From Pressure Point (dir. Hubert Cornfield, 1962), now streaming in the Criterion Channel feature Hollywood Crack-Up: The Decade American Cinema Lost Its Mind. It’s 1942. Sidney Poitier is a prison psychiatrist, unnamed, treating a prisoner, also unnamed (Bobby Darin), a member of the German American Bund, imprisoned for sedition:
“At that point I knew that my primary concern was not with the welfare of my patient but with the question of whether he was making any sense, and how many people there were in this world to whom he would make sense. For although psychopaths are a small minority, it seems significant that whenever militant and organized hate exists, a psychopath is the leader. And if, for instance, one hundred disgruntled and frustrated individuals fall in line behind one psychopath, then, in essence, we are concerned with the actions of one hundred and one psychopaths.”Highly recommended viewing in 2024.
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Somewhat to the side…
There’s a connection to the spelling of the word “bundt” (the pan, developed in Minnesota:
“Savvy to the anti-semitic beliefs prevalent at the time following World War II, Dalquist named his new pan, “Bundt”, using Bund from the original recipe and adding a “t” on the end to differentiate from the Nazi German American Bund (“bund” means group or gathering in German).
https://www.joyinminnesota.com
Minnesota's Bundt Cake History”
Could this be a folkloric explanation? The Wikipedia article for Bundt cake says that the extra letter was a matter of getting a copyright, circa 1950.
Ah! Librarian FAIL, here!
I had heard the story—and then found corroborating “proof” on the internet.
Whoops.
Found this on WashPost:
“ One day in about 1949, Dalquist, now 78, recalls, a trio of "very nice ladies" from the local Hadassah chapter of Minneapolis approached him. They described a handmade ceramic baking mold that the chapter's president had inherited from her European grandmother. It was used, they said, to make Bundkuchens, party or "gathering" cakes, and was round and scrolled and, like several other traditional European baking pans, had a tube running up the center of the mold the better to bake big, dense cakes. Could he possibly make them such a thing in metal?”
Still a nice story, but not the same.
And yes, it goes on to say he added the “t” for copyright.
Quote From
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/food/1997/06/11/the-birth-of-the-bundt-a-pan-with-a-past/e9c6da7c-c3a7-4328-9bd8-b753a4ddd2ba/
Aha — it seems to have been a way to avoid the Bund association and to get a copyright:
https://www.mnopedia.org/thing/bundt-pan
Oh, wow—it’s BOTH! I like that.
Thanks!
Now I want a Bundt cake too 😆❤️
I would never have guessed that there’s so much history written into that word, or cake.
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