World War II (1939-45)

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    Wim Wenders on Where the War in Europe Really Ended 80 Years Ago

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    Wim Wenders, the renowned German film director, is nearly 80 years old, as old as the peace in Europe that followed the capitulation of the Nazi regime.“From my childhood onward, I have lived 80 years in peace,” he says in a short film he has directed to commemorate the end of World War II. But now, with a war in Ukraine that he calls “a war against Europe,” Wenders says that the stakes have rarely been higher.“Eighty years after the liberation of our continent, we Europeans are realizing again that peace cannot be taken for granted,” he says in the film. “It is now up to us to take the keys to freedom into our own hands.”In an interview in his Berlin office, Wenders said that the decades of peace “defined my life,” as the war had defined the life of his parents. His father, an army surgeon, spent five years at the front and was the only one of his class who did not die there, Wenders said. “I had the privilege to be among the first generation of Germans who lived for 80 years in peace,” he said. “None of my ancestors had that privilege.”Europe and Germany are crammed with varied efforts to remember the end of the war this week, including somber memorial events at concentration camps like Dachau and Bergen-Belsen. But Wenders’ film is a rare personal and political testament from the man behind award-winning movies including “Paris, Texas,” “Wings of Desire” and “The American Friend.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      Monsters Plague Japan. But What Do They Mean?

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      How ancient history and modern calamities have cultivated a national obsession with menacing creatures.HIROSHIMAON A BLUSTERY afternoon last November, I stood on the esplanade of Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park listening to the solemn gong of the Peace Bell as English and American tourists rang it again and again. A traditional Japanese bell made of oxidized metal, it has a pendular log that strikes at the atomic symbol engraved on its side as if to banish that evil from the earth. A few feet away, a group of Japanese schoolboys stood laughing and gamboling, hanging on each other as schoolboys do everywhere. More

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      in Theater

      ‘Operation Mincemeat,’ a Very British Hit, Lands on Broadway

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      Now in previews, the musical comedy about an outrageous World War II spy mission is working to adjust to the particular sensibilities of its New York audience.Last year, the hit West End musical “Operation Mincemeat” embarked on a mischievous publicity campaign. “Are we too British for Broadway?” it asked, inviting Americans on its email list and via social media to fill out an online questionnaire about whether, for instance, they had trouble understanding British accents. (“No,” 90.2 percent of the respondents said.)After making its way across the ocean armed with high expectations and an Olivier Award for best new musical, the show, a screwball comedy about an unlikely World War II spy operation, will open March 20 at the Golden Theater on Broadway. Its lengthy preview period is giving it ample time to adjust to the particular sensibilities of a New York audience, unaccented or otherwise.Some of what the cast and crew have found has been surprising, said the director, Robert Hastie, who was so eager for early on-the-ground feedback that he strode onstage before the curtain rose at the first preview and boldly (or maybe recklessly) gave out his email address to the packed house.“This show has always grown and developed from what the audience has been kind enough to give back,” he told the crowd. “If you have any thoughts when you come away from tonight, we’d be really, really grateful.”The real Operation Mincemeat was a sleight-of-hand spy mission in 1943, in which the British dressed a dead body as a Royal Marines officer, outfitted it with fake invasion plans designed to hide the Allies’ real intentions and then dumped it into the sea to be discovered by the Nazis. Its musical version has had a charmed trajectory in London, opening in 2019 at the tiny New Diorama Theater before settling in at the Fortune Theater in the West End, where it’s still playing.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi Beliefs Seen in New Film

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      Recent access to Leni Riefenstahl’s estate has prompted new discussions in Germany about her politics and a reconsideration of her photographs of the Nuba people in Sudan.Two decades after her death, the German director Leni Riefenstahl occupies an uneasy place in film history. She directed two influential movies that are still studied for their aesthetic ambitions despite being propaganda for the Third Reich: “Triumph of the Will,” a visually striking film about the Nazi party’s 1934 rally in Nuremberg, and “Olympia,” about the 1936 Berlin Olympics.After World War II, she was declared a Nazi follower, after four denazification proceedings. Later, Riefenstahl tried to recast herself as an apolitical artist. New access to the estate of the director, who died in 2003 at 101, has prompted a debate in Germany about how to manage her political legacy — and about whether her postwar rehabilitation was based on false premises.Last week, “Riefenstahl,” a documentary by the filmmaker Andres Veiel that uses recordings and letters from the estate to argue she had willfully concealed her support for Nazism, was released in German cinemas. And at a symposium in Berlin last month, researchers presented the results of a yearslong project investigating the impact of Riefenstahl’s photography of the Nuba people in Sudan.In a video interview, Veiel said that renewed scrutiny of Riefenstahl was justified by findings in her estate, which was donated in 2018 to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin and comprises 700 boxes filled with film rolls, photographs and audio recordings, among other items.Riefenstahl welcoming Adolf Hitler in her villa in the Dahlem neighborhood of Berlin in 1937, in a contact sheet of photos taken by Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler’s official photographer.Bayerische Staatsbibliothek/BildarchivThe material “contradicts the basic perspective, her legend, that she had sold to the outside world,” he said. “Even in her old age, she believed in Nazi ideology.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How ‘Blitz’ Recreates War-Torn London

