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Making a Fool of the Madman

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February 6, 2022 by fitzgeraldam

 

This meme is clearly making fun of the scene where Reinhardt Heydrich walks into the room full of Czech and Nazi officials to address the Skoda workers’ strike. The scene then has Heydrich speak in German while, to the viewer, everyone else in the room is speaking in English. The German spoken by the Hangman is spoken without subtitles and at first one might find this confusing. However, as Brecht states, Lang made the movie have this detail to portray the Nazi figurehead as he was to the Czechs and to make the audience hate him more than they already would have. Lang portrays him as a foreigner, an unknown who is speaking down to those who the audience understand. The objective was to portray Heydrich as an occupyer, an other. This sets the scene for a justifiable cause for the main characters. This is emphasized when Heydrich gets up to speak in front of the crowd, when he ridiculously emphasizes his German in a movie made to be a form of propaganda during the war. If someone was to speak German during WWII the first thought would be that they’re the “bad guy”, and even though the other Germans in the room speak English, to point out the main villain, Lang made this artistic choice.


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