Abstract
This article from Neues
Deutschland, the official daily newspaper of the Socialist Unity
Party of Germany (SED), continued the East German tradition of
associating West Germany with fascism and Nazism, seizing upon a
controversy caused by the attempt by the West German embassy in France
to have the French documentary Night and
Fog withdrawn from the Cannes film festival. The film documented
the horrors of the concentration camps and also showed the
participation of the Vichy regime in Nazi crimes. Contrary to claims
made in the article, the film was not withdrawn from the festival,
however, it was shown out of competition. The film was directed by
Alain Resnais, a French avant-garde filmmaker; he insisted on making
the film with people who had been directly affected by the Holocaust,
as he felt that he could not do justice to the event himself. He
worked with Jean Cayrol, a French novelist and poet who spent three
years in a concentration camp after participating in the French
Resistance, who wrote the narration for the film, and Hanns Eisler, an
Austrian composer who had gone into exile after his music was banned
by the Nazi party, who composed the score. Eisler was a lifelong
communist; he emigrated to the United States in 1938 but was
blacklisted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities and
eventually deported in 1948—he returned to Austria, but later moved to
East Berlin, and is most well-known for composing the national anthem
of East Germany. The film was show in East Germany during Leipzig Film
Week in November 1956, but the state film company DEFA claimed that
the West German version of the film had been mistranslated; they
created their own translation that suited the communist ideals of East
Germany better, thus the film was misused by the very people who were
accusing West Germany of misusing and suppressing the film.