The Epitome of Evil: Hitler in American Fiction, 1939-2002

The Epitome of Evil

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The Epitome of Evil Hitler in American Fiction, 1939–2002

Michael Butter

THE EPITOME OF EVIL

Copyright © Michael Butter, 2009. All rights reserved. Cover image created by Jeremy Kaposy, www.jerkaposy.com “ ” copyright © by Charles Bukowski. Reprinted by permission of City Lights Books First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States - a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-61341-6 ISBN-10: 0-230-61341-1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Butter, Michael. The epitome of evil : Hitler in American fiction, 1939–2002 / Michael Butter. p. cm. “This book is a slightly revised version of my doctoral dissertation completed in March 2007 and submitted to the University of Bonn, Germany”—Acknowlegments. Includes bibliographical references (p. ). ISBN 0-230-61341-1 (alk. paper) 1. American literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Hitler, Adolf, 1889–1945—In literature. 3. Hitler, Adolf, 1889–1945—Influence. 4. American literature—21st century—History and criticism. I. Title. PS228.H58B88 2009 813’.5409351—dc22 2008040591 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Macmillan Publishing Solutions First edition: May 2009 10

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Printed in the United States of America.

To my parents

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Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction

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Chapter 1 The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Narrative, or The Emergence, Disappearance, and Return of Hitler Fiction, 1939–1968 Wartime Propaganda: Trying the Ridiculous Hitler Who Attacked America Postwar Challenges to the “Progressive Narrative”: The Americanization of the Holocaust From Ideology to Ontology: The New Rhetoric of Evil

19 20 28 38

Chapter 2 “Keeping the Monster Alive”: The Cultural Work of Hitler Fiction Between Affirmation and Revision: The Alternate History Novel Self-Critique, Projection, Othering: A Typology of Self-Other Relations in Hitler Fiction Realism—Neorealism—Postmodernism

47 49 57 61

Chapter 3 Hitler, Nixon, and Vietnam: Self-Critique in Early 1970s Fiction Hitler in the White House: Charles Bukowski’s “ ” (1972) Hitler as an American Girl: Gary Goss’s Hitler’s Daughter (1973) Hitler as Author of the Vietnam War: Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream (1972)

67 69 75 83

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Chapter 4 Children, Clones, Conspiracies: Projection in Late 1970s and Early 1980s Novels The Hitler Trope at the Crossroads: Ira Levin’s The Boys from Brazil (1976) Externalizing Good and Evil: Gus Weill’s The Führer Seed (1979) Between Projection and Othering: Timothy Benford’s Hitler’s Daughter . . . Wants to Occupy the White House (1983)

91 93 101 109

Chapter 5 Hitler, Stalin, and bin Laden: External and Internal Othering since the Mid-1980s Remapping Russia: Joseph Heywood’s The Berkut (1987) Hitler in Guantanamo: David Charnay’s Operation Lucifer: The Chase, Capture, and Trial of Adolf Hitler (2002) The Left-Wing Reappropriation of the Hitler Trope: Robert Pielke’s Hitler the Cat Goes West (1995)

119 122 131 141

Chapter 6 Redeeming Hitler? Steve Erickson’s Tours of the Black Clock (1989) “No Measure of Time that God Understands”: Tours of the Black Clock’s Post-Einsteinian Worldview “The Humanity of His Evil”: Demystifying Hitler Redeeming Hitler? Redeeming Banning!

147 149 153 160

Conclusion

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Appendix

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American Hitler Fiction, 1939–2002

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Notes

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Works Cited and Consulted

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Index

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Acknowledgments

This book is a slightly revised version of my doctoral dissertation completed in March 2007 and submitted to the University of Bonn, Germany. I first and foremost wish to thank my adviser, Sabine Sielke (Bonn), for inviting me to work with her in Bonn, and for the time she invested in meticulously reading and commenting on my various drafts. I would also like to thank Monika Fludernik (Freiburg) for serving as second adviser and for pushing me into the right direction in my thinking about alternate histories. I am indebted to Barbara SchmidtHaberkamp and Jürgen Fohrmann (Bonn) for their readiness to serve as members of my defense committee. My work on alternate histories would surely have gone offtrack again if Hilary Dannenberg (Bayreuth) had not been kind enough to make available to me the manuscript of her then unpublished book on counterfactuals. I also wish to thank Manfred Pütz (Freiburg) for his helpful comments on the first one-page outline I ever wrote of this project. Achim Aurnhammer (Freiburg) provided me with a roof above my head during the summers of 2004 and 2005, and wrote countless letters of recommendation for me. He made me familiar with a model of academic integrity that I have been striving for ever since. Special thanks go to Priscilla L. Walton (Ottawa), who provided additional tenured support in times of crisis. A grant from the State Foundation of Baden-Württemberg enabled me to conduct the initial research for this project at Yale University, New Haven, during the academic year 2003–4. Back in Germany, the German National Academic Foundation provided me with a grant that allowed me to focus exclusively on my academic work for more than two years. In addition, the foundation’s graduate student meetings were a welcome platform to present and discuss my work in progress and to meet interesting people. I also wish to thank the Heidelberg Center for American Studies and its founding director, Detlef Junker, for inviting me to the 2005 Spring Academy where I presented my work in progress and received helpful feedback. Special thanks are due to Stephan Schubert and the

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other students who participated in my seminar on “Hitler in American Fiction,” which I taught at Bonn during the winter semester of 2004–5. At a time when I didn’t know where I was going, their comments, questions, and sharp observations helped me to move on. My former colleague Tim Kaposy was kind enough to put me in touch with his brother Jeremy, who designed the wonderful cover image. Regine Egeler, my research assistant at Freiburg, was a tremendous help during the revision process. I also wish to thank the staff of Macmillan Publishing Solutions, who made many helpful suggestions, and my editors at Palgrave, Farideh Koohi-Kamali, Brigitte Shull, and Kristy Lilas, who were a pleasure to work with. Finally, it is the greatest pleasure to thank the many friends who contributed on so many different levels and in such diverse ways to this project. My former colleagues at the North American Studies Program in Bonn, most notably Edmunda Ferreira, Claus Daufenbach, Tilly Schmauss, and Patrick Stärke, supported me wherever they could and provided encouragement whenever it was most needed. Carol Morgan, Jess Morgan, and Steve Jefferys did their best to de-Germanize my English. All remaining errors, of course, are mine. Melinda Nyerges, Elisabeth Schäfer-Wünsche, Carsten Schinko, Ingrid Thaler, and the other members of our graduate reading group have, probably more than they know, shaped my project. So has Catrin Weimbs, who made many helpful comments on my second chapter. My brother Stefan shared his profound knowledge of American film with me during long walks with the family dog, and Christine Weiss provided me with cinnamon rolls, wine, and encouragement at Yale and in Berlin whenever I needed them. Hannes Bergthaller and Peter Schniering invested lots of time to read my whole manuscript and made many enlightening comments. The same goes for Katrin Amian. Always a step ahead of me with her own project, she was a perfect role model and a great friend whenever I needed one. Birte Christ also read the whole study, just as she has read pretty much everything I have written over the last ten years. I can’t express what our friendship and collaboration mean to me. I am also indebted to Helga and Helmut Brinkmann, who did so much for me during my time in Bonn—and saw so little of me. Last but not least I wish to thank my parents, who always emotionally as well as financially supported my work, and Irina Schmidt, who entered my life as the dissertation began to transform into a book and made the time of revision the most enjoyable I have spent on this project.

Introduction Robert Zemeckis’s movie Contact (1997) tells the story of a young and ambitious scientist, played by Jodie Foster, who is obsessed with proving that alien life forms exist. Located in the desert of New Mexico, her team of researchers scans outer space with huge radio telescopes, searching for signals of alien intelligence. And indeed, one day the group detects a transmission whose systematic pattern suggests that it is an intentional piece of communication from another solar system. The reception of this transmission initiates a process familiar to the audience from countless other movies: The military arrives, the media surround the camp, and generals and journalists alike wait impatiently for the scientists to decode the message. They only manage to do so, however, once they realize that the signal they are dealing with is a simple TV transmission, which they put on a screen immediately. This, too, is a moment the spectator knows from many other science-fiction movies. It is the moment when the alien is given face and form that either confirm or subvert the otherness it traditionally embodies. In Contact, however, what appears on the screen is not what the scientists, braced for almost anything, expect. What appears on the screen are not images of an alien life form, but images of Adolf Hitler opening the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. Hitler’s appearance comes as a surprise not only to the movie’s characters but also to the audience in the movie theater. At the same time, though, Hitler’s appearance in a context in which one would not expect him—a movie about aliens set in the 1990s—is rather typical of how the figure has fared in American culture over the past three decades. Representations of and references to Hitler are not restricted to novels or films about World War II or the Holocaust, nor to historical documentaries or speeches that commemorate America’s role in the fight against Nazi Germany. Since the early 1970s, the number of such images has steadily increased, and the figure has permeated areas of U.S. culture that

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have obviously nothing to do with the history of the Third Reich. Hitler is frequently evoked in speeches about Iraq, Iran, or North Korea and is employed in attempts to disqualify domestic political opponents. Several websites collect images of cats that allegedly resemble Hitler, and in the recent movie Sideways (2004), a conversation about a demanding and “evil” mother-in-law is held against the backdrop of silent images of Adolf Hitler on the History Channel. Moreover, U.S. culture has also produced a considerable number of movies and novels—so-called alternate histories—that imagine that Hitler had children or escaped from the bunker, or that Nazi Germany won the war. These narratives, some of which I will address in detail later, place Hitler (or his offspring) in the White House and on Mars or cast him as a science-fiction writer or as a vampire eager to marry Evita Péron. This study analyzes the attraction that the figure of Hitler holds over the American imagination and asks why representations of Hitler have proliferated to such an amazing degree. For U.S. culture, I argue, Hitler has become a powerful trope that is employed to negotiate contemporaneous domestic concerns whose actual connection to the Hitler of history is feeble, to say the least. I conceive of tropes in many ways as Judith Butler does in the first footnote of The Psychic Life of Power, where she writes that “a trope can produce a connection between terms that is not considered either customary or logical” (201). As metaphor, metonymy, or synecdoche, the figure of Hitler constantly generates such connections between concepts, figures, and events for American culture. Unlike Butler, however, who argues that “a trope cannot operate, that is, generate new meanings and connections, if its departure from custom and logic is not recognized as such a departure” (202), I hold that tropes just as often reiterate and stabilize established “meanings and connections.” They naturalize the links they forge by rendering them customary or apparently logical. Focusing on its deployment in fictional texts, I investigate the cultural work that the “Hitler trope” performs in various contexts and at different historical moments. The opening scene of Contact already hints at an array of such cultural functions. The film begins with a two-minute special-effect shot that creates the illusion of the camera moving away from North America and Earth, passing Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, leaving our solar system, and finally arriving at the point in space from where the alien message originated. Traveling deeper and deeper into space, the camera overtakes TV and radio messages from the 1970s to the 1930s. Since the older transmissions have traveled further, the movement into space is also one back in time, a dimension explored by the soundtrack. Thus, the film’s opening takes the spectator back to the Watergate affair, the assassinations of

Introduction

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Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and JFK, to the McCarthy era, and finally to World War II, to Roosevelt’s speech to Congress after Pearl Harbor and his earlier assertion that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Significantly, the sound bites from 1941 and before are heard against the background of an otherwise incomprehensible speech by Adolf Hitler, creating the illusion that the “infamy” Roosevelt refers to was perpetrated by the Nazis and orchestrated by Hitler. By constructing a timeline that is restricted to events of U.S.-American and Third Reich history, the movie puts to the fore the degree to which Hitler and the Nazis have become a means for American culture to understand, comment on, evaluate, distort, deny, affirm, revise, or criticize its own history. In other words, what the scene dramatizes by juxtaposing bits and pieces of American history and Nazism is that U.S. self-conceptions often hinge on representations of Hitler and the Third Reich, that Nazi Germany has become the United States’ “significant other” (Monaco 403). Unlike most cultural texts that deploy the Hitler trope, Contact does not promote a particular perspective on American history. What is at stake throughout the movie instead are the precarious and unstable relationship between self and other and the difficulty to accept and understand otherness. The film’s favorite trope for self-reflexively negotiating these issues is the alien, but in the central scene in which the aliens first establish contact with humans, the figure of Hitler is employed. By having its aliens send images of Hitler back to earth, the movie displaces one possible representation of the other, the alien, with another one, Adolf Hitler. While the dangerousness of the alien would need to be established both through its appearance and through the narrative, a Western audience requires nothing of the kind when it comes to Hitler. A few grained images of the familiar figure suffice to evoke the history of Nazism, the carnage of World War II, and the horrors of the Holocaust, that is, events to which Hitler is metonymically connected. Consequently, in the movie, the American military initially reads the alien message as a threat and worries that World War II and the Holocaust might soon be superseded by an interstellar war and the extermination of all human beings. However, as Jodie Foster and the other scientists understand just as quickly, the image of Hitler carries no meaning whatsoever for the aliens, who indeed turn out to be benign. The TV transmissions from the 1936 Olympics were simply the first ones powerful enough to travel into space and therefore the first images from Earth that the aliens received. Contact, then, does not employ the “Adolf transmission,” as journalists quickly come to call it, to provide information about the aliens. Rather, the transmission’s reception dramatizes the powerful position Hitler has come to occupy in the American cultural imaginary.1 The chain of events triggered

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by Hitler’s appearance on the screen explores the associations the figure carries for U.S. characters and audiences. At the same time, the “Adolf transmission” pushes Contact’s negotiation of the interrelatedness of self and other a step further. The scene not only shows that tropes for the other are often interchangeable, it also suggests that notions of the self are unstable and flexible and depend on an “other” to become momentarily fixed. Thus, the awareness of alien life suddenly unites humans as a species, as a single “we,” enabling the White House chief of staff to say about Hitler that “20 million people died defeating that son of a bitch and he’s our first ambassador to outer space” (emphasis added). Extraterrestrial otherness thus supersedes interhuman otherness, although it is mainly Americans who, just as in most sciencefiction films, synecdochally represent humanity. Moreover, that the aliens use footage of Hitler to contact earth foregrounds that representations of the other always originate in the self. What comes back to Earth is what has left Earth before. The aliens, more advanced not only in terms of technology but also in their understanding of alterity, seem to have taken this into account. Knowing that the people on earth can engage otherness only in combination with or under the garb of the familiar, they have added a further dimension to the “Adolf transmission.” What the scientists, faced with the technology of a far superior civilization, originally regard as “noise” later turns out to be a digital message that contains detailed plans for the construction of the spaceship in which Jodie Foster will eventually travel to meet the aliens. In a sense, then, the aliens have employed the “Adolf transmission” as a rhetorical device. Their message is not at all about Hitler: They have used the figure of Hitler to attract attention and to get the “real” message across. This, I argue in this study, corresponds to how U.S. culture employs representations of Adolf Hitler. In two different yet interrelated ways, the figure of Hitler has become a rhetorical device, a figure of speech, a trope for American culture: Drawing on the associations Hitler evokes, cultural texts and political discourse often employ the figure to address U.S. issues directly—just as the aliens functionalize the broadcast of Hitler’s speech to transport their message. A smaller group of cultural texts employs the figure of Hitler to displace and “hide” U.S. domestic concerns—just as, from the scientists’ perspective, the plans for the spaceship are hidden inside the “Adolf transmission.” These texts purport to be unconcerned with the U.S. issues at stake, negotiating them under the garb of the other. In both cases it is beside the point to ask whether the representations of Hitler are historically accurate. The figure of Hitler has become part of

Introduction

5

the American cultural imaginary. Despite inerasable metonymic links to Nazism, World War II, and the Holocaust, the Hitler of American culture is not so much a historical persona as a free-floating signifier ready to be filled with shifting meaning, depending on the exigencies of the historical moment.2 Accordingly, I will not check U.S. representations of Hitler for historical accuracy or relate them to events in postwar Germany. Instead, I will relate them to the American contexts from which they evolved. U.S. representations of Adolf Hitler—this is the major premise of this study—tell us little or nothing about Hitler or Germany but a lot about American culture. The questions that guide my analysis throughout are therefore: How does U.S. culture employ the Hitler trope to negotiate domestic issues? In other words, how does it openly functionalize the figure? And what does American culture displace when it produces representations of Adolf Hitler that are seemingly unconnected to American concerns? In other words, what hides behind the figure of Hitler? * * * I have used a film to develop these questions, and since I contend that my observations are valid for U.S. culture at large, I will continue to refer occasionally to films as well as to political discourse, journalistic writing, and historiographic texts. My focus, however, is on representations of Adolf Hitler in American literature from 1939 to 2002.3 During that time, roughly a hundred texts that feature Hitler (or his children or clones or somebody else called Hitler) as a character were published. As more than seventy of these texts came out after 1968, I will concentrate on the last forty years here. Since, except for a very small number of plays and poems—most of them written during World War II—these are all novels or short stories, I use the term “Hitler Fiction” to refer to this body of texts. The designation “Hitler Fiction” has the advantage that it not only identifies the texts in question as narratives; it also resonates with and thus serves as a constant reminder of the fictionality of any representation of Hitler. There have been, as I discuss below, isolated attempts to analyze U.S. cultural representations of Hitler. This study, however, is the first to treat American literary texts that feature Hitler as a character in systematic fashion and the first that investigates the diachronic development of this genre. Due to my character-centered definition of Hitler Fiction, I will not address in detail the one text most readers will think of immediately: Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985). Initially, I intended to thoroughly analyze this novel, which got me started on the project, justifying this breach of

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my own principle with its complexity and canonical status. Finally, though, I decided to focus on and move to the center of attention those lesser-known texts whose preoccupation with Hitler is parodied by White Noise. I conceive of this study as a contribution to a project outlined by Jane Tompkins in Sensational Designs two decades ago, as part of the continued “attempt to move the study of American literature away from the small group of master texts that have dominated critical discussion” (xi) and toward lesser-known, supposedly less complex, and therefore often still neglected texts. Central to Tompkins’s argument for concentrating on these texts as well as to my project here is her notion of “cultural work” that she sees all literary texts perform. She regards fictional texts—and this, we might add, applies to all cultural artifacts—“not as works of art embodying enduring themes in complex form,” but as “attempts to redefine the social order.” As such, texts “offer powerful examples of the way a culture thinks about itself, articulating and proposing solutions of the problems that shape a particular historical moment” (xi). This implies that the relationship between a text and its various contexts is reciprocal. Literary texts are products of and simultaneously produce their contexts, since literature, as Ulfried Reichardt puts it, “is historically determined by institutions, modes of production, cultural values, but at the same time produces conceptions, forms of perception and also narratives which shape ideas about the world and herewith determine social reality in turn” (69). In other words, while literature draws on tropes from other discourses, it simultaneously reconfigures and creates tropes for these other discourses, and while it takes up, echoes, and repeats circulating cultural narratives, it also rewrites them, creates new ones, and provides the symbolic systems through which individuals or groups understand the world. Accordingly, I aim to (re)construct what ways of making sense of the world a text offered to its contemporaneous readers and how it provided answers to concerns that preoccupied the culture at the historical moment when it was first published. I will engage the historical and cultural context from which the text emerged, its generic peculiarities, narrative structure and rhetoric, and, most importantly, its deployment of the Hitler trope. One way to deploy the trope is discussed by Joseph Heywood in the author’s note to his novel The Berkut (1987), the story of Adolf Hitler’s capture, torture, and eventual execution at the hands of the Russians. “Keeping the monster [Adolf Hitler] alive,” Heywood writes, “so that we might have the accounting we were denied in 1945 has social value for all of us.” What Heywood calls “social value” corresponds to a large

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degree to the concept of “cultural work,” because he implies that representations of Hitler perform a function for culture and society. Commenting on a narrative that casts both the majority of Germans and Russians as “honorary” Americans and thus ultimately as good at heart, Heywood suggests that staging Hitler’s death “even in fiction” is valuable for an American audience (568). It confirms that their values will prevail over the values embodied by Hitler, whom the text others as “the monster” or as a cowardly pervert. What Heywood lays out here is a conservative agenda that depends on the strict binary between what Hitler stands for and what Americans are said to embody. Heywood implies that fictional texts should perpetually reproduce this binary in order to stabilize it and to affirm positive notions of American identity. And this is indeed the kind of cultural work that the majority of Hitler Fiction has performed over the last two decades. Other texts, though, challenge this binary and equate U.S. history with that of Nazi Germany, suggesting that there are striking parallels between the two. Such texts also challenge a notion of the United States that is implicit in Heywood’s usage of the pronoun “us.” Heywood means the collective “we” he constructs to encompass all Americans. In his text, as well as in almost all other texts of the same kind, however, Americans are represented exclusively by one group: by white middle-class AngloSaxon Protestant or Jewish males (and their female spouses who embrace the patriarchal order). Just as the Americans represent humanity in Contact, white, middle-class males synecdochally represent Americans in Hitler Fiction. It is this displacement of the complexities of American social reality by the fiction of homogeneity and national unity that some of the texts I address here challenge by introducing notions of ethnicity and class. It is hardly surprising, however, that Hitler Fiction largely works to affirm the identities of white, middle-class males of Jewish or Christian faith. The producers and consumers of the genre almost exclusively come from this group. Only four of the approximately hundred texts that feature Hitler as a character were written by women, and none, as far as I could determine, was written by a Native American, African American, Chicano, or Asian American. My assumption that the texts are not only written but also predominantly read by middle-class males rests on shakier grounds and cannot be confirmed by empirical evidence. Published often as paperbacks only, most of these novels are advertised, sold, and consumed as entertainment, although they perform, of course, more important functions. They “operate as instruments of cultural selfdefinition” for their readers, whom the narratives usually invite to identify with the protagonist through strategies such as point of view and characterization (Tompkins xvi). Real-world readers are generally

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assumed to identify more easily with characters of the same or similar gender, ethnicity, and class. Since most Hitler Fiction either features a white, male, middle-class Christian protagonist, who is supported in his fight against Hitler and the Nazis by a Jewish friend, or, especially during the late 1970s, casts an Israeli as the hero, I believe it is safe to assume that Hitler Fiction is primarily read by white middle-class males. As a consequence, whenever I refer to “American culture,” the “American cultural imaginary,” or “American identity” in the following chapters, it means that I have in mind a particular imaginary, a particular culture, and a particular identity, namely, that of white middle-class males whom the texts frequently cast as the “real” Americans and as “more American” than others. * * * Although some texts that feature Hitler as a character, most notably Heywood’s The Berkut and Ira Levin’s The Boys from Brazil (1976), were commercially very successful, and although others—Gary Goss’s Hitler’s Daughter (1973) or Steve Erickson’s Tours of the Black Clock (1989)—are highly original works of stunning complexity, neither individual texts nor the genre as such has so far received much critical attention. In fact, criticism of Hitler Fiction has up to now been a family affair, as the only two studies that address the genre were written by father and son: In 1985 Alvin H. Rosenfeld, a literary critic and Holocaust scholar, published Imagining Hitler, and exactly twenty years later his son, Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, a historian, brought out The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism. Both authors do not focus on representations of Hitler in U.S. culture exclusively, but are more generally concerned with images of Nazism throughout the Western world. My own work would have been impossible without these precursors. They provided vital bibliographical information and perpetual food for thought—although, or maybe because, I disagree with most of their conclusions. Both Rosenfelds are driven by a palpable concern about what they regard as the negative effects that fictional representations of Hitler and Nazism might have. However, there are crucial differences between the two approaches, differences that point to how criticism has developed over the last two decades. For Alvin H. Rosenfeld, who still believes in historiography’s power to access the referent and to produce (historically) accurate representations, “[t]he challenge in writing about popular imaginings of Hitler [is] to expose the disease without becoming infected by it” (xix). Consequently, he criticizes texts that place Hitler in new contexts for being immoral, for distorting

Introduction

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historical reality, and for transforming traumatic events into “forms of entertainment.” And although he observes that Hitler and Nazism have become “so plastic to the contemporary imagination as to be almost whatever one would like [them] to be” (xiv), he never analyzes how texts deploy these powerful tropes to negotiate issues other than the history of the Third Reich. He never inquires what kind of cultural work the texts perform, because he regards entertainment as the sole function of popular fiction. Gavriel Rosenfeld’s recent study, by contrast, is characterized by a different attitude toward both the question of historical accuracy and popular fiction. His focus is no longer on history but on memory, and he ascribes to popular culture and particularly to the genre of alternate history, on which he focuses, the “unique ability to provide insights into the dynamics of remembrance” (4). Alternate histories are narratives in which one or more past events are changed and the subsequent consequences on history imagined. Thus, texts about Hitler and Nazism have Hitler survive or imagine a different outcome of World War II altogether. Rosenfeld acknowledges that alternate histories perform important kinds of cultural work when he states that these novels “validate or criticize the present” (13). Yet, his interpretations focus on what kind of memory of Nazism and Hitler certain texts promote. He hardly ever addresses the question of why and how certain texts at various historical moments use the Hitler trope to either criticize or confirm certain notions of U.S. identity and celebratory accounts of American history. Instead, Gavriel Rosenfeld persistently asks whether texts preserve the “shared belief in Nazism’s [and Hitler’s] absolute evil” or diminish this evil by setting Nazism in relation to, for example, communism or even U.S. history (18). For him, there is a “good” and a “bad” memory, and since he himself regards Hitler as the epitome of evil, he praises texts that stress Hitler’s exceptionality. He favors novels that allegedly do not employ the figure of Hitler as “a broader symbol of evil” to comment on other issues but to “[express] an enduring commitment to preserving the memory of the Nazi past for its own sake” (223, 219). Rosenfeld’s analysis thus neglects what all current theories of individual, collective, and cultural memory emphasize, namely, that nothing is ever remembered “for its own sake.”4 Since memory is vital for identity constructions, it is always determined by current needs. Individuals, groups, and whole cultures do not only search for usable pasts. They actively construct these pasts by remembering some things and forgetting others and by devising narratives about the past that answer the needs of the present. Whereas Rosenfeld’s analysis, contrary to what he promises at the outset, hardly ever touches on how the texts he analyzes “validate or criticize the present,”

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my own readings of Hitler Fiction will consequently link narratives about Hitler and Nazism to the American context(s) from which they emerged and investigate the needs and desires they answered, created, and shaped when they were first published. Rosenfeld’s major problem, in my opinion, is his uncritical use of the term “evil.” For him, though he never spells it out but simply takes it for granted, evil possesses an ontological existence of its own, and Hitler is indeed “evil incarnate.” This, of course, is highly problematic because it entails an essentialism that appears outdated and dangerous to those who take seriously the antiessentialist drive of poststructuralism. As Jennifer L. Geddes argues in her introduction to the recent collection Evil after Postmodernism, most contemporary criticism regards “the word ‘evil’ [ . . . ] as a holdover from metaphysical and religious vocabularies that have been revealed by postmodern thought to be oppressive, binary, totalizing, and exclusionary” (1). While Geddes goes on to argue for the usefulness of the concept of evil as an analytical instrument even after postmodernism, I wholeheartedly subscribe to the postmodern skepticism she outlines. However, the belief in an ontological kind of evil remains important for those unaffected by or opposed to the implications of postmodernist thinking and its alleged “moral relativism” (Geddes 2). American culture from political discourse to popular fiction is still permeated by the rhetoric of (good and) evil. In fact, the talk of and belief in evil even seem to have increased in recent decades. For many Americans—and Gavriel Rosenfeld’s argument is a point in case here—the “metaphysical and religious vocabularies” mentioned by Geddes are very often still meaningful in some way or other, be it because of “the intense religiosity that pervades American culture” (Gray 124), or be it because the terminology— as a “holdover”—has become deeply ingrained in secularized discourse. Consequently, I cannot simply discard the concept, however anachronistic it may appear to me and to many of my readers. What I can and will do, though, is to treat “evil” not as an analytical category but as a concept that requires analysis itself. I am not concerned here with arguing that Hitler is not evil—if one believes in the concept, Hitler surely is—but with analyzing how the rhetoric of evil surrounding Hitler works. * * * My study is thus closely aligned with current approaches in Holocaust studies that problematize the notion that “The Holocaust is unspeakable” (Mandel 5).5 Just as scholars have recently begun to challenge the idea that the Holocaust escapes both comprehension and representation and have begun to investigate “the forms and functions of [this] discourse, the

