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357: Babylon Berlin, Season 4

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Babylon Berlin, Season 4 (2024)

Uploaded 4 October 2024

After Netflix canceled the excellent German TV series Babylon Berlin, at the end of Season 3, I purchased a DVD of Season 4. In the meantime, it has actually become available on MHz Choice, but dubbed into English (as are the previous 3 seasons),
so I’m happy I can watch the DVD because I love hearing the Berlin dialect although Inspector Gereon Rath’s Cologne accent is barely audible, except for a few soft Gs. The series is very loosely based on three best-selling Gereon Rath detective novels by Volker Kutscher, but while the novels are relatively realistic crime dramas, the TV series sensationalizes the novels into an expansive phantasmagoria of Weimer Republic tropes about popular culture and politics.

For example, the central character of Charlotte Ritter, Rath’s love interest, is in the novels first a secretary with the police, then returns to college to study law, while helping Gereon solve cases; in the TV series “Lotte” starts out as a part-time prostitute and It girl, who joins the police force as an assistant, gets kicked off for helping her juvenile delinquent sister to escape custody but is finally asked to return (Ep. 12, S. 4) after almost single-handedly rounding up a criminal conspiracy of vigilantes. Gereon, on the other hand, has in the novels a brother in America and suffers under the shadow of his father who is a police commissioner in Cologne, and his accidental killing of a suspect, but he is neither haunted by his World War I experience and his supposedly dead brother in the trenches who morphs into Dr. Schmidt (or does he?), nor is he a cocaine addict, as in the tv-series. Finally, as a pastiche of popular culture and historical politics, Babylon Berlin freely mixes genres: political thrillers, detective/gangster films, sci-fi, medical films, musicals, and even avant-garde cinema.

Referencing 1920s avant-garde film techniques, the title sequence is itself a post-modern montage of German Expressionism, kaleidoscope images, and flashing views from history, seemingly culled from newsreels, but actually recreating the feel of the late Weimar Republic through digital technology. Each episode begins with an iris, a silent film anachronism that calls attention to its own artifice. With the story of Toni Ritter, Lotte’s sister, the film takes us into the slums of Berlin, recalling late Weimar proletarian films, like Mother Krausens Trip to Heaven (1929). Episode 11 includes a flashback that employs Lotte Reininger’s cut paper silhouette animation in The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), a signature film of the Weimar film avant-garde, to reveal the origin of the “Blue Rothschild” diamond. All episodes end with the credits scrolling over a clever computer-generated recreation of Walter Ruttmann’s Opus 1 (1921), the director’s first abstract animation.

**Meret Becker as Esther Kasabian, aka Esther Korda**

Throughout the series, choreographed musical numbers are interpolated for both spectacle and entertainment; Season 4 begins with a New Year’s Eve Party given by the psychopathic industrialist Nyssen, a reference to steel magnet Fritz Thyssen who was incarcerated in an insane asylum by the Nazis, but was not insane. Two episodes show Charlotte participating in a dance marathon, a phenomenon which was hugely popular in America in the 1930s, but unknown in Weimar; numerous other musical numbers also take place at the “Moka Efti” nightclub, shot in the former Delphi Cinema in Berlin. Later, Esther Korda, a gangster’s wife, auditions at a smaller club, after the Moka Efti is closed, where she served as star attraction and proprietress.

***Mungo, der Schlanentöter*** **(1927)**

Dr. Schmidt’s numerous experiments, executed on Rath and others, reference Dr. Mabuse and the UFA’s first medical films, as well as Fritz Lang’s sci-fi epics, like Metropolis. In Episode 1, Schmidt immerses Rath in clear fluids, hooking him up to electrodes, like some Dr. Frankenstein monster; later Schmidt has a small weasel attack a wolf four times its size and kills it after it has been shot full of amphetamines. He next tries the same “speed” experiment on the diminutive Rath, who proceeds to beat a much larger man to a pulp, both sequences referencing Mungo, der Schlanentöter/Killing the Killer (1927), in which a mongoose kills a deadly cobra. One of the last images of the Season is of a courtyard full of war veterans who have been transformed into an army of grey-clad automatons, ready to conquer the world, another Metropolis reference.

