RAW MATERIAL FOR MEMES
Starting in the 1980s, however, another media phenomenon developed in parallel. It began when Stern, a German magazine, published what it alleged was Hitler’s diary. It was a sensation – and also turned out to be fake.
A worrying precedent was set: The Fuehrer as clickbait to sell copies and, nowadays, to harvest retweets. The fascination with the Nazis became prurient. German television, as I’ve written before, airs almost nightly documentaries on Hitler’s henchmen, women, ailments, table silver or German Shepherd Blondi.
Increasingly, the obsession veered off into parody. It was one thing for Charlie Chaplin, during Hitler’s lifetime, to ridicule the enemy in The Great Dictator. It was quite another in 1998 for Walter Moers, a German satirist, to score a hit with a comic strip called “Adolf, the Nazi pig”.
That launched a genre of Hitler farce, including bestsellers such as Look Who’s Back. In that novel, the Fuehrer wakes up near his old bunker in present-day Berlin and so amuses people with his shtick that he kills it as a comedian.
The phenomenon isn’t German but global. Hitler has become the raw material for memes. For example, there’s that scene in Downfall in which the dictator, played by Bruno Ganz, loses it.
The clip keeps circling around the world, each time with new captions. Here the Fuehrer can’t find his favourite cupcakes on either the Upper East Side or the Upper West. Here he’s stuck with Bitcoin when he should have invested in Dogecoin.
Pundits and the public keep invoking Hitler’s name in vain. As early as 1990, Mike Godwin, an American lawyer and author, coined “Godwin’s Law” of Nazi analogies. It states that as an online discussion grows longer – regardless of the topic – the probability of a comparison to Adolf Hitler approaches 1. For corroboration, just look at the comment sections under some of my columns.
We hardly batted an eyelid anymore when Prince Harry showed up at a party dressed in Brown Shirt and Swastika. I once heard an Iyengar teacher who was rather too precise about asana alignment described as, yes, a “yoga Nazi”.
The phenomenon amounts to a reverse Voldemort effect. In the Harry Potter novels, the personification of evil commanded such revulsion and awe that witches, wizards and warlocks referred to him only as “He Who Must Not Be Named” or “You-Know-Who.”
With Hitler, it’s the opposite: The Fuehrer is He Who Must Be Named All the Time, Whether It Fits or Not. As a result, he no longer seems evil, just cartoonish.
For all the latest world News Click Here
