Stalinism, Nazism, and Cinema

Nazism and Stalinism: An Examination

Compare the two most cruel and inhuman dictatorships of the 20th century, Nazism and Stalinism

Like any regime which engages in the use of terror and violence, one can trace the roots of both Nazism and Stalinism as originating intensely in deep amounts of fear. Fear of modernism, fear of poverty and fear of the unknown were at the root causes of these regimes filled with hate. For many scholars, the success and rise to power of Adolf Hitler can be seen as particularly baffling. Hitler, when it comes to dictators motivated by evil, is one of the most dominant figures of our era, outshining, Mussolini and even Stalin as a villain, politician and strategist (Seligmann). The consequences of everything that Hitler did continue to impact the thoughts and emotions of all members of humanity, particularly the Germans.

The repercussions of the Nazi regime have been intense and long-lasting. As one scholar explains, when the Nazis came to power in 1933 it was a tremendous defeat to the working class and to the world at large. "The world's oldest social democratic party and its second biggest Communist party, with 13 million votes between them, capitulated without a fight as Hitler took power. He was able to destroy in a matter of weeks basic forms of economic and political organization that had taken more than 60 years to build" (Merson, 2010). This is not to mention the sheer amounts of tremendous devastation that occurred as the result of the Nazi party coming to power -- the six million Jews which perished in camps during the Holocaust. Given the fact that Hitler has had such a chilling and unfathomably destructive impact on society and all members of society, it's still worth asking why were the Germans so receptive to this particular dictator. Why was Hitler so readily able to win over the minds and hearts of so many Germans with such a willingness on the part of the Germans? "Why did the Germans elect Adolf Hitler, thereby unconditionally linking their fate to his person? Why did they go to war for him? Why did some even become murderers?... Hitler could only win power, because he had made himself the spokesman of German fears and longings. He led a war against modernism (Seligmann, 2006). This is really an astute reason which really does explain so much of why Nazism was successful and the why Hitler was able to gain German cooperation.

Fear, not only of modernity, but of the unknown, was a major reason that Hitler came to power, as Hitler was able to prey upon and exploit the German fear of the uncanny, exploiting the fear of the "uncanny Jew." The terrifying experience of the uncanny is that it is both recognizable and unrecognizable: "Similarly the uncanny Jew is recognizable and unrecognizable. His nondescript appearance stands for recognizable Germanism. But his deformed caricature appearance stands for the not-to-be-recognized older and more primitive German core" (Gonen, 59). Thus, Hitler created a methodology of othering the Jewish individual by presenting them as disguised, racially inferior, as sub-humans, and as the carriers of infection (Gonen, 59). By presenting the Jewish individual in such a destructive manner, Hitler was creating an intense legion of fear and a marked lack of comfort and stability among organized society: "This time the major hurdle is not the disguisability of degenerate humans, but the invisibility of germlike or viruslike creatures. This is an altogether different psychological factor. We are still dealing with fear, but in this case the fear is an outcome not of paranoia but of phobia" (Gonen, 59). This demonstrates how Hitler was able to gain such an invasive hold on the minds of the German people: it was a particular type of fear that he cultivated within society. In such a case, it's worth discussing the difference between a fear and a phobia: a fear is an innate emotional response to a perceived threat, something that is common within the population and often normal, or at least innocuous, when it comes to real or perceived threats (Covin): fears come up with the dangers of walking down a dark street late at night, fear of having one's house burglarized after one's neighbor's house was robbed and comparable scenarios. Fears are founded in something immediate and situational which create the emotional response. "A phobia is similar to a fear with one key difference: the anxiety they experience is so strong that it interferes with their quality of life and/or their ability to function" (Covin). This is a remarkable distinction because it demonstrates how Hitler was able to exploit and exacerbate the German phobia of differentness. By othering the Jews, Hitler preyed upon the phobias of the German people, creating a scenario where they felt that the Jewish person was a threat to their safety, such a threat that prevented them from functioning properly.

