Joy Division

Joy Division were an English rock band formed in 1976 in Salford, Greater Manchester. Originally named Warsaw, the band consisted of singer Ian Curtis, guitarist and keyboardist Bernard Sumner, bassist Peter Hook, and drummer Stephen Morris.

Formed by Sumner and Hook after the two attended a Sex Pistols gig, Joy Division moved beyond their punk roots to develop a sound and style that made them one of the pioneers of the post-punk movement. Their self-released 1978 debut EP, An Ideal for Living, drew the attention of the Manchester television personality Tony Wilson, who signed the group to his independent label, Factory Records. Joy Division's debut album, Unknown Pleasures, recorded with producer Martin Hannett, was released in 1979 to critical acclaim. As the band's popularity grew, Curtis, who suffered from personal problems that included severe depression, a failing marriage, and epilepsy, found it increasingly difficult to perform at live concerts, during which he occasionally collapsed into seizures.

Joy Division (2007 film)

Joy Division is a 2007 British documentary film on the British post-punk band Joy Division, directed by Grant Gee.

The film assembles TV clips, newsreel, pictures of modern Manchester and Manchester in the late 1970s, and interviews. The interviewees include the three surviving members of the group, Tony Wilson, Peter Saville, Pete Shelley (of Buzzcocks), Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (of Throbbing Gristle), Alan Hempsall (of Crispy Ambulance), Paul Morley, Terry Mason, Richard Boon, Anton Corbijn, and Belgian journalist Annik Honoré, with whom Ian Curtis was having an affair.

Film critic Philip French: "Someone says in the film that the revolutionary step they made was to progress from the usual punk group's angry statement: 'Fuck you.' Joy Division were the first to say: 'We're fucked.' There is a particularly impressive sequence in which dark, despairing tracks of urban alienation and angst from the 1979 album Unknown Pleasures are accompanied by a speeded-up nocturnal journey around Manchester. It has the hallucinatory sci-fi feeling of Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville." The person being quoted was Tony Wilson.

Joy Division (disambiguation)

Joy Division may refer to:

History

Art, entertainment, and media

Film

Music

Joy Division (2006 film)

Joy Division is a 2006 British-German-Hungarian film directed by Reg Traviss. The story is a fictional biopic which follows the life of a boy in Germany at the end of World War II into his adulthood in Russia and London during the Cold War. The script was written by Reg Traviss and Rosemary Mason and went into production in 2004 after completion of Traviss' short film JD Pilot in 2003, based upon the same script and which also starred Ed Stoppard in the role of adult Thomas. Joy Division was shown for the film industry at the Cannes Film Festival European Film Market and at the American Film Market in 2005. It was invited to screen at the Copenhagen International Film Festival in 2006 and was released theatrically in the United Kingdom in November 2006.

Plot

Thomas (Ed Stoppard), a young German, fights unsuccessfully as one of Nazi Germany's Joy Division youth troops after the Soviet Union invades. In the early 1960s, he loses faith in the ideals he was brought up with, and works as a spy and assassin for the Russians during the Cold War. His story is mostly revealed in flashbacks.

House of Dolls

House of Dolls is a 1955 novella by Ka-tzetnik 135633. The novella describes "Joy Divisions", which were allegedly groups of Jewish women in the concentration camps during World War II who were kept for the sexual pleasure of Nazi soldiers.

Origins

The origin of Ka-tzetnik's story is not clear. Some say it is based on a diary kept by a young Jewish girl who was captured in Poland when she was fourteen years old and forced into sexual slavery in a Nazi labour camp. However, the diary itself has not been located or verified to exist. Others claim, and the author suggests as much in his later book Shivitti, that it is based on the actual history of Ka-tzetnik's younger sister (House of Dolls is about the sister of Ka-tzetnik's protagonist, Harry Preleshnik).

Between 1942 and 1945, Auschwitz and nine other Nazi concentration camps contained camp brothels (Freudenabteilung "Joy Division"), mainly used to reward cooperative non-Jewish inmates. Not only prostitutes were forced to work there. In the documentary film, Memory of the Camps, a project supervised by the British Ministry of Information and the American Office of War Information during the summer of 1945, camera crews filmed women who had been forced into sexual slavery for the use of guards and favoured prisoners. The film makers stated that as the women died they were replaced by women from the concentration camp Ravensbrück.

German camp brothels in World War II

In World War II, Nazi Germany established brothels in the concentration camps (Lagerbordell) to create an incentive for prisoners to collaborate, although these institutions were used mostly by Kapos, "prisoner functionaries" and the criminal element, because regular inmates, penniless and emaciated, were usually too debilitated and wary of exposure to Schutzstaffel (SS) schemes. In the end, the camp brothels did not produce any noticeable increase in the prisoners’ work productivity levels, but instead, created a market for coupons among the camp VIPs. The women forced into these brothels came mainly from the Ravensbrück concentration camp, except for Auschwitz, which employed its own prisoners. In combination with the German military brothels in World War II, it is estimated that at least 34,140 female inmates were forced to serve as prostitutes during the Third Reich.

History and operation

The first camp brothel was established in Mauthausen/Gusen in 1942. After 30 June 1943, a camp brothel existed in Auschwitz, and from 15 July 1943, in Buchenwald. The one in Neuengamme was established in early 1944, Dachau's in May 1944, Dora-Mittelbau's in late summer, and Sachsenhausen's on 8 August 1944. There are conflicting dates for the camp brothel in Flossenbürg: one source claims summer 1943; another states it was not opened until 25 March 1944.