Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2020 January 31

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January 31

Omniatlas

Would this source be allowed to be used in a page about Saudi expansion? https://omniatlas.com/maps/southern-asia/19220505/ 79.67.65.129 (talk) 21:05, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

If you mean, would it count as a reliable source, then I'm afraid the answer has to be that it would not. The "About" page of the Omniatlas website states: "An atlas such as this would have been impossible to produce without access to wikipedia, ...", so this could lead to circular sourcing.  --Lambiam 10:41, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

The Pianist - German-speaking Nazis in Poland

In the Holocaust film The Pianist, why did the Nazis spoke to Władysław Szpilman and other Polish Jews in German instead of Polish or English? 86.128.175.37 (talk) 22:04, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

Because the characters knew German. Temerarius (talk) 00:39, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

Because they were Germans, not Nazis. Nazi is a social and political ideology, but their nationality and their citizenship was German. Poland was under a German occupation and German authorities talked to citizens in the German state's national and official language. Which was German. That's about facts.

If you ask about depiction of the facts, that is why actors in the movie were speaking in German, then I can only guess it was decided so to emphasis the contrast between the occupiers and occupied. --CiaPan (talk) 09:12, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

P.S. I hope my English is not that bad to cause some misunderstanding, and you'll not read something I didn't mean to write. CiaPan (talk)

See History of the Jews in Poland#Jewish and Polish culture which says; "according to the 1931 census, 79% of the Jews declared Yiddish as their first language, and only 12% listed Polish". Yiddish is " a High German-based vernacular". I found The Jews of Pinsk, 1881 to 1941 (Pinsk is in Belarus) which says of the German occupation in the First World War that "Yiddish, the first language of the Jewish majority and German were close enough for the occupied and the occupiers to quickly understand each other".

Another factor is that it seems likely that German would have been taught as a foreign language in Polish schools before the war. There was a substantial German minority in Poland and Germany would have been an important trading partner. No luck with a reference for that but I'll have another look later on. Alansplodge (talk) 13:08, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

As for why they did so in the film, the definitive answer is: that is how the Director Roman Polanski decided to present them in the cinematic work, which may or may not have been an aspect of how the Screenplay writer Ronald Harwood had chosen to adapt the memoir by Władysław Szpilman on which it is based.

Depicting, for an at-least partially English monoglot audience, events involving people speaking other languages, sometimes with and sometimes without mutual intelligibility, there are several possible approaches. One is to have them all speak English with varying "foreign" accents, but this can often seem comic even if not intended to be. It was successfully deployed with deliberate comic effect in the largely fictional 'Allo 'Allo!, but would surely have risked inappropriateness for the horrific true events of The Pianist.

Since Polanski's own tragic childhood experiences were broadly similar to those of the (older) Szpilman, he no doubt thought very deeply about this as well as other aspects of the film. It may be that he or a colleage have spoken about the decision publicly, but if not no-one can know the answer for sure. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.205.58.107 (talk) 16:29, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

Because the Germans spoke and still speak German and many educated Poles could speak German, which used to be a language for international communication in Eastern Europe. I think most Europeans at that time didn't speak English. 118.70.42.151 (talk) 07:51, 5 February 2020 (UTC)