "flug," 
and, er, "Nazi" were my key phonemes here), I'd not only be greatly 
appreciative, I might even be able to turn up a little something about this. 
  If only for my own benefit ...

The venerable Internet Movie Database (http://imdb.com) turns up absolutely 
nothing of use.  The closest I've come is either Frau im Mond (dir. Fritz 
Lang, 1929) or Der Schwiegende Stern (dir. Kurt Maetzig and Hieronim 
Przybyl, 1959), both of which are obviously not what we're looking for here 
...

The latter, though, if you're not up on yr East German SF, is based on 
Stanislaw Lem's The Astronauts.  Lem apparently wasn't happy with the film, 
but it's actually pretty cool, with an interestingly multinational, 
multiethnic, multiracial cast (which strikes me as unusual for the DDR, but, 
then again, it would have been at least as unusual for an American film at 
the time as well ...).  Available on video in the US as First Spaceship on 
Venus.  Was even given the MST3K treatment ...

Anyway, I'd hoped to consult the following ...

Fisher, Peter S.  Fantasy and Politics:
   Visions of the Future in the Weimar Republic.
   Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1991.

Telotte, J.P.  A Distant Technology:
   Science Fiction Film and the Machine Age.
   Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1998.

Both of which do cover the time/place in question.  Now if only I could find 
the damn things ...

And maybe see as well ...

Carter, Paul A. The Creation of Tomorrow:
   Fifty Years of Magazine Science Fiction.
   New York: Columbia UP, 1977

Chapter titled, "The Phantom Dictator: Science Fiction Discovers Hitler" ...

Did manage to extract ...

Rentschler, Eric.  The Ministry of Illusion:
   Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife.  Cambridge,
   MA: Harvard UP, 1996.

... but no luck so far there, either.  "Appendix A: Films and Events, 
1933-1945" mentions "86 German premiers" for 1940, lists about half as many 
films ("each year's most important"), but, then again, you're talking about 
a previously unreleased film?

Interestingly, though ...

"In contrast to its Weimar counterpart, Nazi ciname denigrated the film of 
the fantastic as well as filmic realism.  The former remained too open to 
irrational forces; the rightful place of the fantastic was to be an everyday 
of bright uniforms, hypnotic rituals, and dazzling spactacles.  Nazi cinema 
thus shunned the extremes of Weimar's haunted screen ... and its socialist 
realism ... assuming a middle ground of historical period pieces, costume 
dramas, musical revues, light comedies, melodramas, and petty-bourgeis 
fantasies." (p. 216)

A Nazi light comedy.  Much less a musical.  Though I will note that the 
recent Chicago premiere--which I couldn't get tickets for--of the expanded 
stage musical of Mel Brooks' The Producers (feat. the infamous "Springtime 
for Hitler") got rave reviews and is headed for Broadway ...

Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream (1972), by the way, is presented as an early 
pulp novel written by one Adolf Hitler, who, in Spinrad's alternate history, 
emigrated to the U.S. after The Great War and became an illustrator, and 
then an author, of those scientific fiction of the Gernsback era.  "About 
the Author: Adolf Hitler was born in ...".  The novel here is called "Lord 
of the Swastika."  I wish I could remeber the other "Hitler" titles listed 
...

The afterword, by an SF scholar in this alterante timeline (where only the 
US and Japan stand in the way of Communist aggression ...) drives home the 
fact that an awful lot of SF/fantasy isn't all too dissimilar from 
"Hitler's" novel here.  Cryptofascism (and then some) abounds.  I've 
wondered on occasion if perhaps Spinrad weren't taking a swipe at Heinlein 
(esp. Farnham's Freehold), and from what I hear of those John Norman Gor 
books, well ...

Anyway, there is a chapter nonetheless in that Retnshler book on the 1943 
Munchhausen, which I'd really like to see.  But some more interesting 
comments from Rentschler ...

"Only a minority of Nazi features displayed what one might speak of as overt 
propaganda....  But to grasp how Nazi films captivated spectators and 
promulgated political meanings, one must comprehend the way in which films 
interacted with and resonated within larger social constellations.  Ideology 
more often than not came sugar-coated ....  Nazi films circulated within a 
vast complex of orchestrated and high-tech efforts to control thought and 
meaning.  The Third Reich constituted the first full-blown media 
dictatorship, a political order that sought to occupy and administer all 
sectors of perceptual possibility, to dominate the human subject's every 
waking and sleeping moment." (p. 217)

"It was a cinema dedicated to illusionism" (p. 217)

Apparently, this became even more imperative as the war wore on, and that 
future wasn't looking quite a thousand years long any more ...

"Government film administrators as well as studio executives eschewed films 
that pt National Socialism directly on display.  In so doing, they carefully 
fostered the impression that cinema was a world apart from party agendas and 
state priorities." (pp. 217-8)

"Films of the Third Reich often allowed viewers vacations from the present 
in fanciful spheres so they could forget politics and civic 
responsibilities." (p. 218)

"Screen illusions cushioned people against grim realities, offering a solace 
of worlds that were in order and seemed to allow unecumbered movement, safe 
havens and playgrounds where one could dream freely."  (p. 218)

And so forth.  "If they can get you asking the wrong questions ..."

Hm ... 8 February 1940, Joseph Goebbles: "I keep impressing my people with 
one basic truth: repaet everything until the last, most stupid person has 
understood." (p. 251)

Anyway, let us know if you get any more details ...

--- KXX4493553 at aol.com wrote:
>Half an hour ago, the German public tv (the second called ZDF)
>showed a program with the title "History" about the expulsion
>of the German citizens of Breslau in January 45 and another one about the 
>life of Cassius Clay (interesting mixture)
>- and there was a third film never shown before: a kind of Nazi science 
>fiction film about the "First flight on the moon", shot in 1940. It looked 
>very Jules Verne-like, the first
>flight was dated 1963 with "Orbit 1" and "Orbit 2". Anyone
>ever heard about it (hardly to believe, because it was shown the first 
>time, but I only ask)?
>
>Kurt-Werner Pörtner


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