February 19, 1944
Introduction to the content
In his poem Change, Curt Bloch comments on press reports about air raids on Berlin. In the first report from 1941, it was claimed that the attacks had “completely failed”, but four recent reports suggest devastating bomb damage. Bloch imagines that the correspondent in Berlin at the time was still “nothing is broken”, but now he himself belongs to the bombed-out, as the Royal Air Force passes by almost daily and works “with loyalty and dedication”. He is sure that “Mofrika” – as the occupied Dutch call Germany – is going to hell, and the “Moffen” will soon be expelled.
Curt Bloch’s inspiration for the song lyrics Churchill is a drunkard was a press release that declared the German victory as certain and slandered the leaders of the Allies. Bloch turns it into a mocking refrain: “Churchill is a boozy, Roosevelt is mad, Joseph Stalin is a sadist, But Hitler without flaw.”
In his long poem Women’s Autarky, Curt Bloch exposes the contradiction between the National Socialist view of women and their real-life situation during wartime. After initially being removed from public life and relegated to the kitchen, women now had to step in for the absent men. An inserted newspaper clipping introduces “de zwarte Erika” (the black Erika), the wife of a chimney sweep who fought at the front. For Bloch, it is clear that women’s newfound independence is only tolerated temporarily and only as long as they can “produce children self-sufficiently”.
In The Denied Denial, Curt Bloch analyzes the contradictions in press reports about the behavior of the Germans on the Eastern Front. When the Russian Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov (1890-1986) accused the Wehrmacht of destruction and atrocities, the allegations were vehemently denied. However, a year and a half later, the Germans boasted of having left the Soviets with nothing but scorched earth. “The propaganda cat now meows a completely different song”, Bloch mocks, “now it’s a lie, soon it will be true, but eventually, it will be over.”
