Questions and Answers

14th January 2007

Last week I posted the text of a talk I gave at on: "The British Occupation of Germany, as portrayed in Humphrey Jennings' film 'A Defeated People'", at the annual German Historical Institute postgraduate conference in London. I said I would post some of the questions I was asked at the end of the talk and my answers, so here they are:

Q:  Did the film or Humphrey Jennings refer to the Cold War? (And by implication did anti-Russian sentiments account for a relatively pro-German attitude in the film, compared with other materials produced 6 months earlier in May 1945?)

A:  No. The film looks at the British zone only. There is no reference to Russia, the US, or France, or to life in their zones. Jennings was politically on the left and, as far as I knew, sympathetic to the Soviet Union. In his British wartime film 'A Diary for Timothy' made at the end of the war, there is shot of a British school choir singing away in a school hall, with a huge banner behind them with a picture of a hammer and sickle and which reads: "Greetings to the Red Army and the Glorious Fighting Forces of the United Nations."

Q:  Were there any British training films made to show to the military, similar to the US film directed by Frank Capra, 'Your Job in Germany' which is much less sympathetic to the defeated enemy than 'A Defeated People'?

A:  Not to my knowledge. As far as I know, 'Your Job in Germany' was shown to many British as well as US troops, at the time they crossed the frontier into Germany, as they were then under joint command. The difference between the two films indicates how much attitudes changed in the 6 months after the end of the war. (I wrote about this in my earlier posting on the film 'Your Job in Germany')

Q:  Did the film refer to any resistance by the Germans to the Allies?

A:  No, rather the reverse. There was no sign of any resistance to the Allies. What shocked Jennings was how the German people appeared stunned and dazed, apathetic and listless at the end of the war. (He wrote about this in his letters to his wife from Germany - see my earlier posting).

Q:  Was there any connection between Humphrey Jennings and Victor Gollancz and the 'Save Europe Now' campaign?

A:  Not to my knowledge. After he had completed 'A Defeated People' Jennings moved on to other subjects which had nothing to do with Germany. He died in a climbing accident in Greece in 1950.

Q:  Do the themes which appear in the film also appear in the 'Germany under Control' exhibition which opened in London in June 1946.

A:  I don't know.  This something I still need to work on.

Q:  How do you analyse a film to use it as a historical source?

A:  A good question and I didn't have a good answer. My reply was that my use of the film was illustrative, and to be historically valid it would be substantiated by other sources. (In fact, I think films can act as good historical sources, but they do need to be placed within a good analytical or theoretical framework. I don't this have at present and probably don't need it for the MA dissertation. It is something I will need to think more about, when I've finished the course).

Q:  I claimed in my talk that studying the British Occupation of Germany can tell us as much about how the British saw themselves, as how they perceived Germany and Germans. What does the film tell us about British society at the time?

A:  The effort which went into the process of reconstruction in Germany, in contrast with more negative actions often given more prominence in historical accounts of the period; how attitudes changed in the transition from war to peace, in the six months after the end of the war; the British view of themselves as morally superior and self-righteous, (which was interpreted by some Germans at the time more negatively as arrogance and hypocrisy); how people came to terms with living with the former enemy. I'm sure there is more I could have said on this...

Overall it was an excellent conference, but I don't intend to say anything about the other very interesting talks given at the conference and the discussions which followed. It's not appropriate for me to do this in this blog, which is about my own research, and there is no way I could do them justice.