Having rewatched my laserdisc of "The Blue Max" I have to put it up there along with Cross of Iron and Stalingrad just for the epic battle scenes of the Ludendorf offensive and the aerial combat scenes.
I do find it vey sad and disturbing that the 2 of the prominent films that portray the German military, Cross of Iron and Blue Max, feature characters whose whole purpose is to get the respective medals, Stransky and the Iron Cross, Stachel and the Pour Le Merite. Both will do anything, including murder, to acheive their goals.
The 2 films have other parallels as well, the biggest is that they both have James Mason. In the Blue Max he portrays a general whose sole interest is to preserve the German Officer Corps from the coming defeat. In Cross of iron he portrays the war weary colonel who sees the coming defeat and welcomes it as being long overdue. In both films he is excellent as uasal and make both characters come alive.
Both films have members of the acting Schell family, Maxmillian as Stransky in Cross of Iron and Carl Schell, his brother, as von Richtofen in Blue Max
Link to my Cross of Iron articles
http://www.wargamer.com/articles/cr...ron/default.asp
http://www.wargamer.com/articles/cross_of_iron_2/
and scenarios
http://www.wargamer.com/hosted/stee...s/spotlight.asp
I know, shameless plug:D
Cross of Iron and Blue Max
Moderator: maddog986
Cross of Iron and Blue Max
Brent Grenadier Richards
__________________
[url=http://
__________________
[url=http://
-
AbsntMndedProf
- Posts: 1475
- Joined: Fri Jul 06, 2001 8:00 am
- Location: Boston, Massachusetts
- Contact:
Don't forget Karl Michael Vogler as the dedicated officer Otto Heidemann. IMHO, his performance makes The Blue Max. His efforts to turn his flyers into proper officers is in stark contrast to Stachel's desire to earn the Pour le Merite and James Mason's Graf's desire to make Stachel into a hero at all costs.
Eric Maietta
Eric Maietta
This is an e-mail I got from one of my fans.
It has photos so if you want to get the full effect, e-mail me and I will forward it to you
brentr@matrixgames.com
From: Gerald Turner Sent: Thursday, August 14, 2003 3:58 AM
To: editor@wargamer.com
Subject: Cross of Iorn-to Brent R
These are some Desgnr notes that I made up for my Combat Mission BB Campaign.
I thought you might like it ...
PS if you might like to join my campaign...write me and let me know...we can use one more...
It’s a RolePlaying Campaign with you taking a German armored Battalion and me role-playing the Russians....
E-mail me and let me know if you do want to play...
on to the notes...
Gerald T
Why do I love Eastern Front War games so much?
Why more than any other theater in any other war?
Is it the relative equal capabilities of the armored fighting vehicles, along with the evenness of the two combatant’s air power air power?
The scope and range of vehicle design starting with simple light Tanks at the beginning to the super heavies at the end of the campaign?
What makes this part of the war special for me?
From a game sense it is the above, but other War Games have those elements, it must be something else.
It might be the transition of the German army in this campaign, and more distinctly the German fighting man from the beginning to end of this struggle.
It is a harsh transition from cohesion of self, highly differentiated ego conciseness, to utter degeneration and disintegration of the soul.
At the start of the campaign, the Germans are in a highly civilized state. They have a high degree of culture.
It may be a sick twisted Nazi culture, but is a highly refined one. If you look at the photos of the Troops preparing to march in to Russia they seem to be enjoying quiet a high degree of solidity.
Nice uniforms, so prim and proper!
The problem they run in to as they push deeper into the Soviet hinterlands, is that there are no café's to stop and rest at, no hotels, country inns or any other civilized amenities .This compares unfavorably to the conquest of France, where they had the luxury of occupying a country of high culture and civilized refinements, a place where people understood, and held the same values of western civilization.
Unlike France, Russia stands at the edge of enlightened culture.
As he drives deeper into the wilds of the East, the German infantry man only finds one stinking hovel after another. It’s always another ratty village. Even the big cities are rather crude and Spartan!
