Swing Kid oder Hitler Jugend (English)

The Swing Kids were teens in Germany in the early 30's had swing music for a religion but everything about them came into growing opposition from the steadily increasing power of the NAZIs.  There is no happy ending as many of them were sent off to work or concentration camps.  The center of it in Germany was Hamburg, the same music city which grew The Beatles.

(Ed:  ahem, was that not Liverpool?)

Of course they grew up there but they made the band became in Germany.  Coming out of there they were The Beatles and now they were a unique presence, albeit with horrendously awful lyrics.

She loves you,
yeah, yeah, yeah

Are you fucking serious?

The Beatles evolved and it seems these days boy bands don't.  Odd phenomenon, that, but way off-topic except insofar as it represents the complete crap which amused teens for music in the early sixties.


In contrast, this is what the Swing Kids did:

"Sing, Sing, Sing" by Benny Goodman, maybe the hottest swing tune of all time and with the inimitable drums of Gene Krupa.  "Smoke another reefer, Krupa!"  (WIKI:  Gene Krupa)


This is aggressively anti-NAZI because it was written by Louis Prima in 1936 but it was covered by the Benny Goodman Orchestra in 1937.  We did not research how the record could get to Germany in those times but somehow that happens.  The factor making it a problem for NAZIS was that Benny Goodman was Jewish.  Swing was generally regarded as Negro music so that brought further NAZI condemnation.

The kids were bright and from homes in the middle to upper classes.  They were blasting all night jitterbugging so they must have been in excellent shape and they probably really were the pretty people at the time.  The movie shows their style.

They were more than pretty people as they continued long after the war started and even after they had been rounded-up by the Gestapo.  Some of them evaded capture and continued working against the NAZIs.


"Swing Kids" is a beautifully-photographed movie and the actors are credible doing what they are doing, all the scenes are beautifully perfect as whatever they are trying to be, and almost all of the characters are beautiful except when they deliberately cast a guy who talks to the Hitler Jugend about the perfection of the master race.  The guy looks like a complete dork.  Well ... that kind of stuff is, in the view here, a silly way to make the point and it doesn't make the point, in any case.  If all the representatives of the master race looked liked dorks, the pitch would not have sold.

While everyone looks credible doing what they're doing, it isn't credible it's really happening to them.  Everything is too beautiful.  Everything most of us know of World War II was in black & white and anything in color was obviously a movie.  The color is immediately dissonant with something we know is going to be one crushing pain of truth.  The story cannot possibly turn out well although it does attempt to characterize the spirit of humans through the kid brother, Willi, when he screams, "SWING HEIL!"

Even though the reality of the situation is not credible, it's reality that this happened.  The story is told too perfectly to be real but it's real nevertheless.  Even so, though it looks like a fairy tale, a really bleak one, it's still at times heartrending.


Something to consider in why American actors were cast for the roles is whether the director was trying to make a point with that as well.  Maybe his purpose was to show Swing Kids can be anywhere, may be needed anywhere, or are needed right now.  (Answer:  right now)


The movie, despite its faults, is a favorite and a fascination as it does its best to show the way kids could be molded or, in some cases, not.  There has also seemed an impression people think the Germans just rolled over for Hitler but the picture gives a more intimate vision of what was really happening and the history shows it is true.


There are always Swing Kids ... until society beats it out of them, turns them into accountants, and puts them into cubicles.

Right now it seems the Swing Kids are mostly likely Goth kids and you don't know what they're doing as you can't even see that world past thirty.  Once you age out from under-30, you are a brick.  That makes it very tough for cops to watch them as the only way to do it is to get creeps from within to narc on them.  No Swing Kid would narc on another but the movie tells the story of how the NAZIs would break them to the point they would or face being shipped off to camps.


Dismissing this as a hysterical comparison is your right but we know the militarization of the police right now.  Many consider it excessive to see them in armored personnel carriers and using major military hardware.  It's not the moment that matters but rather where it's going and at the rate of this progression there will be county sheriffs in ten years calling in B-52 strikes.

Militarization of police forces has increased radically since the sixties and this isn't something I've read but rather I've watched it.  The data points are clear:  sixties had relatively low cop militarization when now we have large-scale cop militarization.  There must have been some change which warranted this so we're assuming someone smuggled an underground army into the country forty years ago and cops have been needing more and more firepower to combat it ever since.

Make of it what you will but I have only one answer:  SWING HEIL!