August 07, 2005
Tomorrow Belongs to Me
Worst Halloween Costume Ever
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Prophesied to last a millennium, Adolf Hitler's Thousand-Year Reich lasted only 12 years, from 1933 to 1945. Scripted to end—if it ever ended—in the melancholy grandeur of triumphal arches wreathed in ivy, its tawdry finale turned out to be a self-inflicted bullet in Der Fuhrer's brain, as Soviet tanks rumbled into Berlin. The Third Reich's only memorials are the death camps that scream its guilt from every stone, and the odd, unmarked grave of evil dreams: here, a buried mound of rubble (the Reich Chancellery); there, a weed-tufted field (the Nuremberg stadium, where the party rallies were held). Even Hitler's remains were not laid to rest in the pharaonic crypt he envisioned for himself, a Holy Sepulchre for the Nazi death cult. Poetic justice ordered a more appropriate fate: Hitler's corpse was shoveled unceremoniously into a shell hole outside the Fuhrerbunker, in a lull between bombings.
(The following is an extended dance remix of an essay that appeared in Vogues Hommes International, spring/summer 03, pps. 252-255, under the title "Fascinating Fascism 2.0." Now that the copyright has reverted to me, I thought I'd republish it here, in expanded form, for those who missed it the first time around. Auto-plagiarism Alert: the Rick Poynor quote that appears here, taken from an interview done for this article, also resurfaces in "Deconstructing Harry," written for this site. Chandler called this sort of thing 'cannibalism'—which means I'm in good company, at least.)
Yet, Nazi Germany won't stay buried. In the United States, at least, the Chaplin-mustached murderer of millions and his Thousand-Year Reich live on—in newspaper headlines, pop culture, the mass imagination. Examine that spiky EEG of American culture, The New York Times, and you'll find dozens, sometimes hundreds, of stories in a single year alone that relate, in one way or another, to Nazi Germany. Every Sunday's Book Review seems to include at least one book like the historian Michael Beschloss's best-seller, The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1941-1945; each day's headlines seem to trumpet another German company's admission that it profited from slave labor during wartime, another Holocaust denier outed, another silver-haired, lawn-mowing grandpa next door exposed as a Nazi war criminal. The satellite dish of our media unconscious is still receiving the ghostly images of a horror show that stopped transmitting a half-century ago.
Which would be appropriate, in light of the Nazis' proto-postmodern intuition that filmed images, not firsthand experience, are what endures, in a media culture. Witness their love affair with the cinema, from Leni Riefenstahl's creepily effective use of moving images to move the masses in Triumph of the Will to the Nazis' obsessive documentation of their genocidal handiwork (brilliantly used as exhibits for the prosecution by Alain Resnais in Night and Fog) to Eva Braun's fondness for home-moviemaking to Hitler's boundless appetite for movies, usually one or two a night, mostly "light entertainment, love, and society films" (Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich) and, more revealingly, footage of the sadistically slow strangulation of the conspirators who attempted to assassinate him, which he watched "down to the last twitches of the condemned" (Joachim Fest, Hitler). "Those Nazis had a thing for movies," quips a character in Don DeLillo's Running Dog (1978), a novel about the black-market intrigues swirling around "the century's ultimate piece of decadence"—a fictional movie shot in the Fuhrerbunker during Hitler's last days. "They put everything on film. Executions, even, at his personal request. Film was essential to the Nazi era. Myth, dreams, memory."
The Third Reich of Dreams. Hollywood conjurations, from The Nazis, by Piotr Uklanski.
And film is where our myths, dreams, and memories of the Reich That Will Not Die are endlessly replayed. Strange attractors in the chaos of human history, Hitler and the Holocaust confound all efforts to make sense of them. Even so, two recent movies attest to our unending attempts to understand do just that: Max, the Dutch director Menno Meyjes's portrait of the Fuhrer as an angry young boho and artist manque, and The Pianist, Roman Polanski's tale of a Polish-Jewish virtuoso who survives the brutality and degradation of the Warsaw ghetto to play another day. Of course, they're only the latest bids, in our long exit from the 20th century, to mine meaning from the hellpit of the Holocaust—or, less loftily, append a Hollywood ending to the unspeakable, as in Schindler's List, Triumph of the Spirit, The Truce, and Life Is Beautiful.
