Thoughts on Who Knows What

Today’s class was the first I’d actually felt “HIST” was accurate to, it was cool to get a reminder on the wars and what went down. It’s something I haven’t studied in a while. I laughed though because today I had more than one class talk about history. My Global Horror Film class is definitely an interesting one, and currently we’re learning about expressionism and why it came about. In doing so, in class we went over WWI and it’s effects on the film industry in Germany so that made two classes in which we discussed war and the wars. When the Nazis gained power in Germany, they proceeded to disallow foreign films from reaching a German audience. This made sense to them given that many foreign powers could see what was going on in Germany, and the Nazis wanted to remain in control of the propaganda and the thoughts being had by their subservients. This in turn resulted in a boom in German cinema concurrently with the mass inflation going on. This included an influx of better and more efficient equipment for fiming The film industry was one of the few safe and actually productive ones in Germany at the time. I drew a comparison after today’s HIST 390 class that peeked my interest, Prof. O’Malley mentioned how WWI lead to the boom of the computer era in the US. It seems that in both the US and Germany, war lead to technological advancement, the fact that the each had it’s own set of technology is intriguing. The former was particularly military based (the original computers anyways) whereas the later was artistic. I don’t know how to interpret that or even if I should, I just find it interesting. I find that we’e often quick to associate and apply the same thoughts and beliefs to opposite sides even if they it isn’t realistic or applicable even as in the case of WWI. History is recited and recorded biasedly all the time, for and against the truth. How can we ever know the whole truth? Perhaps that’s why the past seems so glamorous.