It wasn't just resentment of Versailles. The back-breaking reparations demanded by Lloyd-George and Clemenceau (and supported by the myopic Wilson in exchange for lip service to his Fourteen Points and the League) made certain that Weimar would be a failed experiment. It took a wheelbarrow of marks to buy bread in the early '20s in Berlin. The stage was set for the man on a horse long before the Great Depression. The average German was fueled by more than hatred for the November criminals. Germany suffered the hunger and deprivation the rest of the world found in 1929 a full decade earlier.HistoryProf wrote:I realize BA explores the 1920s and the transition from Weimar excess into Nazi fascism....I just meant that it fascinates me as - from what i've read - as an honest look at the period that laid the foundation for the horrors of the Third Reich. It's easy to sit back and coolly understand that resentment of the Treaty of Versailles started it all and then crashed headlong into the despair of the Great Depression, giving a power mad dictator like Hitler his opening...but it's a much different thing to try and understand the average joe in those crucial years - and it seems to me that Fassbinder went farther than most in trying to uncover that peculiarly "German" mentality.
I do agree that Fassbinder in BA gives insight into how the average guy - if Franz can be considered average - reacted to the events of the late Weimar Republic. I don't agree that it's a peculiarly German mentality. I find some rather uncomfortable parallels in the Tea Party movement and I think they arise from some very similar situations - the sense that things are out of their control, the rampant xenophobia, the hatred of government in its current incarnation while looking for a leader who validates their world view and feelings about themselves. If Fassbinder were still alive, I wonder if he wouldn't be making films about America?