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implications of the evasions it promotes” (7), I am interested in the cultural and political functions of casting Hitler as evil.6 As Ian Kershaw stresses in the preface to the second volume of his Hitler biography, “[To] call Hitler evil [ . . . ] explains nothing” (xx). In fact, as one might add, to call the historical Hitler evil even forecloses explanation, because it offers a pseudoexplanation that only simulates depth. The complex social, historical, cultural, and biographical factors that produced Hitler and brought him to power are thus reduced to his inherent evilness.7 In analogous fashion, to observe that Hitler is cast as evil in a particular cultural text also explains nothing. This observation, though, raises an array of interesting questions that relate to the concerns I formulated earlier: What does it actually mean to call Hitler evil? How, on the one hand, did Hitler come to be conceived of as the epitome of evil so that Contact can evoke this association with a few grained images? What representational, rhetorical, and ideological strategies are at work in texts that project Hitler as evil? Which allegedly typical American values do these texts cast as “good” by setting them in opposition to Hitler’s evilness? How do the novels employ the Hitler trope to confirm narratives of U.S. exceptionalism and global hegemony or to legitimize America’s role in postwar conflicts? And at which historical moments, on the other hand, do other texts critique essentialist notions of good and evil in order to challenge ideas of U.S. exceptionalism? How do these texts use the Hitler trope for their purposes? Which strategies do they employ to highlight the tropological status of all representations of Hitler, their own ones included? The Epitome of Evil seeks to tackle and answer all these questions. I link the changing deployments of the Hitler trope in U.S. culture to both the major events of U.S. postwar history and the Americanization of the Holocaust, and I situate Hitler’s transformation into “the epitome of evil” in the context of a more general fascination with ontological concepts. What I offer is one possible trajectory of how the dominant functions of Hitler Fiction have changed and replaced each other since World War II. I analyze how wartime representations of Adolf Hitler are related to the larger U.S. propaganda effort and explain why American culture has produced hardly any representations of Hitler between 1945 and 1968. The focus of this study is on the constant proliferation of the Hitler trope since 1968 and its transformation from a means of left-wing critique into a rhetorical device of right-wing politics employed to justify U.S. global hegemony and affirm celebratory accounts of American history. This development, I argue, depends on, and simultaneously helps to bring about, Hitler’s transformation into the epitome of evil. Moreover, it also entails a shift in aesthetics from postmodernist back to realist

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modes of representation. In this study I use the term “postmodernist” to refer to self-reflexive texts that highlight the creative and world-making powers of language, the tropological status of their own representations of Hitler, texts that challenge essentialist and ahistorical notions of truth and identity and good and evil. By “realist” texts I refer to popular fiction that strives to create the illusionism traditionally associated with nineteenth-century literature, texts that largely ignore the insights of modernist and postmodernist writings. These realist texts downplay the tropological status of language and employ certain representational strategies, most notably a strict adherence to verisimilitude and a preference of metonymy over metaphor, to maintain the illusion that language simply mirrors the world and offers direct access to the referents. Consequently, realist Hitler Fiction tends to naturalize its representations of Hitler and presents the notions of good and evil that it actually constructs as prelinguistically given.8 With regard to those who are troubled by the strict binary I construct between realist and postmodernist Hitler Fiction, I would like to emphasize that what I am offering here is one possible history of the genre. On the basis of certain theoretical assumptions that I discuss in Chapters 1 and 2, and by close-reading texts that I regard as paradigmatic, I devise a narrative that remains open to revision and that even requires revision from those who will tell the story of Hitler Fiction in the future from a different theoretical perspective or by focusing on other texts of the genre. Chapter 1 (“The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Narrative, or The Emergence, Disappearance, and Return of Hitler Fiction, 1939–1968”) offers an overview of the first thirty years of Hitler Fiction, a period during which the Hitler trope is not yet used to negotiate issues obviously unconnected to Nazism. Wartime representations of Adolf Hitler are part of the larger propaganda effort to unite public opinion against the Nazis, to boost morale on the home front, and to negotiate—toward the end of the war—questions of German guilt. After 1945, however, representations of Hitler quickly disappear from American culture, and until 1968 less than a handful of texts featuring Hitler as a character are published. The second part of the chapter explores the reasons for Hitler Fiction’s disappearance, reemergence, and large-scale proliferation after 1968. Representations of Hitler resurface, I suggest, when the “progressive narrative” (Jeffrey Alexander) of U.S. exceptionalism is challenged by domestic conflicts and, most notably, by the Vietnam War. Thus, the reemergence of Hitler Fiction is synchronous and, I argue, closely tied to the early Americanization of the Holocaust. In the last part of the chapter, I then relate both phenomena—the Americanization of the Holocaust and the return of Hitler Fiction—to a more general shift from

Introduction

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ideology to ontology in American culture, whose beginnings Walter Benn Michaels has recently located around 1968. This shift is at the heart of both the emerging conception of the Holocaust as the evil event in history and the transformation of Hitler into the epitome of evil and thus into a master trope of American culture. The conviction that what people believe and do is a result of who they are puts the notion of evil as an ontological category back on the agenda. In Chapter 2 (“‘Keeping the Monster Alive’: The Cultural Work of Hitler Fiction”) I set the scene for the interpretations of what I call post1968 Hitler Fiction. Almost all Hitler Fiction written from that year onwards belongs to the genre of alternate history, a genre that has so far received only limited critical attention. Therefore I develop a taxonomy of alternate histories that foregrounds the cultural work the texts perform in the first part of the chapter. Differentiating the genre from science fiction and positioning it in relation to contemporary forms of the historical novel as well as to utopian and dystopian literature, I distinguish between an affirmative and a revisionist type of alternate history. Since the genre’s two dominant cultural functions hinge on how texts conceive of the relationship between Hitler, Nazis, Germans, and Americans, I then address the various functions that representations of Hitler and the Nazis fulfill for American culture and define three possible relations between self (the United States) and other (Hitler) that are relevant for Hitler Fiction. The Hitler trope is mostly used either for self-critique (to argue that postwar America is like Nazi Germany) or for processes of explicit othering (to construct an opposition between the United States and what Hitler embodies), for two forms of cultural work, that is, that can easily be linked to revisionist or affirmative alternate histories, respectively. The third type of self-other relation, which I call projection, is situated between self-critique and othering and contains elements of both. Texts that perform the cultural work of projection negotiate American concerns without explicitly addressing the issues at stake. They project the concerns they engage from the American contexts onto Hitler and the Nazis. In the final section of the chapter, I relate these kinds of cultural work to different aesthetic strategies. Whereas realist Hitler Fiction tends to perform the cultural work of othering or projection, the postmodernist texts, most prominent during the early 1970s, usually employ the Hitler trope for self-critique. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 explore in detail the various kinds of cultural work that post-1968 Hitler Fiction has performed through a series of close-readings of paradigmatic texts. As mentioned already, the trajectory I construct in these chapters foregrounds how the Hitler trope develops from a means of left-wing critique into one of right-wing affirmation.

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During this process, realist texts replace postmodernist ones, and the notion of Hitler’s generic evilness becomes vital for the cultural work the texts perform. The three texts I interpret in Chapter 3 (“Hitler, Nixon, and Vietnam: Self-Critique in Early 1970s Fiction”) are all postmodernist texts that self-consciously employ the Hitler trope to challenge celebratory accounts of U.S. history. Charles Bukowski’s short story “[Swastika]” (1972) literalizes the metaphor “Nixon is the new Hitler” by having Hitler’s brain implanted into the body of the American president. Gary Goss’s Hitler’s Daughter (1973) shifts the focus to the genocide of the American indigenous population, imperialism in the Americas, as well as to race, class, and gender conflicts within the United States. The novel also holds that the increasing insistence on the uniqueness of the Holocaust prevents an appropriate memory of U.S. atrocities. Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream (1972), finally, is even harsher in its critique of the United States because it casts Adolf Hitler as the author of the Vietnam War, thereby suggesting that U.S. military involvement in Vietnam has much in common with Hitler’s war of extermination in Eastern Europe. Chapter 4 (“Children, Clones, Conspiracies: Projection in Late 1970s and Early 1980s Novels”) traces Hitler Fiction’s development from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, a decade during which (white middle-class) American culture slowly returned to a more positive self-conception. I begin with Ira Levin’s The Boys from Brazil (1976), which, I argue, occupies a middle position between the postmodernist texts of the early 1970s and the realist ones written only a few years later. The novel negotiates conflicting conceptions of Hitler in American culture and explores their potential for self-critique and affirmation, it thus places the Hitler trope at the crossroads of these diametrically opposed cultural functions. By contrast, the realist popular fiction texts I interpret in the second and third part of the chapter no longer openly employ the Hitler trope for self-critique but use it to circumvent America’s domestic conflicts. This strategy, I argue, crucially depends on casting Hitler as evil by nature and on encoding ontology as biology. Gus Weill’s The Führer Seed (1979), like a number of other texts from this period, revolves around a Nazi resurgence under Hitler’s son in the Federal Republic of Germany and projects both American racism and the domestic struggles of the 1960s onto this context. In similar fashion, Timothy Benford’s Hitler’s Daughter . . . Wants to Occupy the White House (1983) projects anxieties about the corruption of the American political system onto Hitler’s daughter. Testifying to the more positive national self-image under Reagan, however, Bedford’s text already marks the transition from projection to othering, as it externalizes evil and casts an American who fights Hitler’s daughter as its hero.

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As I argue in Chapter 5 (“Hitler, Stalin, and bin Laden: External and Internal Othering since the Mid-1980s”), othering has been the dominant cultural function of Hitler Fiction since the second half of the Reagan presidency. Shaping and reflecting a restored national self-confidence, most texts written after 1985 project plots in which American protagonists fight and overcome Hitler, reassuring their readers that Americans are “good” and that their values will ultimately prevail over evil. The texts thus reconstruct the progressive narrative challenged during the 1960s and early 1970s. My focus in this chapter is on how these novels map allegiances and enmities, how they employ the Hitler trope to construct metaphoric and metonymic connections between America’s postwar enemies and Hitler, suggesting that these new conflicts are not different from, but in fact continuations of, World War II, the conflict that figures as the mythical battle between good and evil in American collective memory. My reading of Joseph Heywood’s The Berkut (1987) highlights how the novel justifies the postwar alliance with Germany and anticipates the post-Cold War alliance with Russia by casting Germans and Russians as good and only Hitler and Stalin as evil; my interpretation of David Charnay’s Operation Lucifer: The Chase, Capture and Trial of Adolf Hitler (2002), a text that associates Hitler with bin Laden and seeks to legitimize the tortures of Guantanamo, shows that othering remains the dominant cultural function of Hitler Fiction in the new millennium. With regard to Robert Pielke’s Hitler the Cat Goes West (1995), however, I argue that the Hitler trope has been cautiously reappropriated by the left since the mid1990s, and that this move entails the return to a postmodernist aesthetics. In Chapter 6 (“Redeeming Hitler? Steve Erickson’s Tours of the Black Clock [1989]”) I focus exclusively on Steve Erickson’s novel Tours of the Black Clock, a text that cuts across generic boundaries and defies such classifications as “revisionist” or “affirmative” that guide my analysis of other texts. The novel self-consciously negotiates the role that Hitler as the epitome of evil plays for American culture. It critiques essentialist conceptualizations of “good” and “evil” and suggests that even Hitler might not be beyond redemption. At the same time, however, Tours of the Black Clock acknowledges the human desire to think in absolutes and thus American culture’s tendency to cast Hitler as evil. In similar fashion, the text’s juxtaposition of two different versions of the twentieth century questions the validity of the progressive narrative by highlighting its artificiality. Simultaneously, though, the novel grants this celebratory account legitimacy by recognizing the role it plays in helping people make sense of their lives. In my conclusion I move from fiction to nonfiction and recapitulate my arguments through a reading of Ron Rosenbaum’s journalistic bestseller

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Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil (1999). The tendency to cast Hitler as evil, I suggest in closing, is not restricted to the United States. It is observable in Germany as well and has different but equally problematic effects there. * * * Before I begin my analysis, though, I would like to briefly address my own situatedness in writing about this topic. One could rightly say that by studying how American culture projects certain characteristics on the other that is Hitler, I, as a German, engage in projecting myself: Instead of analyzing how Hitler figures in German literature and culture, I displace the issue to the “significant other” that the United States constitutes for Germany. However, for reasons I explore in the following chapters, American representations of Adolf Hitler are far more diverse and interesting than those of any other Western culture, Germany included. Just as the “paranoid style,” which Richard Hofstadter analyzed more than four decades ago, seems to be more specifically an American issue than Hofstadter acknowledged, “Hitler rhetoric” too is much more prominent in the United States than elsewhere. Still, one might answer, I could have chosen a more comparative approach. This is true, too, and there were moments when I regretted not to have done so. Yet, I also believe that a large-scale and at the same time nuanced comparison would not have been manageable. I have opened up a new genre of texts for analysis here, and to have done so for more than one cultural context would surely have proved impossible. Personally, I find representations of Hitler in American culture and the various uses they are put to both fascinating and troubling. They are fascinating because they speak of the traveling of tropes and concepts over cultural boundaries and testify to the productiveness of language in shaping reality. They are troubling because of the historical associations they carry, no matter how far they are removed from their original context and no matter which new uses they are put to. As a German citizen, I believe that there are convincing reasons for considering the Holocaust unique and believe that it would not have happened the way it did without Hitler, a view that prevails in those texts that cast Hitler as the epitome of evil. At the same time, however, I am troubled by how American culture uses the discourses of uniqueness and good and evil to displace and disremember the more problematic aspects of its own history and to legitimize, for example, the torture and illegal detainment of prisoners at Guantanamo or the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

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I feel a lot of sympathy for texts that employ the Hitler trope to foreground, say, the genocide of the American indigenous population or U.S. imperialism, although I am also troubled by the ways in which these texts deploy the Nazi past, as I do not believe that slavery or the Vietnam War compare to the extermination of the Jews and the war in Eastern Europe. If I still prefer such texts over those that affirm accounts of U.S. exceptionalism, then I do so because these self-critical texts usually also challenge the rhetoric of good and evil, which, in my opinion, undermines any attempt at really engaging and understanding the other. Casting bin Laden as yet another manifestation of evil by metonymically connecting him to Hitler, for instance, may be morally satisfying, but it prevents American culture from understanding and tackling the economic, social, and historical roots of Islamist terrorism. Accordingly, I have for the most part here tried to follow the example set by Ian Kershaw in his outstanding Hitler biography. Kershaw declares that his task “has been [ . . . ] not to engage in moral disquisitions on the problem of evil in a historical personality, but try to explain the grip Hitler had on the society which eventually paid such a high price for its support” (II: xvii). In analogous fashion, I have largely avoided morally evaluating the texts I analyzed and have concentrated on explaining how these texts perform their specific forms of cultural work. At times, however, most notably in my conclusion, I have given up the assumed pose of neutrality and pointed out the difficulties and dangers I perceive in regarding Hitler as the epitome of evil.

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Chapter 1

The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Narrative, or The Emergence, Disappearance, and Return of Hitler Fiction, 1939–1968 To the best of my knowledge, twenty-one fictional texts featuring Hitler as a character were published in the United States between 1939 and 1945. And whereas over the next two decades only another twelve were added to that list, the years after 1968 saw the publication of roughly eighty-five such novels and short stories. The first part of this chapter situates the emergence of Hitler Fiction in the context of World War II propaganda. What distinguishes wartime Hitler Fiction from postwar and in particular from post-1968 texts is that for the former, Hitler is not yet a trope employed to negotiate issues disconnected to Nazism, but a trope to chart and understand the conflict with the Third Reich. The novels and plays written between 1939 and 1945 fulfill an array of cultural functions that change over the course of the war from explaining Hitler’s personality and motives and alerting the public to boosting morale and negotiating the question of Hitler’s and Germany’s guilt. Most of these texts personalize the conflict: They single out Hitler and cast him as the “natural” enemy of human and divine values and of everything the United States is said to represent, thus laying the basis for the post-1968 deployment of Hitler as a trope to negotiate issues whose connection to Nazism is at least feeble.

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Before Hitler Fiction unfolds this broader tropological potential, however, more then twenty years passed in which hardly any text featuring Hitler as a character was published. This seems extremely surprising at first, because, during recent years, Hitler has come to loom so large in American culture that it is hard to imagine how it could ever have been otherwise between 1945 and 1968. And yet, that Hitler disappeared from the front pages (of both newspapers and novels) once the war was over is not that striking, because this is what usually happens once the enemy has been defeated. What is far more surprising is that representations of Hitler resurfaced at the end of the 1960s and have steadily increased since then. In the second part of this chapter, I therefore investigate Hitler’s disappearance and return, and link it to how the Holocaust has fared in American culture. Drawing on the theories of the historian Peter Novick and the sociologist Jeffrey Alexander, I argue that the so-called Americanization of the Holocaust and the return of representations of Hitler are inextricably tied together and interrelated, as the narratives of Hitler and the Holocaust are grafted onto very similar templates.1 The last part of the chapter, then, addresses changing conceptions of the Holocaust’s and Hitler’s “evil.” The notion of evil plays a decisive role in both Novick’s and Alexander’s accounts of how the Holocaust moved to the center stage of U.S. culture, and both highlight the transformation of the Holocaust into “the archetype and yardstick of evil” (Novick 197). In similar fashion, I contend, American culture has transformed Hitler into “the incarnation of absolute evil” over the last decades (Wiesel, “Adolf Hitler”)—a reconceptualization that can be situated in the context of a broader shift from ideology to ontology affecting the culture. Wartime Propaganda: Trying the Ridiculous Hitler Who Attacked America “I saw Munich, and said to myself, ‘This is the end; the end of our world,’” Upton Sinclair wrote in the July 1940 edition of Wings, the Literary Guild’s monthly bulletin (“Appendix” 638), explaining why he wrote World’s End (1940), the first novel in his ten-volume World’s End Series, which covers most of the important global events that took place between 1914 and 1945. Sinclair refers, of course, to the Munich Agreement, the second of three 1938 events that turned Hitler into a figure of interest for the general American public. From the early 1930s onwards, liberal commentators and journalists like William Shirer and Dorothy Thompson had tried to draw attention to the Nazi movement. They highlighted the new regime’s aggression against political opponents

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and Jews but were unable to get an overwhelmingly isolationist public concerned with what was happening in Europe. This changed in 1938, however, when Hitler’s domestic and foreign policies became too bold and brutal to be ignored any longer. The Anschluss of Austria in May, the Munich Agreement in October, and the night of November 9, the so-called Kristallnacht, received considerable attention in the United States. As a consequence, Hitler was not only named Time Magazine’s “Man of the Year” but also became a subject for American fiction. Significantly, the first two American texts that feature Hitler as a character, The Man Who Killed Hitler and The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler, both anonymously published in 1939, each revolve around one of those highly mediated 1938 events. The Man Who Killed Hitler begins with the Anschluss of Austria, and The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler ends with the Munich Agreement. The publication of these texts shows that Hitler had become a marketable object of interest for a larger American audience, a figure not yet regarded as a threat to the United States but fascinating enough to add a further dimension to sensationalist sex-and-crime plots. Moreover, anticipating Sinclair’s World’s End, both texts try to explain Hitler’s behavior and his appeal to the German people to an American public, which, as Paul Fussell has put it, found Hitler an “odd” figure (48). For Americans, Hitler’s whole appearance, his gestures, his toothbrush mustache, his forelock, and the strange sound of his voice seemed irreconcilable with the fact that he had quickly become one of the most powerful men in the world. But whereas Sinclair’s World’s End and its sequel Between Two Worlds (1941) favor a sociohistorical approach and turn to the Treaty of Versailles and Germany’s internal crises of the 1920s to explain the rise of Nazism, The Man Who Killed Hitler and The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler focus on Hitler’s biography and what they perceive as the collective psyche of the German people. Both novels draw on popularized and simplified versions of Freudian psychoanalysis, immensely popular in the States at the time, to explain Hitler’s character, and both somewhat surprisingly still paint a fairly sympathetic and, in The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler, even benevolent picture of him. Hitler is not yet conceived as malicious or evil, but rather as misguided and mentally ill.2 With the outbreak of the war in Europe, the cultural functions of representing Hitler changed. Since Hitler was now increasingly conceived as the enemy, explaining his motives became less important than alerting the public to the danger he posed. Although Americans overwhelmingly favored France and Britain during 1940 and 1941, the majority of them were still unwilling to see the United States enter the “war in Europe.” It was exactly this isolationist attitude that the only text featuring Hitler published between the invasion of Poland and Pearl Harbor criticized.

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Fred Allhoff ’s novel Lightning in the Night, serialized in Liberty Magazine in thirteen installments between August 24 and November 16, 1940, dramatizes the dangers of isolationism in drastic fashion.3 Its dystopian vision of a Nazi invasion of the United States in 1945 casts Hitler as a direct threat to the country and seeks to convince isolationists that neutrality will ultimately leave the country unprepared for a war that cannot be avoided and should rather be fought in Europe and Asia than on American soil. Lightning in the Night, which prophetically opens with a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and ends equally prophetically in a nuclear stalemate (albeit between the United States and Nazi Germany), anticipates in many ways the officially orchestrated propaganda after Pearl Harbor. The novel frames the conflict between the United States and Nazi Germany as one between freedom and democracy on the one side and slavery and machinelike obedience on the other; it presents the United States as an organic community held together by simple, common-sense values, and persistently evokes Nazism as the ultimate threat to everything “instinctively” associated with the “real America” (73–74). In addition, Lightning in the Night tries to reheat the anti-German feelings of the Great War by presenting aggressive Prussian militarism as the decisive trait of a presupposed German national character. In the novel, the figure of Hitler synecdochally represents this destructive spirit: As one chapter heading puts it, “Hitler Speaks—and America Answers” (65), and it is Hitler who “has been hammering away at our East Coast from Labrador to Virginia” (95). The novel thus uses Hitler’s name to suggest that the German soldiers are mere extensions of his will and that all Germans agree with him. In this respect the novel differs pointedly from the official World War II propaganda produced after America’s entry into the war and orchestrated by the newly founded Office of Wartime Information (OWI). Until the end of 1943, American propaganda maintained a clear distinction between a small group of guilty Nazis and the majority of Germans, who were regarded as the Nazis’ first victims. As Benjamin Alpers has shown, the war in Europe was conceived as an ideological conflict between democracy and fascism and not as a traditional war among nations; it was “a war against Nazism, not the German people” (193). Although novelists and playwrights were not as directly influenced by the OWI as Hollywood filmmakers were, they too usually maintained the clear distinction between Nazis and ordinary Germans that the OWI encouraged. Broadway plays such as Lillian Hellman’s The Watch on the Rhine (1940/41) or John Steinbeck’s novel The Moon Is Down (1942) invariably featured some “good Germans.” These texts simply reconfigured the established distinction between the “good” and the “bad”

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German, which Peter Freese has traced back as far as James Fenimore Cooper (115), as the dichotomy between the “good German” and the “evil Nazi.” Accordingly, many wartime texts that focus on Hitler employ him as a synecdoche for Nazism and not for Germany, as Lightning in the Night does. However, the synecdochal deployment of Hitler in Allhoff and other texts also simultaneously singles out Hitler and casts him as solely responsible for the conflict. This is not at all surprising, since propaganda has always and everywhere tended to personalize confrontations and to neglect the sociohistorical circumstances of the conflict. Frequently, it has cast the enemy as an agent of evil in order to provide a seemingly solid moral foundation for one’s own position. Othering thus constitutes, as Marianna Torgovnick stresses, “the normal [ . . . ] dynamic within war [ . . . ]. At the furthest extreme, the enemy becomes subhuman or demonic, linked by some ineradicable trace, often conceived as racial or religious, to pure evil that must be destroyed” (9). And since Nazism was cast as “an Old World evil that threaten[ed] the New World,” othering Hitler and the Nazis not only made the conflict a question of “us against them” but also confirmed notions of U.S. exceptionalism (Alpers 216). This othering took many different shapes in World War II propaganda. Some Hollywood movies like The Hitler Gang (1944) or Max Radin’s novel The Day of Reckoning (1943) cast Hitler and his inner circle as gangsters motivated by greed and unwilling to play by the rules of “good” capitalism. Other texts such as W. G. Beymer’s 12:20 p.m. (1944) or Michael Young’s The Trial of Adolf Hitler (1944), present Hitler and the Nazis as godless and thus as evil from the religious perspective the texts subscribe to. In Young’s novel, Hitler appears as a larger-than-life figure tried for “high treason against the dignity of God and man” after the war (151). In a scene that echoes the Gothic tradition, one of Hitler’s victims returns from the dead to testify against him and then chokes him with her supernatural powers. In similar fashion, Hitler is struck down by a stroke of lightning in Beymer’s 12:20 p.m. This, the novel implies, is God’s answer to people’s prayers all around the globe. Hitler is also cast as evil in the latter volumes of Upton Sinclair’s World’s End Series, whose early parts resisted such simplistic binaries and provided a more nuanced analysis instead. As late as 1943, the third part, Wide is the Gate, addressed the shortcomings of the capitalist system and fascist tendencies within the United States. All this changed, however, with the fourth volume, Presidential Agent (1944), which replaces the earlier socialist interpretation of history with a Manichean worldview, in which Roosevelt represents good and Hitler evil. At the end of the novel, Lanny Budd, Sinclair’s hero and mouthpiece—and so far a critic of

