Schwarzenegger’s message to the Russians sounded like Thomas Mann’s to the Germans

Arnold Schwarzenegger as Thomas Mann. Well yes: “Conan the Barbarian” in the wake of the “Magic Mountain” and the “Buddenbrooks”. It is Spiegel who launches into the comparison – certainly unprecedented – between the American superstar of Austrian origins (as well as former governor of California) and the great German writer.

In particular, according to the authoritative Hamburg weekly, to unite two apparently so distant personalities is the video of almost ten minutes – posted on Twitter, also subtitled in Cyrillic, seen by millions of people – in which the interpreter of “Terminator” he addressed the Russian people and Vladimir Putin asking for an end to the appalling conflict in Ukraine.

Spiegel speaks of the “art of rhetoric”, whose target audience is the Russians in an attempt to “answer a difficult question: how can one speak from a great distance to a blind people? A people who love each other, who are currently committing a crime. How can Russians be taken away from Putin?”.

Well, according to the German newspaper, Schwarzenegger’s ability consists in being able to combine his memories, his history (his friendship with the Soviet weightlifting champion Jurij Petrovic Vlasov), his “love” for Russia, with the demystification of the Russian narrative on the war in Ukraine: starting with the alleged “denazification” of the country, even more absurd in consideration of the fact that the three brothers of Volodymyr Zelensky’s father were exterminated in the Holocaust of the Third Reich.

Here too, the personal note: his own father, “Schwarzy’s” father, had returned from World War II as a veteran of the Nazi army, right from the Russian front, broken in two, devastated by shrapnel from explosives and tormented in the soul. , with the burden of trying to come to terms with his own guilt for the rest of his life. And he too had been “blinded” by the propaganda of his government, that of Hitler, which had annexed Austria in 1938.

Spiegel still writes that “there is a model for Schwarzenegger’s video message: these are the speeches that Thomas Mann addressed to the Germans between October 1940 and May 1945and which were broadcast on the German BBC program “.

In fact, Tobias Rapp’s article reads, “Mann faced a similar question: how do you speak to a blind people? How does he get away from his leaders?“. According to the weekly, the rhetorical key of the great writer was to clarify” that the real Germany was the one in exile, and that the Germany to which the Nazis referred was a lie.

The actor (and politician) moved similarly in his video letter: the real Russia, this is the message, the real heroes, are the people who today in Russia turn against the war and who for this reason are beaten and placed under arrest. They are “the real heroes”.

Then, remember the weekly, Schwarzenegger addresses the Russian soldiers themselves: “You know that I am telling the truth, you have seen it with your own eyes”. This is what Thomas Mann also did when he spoke to the Germans while the blood flowed in rivers in the world, when the concentration camps were annihilating millions of people, or when Germany was already in ruins: “Where democracy opposes autocracy – Spiegel writes – the strongest weapon is that of appealing to the judgment capacity of the single individual “.

By Editor

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