Hi Hitler! by Gavriel D Rosenfeld review – is Nazism being trivialised?
A critical account of how contemporary culture is re-evaluating the Nazi past is absorbing but ultimately misguided
Hitler
is everywhere. It’s impossible to escape him. You just have to look
online. There are websites with images of “cats that look like Hitler”
and “things that look like Hitler”; you can play a game called “Six
Degrees of Hitler”, where the winner is the person who can go from a
randomly chosen Wikipedia entry to the article on Hitler in the fewest
possible moves; and YouTube now has a vast collection of parodic
versions of Bruno Ganz’s rant in the movie Downfall,
when Hitler concedes final defeat and rages against those he believes
have betrayed him (“Hitler Doesn’t Like How Harry Potter Ends”; “Hitler
Reacts to Kim Kardashian’s Divorce”; “Hitler is Informed His Pizza Will Arrive Late” and even “Hitler Rants About the Hitler Parodies”).
Portrayals of Hitler and the Nazis in film now abound, from alternative historical portrayals such as Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009), in which Hitler dies at the end in a hail of bullets, to Iron Sky (2012), in which the Nazis have escaped the chaos of the last days of the war in a giant spaceship and set up a base on the far side of the Moon from where they are preparing to invade the Earth. There are even comedies about Hitler, most notably the novel Er Ist Wieder Da (Look Who’s Back), by Timur Vermes, published in 2013, in which Hitler wakes up, his clothes still soaked in petrol, in present-day Berlin. Exploring the 21st-century German metropolis, he sees everything through Nazi eyes, with predictably comical consequences.
For Gavriel Rosenfeld, this wave of trivialisation goes together with new trends in academic history such as a tendency to regard the Nazi extermination of the Jews as just one genocide among many. He is correct to see in this a new and disturbing development, and his critical account of the work of its principal advocates is a model of even-handed historiographical analysis. Similarly, in another chapter, he tackles with admirable fairness the closely related trend for some historians to argue that the second world war was not really a “good war” because it delivered the eastern half of Europe into the hands of Soviet tyranny for nearly half a century. The arguments are linked by the common drive on the part of eastern European states today, along with their sympathisers, to equate Stalin with Hitler.
Rosenfeld goes on to examine two more recent developments in the cultural appropriation of the Third Reich, namely “counterfactual” speculations about how the Jews might have been saved, and “alternate” histories of how things might have been had Germany defeated and occupied Britain in 1940 or the USA been ruled by a quasi-fascist president such as Huey Long (strangely, in this context, he fails even to mention Philip Roth’s brilliant The Plot Against America).
Rosenfeld’s treatment of these topics is detailed, illuminating and very informative, though at points one feels that the plot summaries have got out of hand and could have been cut by judicious editing. Yet Nazi kitsch has been around for a long time, and Hitler has appeared in many films and TV dramas over the years. The 1978 movie The Boys from Brazil imagined the former Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele re-creating genetically exact copies of Hitler from samples taken from the Führer’s blood; a 1978 episode of The New Avengers starring Patrick Macnee and Joanna Lumley had neo-Nazis trying to release Hitler from suspended animation; 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade pictured Hitler at a Berlin rally signing an autograph for the hero while Nazi archeologists tried to harness the power of the Holy Grail. There are plenty of older “counterfactual” novels about Nazism, too, at least as far back as Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle of 1962.
More seriously, the concepts Rosenfeld deploys to pull these very varied phenomena together are not really adequate to the task. His key idea is that they all contribute to a “normalisation” of the Nazi past, which he defines as a move away from the moralising approaches of the immediate postwar decades. Nazism, he says, no longer seems exceptional, as once it did. But what he gives with one hand he takes away with the other, for in almost every instance he concludes that “normalisation” produced its opposite, namely a renewed insistence on the historical uniqueness and evil essence of Nazism.
And in any case, “normalisation” itself is an empty concept, for what is “normal” today might no longer be so tomorrow; no one can tell. Many of the historians and writers Rosenfeld discusses are in truth marginal figures anyway, from Patrick Buchanan to Nicholson Baker, James Bacque to Michael Bess. Counterfactual speculation is not central to mainstream historians of the Third Reich, and the examples Rosenfeld cites are merely throwaway remarks, peripheral and ultimately irrelevant to the historian’s principal task of explaining what actually did happen.
Mainstream history has gone in the opposite direction, moving away from the cool objectivity of the first scholarly studies of Nazism in the 1960s and 70s by historians such as Martin Broszat towards the morally driven works of writers such as Saul Friedländer, as the Nazi extermination of the Jews has been subsumed under the label of the “Holocaust”. It is no longer possible to approach the Third Reich as if it were 16th-century Italy or ancient Greece, as it was for historians decades ago; in the 21st century, moral judgment is de rigueur as everyone involved is categorised as a “perpetrator”, “victim” or “bystander”.
Rosenfeld appears to object to depictions of Hitler as a person rather than a monster, in a process he describes disapprovingly as “humanisation”, but he never really explains why this is wrong. Viewing Hitler as a human being, which he undoubtedly was, is more challenging to our understanding, surely, than simply writing him off as a cartoon villain. And yet, in many ways, that is what Hitler and Nazism have become: icons of evil, signifiers of malefaction, beyond any kind of moral rescue, unlike even Stalin, who still has those who defend him by pointing out that he industrialised Russia and defeated the Third Reich.
