legov Posted May 23, 2012 Share Posted May 23, 2012 Pointless adaptions of novels into films. Agree, Godfather was terrible. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CarewsEyebrowDesigner Posted May 23, 2012 Share Posted May 23, 2012 They weren't pointless. Coppola needed to raise money to make Apocalypse Now, and people love the mafia Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
legov Posted May 23, 2012 Share Posted May 23, 2012 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blunther Posted May 23, 2012 Share Posted May 23, 2012 People who still haven't shut up. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mjmooney Posted May 23, 2012 VT Supporter Share Posted May 23, 2012 Pointless adaptions of novels into films.'Novelisations' of films are even worse. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mjmooney Posted May 23, 2012 VT Supporter Share Posted May 23, 2012 I'd recomment Jean Amery's account of suffering under the Holocaust as an example of consequences and the trauma of a void in understanding. He was born Hans Maier in Austria but after capture and torture and post liberation he renounced all links to a Germanic heritage. He never even felt Jewish before hand but due to a blood-link he was still victimised, and there's an excellent collection of essays he wrote on his experiences "At The Minds Limits" including one titled the necessity and impossibility of being a Jew, which talks about the paradox of identity 'bequeathed' to him. It's a powerful read, and a contrast to some of the attempts not at "reconcilliation that's not correct, but in tone it's just different to some of the well known Holocaust accounts like Primo Levi or Robert Antelme. I've recently done some reading on the victim-perpetrator debate in Germany which is interesting with respect to sensitivities in this sense, for example there was for a long time - and perhaps still is an issue of Germans private memory focusing on their own particular family history, and less on the totalising environment that created the Holocaust. Of course I think it's perfectly natural that any individual will always have that family loyalty and interest first, and there was a study In German recently that showed a 'cumulative heroisation' of transgenerational memory - the grandchildren wished to make the eyewitness generation into models of anti-Nazism - which whilst proof of a positive model, has the problematic element of eliding a consideration of the conditions that enabled Hitler and co in the first place, where everyone's grandparents were resisters, none complicit etc. It's a tricky situation, as every victim of war, of trauma deserves space for the 'talking-cure' as it were but with an event like the Holocaust, there's an extra moral imperative that's not easily been understood - google Bitburg commemoration controversy and the Historikerstreit ( historians debate ) for more of that.Bump. Interesting update on this: Nazi legacy: The troubled descendants By Frances Cronin BBC News The names of Himmler, Goering, Goeth and Hoess still have the power to evoke the horrors of Nazi Germany, but what is it like to live with the legacy of those surnames, and is it ever possible to move on from the terrible crimes committed by your ancestors? When he was a child Rainer Hoess was shown a family heirloom. He remembers his mother lifting the heavy lid of the fireproof chest with a large swastika on the lid, revealing bundles of family photos. They featured his father as a young child playing with his brothers and sisters, in the garden of their grand family home. The photos show a pool with a slide and a sand pit - an idyllic family setting - but one that was separated from the gas chambers of Auschwitz by just a few yards. His grandfather Rudolf Hoess (not to be confused with Nazi deputy leader Rudolf Hess), was the first commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp. His father grew up in a villa adjoining the camp, where he and his siblings played with toys built by prisoners. It was where his grandmother told the children to wash the strawberries they picked because they smelled of ash from the concentration camp ovens. Rainer is haunted by the garden gate he spotted in the photos that went straight into the camp - he calls it the "gate to hell". "It's hard to explain the guilt," says Rainer, "even though there is no reason I should bear any guilt, I still bear it. I carry the guilt with me in my mind. "I'm ashamed too, of course, for what my family, my grandfather, did to thousands of other families. "So you ask yourself, they had to die. I'm alive. Why am I alive? To carry this guilt, this burden, to try to come to terms with it. "That must be the only reason I exist, to do what he should have done." His father never abandoned the ideology he grew up with and Rainer no longer has contact with him, as he attempts to cope with his family's guilt and shame. For Katrin Himmler, putting pen to paper was her way of coping with having Heinrich Himmler in her family. "It's a very heavy burden having someone like that in the family, so close. It's something that just keeps hanging over you." Himmler, key architect of the Holocaust, was her great-uncle, and her grandfather and his other brother were also in the Nazi party. She wrote The Himmler Brothers: A German Family History, in a quest to "bring something positive" to the name of Himmler. "I did my best to distance myself from it and to confront it critically. I no longer need to be ashamed of this family connection." Scene from Schindler's List Schindler's List featured Amon Goeth as a major character She says the descendants of the Nazi war criminals seem to be caught between two extremes. "Most decide to cut themselves off entirely from their parents so that they can live their lives, so that the story doesn't destroy them. "Or they decide on loyalty and unconditional love and sweep all the negative things away." She says they all face the same question: "Can you really love them if you want to be honest and really know what they did or thought?" Katrin thought she had a good relationship with her father until she started to research into the family's past. Her father found it very hard to talk about it. "I could only understand how difficult it was for him when I realised how difficult it was for me to accept that my own grandmother was a Nazi. "I really loved her, I was fond of her, it was very difficult when I found her letters and learned that she maintained contact with the old Nazis and that she sent a package to a war criminal sentenced to death. It made me feel sick." Trying to find out exactly what happened in her family's past was hard for Monika Hertwig. She was a baby when her father Amon Goeth was tried and hanged for killing tens of thousands of Jews. Goeth was the sadistic commander of Plaszow concentration camp, but Monika was brought up by her mother as if the horrors had never happened. As a child she created a rose-tinted version of her father from family photos. "I had this image I created [that] the Jews in Plaszow and Amon were one family." But in her teens she questioned