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American society—realizes that Roosevelt and Hitler are “the protagonist and [ . . . ] the antagonist in a world drama.” World War II is thus recast as “a duel of wills between these two” and between the concepts of democracy and tyranny the novel associates with them, respectively (655). Accordingly, the following volumes no longer present Hitler as a psychologically round character, but turn him into the “Head-Devil” of destruction (Dragon Harvest 216), a designation that resonates with the religious undertones of other propaganda texts. At the same time, Sinclair’s depiction of Roosevelt and the United States becomes openly celebratory, affirming America’s role in the conflict and the superiority of its values. In many other novels and films from the war and especially in those produced during the two years following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hitler was also ridiculed. As he was now officially the enemy, propaganda no longer needed to stress the danger he posed to the United States. At a time when an Allied victory was far from sure, these texts made fun of Hitler in order to boost morale on the home front. Following the example of Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940), whose comic effect derives from the incongruity between Chaplin’s Hynkel and the historical Hitler, Hollywood simply grafted Hitler and his “gang” onto the formulaic slapstick genre. With Hitler—Dead or Alive (1942) and The Devil with Hitler (1943), the industry produced two feature-length Hitler comedies and included comic appearances of cameo Hitlers into various other films. And in Disney’s Der Fuehrer’s Face (1942), “Donald Duck incited audiences to sing ‘Heil’ right in the Führer’s face, or at least his Technicolor caricature” (Doherty 84). Ridiculing Hitler hinged on the visual, and all the films made use of the medium’s ability to reproduce and exaggerate Hitler’s physical features. For written texts, however, it was almost impossible to achieve this effect. Peter Fleming’s The Flying Visit (1940), published even before Chaplin’s movie was released, tries to generate laughter by including thirteen Hitler caricatures, which depict key moments in the narrative. Like Chaplin’s film, the novel undertakes a deconstruction of the official Nazi myth of “Hitler the superman” and casts him as an incapable, neurotic coward. The novel, though, remained an isolated attempt, and until today comic representations of Hitler in American fiction are virtually nonexistent, while they are still frequently found in films as diverse as Charles Martin’s How to Seduce a Woman (1974) or Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989).4 Due to their performative dimension, plays could do what fiction could not. Published in 1943, both William Richard Schneider’s The Last Twenty Minutes of Hitler, Goebbels, Göring and Himmler, in which

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American soldiers capture Hitler in the Chancellery in Berlin, and Caroll John Atchinson’s Heel Hitler develop visions of victory, celebrate American superiority, and poke fun at Hitler. Performances of the farce Heel Hitler, for example, were apt to provoke the same liberating Bahktinian laughter that Hitler films tried to trigger. As its title indicates, Heel Hitler promotes the notion that Hitler is nothing more than a heel and a petty crook and that the few important Nazi leaders are gangsters motivated by greed and not by ideology. Heel Hitler thus echoes an interpretation of Nazism that was familiar to audiences from many Hollywood movies of the time, which—much to the distress of the OWI—tended to present Nazism as nothing more than the result of the actions of a bunch of criminals. Visions of victory, as Heel Hitler and The Last Twenty Minutes stage them, persisted in Hitler Fiction until the end of the war, but performed a different function once the Allies were on the advance and Americans became convinced that the Third Reich would eventually fall. Thus, Michael Young’s The Trial of Adolf Hitler and Erwin Lessner’s Phantom Victory (1944) too project victory. However, they also negotiate what should happen to Hitler and Germany after the war, mirroring and probably bringing about a change of attitude toward the enemy country. As Alpers has convincingly argued, the view that the enemy was Germany and not only Nazism “became stronger in America over the course of the war” (208). Alpers offers two reasons for this development. He stresses that “[in] wartime, particularly in a modern war, it has been much easier to think negatively of the entire enemy nation than to imagine that it, too, is the victim of ideology that is the real enemy” (209). Moreover, “it was easier to believe in a more abstract Nazi enemy when U.S. troops had yet to encounter Germans in the field in any large number” (219). Once U.S. soldiers entered the European war in Italy in mid-1943, they mostly fought, killed, and were killed by regular German soldiers. Accordingly, a text like Young’s The Trial of Adolf Hitler erases the distinction between good Germans and evil Nazis completely. “You are responsible—every last one of you—for Nazi crimes,” an American Jew tells nameless Germans when the American troops reach Berlin where they capture Hitler (113). His ensuing trial is presented as the first undertaking of the newly founded United Nations. Germany, however, “never an ordinary country” (131), is excluded from the organization and has been dismantled into separate states, because, as one Polish witness puts it during Hitler’s trial, “the rise of Hitler was but an outward manifestation of the inherent character of the spiritual corruption and moral depravity of the Germanic people” (153). For the text, then, not only Hitler is on trial, but the whole population. Echoing Lightning in the

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Night’s deployment of Hitler’s name, The Trial of Adolf Hitler employs the figure synecdochally to argue that all Germans are guilty. Erwin Lessner’s Phantom Victory: The Fourth Reich: 1945–1960 projects the same wholesale condemnation of Germany by casting Hitler and his successor, Fridolin, the leader of the Fourth Reich, as descendants not only of Hindenburg, Bismarck, Frederick the Great, and Barbarossa, but also of “Arminius the Cheruscan” and “Odacer, conqueror of Rome” (182). Nazism, the narrative suggests, is merely furor teutonicus (the Germanic war-mongering), first diagnosed by Tacitus, in a new garb. Since Phantom Victory replaces Young’s utopian vision of a peaceful postwar order with a dystopian one, it also echoes Allhoff ’s Lightning in the Night. And as the novel holds that Germany will always try to conquer the world, it ends with a single-sentence chapter that echoes Cato the Elder’s famous “Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam”— “And for the rest, I say that Germany should be destroyed” (227). Fuelled by reports from Europe and novels such as Lessner’s, antiGerman feelings in the United States steadily increased during the last years of the war and peaked immediately after the end of hostilities. In mid-1945 the National Opinion Research Center found that 39 percent of Americans believed that “[The] German people will always want to go to war and make themselves as powerful as possible” (qtd. in Alpers 219). While this constituted the top answer—a smaller number of people were content to blame Nazi leaders and the German people’s tendency to be seduced by them—the poll results also indicate that, despite all propaganda efforts, public opinion never turned as completely against the German population as it turned against the Japanese. As far as Germany was concerned, many Americans continued to blame Hitler and a small group of Nazi leaders. And in fact, films and novels largely continued to focus on a small group of Nazi leaders around Hitler, thus contributing to their mystification as superhuman villains and paving the way for the eventual transformation of these figures into tropes of absolute evil. The tendency to cast Hitler as chiefly responsible permeates even Phantom Victory and The Trial of Adolf Hitler, texts that consciously work against such notions of individual guilt. In Phantom Victory, Hitler finally emerges as the mastermind behind the devious German plan to create the Fourth Reich. The Trial of Adolf Hitler, contrary to its explicit agenda, stresses Hitler’s exceptionality even more, because it casts him as the sole representative of and synecdoche for Nazi Germany. A synecdoche, of course, never merely replaces the whole through a part; it simultaneously disconnects the part from the whole and imbues it with independence. Hence Hitler does not merely represent Germany in the novel; he also comes to stand as an

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isolated figure of evil on his own. Moreover, Hollywood movies such as The Hitler Gang suggested as late as 1944 that the Nazi movement consisted merely of a small group of gangsters that had seduced the German people. Unsurprisingly, a public regularly exposed to such images and hence still quite positively inclined toward Germany protested against the administration’s 1944 Morgenthau plan, which proposed Germany’s transformation into an agrarian state in order to punish the German people and to prevent it from ever attacking its neighbors again. Reacting to public pressure, President Roosevelt gradually pulled back from this extreme position in the months prior to his death and eventually abandoned the plan altogether.5 Another important factor that prevented the Roosevelt and later the Truman administration from imposing a harsh peace was the rapidly changing political landscape of Europe. The beginning of the Cold War with the Soviet Union necessitated turning Germany into an ally, a move that could be much more easily communicated to the public by returning to presenting Germans as victims of Hitler and Nazism. As the Soviet Union emerged as America’s new ideological enemy, “hatred of the German people steadily subsided” in the United States and interest in Hitler and the Nazis quickly vanished (Alpers 219). This is particularly apparent in Sinclair’s World’s End Series. As historical novels set during the early 1940s, the parts written and published after the end of hostilities in Europe are still primarily concerned with the fight against Hitler. Yet, they also already address the emerging Cold War. While A World to Win (1946), still mostly written during the war, presents Stalin as a reliable ally, Presidential Mission (1947) and O Shepherd, Speak (1950) are already characterized by a much more critical perspective on the Soviets. Finally, in The Return of Lanny Budd (1953), Sinclair’s sequel to the series, Sinclair has his hero, Lanny, fight a communist conspiracy in the United States and characterize Stalin as “more dangerous to the world than Hitler” (39). Lanny’s judgment indicates how quickly and completely the Cold War and communism replaced World War II and fascism as America’s major concern and how insignificant Hitler swiftly became. Most Americans were convinced that Hitler was dead, that Nazism was history, and that Stalin’s communism represented the new challenge to American values.6 Accordingly, it is hardly surprising that only a handful of fictional texts featured Hitler as a character over the next two decades. What is surprising, however, is Hitler’s comeback at the end of the 1960s and his conversion into a powerful trope of evil for American culture. This development, I argue in the next part of this chapter, is tied to reconfiguring the extermination of the Jews as the Holocaust, and I approach it

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from this angle. Consequently, Hitler disappears for a few pages from this study, just as he disappeared from American culture at the end of World War II. Postwar Challenges to the “Progressive Narrative”: The Americanization of the Holocaust For a variety of reasons, references to what we have come to call the Holocaust are almost completely absent from wartime propaganda and did not occupy the American public during the war. Crimes against Jews received considerable public attention in the United States before the war and especially after Kristallnacht, but even then Jews were regarded as merely one group among the many victims of Nazism. Later, “it was the overall course of the war that dominated the minds of Americans” and not the fate of one particular group of victims (Novick 20). And even when reports about the horrible fate of the Jews in the death camps surfaced in 1943, they were largely ignored by the administration and the media and were not used for propaganda purposes because those in charge—many of whom believed the reports to be exaggerated anyway— did not want to single out the Jews. As Peter Novick has put it: “That the Nazis were the enemy of the Jews was well known; there was no rhetorical advantage in continuing to underline the fact. The challenge was to show that they were everyone’s enemy, to broaden rather than narrow the range of Nazi victims” (27). Consequently, propaganda aimed to present the Nazis as everybody’s enemy and downplayed the ethnic or religious identities of victim groups. This broad focus also worked to counter isolationist and antiSemitic allegations that America was fighting the war in Europe only because of the Jews. In addition, the OWI feared that highlighting what was (allegedly) happening to the Jews in the death camps would backfire, as a public disaffected by and still remembering the propaganda lies of World War I would not believe the reports of unimaginable atrocities and genocide. Thus, as in propaganda texts in general, violence against Jews figures only occasionally in wartime Hitler Fiction. And when it does so, it is never projected as genocidal or particularly tied to the Jews, but as indicative of Nazi violence against humanity and culture. Even in Michael Young’s The Trial of Adolf Hitler (1944)—written after the atrocities had become known and that revolved around a Viennese Jewish family who flees to the United States—the symbol for Nazi barbarism is not Auschwitz, as it is today, but Lidice, the Czech village that the Nazis erased and whose population they killed after partisans assassinated Reinhard Heydrich in 1943.

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Even after the war, when propaganda restraints had disappeared and when there was no longer any doubt about what had happened in the death camps, the fate of the Jews did not move to the center of American attention. It was not until the 1960s that the extermination of the Jews became the Holocaust. Trauma theory offers the most widely spread explanation for this phenomenon, suggesting that “[o]nly after two or three decades of repression and denial were people finally able to begin talking about what happened and to take actions in response to this knowledge” (Alexander 9). In recent years, however, this account has been criticized by the historian Peter Novick and the sociologist Jeffrey Alexander. While they do not question that many survivors were severely traumatized, they hold that there is no evidence that Gentiles shared this trauma on a collective scale. Moreover, as Novick argues, there is also considerable evidence that “many [survivors] were willing, indeed anxious, to talk of their experiences but made a deliberate choice not to do so” (83). Consequently, he and Alexander dismiss trauma and offer different explanations in its stead. Although Alexander explicitly distances his more recent argument from Novick’s by now classical one,7 their explanations, I hold, complement each other. By setting the two theories in relation, I wish to argue that what they describe are different dimensions of the same phenomenon. The concepts they develop along the way—especially Alexander’s “progressive narrative”—are highly useful for explaining the almost complete absence of Hitler from 1950s and 1960s American culture, his return to the limelight, and eventual conversion into a trope employed to negotiate all kinds of issues. Novick draws on Maurice Halbwachs’s theories of collective memory to explain how the Holocaust developed from an unusable into a usable past for American Jews during the 1960s and how it spread from this particular group to the culture at large. He thus primarily conceives of the changing conceptualizations of the Holocaust in the United States as the result of American Jewry’s identity politics. According to Novick, Jewish leaders initially discouraged survivors who wanted to talk about their experiences, because “throughout the 1950s, talk of the Holocaust was something of an embarrassment in American public life” (85). Germans were no longer perceived as innately depraved but cast as victims of the totalitarian structures of Nazi society. Moreover, they were now allies in the Cold War. Jewish leaders, eager to make sure that Jews “were not perceived as out of step with other Americans,” downplayed both the Holocaust as such and its particular Jewish dimension: “Survivors were constantly told [ . . . ] that they should turn their faces forward, not backward” (Novick 91, 83).

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“Forward orientation,” albeit of American culture at large, is also at the heart of Jeffrey Alexander’s explanation for why “[in] the beginning [ . . . ] the Holocaust was not the ‘Holocaust’” (6). Alexander stresses that how events are conceived and evaluated depends on their representation, on how they are framed and narrated, and on “who is telling the story, and how” (11). The Holocaust, he suggests, did only then become the Holocaust, as we conceive of it today, when what he calls the “progressive narrative” collapsed during the 1960s (16). The progressive narrative, he argues, emplotted the extermination of the Jews as just one of many Nazi war crimes and by no means as an exceptional or unique event. As it expressed a firm belief in the promise of the future and the advancement of civilization, the narrative demanded from both Jews and Gentiles “a future-oriented renewal,” which Alexander sees “fundamentally tied to assertions about the utopian telos of the United States” (25, 24): The United States guaranteed the progress of civilization and mankind’s eventual salvation, while Nazism, by contrast, was kept “situated and historical.” Since Nazism was regarded as “defeated and eliminated from the world” (16), there was no need to look back to it. This, Alexander suggests, is the reason why Nazism and the extermination of the Jews hardly figure in 1950s and 1960s American culture and public discourse. Novick and Alexander tell the same story from two different perspectives, the one focusing on American Jews and conscious tactical considerations, the other on the culture as a whole and the power of cultural narratives. In fact, many of the examples Novick uses to demonstrate the forward orientation of American Jewry also show how the progressive narrative dominated the whole American culture and how Gentiles invited Jews to “[overcome] the past” (115). American Jewry’s forward orientation thus appears to be one dimension of the encompassing progressive narrative. Even the concept of totalitarianism, which Novick foregrounds, can be seen as an element of the progressive narrative. As the theory of totalitarianism casts communism as a danger structurally equivalent to Nazism, it also implicitly entails the promise that, after its victory over Nazism, the United States will also prevail in the struggle with communism. The projected victory over communism thus figures as the next step in mankind’s progression toward liberal democracy. Alexander’s progressive narrative and Novick’s forward orientation convincingly account for the almost complete absence of Hitler from American culture and especially fiction during the 1950s and 1960s. Hitler was no longer a threat that needed to be taken into account, and as neither he nor his deeds were yet considered unique or exceptional, he did not yet figure as a trope used to put newer events into perspective. Accordingly, new enemies—like Stalin—were not yet presented as

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new Hitlers. If Stalin, for instance, was compared to Hitler at all, then it was as unvaryingly as Sinclair’s Lanny Budd does when he asserts that Stalin is worse than Hitler. In fact, during the 1950s the figure of Hitler was not even interesting enough to carry through a cheap B movie, as the case of They Saved Hitler’s Brain shows. Begun during the 1950s, the project quickly came to a halt because of insufficient funding, as producers were simply not interested in a film about Hitler. The movie was eventually finished and released in 1963, when interest in Hitler and the Holocaust was increasing again; and due to the never abating fascination with Hitler ever since, the film is by now, despite its poor quality, regarded as a cult classic. Accordingly, the few texts written between 1945 and 1960 that feature Hitler as a character all invariably suggest that Hitler is history. Allan G. Field’s short story “Pharaoh Meets Hitler” (1945), André Richard’s Lisa: A Novel of the Postwar Life of Adolph Hitler (1950), or Thomas Sweeney’s poem Makers of War (1951) all confirm the power of the progressive narrative, a narrative that they help shape as they employ it to make sense of the events of World War II. These texts do not cast Hitler as a continuous threat to the postwar world or speculate how Hitler’s regime might have been prevented or what the world would look like if the Nazis had won, as post-1968 texts frequently do. Instead, they put Hitler into historical perspective, often stressing that other dictators (such as Caesar and Napoleon in Sweeney) or anti-Semites (such as the mythical Pharaoh in Field) were worse. Echoing wartime trial novels, the texts show Hitler as a defeated enemy who is now being punished for his crimes, while stripping away the superhuman features that earlier texts often unwittingly ascribed to him. While Field’s “Pharaoh Meets Hitler,” published in the Jewish Spectator in April 1945, focuses on Hitler’s Jewish victims and suggests that “Jew-killing doesn’t get anybody anywhere except to Hell—while the Jews keep on going full strength ahead” (16), Richard’s Lisa, a novel published only five years later, already revolves around how the Germans themselves suffered under Hitler. The novel’s eponymous heroine is a young woman who flees from Germany after being raped by Hitler. She moves on to Puerto Rico, where she works as a nurse in an asylum after the war. One day a new patient, old and handicapped, arrives, whom Lisa immediately recognizes as Adolf Hitler. She decides not to turn him in but to take her revenge. Over the next weeks, she burns him with an ironing board, mutilates and blinds him, and finally feeds his half-dead corpse to a bunch of wild pigs. Having thus worked through her trauma successfully, she accepts an American soldier’s proposal of marriage and follows him to the States where “[h]er hate at last forgotten, Lisa found

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love and peace” (217). Through the suffering of its heroine, Lisa translates the doctrine of totalitarianism into narrative form. Lisa’s rape symbolically represents how the German people suffered under Hitler, and the inability of her neighbors and family to help her suggests that, just as totalitarian theory presupposes, it was impossible to oppose the prevailing power structures of the Third Reich. Moreover, the novel frames her suffering and recovery as a progressive narrative in itself. While the text acknowledges Lisa’s trauma, it nevertheless holds that this trauma is only “temporary”; it is finally “removed” through her revenge and through the marital bliss and happy future the United States has to offer her. The United States thus figures in the narrative as a haven of the oppressed and guarantor of a “world in which there [can] never be Nazism again” (Alexander 16). In a similar vein, Martin Dibner’s A God for Tomorrow (1961) dismisses the idea that Nazism might resurface in Germany. In fact, through the development of its protagonist, Cooper, the novel dramatizes conflicting attitudes about Germany and the Germans and consciously works to reverse the position of those who still harbor prejudices. At the beginning of the story, Cooper, a war veteran turned photojournalist, still believes in the concept of collective guilt, feeling that it “was comforting to be anything but a German” (19). Therefore he is reluctant at first to visit Berlin to check on rumors that Hitler fathered a son who lives somewhere in the city. The novel, however, dismisses essentialist notions both about the “German spirit” in general and Hitler’s son in particular (23). Once he has arrived in Berlin, Cooper quickly realizes that the Germans are in many ways like Americans and even falls in love with Käthe, a German girl. Like Lisa in Richard’s novel, Käthe has suffered under the Nazis and is later tortured by neo-Nazis. In line with the progressive narrative, however, Cooper tells her on the last page of the novel: “Listen Käthe. From now on, no looking back” (190). His comment refers both to Käthe’s personal history and, since Cooper has indeed located Hitler’s son earlier but found “nothing wrong, nothing strange about him” (173), to the Nazi past in general. Whereas later Hitler Fiction frequently holds that Hitler’s children share what the texts perceive as their father’s generic evilness and detects proof of this in the children’s outward features already, the boy in A God for Tomorrow is simply “slim and straight and handsome.” Moreover, he “does not speak [ . . . or] hear,” as Cooper learns a moment later (173). Thus, the boy is useless for the small group of neo-Nazis who originally want him as a future leader. Their present leader, who arrives only minutes after Cooper at the boy’s home, “let[s] go the boy [sic] as though he were diseased” as soon as he understands his condition (177). The boy

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escapes with his guardian, covered by Cooper, who tells the police when they arrive at the scene, “There is no boy” (181). On one level, this is of course a lie, on another, it is Cooper’s genuine assessment of the situation. His time in Berlin has convinced him that Nazism will not rise again. Just as the boy is deaf and mute, the neo-Nazi movement is weak and negligible; it pales in comparison with the “unquestionable sincerity” Cooper detects in most Germans, who, as his hotel manager tells him, only want “to be friends” (182–83). And yet, A God for Tomorrow differs from “Pharaoh Meets Hitler” and Lisa, as the novel also testifies to the beginning shift in cultural mood that would soon transform the extermination of the Jews into the Holocaust and the historical Hitler into such a powerful trope for evil. Overtly, of course, the narrative dismisses neo-Nazism and Hitler having a child as empty threats. However, the fact that the text, which also evokes the Eichmann trial repeatedly, draws on the theme at all indicates that Hitler, Nazism, and the Holocaust were slowly developing into more than history and that the self-confident, progressive outlook of the immediate postwar years was already fading away. From the perspective of American Jews, this waning of forward orientation is palpable in Abraham G. Duker’s “Hitler Meets Haman” (1960), which was published in the Jewish Spectator fifteen years after Field’s “Pharaoh Meets Hitler.” “Hitler Meets Haman” copies both the basic idea and the structure of “Pharaoh Meets Hitler,” replacing Pharaoh with Haman, “the first international anti-Semite” (9). Duker’s story, too, holds that “[t]his people [the Jews] is eternal. It has outlived all its enemies” (10). Yet, there are significant differences: That Hitler is now cast as the subject rather than the object of the title and that Haman acknowledges Hitler’s superiority in killing Jews (“True, you have done a better job than I have”) hints at the emerging discourse of uniqueness that would soon dominate discussions about Hitler and the Holocaust. Moreover, American Jewry’s growing disaffection with the United States is palpable: Newly arrived in hell, Haman tells Hitler, are “top politicians from the U.S. Mixed up in some Arab deal. Arab oil and Jewish blood, you know.” The United States thus no longer figures as protector of the Jews and as the moral superior to other nations. Rather, Haman implies, the country is like others driven by selfish interest and lets Israel down to secure oil delivery from Arab countries. In addition, Jewish identity and conflicts among America’s Jews are an issue. According to Haman, “some anti-Zionist Jews who would like their people to disappear” constitute the biggest threat to the Jews (10). The term “disappear” of course cuts two ways: It blames antiZionist American Jews for not supporting Israel enough against its enemies, and it touches on the issue of increasing intermarriage between

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Jews and Gentiles in the States, which some Jewish leaders came to regard as a threat to Jewish “survival” during the 1960s (Novick 184). “Hitler Meets Haman” can thus also be read as indicative of what Peter Novick has called the “inward turn” of American Jews (171). According to Novick, during the 1960s and early 1970s, the “integrationist ethos” of all-inclusive American identity was replaced by “a particularist ethos” (6–7), which emphasized the specific identities of ethnic and religious groups. For Novick, the “disillusionment with an idealized image of America”—a result of the struggle over the Civil Rights Movement, political assassinations, and Vietnam—affected American Jews in particular (188). They were also alarmed by what they regarded as the danger of a “new Holocaust” in Israel in 1967 and 1973 (148), a lack of support for Israel by the United States, and by what they perceived as a new anti-Semitism in the States. Consequently, Novick argues, American Jews gave up their integrationist agenda and started emphasizing a specifically Jewish American identity: “[T]here was an inward turn, an insistence on the defense of separate Jewish interests, a stress on what made Jews unlike other Americans” (171). And what made them different and united them as a group no matter how their beliefs, convictions, or interests might otherwise divert, Novick suggests, was the Holocaust as an event that had or would have affected them all. Once the identity of American Jews had been tied to the Holocaust, Novick goes on to argue, they endorsed the notion of uniqueness, because, for Jews, “the uniqueness of the Holocaust is the sole grantor of their uniqueness” (198). Moreover, they actively promoted talk of the Holocaust to raise Holocaust consciousness among Gentiles in order to gather support for Israel or achieve other political goals. During the 1970s, and finally through the 1978 airing of the miniseries Holocaust, Novick claims, “the Holocaust moved from history to myth, it became the bearer of ‘eternal truths’ not bound by historical circumstances” and evolved from “a Jewish memory [into] an American memory” (178, 207). Removed from its historical context, the extermination of the Jews came to be projected as the Holocaust, a unique and “simply inexplicable” event (Lang, “Evil” 15), which could teach important moral lessons not only to Jews but to everybody else as well. Novick himself is highly critical of both the grounding of Jewish identity in the Holocaust and the spread of Holocaust analogies and comparisons over American culture. He argues that it is “the very extremity of the Holocaust” that makes it a dubious source for lessons to be learned, as it is likely that the event the analogy is brought to will pale in comparison to the Holocaust and thus is in danger of not being taken seriously. Accordingly, he holds that the “talk of uniqueness and

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incomparability surrounding the Holocaust in the United States [ . . . ] promotes evasion of moral and historical responsibility,” because American atrocities seem to “[pale] in comparison to the Holocaust” (15). In his opinion, Holocaust memory in the United States tends to confirm “traditional American values” “by showing their negation” (234). In sharp contrast to Novick’s bleak evaluation, Jeffrey Alexander optimistically holds that “[t]he project of renaming, dramatizing, reifying, and ritualizing the Holocaust contributed to a moral remaking of the (post)modern world,” and has universalized morality “beyond any particular time and place” (32, 33). According to Alexander, this development results from the collapse of the progressive narrative during the late 1960s and 1970s, which he refers to as “the ‘critical years.’” Internal turmoil and Vietnam, he suggests, “undercut the main agent of this progressive narrative”: “If the United States itself committed war crimes, what chance could there be for the modern and democratic societies ever to leave mass murder safely behind?” (40). Once “the progressive narrative was blocked” (29), the mass murder of the Jews was reconceptualized as the central event in what he calls the “tragic narrative” (26). Within the framework of the tragic narrative, the extermination of the Jews figures no longer as a historically situated traumatic experience that is overcome by the advancement of civilization. Instead, it is turned into the Holocaust, “not an event in history, but an archetype, an event-out-of-time,” a perpetual reminder that “it could happen again” anywhere (30, 31). As the tragic narrative, on the one hand, replaces linearity with circularity, the Holocaust is returned to “time and time again” since this is “the only way to ensure that such an event would happen ‘never again’” (31). However, Alexander holds that, on the other hand, “[t]he implication of the tragic narrative is not that progress has become impossible.” It has merely become “much more difficult to achieve” (32–33). This is why he ultimately arrives at a positive evaluation of the Holocaust’s status as an emblem of “human suffering as such” in the United States and throughout the Western world (34). He believes that the frequent Holocaust analogies (to atrocities committed within the United States as well as to genocides in Rwanda, Serbia, or elsewhere) have had an overall positive effect on how the United States and other Western nations have handled these challenges. Paradoxically, then, by turning the Holocaust into the central event in a tragic narrative, Alexander himself relates a “progressive narrative” of growing awareness of human rights violation. Novick’s account, by contrast, can be read as a “tragic narrative” in which the Holocaust blocks American Jews from grounding their identity in anything but their status as victims and in which American culture “uses” the Holocaust to avoid