Meanwhile, on the small screen, World War II—a reassuringly Manichean struggle between good and evil, in our age of videotaped beheadings and Abu Ghraib torture porn—is fought and re-fought on cable-TV shows such as The History Channel, waggishly dubbed the "Hitler Channel," in recognition of its seemingly all-Nazi, all-the-time programming. The satirical webzine Bizcotti.com wasn't far from the truth when it ran a parodic item headlined "History Channel Goes To All-Hitler Format." According to Bizcotti, executives sporting red-and-black armbands adorned with a "Teutonic version of the History Channel's 'H'" announced that "in addition to the usual slew of documentaries about WW II Germany and the life, death, and machinations of Adolf Hitler," the channel was developing "Cooking with the Fuhrer," "Hitler's Top 10 Funky-Fresh Videos," and the "madcap sitcom "Keeping Up with the Himmlers.'" To quote Jack Gladney, the professor of Hitler studies in DeLillo's novel White Noise (1985), "He's always on. We couldn't have television without him."
From The Nazis, by Piotr Uklanski.
Closer to the bottom of the cultural slagheap, the straight-to-video market thrives on Hitleriana, juiced up with "historical recreations." The shelves of my local video store sag under the weight of titles such as Hitler's Home Movies, a blurry, low-budget exercise in exploitation whose absence of any narration—in fact, any sound whatsoever—or even titles lends it a weirdly pornographic air. Volume 5 (!) of the series begins abruptly, in the middle of a non-narrative whose jerky, hand-held camerawork and cinema verite plotlessness would make it the envy of undergraduate auteurs everywhere: anonymous children toddle jerkily around the Fuhrer's Bavarian hideaway, watched over by genial SS guards; women (Eva Braun among them?) frolic in swimsuits. But where's Adolf? Like those shrouded, trussed-up models in fetish magazines, their invisibility the source of their erotic power, the Fuhrer's absent presence haunts this chaste pornography. Grabbing a copy, I ask the woman at the register if I get a discount for being the first person to rent it in years. "Oh, you'd be surprised," she says, with the unflappable deadpan of the career video clerk. "There's a lot of interest in this stuff."
Indeed there is, if eBay is an index of our obsessions. Checked recently, the "collectibles" section of the American version of the auction website was awash in Nazi memorabilia. Up for auction were Hitler Youth backpacks, a Nazi officer's photo albums, a pair of size 42 clogs made in "the largest forced labor shoe factory in occupied Europe," and enough "genuine" Nazi-era Hitler-head stamps to mail some deserving Holocaust denier a mountain of SS daggers and concentration-camp armbands.
Little Drummer Boy. Hitler Youth figurine, hawked through the neo-fascist UFC website, bringing you "information which is uncorrupted by the forces of political correctness and Liberal Consensus."
But what's it all about? Susan Sontag's groundbreaking essay "Fascinating Fascism" (1974), a meditation on the eros-and-thanatos frisson of all those chisel-faced Aryans in their death's-head insignias and black uniforms, isn't much help in explaining media dream life in the early oughts. The eroticizing of the swagger stick and the jackboot was a product of the pleasure-dungeon demimonde in the days before AIDS. Our conjuration of the Third Reich has more to do with the sudden realization that the last living Holocaust survivors are dying—as are their Nazi tormentors, a development that spurred the record-breaking acceleration, in 2002, of U.S. Justice Department prosecutions of Americans suspected of Nazi war crimes.
Then, too, there is the sheer, staggering enormity of Nazi evil, a black hole in the cosmos of intellectual discourse that we are only now beginning to reckon with, through pop myth and scholarship. "If we ask why Nazism feeds the imagination more than, say, the horrors of Stalinism, or other dictatorships, then we can recall that no other dictatorship spawned both a world war and a major genocide—in fact, the worst genocide in history," says Professor Ian Kershaw, author of an acclaimed multi-volume biography of Hitler, in an e-mail interview. "Mussolini, Franco, even Stalin seem therefore to be more understandable products of their own societies and state systems, whereas the riddle of how such a devastating doctrine of inhumanity and regime of breathtaking brutality and destruction could arise in a modern, economically advanced, and culturally sophisticated country like Germany (with its many similarities to our own societies) prompts unceasing interest and enquiry."
Thus, there may be less irony than meets the eye in our tendency to replay flickering Third Reich newsreels on our mental movie screens at a time when cloned sheep and pigs with human genes are science fact and bacterial computing and molecular robotics seem just around the bend. "Hitler's contemporaries—Baldwin, Chamberlain, Herbert Hoover—seem pathetically fusty figures, with their frock coats and wing collars," wrote the sci-fi novelist J.G. Ballard in 1969. "By comparison, Hitler is completely up to date, and would be equally at home in the '60s as in the '20s. Certainly, Nazi society seems strangely prophetic of our own—the same maximizing of violence and sensation, the same alphabets of unreason and the fictionalizing of experience."
