From The Man I Married (dir. Irving Pichel, 1941). Carol Hoffman (Joan Bennett), an American vacationer in Berlin, asks a question. Kenneth Delane (Lloyd Nolan), an American foreign correspondent, answers:
“What I can’t get through my head is why these people listen to Hitler, when they know in the end it’ll only mean bloodshed and chaos.”Eerie viewing in 2026.
“Well, Schickie sold them a goldbrick, probably the greatest goldbrick that’s ever been sold any peoples in the whole history of time. He’s actually made them believe that the only culture in the world is the Nazi culture, that the only form of life worth living is the Nazi form. He’s a mathemagician. Fanatical egomaniac with the greatest appetite ever since on this earth since the days of Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun. He won't be satisfied until he makes an effort to wipe the democracies right off the map, and I don’t mean just England and France either. Yeah, I know, I know. A lot of us Americans laugh it off when they hear things like this, but not me. I’ve seen too much. I’ve seen the war machine he’s constructed. Nobody can tell me he has the slightest intention of letting that machine go to rust. In the long run, of course, he won’t win. But before he’s through, Schickie’s gonna spill an awful lot of blood.”
[Schickie: Schicklgruber, the original family name of Hitler’s father Alois. Goldbrick : “a confidence game in which the victim buys a ’gold’ (actually gold-painted lead) brick.” Mathemagician : a portmanteau that suggests a mastermind and trickster.]
I was just noticing that I can't recall anyone comparing Hitler to the current occupant, building-wise. I remember Adolph had a big tabletop model of all the new buildings and monuments that Berlin would have some time after the war. He often examined it with the only competent officer of his administration, Albert Speer.
ReplyDeleteThe current administration has zero competent people.
It was either history professor Sarah Paine or Heather Cox Richardson who pointed out on Youtube that dictators surround themselves with people who could never hold high office on their own.
It’s an apt comparison. I think it might have been HCR who recently pointed out the despot penchant for monuments.
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