Word: nazis
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Grass' novel is a perrennial best-seller in Germany, a volume of modern myths that has almost Biblical significance for those that lived through The War and knew Nazi Germany; and for the younger generation, for whom the swastika and the "heil" are the lost trapping of a confusing, all too-recent past. Even Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's seven-hour nightmare, Our Hitler, with its pounding Wagner and Beethoven, acknowledges Oskar's drum. It beats in time to the modern German effort to recreate Hegel's sense of history, Goethe's sense of self, Nietzche's sense of strength...
...even when he drops the subjective/objective technique, Schlondorff can be playfully brilliant. Following a sepia-toned clip of a Nazi rally comes a sequence in which Oskar's drumming turns the propaganda gathering into a waltzing Danube of Hitler Youth. As Oskar drums, the Nazi band picks up his waltz, a goose-stepping Nazi commandant adds a back-skip to his gait and a crowd of arms extended in "Seig Heils" begins to sway to the music. Aryan youths pair off to dance, leaving the SS confused and helpless...
...examine the world of adults with studied innocence. His voice has a contemptible condescending tone that nonetheless seduces us. His high-pitched screams that break glass--art as a destructive protest--ring with the desperate tremor of a genius creating a master-piece. Bennent is terrifying in a Nazi uniform yet his cherubic smile is almost Christ-like in its beneficence. His Aryan forcefulness and unceasing intensity combine with a demonic sensuality that brings to mind images of a tiny Adolph Hitler...
Schlondorff feels he must play with Grass' symbols and he has included many of them: Oskar's red and white drums, the smashed glass, the eels, the death of Oskar's mother by over-consumption of fish, Oskar's valiant attempts at sex, cemetaries, the death-dealing Nazi-party pin. Yet unlike Grass' novel, Schlondorff's film refuses to tie these ugly images together; time has strange dimensions and the laudably meticulous attention to detail--violent and spectacular--leaves us empty. The Tin Drum is full of disturbing moments: Oskar is forced to drink a stone and urine soup; eels...
...requiring enforcement of the most rigorous standards for the preparation of kosher food; in New York City. Born in what is now the Soviet Ukraine, Grunwald was grand rabbi of Tzehlem, a town in northern Austria, when in 1938 he led his congregation to the U.S. to escape Nazi persecution; later he aided the postwar resettlement of many Hasidic Jews, whose men wear broad-brimmed black hats, grow their sideburns into long curls and never shave, heeding the biblical injunction: "Ye shall not round the corners of your heads, neither shall thou mar the corners of thy beard...