German Life and Civilization 44 Unmasking Hitler Cultural Representations of Hitler from the Weimar Republic to the Present von Jost Hermand, Klaus L Berghahn 1. Auflage Unmasking Hitler – Hermand / Berghahn schnell und portofrei erhältlich bei beck-shop.de DIE FACHBUCHHANDLUNG Peter Lang Bern 2005 Verlag C.H. Beck im Internet: www.beck.de ISBN 978 3 03910 553 3 Inhaltsverzeichnis: Unmasking Hitler – Hermand / Berghahn Preface The shadow of Adolf Hitler still looms large over German if not world history. The Third Reich, the Nazi crimes against humanity, and the Holocaust are, for a younger generation, perhaps a distant past. Never- theless, this history still overshadows our present, as the recent scan- dals over dormant Swiss bank accounts, the insurance swindle of Jews murdered in Auschwitz, and the controversy over the financial retribu- tion for slave labor in Nazi Germany have demonstrated. Hitler, the evil incarnate—as many still see him—will not disappear from mem- ory for a long while. He will keep historians busy far into the twenty- first century, and the bizarre story of his life will fascinate generations to come. Although he realized nothing but a moral and political catas- trophe over twelve years, he succeeded in at least one respect: he is still remembered as one of the most brutal despots of the twentieth century. Among the many studies on German National Socialism that ap- peared in the last fifty years, one aspect has seldom been dealt with or analyzed in detail: the cultural representations of Adolf Hitler from the time of his first appearance in the Weimar Republic up to the our pre- sent day. Since there are so many images—be they in biographies, films, novels, plays, poetry, paintings, sculptures, caricatures, and car- toons—there is enough material to warrant an entire collection of es- says on this topic, which will enrich—so we hope—our understanding of the cultural history of the Führer of German National Socialism and especially of his adversaries. Over the last two decades, the discussions of Hitler, National So- cialism, and the Holocaust have evolved increasingly as a supplemen- tary cultural discourse about memory. The debates which followed the Historians’ controversy (“Historikerstreit”) of 1987 (such as the Wehrmacht-exhibition, the Holocaust monument in Berlin, theater productions by George Tabori, the success of works like Victor Klemperer’s diaries, Auschwitz-novels, films, and many other cultural 8 BERGHAHN/HERMAND objects) have proven how much a culturally oriented public is still interested in Germany’s recent past, but at the same time, there is a rising suspicion that something else is shifting here. Recent history is treated from a moralizing and aestheticizing perspective, and it has become a highly valorized subject of our cultural archives. Nothing is wrong with this, and it can be seen as yet one more sign indicating how the discourse on the Nazi past has been materialized in the Berlin Republic. The danger of this purely cultural utterance is, of course, that it also loses historical depth by concentrating exclusively on cul- tural questions of identity, ethnicity, and gender. Sixty years after the “Final Solution,” the treatise on the Nazi past appears no longer to be a branch of the profane, political sphere—if it ever has been a part of it after 1945—but it has moved to the cultural sphere, or it has even become a mere aesthetic experience. This too is reason enough to ana- lyze the cultural representation of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. What the two editors had in mind, when they were planning a workshop on this topic and preparing its publication, was an investiga- tion of the following aspects of various Hitler images: the historical changes in the representation of Adolf Hitler from the 1920s through the period of the Third Reich to the time of the divided Germany after 1945 and beyond; the impact that these images had on sympathetic and/or hostile audiences; the differences that are brought about by the techniques em- ployed by the various media in regard to this specific topic; the blatant ideological and national dissimilarities in repre- senting Hitler as a threatening or a merely farcical figure in periods such as the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and the two Germanys after 1945, as well as in countries such as the Soviet Union, England, and the United States. It is the aim of this book to demonstrate that the cultural representa- tions of Hitler, which are—with the exception of popular biographies and films—still widely unknown to a broader public, will give schol- ars of cultural history and a general audience a better understanding of the various practices in which these images were employed: as meth- ods of nationalistic propaganda (e.g. in Germany during the years 1933 to 1945); for satirizing or ridiculing techniques (as in most other Preface 9 countries since the 1930s); and in many other forms of representation after 1945. Historiography as a form of “cultural representation” of