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      Steve McQueen’s latest film, set in 1940 during Germany’s bombardment of the British capital, draws extensively from contemporary photos, and was shot entirely outside London.In a London train station, a young Black child clutches a suitcase with both hands. Drowning in his coat, he wears a flat cap and a stoic expression, striding toward his future as an evacuee. The photograph, taken during the eight-month-long bombardment of British cities by German forces during World War II, was one of the images that inspired Steve McQueen’s new film “Blitz,” currently in select theaters.The boy, carrying his small suitcase as he evacuated London in 1940, inspired the character of George in “Blitz.”AlamyThe film is told from the perspective of George (Elliott Heffernan), a biracial 9-year-old who is evacuated from London to the countryside as bombs descend on his hometown. Mid-journey, he escapes the train, abandoning his suitcase and weaving his way back to his mother, Rita (Saoirse Ronan), in east London.Doing research for the film, McQueen and its production designer, Adam Stockhausen, were struck again and again by “the incongruity, and the heartbreak,” of images of life in London during the bombing, Stockhausen said in a recent interview. McQueen would see a photo of a woman sweeping out her ruined house or one of a man sitting in a chair and smoking a cigarette, the home around him reduced to rubble, and build a scene around it, Stockhausen added.The film’s production design is meticulous — Stockhausen previously collaborated with McQueen on “12 Years a Slave” and “Widows” — and seen through George’s eyes, 1940s London is a sprawling labyrinth. Depicting the sweep of the city was essential to the narrative, Stockhausen said, but shooting in London would have been too difficult and expensive, and the team wanted to avoid a C.G.I. set.Adam Stockhausen, left, the film’s production designer, and Steve McQueen, the director, working on set.via AppleWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      What It Means to Make Art About Nazis Now

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      And is the culture telling the right stories about them, at a time when it’s never felt more urgent?A MAN IN a tie and suspenders smokes a cigar thoughtfully, its ash end hot orange in an otherwise cool blue shot. Its fiery pock is the most lurid thing we see in Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest,” even though there’s a crematorium next door.“The Zone of Interest,” winner of the 2024 Academy Award for best international feature, imagines the domestic life of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife (Sandra Hüller), who for a time lived mere yards from the ovens built to burn the bodies of hundreds of Jews a day. The screenplay might have been ghostwritten by Hannah Arendt, so banal is its portrait of evil. Höss fishes with his children, worries about a promotion, enjoys his garden, conducts an affair. We see no victims, nor, other than that cigar, any flame: just a pretty, smoky glow from the furnaces at night.It’s not as if the movie’s intentions could be misread. Without depicting horror itself, Glazer, who is Jewish, wants to show how easily middle-class values like diligence and ambition were adapted by Nazis to horrible ends. But in avoiding what the cartoonist Art Spiegelman, in response to Roberto Benigni’s 1997 movie “Life Is Beautiful,” called Holokitsch — the sentimental exploitation of victims’ suffering to dredge up drama — “The Zone of Interest” approaches it anyway, only now from the other direction, drawing its aesthetic power from detachment instead of engagement.Is that better?Tear-jerking as they may have been, works like “Life Is Beautiful,” the 1979 mini-series “Holocaust” and Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” (1993) had no trouble plainly acknowledging the murder of six million, which “The Zone of Interest” does only obliquely. If, as the German philosopher Theodor Adorno asserted in 1951, it became “barbaric” to write poetry after Auschwitz, it also, for many, became barbaric not to. What else can artists do with atrocity but make art from it?At the same time, and especially in our time, they are faced with a paradox. The appalling resurgence of antisemitism has made it more important than ever to remind the world of the great crime against the Jews. Yet the names and symbols of Adolf Hitler’s regime — and of Hitler himself, the big rhetorical nesting doll that contains the rest — have been emptied of real meaning by years of overuse as sitcom punch lines (the Soup Nazi from “Seinfeld” nearly three decades ago) and zingers for politicians (Donald Trump called out Joe Biden’s “Gestapo administration” in May). To try to reinvest these ideas with awfulness is to risk aesthetic failure. Not to try is to risk the moral kind.Still, the “Sieg Heil” salutes, SS lightning bolts and swastikas keep coming, even if in most contexts their omnipresence has rendered them not just objectionable but trite. In political discourse, Nazi name-calling almost always diminishes the unique evil of the originals. The words themselves, like amulets, may even burnish the twisted self-respect of those who trade in them. JD Vance, who in 2016 wrote that Trump might be “America’s Hitler,” has had a convenient change of heart, but it’s not clear that Trump minded anyway. That he might just as easily have been called America’s Idi Amin or Joseph Stalin emphasizes the emptiness of the insult.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      The Holocaust’s Grandchildren Are Speaking Now