And he is not able to relate to the peasants in their straw huts.
And so this harsh environment of rustic barbarism slowly begins to peel away the thin veneer of civilization that separates the higher man from unconscious base animal existence.
The German solder is faced with an option of expending a lot of energy maintaining his high cultural bearing, but at the cost of perhaps lowering his ability to survive in a brutal environment where degree of cultural refinement are useless for the purposes of survival.
But if he goes native, and discards his lofty personal values and principles, and descends down to the basic expedient level required to survive on the eastern front, he has lost the very thing that makes him better then the lesser races he disparages so much.
He is no longer qualifies for the declaration of being part of any higher master race!
So at last he arrives at The Gates of Moscow, or Stalingrad, and is hurled back by waves of howling Russian infantry charging out of a raging blizzard!
In this brutal battle for existence he is striped of every thing that he once considered of value, only to be left with a signal primal characteristic, the will to survive, and then perhaps to lose even that.
This is very edge of the abyss, beyond what lays only the howling void, a total loss of all things that give a civilized man his character and identity. The men of the German army are left wandering bewilderedly into the icy darkness of the Russian winter.
The end of the conscious ego based self, all principles, precepts, and values of civilized man gone, reduced to survival instinct, and nothing else…
Is this the necessary fate of all men who journey to the edge?
Do not all men crumble when staring into the abyss?
Is there not that one in a thousand?
Is their not one that can survive the striping away of all refinements, and still maintain some degree of a higher nobler character?
Yes there is one!
Steiner!
Steiner!
Steiiiinnnneeer!
Sgt Steiner is not affected by the loss of the trappings of civilization, because his strength does not come from the culture around him.
It is not a product of any moral or religious teaching.
Throughout all the chaos and turmoil swirling around him he is able to maintain an integrated sense of self because his power is drawn from life it’s self.
Who and what he is can not be thrown down by the conditions of life he finds himself in. He is those very conditions. And life can not destroy life.
Life can only break apart that what is not life. What is not life? What stands opposed to life?
That would be the ascetic ideals that are a creation of the civilized man;
moral systems,
religious values,
political points of view,
Nazi ideology.
A master race self identification value.
Steiner is too simple a man for these adornments.
He operates on a basic principle.
The principle of the self.
He goes by what is his self.
What is not his self he rejects.
He is pure.
He is the stuff of life itself, he is a natural man.
Therefore he survives…
At the end of the movie is the quote:
Bertolt Brecht:
"Don't rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the world stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again."
So after the ascetic ideals are broken upon the gates of life, and the natural man lives on, it begins all over again. Another army is raised, another host is directed eastward and the battle for supremacy over life is waged anew…
When we see the Wehrmacht march off in to the Mother Land, we are witness to the Eternal Recurrence.
We see the great cycle of life.
Out of nature comes man, ascends to a great height of refinement, and is then overthrown by the very forces that brought him in to existence, returning to the primordial ooze that brought him fourth.
We are faced with a dilemma; remain pure and simple like Steiner, ever balanced on the knife edge, ever hovering between two incompatible states of being, that of becoming more civilized, more ego aware, and the deeper realm of awareness, of remaining part of the misty origins, the dim shadowy beginnings of life, having no goal, never building any edifice of higher distinctiveness that life may then throw down and destroy.
But this involves an acceptance that we may never know what the view is from the great heights, never know levels of achievement, and completion of higher goals that are beyond the reach of the simple man!
We may want what the Prussian officer in the movie wants, the Iron Cross.
The Iron Cross symbolizes the bringing together all the multiplicity of life, the vast array of powers and aspects of existence into an integrated self of absolute supremacy.
To become a god! One of the giants that walk the earth!
But this always leads to disaster, the pinnacle of absolute power and completion can never be attained!
Life will destroy all that is not life, and the Iron Cross ideal of total integration of ourselves with all things-while at the same time maintaining a mastery of all thing that are not ourselves , is opposed to life, is not of Life!
