The Living Dead: Episode 1 - On the Desperate Edge of Now

Description

Out of the carnage in Europe 50 years ago, the Allies selected certain memories. They used them to build the official version of the good war. This film is about how that happened. It tells why certain memories have to be buried and forgotten because they contradicted the optimism of the big historical picture. The Living Dead (subtitled Three Films About the Power of the Past) was the second major documentary made by the film-maker Adam Curtis.

On the Desperate Edge of Now

This episode examined how the various national memories of the Second World War were effectively rewritten and manipulated in the Cold War period. For Germany, this began at the Nuremberg Trials, where attempts were made to prevent the Nazis in the dock—principally Hermann Göring—from offering any rational argument for what they had done. Subsequently, however, bringing lower-ranking Nazis to justice was effectively forgotten about in the interests of maintaining West Germany as an ally in the Cold War. For the Allied countries, faced with a new enemy in the Soviet Union, there was a need to portray WW2 as a crusade of pure good against pure evil, even if this meant denying the memories of the Allied soldiers who had actually done the fighting, and knew it to have been far more complex. A number of American veterans told how years later they found themselves plagued with the previously-suppressed memories of the brutal things they had seen and done. The title comes from a veteran’s description of what the uncertainty of survival in combat is like.

Tags