Rudolf Herz, "Zugzwang" (1995), from "Mirroring Evil" at the Jewish Museum, New York City.
The mass psychosis that swept through Germany in the '30s nags at us because '30s Germany was perhaps the first truly modern, mass-media society, in many ways scarily like ours; if it happened there, it could happen here, the logic goes. The Holocaust was the nightmare offspring of the Machine Age and a Wagnerian mysticism whose virulent anti-semitism may have been of its moment, but whose murderous anti-modernism is always with us, making blood brothers of Ted "Unabomber" Kaczynski, Osama bin Laden, and every other mad bomber who wants to Fight the Future.
Then, too, our hypercapitalist age—when politics has been annexed by advertising, nations hire image consultants, and war fever is fanned by P.R. firms—is especially susceptible to the mesmeric power of what might flippantly be called Nazi "branding." In a culture seduced by surface, the brutalist Deco of Nazi architecture and design becomes one more historical style to rip, mix, and burn. "This material engages us not only because of what it represents to the popular mind—the specter of absolute evil—but because it does so with a stylish command of imagery that has never been surpassed," says the design critic Rick Poynor, author of Obey the Giant: Life in the Image World, in an e-mail interview. "The devil has the best tunes and the Nazis have the best uniforms, insignia and banners, and a 'logo,' the swastika, of incomparable power. (No wonder books on corporate identity can never resist including it; next thing you know, they'll be calling it a 'brand.')"
Instructive to remember, at such a moment, the original "No Logo" refusenik Karl Marx's admonition that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce—to which one might add: and finally, as brand. "Fascism—I hate to say it, but it's sexy," said a magazine editor quoted in a 2000 New York Times article about the passing fad, in couture, for gladiatorial breastplates, military uniforms, and other fascist chic.
Ann Coulter, She-Wolf of the Media SS. Nazi kitsch, ripped and remixed by Eponymous.org.
The moral weightlessness required to see fascism as sexy is a sublime obscenity, especially in a world where the ethnic cleansing, eugenic rhetoric, and apocalyptic politics of the Nazis have come back to haunt us. But that's the danger of playing with loaded images: The boots gleam, the death's-heads wink; we'll try them on, we think—just for fun, only for a minute, when no one's looking. They fit like a dream, and before we know it, we're acting the part.
Posted by Mark Dery at 12:28 AM
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January 26, 2005
Deconstructing Harry
On January 13, the world learned that England's irrepressible Prince Harry had pulled another madcap stunt: attending a costume party for A-listers dressed in Desert Fox drag (the Afrika Korps uniform worn by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, topped off with a swastika armband).
© The Sun, 2005.
The vultures of Fleet Street descended in the usual Hitchcockian frenzy. A flurry of buzzwords, the raucous cawing of columnists fighting over the juiciest morsel, and then they were gone, leaving nothing but a bloody tuft of carrottop and another damage-control migraine for the royals...
Now that the gregarious carrion-feeders have fled, The Department of Hitler Studies (chairman emeritus: Jack Gladney) wonders about the deeper meanings of this whole foofaraw. (Or is it a kerfuffle? Who the hell knows?) To begin, who hacked the hakenkreuz on Harry's armband? Did the costume manufacturer attempt to inoculate the wearer against public outrage by defanging the infamous icon—shortening the bent part of the cross's arms? (Hitler's eye for graphic design insisted on longer, more symmetrical arms.)
Illustration © Flags of the World, 2005.
Failed postcard-painter, architect of megabuildings never to be built, Hitler deserves his due, however much it pains us, as an intuitive master of what marketing professor Douglas B. Holt calls "cultural branding." In Mein Kampf, the leader of Team Nazi recalls his struggle to build the perfect logo:
I myself, meanwhile, after innumerable attempts, had laid down a final form: a flag with a red background, a white disk, and a black swastika in the middle. After long trials, I also found a definite proportion between the size of the flag and the size of the white disk, as well as the shape and thickness of the swastika.As the design critic Rick Poynor told us, in an e-mail interview for a Vogue Hommes essay we were writing, "This material engages us not only because of what it represents to the popular mind—the specter of absolute evil—but because it does so with a stylish command of imagery that has never been surpassed. The devil has the best tunes and the Nazis have the best uniforms, insignia and banners, and a 'logo,' the swastika, of incomparable power. (No wonder books on corporate identity can never resist including it; next thing you know, they'll be calling it a 'brand.')"
