Marcin Wilkowski vom sehr guten und schönen (soweit ich das beurteilen kann) polnischen Blog “Historia i Media” hatte ein paar Fragen zum Hitlerblog, zu Hitler und zur Hitlerrezeption in Deutschland und generell.
Im Folgenden ein Ausschnitt auf dem Interview – der vollständige Beitrag findet sich hier.
Can we say that Hitler has become a popculture icon of your country? Do you see this as a process of overworking the national postwar trauma and fighting with the myth (as you write in your blog), or is it a angerous direction of changes in the social memory: we prefer to see Hitler as a funny (almost fictional) comic character than to remember that he is a part of our true national histories?
We can say that Hitler has become a cartoon of himself in nearly every country of the world. But, yes, in a way. If someone wants to make a mean point about Germany today, you can always pull the Nazi card. Remember the cover of Wprost with Erika Steinbach on the German chancellor’s back some years ago? If it this wasn’t Hitler himself, it displays a a-historic useage of the symbols of the Third Reich. Interestingly enough, this usage is much more advance in the US and in England then it is in Germany for example. Or Austria. And again, for good reasons. Neither have the English and the Americans to be ashamed of this 12 years of history and hence the interest, as you write, to try to forget about the cruelties which indeed might be part of the way that German deal with Hitler. On the other hand Germans do take that part of history very serious. Up to today Germany is the only country in the world that displays a memorial of it own crimes in the center of its capitol. And if you would follow the German debate, you would see that Germans are indeed rather reluctant to see the nevertheless existing humorous sides to the subject. As I said before, nearly non of the pop cultural references make fun of the crimes or the victims. Nearly non of them ignore the crimes or the victims quite the opposite actually. Mostly, Nazis are displayed as pure evil, as criminals and rather unsympathetic people. I question that these stereotypes are very helpful in remembering history and in preventing future wars and genocides, but they are much easier to handle than the historic truths. Just look around in the neighbouring countries of Germany and you will find collaborateurs or fascist there, that helped the Nazis in a very similar way than many Germans did. Nevertheless, France, Italy or Hungary have never debated their role in the Third Reich in the same way as it happened in Germany. The point here is: Not only in cartoons and pop culture nations tend to prefer simple, easy stereotypes to the difficult truth. I guess there are good reasons to do so, especially in order to keep national coherence. But I am not an expert on national psychology, so this is pretty much guessing.
