Monday 27 September 2010

Jud Süß - the medium is not the message


Jud Süß is the most notorious anti-Semitic movie ever made. Commissioned by Joseph Goebbels and directed by Viet Harlan, the story is partly based on the novel of the same name by Lion Feuchtwanger, though his message has been twisted and corrupted almost out of all recognition.

The book and the film are both about Joseph Süß Oppenheimer, an eighteenth century Jewish financier in the service of the Duke of Wurttemberg. In the book he frustrates a plan by the Duke to subvert the duchy’s constitution, sacrificing himself in the process. In the movie he is a malevolent schemer and a sexual blackmailer, one who rapes a Christian girl, who subsequently kills herself in shame. It’s meant to induce hate, drawing on heavy Jewish stereotypes; it did induce hate, along with movies like Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew), acting as an appetiser for the Holocaust.

Jud Süß is banned in Germany; it has been for the past sixty-five years. But a new interpretation, premièred at the Berlin Film Festival last year, is now on general release in the country. Directed by Oskar Roehler, Jud Süß- Film ohne Gewissen (Jud Süß - Film Without a Conscience) is a movie about a movie. It’s about another kind of seduction, another kind of blackmailer, with Joseph Goebbels in the role of manipulator and schemer.

In the original the moneylender is played by Ferdinand Marian, a onetime ambitious actor in German cinema. Marian originally declined the part but the Propaganda Minister ‘persuaded’ him to change his mind by a mixture of flattery and blackmail, vague threats against his Jewish wife, hints of possible troubles to come.

Robert Boyes in his report on the film in The Times makes it clear that the director’s intention is to show that this is how the Nazi regime operated, less by force than by a process of cooption and moral corruption. Marian is shown visiting the troops supervising the construction of Auschwitz. There he witnesses a screening of Jud Süß. When the body of the dead girl is held up the soldiers shout Jew! Jew! at the screen, their faces contorted with hate. All too late Marian has a moment of personal epiphany, realising that he has become an integral part of the coming Holocaust.


The film has caused some controversy in Germany, not least because it draws on the same racial caricatures as the original. Charlotte Knobloch, the head of the Central Board of German Jewry, has gone so far as to suggest that it should not be on general release, worried, as she is, about new stereotyping. But it seems to me that there is a serious and important message here and I’m not at all sure how one could make it without drawing on the corruptions and vices of the original.

I’ve not seen the movie so I cannot say if the director has been successful or not in his primary aim, but banning and interdicts, based on fear and presupposition, is not the answer. Yes, movies do have the power to seduce, something Goebbels, a propagandist of genius, clearly understood. Nevertheless, so much depends on the context, so much depends on the times; so much depends on the atmosphere.

Anti-Semitism does exist in the modern world, there is no point pretending that it does not, though the assumption that people are all as simple-minded as the simple-minded, that they are all ready to be seduced anew, seems to me to be disingenuous in the extreme. It’s the same censorious attitude that led to the prolonged ban of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and Olympiad; the same attitude – dare I say it? – which allows the 1940 Jud Süß to be shown in Germany only to approved researchers and only after they’ve received a preliminary lecture on ‘context’. This is all so much condescending and paternalistic rubbish: in the case of the original the medium was not the message; the Nazi state was the medium and the message.

According to Boyes there are plans to release Jud Süß- Film Without a Conscience in Britain. He urges his readers to watch it, even if it hurts. I will; I shall.

54 comments:

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  2. I think Mein Kampf also continues to be banned, though I'm not completely sure about that. I personally would hand out free copies. It's one of the most tedious books ever written, enough to destroy all misplaced enthusiasim!

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  4. Yes, you are right, Adam, it’s the most honest testament ever written by a politician, consistently ignored by other politicians who could not believe that one the clan was not as cynical as they were! It was this blindness that led to all sorts of post-war rationalisations, a rush to discover significances in the political pronouncements of one’s perceived enemies, which meant lumping speeches together and publishing them under fatuous titles like Khrushchev’s Mein Kampf!

    Hitler always believed that the spoken word was far more important than the written. If he had taken power in 1923 instead of 1933 Mein Kampf would never have been published, just like his later book on foreign policy.

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  6. It's also a mistake to assume that Hitler was a lunatic; irrationaly, yes, a dreamer, yes, but no lunatic!

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  8. I don't. People have different dreams; that's all.

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  10. I’m going to leave you tonight with a paradox, Adam, one that I know you will find uncomfortable. This is not my position, but it is a position based on the facts. Now I assume you have read Mein Kampf? If so you will know that it was Hitler’s ‘dream’ not to destroy the British Empire, which he hugely admired (his favourite movie was Tales of the Bengal Lancers), but to preserve it in alliance with Germany. He would have preferred Germany’s old colonies back, but even on this he was prepared to compromise.

    The First World War had severely weakened the British Empire; it was no longer as it was. Those who seriously wanted to preserve it should have done everything to avoid a Second. Churchill in his determination to pursue Germany and Hitler ensured, for all his romantic vision, that the Empire was foredoomed. Hitler did not want to see it end; Roosevelt and Stalin, Churchill’s allies did. So, the answer to your question has to be Churchill, in objective if not subjective terms.

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  11. Sorry, I was tackling that in slightly the wrong way. Churchill, by his actions, won a war and lost an Empire.

