Since Die Hard is a Christmas film, a brief thread on my own head canon of how the Gruber brothers disparate bios are tied up in postwar German history.
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In the first film, Hans Gruber is a renegade West German RAF member and in the third, his brother Simon is an ex-East German National Peoples Army Colonel.
What would make sense to align their bios is that they were teenagers in Berlin when the wall went up in 1961. Hans joins the student movement in West Berlin and Simon does compulsory military service in the NVA and gets on the officer track
Or simply and what I know from personal family history, dad is a soldier, after WW2 he shacks up with a different lady and makes a brother in a different part of the country. @philipwblood.bsky.social. I’ve got cousins this way in Poland and Germany.
They meet again in the 1970s after Hans has to take refuge in the GDR after he is implicated in a series of armed bank robberies. Simon is brought in by the Stasi to work with him on international terrorist activities.
Having failed at this last ditch effort to save the GDR economy in 1988, East Germany collapses with the opening of the Berlin Wall the next year. Ergo John McClane is responsible for the end of the Cold War.
An intimate story of the parents separation and divorce that implicitly leads to all the action later. The only shooting takes place at the Berlin Wall. 7 Academy Award nominations but no wins.
His dad was a minor SS functionary, but what really radicalized him was the death of Rudi Dutschke, which led him to parachute into the Soviet zone from the top of the Axel Springer building in a bizarre foreshadowing of his death
and there was me thinking they just borrowed the Hans Gruber name from the person who wrote Silent Night….
(Absolute proof that Die Hard is a Christmas movie… 😉)
The arrest of Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Holger Meins in the Frankfurt garage on June 1, 1972, was the result of police surveillance and a tip-off from an informant. That informant’s name? Hans Gruber.
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how many eggnogs did you have?
Nakatomi Plaza was on my paper route
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(Absolute proof that Die Hard is a Christmas movie… 😉)