Trendy Monsters: The Nazis, the Perpetrator Turn, and Popular Culture

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

“The ancient gigantic cannibal near-man flourishing now, ruling the world once more. We spent a million years escaping him, Frink thought, and now he’s back. And not merely as the adversary . . . but as the master.”1 This comparison of Nazis (“near-men”) and cannibals from The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick (1962), is voiced by the novel’s protagonist, Frank Frink, a Jewish artist in hiding. In this alternate-universe novel, the Axis powers won World War II. In the 1960s equating someone with a cannibal was intended as an extreme denunciation; it did not evoke the Hannibal Lecter portrayed by movie heartthrob Mads Mikkelsen. Nor were the Nazi perpetrators rendered as “sympathetic” family men by stars such as Rufus Sewell, as in the recent TV adaptation of Dick’s novel. Clearly, important changes in the representation of the Nazis and cannibals have occurred in popular culture between the 1960s and the present.In this article I compare how popular culture portrays Nazis and homicidal monsters, such as vampires, cannibals, and serial killers, and argue that their images have evolved in parallel and interconnected ways. Over the past three decades, fictional monsters have transitioned from aberrant criminals to cultural idols, and their humanized forms have influenced the trajectory of the images of Nazis. I suggest that this evolution aligns with broader trends in how popular culture depicts violence against people. An emergent tendency in memory studies and Holocaust studies, the perpetrator turn—which designates a shift of attention from the victims’ perspective to the perpetrators’ perspective—finds parallels in these changing attitudes to monsters and the Nazis in popular culture. The perpetrator turn may be seen as an example of the mutual influences and interactions between popular culture and academic discourse. Indeed, can the rise of the “sympathetic Nazi” as a popular protagonist and the “lively intellectual engagement with perpetrators” be viewed as unrelated phenomena?2 I further argue that the fixation on “empathy” with, and “humanization” of, the perpetrators that has come about in fiction, movies, and scholarship is rooted in an ideological shift in the attitudes to humans. I link this shift to the role that the radical critique of humanism and the rejection of anthropocentrism have played, since the 1990s, in academe and popular culture. Finally, I contest the view that fascism is still universally envisaged in movies and novels as an absolute evil or the incarnation of “a dangerous enemy.” On the contrary, the extraordinary popularity of Nazi characters in early 2000s fiction and cinema, which made one critic title his article “Nazis, Nazis Everywhere,”3 may suggest that the Nazis are invading again—but this time, in popular culture. I do not imply, though, that the traditional ways in which Nazism has been represented have completely disappeared.4 But what interests me here is what the new modes of “engagement” with the Nazi perpetrators and with fictional monsters reveal about the current cultural situation. I also address the reception of these images, because audience expectations play an important role in shaping fictional identities._________To highlight the differences in the representations of Nazis in the 1960s and today, I compare Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle and the Emmy Award–winning TV series of the same name (Amazon Studios, 2015–19), which was at one time rated the “most popular digital series in the US.”5 No reader of The Man in the High Castle is left wondering whether any aspects of Nazism and individual Nazis qualify as having any merit. The only sympathetically portrayed Nazi in the novel is an antifascist, Captain Rudolf Wegener, who acts against the Nazi state. Wegener condemns the Nazi world order in unequivocal terms—“The madmen are in power”—and thinks that Nazism is “evil beyond compare.”6 In the novel, Wegener saves the world from the Nazis’ nuclear apocalypse. The novel’s main antihero is a zealous Nazi, Joe Cinnadella. Juliana, the novel’s protagonist, who revolts against Nazism, calls Joe “a Gestapo assassin” and kills him to protect a dissident writer. This novel belongs to what Gavriel Rosenfeld terms “the era of moralism” in representations of the Nazi past, which he defines as a “continued aura of moralism surrounding a given historical era that helps to define its ‘abnormality.’”7 According to Rosenfeld, “The waning of a moralistic perspective towards the past, by extension, is a crucial component of the larger process of normalization.”8The TV series radically challenges this “moralistic perspective” by altering the disposition of characters. Wegener (Carsten Norgaard) remains an antifascist, but he becomes a secondary character. His cinematic incarnation differs from the novel in two important respects. First, he does not save the world, and second, he does not despise Adolf Hitler. On the contrary, in the final episode of the first season, when Wegener gets the chance to assassinate Hitler (Wolf Muser), the arch-Nazi is portrayed as a reasonable person and charismatic personality who persuades Wegener to commit suicide instead of going ahead with the assassination.Breaking free from the novel, the TV series introduces three new characters: SS Obergruppenführer John Smith (Rufus Sewell); his son, Thomas Smith (Quinn Lord); and Joe Blake (Luke Kleintank), all devoted Nazis, who take center stage. The reaction of the