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PDF Engelen, Leen - Cinematic Representations of the Enemy in Belgian Silent Fiction Films Keywords: Fictional Fictional | Belgium Belgium | Germany
fictional and poetic writing of the Great War writers, including Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves. In Barnes’s and Barker’s narratives, the protagonists are obviously at variance with the collective and official memory embodied in war memorials. Meyer Jessica British Popular Culture and the First World War
explicitly antiwar tone. Although in many parts it is not autobiographical and the locations given are fictionalized, the publisher marketed the text as an authentic account of events. At the publisher’s suggestion, Renn even exchanged his noble name for the name of the novel’s protagonist. Krieg was greeted, especially by German nationalist and National Socialist critics, as a “true” portrayal of the war. In a discussion of Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues , it was even featured as a positive counter-example. Despite his KPD membership; despite the publication of
” Landung auf Ösel (The Landing on Ösel: 1917), and a treatment of the 12th Battle of the Isonzo (1917), which was shown in cinemas just a few days after the event. Feature films were, on the whole, a much more successful medium for mobilizing patriotic feeling. Films were also used during the course of the war to entertain the troops at the front and in the rear areas; there were many frontline cinemas, and even mobile cinemas. Even though the soldiers were aware that most of the war scenes were fictional reconstructions, the films shown still provided welcome
Front in March 1918. Ritter’s film epic chooses rather to culminate in the portrayal of a daring and successful tank maneuver against the encircling Allied forces. Perhaps the great success of this film had also to do with the revisionist opportunity offered by its fictionalized narrative of the course of the conflict. It may be no coincidence that Hitler’s tank-building program received energetic impetus at the time this film was made. Above and beyond the cultural and political exploitation of the First World War, its reinterpretation and the
oppositions of the interwar period to the politically motivated demands for literature by both the nationalist right and the communists and organized left. Fictional literature was also subjected to these norms. Coherence, causality, and plausibility were demanded of novels and stories, so that in the logical structures of literary language, the reality of the war could be depicted as an event that followed the rules of logic and rationality. The vociferous debate about Remarque’s novel was symptomatic. Its tone was set by realists of the left and the right, and it defined