#btw El Búnquer de Catalunya Ràdio tenen un episodi sobre la Leni Riefenstahl que parlen d'això!

[useless-catalanfacts]

You're in for a big surprise about these adaptations! With an unexpected apparition of... the Nazis.

As context for people who might not know, Terra Baixa is one of the most iconic plays in Catalan theatre. In English, it's usually translated as Marta of the Lowlands. It premiered in 1896.

There have been at least 8 film adaptations of Terra Baixa made in various countries (1907 Spain, 1913 Argentina, 1914 USA, 1922 Germany, 1940/1944 Germany, 1950 Mexico, 1982 Catalonia, and 2011 Catalonia). It has also been adapted into 3 operas (La catalane by the French composer Ferdinand Le Borne in 1907, Tiefland by the Scottish composer Eugen d'Albert and German librettist Rudolf Lothar in 1903, and a third Catalan production from the 1990s).

You might be thinking: what's will all this German stuff? Germany 1940-1944?? Leni Riefenstahl??? Yes, my friends. You're about to hear something weird.

Àngel Guimerà (author of Terra Baixa) is famous for his works being explicitly against racism and against religious discrimination (that's Mar i cel's whole point), and denouncing the unfair gender-based violence that women go through such as domestic abuse, rape from men who abuse their social situation (such as bosses) and lack of freedom to take decisions over their lives and, more generally, the control that landowners have over workers (Terra Baixa). The topic of migration and culture mixing also comes up often in his work, which makes sense considering that Guimerà himself was from a mixed Canarian-Catalan family and grew up in the Canary Islands before moving to Catalonia. And, of course, he's also known for his defense of Catalan language and rights for Catalan people, becoming one of the main representatives of political Catalanism, one of the main enemies of Spanish fascism.

So it will come as a shock to anyone familiar with his work to hear that Leni Riefenstahl (a Nazi collaborator) directed a movie version of Terra Baixa.

You're probably thinking "what the fuck? How is that possible when Terra Baixa denounces situations that Nazis were in favour of?", and it's definitely a weird movie. To begin with, they had no idea about (nor interest in) where the play is set (the rural Pyrenee mountains of Catalonia), instead choosing to replace it with a stereotypical Spanish (Andalucía) setting and cultural aesthetic, which they created through casting Romani people that were later sent to concentration camps. So that's a shitty start.

The reason why it resonated with them was the contraposition of Terra Alta ("highland") and Terra Baixa ("lowland"). The play follows the story of a shepherd boy named Manelic who grew up in the "high land", up in the mountains, isolated without knowing many other humans. He is innocent and naïve, and doesn't conceive that people have bad intentions. One day, Manelic is contacted by a rich man from the town in the plane under those mountains (the Lowland). This rich man is Sebastià, the owner of the mill where the Lowland's population works. Sebastià proposes Manelic marry a girl named Marta, who is one of the workers in Sebastià's mill. Manelic immediately falls in love with Marta, and accepts. Of course, nobody asks Marta about this because this is a contract between two men, and so the marriage is set. What Manelic didn't know is the reason why Sebastià proposed this: Sebastià has been taking advantage of Marta and sexually abusing her since she was of young age, using the fact that he's the landowner and a respected man, and she's a much younger working-class girl who depends on him to make a living. Despite owning the land, Sebastià is also in debt, and for this reason he is preoccupied with marrying a rich heiress, but everyone has heard the rumours that Marta is his mistress and so he can't find any respectable (=wealthy) family who will marry their daughter to him. To solve this problem, he decides to marry Marta to someone else and end the rumour, and thus he brings some naïve fool who has no idea of what's going on to be used in his scheme and marry him to Marta in the eyes of the public.

Manelic only finds out about this in his wedding night when Marta, terrified and traumatized, tells him that she doesn't love him and that she refuses to sleep with him. She explains that she did not consent to this marriage, that Sebastià forced her to marry Manelic, and explains how she has been at the mercy of Sebastià all these years, and how she blames Manelic for joining this scheme to clean Sebastià's image after everything he has done to her. Thus, the plot of the story is how Manelic, who comes from the idealistic and naïve Highlands, comes to know about the horrible conditions, the terror, the oppression, and the violence that routinely goes on in the Lowlands. Throughout the story, all the workers laugh at Manelic for being so naïve that he doesn't realize the role he's playing in Sebastià's scheme, but Manelic ends up learning of what happens and swears to leave the Lowland, that he considers a horrible world of lies. Marta, realizing Manelic's pure heart and real respect for her, falls in love with him, and they both decide to escape to the idyllic Highland. However, Sebastià finds out and locks Marta in his mill. The play ends with a fight to death between Manelic and Sebastià, until Manelic manages to kill him and proclaims "I've killed the wolf!", a sentence that has become the most iconic phrase in the history of Catalan theatre.

As you can see, the story is a critique of the conditions that allow these abuses to happen, particularly of "caciquism" which was the majoritary economical-political system in the rural areas of the Iberian peninsula, including Catalonia, at the time when the play was written. The same critiques of Sebastià's power over his agriculture workers under caciquism can be applied to factory owners to the proletariat in industrialized areas as well. And, sadly, Marta's situation of gender-based violence rings true in both of those settings as well as our modern society. The contrast between the ideal Highland (a good-hearted, honest place) and the corrupt Lowland (where exploitation and materialism has degraded its inhabitants into cruel people) is present throughout the play, and it's precisely what caught the attention of Nazi sympathisers.

Instead of understanding this as a critique of hierarchies and how they create the perfect conditions to allow the abuse perpetrated by those above, they saw this story as the contraposition between the "ideal national past", a perfect and pure rural world that never existed, vs the corrupt modern civilization. The same "reject modernity, embrace tradition" that neo-nazis still parrot today, accompanied by their white families with stay-at-home wives (potential Martas! same as her, without their own means to escape if the situation gets bad, at the mercy of their husbands who hold absolute economical and social power over them).

Of course, the Nazis didn't propose anything that would solve those problems, they only pointed at them to blame them on "the decline of Germanic civilization", Jewish people, communists, etc. In fact, Nazi proposals exacerbate the problem. They are Sebastià (though in this case, the wolf killed himself 🤭). But we all know the Nazis aren't exactly bright, to put it softly.

So, yeah. Sorry for this massive tangent lmao, but I love Terra Baixa and I find this such a fascinating topic.

Hey @useless-catalanfacts I just learned that a century ago Terra Baixa got so famous in the international scene that an opera was made in Germany, and also films in the same country and the US!!

Do you know anything about that?? 👀👀