 Never had a path led into the distance like this one. The head knew nothing more of the legs. There was no burden. The eye was everything. Everything was image. The march was sound, a noise, a joyous stream.
--Karl Aloys Schenzinger 1
Action does not mean "deciding in favor of". . . for that presupposes that one knows in favor of what one is deciding; rather, action means "setting off in a direction," "taking sides," by virtue of a mandate of destiny, by virtue of "one's own right." . . . It is really secondary to decide in favor of something that I have come to know.
--Alfred Bäumler 2
There in the bleak, gray twilight, yellowed, tortured eyes stare into the emptiness.  Long, deep wounds extend down the slender body, and a deadly laceration tears through his lungs and heart. . . . Yet it is as if life stirs anew out of pale death. Look now, the slender, elegant body begins to move. Slowly, slowly he rises as if conjured up by magic, until he stands tall in all his youthful glory right before my trembling eyes. And without moving his lips, a frail child's voice is heard as if speaking from all eternity
. . . . "What is mortal in me will perish. But my spirit, which is immortal, will remain with you. And it . . . will show you the way."
--Joseph Goebbels 3
Hitlerjunge Quex (Hitler Youth Quex) is a legend for modern times, a film with a fatal attraction. 4 It sanctifies an adolescent's heroic deed, reshaping a young boy's dead body into an icon. It demonstrates a cinema of clear lines and straightforward answers, a medium charged with a mission: it aims to show the way. The film illustrates a political process and intimates a master narrative wherein human subjects become state objects and living beings give way to abstract patterns. Hitler Youth Quex both heralds a new order and preres its subsequent self-destruction. 5
The first feature film substantially supported by the new government and produced under the protectorate of the Youth Leader of the German Reich, Baldur von Schirach, Hitler Youth Quex offers a stirring example of how the National Socialists employed a modern medium for state purposes, mobilizing a vast technology to craft gripping narratives and promote popular legends. Goebbels well recognized the film's potential value as a political instrument when he became minister of popular enlightenment and propaganda in March 1933. 6 Nonetheless, a comprehensive policy did not immediately make itself evident in the first declarations of the self-avowed "passionate lover of filmic art." 7 Being in power did not mean controlling culture; swift legislation could not ensure overnight legitimation; any campaign of coordination (Gleichschaltung) would demand different strategies on different fronts.
The National Socialists had become the masters of public life. Whether they would also become the masters of popular imagination remained to be seen. 8 The Minister entered the scene with a mixture of swagger and circumspection, proclaiming a desire to combat a spiritual crisis and "reform German film from the ground up" (von der Wurzel) aus so that it might convalesce and grow into a world power. 9 In his early programmatic declarations, Goebbels blends natural and martial metaphors, speaking of films as a body and a territorial surface, declaring himself the physician whose surgury will purge an afflicted organism of harmful alien elements. He scorns wishy-washy entertainments without national character, clear contours, and a sense of the historical moment. A new cinema for a new Germany must rediscover the innate laws of the medium and realize its mission as a mover of masses. "It takes imagination," he proclaimed, "to grant life to the innermost purpose and innermost constitution of a new world." 10
Repeatedly, Goebbels stresses how film should exercise a discernible effect (Wirkung), how it must act on hearts and minds. Its calling should be that of a popular art (Volkskunst), an art that simultaneously serves state purposes and fulfills personal needs. The new film must free itself from art-for-art's-sake dalliance, intellectual liberalism, and wanton commercialism. However makeshift and ambiguous his first proclamations might have seemed (they apparently made for some confusion), Goebbels attracted attention by taking dramatic leave of a previous era's attractions, pointing the way to a popular, contemporary, and distinctly national cinema. 11 Film, he proclaimed, should emanate from political life and find its way to the deepest recesses of German soul and soil. Such a reform will take time as it will demand energy and sensitivity. It makes no sense to enforce an authoritarian dogmatism, to "proselytize from morning till night." 12 Political ideas must assume aesthetic force. That does not mean, however, simply reenacting parades and spectacles, photographing marching storm troopers and fetishizing flags and emblems. "Arousing the masses, that's something we know a thing or two about," Goebbels boasted, in so doing setting aside a special place for film apart from mass rallies and overt agitation. Mere loyalty to the party would not guarantee aesthetic success. Authentic film art must transcend the everyday and "intensify life." 13
Hitler Youth Quex would do precisely that, intensifying life to the point of devivification. It focuses on a human subject and transforms him into a political property. The film remakes and ultimately overcomes a boy's mind and body, rendering the material spiritual, transmuting being into form. This process involves the literal occupation of a destiny, its orchestrated functionalization by the mass media. Its subject was based on the life of Herbert Norkus, a Hitler Youth in the Berlin working-class district Beuselkietz, who had died at the hands of communist assailants while distributing leaflets during the election of January 1932. Quickly enlisted as a Nazi martyr, Norkus became the subject of impassioned editorials and inspirational public addresses. Memorial services for the boy occasioned elaborate marches and demonstrations throughout Germany. His death received annual consecration on 24 January, a date of ritual observance during the Third Reich for all fallen Hitler Youths. 14
These recognitions accompanied a wide range of popular renderings: novels, plays, poems, and songs. 15 Karl Aloys Schenzinger immortalized Norkus in Der Hitlerjunge Quex, a novel written between May and September 1932 and prepublished in installments in the Nazi party organ, the Völkischer Beobachter, prior to the book's release in December. The volume would become obligatory reading for Germany's youth, undergoing innumerable editions and registering sales of more than half a million copies by 1945. 16 Soon after Schenzinger's novel appeared, Ufa, the most important studio of the German film industries, announced plans for a film version directed by Hans Steinhoff and produced by Karl Ritter, a project actively supported by the National Socialist leadership.
The premiere took place in the Munich Ufa-Phoebus-Palast on 11 September 1933, a festive event attended by party dignitaries (including Hitler, Göring, and Hess) and accompanied by a gala performance of Anton Bruckner's Fourth Symphony by the eighty members of the Reich Symphony Orchestra. 17 The film received the rating "artistically especially worthwhile," prompting words of praise from Goebbels, who wrote the prominent Ufa executive, Ernst Hugo Correll:
If Hitler Youth Quex represents the first large-scale attempt to depict the ideas and world of National Socialism with the art of cinema, then one must say that this attempt, given the possibilities of modern technology, is a full-fledged success. 18
Germany's greatest film company, proclaimed the Licht-Bild-Bühne on 12 September, has mobilized "its extraordinary technical, material, and artistic means" to create "a lasting document of human and social circumstances, of the spiritual and emotional impulses which brought about the turn in Germany's history." 19 The film likewise met with a degree of commercial success, even if it did not match that of the more popular contemporaneous Ufa prodcutions directed by Gustav Ucicky, Morgenrot (Dawn) and Flüchtlinge (Fugitives). Having cost a modest RM 320,000 (an amount slightly above average for the time), it ran for fifteen days in the massive Ufa-Palast-am-Zoo, and by the end of January 1934 had attracted over a million viewers. 20
Like the two other feature films screened in 1933 which portrayed party martyrs, SA-Mann Brand and Hans Westmar, Hitler Youth Quex unfolds as a family drama against the political and economic crisis of the late Weimar years. 21 Heini Völker, a printer's apprentice, joins a communist youth group at the prompting of his father, an unemployed worker and war veteran, a choleric drinker who torments his mournful wife. During a weekend outing Heini quickly grows disenchanted with his unruly comrades and flees their alcoholic and sexual revelry. Retreating into the woods, he spies a group of Hitler Youths and looks upon their nighttime ceremony with fascination, an interest undiminished even after the Nazis discover him and send him away. He returns to Berlin effusing about their order and discipline, singing their anthem to his mother, and causing his father to scold and beat him. Despite this outburst and the promptings of the communist leader, Stoppel, Heini seeks out the young Nazis Fritz and Ulla. He refuses to participate in a communist raid on the new Hitler Youth dormitory, but cannot fully convince the Nazis of his good faith until he warns them that Stoppel and his group plan to bomb the new hostel. Mother Völker, confronted by an enraged Stoppel after the communist plot backfires, fears for her son, but does not know how to protect him. In desperation, she turns on the gas to put an end to both herself and the sleeping boy.
After awakening in a hospital, Heini finds himself surrounded by a group of Hitler Youths who express their gratitude and present him with a uniform and a mirror. As a result of his mother's death and his father's submission to the special plea of Hitler Youth Brigade Leader Cass, Heini moves into a Nazi dormitory. Active and energetic (so much so that his alacrity gains him the nickname "Quex," i.e. quicksilver), Heini works all night to print leaflets for the upcoming election and insists on distributing them in his old neighborhood, Beuselkitz. Members of Stoppel's group, headed by the vicious Wilde, learn of Heini's presence and chase him through the streets, cornering him in a fairground where Wilde bludgeons him with the knife once coveted by Heini. When his Nazi cohorts reach him, it is too late. With his last breath Heini gestures upward and utters the words, "Our flag flutters before us, it leads . . . " as the image segues into a close-up of a party banner over which marching res parade in geometric conrations. 22
Herbert Norkus reappeared as Heini Völker, a boy who overcomes his own past and the internationalism inherent in the name of his father: Heini "Völker" becomes a boy of the German "Volk," a hero who responds to a "völkisch" calling and a historical mission. 23 He resembles spirited comrades in arms who, possessed by patriotic fervor, fell in droves during the first months of World War I, a shared martyrdom made explicit in a contemporary press booklet: "Hunted down by the commune and caught, he [Heini] dies the sacrificial death of German youth, just as an earlier generation died before him at Langemarck, death for the sake of the new fatherland." 24 The film narrative depicts how Heini becomes a Hitler Youth, how human material ("Völker") becomes expediency incarnate ("Quex," i.e. mercury), a vehicle of transport and tempo, a political medium. 25 Quex's last words strike up a triumphant song and give way to a rousing march, a symphonic conclusion and an invitation to a dance of death. 26
Nazi cinema initially took form as a site of transformation: art and technology were implemented to engineer emotion, to create a new man--and to recreate woman in the service of the new order and the new man. The different being envisioned here was an amalgam of vitalism and irrationality, a creature longing for spiritual rebirth, for ecstatic life undaunted by cerebration. In some respects, Hitler Youth Quex reaches back to expressionist scenarios, the Wandlungsdramen (transformation dramas) of Ernst Toller, Georg Kaiser, and Ernst Barlach, plays in which angry sons rebel against tradition, confronting and even murdering their fathers, forsaking the bourgeois family in a search for more fulfilling communal ties. In both instances we find essentialized emotions, the pathos of what Gottfried Benn calls a "constructive mind." 27 "Facts, things, feelings, and persons do not exist for it [the drama or film] in their own right, but only as parts in a working relationship to other parts. Even as content gives way to form, the concept of 'being' yields to the concept of 'functioning.'" 28 Similarly, the influential right-wing author Ernst Jünger valorized objectified human bodies. His new man relinquishes existence as an individual, steeling blood and brains into the reified technical potential of the "type" (Typus). 29 Hitler Youth Quex puts a hero into motion by inhabiting his person, dissolving his family, and arresting his life. Heini becomes a part of a larger whole and thereby whole in his existence as a part. 30 He functions as a role model for his comrades in the film and for the many young Germans who watched this film.
