Cross-cultural communication （73）　

73) Thoughts on Dunkirk
I have a great interest in the history of the period between the First and Second World Wars, and I have read and watched many works of fiction and non-fiction, as well as films. And in the six months between 2017 and 2018, I came across three works that made me drool. They were the 2017 film “Dunkirk”, the 2018 film “Winston Churchill: The Man Who Saved the World from Hitler” (hereafter “Churchill”), and the 2018 novel “The Remains of the Day” by Kazuo Ishiguro.

The film Dunkirk, which was released in the second half of 2017, is about how, in 1940, Germany invaded Denmark and Norway, and then used the momentum of that invasion to invade France, completely encircling the Allied forces made up of the United Kingdom, Belgium, Canada and France at Dunkirk. Churchill, who had just been appointed Prime Minister, led Operation Dynamo, in which civilian ships were commandeered to rescue 300,000 Allied soldiers with 860 civilian ships. This film depicts the events through the eyes of a British soldier.

The film “Churchill”, which was released in spring 2018, attracted attention as Gary Oldman, who played Churchill, won the Academy Award for Best Actor, and Kazuhiro Tsuji, who transformed Oldman into Churchill, won the Academy Award for Best Makeup and Hairstyling. This film also deals with the same period as “Dunkirk”. Shortly after becoming Prime Minister, Churchill is feeling the pressure from the German-friendly faction of his cabinet, when the major incident of the British army being surrounded by the German army in Dunkirk arises. Here, Churchill makes the decision to launch the 'Operation Dynamo' and it is a brilliant success. The highlight of the film is how Churchill gains the trust of the people through the 'Operation Dynamo', but the original title of the film is 'Darkest Hour', and it means that the British people, especially the citizens of London, endured the dark five years until 1945. This film can be said to depict Dunkirk through the eyes of the politician Churchill.

Now, the last one is “The Remains of the Day”, a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, who won the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature, and which has also been made into a film. I've been a fan of Ishiguro's novels for 20 years, and have read most of them (in English, of course), but for some reason I'd never had the chance to read “The Remains of the Day”, and I'd never seen the film either. I decided to read it after the Nobel Prize, and when I went to the bookstore, all of Ishiguro's works were sold out. The translated version was reprinted in an emergency and was back in stores in about a month, but it took six months for the English version to appear in stores. It was available on Amazon, but it was priced at 3000 yen, a premium price for something that would normally be around 1000 yen! When I started reading it with great excitement, I realized that it was a post-war memoir by a British butler. The butler, Stephen, was working at Darlington House just before the start of World War II. The owner of the house, Lord Darlington, was a German-friendly aristocrat who would invite German aristocrats, diplomats and prominent German-friendly British figures to Darlington House for private meetings. As depicted in the film “Churchill”, the German-friendly faction had a certain amount of power in Britain before the war. At the Munich Conference in 1938, which is also mentioned in high school world history textbooks, Britain and France made a compromise with Germany and allowed Germany to annex the Czech and Sudeten regions. Of course, the subsequent strategy taken by Hitler showed that the wishful thinking of the Allied appeasers was completely wrong, and today, the hard-line Churchill is seen as a hero. For this reason, after the war, Lord Darlington fell out of favor with public opinion and had a hard time. Of course, the butler Stephen showed a certain understanding of Lord Darlington's actions after the war, and he remembers him as a dignified gentleman.

So, in the short period of six months from 2017 to 2018, I was able to spend a blissful time encountering three works from completely different perspectives on Anglo-German relations during World War II, and my interest in the history of this period has only grown.

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