Hitler, as it is practiced in these essays, may still be debatable, but re- cent developments in historiography, such as Cultural History, New Historicism, the so-called “linguistic turn,” and even Deconstruction have illustrated how the various portraits of Hitler can be read from different cultural and socio-political perspectives, or how Hitler pro- voked various cultural responses, from John Heartfield’s photo mon- tages to Adorno’s negative dialectics. With the exception of Claudia Schmölders’ opening essay, which introduces the topic of our volume proper, we have organized this book chronologically. We begin with the liberal and leftist images of Hitler during the final years of the Weimar Republic; then follow with a discussion of the heroic images of Hitler inside of Germany during the Third Reich as well as their liberal and leftists counterparts in Czechoslovakia, England, the Soviet Union, and the United States, mainly executed by exiled German artists; and concluding with the Hitler images in West- and East-German theater productions after 1945 as well as in three major Hitler biographies and philosophical treatises in Western countries during the same period. The essay by Claudia Schmoelders has a double function here: it inaugurates the topic of the volume, and it deals extensively with the literature on Hitler’s representation in photography, propaganda, and historiography. Indeed her contribution can be read as a summation of her book, Hitlers Gesicht. Eine physiognomische Biographie (Hitler’s Face: A Physiognomic Biography, 2000), which opens up a novel ap- proach to the subject of how Hitler’s face was photographically repro- duced and how this representation has influenced recent historiography by scholars from George L. Mosse to Saul Friedländer. It sets the stage for how “Hitler’s cultural self” was constructed and viewed by his contemporaries and critics, moving from observations of Hitler’s voice and hands to his face, as his official photographer Heinrich Hoffmann portrayed him. And yet, beyond these carefully orchestrated images of Hitler for propagandistic purposes, his visage showed nothing of the ordinary and murderous self. No book on Hitler satires can do without an article on John Heart- field, who during the last years of the Weimar Republic already pro- 10 BERGHAHN/HERMAND duced some of his most sarcastic anti-Hitler photo montages. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Heartfield escaped to Prague, and after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938, he fled to England, where he continued his satirical attacks on Hitler and the Third Reich. Jost Hermand’s article, “Cutting out Hitler,” demonstrates how Heart- field’s caricatures are far more political and far-reaching than com- mentaries by many liberal critics who saw in Hitler merely a passing political abnormality. Heartfield, by contrast, anticipated that Hitler would bring down Germany and Europe in another world war, and he consequently unmasked him as an extremely dangerous and contradic- tory man: an ordinary bourgeois parvenu and puppet of big business, a fascinating demagogue and murderous racist, a cunning politician and warmonger. Long suppressed, Heartfield’s biting photo montages were resurrected in a 1957 exhibition in East Berlin (John Heartfield und die Kunst der Photomontage) and in a MOMA retrospective in 1993. Helmut Peitsch also deals with the last years of the Weimar Re- public by excavating a long forgotten book by Ernst Ottwalt, Deutsch- land erwache. Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus (Germany Awaken: A History of National Socialism, 1932), which was published shortly before Hitler’s seizure of power. The book was unique among communist studies of National Socialism since Ottwalt’s sociologi- cally informed study focused mainly on anti-Semitism. For this per- spective, however, the book was criticized as unorthodox, if not misguided, among its communist readers in Germany and the USSR, since it did not promote the so-called Dimitroff doctrine, which inter- preted fascism as an extreme form of capitalism. These inner- communist debates, which Peitsch richly documents, demonstrate the weakness of the communist anti-fascist perspective on Hitler. Not to forget that Ottwalt’s liquidation at the hands of Stalin contributed to the silence about his anti-fascist writings. While Peitsch focuses on the communist reception of Adolf Hitler in Germany and the Soviet Union, David Bathrick’s “Cinematic Re- making of Hitler: From Riefenstahl to Chaplin” examines Riefen- stahl’s contributions to the making of the public persona of Adolf Hitler into an icon of National Socialism, and he contrasts her glorifi- cation of Hitler with Chaplin’s satirical demolition of that icon in his Preface 11 1940 film The Great Dictator. Combining a historical and political survey of the origins of the two films, Triumph of the Will and The Great Dictator, with an aesthetic analysis, Bathrick succeeds in dem- onstrating the affirmative and critical power of these films.