FORBIDDEN REFERENCES

Mark R. Hasan : You managed to include extracts of vintage propaganda films - Hitlerjunge Quex / Hitler Youth Quex (1933), Stukas (1941), Pour le Mérite (1938) and Kolberg (1945) - which is rare for a German production.

Mark Cairns : I think within a documentary, showing clips of the films is probably permissible because you're showing them within a context of talking about those films. We didn't show it, but I know that with Triumph of the Will, it has to be preceded by a talk or some kind of introduction, and I think quite rightly, because these are quite unfortunate films... Because we were telling the story of UFA, we had a legitimate use of those things… We went to the Bundesarchiv, and had a great few days digging through cans of film.

Carl Schmitt : We have clips from Kolberg, but you're limited to two minutes. You can't show more that that. I don't know why. I mean, there are other films which are much worse than Kolberg in terms of propaganda, but with Kolberg, I think it's still the last finished film of the Third Reich that made it to the cinema. The shooting was parallel to when they were shooting Life Goes On.

MRH : Some of the films your excerpted have appeared on VHS outside of Germany.

Carl Schmitt: I know. We got a lot of stuff from America because there was no other way of getting it; not for cutting into our film, but for research reasons.

MRH: There must have been a tremendous amount of propaganda that was produced at that time. It seems even name directors were trapped in the propaganda machine, and some never re-established their filmmaking careers in postwar Germany .

Mark Cairns : Yes, and this is one of the reasons we think that parts of Life Goes On might still be in existence, because a lot of these films were then taken by the Russians when they took over the UFA studios, and chopped up and used in their own propaganda films. There was an awful lot of propaganda produced.

MRH: There's one film that I've seen called Wunschkonzert / Wish Concert. Essentially, the premise is that two people meet while attending the Berlin Olympics, and over several years, keep up their relationship while the war goes on in some vague European battle front.

Carl Schmitt: It's very rare when you see uniforms or flags in the films from the 1940s. In a lot of these films, the Nazis don't exist, which is very interesting. A couple of films are propaganda films, but the majority were just musicals, comedies, dramas, and love stories, where you never saw a Nazi in the whole film. This was a clever idea from Goebbels who wanted a clear line between the harsh reality in Germany, and what people would see in the cinema for entertainment.

MRH : There's no references to Jews or concentration camps in Wunschkonzert, and it's not dissimilar from a standard war drama: you have romance, tragedy, soldier camaraderie, and some combat sequences, except it gets a bit chilling when a visiting soldier on leave gets a Seig Heil from the local kids; and when he goes to his superior's office, there's a picture of Hitler on the wall.

Mark Cairns : I think they were conscious of the fact that their propaganda had to be of a kind of subtle variety. I mean, the UFA were making an awful lot of musicals and comedies during the war, and Life Goes On was going to be one of the first films that showed some degree of reality.

I think it was supposed to be set in 1943, and it was showing the bombing. One of the main characters was a scientist developing something to help night-fighters shoot down British bombers. One of the other characters was a [female air raid warden] who worked on the German railways and died during an air raid. There was also a pilot who was obviously trying to shoot down the British bombers.

Those were the characters, and Carl often described it to me as a kind of Coronation Street – lots of different characters living in a tenement block - and you'd see the wife living in the same block as all the characters, and there would be a big multi-strand storytelling going on with all these different characters, and how they experienced the war and lived through it... There were several endings talked about, but the ending was going to be people sort of carrying on through the ruins after a particularly heavy bombing raid.

Carl Schmitt : At that point, the damage from the bombing was so extreme, Goebbels said, ‘Okay, we'll go another way now. Life Goes On will be the first film where we will show the reality where Germany is at war, and we show the destruction, but if we stick together, we will make it, we will overcome that, we will win, we will rebuilt the whole thing.' That was his message.

MRH : And I take it this was going to be even more expensive than Kolberg?

Mark Cairns : They were spending an awful lot of money on it, but you have to remember that Liebeneiner wanted this film to last as long as possible to avoid getting sent to the front, because he knew that as soon as that film closed, a lot of his cast and crew would be given guns and sent to fight the Russians, so it was in their interest to keep inventing more expensive set-pieces that would take a long time to do, especially under the wartime circumstances, hence the crazy idea of trying to rebuild the Stetina Railway Station in a studio – a massive undertaking in any film, but they were going to do it in wartime.

MRH: Did they manage to actually construct any of the sets, or did the plans remain on paper?

Mark Cairns : No, I think the Stetina set was built, and the extras were brought in. The extras were from labor camps - what were euphemistically called ‘guest workers' / gastarbeiter from countries that the Germans had invaded - and I think there were a lot of Poles. They built ruined streets while there were real ruins outside, which seems rather ridiculous.