Das boot submarine7/24/2023 Buchheim’s novel caused a massive stir in the 1970s because it thematized the crimes, the guilt, and the pervasive sense of futility among those who had volunteered for service in the U-boat war. The German Kriegsmarine had long been allowed to claim for itself a relatively clean record, and the U-boat fleet in particular was subject to mythification and lionization that had carried over with shocking continuity from Nazi propaganda. In a way, this tight focus was what made Buchheim’s novel so explosive: By spending time with the sailors, listening to their lingo and examining their world, Buchheim shattered a separation that had long existed in German public discourse between the bad Nazis (SS, Gestapo, etc., etc.) and the supposedly apolitical armed forces. Like the movie version, it told a confined, claustrophobic tale that thrived on close observation. When Buchheim’s Das Boot was published in 1973, the novel packed an enormous punch. Even back then, Buchheim complained that Petersen had failed to find the antiwar message in his novel, that he had presented the war as adventure rather than “moloch.” It became famous for its incredible camera work, its oppressive sets, its bravura sound design and Klaus Doldinger’s iconic score. But it was nevertheless a technical triumph. To be sure, the film was harrowing, claustrophobic, unvarnished. German filmmakers have made many deeply thoughtful films about the Nazi years, but Petersen’s Das Boot may have been the first film explicitly seeking to wring entertainment from the topic. Making Das Boot is always about Germany and its relationship to its history, but it is also about the global market for the kinds of stories Germans tell about their history. The creators of the new version on Hulu returned to the submarine pen, for a send-off of yet another U-boat. When Wolfgang Petersen made his film version of the book in 1981, he used the pen in La Rochelle as his stage, including for the film’s final scene when the U-boat crew arrives in home harbor only to be mostly killed in a surprise Allied bombing raid. Every few decades, it seems, the German film industry sends a few hundred people in Nazi uniforms to play around in one of these structures. Lothar-Günther Buchheim based his 1973 novel Das Boot on his experiences as a war reporter on several U-boats, and while the novel is fiction, the submarine base in the novel is recognizably the one at Saint-Nazaire. The structure sits around today relatively unchanged-an enduring monument of World War II, and a convenient backdrop for telling stories about it. Its extreme dimensions and sturdiness-the roof alone is more than 20 feet thick-made it impossible to destroy after the war. Like the ones at Saint-Nazaire and Lorient, its colossal berths, titanic dimensions and worn concrete today give the structure the appearance of a relic of prehistoric times. The submarine pen in La Rochelle, France was built in in 1941.
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