Poor Germany- they were so obnoxious in the 20th century that I think we get to make fun of them for all of the 21st century.

Any references to 'Gerry' were strictly personal, of course.

<Dom> oh good, at least we agree on that...

Thanks to your previous pun, I'm able to break your anonymity with impunity. Did you get the one line email I sent you from my new account?

Let me know, because possibly it landed in your "spam" folder, where it probably belonged in the first place.

Tough to round up any sympathy for Germany, or Poland, for that matter, after viewing <Shoah>.

It took me over two weeks to watch it all, because it's so horrifying I could only take it in 20 minute chunks.

I can't imagine sitting in a theatre for five hours watching it all in one go.

I should think this film may rightly claim to be the most important film ever made- at least in terms of "summing up" the most appalling, and perhaps most instructive, event of the 20th century.

Or maybe of all history, due to the magnitude.

For me, the most horrifying moment of all was when the German woman informed <Lanzmann> about Polish-Jewish relations before the war:

The three part <Polish Chess History> is pretty much ready to release, although I keep tinkering with it for some reason.

Can you think of a snazzier title I could use?

But *somebody* always knows these things. And if they don't, *everyone else* does ... I'm surprised it's lasted.

However, history determines such things in some sense.

In Germany there is also a kind of well-deserved "secondary guilt" to do with their white washing of the Holocaust in the first decade or so after the war.

This would be in terms of their school curricula, which have since been revised to acknowledge the full story.

And that's one better than the school curricula in Japan, which to this day are whitewashed.

In addition, after centuries of genocidal policy against Korea, Japan has yet to issue any sort of official "apology" or even simple acknowelgement of what they did.

I'm also not without sympathy for Germans- the German "New Cinema" took the country to task when more official state apparatuses would not.

The films of <Schlondorf, Syberberg, Herzog, Wenders, Fassbinder, and Von Trotta> wrested the beauty, and terror, of the German experience of modern history.

Arguably one of the most powerful films about the Holocaust never actually mentions the Holocaust- <The Anxiety of the Goal Keeper on Facing the Penalty Kick>.

jessicafischerqueen@yahoo.com

If it's not in your inbox, check the spam box and then add me as a "semi-trusted" contact.

Innaresting guy, grew up in Shanghai and fought in the Six-day War. Sort of a cross between JG Ballard and Moshe Dayan.

I think the fear/catch-22 haunting many Germans is the notion that any form of 'pride' in German-ness -- even the artistic sublime -- leads somehow down the old road to Nazidom. They're afraid to have an ethnic identity, in case it turns atavistic -- which is actually a very good thing in some ways. It could point the way out of the morass of nationalism.

Of course, with much of the world either still tribal or quickly regressing to tribalism, getting past nations may not be a burning issue.

I once shocked a politically correct flatmate - the phrase hadn't been invented, he was just an old-style leftie with humane instincts -- by playing a Captain Beefheart song, 'Dachau Blues'.

He was horrified to hear lines like "Dachau blues, those poor poor Jews ... the world can't forget the misery, one mad man, six million ... down in Dachau blues".

The sentiments were fine. He thought it was wrong to have them in a 'pop' song.

Quite right, and sorry to hear of the passage of one of your most beloved people, the <Good Captain>.

How can it be "wrong" to have anything in a pop song?

It strikes me that the "pop song" is the perfect venue for INCREDIBLY SERIOUS topics because you are free to say anything you like.

After, you can say "Hey calm down- it's just a bleeding pop song."

Also, for the millionth time- if there hadn't been an England I should have liked one invented, for the sole reason that it produced pop songs dedicated to informing us of <The Politics of English Agrarian History>.

"And they make all their animal
Deeeeeeee
eeel eeeel eeel eeeeels"