Fiction Trumps Reality and IB

[rich]

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/germany/090903/inglourious-basterds

“Hurray! They’re torched!” wrote one reviewer from the weekly Die Zeit
about the final scene, when Hitler, Goebbels, & Co. are incinerated in
a Paris cinema. This writer saw the film not as one solely of Jewish
retribution but as a revenge fantasy for Germans born since the war
who have been made to feel guilty for a war and crimes that they had
no part in. No wonder everyone clapped, concluded one reviewer: “For
postwar Germans the story is an orgy of self-righteousness.”
...
I
One of Germany’s foremost critics, Georg Seesslen in the magazine Der
Spiegel, noted that "Inglourious Basterds" was the first film to
actually show Hitler die. Why, he asks, had no one ever thought of
killing off Hitler on the silver screen? By the end of "Inglourious
Basterds," he wrote, Hitler is "more than dead. He is kaputt — all
shot up, burned and chopped to pieces.” All other films symbolically
left the book open, thus turning Hitler’s evil itself into a spectre
that never perished. By implication, Germany could never be “normal”
because Hitler lived on, at least on film.

According to Seesslen, the genius of "Inglourious Basterds" is that it
“has the audacity to ignore history.” In some cases, he argues, pure
cinematic fantasy can do a better job of getting to the truth than
historical authenticity: fiction trumps reality.
________
wow--are we all just getting stupider? geez, I feel real old

rich