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>>>Why is it people complain about Hitler being portrayed as human? I've heard this quite a few times as an argument why this movie sucked, but I never actually understood how this was justified; I mean, he was human after all, for all I know.<<<
This is the introduction to Grant Morrison's "New Adventures of Hitler" strip in Crisis Magazine, which has always stuck with me. I know this is a discussion of the film Downfall, and this is a comic book intro, but I thought it was pertinent to the discussion.
Adolf Hitler was a short, frustrated painter with a funny moustache. He also instigated the largest wholesale slaughter of human beings this century. Anyone capable of changing one of the most civilised nations on the European continent into a well-disciplined, precision abbatoir could only inspire a mythology of personality of the grandest proportions within our collective evaluation. Fairly or unfairly, this is the way we account for deeds beyond our comprehension.
History belongs to the victors, and it is the privelege of victors to tilt the balance of truth in their direction. Hitler was a monster. Hitler was Satan. Hitler was a madman. Hitler was Thanatos unleashed. All of these statements are false. Hitler was much worse: he was a human being. He was born April 20th, 1889 to a mother and father. He was suckled at his mother's breast. He was toilet trained. He went to school. He had friends. He had ambition. Perhaps it was this last aspect that set Adolf apart from other men. He was singlemindedly relentless and knew no limits as to those to be sacrificed on the altar of his ambition.
But this is all conjecture. Adolf Hitler is dead, and as the bard said "The evil that men do lives after them." It is our collective responsibility to recognise that evil and fight it to our last breath. It is not enough to recognise that evil and fight it to our last breat. It is not enough to recognise that Adolf Hitler murdered 6 million Jews, 3 million Gypsies and uncounted Russians, Poles, Germans, homosexuals and Catholics.
One mad did not do this alone. The idea that one man or the image of one man could be solely responsible for the systematic annihilation of a continent is a safe haven from the truth. To say that Hitler was a madman or a monster firstly elevates the sonofabitch to the loftly level of icon and symbol, and secondly permits us to blind ourselves by labelling Hitler as an abberation within the human community. Hitler was not an abberation. Fascism did not end in a Berlin bunker in 1945.
Hitler's murderous Fascism is not the sole property of the German people, although this misapprehension gave license to some of the worse of the Allied atrocities including the bombing of Dresden. To dehumanise Hitler or the Nazis is to finally admit the greatest defeat. Hitler's crime, the crime of fascism, is precisely the mass dehumanisation of people. Hitler was able to summon his awesome powers of persuasion to convince the Germans (as well as a few English and American industrialists; Henry Ford was an anti-Semite) to motivate their innate anti-Semitism one step further to the extreme of actually seeing Jews as bars of soap and lampshades.
THE NEW ADVENTURES OF HITLER is an attempt to bring these points home by not copping to the iconisation of Hitler and by revealing the true nature of fascism. It lives in your neighbourhood. It lives in the mechanical bloddlust of the speeding motorist as he accelerates to meet the pedestrian. It lives in the licensing of the individual will for the sake of conformity. It lives in the unquestioning adherence to bureaucratic instruction. It lives in the hand that hits a loved one. It lives in the compulsive need to control other people. It lives in the preference for structure and systems and the expense of human beings. It lives in racial generalisations. In effect, fascism lives in each and every attempt to categorise or dehumanise other people.
This is the legacy of Adolf Hitler. This is the evil that lives after him.
Igor Goldkind April 20, 1990 |
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