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confronting the darker chapters of its own history. Yet, once again, I would claim that both approaches do not so much contradict but complement each other. Alexander’s, of course, has the advantage that it does not need to explain how Holocaust awareness spread from the Jewish community to the culture at large, which is arguably the weakest part of Novick’s argument. But why shouldn’t one assume that the process Novick describes was reciprocal and not one-directional? It seems likely that Holocaust consciousness did not simply spread from American Jews to Gentiles, but arose among them due to the same events of the 1960s—the Eichmann trial and the Six Days’ War, among others—that Novick regards as so important for Jews. Significantly, Alexander refers to these events too, but analyzes their implication for all Americans. This would not invalidate Novick’s argument that American Jews actively promoted the proliferation of Holocaust awareness. After all, it is reasonable to assume that Eichmann, Israel, and what was perceived as a new anti-Semitism affected Jews more than Gentiles. However, it seems equally true that the Holocaust could only become significant for the whole culture because Gentiles were already receptive to it, as the culture at large had been affected by the same events that affected the Jews and challenged the progressive narrative: racial turmoil, political assassinations, and a highly unpopular war. Thus, I would argue, it is when they are taken together that Novick’s and Alexander’s theories provide a convincing explanation of how the extermination of the Jews became the Holocaust. The same is true for the conclusions they draw. Alexander is of course right: The Holocaust has considerably shaped moral consciousness throughout the United States and the rest of the Western world. And Holocaust awareness has served in many ways to correct overtly celebratory accounts of American history by foregrounding the fates of the indigenous population, African Americans, women, and other groups who suffered at the hands of white, male Americans. But Novick is right too when he points out that “[a]part from the Holocaust’s alleged uniqueness, its extremity, which made it so potent a rhetorical weapon, also meant that compared to the Holocaust, anything else looked not so bad” (254–55). As a consequence, references to the Holocaust have frequently proved counterproductive, as they often triggered a discussion of whether comparing the current crisis to the Holocaust was appropriate and distracted attention from the atrocity at stake. Most importantly, the insistence on the Holocaust’s uniqueness and America’s role as liberator has often served the purpose of confirming affirmative accounts of American history. What Alexander neglects is that the Holocaust has also become a means of reconstructing the progressive

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narrative of American exceptionalism after the 1960s, Vietnam, and Watergate. While there are cultural texts that challenge and deconstruct the progressive narrative, most others merely reconfigure it: They rewrite it with regard to the new significance of Hitler and the Holocaust, but hold on to the basic template nevertheless. Most texts that feature Hitler as a character participate in this reconstruction. While there are, especially during the early 1970s, texts that try to replace the progressive with a tragic narrative, the bulk of Hitler Fiction works to reaffirm the progressive narrative. The theories of Alexander and Novick thus also explain the return of representations of Adolf Hitler at the end of the 1960s. For U.S. culture, Hitler and the Holocaust have to a considerable degree become two sides of the same coin. Not only are they surrounded by a similar discourse of inexplicability, they are also metonymically connected as cause and effect, as perpetrator and crime. Thus, the 1970s witnessed not only the proliferation of the young genre of Holocaust literature and the emergence of the new subject of Holocaust studies, but also the beginnings of the so-called Hitler Wave, a term coined by historian Eberhard Jäckel to describe a new interest in Hitler that ranged from a scholarly focus on his biography to outright fascination with his personality. However, the term “wave” is slightly misleading, as John Lukacs has observed, because the Hitler Wave is a wave without “a trough” (4). As with the Holocaust, interest in Hitler has never abated but has constantly grown since the late 1960s. Most importantly, though, Hitler and the Holocaust have been treated in much the same fashion by American culture. Just as the Holocaust has been universalized, Hitler and the Nazis have been “removed [ . . . ] from their historically specific particularities and made into universal figures” (Alexander 37). Accordingly, the texts I analyze in this study habitually strip Hitler and the Nazis of their Germanness. They employ Nazism and Hitler as tropes to negotiate issues unrelated to the history of the Third Reich and thus reconfigure them as timeless representatives of the potential threat of another Holocaust. And this reconfiguration of Hitler and the Nazis affected U.S. culture even earlier than the Americanization of the Holocaust. Whereas the Holocaust first became an issue within the Jewish community during the 1960s, it was not before the late 1970s that Gentile culture was affected by the Holocaust to a comparable degree. This Gentile culture, though, had always been aware of Hitler and the Nazis and thus (re)turned to them earlier in its attempt to make sense of contemporaneous events. As a consequence, Hitler and the Nazis already figure as powerful tropes within U.S. culture by 1968, a year whose significance for the

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genre of Hitler Fiction I discuss at the beginning of the next chapter. Like references to the Holocaust, post-1968 representations of Adolf Hitler perform various contradictory kinds of cultural work: The Hitler trope can be employed for critical as well as celebratory negotiations of American identity and its Nazi other, which Hitler epitomizes. References to and representations of Hitler can have “the effect of widening the circle of ‘perpetrators’” by highlighting the parallels between Hitler and the Nazis on the one hand and “ordinary” Americans on the other (Alexander 38); or they can insist on the essential differences between Hitler and Americans by casting the former as “evil” and the latter as “good.” In fact, for American culture, the discourse on Hitler and the Holocaust is almost invariably a discourse on the concept of “evil.” And the potential of representations of Hitler for self-critique and affirmation usually hinges on rejecting or confirming the belief in the existence of evil “as a distributed entity with an ontological essence of its own” (Delbanco 9). From Ideology to Ontology: The New Rhetoric of Evil “Is it, in any case, useful (as many seem to believe) to talk of a thing called evil—a noun rather than an adjective?” Peter Novick asks in a footnote to The Holocaust in American Life, claiming immediately afterwards that this is a “philosophical (or religious) question we can sidestep” (342). What his careful wording and quick dismissal of the issue imply, though, is that he shares my own position, which I outlined in the introduction: Novick, too, does not believe in “a thing called evil” and seems to fear that the concept obstructs the historical explanation of such events as the Holocaust. I am more interested here, however, in Novick’s distinction between “evil” as noun and “evil” as adjective than in the parallels between our positions.8 If “evil” is conceived as a noun (and thus as a thing), one ascribes to it an ontological essence of its own. It is then said to objectively exist and to manifest itself in very different garbs, be it Satan or be it, as we will see, Hitler. Hence, in this “strong version” as I would like to call it, evil figures as a kind of explanation for phenomena that could have been accounted for differently and even for those that are otherwise said to be inexplicable. Satan does certain things because he is evil. And Hitler, to run ahead of my argument for a moment, is from this perspective not seen as shaped by ideological, cultural, and historical forces, but as someone who committed his crimes because he was evil. The recourse to evil thus replaces historical explanations. This is why Novick, as a historian,

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is so reluctant to accept this position and to regard evil as a noun and hence as an ontological category. What he seems more willing to accept, though, is a second way to talk about evil, a “weak version” in which “evil” is employed as an adjective only. To call somebody or something evil in this sense means to pass a moral judgment. It does not mean to regard evil as an ontological category or as the cause of the behavior or action labeled evil. In both cases, however, this rhetoric charts the world along the binary of “good” and “evil.” Moreover, since it usually rests on the assumption that “evil” can be objectively identified and that this identification is independent of point of view, the rhetoric of evil naturalizes this Manichean worldview. Hence, this rhetoric denies the constructivist insight that “evil” does not really exist, that, as Alexander puts it, “evil is a matter, first and foremost, of representation,” the result of aesthetic and narrative strategies (10). Since the rhetoric of good and evil always carries more or less overtly religious overtones, it has over the last few centuries been much more powerful in the United States than in Europe. The United States was considerably less affected by the Enlightenment process of secularization, which has cast considerable doubt on the validity of such categories as “good” and “evil.” From the first Puritan settlers onwards, whose Millennial Protestantism fostered the division of the world into absolute good and evil, American culture has tended to label external as well as internal others “evil.” With regard to Hitler, this othering, as I have argued above, took various shapes during World War II: Hitler was cast as a maniac, as a gangster, and—in the traditionally religious sense—as an enemy of God. Officially, of course, America’s war against Nazi Germany was a war against an ideological enemy and not against evil. Therefore, administration officials usually avoided the strong version of evil when talking about Hitler and the Nazis. And so did many of the texts featuring Hitler; other texts, however, and especially those that blamed the German “national character” employed the strong notion of evil, a move that appealed to those for whom the vocabulary of good and evil remained meaningful in the traditionally religious sense and to those that favored a simplistic, binary worldview. At the same time, propaganda texts often staged America’s victory, indicating that the evil Hitler represented would ultimately be overcome by the good the United States embodied. If propaganda thus painted an ambivalent picture of Nazi evil, using strong and weak versions of the concept simultaneously, the immediate postwar period clearly favored the weak notion. As Germany developed from enemy to ally, at least all official rhetorical insistence on the generic

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evil of Germans disappeared. In its stead, the concept of totalitarianism was rediscovered and quickly spread throughout the culture. The theory of totalitarianism not only explained why Germany was now an ally and the Soviet Union the enemy. The theory also held that Germans were not evil by nature but that the structures of fascist society imposed on them had produced behavior that could and should be called evil. Under the framework of the progressive narrative, Hitler and Nazism were thus emplotted and represented as what Novick calls “human evil” (85) and what Alexander calls “social evil” (12). Nazism was kept historically situated, its origins were “linked to specific events in the interwar period and to particular organizations and actors within it,” and its effects on people were explained (Alexander 16). It is in this context that Hannah Arendt famously wrote of Adolf Eichmann as the incarnation of “the banality of evil” (287). For Arendt as well as for most other theoreticians of totalitarianism, the focus of interest was not on the Nazi leaders, let alone on Hitler himself, but on the structures of fascist society and on how they corrupted “ordinary” humans. From her perspective, the genocide Eichmann helped to organize is a historical event that can be explained through an analysis of social and historical factors. And one of the reasons why “evil” appears banal to her is that, for her, the concept as such possesses only very limited explanatory power. However, it is not deplete of a certain irony that Arendt develops her theory of banal evil with regard to Adolf Eichmann, since it was his highly mediated trial that marks the beginning of the transformation of the extermination of the Jews into the Holocaust, a development that also causes a shift to an altogether different notion of evil. As the Jewish mass murder is reconfigured as a mythical event, both the degree of evil that Nazism and the Holocaust are said to represent and the function of labeling event and perpetrators of evil change. If the extermination of the Jews as emplotted in the progressive narrative represents “social evil,” the Holocaust, as a challenge to or as a means to reconstruct this narrative, represents what Jeffrey Alexander calls, with reference to Emile Durkheim, “sacred evil.” In addition to the conceptual difference I referred to earlier, “sacred evil” entails a different degree of evilness; it is “set apart from ordinary evil things” because it is more extreme and simply so evil that anything worse is not imaginable (27). Raul Hilberg, for instance, has called the Holocaust “the benchmark, the defining moment in the drama of good and evil,” Michael Berenbaum regards it as “the paradigmatic manifestation of evil” (both qtd. in Novick 197), and Elie Wiesel considers the Holocaust as “an ontological event” (qtd. in Alexander 33).

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For Hilberg, Berenbaum, and Wiesel as well as for large parts of American culture, the Holocaust has become a universal moral reference point in comparison with which other genocides and atrocities are “measured.” At the same time, all three quotations resonate with the notion of the Holocaust’s uniqueness. Moreover, Wiesel’s words hint at the conceptual difference in evil involved in the distinction between “social” and “sacred” evil. Whereas the Jewish genocide as “social evil” could be explained historically, the Holocaust as “sacred evil”—and this is how the Wiesel quotation continues—“transcends history [and] cannot be explained” (qtd. in Alexander 33). Thus, however, asserting the fundamental evil the Holocaust represents becomes a kind of explanation in itself: The Holocaust happened and could happen again, because evil exists. Obviously, this new conceptualization of the Holocaust did not emerge as suddenly as my juxtaposition with the old one suggests. Regarding the Holocaust as the manifestation of an ontological and inexplicable evil only gradually became the dominant way of thinking during the 1960s and 1970s. And, of course, many people in the States and elsewhere still favor historical or sociological explanations of the Holocaust. For them, Eichmann remains the prototype of banal evil, “‘the man in the glass booth,’ an ‘ordinary,’ ‘normal’ man, a functionary or a bureaucrat,” whose biography tells the lesson that a totalitarian society can turn almost everyone into a murderer. And yet, as Marianna Torgovnick stresses in her chapter on “Eichmann’s Ghost” in The War Complex (2005), there exists also another—historically incorrect but nevertheless powerful—image of Eichmann in the culture today, the image of Eichmann as “the Ur-Nazi of our imaginations—‘the second Adolf ’ or ‘Hitler’s right-hand man’” (65). In this version, Eichmann appears as anything but ordinary, he is—the phrases Torgovnick quotes are revealing— like Adolf Hitler and shares with Hitler a kind of evil that is not at all banal, evil that is not only a moral label, but of an ontological kind and thus the ultimate reason for his crimes. As Eichmann figures as a smaller version of Hitler in this account, it does not come as a surprise that this particular narrative has largely focused not on the copy, but on the original, on Hitler himself. In fact, the transition from “social” to “sacred evil” with regard to the Holocaust corresponds to a shift of interest from Eichmann to Hitler. Just as the conceptualization of the Holocaust as the most extreme manifestation of evil gains strength, so does the analogous one of Adolf Hitler as the epitome of evil. For large parts of American culture today, Hitler’s evil has been completely naturalized. In fact, those who believe in ontological evil frequently refer to Hitler to argue their point.9 The reason for these constant references, I believe, is that drawing on Hitler as the established personification

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of evil seems to allow giving concrete meaning to the rather vague concept of evil. It is out of question, this reasoning implies, that Hitler represents evil. And it is for this reason that comparisons, analogies, and associations between Hitler and other figures work to cast these other figures as evil. However, it is often far from clear what Hitler actually represents, as the meaning the figure carries is constantly (re)negotiated by all sorts of American cultural texts. Most often—and this is what happened already in World War II propaganda—Hitler is simply made to embody everything that the texts claim the United States is not. He is thus employed to define American values by explicitly negating them: If Hitler and what he represents is evil by nature, then the United States must be good by nature. To claim that Hitler is evil, as U.S. culture has overwhelmingly done ever since the 1970s, means to essentialize his evilness and to return to the strong notion of evil that already permeated parts of wartime propaganda. And whereas the Cold War theory of totalitarianism held that behavior that could be labeled evil is the result of ideology, historical moment, and social surrounding, conceiving of Hitler as the manifestation of ontological evil turns cause and effect around. Hitler’s evil nature now figures as the origin of totalitarian society and its horrible crimes. What counts is therefore who or what Hitler is, since this is thought to determine what he believes and does. Accordingly, in post-1968 Hitler Fiction, the notion of evil gradually emerges as the dominant explanation for Hitler’s character and deeds. While postmodernist texts of the early 1970s still reject the concept, most novels written since the 1980s—and this I believe also goes for U.S. culture at large, which shapes and is shaped by these texts—subscribe, without ever questioning it, to the idea that Hitler is of an ontological evil. On the whole, therefore, Hitler Fiction works to bring about and mirrors what Walter Benn Michaels has recently called “the replacement of the discourse of ideology by the discourse of ontology” (177).10 It may appear odd at first that I situate the essentialist discourse on Hitler’s evil in the context of Michaels’s The Shape of the Signifier (2004). The brunt of his argument, after all, is directed against the distinctly antiessentialist identity politics of the New Left, which, according to Michaels, “can hardly function as the basis for a critique of economic inequality,” because it treats class as an identity (157). However, Michaels takes on not only antiessentialist concepts of identity but essentialist ones as well. For him, the preoccupation with identity results from the shift from ideology to ontology, which “replace[s] the differences between what people think (ideology) and the differences between what people own (class) with the differences between what people are (identity)” (24).

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He locates the origins of this shift in the advent of postmodernist and poststructuralist theory and its “privileging of the subject position” in the late 1960s and sees its ultimate victory in the end of the Cold War, which, as the loudly proclaimed “end of history,” allegedly made ideological struggle obsolete (12, 19). This shift from what people believe to what people (believe they) are, he argues, creates “difference without contradiction” (45). Whereas “[i]deological conflicts are universal” and thus “involve disagreement” (31), subject positions, Michaels claims, are like languages: One is not better than the other; and therefore different subject positions do not necessarily lead to disagreement. The same applies, he holds, to different cultures, which constitute the most important “site of difference” in the postideological age (26). Reading the physical otherness of the alien in some of Octavia Butler’s novels as a staging of cultural difference as a biological one, Michaels holds that it does not matter whether difference is understood “as essentially physical or essentially cultural” (35). Where right-wing essentialism and left-wing antiessentialism disagree is only “the question of whether your position can be changed [ . . . ] whether subject positions are fixed and stable [essentialism] or mobile and unstable [antiessentialism]” (41). He sees both positions united, however, by an “unacknowledged appeal to human nature” and “a consensus about the desirability of maintaining difference” (15, 35). Radical and provocative as it is, I find Michaels’s argument very convincing and highly enlightening. It provides both a conceptual framework and a vocabulary that I will draw on in this study. My only major criticism is that Michaels overemphasizes the notion of difference without disagreement. He does so for strategic reasons, as this enables him to formulate his harsh critique of how talking of class as an identity has become “the mechanism through which the inequality between labor and capital is imagined out of existence” (157). While Michaels makes a strong point here, I would suggest that subject positions are often conceived of as hierarchical, especially by essentialists. Conceiving of two positions as “good” and “evil” in particular immediately implies a hierarchic order. Michaels implicitly acknowledges this when he dedicates the first part of his coda to the war on terrorism. In America today, the enemy, he writes, “can no longer be ideological or national. The enemy now must be understood as a kind of criminal, as someone who represents a threat not to a political system or a nation but to the law” (171). And he continues: “That’s what makes the terrorist an ‘evildoer’ [who] does what he does because it’s wrong” (172). Hence, taking into account how the concept of evil has figured in American culture over the last few decades confirms Michaels’s argument. After all, he locates the origins of the shift to ontology in the late 1960s at exactly the

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historical moment when the Holocaust, Nazism, and Hitler were no longer conceived in ideological terms exclusively, but were increasingly regarded as manifestations of evil, and thus as a matter of ontology as Michaels understands it. Over the last decades, this take on evil has steadily proliferated and reentered U.S. political rhetoric. By the 1980s, for example, Ronald Reagan imagined world politics already “as a titanic struggle between the forces of good and an empire of evil” (Rogin xv). In his speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in March 1983, he famously employed the rhetoric of evil to explain the Cold War: “[L]et us be aware that, while [the Soviet leaders] preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples in the world, they are the focus of evil in the modern world” (“Speech”). While Reagan’s argument draws on the established ideological opposition between individual and state and acknowledges the universalist claim of communist ideology to spread over the whole world one day, he also brings the ontological concept of evil to bear on the issue. What Reagan implies is that communism is a manifestation of evil, and that the Soviet leaders preach this belief system because they are evil. Without making it all too explicit, then, Reagan moves from ideology to ontology, not discarding with the former on the way, but conceiving of it as an effect of the latter. Accordingly, to say that the focus on who people are replaces the focus on what they believe does not imply that these beliefs do not matter anymore. However, they are now conceived of as conditioned by the subject position, they can be explained by “a description of who you are” (Michaels 10). An ideological belief system such as communism in Reagan’s speech is thus turned into an effect; it is an outward sign of an inner nature. You are a communist because you are evil. However, if you are evil you do not necessarily become a communist; you could also turn out a Nazi. And in fact, in the eyes of the public, Nazism has even more than communism long lost its status as an ideology and has been transformed into an ahistorical manifestation of evil. Thus, speaking almost twenty years after Reagan and more than a decade after the end of the Cold War, President George W. Bush could so influentially call Iran, Iraq, and North Korea “an axis of evil” (Bush), coining a term that resonates with references to the Axis powers of World War II. While it downplays what divides those regimes in terms of politics and ideology from each other but also from Nazi Germany, Bush’s phrase associates them through their ontological position as evil (from a U.S. position, of course) and casts them as new manifestations of the evil enemy the United States fought and overcame during World War II.

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This rhetoric, which disqualifies America’s enemies by labeling them evil and justifies America’s own politics by projecting them as effected by Americans’ “natural” goodness, only makes sense when good and evil are understood in essentialist terms. In fact, as my interpretations of Hitler Fiction in the next chapters show, the way “evil” is conceptualized, how the concept as such is challenged or confirmed, is closely related to whether the Hitler trope is used for critiquing American history, culture, and politics or for affirming celebratory accounts. Texts that cast Hitler and the Nazis as evil by nature usually insist on an essential and unchangeable difference between Hitler and Americans. As they tell of the struggle between good and evil, these narratives often openly work to reconstruct the progressive narrative of American exceptionalism. By contrast, texts that reject essentialist notions of good and evil frequently challenge the progressive narrative and employ the Hitler trope to undermine positive constructions of American identity. Since the idea that somebody is evil hinges on representation, these two groups of Hitler Fiction do not only differ in how they map the relation between (American) self and (Nazi) other, but also differ considerably in their aesthetics. What both groups of texts have in common, though, is that they belong to the genre of alternate history. These three elements—genre, self-other relation, and aesthetics—are the subject of Chapter 2.

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Chapter 2

“Keeping the Monster Alive”: The Cultural Work of Hitler Fiction It is of course impossible to determine the exact moment when Hitler entered the American cultural imaginary as a trope apt to negotiate issues unrelated to the Third Reich. By 1968, though, parts of the culture began to self-consciously interrogate how the figure was faring in the United States. This is perhaps most evident in Mel Brooks’s film The Producers, a comedy about two Broadway producers who stage a musical called Springtime for Hitler. They hope that the show will fail, because this promises greater financial gains, and are shocked when it proves a huge success with an audience that takes it to be a satire. Casting Hitler as a rather harmless, ridiculously bad singer, The Producers can be read as an early attempt at demystifying the Hitler of the cultural imaginary and at challenging the aura of evil incarnate that was increasingly surrounding him. If Brooks’s movie parodies American culture’s growing fascination with the figure of Hitler, the same goes for Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), the text that like no other engages American culture’s obsession with Hitler, also refers back to 1968. As the reader learns on the second page of the novel, DeLillo’s narrator, Jack Gladney, “invented Hitler Studies in North America in March of 1968.” That Gladney created his field in spring—on “a cold bright day with intermittent winds out of the east”—marks the open intertextual relationship to Brooks’s The Producers and the musical Springtime for Hitler that his protagonists stage; that 1968 was the year when “Hitler’s life and work” could become the subject for “a whole department” confirms my argument about the importance of the date (4).

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Significantly, 1968 also witnessed the publication of Ted White’s and Dave van Arnam’s Sideslip, a science-fiction novel that marks a further step in the literary use of Hitler as a trope. Sideslip is about a private investigator, Ronald Archer, who is miraculously transported from his 1968 New York reality to a parallel world. In this other 1968 New York, many things are very different, because, as Archer soon learns, this world was conquered by aliens in 1938. These aliens, called “The Angels,” have installed puppet governments everywhere and prevented the outbreak of World War II, because conflicts among their human laborers would interfere with their exploitation of the planet. One of the effects of this changed course of history is that Hitler and some other Nazis now live in New York, where Archer meets them. Sideslip employs the Hitler, and more generally the Nazi, trope in a fashion that anticipates those texts I will close-read later. The narrative defines Archer’s, as it suggests, typically American belief in democracy and individualism primarily through his opposition to “that magnificent villain,” Adolf Hitler (103). Accordingly, the novel ends with Archer helping the Angels foil Hitler’s revolutionary plans. At the same time, Sideslip acknowledges certain parallels between Hitler’s anti-Semitism and American racism, as the Nazis have a moderate powerbase in “the southern United States” (45). However, for Sideslip, Hitler and the Nazis are not yet as important as they are for many texts written only a few years later. The dominant trope the novel employs to negotiate questions of colonization, democratization and independence (which the aliens eventually grant Earth), and the United States’ role in such a changing world is the trope of the alien.1 Set in a parallel world where history took a different course, Sideslip is situated at the borderline between the genres of science fiction and “alternate history.” “Alternate history” is the now-agreed-on designation for narratives that explore what-if scenarios, for texts that are set in worlds where the Nazis won World War II or the Reformation failed.2 Alternate histories revolving around Hitler have taken Joseph Heywood’s demand to “[keep] the monster alive” (568), which I discussed in my introduction, almost literally. Placing Hitler (or his fictitious offspring) in the White House, on Mars, or in Guantanamo, casting him as the powerful leader of a victorious Third Reich or as a New York science-fiction writer, these narratives have created a broad spectrum of alternate Hitlers. In fact, the vast majority of post-1968 Hitler Fiction belongs to the genre of alternate history.3 Accordingly, I map out the basic parameters of the genre in the first section of this chapter. While I am only concerned with texts that feature Hitler as a character, and my observations will remain restricted to this

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subgenre of alternate history, I suspect that my findings are true for most alternate histories, if only because a different outcome of World War II is the genre’s most common plotline. Positioning the genre at the intersections of what Ansgar Nünning has identified as the realist and the revisionist historical novel, on the one hand, and dystopian and utopian fiction, on the other, I identify two types of alternate histories that perform markedly different kinds of cultural work. Yet, the cultural functions of Hitler Fiction hinge not on genre alone but also on how the texts project the relation between the American self and its Nazi other. I therefore develop a short typology of relevant self-other relations in the second section of this chapter. In the last section, then, Janice Radway’s analysis of popular romances and the way they are read serves as a point of departure for my argument that most alternate histories are realist texts, whose cultural work depends on them being read realistically. Between Affirmation and Revision: The Alternate History Novel In academic writing on the genre of alternate history, there is a fascinating discrepancy between European and American scholars, which might be indicative of diverging interests and traditions that inform literary criticism on both sides of the Atlantic. Unwilling to take products of popular culture seriously, European scholars have so far mostly ignored the vast body of popular alternate histories and focused on a small number of complex and highly self-reflexive narratives. Elisabeth Wesseling, for example, defines alternate histories as texts that “[merge] historical materials and utopian fantasies about alternate worlds” (100). While this definition comes fairly close to the one I will provide later on, she then goes on to employ the term as an alternative to Linda Hutcheon’s coinage “historiographic metafiction” (Hutcheon 5). As a consequence, Wesseling focuses on Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) or Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) and ignores a large number of texts I would include in the genre. In similar fashion, Christoph Rodiek accepts as alternate histories only works of “high literature.” In his opinion, science-fiction texts set in alternate worlds—“‘alternate time stream novel[s],’” as he calls them—do not qualify as alternate history, because they create the alternative world merely as a space of evasion (“Potentielle Historie” 49). Ironically, though, these—alleged—science-fiction novels are those texts that American critics concerned with alternate history have so far focused on. In the United States, it is still common to regard alternate history at best as “a subgenre of the genre of science fiction” (Hellekson 3). Consequently, American critics have so far rarely considered

