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'Just Like Hitler': Comparisons to Nazism in American Culture

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'Just Like Hitler': Comparisons to Nazism in American Culture University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Open Access Dissertations 5-2010 'Just Like Hitler': Comparisons To Nazism in American Culture Brian Scott Johnson University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/open_access_dissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Johnson, Brian Scott, "'Just Like Hitler': Comparisons To Nazism in American Culture" (2010). Open Access Dissertations. 233. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/open_access_dissertations/233 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Access Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ‘JUST LIKE HITLER’ COMPARISONS TO NAZISM IN AMERICAN CULTURE A Dissertation Presented by BRIAN JOHNSON Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY May 2010 English Copyright by Brian Johnson 2010 All Rights Reserved ‘JUST LIKE HITLER’ COMPARISONS TO NAZISM IN AMERICAN CULTURE A Dissertation Presented by BRIAN JOHNSON Approved as to style and content by: ______________________________ Joseph T. Skerrett, Chair ______________________________ James Young, Member ______________________________ Barton Byg, Member ______________________________ Joseph F. Bartolomeo, Department Head Department of English DEDICATION I dedicate this work to my wife Lynn and my children, Alexander and Theodore. They have been sources of both strength and relief. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project could not have been completed without the help and direction of Joseph T. Skerrett, James Young, Barton Byg, and Robert Keefe. v ABSTRACT ‘JUST LIKE HITLER’ COMPARISONS TO NAZISM IN AMERICAN CULTURE MAY 2010 BRIAN JOHNSON, B.A., CAIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, CHICO M.A., CAIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, CHICO Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Joseph T, Skerret ‘Just Like Hitler’ explores the manner in which Nazism is used within mass American culture to create ethical arguments. Specifically, it provides a history of Nazism’s usage as a metaphor for evil. The work follows that metaphor’s usage from its origin with dissemination of camp liberation imagery through its political usage as a way of describing the communist enemy in the Cold War, through its employment as a vehicle for criticism against America’s domestic and foreign policies, through to its usage as a personal metaphor for evil. Ultimately, the goal of the dissertation is to describe the ways in which the metaphor of Nazism has become ubiquitous in discussion of ethics within American culture at large and how that ubiquity has undermined definitions of evil and made them unavailable. Through overuse, Nazism has become a term to vague to describe anything, but necessary because all other definitions of evil are subject to contextualization and become diminished through explanation. The work analyzes works of postwar literature but also draws in state sponsored propaganda as well as works of popular culture. Because of its concentration on Nazism as a ubiquitous definition of evil, it describes American culture through a survey of its more prominent, popular, and lauded works. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................................................v ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... vi INTRODUCTION: NAZISM AS AN EPITOME OF EVIL FOR AMERICAN ETHICS...................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 1. REDUCTIO AD HITLERUM AD NAUSEUM: FINDING THE MEANING OF NAZI ANALOGIES FOR AMERICAN CULTURE ................. 42 2. FROM HUN TO HOLOCAUST: AMERICA’S DEPICTIONS OF NAZISM BEFORE AND AFTER CAMP LIBERATION ......................................76 3. AMERICA ÜBER ALLES: THE LURE AND THE DANGER OF POSTWAR AMERICAN PATRIOTISM ..............................................................109 4. THE THIRD REICH AND THE RED MENACE: THE USE OF NAZIS IN AMERICAN ANTI-COMMUNIST PROPAGANDA.........................145 5. THE MATINEE WAR: SELLING THE WAR AGAINST COMMUNISM WITH WORLD WAR II ..............................................................176 6. NAZISM, MCCARTHYISM, AND THE COUNTERCULTURE: THE PLACE OF RACE IN NAZI ANALOGIES ..................................................211 7. THE REPERCUSSIONS OF UBIQUITY: A CONTEXT FOR EVERY EVIL AND AN EVIL FOR EVERY CONTEXT ..................................................258 ENDNOTES ....................................................................................................................321 