So as the brave boys march off to Russia we wish them the best of luck, knowing full well that all the luck in the world will not carry a man to, nor keep him from, his ultimate destiny.
The infinite experience of The Eternal Cycle of life.
So perhaps it is not the Iron Cross we seek, but something else, perhaps we hope one day to embrace our destiny of forever striving, forever marching off to a war for something that can never be conquered or possessed.
An eternal campaign whose objective is the nonobjective to one day be standing in the exact center of the magic circle of life.
That’s what’s behind the gates. Our destiny
It has photos so if you want to get the full effect, e-mail me and I will forward it to youbrentr@matrixgames.com
From: Gerald Turner Sent: Thursday, August 14, 2003 3:58 AM
To: editor@wargamer.com
Subject: Cross of Iorn-to Brent R
These are some Desgnr notes that I made up for my Combat Mission BB Campaign.
I thought you might like it ...
PS if you might like to join my campaign...write me and let me know...we can use one more...
It’s a RolePlaying Campaign with you taking a German armored Battalion and me role-playing the Russians....
E-mail me and let me know if you do want to play...
on to the notes...
Gerald T
Why do I love Eastern Front War games so much?
Why more than any other theater in any other war?
Is it the relative equal capabilities of the armored fighting vehicles, along with the evenness of the two combatant’s air power air power?
The scope and range of vehicle design starting with simple light Tanks at the beginning to the super heavies at the end of the campaign?
What makes this part of the war special for me?
From a game sense it is the above, but other War Games have those elements, it must be something else.
It might be the transition of the German army in this campaign, and more distinctly the German fighting man from the beginning to end of this struggle.
It is a harsh transition from cohesion of self, highly differentiated ego conciseness, to utter degeneration and disintegration of the soul.
At the start of the campaign, the Germans are in a highly civilized state. They have a high degree of culture.
It may be a sick twisted Nazi culture, but is a highly refined one. If you look at the photos of the Troops preparing to march in to Russia they seem to be enjoying quiet a high degree of solidity.
Nice uniforms, so prim and proper!
The problem they run in to as they push deeper into the Soviet hinterlands, is that there are no café's to stop and rest at, no hotels, country inns or any other civilized amenities .This compares unfavorably to the conquest of France, where they had the luxury of occupying a country of high culture and civilized refinements, a place where people understood, and held the same values of western civilization.
Unlike France, Russia stands at the edge of enlightened culture.
As he drives deeper into the wilds of the East, the German infantry man only finds one stinking hovel after another. It’s always another ratty village. Even the big cities are rather crude and Spartan!
And he is not able to relate to the peasants in their straw huts.
And so this harsh environment of rustic barbarism slowly begins to peel away the thin veneer of civilization that separates the higher man from unconscious base animal existence.
The German solder is faced with an option of expending a lot of energy maintaining his high cultural bearing, but at the cost of perhaps lowering his ability to survive in a brutal environment where degree of cultural refinement are useless for the purposes of survival.
But if he goes native, and discards his lofty personal values and principles, and descends down to the basic expedient level required to survive on the eastern front, he has lost the very thing that makes him better then the lesser races he disparages so much.
He is no longer qualifies for the declaration of being part of any higher master race!
So at last he arrives at The Gates of Moscow, or Stalingrad, and is hurled back by waves of howling Russian infantry charging out of a raging blizzard!
In this brutal battle for existence he is striped of every thing that he once considered of value, only to be left with a signal primal characteristic, the will to survive, and then perhaps to lose even that.
This is very edge of the abyss, beyond what lays only the howling void, a total loss of all things that give a civilized man his character and identity. The men of the German army are left wandering bewilderedly into the icy darkness of the Russian winter.
The end of the conscious ego based self, all principles, precepts, and values of civilized man gone, reduced to survival instinct, and nothing else…
Is this the necessary fate of all men who journey to the edge?
Do not all men crumble when staring into the abyss?
Is there not that one in a thousand?
Is their not one that can survive the striping away of all refinements, and still maintain some degree of a higher nobler character?
Yes there is one!
Steiner!
