Jo Fox

Millions Like Us? Accented Language and the “Ordinary” in British Films of the Second World War

T the British mind, accent has long been an indicator of social status and individual or collective identities. During the Second World War, it came to play a significant role in defining the new social positioning resultant from the cultural construct of the “people’s war.” At a time when British propagandists concentrated on the image of the “ordinary” man and woman and, in particular, their integration within the organic whole, the problem of social identity was brought into sharp focus, representing the nation reconfigured. In attempting to connect the wider populace with the war effort and the drive for unity, propagandists knew that representations of the “ordinary” had to be realistic, creating an individualized, personal identification with the role of the “everyman” and foregrounding “his” experience. Naturally, accent and language played a key role in this process, featuring prominently in appeals set within the “people’s

Justifying war : propaganda, politics and the modern age

This book is not only about Just War Theory. Rather, it is a collection of essays by leading international historians who have analyzed how wars in the modern age have been justified in different political, economic and cultural contexts.1 It starts from the premise that wars have always been with us. Each essay is placed in historical context with the intention to question whether the Just War Tradition remains a valid theoretical framework for governing principles of how and why wars are fought. If Just War Theory (albeit with important redefinitions) has survived the test of different types of war during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, will it remain robust in the face of the challenges of the twenty-first century? In the modern age, once wars have begun, belligerent states, in order rapidly to mobilize opinion, invariably begin publishing accounts of how the war has been caused. They do so because the issue of responsibility is one of the key elements in the propaganda battle for ‘hearts and minds’. The relationship between the need to justify war and the means of communications is the other central feature of this volume. Propaganda came of age in the twentieth century. The development of mass- and multi-media offered a fertile ground for propaganda and total war — and, later, global conflict and asymmetric warfare — provided the impetus needed for its growth. Over the past 100 years, ‘opinion management’ has become a major preoccupation of states, in times of both war and peace.

‘Heavy Hands and Light Touches’: Approaches to the Study of Cinematic Culture in the Third Reich

In 1996, Eric Rentschler claimed that ‘cinema in the Third Reich involved a division of labour between heavy hands and light touches’. Such a description is a fitting comment on both the organisational processes of the propaganda machine under the Nazis and the sometimes inconsistent messages of their feature film productions. Issues surrounding the nature of cinematic culture in the Third Reich have prompted intense debates among film scholars. This article seeks to outline the key debates and issues, concluding with an analysis of Veit Harlans Der grose Konig, with reference to the diverse methodological approaches employed to study film under National Socialism. It argues that one needs to understand both the ‘heavy hands’ and the ‘light touches’ of NS film policy and production to enable a deeper understanding of feature films produced in the Third Reich.