It is a tale of a female goose consumed by adventure and urban glamour in her countryside life, who has to be saved from a cunning fox by her friends and family.
Though this "There's no place like home" theme was a commonplace of 1930s and '40s animation, in this cartoon there is special emphasis, typical of Nazi propaganda, on the Völkisch ideology of conformity and conventionality, portraying individualism and sexual freedom (seeking pleasure rather than to be the mother of ‘true’ German children) as inherently both alien and dangerous.
[2] The cartoon suggests that divergence from traditional German life could be dire, even possibly lethal, in line with National Socialist characterizations of opponents of the regime as asocial, disloyal, and self-destructive.
[3] While on their journey they pass a vibrant city which includes urban glamour shops influenced by international fashion, an exotic parrot and lively music.
A train passes by which quickly shifts this arrangement as the silly goose is excited to see something unnatural, whereas the mother pulls the other siblings back in fear.
Inside the lair there are geese locked up, a slave cat making music on a xylophone of bones and ants turning a spit roast.
[4] It was produced in 1944 when censorship of all media, including child short films, had to go through Joseph Goebbels who was the leader of the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda from 13 March 1933.
[11] This led to many children's animations being produced, leading to film being one type of media which helped to crush Hitler's opposition in Germany.
[12] This animation includes four main aspects: the role of the mother, being asocial, anti-Semitism and showing Fischerkoesen subtle resistance to some of the Nazi policies.
[14] The animation demonstrates this ideology by showing the mother and the silly goose eventually having four children each, despite previously not learning how to lay an egg.
[18] Secondly, with the war affecting the German economy, propaganda was aimed at preventing people buying international goods in order to keep money in the country.
[20] This concept is displayed in the animation towards the beginning, where the cart drives past the glamorous urban city and the silly goose is pulled away by her mother and dropped.
This represents the first symbol of hurt from embracing the urban city life, reflecting it back to if someone went against Völkisch ideology there could be fatal circumstances, with two thirds of non-Jews in concentration camps, during 1933 to 1943, being defined as asocials.
Stereotypes of the Jewish population were at their height in 1944, for example being cunning and having large noses, and of course, many factors played into part to alienate and exterminate them from society.
Therefore, with the master Aryan race being part of Nazi ideology they used propaganda as a tool for exclusion, with Jews becoming the central characters of many films from 1939 onwards.
[29] Therefore, it can be said that the animation was subtly alienating the Jewish population and to some extent trying to justify the exclusion of Jews through the mass killings which began from March 1942.
[35] This links to German society, where people would have been expected to stay in their environment and not be adventurous, emphasising the fear policy the Nazis held.
As stated by Hans Steinback in 1937, they used film as a messenger of Völkisch ideology, and with the war ongoing Goebbels wanted to represent Germany as growing industrially just as in peacetime, and to be able to compete with the rival; America.