Thursday, August 2, 2007

Bergman admitted Nazi past

from Steve Sailer via Stephen Pollard:

According to Google News, none of the 1,294 news stories on the Swedish movie director's death mention that he finally admitted in 1999 that he had been a Nazi-supporter all through WWII, when he was in his 20s, because he found Nazism to be "fun and youthful." Bergman's Nazi enthusiasm wasn't unknown back in Bergman's heyday: Richard Grenier, Commentary's film critic, wrote a hostile article about it in the 1980s, but, otherwise, Bergman seems to have gotten a free pass over it.


from
BBC News (September 7, 1999) via :

Bergman admits Nazi past

Legendary Swedish director Ingmar Bergman has revealed that he was a great admirer of Adolf Hitler, only losing his enthusiasm for Nazism after the horrors of the concentration camps were uncovered.

The 81-year-old has spoken candidly to author Maria-Pia Boethius, whose book Honour and Conscience asks whether Sweden was genuinely neutral during World War II.

Bergman, maker of some of the world's most acclaimed films, has admitted that he was a Nazi sympathiser on previous occasions.

But he has now said he was impressed by the Nazi dictator after seeing him address a rally, reports the Swedish tabloid Expressen.

The young Bergman was on an exchange trip to Germany in 1936, staying with a Nazi family when he saw Hitler speak.

"Hitler was unbelievably charismatic. He electrified the crowd," said the Oscar-nominated film-maker.

Bergman describes his father as being ultra right-wing and his politics rubbed off on the whole family.

"The Nazism I had seen seemed fun and youthful," he admitted to the author. "The big threat were the Bolsheviks, who were hated."

The book also documents an attack by Bergman's brother and friends on a house owned by a Jew. The group daubed the walls with a swastika - the symbol of the Nazis.

But the director has confessed to being too cowardly to raise any objections.

The maker of Fanny and Alexander and The Seventh Seal retained his admiration of Fascism right up to the end of the war.

"When the doors to the concentration camps were thrown open, at first I did not want to believe my eyes."

"When the truth came out it was a hideous shock for me. In a brutal and violent way I was suddenly ripped of my innocence."

Bergman officially retired for directing after the success of 1983's Fanny and Alexander - which won the best foreign film Oscar. He continues to be an active writer and stage director.

2 comments:

Daniel said...

Sweden was a defacto ally of the Nazis. Germany is low on iron ore and needed swedish ore for the wehrmacht. They bartered with the germans receiving Jewish gold.
Its a pity that there are no Al Damato's in congress to go after Sweden for that Jewish gold

Anonymous said...

I think that we often underrate how important political fashion is among the, well, fashionable.

I can easily believe Bergman when he says that he was attracted by the youthfulness and enthusiasm of the Nazis, and by Hitler's charisma. Too bad he wasn't overly disturbed by what was being done to the Jews since 1933.

It's not too far-fetched to surmise that those who are pro-Muslim today would've been Marxists 30 years ago, and would've been arguing that religion was the opium of the people. And it's not too far a stretch to think that, 70 years ago, at least some of them would've found fascism seductive.

I remember a class I was in graduate school, umpteen quadrillion years ago. During a discussion about '68, one of my classmates argued that students tend to be the voice of conscience. Our middle-aged European professor offered no support for that statement. And, no wonder, since Nazism got a big boost from university students in Germany.

I think that students--and professors, public intellectuals, media people, etc.--are not the voice of political conscience. Rather, they're the voice of political fashion, of the Zeitgeist, or at least the emergin Zeitgeist. That doesn't mean that they're always wrong, but...well, you know.

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