5. At the beginning of their occupation of Germany, Americans exercised a tighter censorship than even the USSR did in its occupation zone. Movies like Gone with the Wind and Grapes of Wrath, for instance, were deemed unsuitable to be shown to Germans.
RIDDLE: can you guess why these specific movies were banned?
“Gone with the Wind” glorifies the evil side fighting for slavery that lost the war, just like Germans lost their evil war for enforcing Nazi ideology on the rest of the world. I suppose Americans won’t use the word “evil” while talking about South, but that’s the probably unstated reason I found for forbidding the movie. May be, stated reason had to do with racism, but then which connection is possible to Steinbeck’s novel?
I read only a short excerpt from “Grapes of Wrath”, so don’t know what is the problem. Does it have racism somewhere? In that excerpt the novel seemed to glorify the common people, beaten by fate but still not giving up. Like Germans post WW2? But that probably wasn’t the problem?
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Just had a thought whether Steinbeck’s novel could be read as endorsing socialism with its bad rich people and idealized truck drivers in the excerpt I read. Can’t connect socialist ideology to “Gone with the Wind”, so the movies were probably banned for different reasons. At first, your post made me think the reason was the same for banning the two.
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Gone With the Wind romanticized the good old days when the losing side of the war had property and money and demonized the actual winners of a war as horrible and ill treating the poor Southerners when in fact Reconstruction was merciful? It’s not like they cared it’s just they didn’t want the Germans drawing parallels.
Maybe they thought Grapes of Wrath would remind Germans too much of the negative side effects of being in Weimar Germany? Like being poor?
I think the Americans wanted the Germans to accept 1) they were defeated and 2) their treatment at the hands of the Americans was just and not impoverishing.
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Of course, it was not impoverishing. It would be hard to make them any poorer. 🙂
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\ Of course, it was not impoverishing. It would be hard to make them any poorer.
I have always thought post WW2 Germany was in much better condition than f.e. parts of Ukraine, destroyed both by Germans and by Soviet government practicing “burned ground” strategy of leaving nothing to the enemy. Read somewhere about Soviet soldiers being incensed by seeing German farmers / villages in good order vs their destroyed motherland. Surely that wasn’t 100% a lie?
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Oh yes, the Red Army looted and robbed the Germans like there was no tomorrow. Americans also looted but in a very different way. Americans stole the intellect. This means they took away the German thinkers, scholars, scientists. The Soviets, in the meanwhile, stole hats, pants, coats, shovels, art objects and entire factories.
Americans rebuilt their part of Germany while the Soviets. . . well, you know.
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“This means they took away the German thinkers, scholars, scientists. The Soviets, in the meanwhile, stole hats, pants, coats, shovels”
I don’t know why but this sounds so funny to me.
Soviet general: “To the victor goes the spoils! To reward your bravery in the face of pure evil, I hereby give you permission to pick up as many pants and shovels as you like. Go for it!”
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Actually, this is what the Soviet soldiers were told almost verbatim, crazy as it sounds.
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“they took away the German thinkers, scholars, scientists.”
Those individuals voluntarily migrated to the United States for the same reason that people with similar skills come to the U.S. today — because of the opportunities available in America that aren’t present in their native lands.
Does anyone think Werhner von Braun would have been allowed to build rockets anywhere in an occupied post-war Germany?
He and most of his team deliberately moved westward in the final days of the war to surrender to the Americans rather than be captured by the Soviets. If the Russians had caught him, he would have been taken to the USSR involuntarily and given a “choice” — build rockets or be executed as a war criminal.
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Nobody is blaming Americans for that. Just the opposite. It was a lot smarter than stealing shovels.
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HINT: the answer is actually much more primitive. The US Occupation Forces were not necessarily composed of ultra-sophisticated intellectuals. Their goal was to effectuate propaganda and promote the American way of life. These two movies were not helpful to that purpose because. . . . ???
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These movies were banned for totally different reasons.
“Gone with the Wind” was banned because of its sympathetic portrayal of slavery, and because its background subject was a violent civil war in the United States.
“Grapes of Wrath” was banned because of its socialist overtones ( railing against the evil capitalist big banks, etc.).
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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