Lili Marlene is with us

On September 17, Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky, in an interview with Interfax, said that the state would not pay for films that “spit on our people, spit on the country”

Minister Medinsky has become noticeably more active in the information space. Program interviews follow one after another. The essence of his attitudes is not, first of all, that the state sponsors artistic culture, but that it controls its content. At the same time, the minister does not forget every time to disavow intellectual suspicions: “We do not interfere in the repertoire policy of theaters,” he assures an Interfax correspondent, “but if we begin to understand that what is happening on the stage does not correspond to the interests of the state, we have one way out - change director. The same goes for cinema."

This uncompromising position came back to haunt the old film of the classic of German cinema by Rainer Fassbinder "Lily Marlene", which was just shown on the Kultura TV channel. The events described in it, and the problems associated with them, seemed to have disappeared over the horizon twenty years ago. This is the story of an unpretentious song about a sentry who lives with memories of a date with his beloved girl and a dream of meeting her again. It was composed before the war, in a quiet cozy Switzerland, and then by the will of circumstances showed up in Germany, on the front lines of the Second World War. In the trenches, under bombs and shells, in dampness and fear, it became a favorite hit for millions of German soldiers, a kind of refuge in which you can, at least for a short time, for a few minutes, warm up your soul.

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Either the picture of forty years ago has overtaken our realities, or just yesterday is catching up with us here and now

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For a long time this adventurous story in a melodramatic wrapper seemed completely irrelevant. And then her motives, her twists and turns suddenly resonated.

The Minister of Culture of the Third Reich, Mr. Henckel, summons the cabaret singer Lily to inform her of the predicament in which she has fallen with her unheard-of popular song. The minister is reserved. He would not mind congratulating the artist on her triumph, but here's the problem: Dr. Goebbels believes that this piece of music and its performance "does not correspond to the interests of the state." In it, Goebbels believes, "there is too much sentimentality with the smell of the dance of death."

The Minister of Culture of the Russian Federation, Mr. Medinsky, as it turned out recently, watched the television series "Penal Battalion" on a "binge" and also considered it not in line with the interests of the state. The minister considered the fact that he was talented as an aggravating circumstance to the director's guilt. So the Minister of Culture of the Third Reich, Herr Henkel, recognized a great talent for the cabaret singer. But he continued in the spirit that it is unlikely that her hit is the work that can "inspire the courage of soldiers devoted to the Führer and become a vivid expression of the National Socialist struggle."

You can’t immediately say: either the picture of forty years ago has overtaken our realities, or just yesterday is catching up with us here and now.

“If the state gives money to a painting, then it should have the right to influence the content of this painting,” the Minister of Culture stated clearly and unambiguously. After that, the private discussion that there is no evidence of Tchaikovsky's homosexuality looked like a direct directive to the authors of the future film about the composer. It is not surprising that director Kirill Serebrennikov decided to refuse the 30 million rubles granted by the Ministry of Culture with the words: “We will look for money for a film about the main national composer, about Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, abroad of our Motherland. Not in Russia…"