Du und mancher Kamerad (1956)

Directed by

Andrew Thorndike

Genre

documentary film

Country

German Democratic Republic, Germany

Runtime

1h 43m

Rating

8.0 of 10 from 1 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

This East German documentary uses old film clips to argue that German governments from the imperial era through the Weimar Republic and the Nazis share a continuous line with postwar West Germany. It presents this connection to make a political point about war and peace.

archivalhistoricalpolemicaleducationalsomberargumentativeretrospectivedidactic

What happens

Du und mancher Kamerad is a 1956 East German documentary film by Andrew and Annelie Thorndike. In English-speaking countries it was titled You and Your Pal or The German Story. The film employed archival footage to draw connections between Imperial Germany, the government of the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich and the government of West Germany at the time. The film has an alternate title of Krieg oder Frieden and is the best-known of the Thorndike films. An East German newspaper claimed that the film was well received in the United Kingdom. It was banned in West Germany and remained so some years after its release; some subsequent films directed by the Thorndikes were banned in Great Britain by the British Board of Film Classification. When the film ran in Dublin in 1960, the Fine Gael opposition complained in the Dáil that it should have been banned by the Official Censor of Films for meeting the statutory criterion of being "subversive of public morality". (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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