9/15/22
Newsletter98
The Crack of Dawn
This may be the biggest overlooked fact of the 20th century. A bit of inaccurate reporting quite possibly led to the extermination of six million Jews.
After the four most brutal years in human history, known as World War I, Kaiser Wilhelm II fled to Holland and abdicated on November 9, 1918. The government fell to the majority party in the Reichstag, the Social Democrats. About half of the Social Democrats were gentile centrists; the other half were an assemblage of: Jews, Bolsheviks, Socialists, Marxists, Communists, or combinations thereof. The top three Social Democrats were not Jewish. On November 11, the Social Democrats sent their number four man, Matthias Erzberger, a former member of the Catholic Centre Party, also not a Jew, to Compiègne, France, to sign the armistice agreement. As Mattias Erzberger was about to sign he said, “I am signing this important document on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.” Following Erzberger’s interesting numeric observation and signature, the brutal hostilities of World War I ceased. 40 million casualties; 20 million deaths. The German newspapers immediately misreported that Matthias Erzberger was Jewish. Given his name and his prominence in the Jew-infested Social Democratic Party, it was an easy mistake to make. This error in reportage, picked up and repeated in newspapers across the country, was sufficient fuel to ignite the long-festering antisemitism that had been brewing in Germany for hundreds of years. This error became the excuse for Germany losing the war, and became Germany’s Big Lie: “The Jews stabbed us in the back.” Catholic Matthias Erzberger was assassinated in 1921 for being “the Jew who signed the armistice”
I love the all-too-few books and stories of Carson McCullers, which are expertly written and mystically strange. She published her first story at the age of 19 in the prestigious magazine, Story, in 1936. McCullers published her first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, in 1940 at the age of 23, and it was a big hit and a critical sensation. She wrote the beautiful novella, The Member of the Wedding, in 1946. She adapted the novella into a play that became a big Broadway success in 1950-51. OK, here’s where Carson McCullers meets Hollywood.
Young whippersnapper producer Stanley Kramer, who would ultimately produce and/or direct: High Noon, The Caine Mutiny, The Defiant Ones, Judgement at Nuremburg, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, to name but a few, buys the film rights to The Member of the Wedding. Kramer sets up an unheard of deal with Columbia – the gist of a tale for another time – takes the whole Broadway cast, meaning three people: Julie Harris, Ethel Waters and seven-year-old Brandon DeWilde, and gets his buddy, Fred Zinneman to direct. Zinneman had just directed High Noon for Kramer and would in the same year, 1953, direct the Best Picture of the year, From Here to Eternity. The Member of the Wedding (1953) is one of my most favorite movies that I have seen innumerable times. It was also Harry Cohn, founder and president of Columbia Pictures, single most-hated film ever produced by his company.
And with that, I bid you bonjour.