Evil’s Allure Gives Life to Nazi Chic

Adolf Hitler’s birthday is today. And while not many people this side of Argentina will be celebrating the Fuhrer’s 112th natal day, Hitler and the Nazis are still getting plenty of attention. The hottest show on Broadway is “The Producers,” the musical version of Mel Brooks’ 1968 movie featuring the song “Springtime for Hitler.”

Recently, Simon & Schuster issued a weighty trade paperback edition of “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” by William L. Shirer; the book was first released in 1960 and has been continuously in print ever since. “Hitler has always done well,” says Trina Sisselman of the publisher’s publicity department. Indeed, a quick search of Amazon.com finds 1,867 titles including the word “Hitler” and another 1,612 with “Nazi.” And, oh yes, 5,284 books concerning the Holocaust.

And that leads to a key question: Does interest in Hitler detract from awareness of Hitler’s war crimes, including the murder of 6 million Jews? Or, more perversely, does the proper remembrance of the Holocaust sometimes bleed over into improper commemoration of Hitler?

The forthcoming movie “Tomb Raider,” opening June 15, is a case in point. It flirts with what might be called Nazi Chic. The March 26 issue of Time magazine features, on Page 65, a photo of actress Angelina Jolie playing superheroine Lara Croft; she is decked out in “terminatrix black,” and on her gold belt buckle is the skull and crossbones symbol of the Nazi Schutzstaffel, or SS. That’s right, not just an ordinary iodine-bottle Jolly Roger, but the Totenkopf--death’s head--of the German killer elite. The studio seems to have since realized it has a potential PR problem; it has airbrushed out the crossbones in more recent promotional photos, although the distinctive skull still remains. Calls to Paramount Studios inquiring further about this matter were, perhaps not surprisingly, unreturned.

John C. Zimmerman is the author of “Holocaust Denial,” a book detailing public unwillingness to accept the truth about the 6 million martyrs. In an interview, Zimmerman notes that some people, even now, are “sucked into the pageantry” of Nazism. He speculates that the “Tomb Raider” makers took an initial liking to the tough-punk style of the Totenkopf emblem without fully realizing what it was. And that’s part of the problem: “A lot of people now are ignorant of history,” he explains. That makes it all the more important, Zimmerman continues, for popular culture producers to “be careful about handling symbols, about anything that may tend to give Nazism legitimacy.”

Such concern brings to mind another film-in-progress. Jodie Foster is working on a biopic of Leni Riefenstahl, director of such Nazi classics as “Triumph of the Will.” In an interview with the London Daily Telegraph last year, Foster explained her attraction to Riefenstahl, still alive today at 98: “I’ve been interested in Leni for many many years. She is an extraordinary woman--sharp as a tack and as beautiful as she ever was, with a tremendous body.” Foster’s word choices reveal much about the true nature of Nazi Chic.

People today don’t believe in national socialism or in exterminating Jews. But the legacy of Nazism, in all its flamboyant evil, is an outrageous aesthetic that plays well in an outrageous culture. That is, in a society that’s seen it all, perhaps it’s only Nazism that still has the power to shock and stun. And such impact-imagery is worth a lot to those who are trying to sell books or movie tickets or fashion.

The famed writer Susan Sontag made this point in her 1975 essay “Fascinating Fascism.” Speaking of the sexual allure of fascism, she noted that the uniforms of the Nazi SS, for instance, were “stylish” and “well cut,” in contrast to the “rather boring and not very well cut” American military uniforms of the same era. Fascism, in other words, oozed a twisted glamour, while democracy offered only musty dullness.

The popular culture’s sex-obsession, she argued, made Nazism appealing. “When sex becomes most purely sexual, that is, severed from personhood, from relationships, from love”--that’s when fascism, in all its fantasies of dominance and submission, becomes most fascinating. And so, 56 years after Hitler’s death, Americans still confront the challenge of not forgetting, but also not fetishizing, the horrors of the Nazi past.