Parallels and meridians

Some weeks ago, Arte, the French-German TV-channel, showed a documentary about Leni Riefenstahl, who was to become Hitler’s favorite filmmaker in the 1930s. The feature focused on a film from 1933 : S.O.S . Eisberg.

Some weeks later, reading the memoirs of the British historian Eric Hobsbawm, who spent two years in Berlin in 1931-1933, I learn that his uncle was involved in the production of that film.

I find fascinating the way in which stories interconnect when researching a subject. Young Eric, who had no idea at the time that he would once become a distinguished historian, not in Germany but in Britain, hears from his uncle Sidney that an adventure film is going to be shot among Greenland’s icebergs. He may also have heard that the main female role was held by Leni Riefenstahl, who at the time had earned some celebrity starring in mountain-films.

Some years later, Eric, by then an active Communist, had graduated in Cambridge while Leni had already made two successful films to the glory of Nazi Germany : The triumph of the Will and Olympia. None of them knew that in 1933 their lives had briefly and remotely touched one another.

There are parallels in history, and where parallels are found, meridians cannot be far away. But this Eisberg story looks more like a diagonal line, connecting not North and South Poles or the equatorial territories with each other, but Greenland with Britain, via Germany and Italy, describing an improbable line through different countries and opposite social and political worlds.

S.O.S. Eisberg was based on a real story : the expedition to rescue the crew of an Italian dirigible in Greenland in 1928. The director was Arnold Fanck, who was a pioneer of the mountain-film genre, a genre where Leni Riefenstahl also appeared as an actress.

Between 1931 and 1933, Eric Hobsbawm, still a teenager, lived in West Berlin with his aunt and uncle (his parents being both dead). Though born in Austria, he was a British citizen. In Berlin, he attended a secondary school, the Prinz Heinrich-Gymnasium (today Friedrich-List-Schule). In his autobiography, « Interesting times », he describes his teachers as mostly conservative and right-wing oriented, but not nazis or especially antisemites.

 

Friedrich-List Schule

His uncle Sidney had got a job with Universal Pictures, owned by Carl Laemmle, a German-born American businessman and filmmaker. One of his jobs was to organize the shooting of S.O.S. Eisberg, a polar adventure with the air-ace Ernst Udet, who was earning his living as a stunt flyer until he got a distinguished place in Hitler’s air force.