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the possibility that alternate histories might exist outside the genre of science fiction, let alone that alternate history might best be regarded as a genre of its own.4 Recently, Hilary Dannenberg has synthesized the two positions to a considerable degree. Dannenberg convincingly challenges the strict separation between “high” and “low” culture as well as the divide between postmodernist historiographic metafiction and “the history alteration narratives of science fiction” (223). She suggests that “a significant process of ontological pluralization occurs in science fiction before the postmodernist period,” and that science fiction texts about multiple worlds “[pre-empt] the thrust of historiographic metafiction” (222, 223). And yet, by arguing along this line, Dannenberg implicitly maintains that alternate histories are science-fiction texts, that alternate history is in fact a “subgenre,” as Hellekson puts it, of science fiction. There are undoubtedly many alternate histories such as Sideslip that can appropriately be classified as science fiction because they revolve around time-travel and parallel worlds and use science as a trope to negotiate social issues. Preoccupied with causality, time, and the possible existence of multiple worlds, these alternate histories indeed share many characteristics with postmodernist historiographic metafiction, as Dannenberg suggests. However, the majority of alternate histories do not create multiple worlds, but only one. Moreover, these texts are less interested in how this alternate world came about than in how people live in the alternate reality. These single-world alternate histories do not employ science as their master trope, but history. Whereas science fiction develops visions of the future and draws on technological tropes to negotiate contemporaneous concerns, alternate history negotiates these issues by means of imagining a changed past. Like science fiction but in a different fashion, the genre of alternate history is “inherently presentist”: The genre “explores the past less for its own sake than to utilize it instrumentally to comment upon the state of the contemporary world” (Gavriel Rosenfeld 10).5 Accordingly, I would like to suggest that alternate history should be regarded as a genre of its own whose various forms and functions are best understood when compared with the different forms of contemporary historical fiction. Moreover, alternate history’s tendency to develop dystopian and utopian visions needs to be taken into account. By dystopian and utopian visions I mean the genre’s inclination to present alternate courses of history that are significantly better or worse than what happened in the “real” world—an inclination particularly evident in those texts that manipulate the course and outcome of World War II or Hitler’s biography. By different forms of historical fiction, I refer to

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the five types of the contemporary historical novel that Ansgar Nünning defines in his Von historischer Fiktion zu historiographischer Metafiktion (1994). Nünning’s monograph analyses late twentieth-century British fiction with a historical bent. He employs five parameters designed to cover all formal and thematic aspects of the contemporary historical novel (I: 219–55). These parameters take into account (1) the different frames of reference a novel can have; (2) the importance and interplay of different levels of narration; (3) the organization of time in the narrative as well as the time the novel focuses on; (4) the narrative’s treatment of commonly agreed upon historical facts; and (5) the various cultural functions a historical novel can perform.6 Applying these parameters to a corpus of more than 250 post-1950 British novels, Nünning then identifies five different ideal types of contemporary historical fiction: (1) the documentary historical novel, (2) the realist historical novel, (3) the revisionist historical novel, (4) the metahistorical novel, (5) and historiographic metafiction (I: 256–90). The documentary historical novel (259–62) creates the illusion of authenticity and objectivity in its representation of history. Covertly narrated, its focus is exclusively on the past and on the narrated story, which is presented in coherent and often teleological fashion. The stories told are not invented but can be documented by factual evidence. This type of fiction never contradicts the established findings of historiography and avoids all anachronisms. Nünning names J. G. Ballard’s The Empire of the Sun (1984) and Thomas Kenneally’s Schindler’s Ark (1982) as prominent examples and argues that these novels perform primarily didactic functions. The realist historical novel (262–67) shifts the focus from factual to invented events. It subscribes to established historical knowledge and employs this documented past as a background to its fictional stories. Told in the fashion of nineteenth-century realism, this type continues the tradition of historical fiction inaugurated by Sir Walter Scott. The focus is on the plot in the past and not on the process of narration or the evaluation of past events through an overt narrator. The temporal order of events is hardly ever manipulated, and the story is presented coherently and centers on psychologically developed characters. Nünning ascribes a primarily hedonistic function to this type of historical fiction and suggests that these texts are primarily read for entertainment. While this is obviously accurate, I will argue below that realist historical novels—the bulk of historical fiction still written today—also tend to stabilize collective, often national, identities. While these first two types of historical fiction are closely related because they confirm established narratives about the past, the revisionist

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historical novel (268–76) challenges traditional accounts in two ways. Attacking established interpretations of history, it provides counternarratives and relates the stories of previously excluded groups such as women or ethnic minorities. At the same time, revisionist historical novels often challenge the established techniques of relating history. Since they try to expose how linear narratives exclude the “losers of history,” they present their alternative versions in an incoherent and contradictory manner, and they highlight their own fictionality much more than the first two types. While not predominantly metafictional, they begin to shift the focus from the diegetic level to the level of narration and thus from the past to the present. According to Nünning, this category includes novels such as Rose Tremain’s Restoration (1989) and D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel (1981). Whereas Nünning sees only marginal differences between the first three types of historical fiction, he emphasizes that the metahistorical novel (276–81) differs significantly from these three types. Predominantly self-referential, it foregrounds its own fictionality through a broad array of intertextual references to other, primarily fictional, texts. It shifts the focus from the characters to the narrator, and, in similar fashion, from history to historiography. Unlike the first three types, it does not confirm or challenge traditional historical accounts but critically negotiates the conventions, methods, and techniques of historiography. As they emphasize that history is always a construction, texts such as Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor (1985) and Graham Swift’s Shuttlecock (1981) self-consciously address the role of historical accounts for the construction of personal and collective identities. Nünning’s fifth type, historiographic metafiction (282–91), corresponds in all important aspects to the metahistorical novel but takes things even further. Novels like Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) focus even more on the narrator and his or her reflections on the ontological status of historiography, different theories of history, and the relationship between historiography and literature. In addition, they constantly expose their own fictionality and, highlighting that they do not refer to the “real,” but only to other texts, their own textuality. As a predominantly discursive subgenre of the historical novel, Nünning argues, they fulfill a didactic function because they confront readers with epistemological and metahistoriographical questions. Nünning’s taxonomy has immense heuristic value for the analysis of contemporary historical fiction, especially since it moves the discussion of postmodern variants of the historical novel beyond the simple binary of historiographic metafiction on the one side and realist novels on

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the other. Instead, Nünning emphasizes that the five types cannot be strictly separated from one another and that they are best imagined as a continuum that stretches between the poles of the documentary historical novel on the one side and historiographic metafiction on the other (257). What concerns me most here is the fact that Nünning himself positions alternate histories on this continuum. He defines them as a subgenre of the revisionist historical novel (274). Like Wesseling, he regards alternate history as “uchronian fantasy,” as texts that “locate utopia in history, by imagining an apocryphal course of events, which clearly did not really take place, but which might have taken place” (Wesseling 102; qtd. in Nünning I: 273). Nünning thus ascribes considerable critical potential to alternate histories, arguing that their utopian visions put into a new perspective the course history really took. Wesseling, however, as I have already explained, classifies as alternate histories novels that Nünning would call metahistorical or historiographic metafiction. Moreover, visions of a Nazi victory in World War II or of Hitler ruling from the White House are not utopian, but dystopian. The same goes even for Kingsley Amis’s The Alteration (1976), the only example Nünning mentions. The Alteration imagines a world where the Reformation and the process of secularization it triggered did not take place and where the Catholic church therefore can have a little boy castrated to preserve his voice to sing for the glory of God. Any discussion of the genre of alternate history needs to take this dystopian dimension into account. In my opinion, alternate history should be regarded as a genre of its own, a genre that exists at the intersections of historical fiction and dystopian literature. Hence, Nünning’s wholesale classification of alternate history as revisionist historical fiction needs to be replaced by a taxonomy that does justice to the various types of alternate history and their cultural functions. What I would like to suggest is that there are two different types of alternate histories revolving around Hitler and the Nazis whose form and function correspond to those of Nünning’s realist historical and revisionist historical novel, respectively. These texts tend to either affirm or revise established national narratives. In formal terms, most alternate histories are the exact equivalent of Nünning’s realist historical novel and treat the alternate past or the alternate present in much the same fashion as the realist historical novel treats the “real” past. Both are usually covertly narrated; and for both, action rather than reflection or interpretation is most important. Their plots revolve around psychologically developed characters and are presented in linear, coherent fashion. And just as the realist historical novel, most alternate histories do not challenge but confirm established historical knowledge. Alternate histories are only recognized as offering alternative

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accounts if their readers understand where the texts depart from the historical facts: They require “a general knowledge of actual history” (Wesseling 105). This “cultural knowledge,” as Rodiek calls it, is implicitly represented in the alternate history through the fact that readers notice how the narrative rewrites and manipulates established facts (Erfundene Vergangenheit 28). What these alternate histories generally do not challenge, however, are celebratory accounts of America’s victory over Hitler and the Nazis in World War II. Instead, alternate histories almost always manipulate the past in such a way that the course history actually took, namely, toward U.S. global dominance, is implicitly presented as the best possible development. William Overgard’s The Divide (1980) is typical in this respect. In this novel, a few remaining American resistance fighters engage in a heroic but hopeless struggle against cruel and merciless Nazis who have occupied America. The Divide’s dystopian vision contrasts pointedly with historical truth. What the novel thus implies is that everything the United States may have done in the real world (to African Americans or native Americans) pales in comparison with the genocides and atrocities the Nazis committed during World War II and continue to commit in the alternate world. The Divide and most other alternate histories are organized along a strict binary: The texts usually cast the Americans as “good” by nature and Hitler and his Nazi helpers as “evil.” As the novels thus insist on the essential difference between Americans and Hitler and naturalize this difference, they relate a national narrative that downplays internal divisions and counters challenges to American exceptionalism. Even though they stage a (temporary) Nazi victory, then, these texts continue to celebrate the superiority of what they perceive and simultaneously construct as “natural” American values. Through the contrast between the dystopian fictional worlds and the reality of U.S. global hegemony to which the reader returns whenever he closes the book, the course history has really taken is recast as utopian. Accordingly, these alternate histories are not only the formal but also the functional equivalent of realist historical novels such as Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War (1971) and War and Remembrance (1978). Alternate history and the realist historical novel both employ Nazism and the Holocaust to reaffirm positive notions of American identity; both can be seen as attempts to reconstruct the progressive narrative. But whereas historical novels like Wouk’s celebrate benevolent American hegemony explicitly, Nazi alternate histories do it implicitly, but arguably even more powerfully: They play on the reader’s anxiety that things might have happened otherwise. In a certain sense, then, all alternate histories of this kind are what Karen Hellekson has called “anti-alternate histories.”

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Hellekson coins this term when discussing the novels of Poul Anderson. In Anderson’s stories, police officers travel back in time to make sure that history is not changed but takes the right course. For Anderson, Hellekson argues, “there is a right history and a wrong history; he wishes to lay out and enforce the right path” (97). In my opinion, however, this is equally true of all alternate histories that contrast a dystopian diegetic world with what they construct as the reader’s utopian reality. Since they aim to legitimize the status quo and confirm established national narratives of U.S. exceptionalism, I will call this type of alternate histories “affirmative alternate history.” There are, however, alternate history novels that use the dystopian vision of a Nazi victory in order to challenge such affirmative identity constructions. These texts usually highlight the parallels between the Nazis in the alternate world and the Americans in the real world, implying that what the Americans did in reality is not (much) better than what the Nazis do in the alternate world. As these novels thus question and critique traditional celebratory accounts of America’s role during and after World War II, their cultural work corresponds to that of Nünning’s revisionist historical novels. Therefore I will from now on refer to this type of alternate history as “revisionist alternate history.” As far as literary form is concerned, though, revisionist alternate histories differ from revisionist historical novels. The alternate histories in question rarely present their plots in fragmented or incoherent manner, and they are generally much more concerned with plot than revisionist historical novels are. Unlike revisionist historical novels, they are usually not narrated by a self-reflexive narrator. In most cases, their revisionist work mainly depends on plot, on storylines that implicitly or explicitly question notions of American exceptionalism by likening the Nazi’s behavior to that of Americans. Some revisionist alternate histories, however, achieve an effect similar to what the narrators of revisionist historical novels accomplish by featuring a novel-within-the-novel that the characters read and discuss. This novel-within-the-novel highlights alternate history’s generic peculiarities and its ontological status as fiction, making the text more self-reflexive and moving it toward the pole of historiographic metafiction on Nünning’s continuum. Moreover, the framed story often presents a world that is closer to the real world of the reader than the dystopian world he is reading about but is not congruent with it. Instead, the world of the novel-within-the-novel tends to be utopian. It is better than both the world of the real reader and of the characters who read the novel. Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1961), arguably the most famous American alternate history, is such a text that employs the device

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of the novel-within-the-novel for revisionist purposes. The Man in the High Castle is set in an America that has been conquered and portioned up by the Nazis and the Japanese. In this dystopian world, all characters read an alternate history novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which tells of a world where the Allies won the war. In the world of The Grasshopper, the United States has played a truly benevolent role in postwar history. It has successfully fought famine in Africa and brought education to all underprivileged areas of the world. This “utopia within [the] dystopia,” as Paul Alkon has called it (74), critiques the role the United States has played in real postwar history and highlights the missed opportunities to create a better world after 1945. The ending of The Man in the High Castle takes this critique a step further. In the novel’s final scene, Julia, one of its central characters, questions the Chinese oracle I Ching about The Grasshopper. The oracle tells Julia that even within the fictional world of The Man in the High Castle, the Allies have won World War II. However, since the United States has not used the influence thus gained to improve life for the people in Africa and Asia, the novel’s characters experience the world as if the Nazis had won. The fiction of a Nazi genocide in Africa in the alternate world thus becomes a trope for the neglect of Africa by the United States in our world. What alternate histories such as The Man in the High Castle stage, then, is the collapse of the progressive narrative. They challenge historical accounts that cast the United States as the benevolent power that guarantees the global progress of civilization and democracy. Unlike the bulk of alternate histories, which confirms celebratory accounts, texts like Dick’s foreground and expose the role of narrative in our understanding of history, and they provide counternarratives that challenge traditional accounts as biased and too celebratory. Such texts, however, are fairly rare. My close-readings in the following chapters, however, are devoted not only to alternate histories “proper” but also to two special types of alternate history: secret histories and future histories.7 Secret histories describe “alternate pasts that are never discovered because they do not end up changing the historical record” (Gavriel Rosenfeld 399). They relate, for example, stories in which the Allies win the war, but Hitler secretly escapes from the bunker and, unsuccessfully, plots his return, or stories in which Hitler secretly fathers a child who then tries to seize power. The general course of history, though, remains unaffected by these actions and plots. Future histories offer dystopian or utopian perspectives for the immediate present of the reader from the perspective of the past. During the later stages of World War II, as we saw in the last chapter, several future histories negotiated questions of postwar world order and provided readers with utopian visions of Hitler being brought to justice.

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Michael Young’s The Trial of Adolf Hitler (1944), for example, (correctly) anticipated the end of World War II and (incorrectly) Adolf Hitler being tried by an international court. Ultimately, it is impossible and unnecessary to distinguish exactly between secret histories, future histories, and alternate histories proper, because the three types tend to blend into each other. The threshold between alternate history and secret history frequently lies in the eye of the beholder, as the notion of the “historical record” is a rather vague one. In similar fashion, future histories become “retroactive alternate histories once the time period they depict is no longer in the future” (Gavriel Rosenfeld 399), and their predictions remain unfulfilled. For the 1944 reader, Young’s The Trial of Adolf Hitler is a future history; for the 1946 reader it is an alternate history. If there is a difference between secret and future histories on the one hand and alternate histories proper on the other, then it is that secret and future histories can deploy the Hitler trope more freely, as they are not bound to imagine an alternative history of World War II. Instead, they can transport Hitler virtually everywhere and interpolate him in contemporary or future history. No matter, however, where exactly alternate, secret, and future histories place the character Hitler and his Nazi helpers, their dystopian and utopian visions and the revisionist or affirmative cultural work they perform depend on putting to work specific relations between self and other, between Americans, on the one hand, and Hitler and the Nazis, on the other. Self-Critique, Projection, Othering: A Typology of Self-Other Relations in Hitler Fiction Obviously, images of the other, no matter if this other is conceived in social, racial, national, political, or cultural terms, are hardly ever accurate representations, but stereotypical and distorted ones. Imagology, anthropology, and postcolonial theory agree that such images perform important functions for the individual, group, or culture that has created them: “[The] depiction of the cultural other is co-determined by, and comments on, the image of the cultural self ” (Schmundt-Thomas 15).8 American culture abounds with such stereotypical representations of Germans or, more specifically, of Nazis. Since Paul Monaco suggested in 1986 that “the historical Germany of the Third Reich [ . . . ] has, in fact, been functioning as a ‘significant other’ in American culture” (411), numerous scholars have confirmed this claim and traced stereotypes of Germans in all kinds of American cultural contexts. Invariably, these scholars have heeded Peter Freese’s suggestion that “the analysis of images

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we have of ‘others’ must not be concerned with their degree of factual appropriateness but with the more pertinent question of why they are developed at all and which psychic needs they are meant to serve” (95). However, they disagree on the “question of why.” Paul Monaco’s observation, for example, that the proliferation of images of Weimar and Nazi Germany in 1970s and 1980s American culture “reflect[s] certain self-fears which are being projected onto the ‘other’” has led to some controversy concerning the question whether this collective process of projection is ultimately self-critical or evasive (404). While Lothar Bredella has argued that “writers and directors use the Nazi period to criticize similar tendencies in the United States and encourage American readers and viewers to acknowledge in themselves what they might project into the evil Nazi” (51), Beverly Crawford and James Martel hold that projection usually works to “permit Americans to avoid confronting their own cultural conflicts” (306). From a diachronic perspective and focusing on images of Germans in general and not so much on images of Nazis, Peter Freese has suggested that the various stereotypes of Germans that U.S. culture has produced since the early nineteenth century are usually “employed for the purpose of boundary-making” (111), for defining what is perceived as typically American through the explicit contrast with what is perceived as typically German. The studies by Freese, Bredella, Crawford and Martel, Monaco, and others have added immensely to our understanding of the function of images of Germans and Nazis for American culture.9 At the same time, though, these critics have left several important questions unanswered, as they have mostly based their observations on a few texts or films only, or considered merely one function that the stereotypes can perform. But how does what Monaco calls “projection” relate to what Freese calls “boundary-making”? Are these functions interrelated or mutually exclusive? When is projection evasive, and when does it have a self-critical thrust? Why is there such an “abrupt increase in the presence of Nazi-related imagery in American culture at the end of the 1960s,” as Monaco observes? And is his claim accurate that “the term Nazi and German are commonly used interchangeably” (407)? It is fairly easy to answer the last two questions on the basis of my argument in the previous chapter. While the term “German” is always to some degree metonymically linked to Nazism and the Holocaust, it is an exaggeration that “German” is generally used as a synonym for “Nazi.” There are of course cultural texts that try to erase all distinctions between the two, implying that Nazism is the logical outcome of the German national character. However, as I argued in Chapter 1, even wartime

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propaganda generally preserved the distinction between the “good” and the “bad” German as the dichotomy of the “evil Nazi” and the “ordinary German”—and the same is true for most post-1945 cultural texts. Moreover, the reason for the proliferation of Nazi imagery from the end of the 1960s onwards is quite obvious. Monaco himself implicitly acknowledges this when he states that these images were produced by a society “caught up in the relative disarray of anti-war protest and youth culture demands for changes in values” (403). What Monaco describes here is what I have called the challenges to the progressive narrative, which are responsible for American culture’s (re)turn to Hitler, the Holocaust, and World War II, a move that understandably led to an immense increase in Nazi imagery. The question how projection and boundary-making relate is more difficult to answer. As Georg Schmundt-Thomas argues in his unpublished dissertation “America’s Germany: National Self and Cultural Other after World War II,” “the repressed elements of the cultural self resurface in the description of the cultural other” (22). Hence, every image of the other always contains an element of projection. At the same time, however, he holds that these images nevertheless can perform very different kinds of cultural work, depending on how exactly the self relates to the other. Accordingly, Monaco’s “projection” and Freese’s “boundary-making” are located on different levels of self-other relations: The former refers to the process always at work in imagining the other; the latter describes one specific self-other relation. Drawing on imagological and anthropological research, Schmundt-Thomas defines four possible interrelationships: First, a positive self-conception can find its expression in a favorable depiction of the “other”; thus, for instance, when American GIs commented on the modernity and cleanliness of Germany and the industry of its inhabitants, pointing out that the country was “like America,” they commented favorably on their own country as well as the cultural other. [ . . . ] Second, we have a positive self-conception that is contrasted with an unfavorable depiction of the “other”; a good example is the eternal fight of the American land of light against the evil empire, be it imperial England, popish Europe, Nazi Germany, or Soviet Russia. [ . . . ] Third, an unfavorable depiction of the “other” correlates with a critical depiction of the self and thus functions as self-critique. The threat of the self to deteriorate and to become like the other is the underlying dynamic of this relationship. [ . . . ] Fourth, a favorable depiction of the “other” can function as selfcritique. [ . . . ] Interestingly enough, we find a prime example of this conception of the cultural other in the depiction of Germany as a utopian counterspace by Black American GIs. (25–26)

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For my purposes here, the first and fourth types of interrelationships, which both entail a positive image of the other, are irrelevant. I am not concerned with representations of Germans, but with representations of Nazis and of Hitler—and there are, unsurprisingly, no favorable American representations of them. As an “unfavorable other,” they are always cast in entirely negative terms and often regarded as incarnations of absolute evil. When “ordinary” Germans figure in Hitler Fiction alongside Hitler and some die-hard Nazis, they are either shown to be Nazis themselves or set in opposition to Hitler. The first constellation casts Nazism as an intrinsic trait of the German national character, the second—and more frequent one—maintains the distinction between “good” Germans and “evil” Nazis. In both cases, though, the important other for the negotiation of what Americans represent are not the Germans but Hitler and the Nazis. The two types of self-other relation in Schmundt-Thomas’s matrix that are relevant for an exploration of images of Nazis and Hitler, then, are the second and the third one. When the negative image of the other is set in relation to a positive self-image, it works through contrast to vindicate or (re)create this “positive self-conception”; when it is combined with a negative self-conception it functions as “self-critique,” implying that self and other are similar and share many negative characteristics. The first of these two types of self-other relation—positive self-conception and negative conception of the other—corresponds exactly to what Freese calls “boundary-making.” I will refer to this process as “othering” from now on, because the term “othering” always already implies a negative conception of the other and an insistence that there is an essential difference between self and other. I will, however, adopt SchmundtThomas’s term “self-critique” to refer to the cultural work of the second type of self-other relation, which challenges the notion that there is a difference between self and other and conceives both in negative terms. Self-critique and othering can, of course, overlap in a single text. Sideslip, with which I began this chapter, for example, insists on the crucial difference between what it conceives as American and as fascist values, but simultaneously likens the beliefs of some Americans to Hitler’s by stressing repeatedly that many people in the American South are as racist as Hitler. In general, however, othering is much more important for Sideslip than self-critique: The racists in the South are mentioned a few times only, but the novel’s Yankee protagonist actively fights Hitler throughout. In fact, self-critique and othering are diametrically opposed processes, and they are rarely evenly balanced in a single text. Most narratives put only one of them to work. As I argue in the following chapters, there is a diachronic dimension to the relationship of these two self-other relations. Self-critique and othering

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are the dominant cultural functions of Hitler Fiction at two different historical moments. The former is most prominent during the early 1970s, and the latter has been proliferating ever since the mid-1980s. Obviously, selfcritique and othering can be easily associated with the two types of alternate history novels I have identified above. Affirmative alternate histories other Hitler and the Nazis and insist on the difference between “good” Americans and “evil” Nazis. Revisionist alternate histories deconstruct this binary and suggest similarities rather than differences between self and other. An element of projection, as Schmundt-Thomas correctly emphasizes, is involved in both self-critique and othering: Certain perceived characteristics of the self are projected onto the other culture. However, one important type of self-other relation for the analysis of Hitler Fiction is absent from his typology. “Projection,” I would like to suggest, is the most adequate term for this process and the cultural work it does. By “projection” in this narrow sense, I intend to refer to novels of the late 1970s and early 1980s that deploy the Hitler trope neither for open self-critique nor for the explicit affirmation of a positive self-image through othering, but instead perform these opposite kinds of cultural work implicitly and simultaneously. These texts are usually set in (Nazi) Germany, hardly ever feature any American character, and rarely make explicit reference to the American context. Some of them capitalize on the by then widely spread analogy between Weimar Germany and contemporary America but never spell out their warnings that the United States might turn fascist. Other texts project visions of how the United States should act on Israel, constructing an explicit contrast between the values embodied by Israel and Hitler and implicitly criticizing America for not following Israel’s model. If these novels thus perform self-critique, they are also already engaging in othering. They may not yet overtly set Hitler’s evilness in opposition to American goodness, but they invariably presuppose and insist on his generic evil, anticipating the conceptualization that allows later texts to insist on American moral superiority. Consequently, the years during which projection is the dominant cultural function of Hitler Fiction mark a transitory stage in the genre’s gradual development from open self-critique to explicit othering. And whereas selfcritical Hitler Fiction is usually postmodernist, novels that perform the cultural work of projection and othering are usually realist texts. Realism— Neorealism— Postmodernism Whether the novel in question is an affirmative or revisionist alternate history, whether the text performs the cultural work of self-critique, projection, or othering, post-1968 Hitler Fiction is invariably postmodern

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because it is a product of postmodernity, “a historical period stretching from the 1960s to the present” (Geyh x).10 However, I contend that most Hitler Fiction is not postmodernist insofar as the term is used “as a marker for a particular aesthetic,” an aesthetic characterized by pastiche, fragmentation, intertextuality, irony, self-reflexivity, and metafictionality (Rebein 8). Neither are these texts neorealist, as are the novels of Paul Auster or Tom Wolfe. According to Winfried Fluck, the “new realism” of Wolfe and others “is not primarily concerned, as 19th century realism was, with an attempt to maximize the illusionism of the realistic mode” (“Surface Knowledge” 83).11 Self-consciously going beyond postmodernist writing strategies, neorealist texts do not simply discard postmodernism’s insights into, say, the linguistic constructedness of reality and experience. Their realism is “more or less traditional in its handling of character, reportorial in its depiction of milieu and time, but at the same time self-conscious about language and the limits of mimesis” (Rebein 20). By contrast, as part of a popular fiction tradition that emerged in the nineteenth century and that has been largely, if not almost completely, unaffected by modernism and postmodernism, the bulk of Hitler Fiction still strives “to maximize the illusionism.” Of course, “the forms of verisimilitude that typify [twentieth-century] popular narrative are variable according to the type of story being told: what is plausible in a crime thriller is not so in romantic melodrama and vice-versa” (Palmer 91). The realism of a twentieth-century alternate history differs from that of the detective novel or a love story, and all three, consequently, differ from nineteenth-century realism. But even if what is regarded as “the Real” diverges from genre to genre and even if the genres employ different techniques to create “reality effects” (Barthes), they nevertheless share with each other and with nineteenth-century realism the illusionism done away with by modernist, postmodernist, and neorealist writing. My claim certainly warrants explanation, because alternate histories (as well as secret and future histories), despite some rather obvious realist elements, openly explore counterfactual and thus fictional worlds. Moreover, the genre’s cultural work, I stressed above, depends on its readers being aware of the contrast between the course history really took and the possible routes it could have taken instead. “In the alternate history,” as Hilary Dannenberg has recently put it, “realism and impossibility meet, producing a new hybridization of romance and realist impulses” (219). The romance Dannenberg is referring to here is the romance that existed alongside the realist novel throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the romance that, in Hawthorne’s

