Having been born into an Anglo-Turkish household, it comes as a huge regret that I was never taught my father's language. This sense of a lost opportunity provided the catalyst for my zeal for foreign languages at school. I was not satiated with merely fluency in the A-Level courses; literature and film offered a wider European cultural perspective on societal issues.
By dipping into the likes of Voltaire to Camus, I have found a new area of language study I had not met before. Voltaire's tale of 'Micromegas' a bizarre tale, in which the reader observes an extra-terrestrial, exiled from his planet for his curiosity, embark on a voyage across the galaxy, provides not only a philosophical view of life and cerebral pursuits but also humanity (army officers termed 'babares sedantaires'). Reading Baudelaire's "Le Joujou du Pauvre " from " Le Spleen de Paris” expanded on this idea;…show more content… The Dardenne brother's film 'Le Gamin au velo' follows a boy in modern France trying to gain a negligent father's affection. The humanism, frequent in French literature, is clear in this film as it deals with themes of love and childish innocence. A connection with German writing was felt, as the boy, on the fringes of society, suffers psychologically. From this film, I learnt how a childhood environment can affect a person psychologically, and the difficulties of single parenthood.
Like German literature, Cate Shortland's film ‘Lore' sees a broken Germany as the Allies seize control of the defeated country. Being the daughter of two high-ranking Nazis, she must rapidly come to terms with the barbarism she was isolated from. Again it is remarkably human, yet I learnt a fascinating lesson of Germany's approach to war, focusing solely on war's effect on the strength of humanity, and also Germany's attitude with its horrific past, a fact that plays a relevant role in studying Vercors’s ‘Le Silence de la