Baron's Tales Make For Good Fantasy Movie: Münchhausen

Baron Münchhausen was a real life German noble of the 1700s who became noted for the fantastic stories he told of his life's adventures. Books recounting the stories were written, "seemingly" based upon the stories told by the Baron, but the thing was, Baron Münchhausen became famous, especially in England and Germany.* By the early 1940s, Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propagandist and overall head of the German film industry, ordered the making of a film about Münchhausen's adventures. Goebbels hoped the color film would demonstrate that the German movie industry could compete with Hollywood in the making of elaborate color films, complete with trick photography.

Erich Kästner, a highly regarded German writer, did much of the screenplay for the movie, but the thing was, Kästner was an anti-Nazi, and although Goebbels admired some of Kästner's works, he kept the author's name from the credits of the film. Kästner's earlier works had been burned as part of the Nazi campaign to limit the German public's access to writings by German Jewish or foreign authors, and to those writings they deemed to be "dangerous;" the translation of which was really, "writings that might make Germans oppose Nazi ideology." After that Kästner settled on publishing children's books and works that were non-political. Very likely Kästner's script for the movie was gone over word by word by Nazi censures, perhaps even by Goebbels himself.

The movie was filmed in 1942 and starred then well known German actor Hans Albers as the Baron. For those who remember actor Walter Slezak, known for films like "Lifeboat" (with Tallulah Bankhead and William Bendix) and "Bedtime for Bonzo" (with Ronald Reagan), as well as for appearances on the television series "Batman" in the 1960s, his father, Leo Slezak, co-starred in the film as the Turkish Sultan. Leo Slezak was well known in Europe in those times for his opera singing. The movie, with the title "Münchhausen," was released to theaters in March of 1943 and it returned a profit. The movie is available on DVD, with English subtitles, and it has some history of the film included, from which I took some of the info here.

I won't go into all of the movie, but it has some interesting turns to it, including the opening part, which is likely to give you a surprise after a few minutes. The most famous scene, taken from one of the books about the Baron, shows the Baron riding a cannonball into a Turkish fort. Other scenes depict the Baron's time in Russia, including with Tsarina Catherine the Great, a sword duel in Venice, and his visit to the moon in a balloon. Don't be concerned, as the movie is NOT a Nazi propaganda film (remember it was largely written by an anti-Nazi), and in fact, when I first saw it, I was surprised that Goebbels had allowed the film to be shown without more editing or script changes, as for instance, the Turkish sultan is shown meting out severe punishment, including beheading, at times for minor infractions. Also, the time on the moon is different from time on Earth, and Kästner has one of the characters in the script say, "the time is broken," seen by many as his subtle way of saying the same about the Nazi era.

* Münchhausen was from the Hannover (English: Hanover) area of Germany, which had close ties to England, as the "House of Hannover" provided the monarchs of England from the early 1700s until the early 1900s.

WORD HISTORY:
Baron-The ultimate origins of this word are complex, as there are two strong possibilities for the Indo European base of the word, both of which later provided English with words that are both spelled and pronounced the same; that is, "bear," but with one meaning "to carry" and "to give birth or to yield produce," while the other is a word for an animal. The problem is, in Old Germanic the source of baron meant, "servant, male follower, warrior." It is certainly not difficult to connect the dots for the use of "bear," the animal, for a "warrior," but it is far less likely for "servant" or "male follower." On the other hand, the connection of those last two meanings, which are similar anyway, to "carry," is not difficult to imagine, as a servant or follower has to "bear" responsibility to someone or to others. I very much favor this explanation, which therefore goes back to Indo European "bher," which meant the above noted "to carry" and "to give birth or to yield produce;" thus the notion "bearer," for the noun form. Indo European "bher" gave its Old Germanic offspring "beran," with the same meanings, which then produced "berun," "carrier," which then developed the "servant, follower" meaning, which then further developed the "warrior" meaning, as in feudal times, the "(male) servants" ("vassals") provided military service to the lord. This gave Old English (Anglo-Saxon) "biorn/beorn," meaning "warrior, (minor?) chieftain, man." In the meantime, Latin had borrowed a form of the same word from Germanic, perhaps from Frankish or Langobardic,^ as "baro" (with varied spellings using "n," depending upon usage in a sentence). This gave Old French "baron," a title in the nobility. The term was carried to England by the Normans and blended with the native English term, but with the French spelling "baron" prevailing. German too borrowed the term, initially as "Barun," but then as "Baron," with a long "o" (all German nouns are capitalized), but German also kept their own word "Freiherr" (literally "free (gentle)man," from the notion in the Middle Ages of a man owning his land outright and not being subservient to a lord directly above him. "Freiherr" became synonymous with "Baron."

^ The Franks and the Langobards were Germanic tribes, with the Franks having a strong presence in what developed into modern France, with the name "France" coming from the Franks, and the Langobards having a strong presence in part of northern Italy, where they gave their name to the province "Lombardia" (usually rendered in English as "Lombardy").