**Mark Ivanir as Abraham Gold, aka Goldstein**

While Kutscher’s third novel, Goldstein, has a Jewish-American gangster possibly inciting a gang war in Berlin though actually only trying to help his terminally ill uncle, Season 4’s Goldstein is trying to recover the blue diamond stolen from his orthodox grandfather by the Nyssen family. Like classic American gangster films, the series features a St. Valentine’s Day-like massacre with Tommy guns, incited by the rivalry between two gangster bosses who also happen to be amorous rivals for the affection of Esther Korda. Rath is partially responsible for the massacre because he had attempted to negotiate a peace treaty between rival gangs at police headquarters. While crooked cops, standard in any American gangster film, also make an appearance here, they are part of a vigilante conspiracy, while lining their own pockets. Finally, these German crime families, as well as Alfred Nyssen dress like American gangsters. Boxing, a popular sport in Weimar, like indoor bicycle races, is also controlled by gangsters.

**Lars Eidinger** **as Alfred Nyssen**, **Hannah Herzsprung as Helga Rath, Holger Handtke as Wegener**

While previous seasons had exposed a Reichswehr conspiracy to undermine the Republic through secret rearmament, Weimar is threatened here by a secret vigilante organization, “the White Hand,” made up of reactionary judges, prosecutors, and police. The White Hand is pure fiction in this political thriller but the judiciary in Germany indeed contributed mightily to the end of the Republic by consistently coddling right-wing assassins, including Hitler, while mercilessly hounding perceived leftists. Shockingly, we see Gereon Rath in a Nazi S.A. uniform – the German police was riddled with Nazis, despite legal prohibitions – but learn he is working undercover to ignite a gang war between the rival Stennes and Hellldorf S.A. factions of the Nazi Party. Indeed, a revolt of the Berlin S.A. against Hitler by Walter Stennes had in fact occurred in August 1930 and again in March 1931. Nyssen who supports the Nazis, as did Thyssen, Krupp, and many other German industrialists, is developing an offensive missile as a weapon of mass destruction, something that would not actually occur until the 1940s with the V-2 rockets, although Werner von Braun’s experiments had begun in 1930 when he was a doctoral student.

**Saskia Rosendahl as Malu Seegs, Benno Fuermann as Col. Gottfried Wendt**

German producer/director Tom Tykwer has announced a final and fifth season of Babylon Berlin, which should please fans of this engaging potpourri of Weimar history and cinema.

356 Bonn Silent Film Fest

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Bonn Silent Film Festival

Uploaded 20 September 2024

**Johannes Meyer, Astrid Holm in *Master of the House* (1925, Carl Theodor Dreyer)**

The 40^th iteration of the Bonn International Silent Film Festival took place from 8 – 18 August 2024. Over eleven Summer evenings, the open-air festival screened twenty-two silent features and shorts from eleven countries, always accompanied by live musical performances. As in the past few years, the festival under the curatorship of Eva Hielscher and Oliver Hanley is also streaming about half the program, which has greatly increased the reach and fame of the festival. Ten films were available for 48 hours online, beginning 10 August.

Streaming began with Du skal ære din hustru/Master of the House (1925), Carl Theodore Dreyer’s feminist Kammerspiel screened in an excellent print/file with a beautiful score by Sabrina Zimmermann and Mark Pogolski. Strangely, Bonn’s program notes downplay the film’s status in the Dreyer oeuvre, saying it “cannot be considered a great film,” even though many film historians now rank it among Dreyer’s silent masterpieces. Confined almost exclusively to a small lower middle class flat, the film portrays an authoritarian pater familias who treats his wife and children as personal slaves. With the help of an old nanny, wonderfully played by Mathilde Nielsen, the husband is knocked off his high horse, while the wife escapes to a much-needed rest in the countryside. Dreyer’s actors walk a fine line between comedy and melodrama, while George Schnéevoigt’s documentary camera roves through the flat, capturing minute details and the mise en scene tracks the shifting power relations within the family. Like La Passion de Jeanne d”Arc and later Dreyer films, Master of the House exploits the formal device of confined spaces to invariably entrap its subject.

**Akiko Chihaya,** **Junosuke Bando in *Crossways* (1928)**

Teinosuke Kinugasa, best known for his Oscar-winning color film, Gate of Hell (1953), directed Jûjiro/Crossways (1928), two years after his expressionist masterpiece, A Page of Madness (1926). Like the latter film, Kinugusa employs expressionist techniques and a complete catalog of cinematic tricks to portray the fever dream-like madness of Yoshiwara, the red-light district of ancient Tokyo, where a brother and sister attempt to survive in squalor. The brother falls prey to a l’amour fou with the district’s most famous courtesan, is temporarily blinded by a rival, forcing his sister into prostitution to raise money for his recovery, all for naught. Kinugasa’s sympathies lie with his poor protagonists, surrounded by the false glitter of Yoshiwara’s non-stop carnival. Kinugusa stages the red-light district as just another kind of insane asylum, with the queen of the prostitutes and her minions laughing hysterically through much of the film.