Cinema assumed a key place within state institutions of discipline, ring as a mode of education, military training, and recreation. Film, claimed Nazi Minister of Education Bernhard Rust, speaking in 1934,
is particularly important for our youngest citizens--the school children. Film must not only help them grasp contemporary political problems, it must also provide children knowledge about Germany's great past, and profound understanding regarding the future development of the Third Reich. The National Socialist State definitely and deliberately makes film the transmitter of its ideology. 31
National Socialism sought to organize the will of youth, to enlist it in a historical mission. In challenging established authority, the party meant to usurp the place held by ineffective leaders of a moribund generation, in effect to proclaim, as Gregor Strasser did in 1933, "Make way, you old men!" (Macht Platz, Ihr Alten!) 32 The Nazi party institutionalized Oedipal revolt, directing the young against "the parental home, church, school and other outdated forms and role models. In its youth organizations it assumed the central role in the rebellion of sons against their fathers." 33
Foregoing the Oedipal triangulation characteristic of the classical narrative, Hitler Youth Quex begins as a family drama; by its end both parents have disappeared, the dead mother only briefly mourned, 34 the father having surrendered his son to the brigade leader. 35 The party overcomes the family and bridges classes. Fritz and Ulla live in a decidedly bourgeois household, but their parents are nowhere to be seen and their middle-class background in no way conflicts with their newfound political identity. The party redefines family and social conrations, turning itself into the dominant focus of allegiance. (Elsewhere, the Nazi government may have paid lip service to the role of the family. Nonetheless, it "simultaneously deprived parents of the qualities on which a child's respect might have been founded" [MFM, 252-3]). The film's project, in short, was to fabricate a new political subject by redirecting identification. 36 It provided a cinematic bildungsroman which aimed to rebuild the youth of a nation. 37 A movement occupied an individual in the hope of overcoming masses, providing images of self-alienation so compelling that an entire generation could, as Walter Benjamin writes, "experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order." 38
Crucial to Heini's evolution is the acquisition of an ersatz ego, a sense of self derived not from parents but a party. Quex's new vocation also demands that he forsake sensual pleasure and sexual desire. Grundler, his roommate in the Nazi hostel, sings a popular tune about bawdy sailors, puffs on a cigarette, and makes suggestive comments about Ulla. 39 "You're one fine comrade" (Du bist ja ein feiner Kamerad!) retorts Heini, setting himself apart from such intemperance, aligning himself with the otherwise unsullied ranks of Hitler Youth. Grundler idly plays a song from an escapist film which was composed by a Jewish artist; Heini sings of a flag and a party.  Aesthetic preferences, the film intimates, mark one's person and define one's very being.
The communists constitute, as Gregory Bateson has noted, a structured and systematic counterpart to the Nazis.   Grundler submits to physical temptation, shirking his duty and betraying the cause. Heini, at his most self-indulgent, enjoys a comradely kiss from Ulla and sips a mug of beer with Cass. Coming into his own, though, means steeling the body and hardening the will, repulsing physical attachments and all-too-human desires.
Heini is first drawn to the party when he witnesses a nocturnal spectacle. He experiences an immediate and intense fascination as he is swept up and ultimately engulfed by this movement. Similarly, youngsters who partook of this film found themselves overcome by its audio-visual enticements. Bernhard K., ten years old when he first saw Hitler Youth Quex in 1933, could vividly recall the film many decades later:
Communist youths were shown. All of them dressed like ruffians. Unsavoury res. Then they set up camp and even girls were with them.  The Hitler Youth on the other hand: all dressed the same, clean, nice, with leaders who had everything under control. I still remember today that after the film we all agreed: the Nazis made an altogether great impression, there was discipline, one wanted to join in. The communists, on the other hand, no, our parents would never have let us be part of a bunch like that. 41
Just as Heini is overcome by the sights and sounds of a new order, so too did this filmic dramatization seek to overwhelm its young viewers, and to shape them into captive audiences. 42
The opening sequence of Hitler Youth Quex fixes on a street, a space governed by crime, chaos, and mass contagion, offering images well known to audiences of 1933. The shots portray an askew world where a youth's attempt to steal an apple and a shopkeeper's angry reaction ignite a political spectacle: debates among bystanders and expressions of outrage, the quick opportunism of communist rabble rousers, whose agitation causes a riot necessitating police intervention. The iconography here consciously evokes memories of "Zille-films" by Gerhard Lamprecht such as Die Verrufenen (Slums of Berlin, 1925) and Die Unehelichen (Children of No Importance, 1926), as well as proletarian dramas derived from Soviet models such as Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins Glück (Mother Krause's Trip to Happiness, 1929) and Kuhle Wampe . 43 In fact, Steinhoff's direction seems quite insistent about its reliance on Weimar's cinematic legacy, borrowing as well from Berlin-Alexanderplatz , M , and Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera, 1931).
Hans Steinhoff's career as a filmmaker stretched back to the early 1920s; he had worked in numerous generic veins, gaining respect (if not inordinate admiration) for his technical precision, skillful handling of players, and careful crafting of dramatic materials. 44 (Cameraman Konstantin Irmin-Tschet likewise had worked on famous Ufa films directed by, among others, Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, and Wilhelm Thiele.) How, though, are we to understand the film's blatant recourse to Weimar cinema? The National Socialists took a dim view of most Systemzeit (a Nazi epithet for the Weimar Republic) features and Goebbels firmly wanted to replace them with a new German film. Further, both Steinhoff and the production head Karl Ritter had unequivocal allegiance to the party. 45
Previous accounts of Hitler Youth Quex stress how it brings together conservative images and left-wing impulses, blending Hugenberg and Müzenberg. The Ufa film evokes the atmospheric urban venues of Weimar and revisits working-class spaces: narrow apartments, smoky pubs, joyless streets. 46 Carryovers also inhere at the level of theme, motif, and dramaturgy, be it an obsession with knives and a pursuit scene straight out of M, or the fairground barker and his ballad which recall The Threepenny Opera. Heini's family seems lifted out of films made by Phil Jutzi, who directed both Mother Krause's Trip to Happiness and Berlin-Alexanderplatz. His father is a latter-day Franz Biberkopf, an individual castrated during the postwar era for whom class consciousness offers little succor; 47 his mother, like Mutter Krause, turns on the gas to take leave of her misery. 48 These familiar elements allowed audiences convenient points of reference. Critics typically speak of an artistic continuity with Weimar film, coming to conclusions like that of Francis Courtade and Pierre Cadars: "If one puts all ideology aside, which surely is not easy, then one must say, that from a technical and aesthetic perspective Hitler Youth Quex is an outstanding film." 49 What people have tended to obscure in their catalogues of intertexts, however, is how most of these borrowings are negatively charged. Hitler Youth Quex retreads memories in order to clear the way. It overcomes a past of inflation and despair and points to a hopeful future; in reckoning with Weimar film, it presages a new cinema. It recycles proletarian films by Jutzi, Brecht, and Dudow, remaking Herta Thiele's confident and sensual Anni of Kuhle Wampe into the de-eroticized Nazi Mädel (girl) Ulla. It also quotes from Lang and Pabst, at the same time pursuing a strategy meant to supersede and transcend Weimar cinema in the name of a different film art. 50
Central to the structure of Hitler Youth Quex are two spaces and the fascination they contain for Heini, namely the fairground and the forest. Going back as far as Der Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920) the fairground recurs throughout Weimar film as a privileged site of agitation, spectacle, and desire, a realm of motion and excitement, a protocinematic cult of distraction. 51 The carnival ground--described in Schenzinger's novel as "a truly fantastic world"--initially lures Heini with its attractions and games of chance (DHQ, 14). It is there that he glimpses a knife with eight blades, an object of fixation which will repeatedly appear during the film. It is there that the communist Stoppel seeks to win over the boy and the vampish Gerda makes her rounds, whirling on the carousel with abandon and later seducing Grundler to betray his comrade. It is there that Heini will die under the knife he coveted. The fairground becomes a realm of sex, peril, and dissolution, a space that teems with uncontained potential and unbridled appetite, a province of impermanence, randomness, and intoxication. The film presents the fairground as a locus of illicit sights and sounds, leaving no doubt that the communists are quite at home in this world of chance and uncertainty.
The communists do not, however, control the fairground. They lack a distinctive will to form and fail to devise a spectacle of their own. Whether partaking of carnival attractions or mimicking Nazi gestures, the group attests to an absence of substance and identity. 52 When Stoppel and his cohorts go to the forest they recreate the fairground, transforming natural space into a site of card playing, sexual dalliance, and rampant consumption. Heini runs into the woods to abandon these amorphous masses and cluttered images, seeking fresh air and open spaces. Gradually, the commune's accordion gives way to brass fanfares and a song with a strident tempo and spirited lyrics. Curious, Heini follows the sound, stopping behind a bush to look down on neat rows of boys and girls standing around a fire, listening to their leader hallow rising flames to celebrate a better Germany. The natural setting and human ornament merge; this is a spectacle that rivets Heini's gaze, a ceremony with an impressive composition, a striking choreography, a binding power. 53 If the communists contaminate nature, the Nazis contain it. The forest no longer appears as an extended fairground, but rather takes on the countenance of a training camp. 54 It is not nature, but an extremely domesticated nature that overwhelms Heini, a mass shaped as a larger body, compact columns of human potential, energy and purpose fueled by a mysterious force. 55 When he later seeks to recount his experience, the boy can only describe physical activity and recite the words of a song about a flag and a movement. Sights and sounds, not argument and rhetoric, have won him over.