WORKS CITED ..............................................................................................................331 vii INTRODUCTION NAZISM AS AN EPITOME OF EVIL FOR AMERICAN ETHICS Jackbooted, he descends the curtain garbed in the kind of military uniform the audience has since come to associate as traditional for a despot. Only moments earlier, promises of world domination and the god-like adoration of his people, offered by his minister of propaganda, Herr Garbitsch, literally drove him up the wall with anticipation and excitement. Now, he is alone with the object of his passion, an enormous shining globe, reminiscent of Atlas, exaggerated and bombastic much like the rest of the décor in Hynkel’s office and the real office, designed for Hitler by Albert Speer, upon which it is based. The audience will soon learn that the globe is only a balloon. The great dictator, Adenoid Hynkel, having come down from the curtain, first circles his globe like a predator upon a wounded animal, and then, with a kind of drunken passion in his expression, he lifts it up into the air, balances it on his fingers, and rolls it down his arm to flap in a slow languid acrobatic; a kind of familiarity that suggests the romantic, if not sexual, play of seducer and seduced, conqueror and conquered, sending the globe ever higher to silhouette against the signs of the double cross that hangs behind Hynkel’s desk. Adenoid Hynkel, Charlie Chaplin’s famous stand-in for Adolph Hitler, bats his eyes at the world, looks at the globe lovingly, and even purses his lips as if readying a kiss. He is dizzy with passion; stupefied by the promise of power. The globe responds to Chaplin’s movements by floating slowly and then bouncing high in the air even when sent there bounced off of Hynkel’s rump as he lays face down on his desk in a pose reminiscent of a beefcake shot. The entire sequence is a ballet, the 1 score behind the action is appropriate to a love scene. Even Hynkel’s last words to Garbitsch before this act with the globe suggest the sexuality implied in this play between dictator and free world: “Leave me. I want to be alone”—alone with his globe and his fantasies. What is Hynkel in this scene? What is Chaplin’s critique of Hitler such that this balloon sequence so sums up the problem with Hitler, Nazism, and maybe even fascism for his audience. Hynkel isn’t particularly evil with his globe. He isn’t violent or horrible. He’s ridiculous. He desires to play with the globe the way one does with a lover. He flirts; he tickles; he directs it as a submissive. Years later, Susan Sontag comments on the various levels of submissiveness present in the crowds at the Nuremberg rallies, marking Hitler as their hypnotic and dominating lover in her essay “Fascinating Fascism” (1974): “Hitler regarded leadership as sexual mastery of the ‘feminine’ masses, as rape. (the expression of the crowds in Triumph of the Will is one of the ecstasy; the leader makes the crowd come.)” ( Under the Sign of Saturn 102). Chaplin has already seen and commented on the sexual character of Nazism in the late 1930s as an intercourse between leader and the led; between the ruler and the enslaved. He has turned it into the ridiculous interplay of domination between a man and the inanimate. He both reduces Hynkel’s desires to a fetish-based sexuality and the crowd that would give up its humanity to become the inanimate fetish. The globe, the world, plays the ultimate submissive, it can do nothing to resist, until finally, in a single moment of assertion, it escapes Hynkel’s grasp by popping. The Great Dictator, left only with the impotent and flaccid remains of the balloon, is reduced to tears. 2 Ultimately though, Hynkel is submissive, too, in Chaplin’s depiction—he is submissive to the definition of Hitler that Chaplin brings out through his character. Hynkel of The Great Dictator isn’t the Hitler of history. A postwar audience, armed with an awareness of the Holocaust, knows the difference implicitly. Hynkel may be a stand in for the tyrant, but, in the end, the resemblance between Hitler and Hynkel is simply cosmetic—a creation of satire that allows Chaplin to poke fun at the Führer and offer human, albeit silly, reasons for why Hitler acts the way he does. Hynkel is a conglomeration of the assumptions that Chaplin anticipates for his audience about Hitler turned funny. The film is successful precisely because it fits its contemporary audience’s own desires so well. It is as if Chaplin said, “this is how Hitler acts; isn’t it ridiculous,” and the audience, finding its own fantasies represented in the film,
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