**Suzanne Merville in** *Organist of St. Vitus (1929)*

I had previously seen the Czech film, The Organist at St. Vitus Cathedral (1929) at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, but it was worth a second look. Both film noir and atmospheric melodrama, shot mostly in real locations around Prague’s Hradčany Castle, its magnificent Cathedral, and Alchemist’s Alley. The film concerns an aging organist and a nun who leaves the order, brought together by her father’s suicide in the organist’s tiny home, complicated by a neighbor’s blackmail scheme. Martin Frič privileges spaces with floor and ceiling visible, i.e. realism, yet mixes in expressionistic imagery to communicate emotional content, and despite heading towards tragedy, offers an over-determined American style happy ending that almost seems parody in its excess.

**Seeta Devi, Himansu Rai in *Die Leuchte Asiens* (1925, Franz Osten)**

In 1924 the Bavarian film director, Franz Osten, the brother of Emelka Studios founder Peter Ostermeyer, traveled to India to shoot The Light of Asia (1925), a filmed biography of the founder of Buddhism, co-financed by the Indian actor Himansu Rai, who also played the starring role. Shot exclusively on location in India, the film presents both an extended tourist view of India and its ancient monuments, as well as the story of Siddhartha, based on the epic poem by Edwin Arnold (1879) and Hermann Hesse’s eponymous novella, published in Germany in 1925. The first two-thirds of the narrative illustrate the Buddha’s growing disenchantment with the material world (he is a prince), while in the final third, we see his wife Gopa (Seeta Devi) search for him, as he casts off all signs of wealth to become a beggar and teacher. Apart from the sumptuous images, the film’s amazing score of Indian music by Willy Schwarz and Riccardo Castagnola made the film an unforgettable experience.

**Werner Kraus, Lya de Puti in *Eifersucht* (1925)**

**Schüfftan process** **shot in *Eifersucht* (1925, Karl Grune)**

Karl Grune’s Eifersucht/Jealousy (1925) moves from the lower middle-class expressionist milieu of Grune’s Die Strasse (1925) to the drawing rooms of the wealthy, where a marriage (Werner Krauss, Lya de Putti) is sorely tested by bouts of jealousy. Except for a street lamp scene, and the husband’s subjective view of his wife dancing with a stranger in a crowded ballroom, expressionism has been replaced here by Neue Sachlichkeit, sumptuous décors and UFA-studio designed cityscapes that seem influenced by Lubitsch’s and DeMille’s social comedies, however, without the irony. Produced by Erich Pommer, Jealousy‘s privileged milieu is in keeping with Weimar’s economic recovery after the Dawes Plan and the end of inflation. The film’s happy end, despite a near murder, reflects briefly both New Realism’s and the German Republic’s optimism about the future.

The Swedish film, Thora van Deken (1920, John W. Brunius) begins seemingly with an inheritance swindle, when a corrupt lawyer and estate manager dupe a wealthy landowner to change his will on his death bed in their favor, but morphs then into a melodrama involving a widow’s perjury, when she claims falsely to have destroyed her husband’s last will, to secure her daughter’s inheritance. Pauline Brunius as the protective mother gives an amazingly nuanced performance, caught between her allegiance to her daughter and her sense of morality. Unfortunately, in trying to capture the expansive novel by Henrik Pontoppidan, the director inserts too many flashbacks, complicating the narrative flow. Nevertheless, the film reveals many of the atmospheric qualities of Seastom and Stiller.

The Portuguese Maria do mar (1930, José Leitão de Barros) is an avant-garde film from the political right, experimenting with film technology, down to the Vertovian climactic chase to save a child, but embodying conservative cultural values. It also freely mixes film genres. Part documentary about the hard life of fishermen, made a year after John Grierson’s Drifters, part ethnographic film in its documentation of village dances and funerals, part melodramatic Romeo and Juliet story with a little situation comedy to lighten things up, given that the central drama concerns a blood feud between two mothers, begun when a fisherman drowns and his wife blames the boat’s skipper. Utilizing amateur actors, the film’s performances are more than credible, visualizing the viciousness of the ancient village gossips, ending in two old women beating each other up on the street.

