DLBreidenthal

Muse @ Belfast Vital, 23rd August 2017

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The Germans in Wonder Woman are not Nazis.

I just saw a troubling comment on a gifset of Antiope and her badass three-arrow stunt shot at the three german soldiers on the beach. I love that moment as much as anyone. However, this comment referred to her ‘killing Nazis’. And those men were not Nazis. 

Wonder Woman is set in WW1. Hitler would not come to power for over a decade after WW1 ended. Fascism had not yet become a political force in Europe. In fact, Germany’s treatment as a defeated aggressor instead of as an equal party in the armistice negotiations - and later the Treaty of Versailles - despite the Allies’ equal culpability for the war, directly contributed to the rise of fascism and nationalism in Germany.

Stop calling the German soldiers in Wonder Woman Nazis. One of the greatest tragedies of WW1 is that the soldiers on both sides of the trenches were hungry, young, sick, poor men, who had no stake in the war. This article talks about the experiences (at least early in the war) of both sides on the Western front meeting on no man’s land and finding little difference between one another. 

There’s a lot to love about Wonder Woman, and I very much enjoyed it. I also loved the points in the movie when the violence done by Americans and British - such as when Diana speaks to Chief about the death of his people - were addressed as well, but they were brief. The presentation of Germans As The Bad Guys - especially since Aries’ influence was inconsistent as a plot point - has led to people mistakenly reading it as a movie about Nazis, when the Nazis did not exist in 1918. A WW1 setting does not sustain a narrative of one side being ‘heroic’ and the other ‘villainous’, especially if one takes into account the atrocities both sides had committed during the quarter century leading up to the armistice. It troubles me that this movie allows WW1 German soldiers to be read as Nazis. 

It’s worth noting that Steve’s side isn’t really shown to be any more “Right” or heroic than the Germans are…while Ludendorf and Dr Poison are cetrainly villains as well, when we meet them the people in charge on Steve’s side they’re a bunch of clueless, cruel, self important, sexist old men who don’t care about the troops on their own side which is pretty much 100% accurate to what World War I was like…the people giving the orders back then were all basically General Melchett from Blackadder Goes Fourth except even less rational…hell the only person who showed ANY compassion among those in power on Steve’s side turns out to be the GOD OF WAR and only be doing it to further his own evil plans 

“Yeah, WWI was essentially the world’s nastiest and bloodiest game of chicken, turning several dozen small territorial conflicts into a bloody conflagration. Kaiser Wilhelm and his leadership were essentially “the villains” or as close as you got, but it was so much more ambiguous because it was so messy. The decision to set it there instead of WW2 was a brilliant move for the story.” (via @wombatking​)

One of the most powerful visuals in this film is in the moment after Diana has defeated Ares, and the German soldiers around her remove their gas masks, revealing that they are just teenaged boys, as were so many of the soldiers - on both sides. It’s all too easily forgotten how many millions of young lives were so needlessly lost during the First World War, acting on the whims of aloof generals who were so far removed from the front lines and unfamiliar with the terrors of the trenches. Those in charge were content to send boys and young men off to their deaths with inane orders whilst they lived in safety and relative luxury - just as Diana discovered in the war meeting in London. When she unleashed her fury on the men in that room, telling them that they were cowards and should be ashamed, that was the film showing us that the British position in the war was just as immoral as the German. (via @cake-emu-dementor​)

We see the soldiers hugging each other, no matter their affiliation, at the end of the war. They were relieved. They were soldiers stuck in a war of no one. (via @xtaticpearl​)

WW1 perfectly illustrates what Wonder Woman is about. That she has to kill anyone in the movie is supposed to be a goddamn tragedy. And her enjoying the battle at first, before she realizes that above all one must do everything to bring peace, is her journey to becoming Wonder Woman. (via @brachial-saur​)

If the German’s were Nazis, then the whole point of the film, that both sides were equally to blame and that in the end it was the civilians and teenaged soldiers that suffered most, is no longer a valid one.You can’t have that balance, that both sides were equally at wrong, with WW2. One side is unequivocally the worst side, because one side murdered 11 million people and marked two persecuted ethnoreligious groups for complete extermination. (via @physicist-pi​)

The idea that the villain is War and Man’s capacity for evil is really underscored by the end, when the German soldier’s take off their masks and are just teenagers. Anyone who came of Wonder Woman thinking the Germans were the bad guys wasn’t paying attention.  (via @amusingmurff)