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  12. the Zionist lobby Apac have a strangle hold on US foreign policy. The Zionist bankers have controll of the Federal Reserve and most of the worlds economy .It was Hitlers wish to break the zionist hold on the world economy. WW2 was to see who would controll the world ,The semetic race won with misguided help.Now they are out to destroy the aryan races with mass imigration and socialism.This is a battle for survival of western civilization and values nothing less.

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  19. Anthony, that's a view I'm familiar with. It's not one I share, though.

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  21. Adam, thanks for such a considered response. I don't want to get into too much detail over this, though, since I believe that the war was a necessary war; but it still bankrupted Britain, and it was this bankruptcy as much as anything that made the Empire unviable. On an empirical point Hitler certainly bombed mainland Britain - though nowhere near the extent to which Britain bombed Germany. I'm not aware that he bombed any other part of the Empire apart from Malta; his aircraft simply did not possess the range.



    Standing alone and grand gestures are fine, Adam, they bring a sense of moral superiority; but in 1945 that was all Britain had, a sense of moral superiority. I can think of no other war in our history fought for less purpose. We came off almost as bad in victory as the Germans did in defeat, an exaggeration, but not by much once the Wirtschafts Wunder kicked in in the 1950s.

    I've read quite a lot on Hitler, including all of his published and unpublished writings as well as his Table Talk. He nowhere expresses hatred for the British Empire. Indeed his idea was that Germany would rule Russia in much the same way that the British ruled India. In hard, realistic and practical politics the only way that the Empire could have been saved is in an accommodation with Germany.

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  25. Yes, Adam, but your point was that Hitler was bombing the Empire willy-nilly whereas the bombs only fell on Britain and Malta!

    Did Churchill not make a pact with an unreliable devil that left Eastern Europe in thraldom for sixty years after the war? The point is pragmatism is essential in politics, a sense of realism. You are making empirical claims here not supported by evidence. Hitler was obsessed not with the extermination but the enslavement of Slavs, at least some Slavs. His racism did nothing to stop his alliance with Slovakia and Bulgaria. Hitler's ambivalence over Britain remained right to the end; he even believed as late as 1945 that Britain would see sense and change sides. He was actually a reliable ally, moreover, as he proved in his sentimental attachment to Mussolini.

    Yes, a fine rhetorical flourish in the best Churchillian tradition. :-)

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  26. Did you know that the stop-line for Barbarossa was Archangel on the White Sea to Voronezh on the Caspian? But your point is a valid one. I'm simply asking you to look at things from another angle. The war may have been the right war, a just war, in part...but it was still the catalyst that brought the Empire to an end, not simply because it bankrupted Britain but because it ushered in a new anti-imperialist age.

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  28. Forgive me, Adam, but you seem to be missing my essential point. Halifax and company are not Tories of of my ilk, and at no point here have I tried to defend appeasement, though I'd be quite happy to do so; I have done in the context of union debates. Churchill's meeting with Ribbentrop, a vain and stupid man, might have been important in his personal perceptions of the Nazi regime but it has no bearing on my core argument, which, once again, is that victory in the war may have brought Britain moral satisfaction (conveniently and shamefully ignoring Poland and the Eastern Question, of course) but it also brought a practical defeat, if you wish to look at these issues in imperial terms. Besides the war itself was by it's very nature anti-imperial, at least the old style of colonial imperialism. This simply could not survive the outcome. It might have survived a bit longer without the war, that's all, but it would not have survived into the modern age.

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  30. Adam, in this context it really does not matter who is or is not of my ilk. I leave my preferences to one side in being advocate for the Devil. I'm presenting an arguments, that's all, as if I truly had taken a brief. My point here was not about 'surrender' but accommodation. The tragedy for Churchill is that he could not see the contradiction in his position. I think, in his mind, he was still alongside his great ancestor, fighting the Second World War as it it was the War of the Spanish Succession. It was not. He was right to warn of Hitler's ambitions; but his war still brought down the Empire he loved.

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  32. Ah, Adam, it's just as well you and I have never met in college debates. I would go straight for your passions. :-))

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  34. Because in the defence of your hero (do remember I stand back from all such considerations here) you continue to sidestep the essential point in a welter of unnecessary detail. Let me remind you what I took issue with Hitler's 'dream' was to destroy the Empire, Churchill's was to preserve it. Who really won the war? We won and we lost; the Empire was lost. That may not have been Churchill's aim but it was the outcome notwithstanding.

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  37. Miss Ana, first thank you for such an interesting blog, another great effort.Second, I like seeing you debate. You have a mind like a rapier, though perhaps a cruise missile is a better word to use.

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  38. Adam, I'm not sure there is much more that I can say.

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  40. Adam, 1935 and Churchill's stand on India is irrelevant to the point I'm making here. The Second World War destroyed the British Empire. I can't put it any simpler than that.

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  43. The Aryans migrated and mixed with the nordic and celtic races. Their ancesteral homeland is northern India to Iran . Aryan equates to blood of the Gods.They crossed the channel and bred intelligence into the native Britons.It is what it is.

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  45. the ancient peoples traveld a lot more than is commonly believed. This happened all over the world ,there is evidence of advanced civilizations that have been lost to history. Modern humans are a result of biological engineering by extra-terrestrial influence.

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  46. what a stupid movie i swear !! non of this is real about the jewish people, it's the biggest lie i have ever seen in my life !!!

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  47. Mind if I use it for a homework ? It's really rich in informations and useful !

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