The international scope and aesthetic quality of Bonn’s silent film program is exceptional, as are the musical performances by such musical stars as Maude Nielsen, Stephen Horne, and Neil Brand.

***La femme et le pantin*** **(1929, Jacques de Baroncelli)**

355: Charles Puffy

Archival Spaces 355

Puffy’s Tragic End

Uploaded 6 September 2024

Whenever they needed a fat man, Károly Huszár at 290 lbs. was there. Starting his film career with Michael Curtiz in Hungary in 1913, the comedian moved to Germany in 1920, before becoming a star of short comedies for Universal in 1924, as well as a character actor in features. When sound arrived, he returned to German cinema, where he remained popular, at least until Joseph Goebbels declared him a sub-human, after which he was able to work a few more years in Austria and Hungary, before anti-Semitic laws made him unemployable there, too. After that, his traces seem to disappear. Was he murdered by Nazis, like so many Hungarian Jews? Two filmographic websites state he died in Tokyo, but are unconfirmed. It was not until I read the published letters of Paul Kohner (Ich bin ein unheilbarer Europär. Briefe aus dem Exil, edited by Heike Klapdor) that I learned the truth of Puffy’s tragic end.

*Pufi – How a Devout Husband from Pest Got Married* (1914, Aladár Fodor)

Károly Hochstein was born in Budapest on 3 November 1884 into a Hungarian-Jewish family. As a teenager, he was a champion swimmer, then joined the Actors’ Training School of the National Actors’ Association the year it was founded (1903), before making his theatrical debut in 1905. Gaining a significant amount of weight, Huszár created the character of Pufi, which means Fatty in Hungarian, after joining Endre Nagy’s Budapest cabaret in 1910. By 1914, he was starring in slapstick comedies in his Pufi guise in Pufi – How a Devout Husband from Pest Got Married (1914) and Pufi Buys Shoes (1917), then played roles in two Hungarian features under Michael Curtiz, before the failed Hungarian revolution sent him to Germany. In 1921 alone, Karl Huszár played in no less than fifteen films as a supporting player, including George Jacoby’s six-part adventure film, The Man Without a Name and Fritz Lang’s Destiny (as the Emperor of China), followed in 1922 by Lang’s Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler.

In 1924 Carl Laemmle hired him on one of his European junkets, starring him in no less than fifty Bluebird comedies as Charles Puffy, a slapstick successor to the disgraced Rosco “Fatty’ Arbuckle. Puffy also shined in character parts in such ambitious films as Benjamin Christensen’s Mockery (1927), Alexander Korda’s The Private Life of Helen of Troy (1927), and Paul Leni’s The Man Who Laughs (1928), before the coming of sound ended his American career. By then he had made millions, allowing to purchase his country estate, Nógrádveröce, on the Danube north of Budapest. His accent-free German made him a favorite character actor at UFA in Babelsberg so he commuted from his estate to Berlin and Vienna for film shoots.

**Curt Gerron, Hans Albers, Huszar-Puffy in *The Blue Angel* (1930, Josef von Sternberg)**

**Huszar-Puffy in *Rakoczy-Marsch* (1933, Steve Sekely)**

Now appearing under the name Karl Huszar-Puffy, the actor played an innkeeper in The Blue Angel (1930), a pesky suitor in My Cousin from Warsaw (1931), a wrestling referee in Five from a Jazz Band (1932), and an army veterinarian in Rokoczy-March (1933), among many other supporting roles. The last named film was produced in German in Budapest, where Puffy was able to appear subsequently in seven more films, including several dual language versions, like 4 ½ Musketeers (1935) and Little Mother (1935) before Hungarian anti-Semitic laws blacklisted him in 1938.

As early as April 1933 Puffy had written to his friend Paul Kohner, then a producer at Universal, that the Nazis were “idiots and bandits.” By March 1938 with no work in sight and Austria now nazified, Huszar wrote to Kohner for help to get to America, since Kohner was now an independent agent representing the European community in Hollywood. Puffy wrote he had invitations from Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, and others, but an expired American reentry visa, no quota number, and no ability to take his money out of the country and that he couldn’t live as a beggar abroad. Kohner and Huszar exchanged several more letters in 1938, Puffy worrying he couldn’t sell his estate, Kohner arguing to just leave it all behind and save his life. In 1939, Kohner tries repeatedly to secure an affidavit for Puffy, writing to Joseph Schenk at Fox, Jack Warner, L.B. Mayer, and Ernst Laemmle, before Warner agreed to an affidavit in June and a $ 100 a week contract in September 1940. Kohner suggests traveling by train across Russia, paying for his ticket with Hungarian Forints, then taking a ship from Vladivostok using Dollars. However, Huszar states in a letter on 14 September that he can’t leave yet because his affairs are not in order, and the journey via Vladivostok is too risky, especially if he is interned by the Soviets.