It is only because it is impossible for our culture, despite the efforts of a tiny and disregarded band of Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis, to express any admiration for Hitler, that he has become the butt of humour and trivialisation: they gain their effect precisely because we all know that in the end Hitler was evil. Rosenfeld’s book is engrossing and thought-provoking, but in the end it does not convince.
• Richard J Evans’s latest book is The Third Reich in History and Memory (Little, Brown).
Hi Hitler! by Gavriel D Rosenfeld (Cambridge University Press, £19.99). To order a copy for £19.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
Portrayals of Hitler and the Nazis in film now abound, from alternative historical portrayals such as Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009), in which Hitler dies at the end in a hail of bullets, to Iron Sky (2012), in which the Nazis have escaped the chaos of the last days of the war in a giant spaceship and set up a base on the far side of the Moon from where they are preparing to invade the Earth. There are even comedies about Hitler, most notably the novel Er Ist Wieder Da (Look Who’s Back), by Timur Vermes, published in 2013, in which Hitler wakes up, his clothes still soaked in petrol, in present-day Berlin. Exploring the 21st-century German metropolis, he sees everything through Nazi eyes, with predictably comical consequences.
For Gavriel Rosenfeld, this wave of trivialisation goes together with new trends in academic history such as a tendency to regard the Nazi extermination of the Jews as just one genocide among many. He is correct to see in this a new and disturbing development, and his critical account of the work of its principal advocates is a model of even-handed historiographical analysis. Similarly, in another chapter, he tackles with admirable fairness the closely related trend for some historians to argue that the second world war was not really a “good war” because it delivered the eastern half of Europe into the hands of Soviet tyranny for nearly half a century. The arguments are linked by the common drive on the part of eastern European states today, along with their sympathisers, to equate Stalin with Hitler.
Rosenfeld goes on to examine two more recent developments in the cultural appropriation of the Third Reich, namely “counterfactual” speculations about how the Jews might have been saved, and “alternate” histories of how things might have been had Germany defeated and occupied Britain in 1940 or the USA been ruled by a quasi-fascist president such as Huey Long (strangely, in this context, he fails even to mention Philip Roth’s brilliant The Plot Against America).
Rosenfeld’s treatment of these topics is detailed, illuminating and very informative, though at points one feels that the plot summaries have got out of hand and could have been cut by judicious editing. Yet Nazi kitsch has been around for a long time, and Hitler has appeared in many films and TV dramas over the years. The 1978 movie The Boys from Brazil imagined the former Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele re-creating genetically exact copies of Hitler from samples taken from the Führer’s blood; a 1978 episode of The New Avengers starring Patrick Macnee and Joanna Lumley had neo-Nazis trying to release Hitler from suspended animation; 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade pictured Hitler at a Berlin rally signing an autograph for the hero while Nazi archeologists tried to harness the power of the Holy Grail. There are plenty of older “counterfactual” novels about Nazism, too, at least as far back as Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle of 1962.
More seriously, the concepts Rosenfeld deploys to pull these very varied phenomena together are not really adequate to the task. His key idea is that they all contribute to a “normalisation” of the Nazi past, which he defines as a move away from the moralising approaches of the immediate postwar decades. Nazism, he says, no longer seems exceptional, as once it did. But what he gives with one hand he takes away with the other, for in almost every instance he concludes that “normalisation” produced its opposite, namely a renewed insistence on the historical uniqueness and evil essence of Nazism.
And in any case, “normalisation” itself is an empty concept, for what is “normal” today might no longer be so tomorrow; no one can tell. Many of the historians and writers Rosenfeld discusses are in truth marginal figures anyway, from Patrick Buchanan to Nicholson Baker, James Bacque to Michael Bess. Counterfactual speculation is not central to mainstream historians of the Third Reich, and the examples Rosenfeld cites are merely throwaway remarks, peripheral and ultimately irrelevant to the historian’s principal task of explaining what actually did happen.
Mainstream history has gone in the opposite direction, moving away from the cool objectivity of the first scholarly studies of Nazism in the 1960s and 70s by historians such as Martin Broszat towards the morally driven works of writers such as Saul Friedländer, as the Nazi extermination of the Jews has been subsumed under the label of the “Holocaust”. It is no longer possible to approach the Third Reich as if it were 16th-century Italy or ancient Greece, as it was for historians decades ago; in the 21st century, moral judgment is de rigueur as everyone involved is categorised as a “perpetrator”, “victim” or “bystander”.
Rosenfeld appears to object to depictions of Hitler as a person rather than a monster, in a process he describes disapprovingly as “humanisation”, but he never really explains why this is wrong. Viewing Hitler as a human being, which he undoubtedly was, is more challenging to our understanding, surely, than simply writing him off as a cartoon villain. And yet, in many ways, that is what Hitler and Nazism have become: icons of evil, signifiers of malefaction, beyond any kind of moral rescue, unlike even Stalin, who still has those who defend him by pointing out that he industrialised Russia and defeated the Third Reich.
It is only because it is impossible for our culture, despite the efforts of a tiny and disregarded band of Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis, to express any admiration for Hitler, that he has become the butt of humour and trivialisation: they gain their effect precisely because we all know that in the end Hitler was evil. Rosenfeld’s book is engrossing and thought-provoking, but in the end it does not convince.
• Richard J Evans’s latest book is The Third Reich in History and Memory (Little, Brown).
Hi Hitler! by Gavriel D Rosenfeld (Cambridge University Press, £19.99). To order a copy for £19.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
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