Sontag reflects on the power of Nazi style, in "Fascinating Fascism," meditating on the SS uniform's reincarnation as the formal attire of S/M devotees with a weakness for the louche:
[P]hotographs of SS uniforms are the units of a particularly powerful and widespread sexual fantasy. Why the SS? Because the SS was the ideal incarnation of fascism's overt assertion of the righteousness of violence, the right to have total power over others and to treat them as absolutely inferior. It was in the SS that this assertion seemed most complete, because they acted it out in a singularly brutal and efficient manner; and because they dramatized it by linking themselves to certain aesthetic standards. The SS was designed as an elite military community that would be not only supremely violent but also supremely beautiful. [...] SS uniforms were stylish, well-cut, with a touch (but not too much) of eccentricity. Compare the rather boring and not very well cut American army uniform: jacket, shirt, tie, pants, socks, and lace-up shoes—essentially civilian clothes no matter how bedecked with medals and badges.
Hitler lived before the Triumph of the Shill, when branding and marketing have infiltrated everything from business to politics to the presentation of self, in the turbo-capitalist West. But if he had survived, we could easily imagine him at home in a cultural climate where anxious middle-managers consult, in all seriousness, books such as A New Brand World: 8 Principles for Achieving Brand Leadership in the 21st Century by Scott Bedbury or the ominously titled Culting of Brands: When Customers Become True Believers by Douglas Atkin, or the suitably dictatorial Power of Cult Branding: How 9 Magnetic Brands Turned Customers Into Loyal Followers by Matthew W. Ragas, or How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding by Douglas B. Holt. (No mention of the swastika in Holt's book, although he does tell us that "Coke celebrated America's triumphs against Nazi Germany in World War II," and that Volkswagen had a persistent image problem due to its origins as the German "people's car," developed by Hitler.)
Warning: Attention-Conservation Alert! Digression ahead. If you're engaging in workplace time-theft, skip down to "Deep breath..."
Hitler's demonic talent for graphic branding reminds us of Uncle Walt, the mediocre cartoonist and self-described benign dictator of the Happiest Place on Earth, whose iconic mouse ears and branded signature (not his own; the company designed it, and he learned to forge it) are as instantly recognizable as the swastika (and, in some quarters, nearly as feared). We think of the Great Dictator's childish delight in Disney cartoons and his unsettling habit of whistling "Who's Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf"? (Hitler nicknamed himself "Wolf") as he dragged his game leg through the corridors of the Fuhrerbunker, a cadaverous apparition sustained by drugs, while the Russian tanks rolled overhead. We think, too, of both men's iconic moustaches, and of the persistent rumors that They Saved Hitler's Brain and They Froze Walt's Body.
Exhibit A:
Exhibit B:
Graphic © GateAVisa, 2005.
We think of Disney's collaboration with recovering Nazi scientist Werner von Braun on TV shows and Tomorrowland. Less glibly, and far more damningly, we think of the noxious anti-Semitism tactfully omitted from Walt's official biography (but helpfully included in Disney's World by Leonard Mosely): "It's the century of the Jew, the union cutthroat, the fag, and the whore!," the Magic Kingdom's Fuhrer once spluttered, in one of his less avuncular moments. "And FDR and his National Labor Relations Board made it so!" Then, too, there's Disney's unbecoming fondness for National Socialism: According to Walt Disney: Hollywood's Dark Prince by Marc Elliot, Everybody's Favorite Mausketeer attended American Nazi Party rallies and visited Mussolini at his private villa. And then we think of Dr. Hibbert's observation, in the Simpsons episode "The Boy Who Knew Too Much," that Hitler, Walt Disney, and Freddy Quimby all had the "evil gene." And then we wonder about Alien Jesus Command's suggestion that Disney imagineers re-imagineer the recently excavated Fuhrerbunker, in Berlin, into a new EuroDisney attraction. And then we find ourselves scanning "Some Signs You are a Disney Nazi" ("Unwavering devotion to all things Disney." "Disbelief of anything anti-Disney." "Obsession with Disney memorabelia." [sic] And "Obedient faith in every Disney employee.") at the "Disney, Hoover and Reno" page, a Henry Darger-approved exercise in crackpot hermeneutics that in pre-Web times would have been scrawled in Magic Marker and stapled to telephone poles.
