My Review of Richard III

One of the great joys I get out of writing theater reviews is revisiting Shakespeare scholar and lit crit man Stephen Greenblatt. His writings are insightful, lovely, witty, human.

My latest research for my review of Post5's Richard III, echoed back to the long work I'm doing on the subject of paranoia. Richard was a paranoid dictator, whose rudely formed stamp would be revisited in more recent times with rumors of Hitler's impotence and Joe Stalin's real life withered hand and shorter arm. Greenblatt noted that many contemporary stagings place the play in Nazi Germany and while he hints at a kind of boredom there, I think the directors made a connection. The Nazi higher-ups, particularly Himmler and Göring created an obsessive, unhistoric, warped Romantic revival of the Medieval Teutonic knight. The real Richard has been a trending topic with the finding of his burial site . The pro-monarchist society which funds clearing his name has had him re-interred in an elegant Brutalist looking shrine. With Brexit, Trump and the West in general turning far right, Richard's reputation as a bloodthirsty monster is not in need of a new shine.

Witch hunting Nazis

I saw the movie Son of Saul a month back and was inspired to learn more about the death camp uprisings at Treblinka and Sobibór. Watching docs like Marcel Orphul's Hôtel Terminus sent me down the rabbit hole of Nazis, South American Banana Republics, quadruple espionage agents. I quickly realized that most of the books, films and culture that came out of the 70's wasn't hype and the more absurd and bizarre fact is that they're based on true events. Think Marathon Man or The Conversation. The perfectly lined shiny heads of the stormtroopers (name even) were inspired by the death cult society of Nazi Germany. It's a bizarre world where escaped war criminals twisted Romanticism topped with a heavy dose of 19th century occult and married it with the violence of Colonialism and an unflinching belief in Futurism. Never mind that the past should be the present.

Himmler, head of the SS with his totenkopf hat

The strangest information I've discovered is about Himmler's Hexenkult. Most of the Nazi top brass were into esoteric beliefs, but Himmler, the main executioner of the Final Solution, put tons of money into research, science, building and practice towards a Nazi Teutonic neo-paganism.

He'd heard as a child that there was a woman in his family line who'd been burned at the stake. Once that person was semi-confrmed, he began a branch of the SS to document all the witches. Himmler wanted to show that witches were the backbone of German society and had been persecuted, displaced, killed by the church in an attempt to destroy "the people." At the end of WWII, the Soviets found in Poznań, Poland a card catalogue spanning 10 years of research and composed of over 30,000 references to witches. It could be the largest investigation and collection of the material in the world. Most of the cards contain information from Germany, France and Austria, but there are some references as far as Mexico. The question is would someone like Silvia Federici benefit? There are many ironies to Nazi interests, but witch hunting could be the top.

SS document informing Himmler of a Margaret Himmler burned at the stake in 1629

16th century illustration of witches