Die Welle - The Wave
This is one of my favourite foreign-language films, and it’s back on iPlayer. I highly recommend it to anyone who hasn’t seen it! It’s a chilling examination of the formation of an autocratic regime, made all the more scary (to my English ears) by the guttural sounds of the German language!
Nicht durch Reden und Majoritätsbeschlüsse werden die großen Fragen der Zeit entschieden […] sondern durch Eisen und Blut.
Otto von Bismarck - Translation: Not by speeches and votes of the majority, are the great questions of the time decided […] but by iron and blood.
I post this because I saw a production of Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s Evita last night, and one of the most chilling scenes is a song called ‘The Art of the Possible’, which was Bismarck’s description of politics. The scene illustrates, in a way so simple as to be severely chilling, the political maneuvering and removal of opponents that was commonplace in Argentinean politics at the time.
For the song, either click http://open.spotify.com/track/52AFTnCzp1jUUOMNAdpbeT or (though lower quality) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kinFwq9FSrQ