reviewers and viewers to these new characters offers interesting insights into the show’s reception and its audience’s expectations of images of the Nazis. Most reviewers agree that the Nazis are represented as “sympathetic” and more often than not consider that the series’ prime achievement. Critics admit that John Smith is initially represented as “the ruthless SS Obergruppenführer” and “a vicious killer with hideous beliefs and menacing bone structure.”9 However, he is later portrayed as a family man “humanized” by the show. His “compelling villain turn” is complicated by the hereditary disease of his son, Thomas, which makes this devoted father disobey the Nazi eugenics laws and kill the family doctor to protect his son’s secret. In turn, Thomas, fully dedicated to Nazi ideology (including its institutionalized racism and laws against people with disabilities), is shown as a sensitive and touching young man. John Smith also has a wife and two little girls, a perfect little Nazi family. The mass-murderer Obergruppenführer is humanized by “a seemingly idyllic suburban family life, in which everyone waves ‘Sieg Heil’ while they’re taking out the trash.”10 The show immerses the audience in the comfortable everyday of this Nazi family, as the “discrete charm of the bourgeoisie” is transformed into the discrete charm of the executioners.Another sympathetic Nazi and romantic hero—Joe Blake—is also shown as a compassionate young man. Initially, he has doubts about Nazi ideology, and he occasionally disobeys his superior, Obergruppenführer Smith. However, later he embraces the power and privileges of the Nazi state. The third season brings this character slightly closer to Dick’s concept of Joe Cinnadella by placing him in conflict with Juliana (Alexa Davalos), who cuts his throat.The perspectives of the perpetrators, and especially those of the Smiths and Joe, are integral to the series’ plot. For example, the episode titled “The End of the World” is not the one in which Frink’s sister is shown gassed together with her two small children but the one in which a Nazi family finds out about their son’s hereditary disease. In contrast, the episode in which Frank’s sister and her children are murdered is titled “Sunrise.”While some critics praise these portrayals of Nazi perpetrators and supporters as the series’ major accomplishment—“But slowly, The Man in the High Castle humanizes even some Nazis”11—for other reviewers there was still not enough empathy and “complexity” in the show’s engagement with Nazi characters. But this is an unfair reproach to the series. Juliana, a member of the resistance, sympathizes with Thomas, the young Nazi. The second season closes with the prophecy that this empathy is the only hope for saving the world. As for the nuclear apocalypse, the world is rescued by Obergruppenführer Smith, Hitler’s loyal man, who, despite his family drama, stands—quite heroically and elegantly—against the conspirators and exposes them to his Führer. According to one critic, “In the first season, Smith was the show’s most instantly compelling character—it was easy to see how he would have been a highly decorated American war hero in our reality but had been only too happy to collaborate with Nazis in the show’s reality.”12 Some of the series’ fans are even more explicit in their reaction to Sewell’s character, commenting on his looks in a Nazi uniform: “Morals: No, no, no! Libido: Yes, yes, yes!”13 This reaction calls to mind Susan Sontag’s analysis of the appeal of the Nazi aesthetic: “The definitely sexual lure of fascism . . . seems impervious to deflation by irony or overfamiliarity.”14The Resistance fighters are often shown as cynical, manipulative, and cruel, no different in their inhumane methods from the Nazis themselves. They are brutal killers and often driven by revenge: Gary Connell, the leader of the West Coast Resistance, and other Resistance members try to kill Juliana to avenge their friend’s death. The novel “has little of the pulp melodrama . . . ; there are no torture scenes, no supervillains, and not even a single scene set in the repressive Nazi-controlled region of the former U.S.”15 Unlike the novel, the series has all that and more. Among the images that excited its audience were the swastika waving over New York and the demolished Statue of Liberty.16This analysis does not imply that the series producers were seduced by Nazi ideology. But to be competitive in the current world of entertainment, their show capitalizes on the attractiveness of a certain type of protagonist and on the earlier representations of perpetrators and monsters in popular culture. Indeed, the Smiths and Joe Blake do not stand alone in the entertainment market: they are the tardy offspring of a previous generation of Nazi characters that emerged at the turn of the second millennium. This lineage of protagonists is exemplified by Jonathan Littell’s novel Les bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones), which launched “the era of the perpetrators.”17In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a whole range of historical movies and novels “complicated” and “humanized” high Nazi officials—representing Heinrich Himmler as a family man and Hitler as a failed artist or an abused child.18 The early 2000s saw an avalanche of films featuring Hitler at various stages of his life. Hitler: The Rise of Evil (dir. Christian Duguay, 2003) focuses on his early days, while the much-acclaimed movie Max (dir. Menno Meyjes, 2002) depicts a young artist who missed his calling as a painter and became a fascist dictator. Other movies, such as Moloch (Moлox, dir. Alexander Sokurov, 1999), Downfall (Der Untergang, dir. Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2004), and My Führer: The Really Truest Truth about Adolf Hitler (Mein Führer—Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler, dir. Dany Levi, 2007), depicting Hitler’s personal life, his last days, and his death, may implicitly predispose viewers to empathize with his “all-too-human” condition. By presenting Hitler as a human being, these films differ from their predecessors, which instead maintained a moral distance from him.19 Rosenfeld argues that “most Hitler films prior to the turn of the millennium displayed a preference for moralism,” whereas “recent films, by contrast, have adopted a less judgmental stance and depicted Hitler as a human being who can be understood in conventional historical terms. In the process, these motion pictures have both reflected and contributed to the increasing normalization of the Nazi past.”20 Rosenfeld traces the emergence of this normalization back to the early 1970s–1980s, when “a wide range of cultural works . . . shifted their narrative focus away from the Nazi regime’s barbarous crimes towards an aesthetic interest in its bombastic style and a prurient interest in its lurid projections of sex and violence.”21 My approach moves the optics of this discussion to the analysis of a broader cultural dynamic, by including the normalization of the Nazis into a larger trend of representations of violence in popular culture and the changing attitudes to other monsters—vampires, cannibals, and serial killers._________A significant step toward making a devoted Nazi perpetrator into a novel’s main hero was taken by Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, or The Nature of the Offence (1991). The story is told in reverse chronology from the death of a former Auschwitz doctor, Tod T. Friendly. The narrator is his apparently “innocent” soul, which is unaware of the crimes committed by Tod in his lifetime. The novel is construed by Amis as an attempt to “write the unwritable.” Arguing against the notion that writing on the Holocaust is impossible, Amis views his novel as an attempt to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive.22 Even if Tod is not depicted as a sympathetic man (unlike, say, Thomas Smith), the novel created controversy precisely because of Amis’s decision to have a Nazi perpetrator as his protagonist: one critic called the novel “morally upright as even he [Amis] could wish,”23 while others accused Amis of antisemitism. Early in the story, even before we understand that he is a former Nazi perpetrator, we learn that Tod has “solitary . . . sins,” which are hard not to find repugnant. For example, he “takes toys from children, on the street . . . with what I believe is called a shit-eating grin. The child’s face turns blank, or closes. Both toy and smile are gone: he takes both toy and smile. Then he heads for the store, to cash it in. For a couple of bucks. Can you believe this guy?”24 Undoubtedly, Amis wanted his novel to offer his readers a moral lesson: “The reader has to do all the morality because these terrible events are described as benevolent, but also in such a way that, I hope, there is a sort of disgust and an unreality and self-delusion in the way it is shown. . . . So it’s there, but the narrator can’t spot it, the reader has to do all that.”25 The descriptions of concentration camp atrocities in this novel are not uncalled-for—they are included to make Amis’s readership aware of the Nazis’ crimes.A similar argument in favor of descriptions of violence in young adult literature (YAL) was advanced by Roald Dahl, one of the founding fathers of the genre. In the late 1970s, more than a decade prior to Amis’s novel, Dahl contested the prevailing ideas of pedagogical theory, namely, that sadistic impulses should be tamed in children by education and culture. He believed that violence should be depicted in the interest of moral retribution and should produce moral revolt in the reader: “Children . . . like a touch of the macabre as long as it’s funny, too. . . . And my nastiness is never gratuitous. It’s retribution. Beastly people must be punished.”26 Already by the 1990s, however, any idea of moral retribution in descriptions of violence had become only peripherally applicable to YAL, which by then had been inundated, to the same extent as the rest of popular culture, by gratuitous violence.27Another significant step in promoting the sympathetic portrayal of Nazis was advanced by Bernhard Schlink in his novel The Reader (Der Vorleser, 1995), set in postwar Germany. The first-person narrator is the fifteen-year-old lover of a thirty-six-year-old woman with many redeeming qualities despite her past as an Auschwitz guard: Hanna is beautiful, loving, and caring, and is sexual Some of her do not doubts on her character, alone her as a her is for to three and is for it with than other because is to admit her and In is described as a of other and is given early for to the of one of her who death and described her in the concentration This Hanna with an of her and is further by the that all her to a that No how this story may does not the reader moral or the for it than an to we have here is a “sympathetic as a protagonist of a new of this novel is that the Nazi perpetrator fully what was if the idea that one should not torture and people could not be by a the the over the of the historical for the this novel to the and of moral in a comparison of the of the in the death camp and that of the perpetrator . . . no for the of the