Tale of a Youth who Set Out to Learn What Fear Was, The (Von einem, der auszog, das Gruseln zu lernen), a prize‐winning puppet film based on the Grimms, and used for teaching Nazi values. In its written form the story is about a young man who has a tender heart but is such a simpleton that he cannot even understand what people mean when they talk about something ‘giving them the shivers’. Reproached for his stupidity by his father, he protests that he is very willing to learn, and would like to start by finding out how to get the shivers. A sexton guarantees to frighten him inside a church tower at midnight, but that has no effect. Nor does sleeping under a gibbet from which seven bodies are hanging. The youth even passes three nights in a haunted castle, thereby winning the king's daughter in marriage, without anything giving him the shivers. Finally his new wife solves the problem by emptying a bucket of small fish over his naked body. Told like this, it embodies folk‐wisdom—‘He who does not know fear is a fool’—and at the same time it is a comic tale about the superiority of female tactics over male.
However, Paul Diehl's 1935 adaptation of this story gives it a different inflection. His was one of a range of silent short films made for the Reichstelle für den Unterrichtsfilm (State Office for Educational Films) and widely shown in German schools. The scene of the night in the castle, though it follows Grimm closely in parts, shows clearly this altered ideological orientation. The youth, now given the name Hans, is swift and violent in his dispatch of a variety of grotesque creatures. He skewers one on a fork and holds it over a flame. He fastens a cat in a vice, cuts its head off, and tosses it into the moat. Unlike the written text, in which the youth feels sorry for a dead body and tries to warm it up, Diehl presents him as pitiless. Since the film has no sound‐track, teachers could talk over it and impose an interpretation: children were taught that the action in the film symbolized the necessity for German fearlessness in stamping out enemies of the state (Jews, gays, Gypsies, non‐Aryans). In 1937 the film was given a gold medal by the government department for which it was made. Nine years later, however, a Unesco commission, charged with the task of de‐Nazifying the teachers and materials that were to be employed in post‐war German schools, came to a different verdict: ‘Though there is nothing that is specifically subversive in this film, there is much that is typically Nazi in outlook, with its approbation of killing and force, coupled with callousness.’ The film was therefore suppressed, and is today little known, despite the technical proficiency of its animation.
Bibliography
- Lang, Andrew, Blue Fairy Book, ed. Brian Alderson (1975).
- Warner, Marina, Cinema and the Realms of Enchantment (1993).
— Terry Staples
