Wednesday, October 7, 2009

“Der Zerbrochene Krug”- a piece of Nazi propaganda?

Thinking about “Der Zerbrochene Krug” as a piece of Nazi propaganda, the only connection that came to my mind was that it brings the chaotic world back into the right order. By dismissing the judge at the end of the play, order is restored. The judge can be seen as the “bad”, the “evil” that disturbed the order. When he is deleted in the end, the society is restored like it should be. Thinking about the Nazis that wanted to erase several groups from their society, from Jews to mentally retarded people, to create a pure, clean and perfect society, the play can be understood as a piece of Nazi propaganda. Especially if we regard the upper-judge as a symbol of the” perfect” German man: he embodies a lot of typical German values like punctuality, strictness, discipline or correctness. One could interpret that he stands for the Nazis who try to restore order to Germany by enforcing these values and deleting everything that is against them.
But there is no evidence for this theory except that it was produced during the Nazi period. Thinking about this fact I decided to check on the internet if I could find anything about being this movie Nazi propaganda. One of the descriptions of the movie I found was this: “The verbatim Kleist adaptation with which Ucicky wanted to save his reputation as an "unpolitical artist". Consequently it can’t really be a piece of Nazi propaganda because it is almost word for word spoken as in the original which was written in 1806 by Kleist. At this time the Nazis didn’t even exist. Furthermore the intention of the director Ucicky was an unpolitical one, thus it can’t be a piece of Nazi propaganda neither. This description was in accordance with all other descriptions that I found. That it isn’t Nazi propaganda although it was produced during the Nazi period.

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