Tag: the Allies

2,014 words

Erik Kirschbaum
Burning Beethoven: The Eradication of German Culture in the United States during World War I
New York: Berlinica Publishing, 2014

Much ink has been spilled over the travails faced by non-white minorities in the United States, but the persecution of German-Americans during the First World War has received scant attention. The few scholars who do address this forgotten chapter in American history, such as Erik Kirschbaum in Burning Beethoven, frame it as a morality tale about the evils of “xenophobia” and cast WASP Americans as the villains. (more…)

3,266 words

I first saw Decision Before Dawn on TV in the mid-sixties on Saturday Night at the Movies, seemingly banal filler that offered a surprisingly good row of early fifties movies such as The Big Carnival (previously reviewed by me), The Desert Fox, and others that were gritty, blunt, and full of Cinéma vérité. This one always stuck with me, and I recently saw it again on YouTube.

What sticks? The realistic setting of this 1951 film in a battered Germany during the Second World War holding off the inevitable, and the strong performance of Oskar Werner as Corporal Mauer, a POW who is convinced by the Americans to go back into Germany on a mission that could supposedly end the war (don’t they all?). (more…)