In 1938, the Museum of Modern Art acquired a copy of Hitler Youth Quex from the Reichsfilmarchiv. During World War II, the prominent ethnographer Gregory Bateson undertook a close thematic reading of the film as part of an endeavor to comprehend National Socialism through its cinematic self-depictions. Bateson recognized that the lies of propaganda also contain distinct truths, that "this film, insofar as it is an integrated work of art . . . must tell us about the psychology of its makers, and tell us perhaps more than they intended to tell." 56 Approaching the film with "the sort of analysis that the anthropologist applies to the mythology of a primitive or modern people," Bateson pointed out how the film, in its systematic structuring of oppositions between the National Socialist Party and the Communist Party, illustrates the projective workings of Nazi subjectivity. Communists appear as unbearable self-images, what Nazis think they "would be like without their discipline or-- psychologically speaking--what they are like under the veneer of that discipline" (SCD, 311). Sensitive to how the film carries out its ideological agenda within a narrative setting, Bateson comes a fair way towards understanding its rhetorical power. Aside from a few brief comments about lighting contrasts and visual motifs, however, his thematic analysis has little to say about matters of form. 57
Most subsequent discussions of Hitler Youth Quex speak of the film as overt propaganda, as a dramatization of "the struggle for the German soul between National Socialism and communism." 58 Similar to the contemporaneous SA-Mann Brand and Hans Westmar, claims David Welch, Hitler Youth Quex embodies that "lie direct," that is, "film is exploited entirely for propaganda purposes; there are no subtle pretensions of mixing art with politics" (NPP, 48). Given what he considers a lack of refinement, Welch finds no need to address questions of representation or to distinguish between propaganda and ideology. 59 Nor is visual acumen necessary. The message is clear, we need only listen: "From start to finish, the National Socialist ideology is loudly and unashamedly proclaimed" (NPP, 48). 60
Welch's procedure resembles Anglo-American wartime responses to Nazi propaganda. Commentators spoke of it as primitive and unrefined, readily transparent to anyone graced with common sense. As Thomas Doherty demonstrates, American wartime audiences "were educated to the ideological power of mass communications, flattered over their superior powers of apprehension, and assured of their democratic immunity to the falsehoods of Axis enticements." Nazi ideologues were seen as clumsy and obvious, incapable of duping a more sophisticated American public. Hollywood productions of the 1940s represented German ploys as risible and flat-footed, assuming "a condescending and professorial tone when addressing its poor relations in mass communications. Look, the screen seemed to say, see how amateurish are the tricks, how easily exposed are the secrets, of these lesser media, so prone to manipulation and cheap effects." Divide and Conquer, a Warner Brothers short of 1943, asserted that a con man of the Nazi media was no match for a movie- conscious American: "You are up to his tricks. You can see through his technique." 61 The brash strategy was meant to build public confidence; it surely had its justification in the context of a world war. In our present setting, however, such smugness becomes an interpretive disability that blinds the viewer to textual seductions.
Commentators repeatedly dwell on the confrontation between Brigade Leader Cass and Herr Völker as the film's "key scene," a showdown where former class enemies "t for the young hero's mind." 62 These analyses concentrate on the dialogue, dealing with the film as if it were a written script. We read nothing about composition, blocking, gesture, about the visual surface of the text in question. 63 This "key scene" likewise seems to stand in isolation. We gain no precise sense of its place in a larger narrative structure. Here Nazi propaganda would seem to speak--I stress the word--forthrightly and apodictically. As Klaus Theweleit reminds us, though, we dare not solely dwell on what fascist language "says"; we need to comprehend how it functions (MFM, 261). If anything, the scene in question and the narrative as a whole rely more strongly on tactile rather than verbal persuasion. The film appeals to a feeling rather than a thinking spectator. If the party member prevails, it is not because of what he says, but how he speaks. And what convinces is the personal touch.
A closer look at the famous confrontation bears this out, a scene of nine shots lasting a little more than three minutes. 64 The convalescing Heini, dressed in pyjamas and bearing a cane, sits on a part bench (shot no. 322). We cut to Herr Völker and Cass walking towards him (shot no. 323), moving to a closer view of them as they approach the boy (shot no. 324). The two enter the frame to greet Heini in a complex shot that will take almost seventy-five seconds (shot no. 325). Initially, Heini stands to the right of his father and Cass; Völker then moves aside as Heini shakes hands with the brigade leader. The youth's question, "Where am I to go?" (Wo soll ich'n hin?) in essence reiterates the compositional dilemma. The father, who has turned his back, spins around, insisting the boy belongs to him. "That is the question" (Das eben ist die Frage!) retorts Cass as the camera changes its position to exclude the father from the frame, thereby anticipating the scene's final outcome. Cass and Heini sit down on a bench. "Where does the boy belong today?" (Wo gehört der Junge heute hin?) the brigade leader asks, going on to effuse about the wanderlust of youth. "Boys are something wonderful!" (Jungens sind etwas wunder bares). he rejoices, with perceptible homoerotic enthusiasm. 65 The camera lingers for a long while on a close-up of Cass's animated face, panning to capture Heini's transfixed response. "Where does the boy belong?" repeats Cass. We pan right from Heini to his father, who peers at his now offscreen son; the camera then dollies back to give us a two-shot of Herr Völker and his son. Heini, though, is elsewhere, contemplating a faraway world, coming to himself only when his father elbows him and bids him to speak.
After his initial question, Heini remains silent for the duration of the scene, positioned between the two adults as they square off in a physical confrontation. While Herr Völker hunches down, his hands tightly gripping a hat between his legs, he articulates the body language of someone diminished and depleted, paralyzed by the past (shot nos. 327-8). The camera cuts to a two-shot of father and progeny (shot no. 329), displaying wounded sons of Germany in need of help. The scene's climactic take (shot no. 330) will last forty-five seconds. Reversing angles, the camera cuts to a vantage point behind the bench, realigning itself so that the viewer experiences the showdown from Heini's perspective. Both men stand up during the face-off: Cass confident, hands in pocket, his voice controlled; Völker huffy, limbs taut, expression grim. Cass belittles Völker's communist allegiances, his comrades, the International. The brigade leader asserts his superiority, commanding the frame, casting a shadow and looking down on Völker, asking him where he was born, in what city, in what country. His face brightly contoured by the light, Cass repeats the ultimate answer as an irrevocable truth ("In Germany, that's right!"), his fingers moving back and forth between himself and his interlocutor: "In our Germany!" (In Deutschland, jawohl! In unserem Deutschland!) His hand reaches out and repeatedly taps Völker on the chest. "Think about that, why don't you!" (Das überlegen Sie sich mal!) 66
A hand reaches out and touches a listener. A compelling presence provides a role model for Heini, a better self-image for Herr Völker, a point of orientation for the viewer. A subsequent scene, another prolonged take, bears out just how strong an impression Cass has made (shot no. 335). Speaking over beer with Stoppel, Völker repeats the brigade leader's catechism, but more importantly, assumes Cass's compositional place and reenacts his persuasive performance. Völker's gaze is now firm, his manner confident. He confronts an interlocutor with a challenge whose impact goes beyond words and logic, whose ultimate effect is that of a physical demonstration. He, like his son, has been won over and transformed, recast in the image of a new Germany. 67 Stoppel also takes pause. Later we see him with a copy of the Social Democratic Vorwärts, suggesting at least a partial shift of political allegiance. In the end, likewise, he warns Heini and sidetracks the boy's pursuers.
We dare not underestimate the formal surfaces and visual strategies of Nazi films, even in the case of one of its most undeniably placative productions. Goebbels and directors like Steinhoff understood well the power of images, how they could stir imaginations and activate emotions. "The camera is the star among the film studio's equipment," cinematographer Konstantin Irmin-Tschet would later write, "it stands at that pinnacle of perfection which supports the art of great performers. . . . Being beautiful is not the thing, the point is being clear! Whoever sees clearly, sees most artistically!" 68 Karl Aloys Schenzinger, likewise, recognized how visual impressions could offer clear points of orientation. In the novel Der Hitlerjunge Quex, Heini thumbs through the pages of a Nazi magazine, the Illustrierter Beobachter, coming across a photograph of a proud young boy standing at attention, underneath which we read the caption, "Germany's future." Immediately Heini makes the portrait a part of his own person, embracing "the boy deeply in his heart" (den Jungen tief in sein Herz geschlossen; DHQ, 160). Later, Heini reads an account of the Tyrolean war of liberation (the backdrop used by Luis Trenker in his film Der Rebell [The Rebel], 1932), afterwards lying in bed and dreaming about what he has read: "There had been a moving story about a boy who had dragged munitions and water to the Tyrolean troops, until a French bullet laid him to rest. Like that boy in the story, he too saw the flag with the red eagle rising out of the darkness, he heard the noise of the rifles and the cries of the victors" (DHQ, 207). 69
What does Hitler Youth Quex disclose about early Nazi film aesthetics? Goebbels sought to transform the film apparatus into a tool of the state, a medium of myth, legend, and fantasy which would relieve reality of its dialectical complexity. The primary task when the National Socialists came into power was that of reshaping public imagination in accordance with its own persuasions, of presenting an appealing and compelling worldview. At issue here was nothing less than the control over perceptual possibility. 70 Among all of the media, film would from the start assume a privileged, indeed seminal role in the Third Reich.  First of all, film was enlisted to simplify the world rather than to complicate it--in essence, to dedialecticize reality. In the early 1930s, this meant winning over cynical and weary minds to a cause by presenting a world of clear fronts and unimpeachable certainties. "Reason as such," claimed a contemporary editorial entitled "National Socialist Film?" "has been divested of its cold power and has become what it should be: the technique of thinking with the heart." Second, the medium's proper calling was not only to simplify, but also to heighten experience, to provide an emotional frisson. "We demand of art," continued the editorial,
that it genuinely move us and not just stupefy us with sensations; we demand of art that it probe the foundations of humanity and plumb its ultimate depths; it must show us the breathing of the soul and not, as has been the case for so long, just the pounding of the brain. We want to partake of the rhythmics of the soul, not just the monotonous uniform march of international intellectuals. 71
Goebbels's rhetoric and that of productions such as Hitler Youth Quex privileged the discourse of the immediate and the authentic. The new German cinema strived for a visceral appeal. In the process film was to become an industrialized means of behavior modification.
National Socialism, despite its ideological pretensions of a coherent worldview, was to a great degree the function of stirring spectacles and pyrotechnic demonstrations. Film provided the special effects with which the Third Reich created itself in its own image. In decisive ways, film and National Socialism would become of a piece. The flow of images and the movement of a party afforded nonstop excitement and ever-shifting perspectives. Each employed elaborate choreographies and dramatic displays of emotion in the name of making fictional worlds become real. Both reached out to beholders, aiming to control their undivided attention.
In Hitler Youth Quex, we witness the fabrication of a new man. This new man is no material being. The film tells the story of how a young boy becomes a political property.  While claiming youth, the National Socialists also sought to reclaim cinema, realizing the power of both entities in their campaign to transform the German nation. Hitler Youth Quex puts a party design into motion; its mise-en-scène reshapes a scene and reforms a country, leaving behind Weimar tableaux of loitering and crime, progressing toward final images of personal sacrifice and collective abandon. We open on a site of hunger and confusion; we end with the ecstatic vision of a future order. With a trajectory that leads from a mob of agitated onlookers to a conration of spirited participants, the film forsakes the agitprop of proletarian realism in the name of a classless society's transcendent power. It disdains the illicit voyeurism and sensual abandon of a decadent regime and privileges the fixed gaze and erect body of a new order, asking spectators to take the discursive leap from Caligari to Hitler, to transform the fairground into the parade ground. 72 This involves a shift of specular allegiance as well: distractions of flowing skirts and whirling carousels are exchanged for the intoxication of billowing banners and parallel lines.
