German animator Hans Fischerkoesen

December 3, 2006 4:15 PM

1942's Weather-Beaten Melody [youtube], an innovative nine-minute cartoon by German animator Hans Fischerkoesen in which insects discover an abandoned phonograph in a meadow. "To fully appreciate Fischerkoesen's daring, one must remember that the Nazis had forbidden jazz and swing as an Afro-Judaic plot to undermine traditional German culture," says William Moritz in "Resistance And Subversion in Animated Films of The Nazi Era: the Case of Hans Fischerkoesen." Before and after subverting Goebbels' battle with Disney, Fisherkoesen made lively cartoons for Philips light bulbs, grocery stores, cigarettes, stockings and digestive aids. [Shorter version of Moritz' article, with pics] [via Glyph Jockey]
posted by mediareport (10 comments total)

Sadly, neither The Snowman (1943) nor The Silly Goose (1944) are available online, although the first can be bought as part of this compilation.
posted by mediareport at 4:18 PM on December 3, 2006

Hmm. In light of the Nazi suppression of Jazz, I wonder if this film is a commentary? The family are clearly German, though I also detect a hint of yiddish sometimes.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 4:56 PM on December 3, 2006

This guitarist I work with related to me a Nazi author's opinion of Jazz while occupying France.

Something along the lines of "it is horrible to march to."
posted by sourwookie at 6:20 PM on December 3, 2006

McDerMott

I Love to Singa is a riff on the first commercial sound film, "The Jazz Singer", which starred Al (not Owl) Jolson as the son of a yiddish cantor, who wanted to sing jazz (or jezz).
posted by hexatron at 6:52 PM on December 3, 2006

That short film was lovely, mr. Thank you.
posted by mmahaffie at 7:29 PM on December 3, 2006

You're welcome. That catchy chorus won't leave my head. :)

His story's pretty interesting; the Soviets imprisoned him after the war as a Nazi sympathizer but he was exonerated in 1948, then escaped to the West with his family. Moritz seems to think that just keeping Nazi propaganda out of his films was a major accomplishment for Fischerkoesen, let alone including joyous cooperation and sensual dancing.

Near the phonograph lies an "abandoned" clasp from a woman's garter belt (with a "lucky" four-leafed clover growing out of it!), which suggests that the interrupted picnic that left behind the musical instrument had also involved erotic play -- something also strictly forbidden by the puritanical Nazi codes. So, from beneath the charming surface of this cartoon emerges a subversive message: women, far from the unnatural Nazi-designated stereotype of revolving around "children, church and kitchen," can escape into Nature to be self-reliant and adventurous, erotic and free -- they can rediscover or revitalize a suppressed world of forbidden joy that is found in music and friendship between diverse creatures; creatures who may be brown or white, frog or caterpiller, or even a pair of ladybug beetles who may be a same-sex couple...the entire community of animals depicted in Weather-beaten Melody are peaceful, friendly, fun-loving, imaginative and altruistic -- quite the opposite of the Nazi requirements for a dedicated Aryan citizen.

Hard to tell how much power that kind of stuff had at the time, but it's interesting to think of folks working to spread a more open-hearted message in the midst of such a horridly authoritarian society.
posted by mediareport at 8:50 PM on December 3, 2006

jazz and swing as an Afro-Judaic plot to undermine traditional... culture

Hey, that's kind of a cool idea.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 9:01 PM on December 3, 2006

What a wonderful post, mediareport, thank you! If I could favorite it twice, I would. The animation is great - he even was prescient about scratch. The article is well worth a read, very interesting, and makes me want to do more exploration about resistance within Germany. I am only partway through the commercials, I love the Phillips one. If we had commercials like that, I would go out of my way to watch them!
posted by madamjujujive at 10:08 PM on December 3, 2006

Wow. I wasn't going to watch the video until I read mediareport's quote. That's some pretty amazing animation for the age. Not a hint of shortcuts.
posted by neckro23 at 10:12 PM on December 3, 2006

There's a very fine novella about the Nazi suppression of Jazz, by Josef Skvorecky, a writer who lived through it, called 'The Bass Saxophone'.

There's an excerpt here on Skvorecky's website.

Thanks for the info on I Love to Singa, hexatron. I don't know why I never made the connection with The Jazz Singer. After all, I've seen the Jolson Story (with Larry Parks playing Asa himself) often enough.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 3:16 PM on December 4, 2006