Das dumme Gänslein

Das dumme Gänslein (The Silly Goose) is one in a trio of German animated short films produced in 1944 by Hans Fischerkoesen, who was the chief animator and author. It is a tale of a female goose consumed by adventure and urban glamour in her countryside life, who had to be saved from a cunning fox by her friends and family.[1] The moral of the tale was not be extravagant and adventurous due to its consequences and it not being what one would expect, and promoting that people should live a ‘normal’ German family life. The animation has an underling theme of Nazi propaganda. It symbolises the Völkisch ideology to be traditionally conventional, demonstrating the idea that a woman's main purpose was to produce ‘true’ German children, and not be individualistic or sexually sinful.[2] It represents that if you vary from the traditional German life then the consequences could be dire, possibly leading to death. This can relate to the Nazi fear policy, by which people who opposed the regime or were seen as asocial, were punished and it could have eventually lead to their death. The film also indirectly contains anti-Semitism through the character of the cunning fox.