Hitler Youth Quex mediates the myth of a martyr in order to mobilize emotions. The dead Herbert Norkus becomes the raw material for the fictional Heini Völker, who, brought back to life by a nameless amateur actor, metamorphoses into Hitler Youth Quex, whose dying body in turn segues into a waving flag that becomes a screen for the sights and sounds of a party. 73 Human substance evaporates into disembodied function; a corpse evanesces into a medium for a movement. The climactic moments of Hitler Youth Quex impress upon viewers a consonance between a waving flag and filmic flux. 74 Both provide attractions that bind spectators and subjects: to a movement, to a medium. The final sequence involves a celebration of death in which human sacrifice is experienced as aesthetic revery. "The flag means more than death" (Die Fahne ist mehr als der Tod) are the film's closing words. This film, likewise, is more than just a film, as its last shot of storm troopers marching offscreen into the battles of the future intimates. Hitler Youth Quex is not only an early Nazi feature, but also a remarkable preview of coming attractions, a Bewegungsfilm that shows the way to war and a nation's collective self-destruction. 75 As Max Picard later observed, this new order would not lead to a new world. It "is a rupture rather than the real thing; this beginning is in fact the end: it is a world coming to its real end through its thousands of pseudostarts." 76 Surrendering one's person, participating in a great spectacle, and acting in a celluloid fantasy will become of a piece for Germany's marching minions. 77 Hitler Youth Quex emanates from a cinematic apparatus that, in equal measure, is to be a dream machine and a death factory.
Eric Rentschler, Professor of Film Studies at the University of California, Irvine, is the author of The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and its Afterlife (forthcoming, Harvard University Press).
Unless otherwise indicated, all translations into English are the author's.
1. Karl Aloys Schenzinger, Der Hitlerjunge Quex (Berlin: Zeitgeshichte-Verlag, 1932), 180. The original reads:
"Nie klang ein Lied wie dieses Lied. Nie zog ein Weg wie dieser nach vorn. Der Kopf wußte nichts mehr von den Beinen. Es gab keine Last. Das Auge war alles. Alles war Bild. Der Marsch war Klang, ein Rausch, ein beglückender Strom."
2. Alfred Bäumler, Männerbund und Wissenschaft (Berlin: Junker and Dünhaupt, 1934), 94, quoted in Herbert Maruse, "The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State," in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon, 1968).
3. Josef Goebbels, quoted in Jay W. Baird, To Die For Germany: Heroes in the Nazi Pantheon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 116.
4. Hitlerjunge Quex. Ein Film vom Opfergeist der deutschen Jugend, 35 mm, 95 min., Universum-Film A.-G, Berlin, 1933. Production Group: Karl Ritter. Director: Hans Steinhoff. Script: Karl Aloys Schenzinger and Bobby E. Luethge, based on Schenzinger's novel. Cinematography: Konstantin Irmen-Tschet. Assistant Camera: Fred Fernau and Erich Rudolf Schmidke. Publicity Photography: Otto Schulz. Editing: Milo Harbich. Set Design: Benno von Arent and Artur Günther. Makeup: Waldemar Jabs. Clothing: Berta Grützmacher and Paul Haupt. Sound: Walter Tjaden and Erich Leistner. Music: Hans-Otto Borgmann. Lyrics for the Hitler Youth Song: Baldur von Schirach.

Original length: 2609 meters (95 minutes). Premiered on 11 September 1933 in Munich (Ufa-Phoebus-Palast) and on 19 September 1933 in Berlin (Ufa-Palast-am-Zoo). Rating: "Artistically especially worthwhile." The film may not be screened publicly in the Federal Republic of Germany.
A 16 mm copy with partial English intertitles (summaries and commentary by Gregory Bateson) can be rented from the Museum of Modern Art; a video copy with English intertitles is available from International Historic Films.
5. This film, claimed an enthusiastic reviewer, provides "a fanfare for Germany's youth and in so doing one for Germany's future" ("Unsere Fahne ist die neue Zeit," Der Kinematograph, 12 September 1933).
6. Gerhard Paul discusses the development of a party propaganda apparatus prior to 1933 in his Aufstand der Bilder: Die NS-Propaganda vor 1933 (Bonn: Dietz, 1990). The propaganda minister's most important programmatic addresses on film are reprinted in Gerd Albrecht, Nationalsozialistische Filmpolitik (Stuttgart: Enke, 1969), 439-500. For general approaches to Nazi propaganda, see Robert Edwin Herzstein, The War That Hitler Won (New York: Putnam, 1978); and Michael Balfour, Propaganda in War 1939-45: Organisations, Policies and Publics in Britain and Germany (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979).
7. The original reads: "[Ich bin] ein leidenschaftlicher Liebhaber der filmischen Kunst" (Goebbels's speech in the Kaiserhof, Berlin, 28 March 1933; quoted in Albrecht, Filmpolitik, 439).
8. See Karsten Witte, "Filmkomödie im Faschismus" (Ph.D. diss., University of Frankfurt, 1986), 1.
9. Josef Goebbels's speech in the Tennishallen, Berlin, 19 May 1933; quoted in Albrecht, Filmpolitik, 443.
10. The original reads: "Es gehört eben Phantasie dazu, den inneren Sinn und die innere Gestaltung einer neuen Welt lebendig zu machen" (Goebbels's Tennishallen speech; quoted in Albrecht, Filmpolitik, 440).
11. For a harsh reckoning with Weimar cinema characteristic of the transition period, see "The New German Cinema," Film-Kurier, 1 December 1933: "One has learned to realize that the former 'concessions to the public taste' have been much more to the detriment than to the advantage of a film and of the film business as a whole." See also a fierce polemic against Weimar cinema's alleged esoteric experiments, foreign sensibilities, and self-indulgent artists, in Robert Volz, "Der Ruf nach Filmen aus dem Leben," Film-Kurier, 22 December 1933. The most vehement sustained attack on Weimar cinema written during the Third Reich, an extension of the campaign against "decadent art" into film culture, is to be found in Carl Neumann, Curt Belling, and Hans-Walther Betz, Film-"Kunst," Film-Kohn, Film-Korruption (Berlin: Scherping, 1937).
12. The original reads: "Man soll nicht von früh bis spät in Gesinnung machen" (Goebbels's Kaiserhof speech; quoted in Albrecht, Filmpolitik, 441).
13. The original reads: "Die Massen aufzubieten, das verstehen wir nun einmal. . . . Die Kunst muß das Leben verdichten" (Goebbels's Tennishallen speech; quoted in Albrecht, Filmpolitik, 442, 444.
14. See Jay W. Baird, To Die for Germany: Heroes in the Nazi Pantheon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 119; hereafter abbreviated TDG. This source provides a meticulously researched account of Norkus's life, death, and transration. Throughout his book, Baird mimics National Socialist perspectives, simulating its virulant anti-Semitism, anticommunism, and misogyny. This discursive ploy is undoubtedly meant to be critical; at times, though, it gives way to an unwitting affective alignment. A description of the character Wilde, for instance, grossly embellishes what we see in Steinhoff's film: "When the devil took human form, he came as Wilde, and his followers are the gangsters and shadowy res who compose the neighborhood KPD. His physiognomy is calculated to reflect an inner nature of decomposition; here, indeed, was a 'subhuman,' the product of miscegenation, venereal disease, and criminality. Unshaven, squint eyed, and repulsive, he was the incarnation of Bolshevism. The gutter was his proper milieu" (TDG, 123). The communist Gerda's "raw sexuality," we read, "is devoid of Nordic refinement"; a "painted street girl," she provides "a walking catalogue of Berlin vice" (TDG, 123).
15. Film-Kurier published and distributed the lyrics to the theme song of Hitler Youth Quex, "Unsere Fahne flattert uns voran," text by von Schirach and music by Hans-Otto Bergmann. The lyrics were available for RM 1.50.
16. See Gerd Albrecht, ed., Hitlerjunge Quex: Ein Film vom Opfergeist der deutschen Jugend (Frankfurt am Main: Deutsches Institut für Filmkunde, 1983), 16. Theater critic Rudolf Ramlow's Herbert Norkus?--Hier! Opfer und Sieg der Hitler-Jugend , according to George L. Mosse, likewise "went through no less than twenty-five editions in six years" (George Mosse, Nazi Culture [New York: Schocken, 1981], 266). Mosse's collection includes a short selection from Ramlow's book as well as a passage from Baldur von Schirach's influential manual of 1934, Die Hitler Jugend: Idee und Gestalt (Mosse, Nazi Culture, 286-7, 294-303). In Hans W. Geissendörfer's Gudrun , a period piece couched in Heimatfilm iconography, we see the young Hitler Youth, Fritz, avidly reading Schenzinger's novel. On the book cover is a photograph of Heini Völker from Steinhoff's film.
17. For a dramatic description of the festive evening, see Oskar Kalbus, Vom Werden deutscher Filmkunst. Zweiter Teil: Der Tonfilm (Altona-Bahrenfeld: Cigaretten Bilderdienst, 1935), 121-3. The film premiered in the United States on 6 July 1934 in the Yorkville Theatre, New York City. The seventy-five-minute version ran under the title Unsere Fahne flattert uns voran (Our flag flutters before us). For an account of the Manhattan response, see "Hitlerjunge Quex in New York: Erste Pressestimmen," Film-Kurier, 24 July 1934.
18. The original reads: "Wenn mit dem Hitlerjugend Quex zum erstenmal im großem Stil der Versuch unternommen Wurde, die national socialistische Ideenwelt filmkünsterisch zu Darstellung zu bringen, so ist dieser Versuch, soweit das bein den neuartigen Methoden überhaupt möglich ist, auf der ganzen Linie gelungen ("Dr. Goebbels über Hitlerjunge Quex," Der Angriff, 25 September 1933).
19. The original reads: "Deutschlands größter Film-konzern hat seine einzigartigen technischen, materiellen und künstlerischen Mittel zusammengestellt, um einen großen, außergewöhnlichen Wurf zu wagen: diesen Film von Kämpfen der Jugend Deutschlands, dieses Hohelied auf die von jugendlicher Begeisteirung durchglühten Bannerträger der nationalen Revolution," reprinted in Ulrich Kurowski, ed., Deutsche Spielfilme 1933-1945. Materiallen III [Munich: Stadtmuseum München und Münchner Filmzentrum, 1980], 207).
20. See Albrecht, Hitlerjunge Quex: Ein Film, 8-10. The film took in RM 190,000 during its first three weeks and by the end of 1935 had reached a domestic box office of RM 800,000.
21. See Gert Berghoff, "Die Spielfilmproduktion 1933-1945," in Der Spielfilm im Dritten Reich, ed. Manfred Dammeyer (Oberhausen: XII. Westdeutsche Kurzfilmtage, 1966), 34. A two-day seminar held in Düsseldorf early in 1988 scrutinized the three martyr films; see Wilhelm Bettecken's report, "Der Film im Dienst der Propaganda," Film-Korrespondenz, 16 February 1988, 3-6. For extended historical analyses of these films, see Martin Loiperdinger, ed., Märtyrerlegenden im NS-Film (Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 1991).
22. The original reads: "Unsere Fahne flattert uns voran. Sie führt. . . . "
23. See Herbert Marcuse, "The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State," in his Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon, 1968); hereafter abbreviated "SAL." Such a call stresses historical exigency but in truth ignores the real forces of history, appealing instead to "self-evident" claims of existence: "A secularized theological image of history emerges. Every folk receives its historical mandate as a 'mission' that is the first and last, the unrestricted obligation of existence" ("SAL," 35).
