50s television in the US was very limited in the variety of genres. Lots of variety and quiz shows, children’s programming, sitcoms, a few crime shows and Westerns, not really any war shows. Maybe it was a technical/expense thing. There were a few excellent drama/playhouse series, and I think it likely that there were one or two treatments of Nazis in those (in fact, McHale apparently started on Alcoa Theater).
I’ll bet there were treatments on the radio.
For one thing, some Euro-American actors wouldn’t play Nazis unless the characters were mercilessly mocked in every scene. That kind of stipulation wouldn’t work in a drama?
I guess they couldn’t find any Uber allies.
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I think it was over the course of the 50s that TV finally replaced radio as the primary medium of choice for most American’s entertainment. I want to say it wasn’t until the very early 60s that most Americans had a TV at home (and quality vastly improved). I wonder about discussions on radio - I’m sure there were plenty of radio news programs that dealt with it. I certainly remember early on (Voice of America, etc) international broadcasts (during the war and right after) had strong anti-fascist content, so I’m guessing the same was true into the late 40s/early 50s, though by the mid-50s, anti-communist content would have very much replaced that.
I’m sure the technical aspect had something to do with it, but I think a good grasp of what had just happened needed some distance. Much of the really important historiography on the holocaust at least didn’t really start to come out until the baby boomers got into grad school.
That’s very interesting. That makes sense, but I wasn’t aware of that. Still, I think treating nazis as either monsters or buffoons (as satisfying as that can be) has consequences for our understanding of them, historically speaking.
In dramas (filmed in the US anyway) Nazis are portrayed as pretty inhuman and monstrous (thinking of Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List). Compare that to, say Black Book, which has all the characters (the resistance fighters and the Nazis) are much more ambiguous across the board, a Dutch film, I think. I doubt you could make a film like the Grey Zone at all until pretty recently (again, since it’s about the Sonderkommandos, based on the work of Primo Levi, it’s just as advertised - moral ambiguity of life in the camps or of prison systems in general).
Cultural attitudes must also have changed over the decades as the cohorts that fought in the World Wars have aged out of decision-making roles in the media.
In the '50s and '60s, lots of people at all levels of society had personal experience “going over to Europe and fighting those stupid Germans again,” to the point it was seeming like an ordinary rite of passage. It was later generations, that hadn’t been there, that have been able to reframe World War II as a unique, Tolkienesque battle between good and evil.
I don’t think that can be right, especially when you look at the sort of language that was being used about the Germans during and after the First World War.
That is full-on good vs evil stuff right there, down to the bayoneting babies and massacring nuns war crimes stories.
I certainly knew several people in the UK who were of the generation that fought in World War II who had absolutely nothing good to say about Germany and/or Japan and considered all German and Japanese to be the devil incarnate.
I don’t know how that worked out in the US of course.
And, of course:
After both World Wars, the American networks constructed for anti-German propaganda were rapidly converted to anticommunism (with “communism” defined as anything to the left of the US military intelligence complex).
Yes, that was the same in the UK.
But did the US have people who’d refuse to buy anything made in Japan for example?
True, but that didn’t happen in a vacuum. People whose parents were in these war were writing this stuff. They’re views are colored by their experiences as children of vets.
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