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famous definition in the preface to The House of the Seven Gables, allows the writer “a certain latitude, both to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume, had he professed to be writing a Novel” (1). Twentieth-century alternate histories claim exactly this “latitude,” and yet I hold that they are at the same time realist novels. To back up this claim, I would like to refer for a moment to a different romance tradition, to the genre of stories that depict the meeting, romantic courting, and eventual marriage of a woman and a man. What I would like to suggest is that the average reader of alternate histories (whom I take to be a white, Protestant, or Jewish middleclass male) reads them in much the same way as the readers Janice Radway describes in Reading the Romance read romances. Alternate history and the romance, I claim, have much more in common than one might suspect at first. Radway’s fascinating analysis of the romance-reading practices of a small group of white, middle-class women shows that Brian McHale was too optimistic when he wrote that “[e]veryone knows that the conventions of nineteenth-century realism were just that, conventions, and not a transparent window on reality” (220). The readers (and writers) of romances, as Radway describes them—and I assume that goes for the consumers and producers of alternate histories as well—do not know that even realism “does not simply reflect or mirror reality.” They are unaware that the realist text operates on the basis of verisimilitude, offering and confirming “a version of [reality], based on certain assumptions about the nature of the real” (Fluck, “Surface Knowledge” 67). In fact, for the readers Radway interviewed—and again I suspect that this holds true for most readers of popular fiction—all literature is realistic, as they believe in “the capacity of language to describe and designate external reality adequately,” and maintain the illusion that language offers direct access to the realm of the referents, that “language is a transparent window opening out to an already existing world” (191, 189). Radway emphasizes that the texts themselves encourage this idea: “The contemporary romance’s view is dominated by cliché, simple vocabulary, standard syntax, and the most common techniques associated with the nineteenth-century novel” (189). Exactly the same can be said of those alternate histories that correspond to the realist historical novel. They are largely dominated—as the excerpts I will quote in the following chapters show—by a different but equally simple vocabulary and syntax and different clichés, and employ the same well-established techniques to create reality effects. And there is yet another parallel. As Radway shows, the readers of romances accept the depiction of “the exotic, the faraway, or the

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unknown,” because these events, settings, or details are described exactly as the familiar and known: “The success with which the ordinary is typically mimed in the romance thus seems to confer factual status on all of its other verbal assertions” (195). Consequently, the romance readers, although aware that they are indulging in a fantasy, regard “the imaginary world [as] congruent with [their] own and, therefore, dominated by events that might well occur in a life such as [theirs]” (192). Again, the same techniques are at work in many alternate histories where the unfamiliar elements of the alternate world, the different course of history, the unknown political landscape, and sometimes innovative technological equipment are usually described in the same matter-of-fact fashion employed for those elements of the fictional world that the reader knows from his world. Hence, I believe, the readers of alternate histories regard the alternate worlds as entirely possible and imagine that they could have lived in such a world. This is especially true for texts that belong to the subgenre of secret history, as these narratives, while clearly marked as fiction, also play with the notion that the events they depict really happened but are simply not known. Radway highlights that the readers firmly held this belief, although they were at the same time completely aware of the nonrealistic, idealistic dimension of both the story’s characters and plot in the romances they liked best. Radway concludes that what she calls “the ideal romance” (119–56) functions for the readers as a utopian promise of what heterosexual love within the confines of a monogamous marriage might ideally be like. The readers’ own relationships unsurprisingly appear deficient when compared with the ones romances celebrate, but the literary texts assure them that they can potentially find similar happiness in marriage—and in marriage only. And yet, the readers’ own experiences as well as the hardships and disappointments the romantic heroine has to endure prior to the happy end put the ending they long for into constant peril. Therefore many of the women Radway interviewed “read the endings of romances before they begin the whole book” to make sure that the narrative will end on the utopian vision they seek (199–200). What I would like to suggest is that the affirmation the female readers experience by reading the ending first is exactly the affirmation readers of affirmative alternate histories experience when they close the book. Just as these readers escape from the dystopian vision of a world ruled by Hitler and the Nazis to the reality of U.S. global supremacy, the ending of the ideal romance confirms its female readers’ belief in “the promise of patriarchy” (119). Romances and affirmative alternate histories thus have similar stabilizing—and also restricting—effects on the identities of their

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readers. Radway’s white, middle-class readers are assured in their identity as women; the male, white, middle-class readers of affirmative alternate histories are confirmed in their identities as Americans and are assured of their “natural” goodness.12 The realist mode, which convinces both the readers of romances and alternate histories that the stories’ larger-than-life characters and formulaic plots are “entirely persuasive and believable” (Radway 203), also facilitates a naturalization of the attitudes and values these stereotypical characters embody and whose confrontations the plot stages. Realist texts thus frequently achieve what Pam Morris has called with reference to Roland Barthes the “truth effect”: “They often seem to imply truth claims of a more universal philosophical and ethical nature” (109). Accordingly, realist Hitler Fiction habitually suggests that concepts such as “good” or “evil” are not cultural constructions but ontological categories and that Americans are good by nature whereas Hitler and the Nazis are evil by nature. In fact, realism is the “natural” mode to depict Hitler as evil by nature. Postmodernist and, to a certain degree, also neorealist texts foreground that language creates reality. Realism, however, is apt to downplay the creative, tropological dimension of language and enables casting “good” and “evil” as prelinguistic and natural categories. Consequently, most realist texts reflect and participate in the conceptualization of Hitler as the incarnation of evil and insist on the essential differences between (good) Americans and (evil) Nazis. Because they are based on the assumption that the surface offers access to “deep knowledge” (Fluck, “Surface Knowledge” 71), these texts often take Hitler’s physical features as safe and clear indicators of his generic evil. This grounding of ontology in biology is characteristic of almost all realist Hitler Fiction written from the late 1970s onwards, but it is especially powerful and obvious in those texts that do not feature Hitler himself but his children. Let me stress that I do not want to revive a debate led in the wake of the “linguistic turn,” when structuralists and poststructuralists accused realism of an automatic ideological complicity with the status quo and those in power. Those critics saw realism “sustaining those underlying structures that produce the unquestioned ideological assumptions mapping our reality” (Morris 98). What I have said so far is merely that realist Hitler Fiction has a naturalizing “truth effect,” because the texts usually confirm the notion that the concepts of good and evil are natural and given. It is thus the combination of a certain ideological thrust and the realist aesthetic that produces the “truth effect,” but not realism as such. On the contrary: Realism can, as Morris explains, also “draw

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attention to underlying epistemological assumptions that shape our social reality, de-naturalizing these structures so that they are visible to us and we are able to think beyond their limits” (99). Hence, realist Hitler Fiction is not always simply affirmative; just as self-critique and subversion are not the exclusive property of the postmodernist texts. Kenneth Brown’s Hitler’s Analyst (2001), for example, is a traditional realist novel that nevertheless challenges the progressive narrative of American exceptionalism and the binary of America’s goodness and Hitler’s evil by presenting the CIA as capable of creating a Hitler double that convinces even a psychiatrist for a while that he is treating Hitler himself. As the novel thus exposes Hitler’s character as the result of simple brainwashing, it suggests to the reader—through realist devices alone—that Hitler’s behavior is culturally produced and not the manifestation of an ontological evil. Showing the United States generating a Hitler of its own, the novel implies that—from an American perspective—“it could happen here,” too. As we will see, however, such challenges to positive American selfconceptions through the Hitler trope are rare in realist texts. Revisionist alternate histories unfold their critical and subversive impact much more frequently under the auspices of a postmodernist aesthetic, as it is the insights of postmodernism into the linguistic and cultural constructedness of seemingly natural concepts that enable them to perform their cultural work. The story of representations of Hitler in American Fiction that I relate is the story of how the Hitler trope moves from postmodernist to realist texts; of how affirmative alternate histories replace revisionist ones; and of how, during the 1970s, self-critique gives way to projection and, during the early 1980s, projection gives way to explicit othering as the dominant cultural work of Hitler Fiction. Yet I will begin the next chapter with a 1971 realist revisionist secret history, Edwin Fadiman’s novel Who Will Watch the Watchers? This should serve as a reminder that the trajectory I construct is one of relative shifts in dominance and not of absolutes, and that my story remains open to be revised by those who integrate in their story of American Hitler Fiction the texts I have neglected and who reread those texts that I turn to now.

Chapter 3

Hitler, Nixon, and Vietnam: Self-Critique in Early 1970s Fiction Some of the 1960s texts that feature Hitler as a character already display an increasing disaffection with overtly positive U.S. self-conceptions. Edwin Fadiman Jr.’s thriller Who Will Watch the Watchers? (1971) pushes this notion further and explicitly critiques the progressive narrative. The novel revolves around a young American couple, Jeff, a Gentile and CIA agent, and Debbie, a Jew, who discover that Hitler escaped from the bunker and is now living a luxurious life in Paraguay. When they inform Jeff ’s superiors, however, they learn that their administration has known this all along. Unwilling to do anything about it, the secretary of state and the director of the CIA destroy the evidence Jeff and Debbie have accumulated to prevent them from going public. Whereas Jeff eventually accepts his government’s position that “Hitler’s life or death in the body [is not] of any prime importance” since “he [is] dead politically” (245), Debbie, the daughter of two death camp inmates, continues to disagree, accusing the CIA of committing “the most profoundly evil thing [she has] ever heard” (249). By having her label the actions of the United States and its World War II allies “evil,” the novel associates them with Hitler and the Nazis, who figure in the text as “the most evil men in the world,” and thus denies the superiority and exceptionality of American values (150). Moreover, the novel also dramatizes the end of what Peter Novick has called the “integrationist ethos” of an inclusive American identity (6). Debbie’s loss of faith in her government is closely connected to the rediscovery of the “Jewishness [that] had been dormant inside her” (229).

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It is mostly this reawakened Jewish identity that makes her insist on Hitler being punished, a position not shared by the Gentiles. Since Debbie suddenly perceives herself in opposition to “white, Protestant, aseptic” Jeff (229), she sees no future for their relationship—nor does he, as she is “not even the girl he wants to sleep with anymore” (254). Their breakup on the final pages signifies American Jewry’s disaffection with U.S. Gentile culture and adds to the novel’s critique of the progressive narrative. Just as there is no future for the Jewish-Gentile couple, the ending implies, there is no future for this optimistic template. Disaffection with the progressive narrative similar to the one dramatized in Fadiman’s realist novel also permeates three postmodernist texts published in 1972 and 1973, which I analyze in this chapter. Charles Bukowski’s “ ” (1972), Gary Goss’s Hitler’s Daughter (1973), and Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream (1972) all use the figure of Hitler metaphorically to comment on and critique U.S. politics and culture. Yet, they do not—as Fadiman and the overwhelming majority of later texts do—cast Hitler as evil. Displaying a high awareness of the cultural constructedness of seemingly natural categories or ontological concepts such as “good” and “evil,” the three texts avoid essentialist rhetoric altogether. Instead, they suggest that there are parallels, for example, between the Holocaust and the extermination of the indigenous American population. The conviction that the United States had become like Nazi Germany was widespread among the New Left during the late 1960s and early 1970s. In fact, spelling “America” in Germanized fashion as “Amerika” became so popular during that time that this version even entered the Oxford English Dictionary. While African American activist groups such as the Black Panthers used the spelling “Amerikkka” to suggest that the whole country was permeated by a Ku-Klux-Klan mentality, other organizations preferred the spelling “Amerika” to cast the United States as fascist. The (white) Weatherman Group, for example, one of the urban guerrilla groups of the time, frequently employed the term “Amerika” in its pamphlets, implying that the Vietnam War was as aggressive and unjust as Hitler’s wars had been and that American society’s treatment of ethnic minorities equaled the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews. Accordingly, the texts by Bukowski, Goss, and Spinrad are indicative of a more general cultural mood, which they foster at the same time. Displaying a high awareness of the fact that they employ Hitler as a trope to negotiate U.S. domestic concerns, however, they surpass the pamphlets of political activist groups in complexity. Through various formal devices such as focalization, intertextuality, or the intricate interplay of several diegetic levels, the texts negotiate the applicability and the workings of the Hitler trope itself.

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Hitler in the White House: Charles Bukowski’s “ ” (1972) Like the other stories in Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness (1972), Charles Bukowski’s “ ” was first published in one of the several San Francisco underground magazines for which he wrote at the time. It was, however, only with the publication of Erections by City Lights in 1972 that Bukowski’s short fiction became known to a broader audience. Apart from casting the Nixon administration as fascist, “ ”, the seven-page narrative of Hitler’s takeover of the White House, I wish to argue here, exposes and critiques two different but equally deficient modes of interpreting signs: a naïve trust that signs offer direct access to the referent, on the one hand, and, on the other, a paranoid style of interpretation that detects hidden meanings everywhere. Moreover, and this is the reason why my first close-reading is dedicated to this text, the story problematizes the usage of the Hitler trope to negotiate domestic issues avant la lettre, before its potential is fully explored by American literature. The story’s plot suggests that Bukowski took his cue from the 1963 B movie They Saved Hitler’s Brain: The president of the United States is kidnapped by his security agents and brought to a secret place where he meets Hitler, who, now in his eighties, has miraculously escaped from the bunker. Then Hitler’s brain is transplanted into the president’s body and vice versa. Presupposing that the brain is the seat of personality, the story ends with Hitler, posing as the president whose body he now occupies, in the White House, while the real president, confined to Hitler’s ailing body, is placed in an insane asylum because he insists that he is the president. This sensationalist plot is presented in a matter-of-fact narrative voice that seems to signal the realism characteristic of many later texts of the genre of Hitler Fiction: The President of the United States of America entered his car, surrounded by his agents. He sat in the back seat. It was a dark and unimpressive morning. Nobody spoke. They rolled away and the tires could be heard on a street still wet from the preceding night’s rain. [ . . . ] “Say, this isn’t the way to the airport.” His agents didn’t answer. A vacation had been scheduled. Two weeks at his private home. His plane was waiting at the airport. It began to drizzle. It looked as if it might rain again. The men, including the President, were dressed in heavy overcoats; hats; it made the car seem very full. Outside, the cold wind was steady. (169)

This is the beginning of the story, and the narrative continues in this fashion. Told by a heterodiegetic narrator with an external focalization,

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the story remains completely neutral in tone and restricts itself to chronicling events. As a result of this preoccupation with the visible and audible, the characters’ thoughts are not represented at all. The only exception in the passage quoted above, indeed in five of the story’s six sections, is the paragraph that follows the president’s first spoken sentence. Here the substitution of the possessive pronoun “his” for the neutral “the President’s” marks a transition to the president’s perspective whose thoughts the reader comes to share for a moment before the focalization shifts back to the impersonal narrator-focalizer. Almost cinematic in its nearly complete restriction to the description of outward action and the rendering of spoken dialogue, the narrative obsessively revolves around surfaces such as the wet street and the clothes the characters are wearing. In his essay “Staying on the Surface,” David Lodge identifies the same obsession with surfaces in Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man (1975), a novel that for all its 300 pages never offers any internal perspective. Lodge argues that the “absence of psychological depth” leads the reader to experience “a surprised attentiveness, and perhaps uneasiness” (118) because they are left in the dark about the characters’ motives and convictions. The story’s staying on the surface, I contend, is aimed at creating the same feeling of uneasiness on the part of the reader, though not with regard to the characters’ intentions, which become quite clear toward the end. Instead, “ ” creates uneasiness with regard to the interpretation of signs in general. The story negotiates what might happen if one assumes that there is a natural and thus transparent link between the surface, the signifier, and what lies beneath it, the signified, as well as what might happen if one assumes conversely that the signifier actually obscures the signified, that the surface hides what lies beneath it. To the other patients in the asylum where he is finally placed, the president is merely an old man who “kinda looks like that dictator-fellow” but claims to be their president (174). There is no uneasiness or doubt on their part, their judgment is clear: “He does know a lot about politics, though. I guess that’s what drove him crazy” (175). Staying on the surface themselves, they locate the reason for the president’s apparent madness in his attempt to penetrate the surface, to acquire real knowledge, and to understand the workings of power. This, the story’s bleak plot suggests, has come out of fashion in postwar America where superficial images are more important for political success than anything else. Rejecting what narrative fiction arguably achieves better than any other art form, namely, the “exploration of human consciousness” (Lodge 118), the story adopts the cinematic style favored by a media-saturated world dependent on visual images. The story’s plot, however, unveils what a society judging by appearance alone misses and how it can be manipulated by

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those in power as long as they produce the right images or, as in this case, show the right face. “ ” stays on the surface until the beginning of the story’s penultimate section. It is only after the brain transplantation has been performed that the reader is offered an interior perspective to share the ultimate alienation the president experiences as he wakes up in Hitler’s body: The old man with the white hair awakened. He was alone in the room. He could escape. He got out of the bed in search of his clothing and as he walked across the room he saw an old man in a full-length mirror. No, he thought, oh my god, no! [ . . . ] He looked down at his hands—wrinkled, and not his hands! And he looked down at his feet! They weren’t his feet! It wasn’t his body! (173–74)

While the first sentence of the passage is still externally focalized, the narrative then shifts to the president’s perspective, employing free indirect discourse to represent his thoughts and feelings. The rest of the passage and the section as a whole are focalized through him as well. While he is looking into the mirror and at his own body, the reader literally shares his point of view and thus experiences with him that his body and mind no longer belong together, that the surface does not signify any longer what lies beneath it. The president’s panic intensifies when his landlady thinks he is joking when he tells her that he is the president. That he fares even worse with the newspaper editor he decides to see can be inferred from the fact that the story’s next section finds him in an asylum. The president, then, differs from the other inmates around him in the way he reads the world. Due to his own bodily experience, he displays the utter “distrust of surfaces” that is one of the key elements of the many conspiracy theories that, fuelled by the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, were circulating at the time the story was written (Melley 117). Bukowski’s story thus inscribes itself into an already well-established conspiracy discourse. Yet, far from simply offering another conspiracy theory, “ ” critically engages this discourse while using it for political critique at the same time. The story comments on this discourse by translating the “distrust of surfaces” into its major formal principle. By highlighting surfaces and refusing to penetrate deeper, the text emphasizes the potential opaqueness of the surface and the impossibility of arriving at any definite deeper meaning. “The crisis of interpretation” it thus stages is, according to Melley, another component of conspiracy theories (16). Searching for hidden meanings beneath the surface of things, the advocates of such theories—in this case the president—arrive

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at radically different interpretations than the community around them— the other inmates—which usually “presumes a surface [ . . . ] that can be seen through and an interior that can, as a result, be seen” (West and Sanders 16). What the majority accepts as obvious, conspiracy theorists find opaque, and what the majority dismisses as a coincidence and thus meaningless, the conspiracy theorists read as meaningful and part of a hidden plot. The community in turn, justified or not, frequently interprets this behavior as paranoia and declares its proponents insane—just as it happens to the president in the story. Melley also observes, however, that “it is remarkably difficult to separate paranoid interpretation from ‘normal’ interpretive practices” (17). By staying on the surface, the text does not only create what Lodge calls “uneasiness” on the part of the reader. In typically postmodernist fashion, it also constantly invites interpretation. While these interpretations are not necessarily paranoid, the story offers one example of how thin the line between “paranoid” and “normal” interpretation might be: When the president wakes up in Hitler’s body, he finds “$18” in his pocket (174). It would be easy to dismiss this little detail as another instance of the text’s preoccupation with the surface, as a superfluous piece of information aimed at creating a reality effect. However, the detail also suggests a “paranoid” interpretation. The number “18” is made up of the digits “1” and “8.” The first letter of the alphabet is “A,” the eighth is “H.” Thus, “18” could be read as a code for “AH”—the initials of Adolf Hitler—and therefore as a last greeting from Hitler to his victim. Under the surface of things could lurk a hidden meaning.1 A less paranoid act of interpretation, namely, that of relating the characters to real-life figures, constitutes a first step in uncovering the parodist brunt of the story. One consequence of the narrative voice’s restriction to description and dialogue is that the narrator never calls the characters by their names. The story leaves it to the reader to identify the figures involved by reading the clues it offers. Hitler is easily identified. He mentions his escape from “[t]he bunkers: April 30th, 1945,” and is addressed as “Adolph [sic]” by one of his doctors later (172, 173). In similar fashion, the story strongly encourages the reader to identify the president as Richard Nixon. First, Nixon was president at the time the story was written and published, which must have been after 1968.2 Second, since Hitler tells the president that he had “Kennedy assassinated [and] then his brother” to bring his current prisoner into the White House, this prisoner cannot be Johnson because Robert Kennedy, the “brother,” was the Democrats’ designated successor to Johnson, who had already stepped down from office voluntarily when Kennedy was murdered. Third, Hitler and his helpers have placed their prisoner in the White House because

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“[they] wanted the right man. You are the right man. The others were too impossible—too alienated from my political philosophy” (172). This comment about the president’s right-wing political philosophy—implicit in the repetition of the adjective “right”—can only refer to Nixon, who prototypically embodied this philosophy for the American left at the time. Fourth, and most importantly, the story’s parodist treatment of the conspiracy discourse hinges on the reader identifying the president as Nixon. “ ” ironically reverses a theory popular with the American left at the time the story was written, namely, that Nixon’s presidency was the result of an impenetrable right-wing conspiracy responsible for the assassination of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King and the American involvement in Vietnam. The story casts Nixon, who for American culture “continues to represent the base of all corrupt politicians” (Fenster 71), as the victim of Hitler’s conspiracy, a conspiracy not only aimed at removing Nixon from office but one that had strategically placed him there before like a pawn in a game of chess. By confessing to the murder of JFK, Bukowski’s Hitler confesses to the one event in U.S. postwar history that has probably given birth to more conspiracy theories than all the others combined. And by staging a conspiracy that puts JFK and Nixon in a line as two of Hitler’s victims, “ ” subverts the sharp ideological binary that the public discourse of the late 1960s had constructed between these two politicians. Taking things a step further and constructing a new binary between the American politicians and Hitler, the story parodies the plots of those countless conspiracy theories that cast Nixon and Kennedy as antagonists. Doing so, the text does not project a new conspiracy theory but powerfully critiques another prominent way of reading signs and understanding politics in U.S. culture at the time, an approach Richard Hofstadter has famously labeled the “paranoid style” (77). The story’s critical impact thus cuts both ways. It critiques not only the tendency to accept signs and their alleged meanings at face value as highly dangerous but also a paranoid way of interpretation that tends to overinterpret signs and imagines history as a series of conspiracies. At the same time, however, “ ” reconstructs the Nixon-Kennedy binary in order to deliver a harsh critique of Richard Nixon and his political convictions—without idealizing Kennedy and his policies. Hitler could, after all, not replace either of the Kennedys but had to put the “the right man” into the White House. Posing as Nixon is much easier for Hitler than posing as JFK or Lyndon B. Johnson would have been. Nixon’s political convictions are thus not equated with, but placed next to Hitler’s: The American president is compared to the figure that American

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culture is beginning to conceive of as the epitome of evil. The completely implausible and fantastic brain transplantation that Hitler and Nixon undergo, an interpolated science-fiction element, does not only ridicule the rather fantastic and unbelievable elements that other conspiracy theories frequently contain; it is also a literalized metaphor for the cultural transfer of an idea from one country to another and from the mind of one head of state to the next. Employing the trope of the brain transplantation, the story suggests that the “real” Richard Nixon is like the historical Hitler, implying that they share a similar mentality. Yet, beyond the vague notion of a proximity in “political philosophy,” the story never spells out in which respects exactly the president is like Hitler (172). And it cannot do so because it offers neither an authorial voice nor an interior perspective of Hitler or the president while he is still occupying his own body. The text thus leaves for the reader to decide what “Hitler” exactly stands for and what frequent comparisons such as “like Hitler” or set expressions such as “a new Hitler” might actually mean. Casting Hitler as a character that is all surface and possesses no interior, as a literalized empty signifier, “ ” suggests that this openness is one of the distinctive features and undoubtedly also one of the major attractions the Hitler trope holds for the American cultural imaginary. The trope transports a strong but vague notion of evilness that ultimately leaves it to the recipients to determine what this evilness exactly consists in and who it affects. In fact, “ ” suggests that the way the Hitler trope fares within American culture has much in common with the way the symbol “ ,” which gives Bukowski’s story its graphic title, has fared in Nazi Germany. The swastika is, after all, a symbol that has crossed cultural boundaries and whose meaning for Western culture has been completely renegotiated during this process. Originally the Hindu symbol for the sun, the historical Hitler later used it when he “personally designed the [Nazi] party’s banner” and established the new and ever since dominant meaning of the swastika as a sign for Nazism and Nazi ideology in the Western world (Kershaw I: 147). Confronted with the swastika at the very beginning of the story, Bukowski’s reader does not expect a text about Hindu religion, but suspects from the outset that Nazis will play an important role in the story. By choosing as its title a symbol that has acquired a very different meaning within the culture it has traveled to, the story self-consciously comments on how the meaning of Hitler has been and is constantly renegotiated within American culture. Moreover, as it associates its own use of the figure of Hitler with the Nazis’ appropriation of the Hindu swastika, the text criticizes the strategy it employs itself. “ ” thus also highlights that

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every attempt to critically lay bare the discourse’s mechanisms is bound to perpetuate it. This is an awareness the short story shares with Gary Goss’s Hitler’s Daughter, the text I now turn to. Hitler as an American Girl: Gary Goss’s Hitler’s Daughter (1973) “Hitler no longer horrified me” (250). With this simple statement Reyes Tejedor, historian of forgotten people and autodiegetic narrator of Gary Goss’s Hitler’s Daughter, sums up what he has learned during his twentyyear long search for Hitler’s daughter, Cynthia. His next sentence— “We are most of us Hitlers” (250)—then turns what has seemed for a moment like a coming to terms with the horrors Hitler embodies into an entirely bleak evaluation of human actions and human history. It is not that Tejedor has at last learned to cope with Hitler’s crimes, but that he himself has finally understood what the novel has suggested to the reader all along, namely, that Hitler and the Third Reich are not aberrations but stand prototypically for the capability of humans to commit horrible atrocities. Allegedly the English translation of the Spanish manuscript of an oral lecture once given by Reyes Tejedor, Hitler’s Daughter is a narrative tour de force, whose intertextual references range from Walter Benjamin to the Beatles and from postmodernist to popular fiction. A textbook example of historiographic metafiction, the novel “problematizes the very possibility of historical knowledge” and highlights the “inevitable textuality of our knowledge of the past” (Hutcheon 106, 127). Hitler’s Daughter constantly negotiates the constructions involved in composing historiography and deconstructs the boundary between historiography and fiction by stressing their similar ontological status. Reworking for fictional purposes the tools of historiography, such as a precise chronology, the novel subverts the conventions of historiography. The references and additional information that Tejedor provides in his footnotes, for example, usually do not confirm but seriously challenge his argument. When he relates that “[o]n the evening of May 23, 1965,” he was reading a novel called “The Big Bust” (47), the exact reference is called into question by the fact that only a few pages earlier, when the book was first mentioned, Tejedor informed his readers in another footnote that The Big Bust was published in “1969” (43). Tejedor thus—unwittingly, it seems—parodies his own and very traditional historiographic endeavor to establish an unambiguous and linear time frame for his narrative. The novel revolves around two closely interrelated topics: the intentional forging of history, and Tejedor’s project of “the recovery of the