24. The original reads: "Von der Kommune gehetzt und gefaßt, stirbt er den Opfertod der deutschen Jugend, den die vorigen Generation ihm bei Langemarck vorstarb, den Tod für das neue Vaterland." (taken from the original press booklet copy [on file in the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek]. See also Karsten Witte, "Der Apfel und der Stamm: Jugend und Propaganda am Beispiel Hitlerjunge Quex ," in Schoch und Schöpfung--Jugendästhetik im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Willi Bucher and Klaus Pohl (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1986). As the Hitler Youths stand around a piano and sing their anthem, we glimpse a helmet (Stahlheim) from World War I hanging on the wall. "The future," claims Witte, "into which these choir boys want to march, as their song announces 'man for man,' is their fathers' past" (Witte, "Der Apfel," 304). Compare Walther Gottfried Klucke's contemporary drama, Einsiedel , in which the ghosts of fallen front soldiers appear before a wounded veteran, now a graveyard attendant, ten years after Germany's defeat. Full of energy, they insist their deaths served a grand national cause--and that youth must carry on their legacy.
25. In order to enhance the fictional impact of Quex, film officials suppressed the name of the Hitler Youth who played Heini Völker. Thus, both in its story and in its production, the film depersonalized its leading player for the sake of a larger cause.
26. Compare the expressive deathbed tableau in Karl Aloys Schenzinger's novel: "Heini sits up in bed with his eyes wide open. His gaze flickers, fixes on no one, peers into emptiness before it slowly fades out again. The nurse lays the sick boy down. His mouth opens. His comrades hear something, but they can't recognize the words. Then terror overcomes them. Heini is singing. They stand there paralyzed. They don't know the words, but they recognize the melody that oozes, chimes, and rattles in his throat. They sing it almost every day, every evening, on every march, on every outing. They've sung it with Quex, just recently. It's terrible to hear him singing like this.
"The nurses bid them silent leave. They sneak away, upset, disturbed, desperate. They feel it. No one talks about it. Everyone knows: this is the song of death." (The original reads: "Mit aufgerissenen Augen sitzt Heini aufrecht im Bet. Der Blick flattert, sieht keinen an, sieht ins Lehre und schließt sich langsam wieder. Die Schwester legt den Kranken zurück. Sein Mund spricht.  Dann aber packt sie das graue Entsetzen. Heini singt. Sie stehen wie versteinert da.  Sie singen sie fast täglich, auf jedem Abend, auf jedem Marsch, auf jeder Fahrt. Sie haben sie mit Quex zusammen gesungen, neulich noch. Es ist furchtbar, ihn so singen zu hören.
"Die Schewster winkt ihnen stumm zu. Sie schleichen sich weg, erschüttert, verstört, verzweifelt. Sie fühlen es. Keiner spricht davon. Jeder weiß es: hier singt der Tod," in Karl Aloys Schenzinger, Der Hitlerjunge Quex [Berlin: Zeitgeschichte-Verlag, 1932], 255; hereafter abbreviated DHQ.)
27. Gottfried Benn, Nach dem Nihilismus (Berlin: Kiepenheur, 1932), 20; cited in Walter H. Sokel, The Writer in Extremis: Expressionism in Twentieth-Century German Literature (New York: MacGraw Hill, 1964), 115.
28. Quoted in Sokel, The Writer in Extremis, 116.
29. See Ernst Jünger, Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt (1932; Stuttgart: Klett, 1981). The film actor's task, according to Jünger, is to represent the type: "For that reason one does not ask that he be unique, but rather obvious. One does not expect him to express the endless harmony of a human life, but rather its precise rhythm." (The original reads: "Daher verlangt man von ihm nicht Einmaligkeit, sondern Eindeutigkeit.
30. "The priority and primacy of the whole over its 'members' (parts)," argues Marcuse, is basic to Nazi doctrine. The whole constitutes "the unity that unifies the parts, a unity which is the precondition for the fulfillment and completion of each part" ("SAL," 19-20).
31. Rust delivered the address to school teachers on 22 June 1934, and it was reprinted in Völkischer Beobachter, 23 June 1934; quoted in John Altman, "Movies' Role in Hitler's Conquest of German Youth," Hollywood Quarterly 3 (summer 1948): 381. Also see David Welch, "Educational Film Propaganda and the Nazi Youth," in Nazi Propaganda: The Power and the Limitations, ed. David Welch (London: Croom Helm, 1983), 69; hereafter abbreviated NPP. Compare Erik Homburger Erikson, "Hitler's Imagery and German Youth," Psychiatry 5 (November 1942): 475-93.
32. Quoted in Peter Loewenberg, "The Psychohistorical Origins of the Nazi Youth Cohort," American Historical Review 76 (December 1971): 1469-70.
33. The original reads: " . . . Elternhaus, Kirche, Schule und andern überkommenden Formen und Vorbilder.
34. No sooner has Frau Völker died of gas inhalation than her son dons a Hitler Youth uniform. As Karsten Witte notes, Heini replaces his Mutter (mother) with a Mutze (cap; "Der Apfel," 303). He reenters the world as the "true child of the drill-machine" spoken of by Klaus Theweleit, an automaton "created without the help of a woman, parentless" (Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, vol. 2, Male Bodies. Psychoanalyzing White Terror, trans. Erica Carter et al. [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989], 161; hereafter abbreviated MFM).
35. In the novel, the father sends the police to look for his son who disappears following the mother's suicide. Apart from a short chat with Stoppel, the father vanishes from the film after his meeting with Cass. The lengthy plot summary in the Reichsfilmarchiv handbook of 1935-36 does not mention the father at all. Theweleit notes the general absence of fathers in the Freikorps-literature: "Whether heroes or chief opponents, fathers are categorically denied a voice in these books. To a remarkable extent, they are simply dispensed with. . . . Patriarchy secures its dominance under fascism in the form of a 'filiarchy'--that much is clear. Nothing but sons as far as the eye can see--Hitler too is one of their number (Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, vol. 1, Women Floods Bodies History, trans. Stephen Conway, Erica Carter, and Chris Turner [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987], 108).
36. See Wilhelm Reich: "By identification, psychoanalysis understands the process whereby a person begins to feel at one with another person, adopts that person's characteristics and attitudes, and in his fantasy puts himself in the other's place; this process entails an actual change in the identifying person, inasmuch as the latter 'internalizes' characteristics of his model" (Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, trans. Vincent R. Carfagno [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969], 46). Heini turns away from his father and Stoppel, finding in neither a desirable focus for his energies, and aligns himself with the party, an entity much larger than a single individual. As he says to Stoppel: "I believe in my Führer and my comrades, that's why I'm with them" (Aber an meinen Führer glaub' ich und an meine Kameraden, deswegen will ich dabei sein!)
37. Oskar Mazerath, the young protagonist of another famous German tale of education, experiences the same period from a much different perspective. Both an antihero and an anti-Heini, he sits under a rostrum and laments, "Poor Hitler Youth Quex, you have died in vain," going on to dissolve the party's mass ornament and transforming a local Nazi demonstration into a swinging counter-Nuremburg (Günter Grass, The Tin Drum, trans. Ralph Manheim [New York: Vintage, 1964], 120).
38. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 242. Also see Hannah Arendt's discussion of complete absorption by a totalitarian movement: "The fanaticized members can be reached by neither experience nor argument; identification with the movement and total conformism seem to have destroyed the very capacity for experience, even if it be as extreme as torture or the fear of death" (Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism [New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973], 308).
39. Grundler sings "Die Liebe der Matrosen," well known to contemporary audiences from Hanns Schwarz's 1931 Ufa musical, Bomben auf Monte Carlo (Monte Carlo Madness), a film starring Hans Albers and Heinz Röhmann. The song was written by the prominent composer Werner R. Heymann.
40. See Gregory Bateson, "Cultural and Thematic Analysis of Fictional Films," Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences 2 (February 1943): 77.
41. Quoted in Karl Heinz-Huber, Jugend unterm Hakenkreuz (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1936), 19.
42. See Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Seabury, 1972): propaganda "fixes the condition of men . . . by setting them in motion. It counts on being able to count on them" .
43. See Michele Sakkara, ed., Die große Zeit des deutschen Films 1933-1945 (Leoni am Starnberger See: Druffel, 1980), 28. The editor applauds the film's realism and authenticity, claiming it anticipates Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave.
44. See H. Sp.: "Anyone who has followed Hans Steinhoff's work through the silent period and into the sound era has witnessed a development that with increasing purity and beauty has crystallized the ideal of a dramatic film, substantial and tactful, mature in its characters and its artistry" (H. Sp., "Deutsche Filmregisseure: IV. Hans Steinhoff," Der Deutsche Film 2 [October 1937]: 110). (The original reads: "Wer die Arbeit Hans Steinhoffs in der Stummfilmzeit und später in der Tonfilmära verfolgt hat, war Zeuge einer Entwicklung, die das Ideal des gehalt-- und taktvollen, charakterlich und künstlerisch reifen dramatischen Films immer und schöner herausarbeitete." Also see the interview portrait, "Hans Steinhoff spricht sich aus," Film-Kurier, 15 January 1935. For recent career evaluations of Steinhoff, see Herbert Holba et al., Reclams deutsches Filmlexikon (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984), 364-5, and the alphabetical entry in Hans-Michael Bock, ed., Cinegraph: Lexikon zum deutschsprachigen Film (Munich: edition text und kritik, 1987), D1-D2. Billy Wilder, coauthor of the script for Steinhoff's Scampolo, ein Kind der Straße (Scampolo, a child of the streets, 1932), later spoke of Steinhoff as "a shithead" and "an idiot," a "very bad director," a filmmaker "without a lick of talent" (Neil Sinyard and Adrian Turner, Billy Wilders Filme [Berlin: Spiess, 1980], 21).
45. For the National Socialists' view of Systemzeit features, see Fred Taylor, ed. and trans., The Goebbels Diaries: 1939-1941 (New York: Penguin, 1984); on 10 October 1939, the minister notes: "Old film, The Threepenny Opera. Typical Jewish humbug. This is the kind of thing that they were allowed to set before the German people with impunity. To our credit that we have got rid of all this rubbish" (Taylor, The Goebbels Diaries, 16). Steinhoff was sympathetic to the Nazi party before Hitler assumed power. After the success of Quex, the director became an important re in youth film activities, overseeing many 16mm short and medium-length political productions for the Hitlerjugend such as the highly recognized Der Marsch zum Führer (The March to the Führer, 1939).
46. See Leif Fuhrhammar and Folke Isaksson: "It is one of the earliest Nazi feature films produced while it was still necessary to build a National Socialist spirit on what was left of the values of the Weimar Republic" (Leif Fuhrhammar and Folke Isaksson: Politics and Film, trans. Kersti French [New York: Prager, 1971], 102).
47. Heinrich George, a former communist who became an important stage and screen luminary in Nazi Germany, played both roles. His onscreen change from red to brown thus paralleled his real-life transformation. Curt Riess (in his inimitably sensationalist manner) describes George's participation here as an act of desperation and accommodation, an attempt to save his career and reestablish himself; see Curt Reiss, Das gab's nur einmal: Die große Zeit des deutschen Films, vol. 2 (Munich: Molden, 1977), 230-3.