Steiner!
Steiiiinnnneeer!
Sgt Steiner is not affected by the loss of the trappings of civilization, because his strength does not come from the culture around him.
It is not a product of any moral or religious teaching.
Throughout all the chaos and turmoil swirling around him he is able to maintain an integrated sense of self because his power is drawn from life it’s self.
Who and what he is can not be thrown down by the conditions of life he finds himself in. He is those very conditions. And life can not destroy life.
Life can only break apart that what is not life. What is not life? What stands opposed to life?
That would be the ascetic ideals that are a creation of the civilized man;
moral systems,
religious values,
political points of view,
Nazi ideology.
A master race self identification value.
Steiner is too simple a man for these adornments.
He operates on a basic principle.
The principle of the self.
He goes by what is his self.
What is not his self he rejects.
He is pure.
He is the stuff of life itself, he is a natural man.
Therefore he survives…
At the end of the movie is the quote:
Bertolt Brecht:
"Don't rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the world stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again."
So after the ascetic ideals are broken upon the gates of life, and the natural man lives on, it begins all over again. Another army is raised, another host is directed eastward and the battle for supremacy over life is waged anew…
When we see the Wehrmacht march off in to the Mother Land, we are witness to the Eternal Recurrence.
We see the great cycle of life.
Out of nature comes man, ascends to a great height of refinement, and is then overthrown by the very forces that brought him in to existence, returning to the primordial ooze that brought him fourth.
We are faced with a dilemma; remain pure and simple like Steiner, ever balanced on the knife edge, ever hovering between two incompatible states of being, that of becoming more civilized, more ego aware, and the deeper realm of awareness, of remaining part of the misty origins, the dim shadowy beginnings of life, having no goal, never building any edifice of higher distinctiveness that life may then throw down and destroy.
But this involves an acceptance that we may never know what the view is from the great heights, never know levels of achievement, and completion of higher goals that are beyond the reach of the simple man!
We may want what the Prussian officer in the movie wants, the Iron Cross.
The Iron Cross symbolizes the bringing together all the multiplicity of life, the vast array of powers and aspects of existence into an integrated self of absolute supremacy.
To become a god! One of the giants that walk the earth!
But this always leads to disaster, the pinnacle of absolute power and completion can never be attained!
Life will destroy all that is not life, and the Iron Cross ideal of total integration of ourselves with all things-while at the same time maintaining a mastery of all thing that are not ourselves , is opposed to life, is not of Life!
So as the brave boys march off to Russia we wish them the best of luck, knowing full well that all the luck in the world will not carry a man to, nor keep him from, his ultimate destiny.
The infinite experience of The Eternal Cycle of life.
So perhaps it is not the Iron Cross we seek, but something else, perhaps we hope one day to embrace our destiny of forever striving, forever marching off to a war for something that can never be conquered or possessed.
An eternal campaign whose objective is the nonobjective to one day be standing in the exact center of the magic circle of life.
That’s what’s behind the gates. Our destiny
Brent Grenadier Richards
__________________
[url=http://
__________________
[url=http://
Re: Cross of Iron and Blue Max
This isn't an uncommon plot device and there is nearly always a similar character in most movies about the US military. The bungling or deviously dangerous officer looking only for fame or personal advancement is a staple in war movies.Originally posted by Grenadier
I do find it vey sad and disturbing that the 2 of the prominent films that portray the German military, Cross of Iron and Blue Max, feature characters whose whole purpose is to get the respective medals, Stransky and the Iron Cross, Stachel and the Pour Le Merite. Both will do anything, including murder, to acheive their goals.
It's also interesting to note that the two characters in Cross of Iron and Blue Max are polar opposites of each other seeking the same goal. Stransky is from the Prussian military elite with all the social and class status of that group, while Stachel is from the lower class and is an outsider clawing his way through discrimination. Both are dispicable characters. So who has the harder task? Stransky trying to save face and prove his elite status or Stachel trying to break through the glass ceiling of class hatred?
“You're only young once but you can be immature for as long as you want”