Springtime for Hitler

The response to "Spring time for Hitler" shows that totalitarianism has little suppport among WAISers.  Miles Seeley wriies: If memory serves, SMERSH became Department 13 of the KGB, known as the Department of Wet Affairs (ie killings and other particularly nasty things). Several KGB defectors I dealt with viewed Dept 13 with fear. In my opinion, any attempt to portray Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and their like as "just flawed human beings" is beneath contempt.  Tun Brown; Stalin? Of course. Poor Uncle Joe was just misunderstood. And Nero.  He was just trying to learn to play the fiddle.  And Mao.  Now there was a bon vivant! As for Torquemada, that Man of God.  How unfairly maligned he has been!! The only value I see in rehabilitating Hitler is to give Europe's new rabid anti-Semites and neo-Nazis social cover for their new-old extremism.  It is, regrettably, a path down which Europe has slid into chaos and violence far too many time in the past.  And it's beginning again.

Daryl DeBell said:     The great difficulty with international relations is that totalitarianism and the power that is implicit in it is intoxicating not only to the leaders but also to the followers. It creates a pathological, pernicious fantasy of purity and perfection, with idealization of those false virtues and virtual dehumanization or 'others'. John Heelan comments: Daryl DeBell is correct. Bertolt Brecht's play "The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui"  demonstrates his points well [for those not familiar with this important work, a synopsis of the play is below.  Despite the satire, as always with Brecht's plays, one leaves the theatre pondering the deeper implications behind the humour.  This one more so than others!

Synopsis: Written in 1941 during his years in exile in the United States, Bertolt Brecht's "Arturo Ui" is a political satire about the making of a fascist. It retells the story of Hitler and the Nazi era. But, if one closely examines it, it is not just about Hitler. Set in Chicago in the 1920s, Brecht modelled the plot and characters on Al Capone's mafia rule in order to demonstrate not only the dangers of National Socialism and Fascism, but also the relationship between fascism, crime and capitalism. "Arturo Ui" is also termed as the comic confluence of a gangster story and German history, and the figure of Ui reveals a facet of political life, topical in the contemporary world - namely the proximity of showmanship to demagoguery and modern mass politics- (http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/2000/12/10/stories/1310032g.htm)]

Christopher Jones defends his commentary on "Springtime for Hitler": I simply related the facts as they appeared on various TV spots, an article in The Guardian (definitely not Der türmer) and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung one of the three top newspapers in Germany -- their cultural affairs editor Frank Schirrmacher is not a neo-Nazi.  I have always defended a careful non biased examination of facts and when possible meeting those who were there to get a first hand opinion.  Only if we understand just what went wrong  in Germany can the AH phenomena be prevented happening again elsewhere. To blame it on the work of the devil is a cop out -- the best way to ensure that it could happen again (elsewhere, not in Germany.  Just maybe in the US?) Finally, to head off the (dare I say hypocrites) at the pass, the film "The Producers" which was Mel Brooks' first film recounted the story of two crooked theater producers, Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom, who attempt to put on the worst play ever written in order to pocket the oversubscribed budget.  They chose "Springtime for Hitler" as that worst play ever written.  Mel Brooks, Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder were all Jewish.  My use of the title was pure literary license.

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