48. See Fuhrhammar and Isaksson, Politics and Film, 102. Jutzi, the erstwhile proponent of a realistic film for working-class audiences, fell into obscurity during the Third Reich. In 1933 the Nazis censored his documentary Um's tägliche Brot (For our daily bread) and banned Mother Krause's Trip to Happiness. His subsequent productions were limited to short features, generally comedies and detective films. Recently his entire career has come under reexamination; in late October 1993, the Historical Museum in Berlin presented a comprehensive work retrospective.
49. Francis Courtade and Pierre Cadars, Geschichte des Films im Dritten Reich, trans. Florian Hopf (Munich: Hanser, 1975), 46; see also David Welch, Propaganda and the German Cinema 1933-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 63. Lotte H. Eisner writes: "The cinema of the Nazi era, which portrays men and societies 'as they are in reality,' is not vastly different from its predecessors; with regard to style, for example, Hitlerjunge Quex [sic] is not a great way away from its political opposite Berlin-Alexanderplatz " (Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen, trans. Roger Greaves [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969], 333).
50. See Alice Yaeger Kaplan: "Fascism recuperates modern man's lost rituals with the help of the very factor that has threatened them in the first place: technology. And this is precisely how fascist art can appear both nostalgic and avant-garde, how it can construct by representing destruction" (Alice Yaeger Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986], 30).
51. See Frank D. McConnell, The Spoken Seen: Film and the Romantic Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 31.
52. See Ernst Bloch's trenchant commentary on the derivative character of Nazi discourse: "After all, the Nazi did not even invent the song with which he seduces. Nor even the gunpowder with which he makes his fireworks, nor even the firm in whose name he deceives" (Ernst Bloch, "On the Original History of the Third Reich," in his Heritage of Our Times, trans. Neville and Stephen Plaice [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990], 117).
53. In the Nazi calendar, the summer solstice (21 June) served as an occasion to recruit new Hitler Youth members. See Klaus Vondung: "The summer solstice celebrations lent themselves particularly well to ritual presentations, where, before a deeply symbolic fire and against a nocturnal nature backdrop, one evoked religious states of mind and feelings in the service of National Socialist ideology." (The original reads: "Die Sonnwendfeiern waren besonders dazu geeignet, rituelle Handlungen vorzunehmen und angesichts des symbolträchtigen Feuers und vor der Kulisse der nächtlichen Natur religiöse Stimmungen und Gefühle im Dienst der nationalsozialistischen Ideologie hervorzurufen," in Klaus Vondung, Magie und Manipulation. Ideologischer Kult und politische Religion des Nationalsozialismus [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1971], 81.) Compare the opening sequence of Edward Dmytryk's Hitler's Children with its stylized studio replication of a Nazi summer-solstice ceremony, replete with a stirring speaker, an ornamental mass, and chiaroscuro lighting.
54. See the compelling recollections of Peter Brückner, Das Abseits als sicherer Ort: Kindheit und Jugend zwischen 1933 und 1945 (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1982). Brückner describes his youth during the Third Reich and his ongoing attempts to find pockets of fresh air, spaces not controlled by the party or the state. He notes how Hitler Youth outings virtually occupied forests and countrysides, "to be entered either as an exercise ground or as a site of loud games, and one could hardly withdraw from either." (The original reads: "Das Draußen, von dem der lyrische Song ausging, war betretbar entweder als Exerzierplatz oder als Ort für laute Spiele, und beidem konnte man sich kaum entziehen," in Brückner, Das Abseits, 31.) For a scene redolent of Brückner's description, see Schenzinger, Der Hitlerjunge Quex, 181-3. As the government increasingly closed its net to ensure all youth joined party organizations, there was some level of resistance, especially after 1938. See Detlev Peukert, Die Edelweißpiraten. Protestbewegungen jugendlicher Arbeiter im Dritten Reich, Eine Dokumentation (Cologne: Bund-Verlag, 1983), and Arno Klönne, "Jugendliche Subkulturen im Dritten Reich," in Schock und Schöpfung--Jugendästhetik im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Willi Bucher and Kalus Pohl (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1986), 308-13.
55. See Theweleit: "The forest (the 'German' forest) seems, then, to have provided a model for the formation of the ornamented fascist mass. The forest was the shaped desire of German men, teeming woman/nature brought to order. In the forest, the sons were united as 'members' of the rank-and-file" (MFM, 67).
56. Bateson, as quoted in Margaret Mead and Rhoda Métraux, "An Analysis of the Nazi Film Hitlerjunge Quex: Gregory Bateson," in their The Study of Culture at a Distance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 302; hereafter abbreviated SCD.
57. Bateson describes a compositional contrast between communists and Nazis as if it were a verbal one, maintaining that "we are told almost in so many words that this contrast is a part of the emotional dynamics upon which Nazism rests" (SCD, 310; emphasis added).
58. Erwin Leiser, Nazi Cinema, trans. Gertrud Mander and David Wilson (New York: Macmillan, 1974), 36.
59. Welch collapses the two, defining propaganda rather fuzzily as "a means of conversion of one kind or another. However, it should also be remembered that it can be used as a means of maintaining the status quo, of reinforcing already held beliefs, by way or various psychological defense mechanisms" (NPP, 55).
60. Compare the verdict of the Variety critic (Kauf.) in his notice of 7 July 1934 (following the Yorkville screening of an unsubtitled version): "It's frank propaganda and no bones about it." It is hardly entertainment, but rather a film with a purpose. Nonetheless, it demonstrates "how good German film technique is."
61. Thomas Doherty, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 29-30, 35.
62. This analysis derives from Leiser, Nazi Cinema, 36-38; it has reappeared in almost every subsequent discussion of the film, for instance in Courtade and Cadars, Geschichte des Films, 45-46; Welch, "Educational Film Propaganda," 68-70; Albrecht, Hitlerjunge Quex: Ein Film, 17-20; Baird, To Die for Germany, 124; Loiperdinger, Märtyrerlegenden, 161. See also Hanno Möbius, "Heimat im nationalsozialistischen Stadtfilm," Augen-Blick 5 : 35. Quoting the scene, Möbius stresses the role of the park backdrop to the confrontation, how the green space suggests Nazism's ideological project of renaturalization. Linda Schulte-Sasse both cites the passage and recapitulates Möbius's reading ("Retrieving the City as Heimat: Berlin in Nazi Cinema," in Berlin: Culture and Metropolis, eds. Charles W. Haxthausen and Heidrun Suhr [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990], 172-3).  The over-simplified method: 'Where are you born? In o-u-r Germany. Think about it.' like a hypnotic order" (reprinted in David Culbert, "The Rockefeller Foundation, the Museum of Modern Art Film Library, and Siegfried Kracauer, 1941," Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 13 [October 1993]: 509).
63. Witte's analysis poses the sole exception. His reading studies a production still from the scene and elucidates its body language; see "Der Apfel," 304.
64. The shot numbers are taken from Thomas Arnold, Jutta Schöning, and Ulrich Schröter, Hitlerjunge Quex: Einstellungsprotokoll (Munich: Filmland Presse, 1980), 171-5.
65. The young actor who played Heini was reportedly the lover of Baldur von Schirach. See the intriguing memoirs of a Hitler Youth member, Hans Siemsen's Hitler Youth, trans. Trever and Phyllis Blewitt (London: Drummond, 1940): "There was a lot of talk . . . about Schirach's relations with a certain boy with whom he was seen about everywhere over a long period. Even at official functions this boy either stood next to him or was a member of his escort. . . . No one," he concedes, "thought any the worse of Baldur von Schirach for loving this boy. We all loved him and quite understood how it was that the Reich Youth Leader had singled him out." For this reason, the verb "to quex" (quexen) became "part of the vocabulary of Hitler Youth. It is easy to imagine what it means" . Schirach was hardly the exception, maintains the author. "Among the sixty to seventy Hitler Youth Leaders with whom I came into close contact practically half were considered by us boys to be homosexuals." Siemsen describes a popular contemporary booklet, Deutsches Jungvolk, with "admirable photographs of boys, marching, camping, eating and bathing; and two full-size portraits of two particularly good-looking boys. It can be seen at once (I don't mean this ironically) that the leaders who compiled the booklet are very susceptible to good looks in their boys" (Siemsen, Hitler Youth, 146).
66. The scene--both in its verbal shape and patriotic project--recalls Heinrich von Kleist's Katechismus der Deutschen (German Catechism, 1809), lessons in national identity which unfold as a dialogue between a father and his son. See, for instance, the opening lines of the first section:
Question: Speak, child, who are you?
Answer: I am a German.
Question: A German? You must be joking. You were born in Meißen, and the country to which Meißen belongs is called Saxony.
Answer: I was born in Meißen, and the country to which Meißen belongs is called Saxony; but my fatherland, the country to which Saxony belongs, is Germany, and your son, my father, is a German.
(The original reads: "FRAGE: Sprich, Kind, wer bist du? / ANTWORT: Ich bin ein Deutscher. / FRAGE: Ein Deutscher? Du scherzest. Du bist in Meißen geboren, und das Land, dem Meißen angehört, heißt Sachsen! / ANTWORT: Ich bin in Meißen geboren, und das Land, dem Meißen angehört, heißt Sachsen; aber mein Vaterland, das Land, dem Sachsen angehört, ist Deutschland, und dein Sohn, mein Vater, ist ein Deutscher," in Heinrich Kleist, Sämtliche Werke [Leipzig: Im Insel-Verlag, 1927], 1073-4.)
67. See Horkheimer and Adorno: "But the miracle of integration, the permanent act of grace by the authority who receives the defenseless person--once he has swallowed his rebelliousness-- signifies Fascism!" (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 154).
68. The original reads: "Die Kamera ist der Star under den Apparaturen des Filmateliers; sie steht auf der einsamen Höhe jener Vollendung, die auch die Kunst der großen Darstellung trägt...Es kommt nicht darauf an, schön zu sein; es kommt daraut an, klar zu sein! Wer klar sieht, sieht zutiefst künstlerisch" in Konstantin Irmen-Tschet, "Objektiv am Objektiv: Filmschaffende berichten von ihrer Arbeit," Filmwelt, 25 November 1942.
69. The original reads: "Eine aufregende Geschichte hatte da gestanden von einem Jungen, der den Tiroles Schützen Munition und Wasser herangeschleppt hatte, bis ihn selbst eine französische Kugel zu Boden strechte. Wie jener Junge in der Geschichte, so sah er jetzt aus dem Dunkel die Fahne mit dem roten Adler, hörte das Krachen der Büchsen und das Geschrei der Sieger."
70. See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, "The Nazi Myth," trans. Brian Holmes, Critical Inquiry 16 (winter 1990): 311.
