Unmasking Hitler

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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 memory 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 present 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 essays 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 cultural 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 employed by the various media in regard to this specific topic; the blatant ideological and national dissimilarities in representing 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 representations of Hitler, which are—with the exception of popular biographies and films—still widely unknown to a broader public, will give scholars 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 recent 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 montages 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 perspective, 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 interpreted 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. Bertolt Brecht’s Hitler satires, as interpreted by Jost Hermand in the context of Brecht’s entire œuvre, demonstrate how Brecht first presented Hitler—in accordance with the communist united front strategy—as a puppet of Germany’s big business. But realizing Hit- ler’s mass appeal, Brecht shifted in his poetry as well as in his dra- matic productions of the 1930's and early 1940's to a different image of Hitler. He now presented him as a powerful, lonely dictator, getting most of his support from a politically disoriented petty bourgeoisie. After 1945, Brecht gave up any further attempts to deal with Hitler in any poetic style in order to avoid being misunderstood as an opponent of a party state. The essay “Will to Power or Vox Populi: Hitler Biographies and the Question of Culpability” by Eric Ehrenreich, Matthew Lange, Corina Petrescu—three of our graduate students—compares three major biographies of Hitler (those by Bullock, Fest, Kershaw) to show how each offered different explanations of the culpability of the Ger- man people in Hitler’s rise to power. Over time, as the authors demonstrate, historians have come to a more sweeping assessment of the Germans’ responsibility for the rise and success of the National So- cialists, and, not to forget, the culpability of the German people in the Holocaust. Gerhard Richter’s essay “Nazism and Negative Dialectics: Adorno’s Hitler” is an intellectual tour de force in explaining the sig- nificance of Hitler for Adorno’s postwar philosophy as exemplified by a close reading of Adorno’s Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life. Richter’s main thesis that Hitler becomes a metonym for the well known dialectic of culture and barbarism in the German philosophical and political tradition is extensively documented and broadly interpreted. In a “radical allegorical reading,” in contrast to a analogical (symbolic) interpretation of the phenomenon of Hitler and/or National Socialism, Richter interprets Adorno’s Denkbilder (thought images) as the results of life in exile, damaged by the siblings of an administered world: Hitler’s political system and the American 12 BERGHAHN/HERMAND culture industry. Both are, as Adorno suggests, a fateful misreading of a certain dialectic of enlightenment, in which even the most illumi- nated thought has a barbaric potential. Consequently, Hitler becomes the signifier for the unfolding barbarism of German National Social- ism. Heiner Müller’s life-long obsession with Hitler, as demonstrated by Helen Fehervary’s “Heiner Müller’s Representation of Hitler,” is present throughout his works. Fehervary explores the diverse theatrical influences noticeable in Mueller’s plays, especially the impact of Brecht’s plays; she analyzes the various stages of Mueller’s develop- ment through his representations of Hitler; and she substantiates how these stages correspond to the different historical legacies of Hitler in the GDR, the FRG and, after 1989, in a united Germany. Although Mueller’s left-wing political beliefs and his analysis both of National Socialism as well as Hitler’s horrendous role in it were fairly consis- tent, his preoccupation with Hitler only intensified over the years. The essay by Klaus Berghahn, “‘Hitler and His Jew’: Notes on George Tabori’s Mein Kampf,” has two goals: to probe the possibili- ties and limits of the theatrical representation of Hitler in a comic genre and to ask the more general question whether humor and laughter are the appropriate modes of representing Hitler and the Holocaust, particularly after 1945. While Berghahn acknowledges the comical qualities and black humor of Tabori’s satirical play Mein Kampf, he criticizes its whimsical excursions as inconsistent with the subject matter. Moreover, the question arises whether or not Adorno’s “light- heartedness of art” and Tabori’s “laughter of despair” are incongruous concepts with regard to a clownish representation of Hitler. Tabori certainly unmasked Hitler’s anti-Semitism through humor, but at the same time this comic relief could also unburden a German audience of its complicity in Hitler’s crimes. Thomas Jung’s “Pop-Icon Hitler” supplements the mostly high culture texts of this volume with a discussion of popular culture’s representation of Hitler. Situating the comic books of Walther Moers and Achim Greser in their post-1989 context, Jung explores the question whether it is possible to represent Hitler in the genre of comic books and with humor in general. Like Berghahn, he is ambivalent about this kind of humor which operates on the razor’s edge: it can serve the Preface 13 ends of a satirical image of Hitler, but it can just as well promote a hilarious normalization of the Nazi past. The Thirty-fifth Wisconsin Workshop convened in Madison on September 19 to 21, 2002, and was organized by the DAAD Center for German and European Studies in cooperation with the Department of German. Additional financial support from the Anonymous Fund of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the Consul General of the Fed- eral Republic of Germany (Chicago), and the Goethe Institute is grate- fully acknowledged. The Editors would also like to express their gratitude to those without whom the organization and publication of this conference would have been unthinkable: first and foremost, Joan Leffler and Rebekah Pryor Paré who took care of all the logistic de- tails of the workshop with efficiency and grace; Jürgen Schaupp and Matthew Lange spent many hours in preparation of manuscript.

Madison, January 15, 2005 Klaus L. Berghahn and Jost Hermand