Diana is trying to fight war itself, but once set into motion it cannot be stopped. This is shown by Ares setting up the armistice which leads to WWII, the Vietnam War, Korean War, Cold War, and the War on Terrorism. I think that the scariest part of the movie is Diana kills the god of war, but she can never kill/stop war itself. (via @linny500​)

The whole point of it being set in WW1 rather than WW2 is because thematically it doesn't want to present one side as heroic and the other as villainous, but war itself as a evil thing that comes from human nature, on both sides. That’s why a huge plot point is diana becoming disenchanted with steve and the allies as any better. They def could’ve gone to more trouble to humanize more of the germans (as it was only having a few scenes where they show the germans also reacting to the horrors of war and/or celebrating peace). I honestly think the fact that they’re being read as nazis by some is in large part because of lack of education about world war 1 (I’ll admit I don’t know nearly as much about ww1 as ww2) combined with the the fact that in the comics diana became wonder woman explicitly in ww2 and fought nazis like a lot. (via @ironiconion​)

Should also be noted that the rest of the German leaders told Ludendorf that they /must/ strive for peace because their people were dying and hungry and doing terribly. They wanted an end to the whole mess just as much at that point as the others in the armistice. The fact that other people saw it as ‘winning’ and thus ‘beating the bad guys’ is…. pretty much in line with the way things were hypersimplified when viewed later. Like others said, Diana doesn’t pick sides because she’s against the Germans. She’s under the impression (most of the movie) that both sides will stop fighting immediately once Ares is killed. She’s just also under the impression that the most violent man wielding the potentially devastating never-before-seen weapon is Ares, and he just happens to be on the German forces. (And betrays them in favor of killing them and trying to kill the world anyway. Pretty much DC’S WW1 version of Red Skull… or… Red Skull is Marvels WW2 version of Ludendorf? Idk) She even shows doubt about her good/bad judgement when she hears Chief’s story. Had she arrived in WW2 and seen the concentration camps and the hydrogen bomb…. if she saw the attack on Japan or their experiments.. In fact, I can’t imagine her reaction to it. Anything canonical out there?I’m guessing blindly that she only doesn’t flip out because she’s already been hit with the hard truth by then. (via @ponywithpaws​)

I actually thought the film did touch on this nicely in the final scene, when after her victory (I’m not counting that as a spoiler) Diana is standing with German soldiers and they all pull off masks to reveal they’re very young terrified looking guys. Like that was the end scene: good won and all that was left we’re a few soldiers some of whom we’re tired old men with PTSD and the rest of whom were teenagers so happy to be alive. There was no way to feel that any of those men were villains. (via @laudanine​)

To reiterate OP’s point, look at the ending, after Ares is killed. The Germans are pulling off their gas masks, and who are they? Young, scared kids, barely of age to enlist. Every war has its horrors, and every war takes advantage of youth, but I think WWI was notable (among other reasons) for perfecting that advantage. (via @terror-in-glasses)

Wasn’t that the whole point of the Chief character? That the Americans don’t have a moral high ground? I know we hate to hear that, but…(via @mustangsally78)

Also not all the Germans were showed to be evil.  It was pretty clear, I thought, that most of the German generals were in favor of the armistice, and that was why Ludendorf killed them. (via @trashmouse) 

 Don’t forget that the movie does contrast war leaders on opposing sides, although it’s not a direct contrast. As mentioned above the British leaders don’t care about the individual soldiers and are willing to let them die. Then there’s the only other German war leaders we see and they want to end the war because their people are suffering and there’s no point to further fighting. Ludendorf is shown as a wild card on the German side obsessed with his own ideals, he’s not meant to be representative of the German war effort as a whole since he, you know, killed off the other generals in order to force his own agenda. (via @kayrc)

Also the US took so long to enter WW1 because they didn’t think it was the US’s problem. There’s a reason Steve was working with the British. (via @pearlcrandall​)