71. Reinhold Conrad Muschler, "Nationalsozialistischer Film?" Deutsche Kulturwacht 21 : 7. The original reads: "Der Verstand als solcher ist seiner kalten Macht entkleidet und zu dem geworden, was er sein soll: Technik des Denkens mit dem Herz...Wir verlangen von der Kunst, daß sie uns packt und nicht mit sensationen verblüfft; wir fordern von der Kunst, das sie uns die Gründe bis in die letzten Tiefen auftut; sie muß den Atem der Seele wiedergeben und nicht, wie lange Jahre hindurch, nur das Hämmern des Hirns. Wir wollen die Rhythmik der Seele vernehmen und nicht mehr den Takt des Gleichschrittes internationaler Intellektualisten."
72. See Karlheinz Schmeer: "The NS leaders were determined to occupy all remaining islands of individuality within the public sphere and to transform them into political spaces. In this endeavor one attempted to create a new type of Volksfest as a replacement for the traditional forms of public amusement" (Karlheinz Schmeer, Die Regie des öffentlichen Lebens im dritten Reich [Munich: Pohl, 1956], 52). The original reads: "Die NS-Regisseure waren entschlossen, jede noch bestehende Insel individuellen Daseins im öffentlichen Leben zu besetzen und zum Ansgangspunkt politischer Beeinflussung zu machen. Auf dieses Ziel steuerte auch der Versuch hin, den Typ eines national sozialistischen Volkfestes zu schaffen, das die üblichen Formen öffentlicher Vergnüngen--Jahrmärkte, Festwiesen, Kirchmessen, Kirchweihfeste--abzulösen bestimmt war."
73. Jürgen Ohlsen in fact was the unnamed Hitler Youth. He would later appear as an enthused admirer of the aviator Ernst Udet in Heinz Paul's Wunder des Fliegens (The Miracle of Flying, 1935). "The children of cinema are growing up," proclaimed a 1934 holiday headline in Film-Kurier. A collection of Christmas greetings included a message from Ohlsen: "What more could I possibly wish than to pass my pilot's examination as soon as possible?" ("Quex will Flieger werden," Film-Kurier, 22 December 1934).
74. For an extended analysis of the different ways in which Nazi films functionalized flags, see Hilmar Hoffmann, "Und die Fahne führt uns in die Ewigkeit": Propaganda im NS-Film (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988).
75. Hitler Youth Quex would often be reprised during the Nazi Youth Film Hours from 1940 through 1942--and received with great enthusiasm (see Gerd Albrecht's comments in Der Spielfilm im Dritten Reich, ed. Manfred Dammeyer, 52). Alfred Weidenmann's Junge Adler (Young Eagles, 1944) was consciously intended as a continuation of Quex, a film for young audiences which built on the earlier success. A father gives his son over to the Hitler Youth after his own attempts at raising the child have failed.  The production in fact issued from government concern about how youths were becoming restive and out of control during the war years, reacting negatively to the hard work (e.g. ten-hour workdays, graveyard shifts), discipline, and sacrifice demanded of them, while being forbidden to go out at night, visit bars, smoke in public, or attend cinemas alone. The working title for Young Eagles was "Schritt ins Leben" (Path to life): here again, the film was meant to show the way. For an analysis of the film, see Rolf Seubert, "Junge Adler: Retrospektive auf einem nationalsozialistischen Jugendfilm," Medium 18 (July-September 1988): 31-37.
76. Max Picard, Hitler in Our Selves, trans. Heinrich Hauser (Hinsdale, Ill.: Regnery, 1947), 54.
77. The final sequence of Hitler Youth Quex intimates Goebbels's desperate mise-en-scène for Kolberg, the ministry of propaganda's last-ditch effort to stave off impending defeat through a feat of filmic illusion: "Gentlemen, in a hundred years' time they will be showing a fine color film of the terrible days we are living through. Wouldn't you like to play a part in that film? Hold out now, so that a hundred years hence the audience will not hoot and whistle when you appear on the screen" (quoted in Leiser, Nazi Cinema, 132).  Möchten Sie nicht in diesem Filme eine Rolle spielen? Halten Sie jetzt durch, damit die Zuschauer in hundert Jahren nicht johlen und pfeifen wenn Sie auf der Leinwand erscheinen."


Hey! My name is John but people call me Travolt. I'm a
Computer Engineering student studying at the University
of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez. I am currently working at
A Research as a front-end
. Fluent in HTML5 CSS3 and JavaScript.
Currently i'm working on my Java, Electronics and Data
Structure Skills. I'm utilizing Angular2 with TypeScript in
various projects and I've recently started experimenting
with IoT using the Raspberry Pi.


| Lenovo P/N | Product | ODM | Country | GEO | FAI Status | Approval Date | Operating |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20141010 | G40-7D | LCFC_HF-NB | US | EMEA | Pass | 2014-10-11 | |
| 20141010 | G40-7D | LCFC_HF-NB | US | EMEA | Pass | 2014-10-11 | |
| 20141010 | G40-7D | LCFC_HF-NB | US | EMEA | Pass | 2014-10-11 | |
| 20141010 | G40-7D | LCFC_HF-NB | US | EMEA | Pass | 2014-10-11 | |
| 20141010 | G40-7D | LCFC_HF-NB | US | EMEA | Pass | 2014-10-11 | |
| 20141010 | G40-7D | LCFC_HF-NB | US | EMEA | Pass | 2014-10-11 | |
| 20141010 | G40-7D | LCFC_HF-NB | US | EMEA | Pass | 2014-10-11 | |
| 20141010 | G40-7D | LCFC_HF-NB | US | EMEA | Pass | 2014-10-11 | |
| 20141010 | G40-7D | LCFC_HF-NB | US | EMEA | Pass | 2014-10-11 | |
| 20141010 | G40-7D | LCFC_HF-NB | US | EMEA | Pass | 2014-10-11 | |
| 20141010 | G40-7D | LCFC_HF-NB | US | EMEA | Pass | 2014-10-11 | |
| 20141010 | G40-7D | LCFC_HF-NB | US | EMEA | Pass | 2014-10-11 | |
| 20141010 | G40-7D | LCFC_HF-NB | US | EMEA | Pass | 2014-10-11 | |
| 20141010 | G40-7D | LCFC_HF-NB | US | EMEA | Pass | 2014-10-11 | |
| 20141010 | G40-7D | LCFC_HF-NB | US | EMEA | Pass | 2014-10-11 | |
| 20141010 | G40-7D | LCFC_HF-NB | US | EMEA | Pass | 2014-10-11 | |
| 20141010 | G40-7D | LCFC_HF-NB | US | EMEA | Pass | 2014-10-11 | |
| 20141010 | G40-7D | LCFC_HF-NB | US | EMEA | Pass | 2014-10-11 | |
| 20141010 | G40-7D | LCFC_HF-NB | US | EMEA | Pass | 2014-10-11 |


| DOSE: T+ 0:00 |
2 tablets |
oral |
MDMA |
(pill / tablet) |
| T+ 1:45 |
1 tablet |
oral |
MDMA |
(pill / tablet) |
| T+ 3:00 |
1 tablet |
oral |
MDMA |
(pill / tablet) |
| T+ 4:10 |
1 hit |
smoked |
Cannabis |
(plant material) |
| T+ 4:10 |
1 tablet |
oral |
MDMA |
(pill / tablet) |
| T+ 4:30 |
1.75 g |
oral |
Mushrooms |
(dried) |
| T+ 5:30 |
1 tablet |
oral |
MDMA |
(pill / tablet) |
| T+ 21:00 |
1 line |
insufflated |
Cocaine |
(powder / crystals) |
| T+ 22:00 |
1 line |
insufflated |
Cocaine |
(powder / crystals) |
| T+ 24:00 |
1 line |
insufflated |
Cocaine |
(powder / crystals) |
Forward: Over the past few months I have used what most would consider entirely too much MDMA. Although for the three weeks before this experience I had not ingested any, I believe the dosages encountered herein are evident of serotonin depletion, and I would recommend highly that others not duplicate my choices. Before the experience I had previously never ingested mushrooms, and only on one instance insufflated cocaine, in quantity less than .5 grams.
Friday, 8:30 PM: My friends and I are all gathered at my apartment, getting ready to head out to the show. The mood is positive, and I am still debating whether I will be taking any chemicals throughout the evening. I decide that I’ll wait and see how the vibe is at the rave before committing to rolling for the evening.
10:00 PM: We’re all inside hanging out – the general mood is good, and I decide that I’ll take a few.
10:30 PM: I take two pills, and continue dancing and drinking water.
11:20 PM: I rapidly realize that I am beginning to come up, and have a seat against a wall in the downstairs room. Within five minutes I am rolling balls, and wander aimlessly before running into some of my friends. The music is amazing, the lights look incredible, and I have a seat while two guys trade off giving me a lightshow – I zone out and watch the lights go by.
12:15 AM: I take another pill, and continue dancing, enjoying myself all the more. My memory of this portion of this evening is exceedingly poor. I recall few frames, mostly of talking with my girlfriend. A friend (who I will herein refer to as Kyle) that I met up with at the party invites us to his house for an afterparty, and offers to give us a ride.
1:30 AM: I get another two pills, and take only one, saving the other for later. Kyle says he wants to leave soon, and we begin to round people up.
2:15 AM: We leave the party and all pile into Kyle’s car. There’s 7 people, two doors, and 4 and a half legitimate seats.  On rights I had been thinking that it would be miserably packed, but as we got on the freeway and Kyle put on 4 String’s Take Me Away I found myself in a state of complete bliss. Nothing in the world was wrong, the moment was perfect, and I wished to myself that I could live in it forever.
2:40 AM: We arrive at Kyle’s house, I walk around and say hi to all my friends. One of Kyle’s roommates passes me a loaded pipe and I take a nice hit. I feel marginally mellowed out, but still positively out of my head. I take my fifth, and what I had planned to be my last, pill. We hang out and I continue socializing, before heading into Kyle’s room to chill out with my closer friends in attendance.
3:00 AM: Kyle asks me to get a plastic bag out from his closet, and I hand it to him – He opens it and pulls out what he says is about half an eighth of mushrooms. I take what he hands me, and he and various other guests eat some too.
3:30 AM: At the behest of one of Kyle’s roommates, many of the people at the house leave for another house. We all load up, a more sober person jumping behind the wheel. By the time we’re halfway to our destination, I’m hallucinating. Having never taken mushrooms before, much less hippy flipped, I had no idea what to expect. I found myself very lethargic and confused. Confused, however, may not be the proper word, as it implies panic or desperation – my state of mind was quite the opposite: I had very little idea what was going on, but I couldn’t care less. Sinking into the backseat of the car I looked at the people seated next to me, watched other cars and the trees go by, I felt like I was melting into one extremely pleasant blob of human gelatin.
4:00 AM: We arrive at the other house, and another of my friends is there. He offers me another pill, which I really shouldn’t have taken, but was too high at that point to make any sort of sound judgment. I sit down on a couch and just chill.
4:XX AM: I’m really too messed up to function at this point. For some reason we decide to go back to Kyle’s house, but the people who drove Kyle’s car here had already left. Another of our friends drives us back and I enjoy another blissful car ride
5:30 AM: Sitting back at Kyle’s place, I sit and lose myself on the couch. Its like an amazing roll, with pretty visuals, and without the capacity to follow events or conversation enough to become irritated or annoying by anything.