**Karl Huszar as one of Mabuse’s henchmen in *Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler* (1922, Fritz Lang)**

Finally, on 11 June 1941, Kohner wires $600 to a Japanese steamship company for Huszar and his wife’s ship’s passage and a “Bon voyage” telegram to the actor. However, the Wehrmacht invades the Soviet Union on 22 June, making Puffy an enemy alien – Hungary by then an ally of Nazi Germany -, so that he and his wife are arrested in early July and disappear without a trace. Kohner frantically writes letters to find him, to friends in Hollywood, to the State Department, etc. but four years later he is still searching when he writes a letter to Sergei Eisenstein on 15 June 1945. Not until 1947 does Kohner learn of Puffy’s fate from an Austrian doctor who survived the Gulag.

**Huszar-Puffy in *Meine Cousine aus Warschau* (1931, Carl Boese)**

*Fuenf von der Jazzband* (1932, Erich Engel)

According to Richard Winter’s letter to Kohner on 28 May 1947, Charles Puffy and his wife were arrested in Vladivostok boarding a ship to freedom, and transported to a Soviet internment camp in Novosibirsk. There, Dr. Winter treated Puffy who had rapidly lost weight, causing heart problems and sleeplessness. In June 1942 the whole camp was transferred to Camp Spassk, near Karaganda, Kazakhstan, where Charles spent much time in hospital, before dying of dysentery in June 1943. By then, the actor who had made a career being a funny fat man was nothing more than skin and bones.

**Charles Puffy in *The Private Life of Helen of Troy* (1927, Alexander Korda)**

354 Prelude to War

Archival Spaces 354

Prelude to World War II: Documentaries

Uploaded 23 August 2024

**Czech demonstrators in Prague after the Munich Agreement in *Crisis* (1939)**

In the Summer of 1938 my dad, Jerome V. Horak, was mobilized into the Czechoslovak Army and received rudimentary basic training when it looked like an invasion by Nazi Germany was imminent. Less than a month later, he was sent home, after Neville “Peace in Our Time” Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, stabbed the Czechs in the back by caving into Adolf Hitler’s demands to annex the so-called Sudentenland, border areas in Czechoslovakia with large German-speaking populations, despite a defensive alliance with the Czechs. On 1 October 1938, the Wehrmacht marched in without a single shot fired, the Central European nation losing its mountainous natural border, making any resistance futile. Somehow, my dad managed to finish his matura, only to be arrested in his freshman year at Prague’s Technical University by the Gestapo. Obviously, I had to think about my dad watching a new Blu-ray release by Flicker Alley, “Against the Storm,” which features two films, Crisis: A Film of “The Nazi Way” (1939) and Lights Out in Europe (1940) that together document the political developments in Czechoslovakia and Poland/England as they nervously prepared (or didn’t) for a war against German Fascism.

Herbert Kline, an American journalist affiliated with the Communist Party, had gone to Spain to fight in the Spanish Civil War for the Republican side, where he collaborated on two documentaries, Heart of Spain (1937) and Return to Life (1938). After Hitler’s so-called “Anschluß” of Austria in March 1938, which left tiny Czechoslovakia almost completely surrounded by the Third Reich, an invasion seemed imminent. Kline and his wife Rosa Harvan traveled to Prague, where they joined forces with Alexander Hackenschmied and Hans Burger to capture the crisis mood in that fateful Summer. of ’38. All three would share writing and directing credits while Hackenschmied, who had produced avant-garde and advertising films in Prague and would later shorten his name in America to Hammid, marrying Maya Deren, also acted as cinematographer, and co-editor. Burger, a German-speaking Czech Jew, also functioned as a producer, before emigrating to America, then returned to Germany with the U.S. Army to co-direct with Billy Wilder, the first film shot in a concentration camp, Death Mills (1945).