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forgotten men” and their histories (21). In the narrow sense, these “forgotten men” are ordinary people not important enough to leave traces in official historical records and only mentioned in passing in obscure sources. In a broader sense, however, Tejedor’s project addresses “[t]he question of whose history survives” and thus challenges historiographic accounts that “silence, exclude, and absent certain past events—and people” (Hutcheon 120, 107). Tejedor is in many ways predestined for such a revisionist endeavor: As a Mexican historian, he lives in a country that exists under U.S. economic hegemony in the present and that lost the wealthiest parts of its territory to U.S. imperialism in the past; as a descendant of the Mayas, he belongs to a people whose civilization was largely erased after the Spanish conquest; and, finally, his rubber fetishism makes him an outsider in sexual orientation as well. Tejedor’s search for Hitler’s daughter, though, does not fit his usual research pattern. As his translator—highlighting the marginalization of women even in this revisionist historian—points out in his preface, Tejedor “has systematically undervalued women in all he wrote prior to Hitler’s Daughter” (14). Moreover, Cynthia Hitler is not a figure of the past but his contemporary. As he spends more than two decades to learn more about and locate her, Tejedor falls into the trap of Otto Tumiel, author of all forged articles on Hitler’s daughter, who embodies those principles of traditional historiography that the novel casts as dangerous. As a white, male European driven by the intention to make “history more tidy” (237), Tumiel is (re)writing history from the center, and not, as Tejedor attempts to, from the margins. And whereas Tejedor is driven by the desire to acknowledge “forgotten people,” Tumiel writes people in and out of history at will and manipulates chronology and causality, having, for instance, Shakespeare and Cervantes die on the same day. Through Tumiel, Hitler’s Daughter foregrounds and parodies historiography’s tendency to create well-organized linear trajectories that marginalize or exclude various “others.” The character’s conservative project thus contributes to the novel’s revisionist agenda. Tumiel’s masterpiece in manipulating history is the “creation” of Cynthia Hitler for which he draws on the (fictitious) account of an American actress who tried to fuel her failing career claiming she was raped by Hitler after a plane crash in the Brazilian rain forest in 1950. The novel thus satirizes the stories of Hitler’s survival that circulated during the 1950s in magazines such as the Police Gazette.3 Moreover, using the daughter instead of Hitler himself, the text consciously displaces the Hitler trope and indicates its awareness that every representation of Hitler is a construction motivated by present needs. More important for the plot, though, Tumiel manages to convince Cynthia, who always

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doubted the truth of her mother’s claim, that she is actually Hitler’s daughter. By way of the stories he wrote about her and in her name, Tumiel, Cynthia believes, “ha[s] created her from whole cloth” and really turned her into Hitler’s daughter (243). For Cynthia, as well as for people in general, the novel thus suggests, accounts are more important than what actually happened. Accordingly, Hitler’s Daughter employs the Hitler trope to critique how specific aspects of U.S. history and politics are narrated and (dis)remembered. To begin with, the attention Tejedor pays to Cynthia Hitler mirrors U.S. culture’s growing fascination with Hitler and his private life. This attention, the novel suggests, should better be invested in the victims of American atrocities who are marginalized and “forgotten” by a culture obsessed with Hitler and the Holocaust. The fact that nobody in the story except Tejedor is disturbed by the existence of an American girl, who claims she is Hitler’s daughter, pushes this notion further. By having people ignore that an alleged relative of Adolf Hitler is moving freely among them, the novel implies that the culture is unable or unwilling to acknowledge fascist tendencies and Hitler-like crimes in the United States itself. Several short newspaper articles that Tumiel writes about Cynthia or in her name and that Tejedor collects are crucial to the novel’s revisionist agenda. They project more concrete similarities between Hitler’s fascism and various aspects of American culture. Here is a particularly dense piece on “SHOOTING CHAMPION: CYNTHIA A. HITLER”: Cynthia A. Hitler, organizer of the Salem, Massachusetts Rifle Club, has one aspiration—she’d like to win the National Bench-Rest Rifle Championship and the 3-Class Grand Aggregate “Before it gets too late.” [...] Hitler is an avid hunter. “As a Christian Marksman,” she says, “I believe that animals are small machines that God put on earth for our use as targets to keep the eye in [sic].” (149)

The passage links various moments of American history to the history of the Third Reich, recasting the former as one of intolerance and genocide. This association is forged via Cynthia, who is metonymically connected to Hitler and who synecdochally stands for U.S. culture. The article presents her as an American girl and projects her as fond of generically American cultural practices, such as the love for guns. This double reference frame is highlighted at the very beginning of the text: Cynthia’s middle initial, “A,” both strengthens her link to “A”dolf Hitler and, because it provides her with a typically American name, reinforces her Americanness.

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The location of Cynthia’s gun club, “Salem, Massachusetts,” calls to mind one of the earliest settlements of White immigrants in the New World and thus evokes the beginning of the Anglo-Saxon colonization of the continent. What is more, the reference to Salem also transports memories of the religious fanaticism of the Puritan settlers, fanaticism that led to the exclusion of dissenters such as Roger Williamson and Anne Hutchinson and culminated in the witch hunts of 1692. Combined with the letter “A,” the setting “Salem” evokes Nathaniel Hawthorne’s critique of Puritan bigotry in The Scarlet Letter (1850), suggesting that the country’s pious and democratic surface is still masking sinfulness. And since the playwright Arthur Miller employed the Salem witch trials for his comment on McCarthyism in The Crucible (1953), the ideological intolerance of the postwar years is also evoked and likened to the Third Reich’s anti-Communism. Via Cynthia, then, the history of the United States from its seventeenth-century roots to the 1950s is set in relation to the history of Nazi Germany. The next paragraph takes this criticism even further. Cynthia’s disregard for animal life foreshadows, on the one hand, Tejedor’s eventual critique of environmental destruction (“[Hitler] did to men what we did to the land” [250]). Against the background of Puritan history, Cynthia’s appeal to the divine justification of hunting can, on the other hand, also be linked back to the Puritans’ claim that the “virgin” land of America had been given to them by God, a claim that helped to rationalize and legitimize the colonization of the country and the extermination of the indigenous population. The genocide committed on American soil is thus related to both the Holocaust and to Hitler’s war of extermination in Eastern Europe, which the Nazis cast as a war for land and “living space.” In a different piece entitled “SHOW US YOUR TITS, BABE!” that he writes in her name for the magazine Romantic Confessions, Tumiel casts Cynthia as a mouthpiece of conservative moral values and double standard. Cynthia’s alleged article echoes both in structure and language those confessional magazines that justify the publication of purportedly factual sensationalist stories with a moralistic condemnation of the evils indulged in. The text relates her sexual adventures at high school and her experiences at a strip club where her stepfather has her “raise tuition money for his education courses at USC” (37). Cynthia, however, initially refuses to undress, which leads to angry reactions from the customers: And then the rest started this crazy chant: “Show us your tits, Babe! Show us your tits, Babe!”

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Their hands were grabbing at me, pulling off Mom’s blouse! I stood naked to the waist! And scared as I was, I knew that I was to blame for what was happening. Any girl who goes to a party dressed like me deserves what she gets. (37)

If the fact that Cynthia’s stepfather puts her to work as a stripper to raise the money for his college education already criticizes both the financial boundary that usually blocks the poor from higher education and, more specifically, the sexual exploitation of women, Cynthia’s reaction to the assault adds a further dimension to the novel’s critique of gender relations. As the men move from verbal to physical abuse, her resistance does not increase, but falters. The passage thus presents Cynthia as a girl who has completely internalized (“I knew I was to blame”) a conservative discourse that locates the responsibility for sexual assaults exclusively in the provocative behavior of the woman (“dressed like me”) who “deserves what she gets.” In fact, Cynthia has internalized this discourse to such a degree that she accepts full responsibility for her provocative outfit and seems to have completely forgotten that her mother “made me put it on, and she made me take off my bra, so my twins hung out” (37). Moreover, as Cynthia suddenly recasts herself as a “girl who goes to a party,” she blends the contexts of work and play. Thereby the novel suggests that the discourse Cynthia echoes does not only affect “professionals” such as dancers in a club but is also aimed at regulating the sexuality of American women in general: They are held accountable for the sexual violence they suffer, while men are freed from any responsibility. The article’s final paragraph expands this critique of class boundaries and sexual exploitation. Shortly after her narrow escape from the club, Cynthia “[is]n’t even mad at Loden [her stepfather] anymore. [ . . . ] I could make something out of my life if I just tried hard enough” (39). The sexual assault on a high school girl, a demonstration of patriarchal power, leads not only to a victim that pleads guilty but culminates in the victim’s reaffirmation of the “American dream.” Paradoxically, then, failure and suffering renew Cynthia’s belief that self-reliance and hard work are the safest roads to success in American society, where, so the myth goes, everybody can make it. The episode’s effect on the reader, however, is exactly the opposite. Cynthia’s narrative exposes that U.S. society is hierarchically structured both in terms of class and in terms of gender relations. Moreover, the passage also lays bare that the ideological and rhetorical strategies that keep the poor and women at bay have a lot in common. If the ideology of the American dream tells the poor that everyone can make it in America and that therefore they only have themselves to blame for failure, the narrative

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template that Cynthia falls prey to blames women for the sexual violence they suffer in analogous fashion. In both cases the victims (of capitalist economy and sexual assaults) are held responsible for their sufferings, while their exploiters are whitewashed. Like the other article I discussed above, this critique of U.S. culture gains a particular edge, because the novel (by means of Tumiel’s forgery) has Cynthia voice these fatal convictions. Again, she is not only speaking as “a completely ordinary girl” and as representative of American culture (200); she is also speaking as Adolf Hitler’s alleged daughter. The novel thus powerfully and satirically associates one of the most important myths of U.S. culture, the American dream, with the Social Darwinism and survival of the fittest promoted by Hitler. Since Otto Tumiel’s forgeries project her as a conservative, Tejedor is quite surprised when Cynthia Hitler, whom he finally meets in Buffalo, New York, turns out to be a left-wing liberal. She strongly opposes the Vietnam War and favors a revisionist understanding of historiography. Whereas Tejedor at that point still believes in a correct version of history that can be distinguished from blatant Tumielesque forgery, Cynthia, the product of her mother’s and Tumiel’s forgeries, seems to function as a mouthpiece for the author when she declares that “[h]istory was worse than lies; it was tyranny” (261). Her criticism, though, is not represented as direct speech but rendered as free indirect discourse by Tejedor, the narrator. This indicates that, by the end of the novel, Tejedor does not completely disagree with Cynthia’s position, although he continues to profess otherwise. Given Cynthia’s sensibility to the effects of historiography, it does not come as a surprise that it is she and not Tejedor who brings his life-long search for “forgotten people” to a climax and thus lays the foundation for the text’s most explicit attack on celebratory accounts of American history. In the novel’s last chapter she tells Tejedor how she once drove to a nearby cemetery: She’d driven out to Cheektowaga alone. At 46 Pine Ridge Road she’d found a cemetery: tombstones for Judelsohns, Schwartzes, Levys, Weinsteins, Rosens. No carved angels, no marble Polish fingers pointing to heaven. Only tough and luminescent starlings. (I think it was Malaparte who discovered, early in 1941, that the amorous birds of the Ukraine were not afraid of the SS.) She leaned with her back against my chest, her hands on my arms around her. “I walked like the note said to, and I found a tombstone, one of the kind with no one buried there.” “A cenotaph.” “It was taller than I was. For a whole village in Poland massacred in a pogrom. Just like my father did.” She stared out through the chicken-wired window.

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“There weren’t any names. They all got lost.” “Each is forgotten in turn, Cynthia. Even Hitler someday.” (263–64)

Retelling her narrative in his own words, Tejedor makes once again a blunder of chronology. There was no SS in the Ukraine “early in 1941” since Hitler attacked the Soviet Union a few months later on June 22, 1941. His alleged source for this piece of information is the Italian writer Curzio Malaparte, who reported as a newspaper correspondent from the Ukrainian front during World War II. The passage thus marks a further moment in the narrative at which the Nazi atrocities of World War II are connected to the plot. The list of Jewish victims and the reference to the atrocities committed by the SS in the Ukraine during Hitler’s war of extermination against the Soviet Union now explicitly evoke the Holocaust for the first time. The victims of the Holocaust are well remembered and honored in the United States. Although their bodies are absent, the tombstones recall each victim’s fate. The inhabitants of “a whole village in Poland,” by contrast, are not remembered individually. Significantly, they were not murdered by the Nazis but prior to World War II. Cynthia’s comment, “Just like my father did,” thus challenges the exceptionality of the Nazi crimes and situates them in the long history of European anti-Semitism. Contrary to what Tejedor and Cynthia think, however, even these victims are not “the really forgotten people.” While their names have been lost, the cenotaph recalls their collective fate. What both overlook is that Cynthia’s visit to the cemetery evokes yet another group of victims, which is not remembered by tombstone or cenotaph and to whose “presence” Cynthia and Tejedor, preoccupied with discussing European atrocities, remain insensitive. The cemetery for the European Jews is located in Cheektowaga, a small town in the state of New York whose Indian population, according to the town’s official webpage, was “defeated by the Americans during the Revolutionary War” and forced to resettle on reservation grounds (Boyer Reinstein).4 As in Tumiel’s article on “shooting champion” Cynthia, then, the genocide of the American Indians is again associated with the Holocaust. Unlike Tumiel’s article, though, the passage also negotiates how these events are remembered in the United States. It suggests that the obsessive commemoration of European victims, of atrocities committed by “others,” facilitates disremembering the fate of the indigenous American population and ignoring atrocities committed by white Anglo-Saxon Americans. The text thus exposes how problematic aspects of the self tend to be projected on and negotiated only under the garb of the other. The reference to Curzio Malaparte links the episode of the cemetery to the novel’s finale. Malaparte’s most famous work about World War II

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is the novel The Skin (1949), and the notion of “skin” plays a vital role in the last scene of Hitler’s Daughter, which further addresses how the United States rewrites and also commercially exploits its own history of violence. In a restaurant in Rawlings, Wyoming, Cynthia finds a “place mat” that tells the story of “Big Nose George Parroti,” who was lynched and then skinned in 1881. “In the Rawlings Museum,” Tejedor informs the reader, “are a number of articles made from parts of Parroti’s tanned skin: razor strops, a coin purse, a medical instrument bag, and a pair of lady’s shoes” (265–66). For this story of unbelievable atrocity, Goss only slightly fictionalized a historical event: His Parroti’s real-life model was “Big Nose” George Parrot, a nineteenth-century outlaw who committed a train robbery with Jesse James. Parrot was indeed lynched in Wyoming in 1881, though not in Rawlings but in Rawlins. J. E. Osborne, a future governor of the state, took possession of the body, opened Parrot’s skull, and had a pair of shoes made of his skin, which he allegedly wore quite frequently, while the skull was later used as a doorstop. Today, shoes and skull are still on display in the Carbon County Museum in Rawlins. A piece of Americana in the real world, the skin of Parrot(i) is turned into an emblem of U.S. domestic atrocities in Goss’s novel. Accordingly, Hitler’s Daughter’s evaluation of American history differs markedly from the one usually ascribed to Curzio Malaparte. According to his translator and editor, David Moore, “there is no other book [about the war] that so brilliantly or so woundingly presents American innocence against the background of the European experience of destruction and moral collapse” as Malaparte’s The Skin (n.p.). If Malaparte, at least in Moore’s reading, thus insists on Nazi exceptionalism and American moral superiority, the finale of Hitler’s Daughter deconstructs the dichotomy between the United States and Nazi Germany altogether. The juxtaposition of the cemetery scene and the Parrot(i) episode likens the inhuman treatment of George Parrot(i) at the hands of Americans to the Nazis’ mutilation and economic exploitation of dead Jewish bodies. But while the victims of European anti-Semitism are officially commemorated in a U.S. cemetery, Parrot(i)’s fate serves as entertainment for customers waiting for their food. His story is integrated into the capitalist system, emptied of political relevance, and rewritten as myth, as just another episode in the story of how the West was won. While U.S. culture frames atrocities committed by others as assaults on civilization, the novel’s final episode suggests that the country’s own history of violence is either silenced or recast as part of the progress of civilization. Hitler’s Daughter lays bare the mechanisms of this progressive narrative and dramatizes its inappropriateness.

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Hitler as Author of the Vietnam War: Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream (1972) Unlike “ ” and Hitler’s Daughter, which both satirically draw on the survival myth and therefore can be classified as secret histories, Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream (1972) is an alternate history in the narrow sense. In Spinrad’s novel, Hitler emigrates to the United States in 1919 and lives there until his death in 1953 as a science-fiction “writer, illustrator, and fanzine editor” (9). If “ ” addresses the politics of Richard Nixon, conspiracy theories, and a lack of interest in politics, and if Hitler’s Daughter attacks domestic policies and U.S. imperialism in broader terms, The Iron Dream takes on American anticommunist feelings, the Cold War in general, and the Vietnam War in particular, suggesting that these events share a fascist ideological underpinning. As in other revisionist alternate histories, The Iron Dream’s cultural work of self-critique hinges on the intricate interplay of two diegetic levels that both project worlds that differ markedly from the world the reader knows. The Iron Dream copies this narrative structure of its most important pretext, Jack London’s novel The Iron Heel (1908). In the framed story of London’s novel, a socialist revolution at the beginning of the twentieth century is brutally crushed by the forces of global capitalism, whose system of suppression is known as the “The Iron Heel” (2). This bleak vision, motivated by the increasing conflict between labor and capital in the United States at the time London wrote the novel, however, is given a positive turn in the frame story, a short editorial note supposedly written hundreds of years after the socialist revolution finally succeeded. By means of this editorial, London’s novel suggests that despite setbacks and defeats, the advancement of civilization and the triumph of socialism are inevitable. The Iron Heel harshly criticizes the present but maintains the belief that a better future is to be expected. Employing the Hitler trope, The Iron Dream, I argue, delivers an equally negative evaluation of contemporaneous U.S. politics and society. As it lacks the socialist faith in the teleological development of civilization, Spinrad’s novel, though, does not suggest that the future will be any better. The Iron Dream’s frame story parodies the paratextual features of genre fiction: It consists of a list of “Other Science-Fiction Novels by Adolf Hitler,” which include “The Thousand Year Rule” and “The Triumph of the Will,” a one-page note “About the Author” that provides biographical information, and, after the framed story, an “Afterword to the Second Edition” by fictitious literary critic, Homer Whipple. What emerges from these short texts is that history has taken a radically different course in this fictional world, but it never becomes quite clear if Hitler’s move to

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the United States was responsible for this. The Nazi Party never assumed power in Germany but “disappeared in 1923,” leaving the country to the communists whose coup in 1930 made the country part of the “Greater Soviet Union,” which now controls Europe and Africa in the diegetic world (252). In the framed narrative, the alternate Hitler’s “Lord of the Swastika,” the history of the historical Hitler, his rise to power, and World War II until the Russian campaign return thinly disguised as a literary fantasy in which almost every character, prop, and plot element can be related back to the real history of the Third Reich. While the alternate Hitler’s fictional alter ego, Feric Jaggar, “a tall, powerfully built true human in the prime of manhood” (13), has not much in common with the outward appearance of the historical Hitler, Feric’s air force commander Lars Waffing has, like his historical counterpart, Hermann Göring, “put on considerable weight since his flying days” (99). However, as this world is a product of the imagination of Adolf Hitler, the fictional counterparts to the Nazis of real history triumph in the end. Set on earth, thousands of years after a nuclear war has basically wiped out civilization, “Lord of the Swastika” stages the historical Hitler’s racist ideologies as the struggle for survival between the few remaining genetically pure (Aryan) humans and genetically contaminated subhuman species like “Blueskins, Lizardmen, Harlequins, and Bloodfaces” (14). The novel opens with Feric’s return from exile in Borgravia (Austria) to his native country of Heldon (Germany), the last stronghold of genetically pure humans. Feric quickly assumes leadership of a party, which he renames “Sons of the Swastika” (Nazi party), and uses democratic elections to establish his authoritarian rule (seizure of power in 1933). After conquering the countries around Heldon (the military campaigns of 1939 and 1940) and exterminating the genetically impure in classification (concentration) camps, Feric faces his worst foes, the “Dominators of Zind” (93, the communist Soviet leadership), a mutant variety with psychic powers that controls the other mutants through “dominance pattern[s]” (23). Although the “Dominators” resort to the use of nuclear weapons, Feric and his troops triumph in the end and establish the global rule of the genetically pure. In his afterword to “Lord of the Swastika,” Homer Whipple, the critic, identifies Hitler’s text as “a typical pulp sword-and-sorcery novel” (248). Significantly, Ursula K. Le Guin, a real-world critic, came to the same conclusion with regard to The Iron Dream, which she identified as typical genre fiction. According to Le Guin, the text fails as a parody of sword-and-sorcery pulp because “you cannot exaggerate what is already witlessly exaggerated” (42). The novel Spinrad has his Hitler write,

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she suggests, is not worse than the average text of the genre. However, in her review, Le Guin consistently refers to “Lord of the Swastika” instead of The Iron Dream and does not discuss the frame story at all. It is for this reason, I would suggest, that she misses The Iron Dream’s parodist impulse, which results from the complex interplay between the diegetic levels, between “Lord of the Swastika” and its paratexts. While Le Guin acknowledges that it is important that “it is Hitler saying these things,” she does not draw the right conclusions (42). That Hitler writes a science-fiction novel that does not differ at all from other members of the genre satirically suggests that the genre generally tends to indulge in and (re)produce fascist fantasies. That Hitler, as Homer Whipple informs the reader, was a wellliked member of the science-fiction community in the alternate world, that he “considered himself one of them” (245), extends the critique to the science-fiction subculture. The Iron Dream thus is a text that proves wrong some of Fredric Jameson’s observations. Like various other early postmodernist texts, Spinrad’s novel is not apolitical nor has it been “amputated of the satiric impulse,” as all postmodernist texts are, according to Jameson (Postmodernism 17). Rather, The Iron Dream employs pastiche to generate parodist effects. According to Homer Whipple, “Lord of the Swastika” was highly successful in the alternate world of the frame narrative. Whipple ascribes this success to the “political allegory” Hitler’s novel offers and, spelling out his argument for the narratee, provides additional information about the alternate world for the reader (252). Hitler’s emigration to the United States, we can deduce from his essay, has not made world history less violent. Germany and the rest of Europe have fallen to the communists and “only the United States and Japan stand between the Greater Soviet Union and total control of the globe” (253). Against this background, Whipple concludes that “Zind [the Soviet Union of the alternate world] represents the logical extreme end-product of Communist ideology” and explains the text’s appeal to its readership as “wish-fulfillment” (252, 254). For Hitler’s readers in the alternate world, he argues, the eventual destruction of Zind by Feric’s troops is a thinly disguised vision of the United States’ victory over communism. Here, however, the difference in perspective between alternate-world and real-world readers is crucial. For Whipple, Hitler may be “a neurotic science-fiction writer” whose “fever dream” can never come true (253). For readers of The Iron Dream, by contrast, Whipple’s interpretation constitutes part of the problem since it constructs a world that has not known World War II and the extermination of the Jews and in which Americans therefore could embrace a literary fantasy dwelling on the complete extermination of their communist enemies. At first sight, then,

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The Iron Dream might be read as a warning that without the Holocaust and World War II, moral standards would not be as high as they are today and that such fantasies might therefore be acceptable to the general public. I would suggest, however, that the novel’s critical impetus is even stronger. The Iron Dream implies that large parts of the alternate Hitler’s fantasies have been put into practice in America’s war in Vietnam. The novel puts forth this criticism through the multireferential text that is “Lord of the Swastika.” While the novel-within-the-novel’s most obvious points of reference are the historical Hitler and World War II, small plot details, landscape descriptions, and metaphors evoke both the Cold War and the Vietnam War. Merging past, present, and a possible apocalyptic future in speculative fashion, The Iron Dream casts Hitler as the author of U.S. foreign policy after World War II to draw attention to what it perceives as parallels between Nazi Germany’s war of extermination in Eastern Europe and the United States’ involvement in Vietnam. In terms of geography, the setting of Hitler’s novel resembles Europe before World War II: “Wolack and Malax,” Heldon’s eastern neighbors, are fictional versions of Poland and Czechoslovakia, the countries located east of Germany in our world at this time. However, the setting also mirrors the political power relations in Europe after 1945. Wolack and Malax are not independent states as Poland or Czechoslovakia were in 1939 but “political jokes” (93). Their mutant population is completely controlled by Zind’s dominators; the countries are like the communist satellite states established by the Soviet Union after World War II. The communist ideology and form of government these countries were forced to embrace by Moscow is translated into the psychic powers the Zind mutants exert over them. And that they try to extend them further to the West is a literalization of what the United States perceived as the ever-growing Soviet sphere of influence. If the overall setting of Hitler’s novel merges references to World War II and to the Cold War, Feric’s campaign against Wolack and Zind more specifically resonates with images and motifs from yet a different war. The descriptions of the landscapes that Feric and his armies move through and their merciless stance toward their enemies suggest that what The Iron Dream negotiates here is the Vietnam War. Wolack and Zind are consistently described as a jungle, and to get from Wolack into Zind, for example, Feric’s army needs to cross “the Roul delta,” whose name echoes Vietnam’s famous Mekong Delta (150). As Ross McGregor has shown, even more realist Vietnam novels tend to personify the Vietnam landscape and frequently describe it as “menacing” (15). Philip Caputo’s DelCorso’s Gallery, for example, transforms the GIs’ surroundings

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into the enemy itself: “It smelled of decaying wood and leaves, and the low trees encircled the outpost like the disorderly ranks of a besieging army” (qtd. in McGregor 19). Spinrad’s novel anticipates these subjective renderings of a hostile environment by presenting the landscape as objectively threatening and perverse. This is most strongly the case in The Iron Dream’s numerous descriptions of “radiation jungle”: [G]reat twisted mazes of purplish, reddish, and bluish vegetation, caricatures of grass the size of small trees, tangles of outsized vines like poisonous serpents, giant bloated cancerous flowers. Lurking in these pus pockets of radiation were creatures that defied description: wild dogs that dragged their intestines behind them in translucent sacs, multiheaded swine, featherless birds covered with running sores that oozed noxious venom, all manner of mutated vermin that bred ever-more-revolting variations from generation to generation. (149)

While this passage is clearly focalized through Feric Jaggar—and introduced by the clause “Feric spied the first patches of radiation jungle” (149)—the jungle here is really dangerous, emanating deadly radiation; it is the result of a nuclear war in the past. The threat does not merely lie in the eye of the beholder, Feric, whose perspective and language falls together with that of the authorial narrator, indicating the degree to which the author, Adolf Hitler, identifies with his protagonist. In accordance with the overall logic of the novel, which, echoing Hitler’s racism and equating it to American racist perceptions of Asian people, stages the conflict between the genetically pure and the mutants not as a war between men but as a conflict between men and beast, the dangerous jungle, however, is not projected as a hostile army as in Caputo. It is not filled with soldiers, but with dangerous, mutated animals. The basic coordinates along which the environment is described, though, remain the same: An atmosphere of decay and sickness permeates both the short quotation from Caputo and the passage from The Iron Dream—with the crucial difference that Caputo’s subjective account is rendered objective by Hitler (Spinrad). In addition, the transformation of the “besieging army” Caputo imagines into actual “poisonous serpents,” and the biblical imagery thus evoked, hints at another cultural pretext that has shaped and is alluded to in Hitler’s landscape description: the Puritan errand into the wilderness. The shock that Feric and his troops experience when they first enter the “radiation jungle” echoes what, according to countless testimonies, the Puritan settlers felt when they first faced the vegetation of the New World that appeared to them much wilder and threatening than what they were