We hang out for several more hours and enjoy ourselves. I come down from both the MDMA and mushrooms at some point, and feel exhausted, but am unable to sleep. I cuddle with my girlfriend, and talk with my friend in Kyle’s living room while everyone else has basically passed out. Although I’m physically spent and “e’d over” as we say, I feel entirely content. We sing along to sublime, and have a generally killer time.
Saturday 2:30 PM: Not having slept yet, I get a ride back to my apartment with another friend at the party. We drop my girlfriend off, I go home and pass out. My friend who had planned to be over that afternoon (who I will refer to here as Aaron) calls and says he’ll be late. I get some sleep.
5:30 PM: I wake up and hang out with some friends who had crashed at my place the night before. We all chill out – I don’t feel nearly as bad as I had anticipated, most likely due to the quality of the pills compared to previous experiences where I had taken a comparable number of pills containing high quantities of methamphetamine.
7:30 PM: Aaron arrives, and unexpectedly has brought with him an 8 ball of coke. All my other friends had stepped out for a few minutes, and we cut ourselves two generous lines to start the night off. I feel great, and we talk some. Our friends return.  We take a line while we’re there.
10:00 PM: We get back to my place and the acid disappears into all my other friend’s mouths. Aaron and I continue, and I start to feel a little bit sick to my stomach, but not too bad.
10:30PM: We take another line, and after the initial effects wear off I don’t feel so good at all. I make my way to the bathroom, and think I might purge. I manage to keep it down, and have a seat on the edge of my bathtub. I sit down and start sweating profusely, and Aaron checks my pulse: 110. I take a few minutes to settle myself and everything is fine. I decide that I’ll sit out for an hour.
11:30PM: My stomach doesn’t feel 100% yet, but its no longer the same sensation as before. Feeling more like I did coming down off my previous experience with cocaine, I decide to go for some more. I have no problems and again feel great.
---
The rest of my night passed with little event besides more blow and lots of euphoria. At about 5AM we finish off the last of the snow and chill out, waiting for what we presume will be an awful comedown.
At about 6 when I can finally feel all of my face again, things are definitely unpleasant. I feel miserable and cracked out, and its 2:30 in the afternoon before I can finally get to sleep.
Experience Reports are the writings and opinions of the individual authors who submit them.
Some of the activities described are dangerous and/or illegal and none are recommended by Erowid.


{% extends 'base.html' %} {% load static %} {% block title %}{% endblock %} {% block style %} .jumbotron{ color: black; } {% endblock %} {% block jumbotron2 %}
This example is a quick exercise to illustrate how the top-aligned navbar works. As you scroll, this navbar remains in its original position and moves with the rest of the page.
View navbar docs »


Questions regarding Lasso and Ridge Regression
Cowboy with his lasso and presumably on a ridge, by Frank Tenney Johnson
This article addresses some frequently asked questions about the two regularized forms of linear regression, namely Lasso and ridge regresion.
How are they different from regular linear regression?
Lasso and ridge regression impose and penalties on the weight, as a form of regularization.
Linear regression has the form where are the predicted label, weight vector and the feature vector respectively (assume the feature vector has a dummy entry of 1 to account for the bias term). The root mean square cost function is .
Now, for Lasso,
(note: is the norm of vector );
For ridge regression,
It can be seen that for both Lasso and ridge regression, the cost function increases with the norm (can be thought of as a measurement of “size”) of the weight vector. With larger weights, the weight vector will have greater norm, resulting in higher cost. A positive hyperparameter, , controlls the extent to which the norm affects the cost (its actual mechanism of action will be described later).
Are the cost functions still convex?
Yes. The original cost function is convex, the norm is always convex, and the sum of convex functions is still convex.
What is the gradient of Lasso’s cost function?
is non-differentiable. However, there exist some generalized gradient descent algorithms for non-differentiable functions.
What are the closed-form solutions for Lasso and ridge regression?
Since Lasso has a non-differentiable gradient, it does not have a closed-form solution. On the other hand, ridge regression does. Let be the vector of labels where each element corresponds to the label of a single sample; let be the matrix such that each row corresponds to a single sample’s feature vector. Assume both and are column vectors, then rewrite the cost function:
As mentioned this function is convex, so a global minimum is guaranteed to be found by setting its derivative to zero.
Take the transpose of both sides:
Which gives the closed form solution:
How does Lasso “select features”?
When being asked this question many people pull up this picture: A graph seen by many but understood by few
Here is a thorough explanation of the picture. Lasso attempts to solve the following convex optimization problem:
In fact, the above is the Lagrangian of the following constrained problem:
where is some constant.
This picture describes the simple case where only has 2 dimensions. The cocentric ellipses are the contour lines of , with its global minimum at the red dot (outer contours represent larger function values). The purple diamond represents the bounded region where .
 It is very likely that this point occurs at a vertex of the diamond, in which case one entry of the weight vector must be zero. As a result, one of the features will have a zero coefficient (since linear regression takes the dot product between the weight and feature vectors) and has no impact on .
Still, Lasso does not always yield zero entries for the weight vector - but it happens often. According to Elements of Statistical Learning, with high dimensional data there are many more opportunities for the estimated weights to be zero because the purple diamond will become a rhomboid with a lot of vertices.
What are the probabilistic interpretations of Lasso and ridge regression?
Basically, Lasso and ridge regression impose different constraints on the probability distribution of the weight. Recall that linear regression attempts to model a relationship of the form
where is a random noise variable that represents the model’s perturbations from reality. Given some training data , one may fit a model by finding a maximum-likelihood estimation of its parameter . The likelihood is the probability of observing the training labels , given the training samples and the parameter :
Since , . Therefore the above equation becomes:
Taking its logarithm gives the log-likelihood form:
To find a best we attempt to maximize this log-likelihood. Notice that:
In other words, minimizing the cost is the same problem as maximizing the log likelihood, giving the optimization problem a graceful probabilistic interpretation.
With Lasso, each term in the weight vector is forced to have a Laplacian prior distribution with mean 0 and some scale :
The likelihood is multiplied by the prior to obtain the maximum a posteriori (MAP) objective:
Taking the logarithm:
After taking the argmax and removing irrelevant terms:
Now this clearly resembles the Lasso cost function described previously, except that in the latter, the term is represented by a single parameter . Since is fixed for a given training set, is actually inversely proportional to the scale parameter of the distribution of weights.
With ridge regression, has a prior in the form of a multivariate normal distribution:
In other words:
where is some constant. In a similar fashion as above, minimizing the cost function of ridge regression can be shown as equivalent to maximizing .
What is a compromise between Lasso and ridge regression?
The elasic net regression takes the linear combination of and penalties as the regularization term:


By the time you have got here you will have read the whitepaper and so have a fairly good idea as to what SimpleORM proports to do. (If not, the we suggest that you do so now.) Unlike many open source projects, we do not expect you to have to download the tool just to figure out what problem it is addressing.
So you should now have a fair idea of what you hope to gain from SimpleORM. We would like to know your expectations, before you use it. And we would like to have a way to contact people several months after they download to see if they have actually used the tool and what their experiences are.
Of course we are not in the business of spamming people, but we are after basic feedback. So if you can spend a few moments filling out the following form we would appreciate it. This is just a mail form which is manually processed, this is all very low key.


Do Phones Cause Cancer?
There are many reasons why people are concerned that cell phones (also known as "mobile" or "wireless" telephones) might have the potential to cause certain types of cancer or other health problems: Cell phones emit radiofrequency energy (radio waves), a form of non-ionizing radiation, which can penetrate the skull.
May 27, 2016


GOVERNMENT OF THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA Department of Forensic Sciences Open Government Report 2014 To institutionalize a culture of transparent and open government, accountability, and to expand opportunities for resident participation and collaboration, this Report describes how the Department of Forensic Sciences (DFS) has and will continue to develop and enhance transparency, public participation, and collaboration. In accordance with Mayor’s Order 2014-170, this report addresses the following topics: Transparency DFS’s Public Information Officer maintains the agency website (dfs.dc.gov) and Facebook page (www.facebook.com/DCDepartmentofForensicSciences), regularly posting news and information to both. The website includes an Open Government and FOIA page that includes to all sorts of DFS information, including administrative, financial, operational, and public testimony/meetings. Agency press releases are posted to the website and Facebook, as well as emailed out to dozens of media outlets. DFS takes its obligations pursuant to the District’s Freedom of Information Act and Open Meeting Act seriously. DFS’s General Counsel is the agency’s FOIA officer and in the most recent fiscal year for which data is available, a disposition was reached in 100 percent of requests received and was done so in a median time of 12 days. Links are available on the DFS website that direct users to a FOIA request form, the agency’s FOIA report, and the results of FOIA requests filed. Regarding Open Meetings, DFS publishes advance notice of the quarterly meetings of its Science Advisory Board in the DC Register and on its website, along with an agenda.  Webcasting is under consideration pending technology review and application. DFS will regularly consider what public information to provide through existing and new media, in keeping with its mission and the statute creating the agency. DFS is working closely with the Office of the City Administrator (OCA) and the Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) to identify a significant number of datasets that OCA and OCTO expect to publish online later this year. If no dataset from DFS is selected to be included in this 2014 release, we will continue to work with OCA and OCTO to identify datasets appropriate to publish in 2015. In the future, requirements for open data reporting will be provided by the Chief Data Officer. Public Engagement and Participation All of DFS’s policies and procedures are linked in the agency’s public website. Commentary/feedback can be sent to<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Through its website and Facebook page, DFS gives advance notice of any community meetings or public hearings in which the agency is participating. The website also features links to the Director’s testimony at Performance and Budget Oversight Hearings before the DC Council. DFS responds promptly to any public inquiries/comments made via its website, Facebook page or emails to its Public Information Officer, Executive Assistant and members of the agency Directorate. Stakeholders are identified by statute, District of Columbia Code, Division 1, Title 5, Chapter 15. The public can contact DFS by email, Facebook page, phone and regular mail. Collaboration DFS has weekly meetings of its Directorate, which includes all Department heads. Coordination among departments on agency-wide issues is discussed. Meetings are held regularly involving DFS and its stakeholder agencies, where information is exchanged and feedback sought. Additional meetings are regularly held with stakeholders to organize, prioritize and resolve issues that may arise. DSF’s website and Facebook page list and give links to news, events, and updates relevant to the agency. DFS works with the stakeholders, media and the public to provide timely and accurate information about activities relevant to its mission.


amass
In-depth Attack Surface Mapping and Asset Discovery tool.
Some subcommands such as `amass db` have their own usage documentation.
More information: home page
- Execute an Amass subcommand:
amass subcommand
- Show general help:
amass -help
- Show help on an Amass subcommand (like `intel`, `enum`, etc.):
amass -help subcommand
- Display version:
amass -version


My Team
This is a modified jumbotron that occupies the entire horizontal space of its parent.
Manager
<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Id: 256
Office# 147