If you’ve read much about history, you can always enjoy a chuckle at the expense of contemporaries who think they invented bad behavior.

Americans might have flocked to Paris in the ’20s, but the real action was in Berlin — the modern Babylon where every night felt like New Year’s Eve and any pleasure could be obtained for a price. In fact, if ever a historical era blurred into one continuous, manic party, it was Berlin in the Weimar years…  Visitors from the Prohibition-bound U.S. were agape at the craze for “American cocktails.” But few were content with an alcohol buzz when high-grade opium balls, morphine, and cocaine were readily available from street dealers or even waitresses, such as the sultry Argentine girls at the Rio Rita tango bar.

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It’s not really Hollywood’s fault, but there are a lot of ambiguities left out of Tom Cruise’s Valkyrie.  Surely, plotting to kill Hitler was a heroic act.  But Colonel Claus Schenk, Graf von Stauffenberg, the Nazi officer portrayed by Cruise, acted from motives that were less than 100% “progressive.”  And there’s the question of whether a leader of the cult of Scientology carries a little too much authoritarian baggage of his own.  Now that the film is playing in Europe, Bernard Henri Levy picks at some of the film’s tensions, oddities, and omissions [read it here].

By the way, Sign and Sight, the online magazine in which Levy’s essay appears, is a resource worth exploring and visiting again.  The editors provide English translations of selected articles from across the European press.  It’s a one-stop shop for keeping tabs on the cultural scenes of many lands in many tongues.