Later in the year, the official copyright for Mein Kampf, the text in which tyrannical leader Adolf Hitler outlined his political ideology, expires, some 70 years after the demise of the Fascist dictator. Bavaria, the southern state in Germany, currently owns the rights to the text, and has previously refused to republish it. But in an effort to beat Neo-Nazis – who might attempt to publish copies of Mein Kampf for personal profit and which promote Nazism – to the punch, an officially-mandated version will be releases, containing critical annotations.
“Can you annotate the devil?” Levi Salomon, spokesman for the Berlin-based Jewish Forum for Democracy and Against Anti-Semitism, asked. “Look at this funny cat, it looks just like Hitler!” the Internet replied.
Do jokes like the 'Nyan Cat' becoming the 'Nyan Kampf' whitewash the truth of the Nazi regime?
The ubiquity of the Führer’s face online is hard to miss. There are countless images of animals who bear a passing resemblance to his stern countenance, while one of YouTube’s most enduring viral videos sees the ranting Bruno Ganz in Downfall, an explosion of vitriol recreating the German leader’s acceptance that the war had been lost, get new funny subtitles lamenting some topical issue. ‘Hitler reacts to Top Gear being cancelled’ suggests you click on ‘Hitler reacts to the Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer’, before inevitably leading you to ‘Hitler reacts to... Hitler reacts videos...’, proving that all arguments online do eventually lead back to Adolf.
Bruno Ganz as Hitler in the German film Downfall, with new subtitles added by a YouTube user
For Gavriel Rosenfeld, a history and Jewish studies professor, the flippant manner in which millennials brush off the Nazi leader as just a joke is just a follow on from the prevailing trend in academic historical writing to redefine the Second World War from the jingoism applied by its victors. In his new book Hi, Hitler! How the Nazi Past is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture, Rosenfeld explores how modern attitudes towards the Third Reich and its brutal campaign of death and extermination are in flux – with memes and jokes competing just as much for online attention as the real history.
As Rosenfeld recently told Sean Moncrieff, western culture is revising just how good the so-called ‘Good War’ really was:This contemporary approach to casting a new critical eye over the Allies’ actions in the ‘Good War’ essentially, according to Rosenfeld, works to normalise perceptions of Germans under Nazism and play at our sympathies. If the Allies’ firebombing of Dresden is an atrocity, as many scholars would suggest, then how bad really was the Blitz?
As Rosenfeld told Sean, it takes effort to combat this normalisation of Nazism without coming under fire from critics:But how then will the Internet’s love of poking fun at Hitler affect our understanding of the horrors of Fascism and the inhumanity of the Holocaust? Or is it simply that as more time passes between then and now, is becoming desensitised not simply a matter of fact?You can listen back to the full interview between Sean Moncrieff and Prof Gavriel Rosenfeld below.
