Wanna see it again?

The year was 1978 and a commentator for the German weekly Die Zeit had a little something to get off his chest:

There we sit after more than thirty years - the Empire in ruins, the East German homeland lost, Berlin divided, Prussia abolished, the old society with all its values destroyed, the new still without contours, the world filled with the rattling of weapons, hearts filled with secret fears, of atomic catastrophe, of inflation and unemployment, of terrorists - and, despite all that, ever again Hitler, Hitler, Hitler - one can't stand it!

Another quarter of a century later, that same conservative writer, if he's still alive and wishing the world would please move along, must be going out of his mind. Scanning the weekend papers from Berlin, New York and London yesterday, I began to wonder about the persistence of Hitler not only as a static icon of ultimate evil, both visually and rhetorically, but also as a dramatic narrative, a story somehow cinematically more engaging than that of his victims - hence, his ever-active presence in collective memory. In this week's column for Telepolis, I do some of that wondering out loud. I should add that, on the one hand, obviously, we must never forget; but on the other, is it possible to overdo it? And for dubious reasons to boot?

"Sieg Hohl," by the way, is a play on "Sieg Heil" and could be loosely translated as "empty salute." That poster is one of over 100 artworks, including objects and films (which they'll hopefully put up on the site some day) created at a design school in Dortmund as a collaborative effort to counter right-wing extremism in Germany.



Posted by dwhudson at June 16, 2003 4:40 AM