The Young Fritz

Long before the arrival of Nazisploitation flicks, which were created mainly by money-grubbing Guidos and a couple sleazy American Semites (David F. Friedman produced Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1975) under the curious pseudonym ‘Herman Traeger’), kosher commies in the Soviet Union were portraying German soldiers as savage beasts worthy of being exhibited in the zoo as demonstrated by the vaudevillian slapstick satire Yunyi Frits (1943) aka The Young Fritz aka Yunyy Frits directed by Soviet Jews Grigori Kozintsev (The Youth of Maxim, Don Quixote) and Leonid Trauberg (The Devil's Wheel, Dead Souls) and based on an anti-German agitprop pamplet poem written by Soviet Jew poet/writer/translator Samuil Marshak. So unwaveringly hateful in its depiction of the German people that it was actually banned by the Soviet censors and never actually released, The Young Fritz is assumed to be lost but someone must have dig up a copy as I managed to see the film recently (I read somewhere that it is a mere 25 minute fragment but the film has a beginning and an end). Despite never having an official release, a non-film marionette version was purportedly a big hit with soldiers of the Red Army during kraut-hunting season at later stages of the Second World War when the pendulum of fate swung to the red side. Originally written by Samuil Marshak in 1942 as a mere satirical pamphlet for the Leningrad Puppet Theatre troupe, The Young Fritz eventually evolved into a slapstick puppet show which traveled to the Eastern Front to play for Soviet soldiers so as to inspire homicidal impulses against the dreaded ‘Hun.’ Indeed, with references to Germans preferring the purity of cattle (and comparing said Germans to said cattle) to the gigantic Judaic intellects of Heine and Einstein, The Young Fritz, more than anything, is a venomous, if not greatly goofy, assault on Aryans than any sort of serious commie diatribe. The totally tasteless tragicomedic story (narrated by no less than a nazi anthropologist aka “famous nazi racist” to boot!) about a blond baby kraut boy who grows up to be a boorish buffoon of a SS man who senselessly vandalizes famous statues in Paris and turns Europa into his own personal campy concentration camp of sorts, only to be taken prisoner on the Eastern Front and put on display as a “German beast” and “mean-eating ape” in a Soviet zoo in the end, The Young Fritz is ultimately in the Hebraic hate spirit of Ilya Ehrenburg (who, during the Second World War, encouraged the murder of Germans and the rape German women aka “blonde hags” via the propaganda pamphlets he wrote that were distributed to Soviet troops) meets the philistine-inspired Yiddish slapstick The Three Stooges. Indeed, the sort of film Melvin James Kaminsky would have loved to have made but lacked the testicular fortitude to do so, The Young Fritz is a kraut-crushing kosher comedy that makes the melodramatic Yid-bashing of Veit Harlan’s Jud Süß (1940) aka Jew Süss seem rather tame and classy by comparison. 

 The Young Fritz opens with a stereotypically ‘Herr Döktor’ type German professor, who acts as the film's intentionally unreliable narrator and who pompously proclaims, “Everyone knows me…I’m the professor of anthropology…the famous Nazi racist. I can tell pure blood when I see it. I can tell you if your daddy and uncle are Aryan or not from the way their skulls can ring. I take at random the skulls of all races from my shelves. I get plenty of them from the Gestapo every day,” and thus proceeds to tell the terribly tragicomedic ‘lecture’ tale of ‘Young Fritz’; or ‘How to bring up a kid’ in Nazi Germany. Beginning with six month old baby Fritz (depicted by then-middle-age Soviet actor Mikhail Zharov), who comes from a ‘very ancient’ German family, laying in his baby bed while his fat and boorish brute of a father drinks a mug of fine Bavarian beer and his politically fanatical and sexually frigid mother knits as a “Blut und Boden” (aka “blood and soil”) signs hangs prominently in the background, one soon learns that the Aryan anti-hero is descended from a long line of secret agents (his father is described as a ‘first-class Gestapo stool’) and thus he is fated for a similar career. In between sewing petticoats for her little boy, Fritz’s mom sings him Nietzschean ‘bird of prey’-themed lullabies and eventually kicks her blond babe out of the house, declaring that he will “earn a cross of honor in battle” and become a “tough sergeant.” While still just a wee boy, Fritz is given twenty tanks for his birthday and at grade school he learns to know “no division” in terms of sharing grape jam with others. When Fritz gets old enough to be an asshole with an Adorno-esque Authoritarian personality, he absurdly gives the names of his parents, granddad, and neighbors as conspirators to Hitler himself and the Führer rewards the enterprising young lad by sending him straight to prep school where he becomes an undercover Gestapo agent who spies on other kids. As the ‘bully of all Nazi bullies’ in prep school, Fritz emotionally torments young girls by lynching plush dog dolls, decapitating teddy bears, and threatening to send them away to an uncertain future in a concentration camps. After six years in the Gestapo, Fritz becomes a polygamist and marries brigade of Aryan babes (one of which has rather masculine shoulders and is missing an eye, but makes up for it by knowing how to crack a whip with sadist glee!) and at the wedding, the groom’s father stoically declares, “We worship not the genius of Einstein or Heine, but our cows and oxen” and “Live like cows, love like cows, breed your pure line of offspring so that a son was like his father and mother – a real Aryan ox,” thus demonstrating the Hebraic makers of The Young Fritz undying feeling of superiority over Germans as members of god's chosen internationalist gang.

