Boyish Romance in a Timeless Idyll?

Alfred Weidenmann (1916–2000) was one of the exceptionally successful members of the Hitler Youth. He published his first book for young readers in 1936; the novel Jakko (Loewes, Stuttgart) followed in 1939. The background ideology of his story and of the film Jakko (1941) exemplifies the motto “frangar, non flectar”, (that is: I will rather break, than bow). Weidenmann worked as a film director, too, and he finished Junge Adler in 1941. His novel Jakko has not been adapted for the screen by Weidenmann himself, but by Fritz Peter Buch (1894–1964) and the soundtrack has been composed by Hans Otto Borgmann (1901–1977). Both of them were renowned in the NS-filmworld. Buch directed – beside others – the propaganda film Menschen im Sturm (1941) and Borgmann wrote the soundtrack for Hitlerjunge Quex as early as 1933. The novelist Weidenmann, the director Buch and the composer Borgmann worked together producing a film, which helped, as Daniel Uziel has put it, to consolidate the German homefront. It is obvious that writer, director, and composer presented an advanced model of convergent media.