Month: October 2009

“If you want to see jackbooted Nazis, watch American movies,” filmmaker Quentin Tarantino conceded recently to NPR’s Teri Gross during a discussion of his new film, “Inglourious Basterds.” Tarantino is right. It is three-quarters of a century since Germany surrendered to the Allies, and Americans still seems unwilling or unable to pass the calcified stones of what you might call “Nazi Porn” out of our cultural maw.

“Inglourious Basterd’s” is the latest in a seemingly endless stream of depictions fascistic; the propensity, at the seeming drop of a clacker, to put out more swastika’s, the bigger, blacker and redder, the better. Check out Tom Cruise’s recent Nazi epic, “Valkerie” Worse yet, tune into the Nazi-related fare on the History Channel. You can spend an entire week watching shows like “Nazi Prophecies,” “Nazi America, a Secret History,” “The Nazi Expedition,” “Nazi Spies in America,” “Nazi UFO’s,” “Hitler’s Britain,” “Hitler, Tyrant of Terror,” “Nazi Guerillas,” “Tracking Nazi Gold,” “The Rise of the Nazi Occult,” “American Spies Inside Nazi Germany,” “Saddam and the Third Reich,” ad – truly -nauseum. It really is enough to make you hurl, or at least insist that the History Channel properly identify itself as “The Nazi Network.”

Nor is this endless parade of Germanalia just a middlebrow activity. Recall earlier this year when the haut-literary world went gaga over the publication of Jonathon Littell’s “The Kindly Ones,” a perverse, Zagat’s for the “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.” To whatever banal hell Hitler, Himmler, Goering, Goebbels, Heydrich, and Eichmann are consigned, we can now send two fictional Nazi Everymen, Littell’s malign Maximilien
Aue and Quentin Tarantino’s sleek Colonel Hans “The Jew Hunter” Landa. When it is made into a film, as it inevitably will be, “The Kindly Ones” will spend as much time as does “Inglourious Basterds” focusing lovingly on the ephemera of fascism; the crisply ironed black shirts, the crook’d cross armband, the deaths-head and SS lightening bolts. The popular appeal of this fetishistic proclivity towards Nazi Porn is a point unwittingly underscored in the New York Times review of Inglourious Basterds, in which Manohla Dargis waxes poetic about the film’s “gorgeously saturated colors, one velvety red in particular.” You can bet your totenkopf in which flag this particular red resides.

What I would really like to know is why these accursed symbols are still so damned arousing today? For Tarantino it is a weird and unconvincingly simpleminded alignment between the genocide of the American Indian tribes and the genocide of the European branches of the Tribes of Israel. But schoolboy rhetoric aside, what is the attraction? Is it some sort of infantile infatuation with the bogeyman? A Goth fashion statement? Or is it the dark thrill of surrendering to a leather-jacketed supermen in hobnailed boots trampling across your night-time dreamscapes?

I can tell you one thing, Nazis, dead or alive, never troubled my dad’s dreams. To him the subject conjured up images of pathetic, shell-shocked boy-soldiers passively herded onto the troop transports in Tangier, Casablanca, Messina and Naples. These were the lucky ones on their way to POW camps in the blessed USA. There was a different fate for the haughty Waffen SS fanatics, who were often hauled behind burned-out farmhouses in Italy and put out of their wretched misery. Dad would be slightly amused, and a little bit sickened at the ongoing fascination with the accoutrements, no matter how glittery, of such a pathetic bunch of historical losers.

In 1965, two decade after the war’s end, we sat in temple, listening to Rabbi A.J. Feldman, the leader of Beth Israel, Hartford’s largest Reformed Jewish synagogue, give a sermon that shocked many of his congregants. Feldman, with the canny timing of the politician he was, understood that it was time for the horrors of the past be interred … in a fashion. “Forgive, but don’t forget,” Feldman proposed, and while Dad could never bring himself to buy a German car, he was inclined to applaud Rabbi Feldman’s missive. He, like Feldman, had grown to understand that the deep, dark secret of the Nazi nation was that it was made up of people not very different from ourselves.

It seems to me that it is past time for a moratorium on all things Nazi. Take the malign stuff from that Dark Age and stuff it in the back of the drawer marked “Enough.” Turn off “Valkerie.” Forego Hitler Night on the History Channel. Ignore the latest deconstruction of the films of Leni Reifenstahl in the New York Review of Books. While we’re at it, why don’t we also take up a collection to send Quentin Tarantino and “Inglourious Basterds” back to eighth grade to learn how to spell, if not how to read and interpret history. And if you want to talk about George Santayana’s chestnut about remembering the past or repeating it; given the exuberant gravitational pull of the symbols of evils past, we are likely condemned to repeat performances whether we remember or not.

I will concede Santayana’s point, but with a caveat. Why not simply try to take the swastika and all the accompanying trappings of evil, and deprive them of the light of day. We might be amazed at how quickly the luster fades and with it, any perverse intrinsic power. Consign Nazi Porn to the historical dustbin where it deserves to be. A tip of the hat to Rabbi Feldman, but maybe it’s finally time to forget and not forgive.