The Technique and Content of Hitler's War Propaganda Films: Part I: Karl Ritter and His Early Films

A FORMER Imperial Air Force captain by the name of Karl Ritter, just discharged from the army, given back to the civilian life of an unsuccessful artist, walked through the streets of MunichSchwabing. He was hopeless, desperate, and malcontent. He was full of hate, but his hate was aimless. It was December, 1918. Imperial Germany had been defeated. When the Air Force captain came home from the front, he saw new men trying to rebuild a "better Germany." Karl Ritter, a young Bavarian from a middleclass family, his mother an opera singer, his father also an unsuccessful artist, did not join them. On the contrary, like another former soldier of Imperial Germany's defeated army-ex-corporal Adolf Hitler-he held the young republic responsible for the Imperium's defeat as well as for his personal disaster. The jobless paperhanger Hitler strolled through the streets of Vienna. The jobless artist Karl Ritter walked the pavements of Schwabing. Full of disgust about everything, including himself, the former Air Force captain said: "Our life was useless and senseless. In me, as in many others of my kind, was a bitterness and hopelessness-the torturing thought of desolation and hatred. All around us was this artificial life of frenzied pleasure-seeking. This was the life given back to us. To me it was a life not worth living."' There were similar feelings in the breast of ex-corporal Adolf Hitler. But the hate of the ex-corporal had already found a direc-