I completely agree that ignorant viewers need to be far more careful in their language and remember context and that the deep tragedy of World War One is that everyone and no one is the bad guy but I have to raise issue with that final paragraph. The film doesn’t allow the Germans to be read as Nazis. The flags aren’t Nazi swastikas, the fighting is trench warfare and they use horses for transportation, they mention the ottoman empire which was dissolved after WWI ended etc. The viewer getting their World Wars mixed up does that. People are just too used to seeing World War Two, and many people, especially Americans, have very little understanding of The Great War at all, it just doesn’t register for them culturally, so they see a world war, and Germans and immediately go “Oh Nazi” even though that is absolutely not the way things were in reality or in the film. And as for “A WW1 setting does not sustain a narrative of one side being ‘heroic’ and the other ‘villainous’, especially if one takes into account the atrocities both sides had committed during the quarter century leading up to the armistice.” That’s the entire point of the plot twist. Sir Patrick being Ares was very clearly telegraphed through the film, I guessed it almost the second we met him, but that’s because I know that the peace deal was a direct cause of World War Two so of course that’s where the God of War would be. And that’s what the film does, it expects you to know your topic, it doesn’t hold your hand, if you know about the war, nothing in the film is a surprise to you: the youth and innocence of soldiers doing terrible things, the awful truth that Ludendorff is just human, the fact that both sides are equally blood soaked. However the film is aware that it’s audience will make presumptions, that many people won’t have spent a year writing a thesis on the political ramifications of the Treaty of Versailles and how World War One led to World War Two (which is what I did). It knows that the average viewer expects a black and white fight, good guys and bad guys, a clear and obvious villain, an evil empire for us to cheer against full of faceless henchmen that our heroine can cut down without us feeling too guilty about enjoying it. In short, the film puts the viewer in the same position as Diana, who does not understand this war either. And from the moment she realises she’s wrong (when she kills Ludendorff) the film methodically shows you how all of those assumptions that you (and Diana) made were wrong the most impactful of which was literally giving the faceless henchmen faces when the very young German soldiers take their masks off after the fight. It’s not the film that makes this a heroes and villains story, it’s people fundamentally misunderstanding the plot. (via @thebaconsandwichofregret)

I don’t want to disturb @rufeepeach ‘s EXCELLENT commentary but I would like to add something -by the time appeasement failed, in 1939, and Nazi Germany had invaded Austria (1938), Poland (’39), and then France (’40), AND begun a programme first to strip Jews of their rights and then to systematically eradicate them, the vast majority of people in non-Nazi-occupied countries agreed that this was a war that had to be fought.this wasn’t the case with WWI. Yes, the Entente Cordiale [Britain, France, Russia] and the Triple Alliance [Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Italy] had divided the world into opposing blocs of alliances in the fifty, sixty years before the war. Yes, this had spilled into an arms race from about the mid 1890s. But!! this didn’t mean that war was inevitable. At all. WWI started because in an already-divided world of factionalism and alliances, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo by a member of a political society aimed at uniting Italy. This war was NOT inevitable, and ultimately it didn’t serve any real purpose. Unlike WWII, for example, it didn’t attempt to stop human rights violations on a scale never before seen. It was literally a diplomatic crisis that ran away with people and got out of hand before anyone could stop it. In this sense WWI is the PERFECT setting for Wonder Woman because it demonstrates, more than WWII, the utter stupidity and capriciousness of war. Individual Germans in WWI were fighting more or less because they had to. While some Germans in WWII fought also more or less because they had to, in WWII an overarching ideology existed against which every individual had the moral and ethical duty to oppose. no such thing existed in WWI; it was just the old story of empires fighting empires, while unseen and unacknowledged, millions died for no good reason. (via @thesepossessedbylight)

Just some historical facts to put the movie more into context to show it was set in WWI– -Trench warfare was a MAJOR ELEMENT in WWI and not so much in WWII. -WWI was also the last major war in which HORSES were used as a primary means of transportation. Largely because they didn’t hold up very well against tanks for obvious reasons… -You see the iron cross a lot in this movie– basically everywhere you would see a swastika if this was WWII, but it’s not. Banners, flags, etc. No swastikas? No nazis. (via @cheesey-toast)

The WWI setting was needed, to show Diana it’s never clear who are the good guys and who are the bad ones. That war was horrible especially in that aspect. Men were sent to the front with no clear understanding of what would happen there. And when they got there, some of them often understood that the guys on the other side were pretty much the same. There are pictures of German and French and English soldiers playing football on Christmas day (or if not Christmas day, it was in December close to the holiday). A WWII setting wouldn’t have worked as well because we all pretend there were good guys and bad guys. There were, but there were also thousands of people who did not believe in the Nazi ideology and found them they were forced to fake such beliefs for the sake of their safety or their family’s. (via @cs-rugbyworld)

I thought the movie was very clear in saying, “these people are not inhuman. They are the ones we are fighting, but it is the fault of the people in charge that they are fighting.” To confuse them with Nazis is completely missing the point. WWI was a good choice for the war, as there was no clear bad guy. That’s why Wonder Woman feels so much turmoil over it. (via @hartleyratsaway)