this view of her father and confronted her mother, who eventually admitted her father "may have killed a few Jews". When she repeatedly asked how many, her mother "became like a madwoman" and whipped her with an electric cable. It was the film Schindler's List that brought home the full horror of her father's crimes. Goeth was played by Ralph Fiennes and Monika says watching it "was like being struck". "I kept thinking this has to stop, at some point they have to stop shooting, because if it doesn't stop I'll go crazy right here in this theatre." She left the cinema suffering from shock. For Bettina Goering, the great-niece of Hitler's designated successor Hermann Goering, she felt she needed to take drastic action to deal with her family's legacy. Both she and her brother chose to be sterilised. "We both did it... so that there won't be any more Goerings," she explains. "When my brother had it done, he said to me 'I cut the line'." Disturbed by her likeness to her great-uncle, she left Germany more than 30 years ago and lives in a remote home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. "It's easier for me to deal with the past of my family from this great distance," she explains. While Bettina decided to travel far from the site of her relatives' crimes, Rainer Hoess decided he had to visit the heart of his family's shame - Auschwitz. As a child he was not allowed on school trips to Auschwitz because of his surname, but as an adult in his forties, he felt the need to face "the reality of the horror and the lies I've had all these years in my family". Seeing his father's childhood home he broke down and kept repeating the word "insanity". "It's insane what they built here at the expense of others and the gall to say it never happened." He could not speak when he saw the "gate to hell". In the visitors centre he encountered the raw emotion of descendants of camp victims. One young Israeli girl broke down as she told him his grandfather had exterminated her family - she could not believe he had chosen to face them. As Rainer spoke about his guilt and shame, a former Auschwitz prisoner at the back at the room asked if he could shake his hand. They embraced as Zvika told Rainer how he gives talks to young people, but tells them the relatives are not to blame as they were not there. For Rainer this was a major moment in dealing with the burden of his family's guilt. "To receive the approval of someone who survived those horrors and knows for sure that it wasn't you, that you didn't do it. "For the first time you don't feel fear or shame but happiness, joy, inner joy." BBC Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
timbaughan Posted May 23, 2012 Share Posted May 23, 2012 Any news report that have a segment about fat people and show clips of fat people walking down the street. Why!? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CarewsEyebrowDesigner Posted May 23, 2012 Share Posted May 23, 2012 Pavements should be divided into lanes and fat people should always be on the inside. I'd say pensioners too but some are quite nifty and it would be harsh on them. Do this and getting around towns would be a more pleasant experience. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rodders Posted May 23, 2012 Share Posted May 23, 2012 Yeah I read that earlier Mike. Fascinating stuff, how the hell would you act in that situation? The Goering relations sterilising themselves is pretty drastic, shows how the burden of guilt really can weigh people down. When I was reading up on it it was generally in mind with descendants of the 'regular' joe bloggen party members, but to come from some of those directly hands on involved in perpetrating genocide must be an extraordinary psychological task to deal with. Great to see the bit about the Auschwitz survivor hugging the relative, I mean obviously the relatives weren't there etc, but it would be easy for people to relocate their anger onto him. It'd be interesting to know if there's a broader comparison that could be made in general on third generation readings of events in history. What did the french kids of 1850 think about La Revolution et Napoleon etc. I there a 'set' period of time one can roughly say needs to be passed before currents in historical discourse change naturally? Sorry, thinking and typing aloud. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PompeyVillan Posted May 23, 2012 Share Posted May 23, 2012 Adverts on YouTube. Just piss off. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mjmooney Posted May 23, 2012 VT Supporter Share Posted May 23, 2012 It'd be interesting to know if there's a broader comparison that could be made in general on third generation readings of events in history. What did the french kids of 1850 think about La Revolution et Napoleon etc. Funnily enough, I've just been reading this: ...which addresses what the second generation French kids thought about the revolution and Napoleon. And the answer is: they thought it was WAY cool. Their parents were always going on about how rough things were during the wars, and how they were glad to get back to the good old (massively reactionary) Bourbon monarchy. They rued their own youthful enthusiasm for revolution, and were rather embarrassed about it. Hence, the kids totally romanticised the whole thing, and thought their parents had become boring sell-outs. Plus ça change... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
maqroll Posted May 24, 2012 Share Posted May 24, 2012 Adverts on YouTube. Just piss off. Wait until they charge a subscription fee... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
maqroll Posted May 24, 2012 Share Posted May 24, 2012 Just did a load of laundry and I'd left a stick of lip balm in there, which melted, and now I have stains all over my clothes :x Actually, this SHOULD piss me off. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Genie Posted May 24, 2012 Share Posted May 24, 2012 Lip balm? sounds a bit ghey Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
villaajax Posted May 24, 2012 Share Posted May 24, 2012 Lip balm? sounds a bit ghey Still better than 'chapstick' Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
maqroll Posted May 24, 2012 Share Posted May 24, 2012 Lip balm? sounds a bit ghey Whatevs, I get chapped lips...hence the balm. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CarewsEyebrowDesigner Posted May 24, 2012 Share Posted May 24, 2012 Nowt wrong wi' a bit a lip balm. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Davkaus Posted May 24, 2012 Share Posted May 24, 2012 Accidentally answering the door while naked. I really hope the police don't come. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
legov Posted May 25, 2012 Share Posted May 25, 2012 Not being able to understand anything about the eurozone crisis I suck at economics. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BOF Posted May 25, 2012 Moderator Share Posted May 25, 2012 Still better than 'chapstick'Sounds like a euphemism for the old fella. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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