perpetrator turn, novel, to the stages an with the perpetrator that to “the of cultural and is for a with a perpetrator, made by such a of would to see the representation of fascism and the fascism of representations made in the early 2000s to a sympathetic Nazi perpetrator, the perpetrator turn in fiction its only in when Les In the of one this novel “the of the perpetrators’ Indeed, with the perpetrator on a whole new Max the novel’s is a committed Nazi, an SS who in in in his readers his in the at readers to about the of and small This exemplified the new trend by making an Nazi perpetrator a first-person narrator with the reader is to and Critics of the novel were called the of Littell’s for and the of sexual which to its and its character, even against who or in one of the most of the novel, argues that Littell’s is that of is a and that the novel a in which the reader is to play the role of the that of the and that of his As that Littell’s novel the ideology of the perpetrator by the of the and by main is that “a of because the reader is shown the Nazis we see members of the SS in their sexual and are to that they too are In of her one critic who that not a but merely “a man who his the novel to especially to the of in which the narrator for example, how he “a young but by into her it like a This scene a of the Nazi his making consider this of and as of and that is to the in these who become of Indeed, the scene and many other in reveal that this Nazi finds about his crimes for of such a novel should two of is . . . a of how attitudes toward the Holocaust have in the last in her for the New York In the novel’s reception in the was a from its with the who the of the and the the novel precisely because the of the Nazi perpetrator is depicted as free of any moral and it a major in the novel genre. According to “The of Les is by not The of the moral is what the reader is to find As Christian are because they that in order to understand the the one to the of the perpetrators, not that of by I not by the of Les This is a This to with the Holocaust perpetrator as he his was not only by the critics but also by the of the perpetrator turn in because the novel especially the of first-person “a into the as a protagonist of a new type because he is a man and an a and a a of and the not at all a As the was to that the perpetrator was an man. the is to that the perpetrator is a as he is in is by the novel as a cultural especially because that he with his protagonist: that this a but I have this protagonist His is not that from even if I on one and he is on In other even the the of this the Nazi perpetrator into “a for when by an if he with John Smith as a father in no terms that he for and with his new it back in to see an Gestapo as a is not an his his and cultural and his other monsters who into before and cannibals, even though, does not his victims’ or The of these monsters emerged in the 1990s and in its current Hannibal a cannibal by in the TV series Hannibal the comparison of Nazi” and and some the evolution of the “sympathetic” Nazi perpetrator and that of the “sympathetic” cannibal has the same and the same The in the trajectory of these images becomes in two The first is Hannibal a serial killer and a former in the novel The of the and in the movie of the same name (dir. Jonathan on one and the Hannibal Lecter of the TV on the In the second, the changes in these of by two decades, should be against those of the Nazi protagonists in Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle and the TV series of the same name the Lecter has a and an these descriptions still of him as an of the His Lecter is an In the novel and the he is depicted as a and his is as a In the novel does not him as or he and In the movie Lecter is portrayed not by a but by a the Lecter of the that is free from any The between intellectual and cultural and his for has made him a and Lecter is a man, with and beyond and a a of and His violence and are not to in the on the contrary, they are to to his charm and His of human with is of a for TV series an it was as and “the by the New York and the many other The first episode of first season was by million viewers in the of and critic than even of evolution of Hannibal as a character and the offer one example of how the of the cannibal and serial killer had evolved in popular culture over a from a to a The culture and the for the way for this with the interest in equating to of had been as a by the late 1990s people as had become an cultural shift from to and humanized protagonist by Hannibal Lecter the of images of Nazis between Dick’s Man in the High Castle and the TV in popular representations of homicidal monsters from to which I in my The of in was by the the most popular of all As studies have in the late and early 1990s the images of the cannibal and the serial killer with that of the may be back to in with the but this new of homicidal monsters as sympathetic protagonists did not popular culture on an the The of novels and films featuring from the novel to the was that not vampires, were the of the some were shown as and the they to human was by and audience a In no way were of as the and But since the 1990s, in a from the have the audience to with the and are and have and and In are and and it is not that they are called which is human characters in these as fans of these movies and to the most example of this trend is the (dir. in which all the of human culture are to vampires, who have the and most of This is not to that the traditional has completely from the entertainment market: it is still in movies and fiction