timespace coodinates: late 19th century Italy / New York City
Cabrini is a 2024 American biographical drama film directed by Alejandro Gómez Monteverde. The film depicts the life of Catholic missionary Francesca Cabrini, portrayed by Cristiana Dell’Anna, as she encounters resistance to her charity and business efforts in New York City. Cabrini explores the sexism and anti-Italian bigotry faced by Cabrini and others in New York City in the late 19th century. (wiki)
Weathering with You (Japanese: 天気の子, Hepburn: Tenki no Ko, lit. ’Child of Weather’) is a 2019 Japanese animated romantic fantasy film written and directed by Makoto Shinkai, produced by CoMix Wave Films and distributed by Toho.
It follows a 16-year-old high school boy, Hodaka Morishima, who runs away from his troubled rural home to Tokyo, and later befriends Hina Amano, an orphaned girl who has the ability to control the weather. (wiki)
timespace coordinates: Set in 1962, the series’ main setting is a parallel universe where the Axis powers of Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan have wonWorld War II in 1946 after Giuseppe Zangara successfully assassinates United States President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, creating a series of developments that include the Germans dropping an atomic bomb on Washington, D.C. (now renamed “District of Contamination”). The German Reich extends to Europe and Africa and the Empire of Japan comprises Asia, but most of the series is set in the former US and in Germany proper.
Western North America, now part of the “Japanese Pacific States”, is occupied by the technologically less-advanced Shōwa-periodEmpire of Japan, which has assimilated its formerly American citizens into Japanese culture, although high-class ethnic Japanese are extremely fascinated by pre-War American culture. Japan’s Trade and Science ministers work in the Pacific States’ capital, San Francisco. The Japanese rulers subject non-Japanese people to racial discrimination and grant them fewer rights.
Eastern and Midwestern North America is a colony controlled by the Greater Nazi Reich (GNR) under an aging FührerAdolf Hitler. The colony, headed by a “Reichsmarschall of North America”, is commonly referred to as “Nazi America” or “the American Reich” and its capital is New York City. The Nazis continue to hunt minorities and euthanize the physically and mentally sick. The superior technology of the Germans is highlighted by the use of video phones and Concorde-like “rockets” for intercontinental travel.
The US as depicted in the television series. Though Denver is the capital of the Neutral Zone, Cañon City, Colorado, is a major setting.
A Neutral Zone, which encompasses the Rocky Mountains, serves as a buffer zone between the Japanese Pacific States and Nazi America due to Cold War–like tensions between the German and Japanese blocs. Another buffer zone is present in the Urals.
Films collected by the eponymous “Man in the High Castle” show views of numerous other Earths, including some where the Allies were victorious, some featuring executed Allied leaders (such as Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin), and some where an American resistance is doing well.
Here is an important book that dwells on the continuities of Hitler’s Germany, the industries that maintained Hitlerist Germany by churning out tanks and ammunition for the front and today. This is not conspiracy talk, it it just about the fortunes of family businesses who were the actual war profiteers, but after WWII during the so-called German economic miracle (Wirtschaftswunder) period became heroic figures of the new Germany’s industrial might, particularly those involved in heavy industries of the Ruhrgebiet – Thyssen, Krupp, Klöckner, Vögler, etc. and the car industry.
Maybe you are familiar with the seminal modernist novels of Thomas Pynchon’s V. and Gravity’s Rainbowthat deal with the mind-boggling implications of Germany’s harnessing the power of chemistry and rockets under the lead of IG Farben and aerospace engineer Werner von Braun. After WWII von Braun was taken off the Nazi V rocket program to be put in charge of US intermediate-range missile program. Due to the secretive nature of the ultra-rich in Germany, we know very little about today’s German corporate industrial giants and their tarnished past. There is a long debate btw historians of Nazi Germany as to what industry branch was more progressive. What if the Junker-Heavy Industry alliance (btw the militaristic Junkers – rye and the Ruhr barons – iron) did not become so prominent or if electricity took the lead? Did the great bankers and captains of industry bankroll the rise of the NS or only join later when the wind of change was in the air?
Anyway, IG Farben – a former giant of the Chemical industry and Big Pharma (as well as concentration camp poisons and numerous other chemical products ) was a different corporate object than older Imperial power company structures such ad Dutch East India Company let’s say. Here is a close look and long overdue historical reckoning of how Germany’s economic might and beloved motor car industries (Volkswagen or BWM) is deeply enmeshed with its wartime nazi support and war effort even involving slave labor. The heirs and heiresses (some of Germany’s richest women and nr 50 on the world’s top richest) are still silent about these things. An ARD documentary eas entitled specifically The Silence of the Quandts – investigating the role of the Quandt family business during the Second World War – KZ (concentration camp) prisoners worked for the batteries in a specially built concentration sub-camp – without any protection workers had to labor and manipulate highly toxic compounds used by the industry.
“I hope people will become more aware on a consumer level that the money they spend on these products might end up as dividends for these families and might go towards the maintaining of foundations, corporate headquarters, and media properties in the name of Nazi war criminals.
“I think people should be more aware of these histories and of history in general, particularly when it comes to consumption and the continuing whitewashing of history by these consumer brands and families that control them.” David de Jong
The Killer is a 2023 American action thriller film directed by David Fincher based on the French graphic novel series The Killer written by Alexis “Matz” Nolent and illustrated by Luc Jacamon.
TimeSpace Warps 