Hello to everyone who has been following this blog for many years - I'm still blogging, I'm just moving over to https://www.claireheffer.com/blog - please continue to follow and let me take this opportunity to thank everyone who has been kind enough to visit over the years. May the lists continue...
Showing posts with label hitler. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hitler. Show all posts

Sunday, 14 February 2016



FILM 1472: THE BOOK THIEF 

TRIVIA: One of the books that Liesel read to Max when he was sick is actually the book The Book Thief itself, containing the sentence: "what came to her then was the dustiness of the floor, the feeling that her clothes were more next to her than on her, and the sudden realisation that this would all be for nothing".

When first arriving at the school, a large poster with many faces can be seen. This is a replica of an accurate period piece, a poster depicting the "ideal" Aryan phenotypes according to the region. Painted by two artists with racial obsession, these posters were placed in every school, and students are forced to memorize them.

The Gravedigger's Handbook, The Dog Named Faust, The Lighthouse, The Shoulder Shrug, The Whistler, The Mud Men, The Standover Man, The Dream Carrier, A Song in the Dark, Under the Cherry Tree, The Tenth Lieutenant, The Last Human Stranger and The Rules of Tommy Hoffman were books Liesel got her hands on in the novel, but they were not real books; Markus Zusak made them up because he liked the sound of the titles and each one referred to problems that Hitler's oppressive tactics caused.



Saturday, 23 August 2014



FILM 1199: THE GREAT DICTATOR

TRIVIA: Adolf Hitler banned the film in Germany and in all countries occupied by the Nazis. Curiosity got the best of him, and he had a print brought in through Portugal. History records that he screened it twice, in private, but history did not record his reaction to the film. Charles Chaplin said, "I'd give anything to know what he thought of it." For political reasons in Germany, the ban stayed after the end of WWII until 1958.

Adolf Hitler considered Charles Chaplin to be one of the greatest actors he had ever seen, while Hitler assumed that Chaplin was a Jew.

Charles Chaplin said that had he known the true extent of Nazi atrocities, he "could not have made fun of their homicidal insanity".
Although this movie was banned in all occupied countries by the Nazis, it was screened once to a German audience. In the occupied Balkans, members of a resistance group switched the reels in a military cinema and replaced a comedic opera with a copy of this film, which they had smuggled in from Greece. So a group of German soldiers enjoyed a screening of this film until they realized what it was. Some left the cinema and some were reported to have fired shots at the screen.


Released 13 years after the end of the silent era, this was Charles Chaplin's first all-talking, all-sound film.