Ewiger Wald

Ewiger Wald is a 1936 German film directed by Hanns Springer and Rolf von Sonjevski-Jamrowski.

Ewiger Wald
Directed byHanns Springer
Rolf von Sonjevski-Jamrowski
Produced byAlbert Graf von Pestalozza (producer)
Written byAlbert Graf von Pestalozza (writer)
Carl Maria Holzapfel (poems)
StarringSee below
Music byWolfgang Zeller
CinematographySepp Allgeier
Werner Bohne
Otto Ewald
Wolf Hart
Guido Seeber
A.O. Weitzenberg
Bernhard Wentzel
Edited byArnfried Heyne
Release date
1936
Running time
75 minutes
88 minutes (Germany)
CountryNazi Germany
LanguageGerman

The film is also known as Enchanted Forest (International English title)

Plot summary

Commissioned by Alfred Rosenberg's cultural organization Militant League for German Culture in 1934 under the working title Deutscher Wald–Deutsches Schicksal (German Forest–German Destiny), the feature-length movie premiered in Munich in 1936. Intended as a cinematic proof for the shared destiny of the German woods and the German people beyond the vicissitudes of history, it portrayed a perfect symbiosis of an eternal forest and a likewise eternal people firmly rooted in it between Neolithic and National Socialist times.

In accordance with Rosenberg's anti-Christian beliefs, the first section on prehistory displayed various customs and rituals of an asserted pagan forest religion like a maypole dance or funerals in treetrunk coffins. Further, it depicted the forest sheltering ancient Germanic tribes, Arminius, and the Teutonic Knights, facing the German Peasants' War, being chopped up by war and industry, and being humiliated by black soldiers from the French occupation army. The years of the Weimar Republic appeared to be disastrous for people and forest alike to legitimize the assumption of power and thus the film culminated in a National Socialist May Day celebration filmed at the Berlin Lustgarten.[1]

Cast

References
  1. Pierre Aycoberry The Nazi Question, p11 Pantheon Books New York 1981

Further reading
  • Meder,Thomas. “Die Deutschen als Wald-Volk. Der Kulturfilm EWIGER WALD (1936).” in: Il bosco nella cultura europea tra realtá e immaginario, ed. Guili Liebman Parrinello, 105-129. Rom: Bulzoni, 2002.
  • Wilke, Sabine. “'Verrottet, verkommen, von fremder Rasse durchsetzt'. The Colonial Trope as Subtext of the Nazi-'Kulturfilm' EWIGER WALD (1936).” German Studies Review 24 (2001): 353-376.
  • Zechner, Johannes. “Wald, Volksgemeinschaft und Geschichte: Die Parallelisierung natürlicher und sozialer Ordnungen im NSKG-Kulturfilm EWIGER WALD (1936).” in: Kulturfilm im „Dritten Reich“, ed. Ramón Reichert, 109-118. Wien: Synema, 2006.
  • Zechner, Johannes. “Politicized Timber: The 'German Forest' and the Nature of the Nation 1800-1945.” The Brock Review 11.2 (2011): 19-32.
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