Legends of the Fall

I’ve been watching a Russian miniseries on World War II called Seventeen Moments of Spring alongside Ken Burns’ documentary, The War. The miniseries is excellent Communist camp — truculent Russian actors trying to play senior Nazis — as well as a gripping spy thriller. The documentary is about as unsurprising as it is stirring and tasteful. But the versions of the war are completely different. Watching the Ken Burns film you can forget that until D-Day it was Russia’s land war, Russia’s epic sacrifice. Watching the Soviet miniseries you can forget the Holocaust had anything to do with the Jews. This weird omission comes in spite of the program’s otherwise detailed sense of history. Over graphic archival footage of the concentration camps the narrator says, in one scene, “It was near Karinhall [Göring’s palatial hunting lodge near Berlin] that a concentration camp was built, where at Göring’s sanction experiments were conducted on sick old people and children.”

     posted 19 December 2009 by Michael Scott Moore