**Map of German minorities in *Crisis* (1939)**

Shortly after the premiere of Crisis on 11 March 1939 in New York, days before the Nazis occupied what remained of the Czechoslovak Republic, Kline and Hammid traveled to Poland and Great Britain, where they filmed the prelude and aftermath of Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939. That film, Lights Out in Europe, premiered in New York on 13 April 1940. Both films were distributed by art house specialists Arthur L. Mayer and Joseph Burstyn, and greeted with ecstatic reviews, according to Thomas Doherty, the author of the accompanying booklet, but ironically, the left-wing press was less keen, accusing the filmmakers of giving too much screen time to the Nazis. Indeed, the two films, which Kline considered to be two parts of the same film, convey a sense of unease, apprehension, and danger, which were hardly the stuff of uplifting Communist agitprop.

**Sudenten Germans Salute in *Crisis* (1939)**

**Gas Mask fitting inn *Crisis* (1939)**

**Czech fortifications in *Crisis* (1939)**

The rhythm of Crisis is determined by the Nazis both within and outside Czechoslovakia, and the reactions of the Czech government and its domestic allies. Guided by Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, prominently displayed in the film’s second image, the followers of Konrad Heinlein’s Sudenten Party are portrayed as vicious agitators and propagandists who sew discontent among Czech German-speaking populations, openly advocating for Hitler, protected by the Czech Republic’s democratic freedoms they sought to undermine. The democratically-minded Czechs are seen as resilient fighters, willing to join with their French, British, and Russian allies to defeat Hitler, preparing for war during the May crisis, then mobilizing in August, psychologically crushed by their abandonment, especially by the French, with whom they shared a long tradition of cultural exchange.

**“Voskovec and Werich”** **explain the anti-Nazi alliance** in *Crisis* (1939)

***Werich and Voskovec*** **sing for anti-Nazi Youth in *Crisis* (1939)**

Organizations like the left-wing Solidarity advocate for peaceful co-existence between the Republic’s various ethnic minorities. Through the eyes of a young female student, Mirka, we see Czechs bringing food packages to poor Sudenten Germans, staging cultural events for anti-Nazi German refugees, and promoting peace. Jiři (George) Voskovec and Jan Werich, the extremely popular leftwing cabaretists are seen explaining the English-French-Russian alliance with Czechoslovakia as the safety pin holding it together, and singing for a children’s event. Both artists fled to America.

**Neville Chamberlain sucking up to Hitler in Crisis (1939)**

But all Czech efforts are for naught when Chamberlain negotiates with Hitler without the participation of the Czechs, forcing President Beneš to resign. Crisis ends with an uncertain almost elegiac note with the sanctioned occupation of the border regions and the title: “Remember: Peace and freedom and the right to live – they can only be possible in lands where men are determined that the swastika shall not be raised in triumph…”

**Kindertransport of Jewish children arrive in London in *Lights Out in Europe* (1940)**

**“We Want to Go Home to the Reich,” Danzig banner in *Lights Out in Europe* (1940)**

While Crisis focused on Czech resistance, Lights Out in Europe documents the failure on the part of the British and Polish governments to prepare seriously for war, choosing instead to nurture a false optimism that their people will remain out of harm’s way, even as Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) and boatloads of refugees warn Londoners of Nazi Germany’s intentions. Meanwhile, as in Czechoslovakia, Nazi Fifth Columnists destabilize the free state of Danzig, leading many Polish and German Jews to flee the city. Only after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 did Poland begin securing its borders, while a general mobilization was only ordered in August, Poland’s generals confident they could withstand German tanks with cavalry and horse-drawn armaments.

**Gas Masks in London drill in *Lights Out in Europe* (1q940)**

**Polish Cavalry preparing to confront German tanks in *Lights Out in Europe* (1940)**

Not surprisingly, the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 23 August is downplayed and the Soviet invasion of Poland from the East is not even mentioned, given Kline’s political sympathies. Similarly, the film ends shortly after the invasion of Poland, not with rousing cries for armed resistance, but with memories of the dead of World War I, as British soldiers return to the trenches of northern France: “Soldiers ask why war? Peace to end all war has never been tried.” With its focus on refugees, delayed social reforms, national paralysis, and WWI dead and wounded, the film is elegiac avant guerre.

**British newspaper headline in *Lights Out in Europe* (1940)**

**World War I dead on the fields of France in *Lights Out in Europe* (1940)**

For anyone interested in how German fascism divided and conquered its enemies, just as white nationalist Americans create divisions in our own democracy today, these two films should be required viewing. Beautifully restored, with audio commentaries by Thomas Doherty and Maria Elena de las Carreras, and other bonus materials, this Blu-ray set makes history palpable.