 When World War II breaks out, Fritz learns to be a “cowardly murderer” and travels all around occupied Western Europe, drinking beers in countries he cannot be bothered to remember the name of and threatening to shoot locals for “anti-fascist laughter.” At the Louvre in Paris, Fritz gawks at Alexandros of Antioch’s Aphrodite of Milos statue and criticizes the work of art for its lack of arms, dress, and underwear, etc., ultimately deciding to vandalize the piece by writing his name on it as if he were a grad school delinquent. Rather unfortunately, things begin to start going downhill for Fritz when he gets involved with the blitzkrieg on the Eastern front and his SS regiment is destroyed. In the end, Fritz is captured by the Soviets and put in a communist zoo where a brainwashed Bolshevik babe self-righteously declares, “Come and have a look, Soviet people! In this cage we keep a German beast. To put it short…his name is Fritz of Nazi family. This beast can talk like a man, wears man’s clothes, uses a spoon to eat with and a cup or a glass to drink from, but he is still an ape! A man-eating ape! He killed for nothing. He murdered, burnt and carved! He killed babies in their cradles! He piloted the bombers and the submarines. He robbed, he killed and tortured the captives. We’ve killed a lot of Fritzes in our lands. But we took this one to the zoo. That man-like beast will survive and live to be studied by scientists as any other viper,” thus summing up the perverse proclivity of Soviet Jewish writers/filmmakers towards Freudian projection.  Not surprisingly, The Young Fritz concludes with the inter-title, “You've watched a movie featuring one of the great mysteries of our time: How a man can degrade to an ape,” as if the Soviet Union was not a collectivist hellhole led by murderous self-appointed pseudo-aristocratic dictators who attempted to mold the masses (or at least those they did not execute or starve to death in man-made famines) into soulless killing machines and robotic factory slaves.

 Featuring the warped Freudian sex stuff you would expect from Hollywood (i.e. Fritz kissing his father on the mouth, a SS officer smacking Fritz on the ass, Fritz and a buddies heads hovering suggestively under a commie officer’s crotch), as well as the supremely stupid sort of uncultivated slapstick humor Tinseltown thrives on, The Young Fritz seems much less ‘dated’ than one would suspect considering its age, which certainly has a lot to do with the particular pedigree of people that made it. An absurdist agitprop work riddled with all sorts of  conspicuous kosher comedy clichés, The Young Fritz is ultimately most insightful in that it reveals that the same sort of anti-German people that worked in the Soviet film industry before the Second World War are also the same sort of people that dominated Hollywood both then and now. Indeed, it is no coincidence that Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan (Natural Born Killers, Fight Club) recently arrogantly revealed that he is an Israeli spy who, among other things, obtained nuclear weapons materials and technology for the Israeli government, just as it is no coincidence that Ilya Ehrenburg—the leading Soviet propagandist of the Second World War—left all his papers and private archives to Jerusalem's Yad Vashem library and archive instead of the Soviet Union, despite the fact he was a lifelong Soviet citizen. Apparently, no less than 600 performances of the play version of The Young Fritz were given to Soviet troops during the Second World War, but one can only guess the influence the film version would have had had it been actually officially released. Of course, Mel Brooks and Woody Allen inevitably proved that a little anti-German/anti-Euro-goy comedy goes a long way as demonstrated by the fact that their anti-Nazi celluloid caricatures have become American cultural archetypes to the point where most Americans cannot hear the word “German” without thinking of goofy authoritarian goose-stepping oafs. Personally, I found The Young Fritz more visceral and authentic in its hatred of Aryans than, say, Brooks’ The Producers (1967), and thus found this little Soviet agitprop flick much more enjoyable, if not reluctantly so. Like a number of Allied propaganda flicks of its time, The Young Fritz also confirms that the holocaust mythos was already long codified before the Second World War ever concluded and for that reason alone makes the film worth viewing, so put on your lederhosen, grab yourself a large overflowing mug of Kölsch beer, and watch what it arguably the most wonderfully warped piece of celluloid Teutonophobia ever schemed up by bloodlusting ‘Soviet’ Semites with a rather nasty and nefarious knack for crude comedy. 

-Ty E