Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

« ListsMainHard Shopping »

Free Speech

413 words

We're quite well off when it comes to free speech in Germany. The only topics where things are a bit strange are those which are in some way Nazi-related. While I can see the point that you're not allowed to carry Nazi-era symbols or wear uniforms in public – as a courtesy to the victims, I am not sure it's a good thing that texts and other media are essentially censored.

As far as I know, you're not allowed to sell Hitler's book Mein Kampf in Germany. Many people inherited a copy, though, because people got it from the government for their weddings back then. Those copies usually look rather pristine and unread. It's a bit silly, what you get to know about the book is that (a) it's evil, (b) people should have read it back then and taken it seriously as Hitler outlines many of his plans and (c) it so boring and badly written that you wouldn't want to read it. But all this is only hear-say as hardly anybody actually read them damn thing – making it much more mysterious than needs be.

So why is it treated as if it were really dangerous by itself? Doesn't the fact that it's 'forbidden' make it more appealing to teenagers? More appealing than it would be if you could simply get a copy, commented, with a foreword giving the appropriate historical context for those who don't know perhaps, judge for yourself and think 'what a jerk'? I think so.

This stigma also seems to apply to media that are considered accomplices of the Nazis, such as Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph des Willens. This morning the paper's satirical page had a comment on how absurd it is that you have to prove some scientific interest before you can borrow it from a library. This commentary was unintentionally up-to-date as Leni Riefenstahl died today.

As everybody is saying that the film was extremely, if not revolutionarily, well made for the time, it's a shame that it's hard to get to see it in Germany (I guess you could order a copy from a foreign amazon and hope they don't care...). Wouldn't this be a perfect application for DVD technology? – Add in some historical context, make clear that while it looks good, it's only propaganda, just in case the media-savvy generation of these days can't tell right away. That should be much better than getting a copy without any context from some p2p network.

September 10, 2003, 0:48

Trackback

Trackback “A Random Hodge Podge of Links” from The FuzzyBlog:

I haven’t done this in a while so here’s some interesting stuff:

September 11, 2003, 18:12

Add your comment

« ListsMainHard Shopping »

Comments on

Photos

Categories

Me

This page

Out & About

pinboard Links

People

Ego-Linking