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      Toward the end of “A Real Pain,” a movie written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg coming to theaters on Nov. 1, two first cousins played by Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin approach the house in a Polish town where their recently deceased grandmother had lived before the Holocaust.Eisenberg’s character, David, the more reserved of the pair, proposes the two leave stones on the doorstep, riffing on the Jewish tradition of placing stones on graves.“She’s not buried here,” says Culkin’s cousin, Benji.“Yeah, I know, but it’s the last place she was in Poland,” says David. “It’s the last place any of us were.”The improvised remembrance, the interruption of self-awareness, the confused sense of duty — all are characteristic of how American descendants of the Holocaust’s victims two generations removed today commemorate an event that, nearly 80 years after it ended, can feel like something that still governs their lives, not to mention the lives of Jews and everyone else.This cohort is known as the third generation of Holocaust survivors, and “A Real Pain” is representative of their output. Which is to say: It is often not about the Holocaust at all. The cousins go together on an organized tour of Holocaust sites and memorials in Poland, but much of it — excepting a visit to the Majdanek concentration camp — is lighthearted. David and Benji grieve mainly not for the Holocaust but for their grandmother, who survived it. They struggle with their own problems, including the dissipation of their relationship. They question why they are even there.Jesse Eisenberg on the set of his new movie, “A Real Pain,” about the grandsons of a Holocaust survivor visiting Poland.Agata Grzybowska/Searchlight PicturesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Amnon Weinstein, Who Restored Violins From the Holocaust, Dies at 84

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      Many had been left behind by victims of the gas chambers. He let the instruments be heard again in melodic tributes through his organization, Violins of Hope.Amnon Weinstein, an Israeli luthier who restored violins belonging to Jews during the Holocaust so that musicians around the world could play them in hopeful, melodic tributes to those silenced in Nazi death camps, died on March 4 in Tel Aviv. He was 84.His death, at a hospital, was confirmed by his son Avshalom Weinstein.Mr. Weinstein was the founder of Violins of Hope, an organization that provides the violins he restored to orchestras for concerts and educational programs commemorating the Holocaust. The instruments have been played in dozens of cities worldwide, including Berlin, at an event marking the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp.“Violins of Hope, it’s like a huge forest of sounds,” he said in a 2016 PBS documentary. “Each sound is standing for a boy, a girl and men and women that will never talk again. But the violins, when they are played on, will speak for them.”There are more than 60 Holocaust-era violins in his collection.Some belonged to Jews who carried them in suitcases to concentration camps, and who were then forced to play them in orchestras as prisoners marched to the gas chambers. Others were played to pass the time in Jewish ghettos. One was tossed from a train to a railway worker by a man who knew his fate.“In the place where I now go, I don’t need a violin,” the man told the worker, in Mr. Weinstein’s telling. “Here, take my violin so it may live.”Mr. Weinstein in his Tel Aviv workshop. He himself was the son of a violin repairman.Menahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      David Seidler, Oscar-Winning Writer of ‘The King’s Speech,’ Dies at 86

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      He drew on his own painful experiences with a stutter in depicting King George VI’s struggles to overcome his impediment and rally Britain in World War II.David Seidler, a screenwriter whose Oscar-winning script for “The King’s Speech” — about King George VI conquering a stutter to rally Britain at the outset of World War II — drew on his own painful experience with a childhood stammer, died on Saturday on a fly-fishing trip in New Zealand. He was 86 and lived in Santa Fe, N.M.His manager, Jeff Aghassi, disclosed the death in a statement but did not cite a cause. “David was in the place he loved most in the world — New Zealand — doing what gave him the greatest peace, which was fly-fishing,” Mr. Aghassi said. “If given the chance, it is exactly as he would have scripted it.”On winning the Academy Award for best original screenplay for “The King’s Speech” (2010), Mr. Seidler said from the Hollywood stage that he was accepting on behalf of all stutterers. “We have a voice; we have been heard,’’ he said.The movie, a historical drama in the form of a buddy picture about an afflicted future monarch (Colin Firth) and his talented but unlicensed speech therapist (Geoffrey Rush), was a commercial and critical success. It also won Oscars for best picture, best director (Tom Hooper) and best actor (Mr. Firth).Colin Firth in the 2010 film “The King’s Speech.” Mr. Seidler’s script centered on George VI’s struggle to overcome his stutter as he prepared to speak to his beleaguered nation during wartime.Laurie Sparham/The Weinstein CompanyMr. Seidler, who was born in England but emigrated with his family to the United States as a child during World War II, spent much of his career writing little-noticed television projects, including soap operas, a biopic of the Partridge Family singers and the TV movie “Onassis: The Richest Man in the World” (1988), written with a longtime co-writer, Jacqueline Feather. That same year, he broke onto the big screen as a co-writer (with Arnold Schulman) of “Tucker: The Man and His Dream,” about the automobile inventor Preston Tucker, directed by Francis Ford Coppola.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More