Heimkehr
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Heimkehr Home Coming is a 1941 German Anti-Polish propaganda film by Gustav Ucicky.
Contents |
[edit] Plot
In Woiwodschaft (in eastern Poland) the German minority is oppressed by the Polish majority. The physician Dr. Thomas does not have a hospital and his daughter Marie, who attends a German school, and needs an important operation, watches how this school is demolished by Poland. He states his protest, noting the constitutionally guaranteed protection of minorities, with the mayor; however his protest falls on deaf ears. Together with his daughter's fiancee, Dr. Fritz Mutius, they drive her into the capital, in order to put their request forward to the central government, but they are not received there either. Deciding to stay in the capital in order to call on the court the next day, in the evening they go to the cinema. They are accompanied there by her friend Karl Michalek, who was drafted by the Polish army. When they refuse to let him sing the Polish national anthem with the rest of the audience in the theatre, Fritz is deeply hurt. Afterwards Marie is rejected at the hospital, and she dies.
The acts of violence against the German minority continue to increase; Marie's father becomes the victim of an attack, and goes blind as a result. When the Germans meet secretly in a barn, in order to hear Hitler's September 1, 1939 speech before the Reichstag, they are arrested and imprisoned. They are be abused by the security guard and finally saved into a cellar set underground, and out of the prison where they scarcely escape a massacre, but then are saved by German soldiers. The Germans ready for their resettlement into the homeland. At the end of the film the car column of the Wolhyniendeut border enters into the German Reich. The conclusion shows an enormous picture of Hitler set up at the border station.
[edit] Historical Context
In the secret supplementary protocol to the Hitler Stalin pact, which regulated the planned allocation of Poland, there was also a resettlement plan by which approximately 60,000 ethnic Germans were resettled into the Reich; these were ethnic Germans whose settlement area would have otherwise been given to the USSR. This resettlement took place shortly before Christmas 1939. Despite the slogan "Home in the reich," the Ethnic Germans, were not resettled into the "Old Reich", but into the conquered Polish areas, which in the future were to have no more Poles or Jews. The German nationality was however withheld from the resettlers.
[edit] Production and Reception
The pictures of the painter Otto Engelhardt Kyffhäuser, who in January 1940, by Heinrich Himmlers orders, took numerous sketches and designs of the Treck of resettlers from Wolhynien served as collecting main for the film, whose emergence it documented again. The interior photographs for the film developed from 2 January to in the middle of July 1941 in the Viennese studios Rosenhügel, Sievering and Schönbrunn. The field recordings took place between February and June 1941 among other things in Chorzele and Ortelsburg (East Prussia). With Zensurvorlage in film inspection station on 26 August 1941 the film was classified as youth-free and kept national political and artistically particularly valuable Höchstprädikat „“. On 30 October 1941 the descriptor was supplemented „film of the nation “and on 10 October 1944 the descriptors „people-forming “and „youth value “. The Ufaverleih took over the rental business. The premiere took place on 31 August 1941 in the Cinema San Marco in Venice. In the context of the film art weeks Venice the film achieved the cup of the Italian Ministry for people culture. The Austrian first performance followed on 10 October 1941 in the Viennese Scala, the German first performance on 23 October 1941 at the same time in the citizen of Berlin Ufa palace at the zoo and in the Ufa theatre Wagnitzstrasse. After the end Zweiten of world war the supreme command of allied winner powers placed the performance of „home coming “under prohibition. FSK the film was not submitted; a public reperformance was omitted. The analysis rights are noticed by the residents of Munich Taurus film GmbH. The director Ucicky received work prohibition, which was waived for Austria in July 1947 after end of war because of its direction activity with “home coming” both for Germany and for Austria. The authoress Elfriede Jelinek means, “home coming” is “the worst propaganda feature of the Nazis at all”.
[edit] Literature
- Klaus Kanzog, “national political particularly valuable”. A manual to 30 German features of the years 1934 to 1945, Munich (Schaudig & single) 1994, ISBN 3-926372-05-2
- Gerald Trimmel: Home coming (strategies of a National Socialist film) . Werner calibration farmer publishing house, Vienna 1998, ISBN 3-901699-06-6 == Web on the left of