Fear is something that is prevalent in the films of World War Two, and is definitely one of the overwhelming motifs that the 1964 Czech film, Diamonds in the Night, explores fully. The film plays clearly and decisively with the notion of reality, and the appearance of objective reality, weaving a tapestry of fear and denial as the viewer watches the boy's desperate flight and attempt to survive. The foundation set forth is objective, but the portrayal for the boys' fight to stay alive is presented in a subjective manner. The film plays with a certain sense of repetition, along with jumps and retreats in time, creating an ominous undercurrent and strong sense of doom.

The distancing technique that N-mec uses allows the viewer to gain his or her bearings for a while at least, but the distance set forth is still evocative of the sense of otherness that Hitler created between the German public and the Jews. Just as the Germans watched the Jews be demoralized and subjugated, the viewer is forced to watch from afar as the boys push for every last shred of life and their futures. As this incredible push and pull is going on, the spectator is forced to watch as the boys consider their fate, while feeling a sense of closeness with them, along with a sense of separation.

On the other hand, the film Europa (1990) takes an unflinching look at the consequences of this process of otherness. Directed by Agnieszka Holland, Europa is a masterpiece of darkness and irony. It follows the protagonist Solly, as he is able to masquerade, to a certain extent as a German (when he is actually a Jew). This film is perhaps the most crushing ballad of the realities of the Jewish experience during Nazism and of the unavoidable experience of being made into monsters: it creates a state where one desires to be someone else, a tragedy in and of itself. The film adequately demonstrates Solly's ambivalence in regards to his own Jewishness: the viewer sees him burying and then retrieving his Jewish ID papers. Other times the film shows him completely immersed in the charade -- singing German anthems with fellow Hitler Youth. The viewer watches as his desire for his girlfriend is intense, and how he tries to hide his circumcision by pulling down the remaining skin and tying it in place with a string. This issue forces the viewer to watch an attempt at Jewish assimilation, and one which is no doubt doomed to failure. The viewer sees how his body will not allow him to pass or to pretend. This movie is able to give a voice and a story to the sense of the tragic experience of Jews during World War Two, by lending a strong level of specificity to what is was liked to be othered in such a dreadful and painful manner. The details that this film provides is able to paint a clear picture of all that is lost in such a struggle and of the individual lives which really end up suffering as a result of such evil and intolerant totalitarianism.

Imagined enemies and a strong dialogue of fear is what largely motivated the Stalinism and the motivations behind the Great Terror: Stalin had an overwhelming fear of an approaching war and a perceived that Germany was an international threat to the Soviet Union: "The military aggression of Hitler's Germany, signaled by its occupation of the Rhineland in 1936, and the occupation of Manchuria by the Japanese, convinced Stalin that the U.S.S.R. was endangered by the Axis powers on two fronts. Stalin's fears were reinforced in November 1936, when Berlin and Tokyo united in a pact (later joined by Fascist Italy) against the Comintern" (Figes, 234). While Stalin did have a sense of "collective security" there was not much faith in western powers and support, particularly as Western states did not intervene in Spain. This created a sense of isolationism and alone-ness: the Soviet Union viewed themselves as vulnerable and on the brink of war with the Fascist nations in Europe and with Japan on the east. Their sense of fear and anxiety became aggravated: the Soviet Union largely felt threatened and surrounded and undermined by Fascist infiltrators and other such hidden enemies via every corner of civilized society. They felt these fascist spies were everywhere (Figes, 235).

It's thus important to view Stalinism as not something that was accidental or which was an uncontrolled happening or manifestation of a chaotic regime that could have erupted at any time, but evocative of Nazism in the sense that it was masterminded and controlled by Stalin according to a specific plan and strategy (Figes, 235).