At this point, we realize that while a frenzy of intertextuality is the mother of deconstruction (or something like that), it is also the first step down the slippery slope that leads to conspiracy theory. We should heed the warning of Casaubon, the demented exegete in Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco (no slouch himself, when it comes to far-flung connections): "[W]anting connections, we found connections—always, everywhere, and between everything. The world exploded in a whirling network of kinships, where everything pointed to everything else, everything explained everything else...."
Deep breath. Where were we, before we went off on that discursive tear about Hitler and Disneyland's Dark Prince? Oh, yeah: Prince Harry, and his unfortunate choice of the swastika as fashion accessory.
While we at the Department of Hitler Studies can understand the moral recoil from Prince Harry's yobbish insensitivity, we cannot fathom the shock expressed, in some quarters. Isn't the little Anus Horribilis's act of monumental insensitivity part and parcel of the royals' highborn disdain for the simple folk? What's the point of being heir to the throne if you're bound by the moral code (not to mention the tax code) that constrains the lesser ethers? Doesn't the appalling theme of the party Our Harry was attending—"Colonials and Natives," which might've seemed a waggish choice if you were sipping gin rickeys after shooting an elephant in Victorian India, but if not, not—speak volumes about the colonial consciousness of all of the realm's bluebloods? As the editors of the London News Review wrote in their tongue-in-cheek "Defense of the Idiot Prince," "'Colonials and Natives'? What the fuck are these people on? What century are they living in? Colonials and Natives? It beggars belief. Why not 'Imperialists and Nig Nogs'?" Then, too, it's common knowledge that a genteel anti-Semitism has long been part of the aristocratic gene code, in England. Ugly? Obviously. Unconscionable? No doubt. Uncommon? Hardly.
Jessica ("Decca") Mitford, an English blueblood, once referred to "the deep dyed anti-Semitism that pervades all England." She knew whereof she spake: Her sister Diana married Sir Oswald Mosely, the blackshirted Adolf wannabe behind the British Union of Fascists, in a secret ceremony in Goebbels's apartment, with Hitler in attendance. To the end of her days, Diana remained a swastika girl at heart. In The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family, Mary S. Lovell quotes Diana's remarks to a BBC interviewer in 1989. Hitler, she gushed, was "extraordinarily fascinating and clever. Naturally. You don't get to be where he was just by being the kind of person people like to think he was..." (Of course, those bullnecked SA bootboys, whose brass knuckles left beerhall hecklers softmouthed, might have helped Clever Adolf along the road to power, but who are we to be critical?) Dina's charming sister Unity—whose middle name was "Valkyrie" and who was conceived in Swastika, Ontario (I'm not making this up)—was an enthusiastic Nazi, too. She thought it hilarious when the Nazi governor of Franconia, the virulent ant-Semite Julius Streicher, forced a group of Jews to mow a meadow—with their teeth. (Again, our source is Lovell's The Sisters.)
Like Mosely, the Mitfords were members of the privileged class, of which Prince Harry is the very flower. As The Guardian points out, "King Edward VIII, Harry's great-great uncle, was a Nazi sympathizer, while Princess Michael of Kent's father was a Nazi party member." Of course, the English hold no copyright on anti-Semitism or fascist sympathies. Protocols of the Elders of Zion publisher and Hitler campaign contributor Henry Ford, Nazi sympathist Charles Lindberg, and American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell—no relation to Norman—remind us that the United States has proven fertile loam for fascism's blood-and-soil theology. Let he who is without sin cast the first swastika. Still, the English aristocracy's coy games of footsie with fascism are surely relevant to any discussion of Prince Harry's indiscretions.
Not that a history lesson is necessary. We are shocked—shocked!—to discover that the scion of a dynasty, whose right to rule rests on the assumption of genetic superiority, failed the sensitivity test in deciding whether or not to wear a Nazi uniform to a costume party. There's a term for the world-view underlying all monarchies: Social Darwinism. Little wonder, then, that the purebred product of one of Western history's best-known experiments in eugenics should feel a sense of kinship, however unconscious, with the people who brought you racial hygiene on an apocalyptic scale. The trouble with Harry, of course, is that he committed the unthinkable indiscretion of exposing in public the birthmark most manor-born ubermenschen keep hidden.
Posted by Mark Dery at 09:55 AM
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