The Warner Library

Books and Movies Spring 2008
Call the Warner Library at 914-631-7734 to register, or email rmannion@wlsmail.org
A trained leader will guide each 90-minute discussion. Challenging questions
are posed to stimulate discussion—with the answers and opinions  of the participants supported in the text. Book Discussion Registration is limited to 20 participants per session.  No registration required for film presentations.

May 15, Thursday 7 pm Defying Hitler: A Memoir, by Sebastian Haffner

In 1920, when Sebastian Haffner was about 13, he noticed another student doodling a swastika. Haffner had never seen one before, but over the next dozen years it became familiar as the emblem of the Nazi Party, by 1933, the ruling party in a new dictatorship. Haffner was 25 in 1933; his girlfriend was Jewish. "Perish, Judah," passing Brownshirts shouted at them. One day Haffner was in the library when Nazis stormed in and threw out Jews. Are you Aryan? they asked him. Yes, he replied automatically. "I had failed my very first test," he writes. "A great nation, which cannot have consisted entirely of cowards, fell into ignominy without a fight," Haffner notes in the memoir, published in Germany as History of a German: Memoirs.

May 17, Saturday 2 pm,  Two Documentary Films

The Nazis: A Warning from History "Helped into Power" (48 Minutes, 1997)
New light is shed on the rise of the Third Reich in Germany in this comprehensive series through archival footage and interviews with those who survived Hitler's reign, including unrepentant Nazis. In the premiere episode of this BBC production, the road to the Third Reich is revealed through an examination of the political and economic conditions that helped thrust the Nazi party into power. From the end of World War I to Adolf Hitler's appointment as chancellor, Germany struggles with the rise of fascism. The first episode mentions the workers revolution that briefly took control of München. Street-fighting between Communists and reactionaries is chronicled, explicating the German populace's understandable desire for law and order. Each of the well-crafted installments of The Nazis: A Warning from History offers new insight into the development and functioning of the Nazi state and enables us to intelligently consider the lives of its supporters.

Victory of Faith (60 Minutes, 1933, German with English subtitles)
Victory of Faith (Sieg des Glaubens) is the first documentary directed by Leni Riefenstahl, who was hired despite opposition from Nazi officials that resented employing a woman -- and non-Party member. The film recounts the Fifth Nazi Party Rally in Nuremberg. It provides a revealing look at the Nazi movement in the first blush of its 1933 triumphs. Here, the movement still bears the marks of its street-fighter origins; lacking the orchestrated precision and theatrical grandeur we associate with later Nazi stagecraft, such as Riefenstahl’s 1935 Triumph of the Will. It includes the prominent role of Ernst Rohm and the Brownshirts that was excised from the public record after their liquidation by Hitler in 1934. Victory of Faith captures the Hitler-state at a pivotal stage in its early development.