That was precisely Steve Trevor’s point at the end when he says, among other things, “maybe it’s my fault!“ Because he’s been in this war enough to know that this isn’t good and bad guys duking it out, like he said in the beginning (which was really just a fast way to get across the situation in a crisis). This war was not caused by one bad guy being aggressive, but human nature. This war did not even have a Hitler. Killing the villains didn’t really solve it. That was the entire point. (via @dazedclarity)

This is what they did so well though in the movie. Wonder Woman’s original origin takes place in WW2. But WW1 was so much more ambiguous - there was not “one bad guy” like WW2 (actually think several but you can name big names from WW2 and clear motives of Fascism). But Wonder Woman shows that pretty much everyone except Ludendorf was ready to end the war because so many Germans (people on both sides) were were starving and sick and desperate… they were dying. They had lost so many soldiers that they were sending children into battle. There was no age limit to going into the fight. Basically an entire generation was lost. And in the end when Diana beats Aries, and all those soldiers take off their masks in relief - I don’t think it’s because his “influence” was lifted or anything like that. But after witnessing that kind of battle, you know that’s it. It’s over. There’s no need to keep fighting anymore. It was just kids glad they didn’t have to take orders anymore because honestly all their superiors are probably dead and the war will be over soon. And on the “good” side of the war you have a general saying soldiers are simply there to die - millions of lives were lost. We see both sides - the more humane side of the Germans desperate to end the war as soon as possible, because every hour thousands of Germans were dying, and the British ready to let thousands more die. So I agree. Stop thinking of them as Nazis. They weren’t Nazis. Notice how in the movie they never also say what the war is about? Most wars you’re fighting for/against something (WW2 fascism etc). That was so unclear in WW1 - both sides clearly didn’t know what they were fighting for (besides Ludendorf as he explains his obsession with war making men better than their petty lives). Also it’s clear to me that Diana then goes on to see more wars and is disillusioned by the time we see her in present times. Ares was really telling the truth, he never influenced humans that way, just watched them destroy themselves with a little nudge here or there. (via @letsgivemeallthethings)

As the other person said, there were no good guys in this war. It was just men sitting in trenches hoping not to be killed by gas or shelling, and waiting for the call to go over the top. There was nothing truly glorious about this war, and how it ended with the Treaty of Versailles is one of the direct causes of World War 2, and arguably led to the Great Depression as well (although that’s a more complicated and more heavily debated idea). (via @my-wandering-world)

I did study WWI so that probs makes me a bit biased but when he said there had been nothing like it, and when Etta said that women didn’t have the vote yet, made it very obvious it was WWI. Trench warfare and a war on this scale had not happened before. ‘Like nothing we’ve ever seen’ ‘the war to end all wars’ was right, bc this was the beginning of trench warfare. And the whole Ottoman empire involvement, but yeah i did study it.But anyway reblogging for the war as the villian commentary cos i had someone try to say this movie was pro war, when it is definitely not, our protagonist hates it and positions the audience to do so too. (via @e–www)

I wasn’t clear on which war it was until I saw the Black Cross and then talk of Kaiser. Also gas attacks and trench warfare were kind of the hallmarks of WWI, making it the festival of human suffering that it was.Also, it’s kind of poignant that the cruelty we metted out to each other in WWI. Diana saves our shit. And BOOM. WWII and we’re being EVEN MORE TERRIBLE THAN PREVIOUSLY IMAGINED.Humans. Are. Garbage. (via @nanner)

thought the movie made it very clear that they were not Nazis. Not a single swastika to be found, no mention of Hitler or any other big name Nazis, and the obvious early 20th century setting. Not to mention Steve Trevor calling it “the Great War,” which was what WWI was called until after it was over.It’s not the film’s fault that audiences are unable to make use of historical context. (via @starlordudonta)

Also, we see Ludendorf and Dr Poison kill off German leaders who had been working on the armistice to make the point that they do not represent all of the German side. And they show the German soldiers being very young when they take off their gas masks at the end. They did a good job with Aries plan because it does reflect the reality of our history. Anyone who calls these German’s Nazis needs a refresher. (via @phdelicious)

Also can we point out that the Germans kept talking about the Kaiser and there literally was not a Kaiser in charge of WWII?? ? Like. Pay attention. Notice the lack of nazi flags?? Notice all the iron crosses used as the German symbol?? (via @synthiesia)

And you are also completely missing the point of that scene when dawn comes and all the soldiers, German and Allies, take off their masks and it is revealed that they are all teenagers and like college aged boys. Because that is an incredibly powerful scene that shows that there is truly no right am wrong but just a bunch of children fighting someone else’s war. (via @shitposting-at-the-finest-level)

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