StudienVerlag - Oapen

sober, democratic nation. It is stubborn, sober all-out war they are waging at our
side, for democracy.
Take the Norwegians! Theirs is a Vikings’ tale. A socialist country, yet staunchly
monarchist. The King, taking the leaders, of his „Reds“, his „Marxists“ along with
him in his own destroyerto liberty. Those thousands following in commandeered
coastal craft, in schooners, in rowing boats; not to escape but to return! It is the
nation of the commando raids. To-morrow it will perhaps be the nation of the
Second Front.
And take the Poles! Theirs is an exceptional case, not for the grimness of their
tragedy, but because they formed their own film unit, and succeeded in producing
lately a film that is by far the best of the lot. There is a fighter squadron’s control
room, and a message: „One aircraft missing“: Then there is a pilot handing to the
intelligence officer the lost man’s property: a wrist watch, a handkerchief, a girl’s
photograph, a plain exercise book used for a diary. This he reads aloud. It is the
killed Polish flyer’s diary, from shattered Warsaw into exile and to the Polish squadron
fighting the enemy day and night. All this is very frightful (with a few genuine
Polish terror shots), and yet very simple, moving and melancholic. It is a very short
film … a too short film. This is, I think, a rare compliment.
Some of the most inviting motives are still missing in this Allied symphony.
There is no film of the Greeks; none of the Yugoslavs. The Russians do, of course,
their excellent stuff in Russia, and need not rely on British film production. As to
the Chinese, I do not know.
But there is one gap more, to be filled: These anti-Nazis and anti-Fascists who
come from Austria and Germany, and are most actively and successfully helping
in the great effort to liberate their homelands from the common foe, are not yet
represented in the list of the allied films. But perhaps they will, before long.
What does it all mean, and prove? There was a time, from June 40 to June 41,
the war looked like a British-German war. There is no better means than this bunch
of short, cheap allied films to prove that this war is something vastly different: the
great war of liberation, of all free men, against all powers of darkness.
Der von RN gelobte polnische Kurzfilm ist: „Diary of a Polish Airman“ (7 Minuten, März
1942) von Eugeniusz Cekalski.
Zu Neumanns Plädoyer für (kostengünstige) konsequent antifaschistische Kurzfilme
und für die Heranziehung österreichischer und deutscher Stimmen zu dieser „Symphonie
der Alliierten“ siehe auch den Brief an Arthur Calder Marshall/Film Division
des Ministry of Information vom 11.4.1942 in diesem Band.
Wie aus den Archiv-Akten ersichtlich, ist das Manuskript durch die BBC (nach dem
Ankauf vom 1.6.1942) „for broadcasting abroad“ ins Tschechische, Polnische „and possibly
other languages“ durch den „London Transcription Service“ übersetzt worden.
189