Wednesday, 27 November 2024
Vignette 4: Twenty-five words
Monday, 25 November 2024
Vignette 3: Twenty-five words
Mayfair. 1924. Midnight. Party games.
‘Barefoot challenge! Cherchez votre femme!’
Screened by bedsheet, their women display bare feet.
Host mistakes feet of mistress for wife’s.
La Vénus d’Arles. (Louvre museum, Paris.) |
See also Vignette 1
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2024/08/vignette-1-twenty-five-words.html
See also Vignette 2
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2024/08/vignette-2-twenty-five-words.html
See also Vignette4
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2024/11/vignette-4-twenty-five-words.html
Monday, 18 November 2024
Deposition of a Rebel from the Cross
Since, in each case of my lantern slides this evening, the image is a species of ideological propaganda let us compare and contrast the exhibits for intended (or possibly unintended) effect.
Exhibit 1: What do we see? The anti-englische propaganda is reproduced here from Sozialismus gegen Plutokratie ([National] Socialism vs. Plutocracy, 1940) a product of the ministry of Dr Goebbels, Reichsminister für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda, who in his youth had considered the Catholic priesthood. Does it not resemble The Deposition of Christ from the Cross? (See Exhibit 2.)
Exhibit 1 A demonstrator is removed. |
We cannot escape the concordances that link the imagery with the conventions of devotional art that depict the Thirteenth Station of the Cross as the stark, unconscionable indignity of a man reduced to vermin to be rubbed out as Enemy of the State.
Exhibit 2 A demonstrator is removed. |
The ‘Compare-and-contrast’ page-spread is a technique of Photojournalism stolen from the British Lilliput men’s magazine (founded 1937), which suggests a further level of propagandist subtlety, never mind the nostrums of Goebbels’s partner-in-crime, Reich Minister for Church Affairs, Hanns Kerrl, who in 1937 pronounced: ‘There has now risen a new authority as to what Christ and Christianity is. This new authority is Adolph Hitler.’
Exhibit 3 ‘The Cruel Ones.’ |
So . . . Wem gehört die Zukunft? Sozialismus gegen Plutokratie. (Who Owns the Future? [National] Socialism against Plutocracy.) Are the concordances I find imaginary or is there substance in my suspicions? You can see here how page 74 (Exhibit 1) and facing page 75 (Exhibit 3) are images staged for contrast, side-by-side. So let us compare the diptych of ‘The Darling Bobbies [British policemen] lead an unemployed demonstrator away’ with its facing text of calculatedly nudge-nudge knowingness,‘The “cruel” SS helps two girls who want to see the Führer.’ The cynicism of Goebbels has the bitter taste of wine mixed with gall.
Certainly, a captive rebel – pinioned to evoke crucified limbs and hauled off to his Golgotha (‘Place of the Skull’) – can be considered to possess a sort of commonality with the ‘Death’s Head’ unit on the opposite page (their Totenkopf insignia may be discerned above their peaked caps) if we accept the birth of another myth . . . the apotheosis of their fair-headed Mädchen as goddesses destined to be the Aryan race’s progenitresses to magnify the thousand-year Reich.
Any resemblances end, however, when we compare the duty of unarmed policemen to serve British democracy – bound in law courts by oaths sworn to Almighty God – with the sacred oath of the pistol-packing praetorian guard, the dagger-wielding SS, who swore by God to render unconditional obedience to one god-like man, Adolf Hitler, the self-proclaimed Führer of the German Reich.
The contradistinction of the two cultures, as perceived by Dr Goebbels, may be examined on the double-page spread of Exhibit 4 (pp. 18 and 19). Apparently, the combined might of the Eton and Harrow Officer Training Corps was no match for Hitler Youth on the march. (Winston Churchill was an Old Harrovian.)
Exhibit 4 |