Stalin was the man who was the "mastermind" behind the Great Famine, an act which spanned between 1932 and 1933 and which was largely responsible for the deaths of around nine million people. Stalin's "Great Famine" was strategic and manmade and was designed to attack a specific class of people: the peasants (Trueman, 2013). Stalin was afraid of the peasant class and feared that these peasants could not be trusted to support his government in Moscow and support the revolutionary ideals of the Bolsheviks at large. "He had once stated in front of others that given the opportunity he would have liked to have removed the whole Ukrainian peasant population of twenty million but that this was an impossible task…Stalin ordered in to agricultural areas troops and the secret police, who took away what food they could find and simply left rural villages with none. Those who did not die of starvation were deported to the gulags. What happened was kept as a state secret within the U.S.S.R. This happened in the Ukraine, the Urals, to the Kazakhs -- anywhere where there was a large peasant population" (Trueman, 2013). This irrational fear of the peasant class was strongly evocative of Hitler's irrational fears of the Jewish population. Both these villainous leaders allowed their fears to act as strong motivating forces into othering these groups of people. Just as Hitler othered the Jews by presenting them as a dangerous portion of the population, Stalin othered the peasants, by presenting them as a threat to human survival. Stalin was "convinced" that the peasants were largely responsible for the food shortage of 1927 due to the fact that he believed that they were hoarding grain and other food items (Trueman, 2013). Thus, Trueman ordered a range of communist soldiers to go to the countryside and villages to seize the grain that the peasants had there. If Stalin or one of his soldiers believed that one had been hoarding grain, one was labeled a "kulak" and it was later found that Stalin sought for the destruction of the kulak class as a whole. Stalin thus systematically began to deal with these irrational fears through the imprisonment of peasants, the deportation of peasants, or the outright murder of peasants. This is strongly evocative of Hitler's strategic extermination and deportation of the Jews. Stalin's mentality and motivation might have been a tad different, in that Stalin believed that this brutality would help persuade others to accept the rule of Moscow in totality by breaking the backs and spirit of the peasantry (Trueman, 2013). Both Stalinism and Nazism were marked by a strong amount of repression and a desire to bury their fears through violence and the intensive subjugation of an entire group of people. Both dictators and both regimes relied heavily on violence, something which meant that the regimes were heavily fear based, as violence can be viewed as an aggressive action which attempts to deal inadequately with one's fears through the use of force.

One can see lucidly the dangers of repression in the 1970 film The Conformist by Bernardo Bertolucci which demonstrates the advance and disintegration of fascism. One sees how something that one can forseeably label as "small" can cause an individual to become unraveled and derailed away from the sense of his or her true self. Marcello, the main character is haunted by the guilt of a childhood homosexual interaction and is currently chasing after the illusion of feeling adequate. One of the remarkable aspects of the film is that it evokes the sense of Stalinism and Hitlerism by demonstrating constant curious coexistences, demonstrating constantly how good often co-occurs with evil, thus giving us a certain visual immediacy to evil. Furthermore, Bertolucci constantly portrays the decadence of the upper classes with a sort of unflinching depiction which can't help but evoke the idea of the upper-German and upper-Soviet classes which were able to bask in luxury as both Jews and peasants fought for their own very survival.

However, it's really the film Burnt by the Sun (1936) by director Nikita Mikhalkov which is able to aptly encapsulate the terror of the Stalinist purges with a strong amount of realism. Burnt by the Sun is able to portray the pain and discomfort of Stalin's Russia via the subtleties of oppression and injustice marked by moments of oppression marked with comedy. The main events of the film occur around a country house in the countryside, where the backdrop is dreamy and idyllic. Even so, the oppression of Stalinism continues to manifest in the lives of the characters on screen, directly and indirectly. For instance, the tension which exists between the characters of Mitia and Marussia is extremely revelatory and symbolic of the extremely repressive and repressed society that all are forced to exist in. In one scene rife with tension, Mikhalkov avoids dialogue and focuses exclusively on the loosely veiled anxiety of the young lasy tapping her nails and drinking water unnaturally fast. There are flashes of the scars on her wrists and what the scars attempted to do. There's a consistent juxtaposition between the visual beauty that is presented onscreen and the spectacle and tension that the characters are forced to live with, creating a strong sense of tension and ambiguity. This tension powerfully alludes to the pain and the totality of Stalinism along with the losses which were experienced by those forced to exist within this regime.