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used to from Europe. If the Puritans regarded nature as inherently evil, as a place of temptation by the devil and hideout of savage and heathen Indians, the same is true for Feric and his troops who literally fight the jungle. In one respect, however, the landscape Hitler describes differs crucially from the descriptions of New England forests it draws on and those of the Vietnamese jungle it also echoes. Whereas the Puritans and Caputo represent the wilderness they face as pure nature, the “radiation jungle” of “Lord of the Swastika” is the result of human interference, the disastrous outcome of a nuclear war. The prospect of a nuclear conflict that might wipe out humanity was of course a constant threat during the Cold War. The expression “radiation jungle” thus connects two different frames of reference: It refers to the jungle of Vietnam, where U.S. forces fought a disastrous war, as well as to the Cold War as the one conflict that dominated and endangered the lives of people all over the world for more than forty years after 1945. By creating the fictional space of the “radiation jungle,” The Iron Dream projects the worst possible outcome of the Cold War, a nuclear conflict that might wipe out almost all life on earth, into its own fictional past. This simple distortion of chronology creates a dystopian vision of what the Cold War might lead to, a scenario the novel employs to suggest that it is impossible to win the Cold War by military means. Moreover, the manipulation of chronology creates a circular structure of events in which the disastrous result of one conflict becomes the origin of the next one. Challenging the notion of progress in this fashion, The Iron Dream deconstructs both the American progressive narrative and—unlike London’s The Iron Heel—also the corresponding communist conception of teleological and inevitable historical development. The novel’s critique of American exceptionalism is underlined by its description of warfare: Feric had ordered the decimation of all villages, farms, and other structures in the path of the advance, and the slaying of any Borgravian rabble stupid enough to show its corrupted face. For the most part, the habitations in these parts consisted of solitary peasant huts crudely constructed of timber held together with dried mud or dung. A single incendiary shell was more than enough to convert one of these sties to a roaring bonfire, and another shot or two sufficed to set the fields ablaze. Occasionally, crabbed creatures would scuttle from the ruins like dung beetles to be cut down by a burst or two of machine-gun fire, but for the most part the Borgravians in the area took to their heels well in advance of the tanks, leaving it to the mop-up troops to round them up for processing. (177)

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The tactic Feric applies is the approach the Wehrmacht used in the Soviet Union—with the small difference that the SS Einsatzgruppen (Feric’s “mop-up troops”) that followed the regular troops killed the Jews immediately and had only few of them transported to the death camps. Told in the Germanic English characteristic of Hitler’s narration, the passage renders this violence explicit and revels in it. Hitler celebrates Feric’s soldiers for exterminating their enemies and destroying their civilization so effectively: “A single incendiary shell [is] more than enough” to destroy a hut, and “a burst or two of machine-gun fire” suffices to kill the surviving inhabitants. Feric’s men are not fighting opponents who are their equals but slaughter enemies who are technologically inferior and whom they regard as subhuman. The racist and ideological thrust that drove the historical Hitler’s invasion of Russia is thus exposed—by Spinrad’s Hitler, whose authorial narrator does not pity the victims but rejoices in their deaths. The passage, though, also exudes an odd sense of tension that arises from the contrast between the explicit depiction of violence and the masking of violence by means of language. Unlike the alternate Hitler that Spinrad casts as the author of “Lord of the Swastika,” the historical Hitler and the Nazis hid their crimes behind seemingly harmless and neutral terms like “final solution” and did not celebrate openly what they were doing to the Jews and others. The term “processing” alludes to this euphemistic rhetoric. By “processing,” Spinrad’s Hitler refers to the gassing of the genetically impure in classification camps, the death camps of the novel. In similar fashion, according to Mary McCarthy, the U.S. army tried to distract from its brutal warfare in Vietnam “through verbiage.” Napalm, she explains, was often referred to as “‘incinder-jell,’ which [made] it sound like Jello” and thus rendered it completely harmless (3). In “Lord of the Swastika,” Feric’s troops do not use napalm but, as in the passage above, “incendiary shell[s],” a term that is phonetically as close to “Incinder-jell” as the name of Feric’s officer responsible for the classification camps, Bors Remler, is to his real-life counterpart Heinrich Himmler. Apart from this allusion to a U.S. rhetorical euphemism for napalm, the whole approach taken by Feric’s troops evokes the behavior of U.S. forces in Vietnam and the heavily mediated My Lai massacre in particular. Like the GIs, the Helder army is mostly preoccupied with destroying peasant villages and—their flamethrowers are explicitly mentioned in other passages—burning down huts. The novel’s fictional landscape therefore strongly resembles those provinces of Vietnam “where U.S. forces by late 1967 had already destroyed 70 percent of the villages” (Franklin 161). The literary fantasy of Spinrad’s Hitler, published

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in 1972, thus suggests that what American soldiers did in Vietnam does not differ from what German soldiers did on the Eastern front during World War II. The Iron Dream, however, not only critiques how the Vietnam War was being waged but also dismisses military deliberations of how the war might be ended. Spinrad’s novel can be read not only as a critique of nuclear warfare in general but also as a warning to those who “believed that they could win the war with tactical nuclear weapons if they were not hamstrung by public opinion” (Franklin 159). Spinrad, who strongly opposed the war and who, together with other prominent science-fiction authors such as Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, and Harlan Ellison, had signed an antiwar petition published in various science-fiction magazines in 1967, had already addressed the dangers of nuclear escalation in Vietnam in his 1969 short story “The Big Flash.”5 In this story, the sound of a rock band called “The Four Horsemen,” who, significantly, also wear swastikas, is used by the Pentagon to win public support for the deployment of nuclear weapons in Vietnam, an action that leads to the extermination of all human life on earth. Against this background, the use of the term “holocaust” for the nuclear destruction in The Iron Dream (51, 228) evokes the word’s original meaning: destruction by fire. Referring the reader back to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the term serves as a reminder that the United States had used nuclear weapons against civilians before. Moreover, the term “holocaust” associates the decision to deploy nuclear weapons at the end of World War II and the idea to do so again to end the Vietnam War with the extermination of the Jews, for which the designation “Holocaust” had by then been firmly established. Forging this connection between Nazism and U.S. culture, The Iron Dream does not “[diminish] the [Nazi] regime’s aura of evil,” as Gavriel D. Rosenfeld has argued (292). Instead, the novel highlights alleged similarities between the history of the Third Reich and U.S. postwar history, suggesting that war crimes and genocide are not only German but more generally human and thus also American problems. Projecting Hitler as a science-fiction writer—“a transformation from ultimate evil to prosaic banality,” according to Rosenfeld (292)—is not a comment on the historical Hitler but an aesthetic strategy to critically engage contemporaneous U.S. issues. By merging references to World War II, a conflict to a large degree “authored” by the historical Hitler, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War, and by implicitly casting Hitler as the author of the Vietnam War, The Iron Dream powerfully critiques the United States’ involvement in Vietnam. Like Goss’s Hitler’s Daughter, Spinrad’s The Iron Dream thus challenges the progressive narrative of U.S. exceptionalism.

Chapter 4

Children, Clones, Conspiracies: Projection in Late 1970s and Early 1980s Novels Early 1970s postmodernist texts employ the Hitler trope as a means of cultural self-critique. They use the figure metaphorically to pinpoint what they perceive as violence, atrocity, and crimes against humanity in U.S. history past and present. However, there are no such texts that are written after 1973. Instead, the deployment of the Hitler trope in American literature and culture changes dramatically. By the end of the 1970s, Hitler Fiction consists predominantly of realist conspiracy thrillers that blend elements of both secret and future history and that revolve around Hitler’s survival and his own or his fictitious children’s return to power in Germany. The product of a particular historical moment, late 1970s and early 1980s Hitler Fiction is of course as concerned with contemporary American issues as earlier texts are—even if it often does without American characters and contains hardly any explicit reference to the United States. For white, male middle-class Americans, the years between 1975 and 1985 constitute a period of transition from the national identity crisis of the late 1960s and early 1970s to the recreation of a positive national self-image during the Reagan presidency. During that time, the Hitler trope is no longer deployed for open self-critique nor yet for explicit cultural and national self-affirmation. Instead, Hitler Fiction of the period displaces the issues at stake and projects them on Weimar and Nazi Germany as well as on the Federal Republic. This chapter explores

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the links between projection, the increasing belief in Hitler’s generic evilness, and the realist aesthetics of the texts in question. I analyze which American concerns are displaced and how they are being negotiated indirectly. Moreover, I am also concerned with how projection gives way to overt othering and how these two cultural functions overlap in texts written during the early 1980s. Don DeLillo’s White Noise, published in 1985, at exactly the time, that is, when othering finally emerges as the dominant cultural function of Hitler Fiction, exposes projection as an escape mechanism by translating it from the collective back to the individual level. Jack Gladney’s obsession with Hitler, the novel suggests, is a desperate attempt to escape his fear of death. His effort to project his own personal anxieties onto Hitler can be read as a parody of what parts of U.S. culture did with domestic issues at the time the novel is set. But whereas White Noise also dramatizes how Jack’s strategy fails, the texts I am concerned with here carry through the work of evasion; they are what Michael Denning has called “cover stories” in his analysis of the British spy thriller. Just as the texts that Denning interprets “translat[e] the political and cultural transformations of the twentieth century into the intrigues of a shadow world of secret agents” (2), Hitler Fiction of the late 1970s translates U.S. domestic concerns into issues that concern Nazi or postwar Germany. Unlike earlier Hitler Fiction and like Denning’s thrillers, the Hitler thrillers of the projection period are characterized by the “binary of good and evil” (34)—mirroring and fostering the culture’s shift from ideology to ontology.1 Yet, it is not the Americans who are cast as good and morally superior in these narratives. If the texts feature American characters at all, they are usually projected as weak and unable to overcome the evil that Hitler or his offspring represents. Instead, these novels frequently center on Israeli heroes. As the successful primetime screening of the miniseries Holocaust (1978) indicates, by the late 1970s the Americanization of the Holocaust had progressed to such a degree that Gentile audiences were ready to identify with Israeli protagonists. This readiness was also helped by the fact that, as Melani McAlister has argued convincingly, for many Americans, Israel increasingly figured “as a model for American action” at that time (187). Whereas the United States—defeated in Vietnam and insecure about its future role in world affairs—was perceived as weak, Israel—victorious in two recent wars and tough on terrorism—was seen as strong: “Israel came to be constituted as an icon” and “played a rhetorical role in an argument about U.S. foreign policy and American identity” (157, 158). Focusing on three novels published between 1976 and 1983, this chapter traces the development of Hitler Fiction through the whole

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projection period. I begin with Ira Levin’s The Boys from Brazil, one of the commercially most successful texts of the genre, which negotiates two competing conceptualizations of Hitler—Hitler as evil by nature and Hitler as a product of social factors—and thus places the Hitler trope and the genre of Hitler Fiction at the crossroads of self-critique, projection, and othering. I then analyze two novels that project America’s cultural conflicts on plots revolving around Hitler’s children: Gus Weill’s The Führer Seed (1979) and Timothy Benford’s Hitler’s Daughter . . . Wants to Occupy the White House (1983). My analysis of Weill will focus on two key moments in the narrative that seem to have nothing to do with U.S. domestic concerns. As I will show, however, the novel engages U.S. issues at exactly these moments, namely, the political assassinations of the 1960s and racism directed against people of color. My reading of Hitler’s Daughter, a text situated at the borderline between projection and othering, does not focus on specific passages but on the collapse of the conventional conspiracy narrative formula. This collapse, I argue, results from the text’s attempt to externalize evil and stage the corruption of the U.S. political system as an attack from the outside. The Hitler Trope at the Crossroads: Ira Levin’s The Boys from Brazil (1976) Published in 1976, The Boys from Brazil is situated on a timeline in between the postmodernist texts written until 1973 and the realist thrillers and alternate histories produced from 1978 onwards. While the novel does not constantly highlight its own fictionality and does not selfreflexively draw attention to its own deployment of the Hitler trope, I would nevertheless suggest that The Boys from Brazil is to a large degree still a postmodernist text, albeit one that wears the garb of realism. The cloning trope around which the plot revolves introduces the idea that Hitler’s character and behavior are genetically determined, but at the same time this conceptualization is dismissed as simplistic. The text subverts the nature-nurture binary central to the cloning debate and displays an enormous awareness of media-generated images of Hitler circulating in the United States. These images as well as the culture’s deeply ingrained racism, its ambiguous ending suggests, are much more likely to influence a Hitler clone than the genetic information inherited from the donor. Cloning, however, only emerges rather late as the driving force behind the plot. Until then, The Boys from Brazil is a conventional, though very well-written, and suspenseful conspiracy thriller, “a clever exercise in reader-hoaxing,” as John Sutherland has put it (181). Yakov Liebermann, a Vienna-based Jewish Holocaust survivor and famous Nazi hunter—a

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slightly fictionalized Simon Wiesenthal—learns about a plot devised by Josef Mengele, the notorious Auschwitz doctor, who escaped from Europe to South America at the end of the war. Mengele has ordered the assassination of ninety-four civil servants, all sixty-five years old, in Europe and North America. According to Mengele, “the destiny of the Aryan folk [. . .] will be fulfilled if the operation succeeds.” While Liebermann manages to identify fairly quickly some of the victims, he has, for most of the novel, no clue why the men are being murdered and why they “have to die on or near certain dates in the next two and a half years” (21). Their murders seem to be completely unmotivated, and Mengele’s role remains equally unclear. Liebermann is particularly struck by the fact that the assassinated men all had considerably younger wives and that identical-looking thirteen-year-old boys, all “gaunt and sharp-nosed,” with “a dark forelock” and “unruly hair” live in each family (111, 113). Eventually Nürnberger, a German professor of biology puts two and two together for Liebermann. He guesses correctly that the identical boys are adopted and introduces Liebermann to the concept of cloning. And when he confirms a moment later that the donor does “not necessarily” have to be alive, Liebermann realizes that Mengele has managed to clone Hitler (189). The baby clones have been placed all over the Western world in families whose structure—a man in a position of minor authority with a much younger wife—mirrors the historical Hitler’s family background. Since Hitler’s father died when his son was nearly fourteen, the foster fathers of the clones, who do not know that they are adopted, must die as well in order to maximize the possibility that the clones will develop as the original did. The idea that Hitler might be cloned dramatizes the cultural anxiety revolving around an issue that was controversially discussed during the 1970s. For many people, cloning was yet another example of mad scientists on the loose, and Mengele, of course, perfectly fits the stereotype of the brilliant but ruthless German scientist. Cloning was conceived as a threat to natural reproduction, heterosexuality, traditional family structures, and thus to democratic society as a whole. Significantly, the most successful popular “text” of the decade, Star Wars (1977), contains several references to past clone wars. Suggesting that the ideal Republic guarded by the Jedi knights collapsed after a fight involving clones, the movie draws on the virulent topic in order to affect its audience. Mengele’s vision that “in 1990 or so [cloning] would be a widely known, maybe widely practiced, procedure” thus clearly reflects a fear many potential readers felt at the time the book was published (195). In The Boys from Brazil, though, cloning achieves much more: Not only is Hitler a trope for the novel to negotiate the possible perils of

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biotechnology, the novel also employs the trope of cloning to negotiate contesting conceptualizations of Hitler. Thus, it is cloning that truly situates the Hitler trope at the crossroads. At the most basic level, the trope of cloning ambiguously engages the question of Hitler’s uniqueness. On the one hand, cloning challenges, as Nürnberger tells Liebermann, the idea of the “absolutely unique individual” (183) and therefore also Hitler’s uniqueness. The existence of ninety-four Hitler clones throughout the Western world suggests that countries other than Germany, most notably the United States where the text’s finale takes place, might produce what Liebermann calls “a Hitler-like leader” (68). On the other hand, cloning reinforces Hitler’s uniqueness because it grounds his behavior and character in his distinctive genetic information. Liebermann’s notion that someone who is like Hitler might emerge is replaced with the idea that the same Hitler might rise again, suggesting that social circumstances and cultural climate alone are not enough to create a “new” Hitler. Cloning thus relates back to the early 1970s texts that all revolve around the idea of an American Hitler or Hitler going unnoticed in U.S. society. At the same time, the cloning trope foreshadows those realist texts that portray Hitler as evil by nature. If, by making nature a factor, The Boys from Brazil anticipates the logic of later Hitler Fiction, it also dismisses as too simplistic the exclusive focus on nature that characterizes those later texts. In Levin’s novel, the “Young Jewish Defenders,” a militant Zionist group that fights antiSemitism around the globe, hold that they are dealing with “ninety-four Hitlers” because the boys share Hitler’s exact genetic information (206). They plan to kill all clones to save their own children from “the way to the gas chambers” (260). Their exclusive focus on nature as the decisive factor for the clones’ development and the drastic measures they propose, however, are strongly disparaged by the narrative. Liebermann, the novel’s figure of moral authority, foils their plot as he foils Mengele’s by destroying the list with the names and addresses of all clones that he takes from the dead Mengele. In addition, the text casts the Young Jewish Defenders as dangerous conspirators who threaten the inner peace of the United States. And yet, the group’s interpretation of Hitler as the embodiment of an ontological evil that will thrive in every social surrounding is the conceptualization that eventually emerges as the dominant one in U.S. culture by the late 1970s and that has not disappeared since. The ideas of Mengele and Liebermann concerning the successful reproduction of Hitler are slightly more complex than those of the Young Jewish Defenders. Both the Nazi and his Jewish antagonist believe in the interplay of genes and social surrounding, of nature and nurture—the two factors involved in successful cloning. Consequently, Mengele tries

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to recreate as closely as possible the environment the historical Hitler grew up in, and Liebermann tries to foil this plan by saving the foster fathers from being murdered. Their antagonism climaxes in a fight during the novel’s finale. Liebermann has learned that the next victim on Mengele’s list is a Henry Wheelock who lives in a small town in Pennsylvania. He calls Wheelock to warn him and tells him that he will come to see him the next day. In the meantime, the Brazilian-based Nazi Organization, intimidated by Liebermann’s investigations, has withdrawn its killers and abolished its plan. Mengele, however, will not accept this and travels from Paraguay to the United States intending to kill at least all the foster fathers there. He arrives earlier than Liebermann at the Wheelocks’ and kills Henry Wheelock. When Liebermann arrives, Mengele attacks him. During their fight, Liebermann is shot several times by Mengele but manages to set free Wheelock’s dogs. With Liebermann paralyzed by his wounds and Mengele restricted by the dogs, Bobby, the clone, arrives. Both men try to draw Bobby on their side, and Mengele even tells him who he is. Finally, realizing that Mengele has murdered his (foster) father, Bobby has the dogs kill Mengele and calls an ambulance for Liebermann—but only after obtaining the promise that Liebermann will tell nobody that Bobby ordered the dogs to attack Mengele. At first sight, this outcome seems to suggest that Liebermann has won and Mengele lost, and that the world will be saved from experiencing a second Hitler because it is now impossible “to duplicate the environment which produced the dictator” (Webb 158). However, the situation is more complex. In fact, while the narrative suggests that the confrontation Bobby witnesses and in which he interferes will prevent him from developing into his “father,” it also simultaneously suggests that what he sees and does constitutes the first step in his development into the new Hitler. The novel thus complicates and, to a degree, satirizes Mengele’s and Liebermann’s understanding of the nature-nurture complex. In its stead, it proposes a more sophisticated concept of “environment” and its effects on the clone. Bobby’s development, the novel holds, is influenced not only by events taking place in the family but also by the media-generated images of television. Significantly, The Boys from Brazil stages the fight over the Hitler clone and its future in the small town of “New Providence” in Pennsylvania (213). The reference to “providence” signifies what is at stake in the confrontation between Liebermann and Mengele, implying that it is the future of America and, by extension, the world. More importantly, though, the name resonates with the Puritan notion of American exceptionalism. Traditionally, this exceptionalism, the idea that America

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fundamentally differs from Europe, has been taken as the guarantee that European fanaticism and fascism will not thrive in the United States. By placing the clone most likely to develop into Hitler in the living room of a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant family, however, the novel suggests that the American project has been infected, since its Puritan beginnings, by a racism that compares to the Nazi version. This suspicion is enforced when Mengele arrives at the Wheelocks’ house: H. Wheelock. The red flag-signal was down at the side of the box. GUARD DOGS, a board below warned (or advertised?) in crude black painted letters. (214)

This short description of mailbox and board, focalized through Mengele, is full of allusions to the Third Reich. The colors, red and black, evoke the Nazi “flag”; the “crude [ . . . ] letters” point to both the swastika and the runic inscriptions favored by the Nazis. And since the reader (together with Liebermann) first learned about Henry Wheelock through a former concentration camp guard, the reference to the guard dogs evokes images of the dogs the Nazis used in concentration camps. Mengele’s insecurity whether the board is warning or advertisement thus mirrors the confusion of the reader who realizes that the entrance to an American family home is projected as the gate to a concentration camp. During the short conversation between Mengele and Henry Wheelock that follows, Mengele poses as Liebermann, whom Wheelock knows as a famous Nazi hunter. While they talk, the semantic (con)fusion of Nazism and the traditional American values that Wheelock represents continue, for Mengele and Wheelock turn out to think very much alike. When Mengele feigns that he “hate[s] all Nazis,” Wheelock answers that “[i]t’s the boogies, not the Nazis we have to worry about now” (217). He maliciously aligns the Nazis, oppressors of ethnic and religious minorities, with the African Americans, an oppressed ethnic minority. The narrative thus implicitly highlights how American culture has frequently used references to the Nazis and the Holocaust to avoid addressing its own history of racism. Wheelock’s comment echoes similar thoughts by Mengele a little earlier in the story. Before seeing Wheelock, Mengele spends a few days in a cheap hotel in a worn-down area in Washington, D.C. Walking the streets, he is appalled by the “veritable textbook of inferior racial types” he encounters, “not only blacks and Semites, but a pair of Orientals as well” and later a “fat and greasylooking [ . . . ] Lebanese” (197–98). Stressing the parallels between the Nazi racism and its U.S. variants, the narrative severely challenges any notion of American exceptionalism.

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Certain social conditions combined with the presence of a charismatic leader figure, the novel suggests, might transform the United States into a fascist country.2 And the Hitler clone’s American family home and the influence of his American foster father are cast as the ideal social surrounding for the development of a second Hitler. Mengele’s mistake, then, is that his interpretation of nurture is too narrow and too literal. In his futile attempt to copy the family background of the historical Hitler, he kills the one person who might have transformed young Bobby into the racist he aims to create. At the same time, though, the novel pessimistically suggests that the killing of the foster father and everything that follows from it are exactly what sets the clone on the path to follow in his father’s steps. The boy’s behavior during and after the confrontation is highly ambiguous. The problem for Mengele and Liebermann—and, by extension, also the reader—is to read the boy’s words and actions against the background information that he is carrying Adolf Hitler’s genetic information, a factor the narrative never completely dismisses as irrelevant. For Mengele, who is looking for signs that the boy is indeed “reliving [Hitler’s] life” (244), Bobby Wheelock is obviously the old and new young Hitler. He guesses correctly that Bobby is not doing well in school, that there are confrontations with his father, and that Bobby “feel[s] different from everyone sometimes” (243). Every piece of information he obtains from the boy strengthens his conviction that the historical Hitler’s childhood is being repeated here. Echoing a Puritan typological mode of interpretation, his reading of Bobby becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It ignores that all Bobby has admitted to are the typical problems and worries most teenagers reaching puberty experience.3 For Liebermann and the reader, by contrast, how Bobby interferes in the fight and how he behaves afterwards is more worrying than the general parallels between Bobby’s and Hitler’s childhood Mengele focuses on. That Bobby has the dogs kill Mengele can be read as an instance of selfjustice, so often condoned by American culture in general and Hitler Fiction in particular. Mengele has after all killed his foster father. But this killing can also be read as an expression of the boy’s genetically determined penchant for cruelty. As the moment at which the sadistic impulse so often ascribed to the historical Hitler wins the better of him, it would constitute a decisive step in his development into the new Hitler. That he blackmails Liebermann into covering this deed lends support to this second interpretation. And even Liebermann, who has throughout maintained that the boys are not “ninety-four Hitlers” but “ninety-four boys with Hitler’s genes,” suddenly thinks of Bobby as “[m]y helper Hitler” when the boy calls an ambulance for him and gets him the list with the

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addresses of all the clones and their families from Mengele’s coat (206, 247). The fact that Bobby, who aspires to be a filmmaker just as the historical Hitler wanted to become a painter, sells a movie to a local news station on the very same morning is equally ambiguous. One the one hand, it can be read as the booster for “contacts [and] self-confidence” the historical Hitler, whose artistic career failed, never had and thus as an indicator that Bobby will not follow in Hitler’s tracks but pursue a career as a director (257). On the other hand, this success can be read as an event that will fuel the boy’s aspirations beyond all reasonable limits and prevent him from leading a “normal” life. Liebermann, in any case, quickly returns to an optimistic interpretation, declaring that the clones are “[n]ot ordinary [ . . . ] [b]ut not Hitlers” (260). Significantly, he also modifies his theories concerning a resurgence of Nazism. While he argued earlier that it took a charismatic, Hitler-like leader and the social conditions that made the masses follow this leader, he now claims that “people are smarter now, not so much thinking their leaders are God. Television makes a big difference. And history, knowing” (261). Liebermann’s trust in the educational role of television, however, is seriously challenged by the novel’s gloomy ending that finds Bobby alone in his room, drawing: He got into the drawing, where everything was nicer. Gave himself to the platform, and the man standing on it. Small from so far away. Brush, brush, brush. Lift up his arms: brush, brush. Who would he be, this man on the platform. Someone great, that’s for sure, with all these people coming to see him. Not just a singer or comedian; someone fantastic, a really good person that they loved and respected. They paid fortunes to get in, and if they couldn’t pay, he let them in free. Someone that nice . . . He put a little television camera up at the top of the dome; aimed a few more spotlights at the man. He thinned the brush to a real fine point and gave little dot-mouths to the nearer bigger people, so they were cheering, telling him—the man, that is—how good he was, how much they loved him. He bent his sharp nose closer to the paper and gave dot-mouths to the smaller people. His forelock fell. He bit his lip, squinted his pale-blue eyes. Dot, dot, dot. He could hear the people cheering, roaring; a beautiful growing love-thunder that built and built, and then pounded, pounded, pounded, pounded. Sort of like those old Hitler movies. (267–68)

The scene seems to gloomily resolve the ambiguities around Bobby’s behavior, as it suggests that he has found a role model in Adolf Hitler.

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While Hitler’s name is withheld until the last line when Bobby himself becomes aware of the cultural pretexts he is drawing on, the reader knows much earlier who Bobby is drawing. The picture he composes resonates with images of the Nazi rallies at Nuremberg and the way directors such as Leni Riefenstahl constructed the historical Hitler’s persona for the public. Moreover, the rhythm of the prose, the short sentences, and especially the onomatopoetic “dot, dot, dot” and “brush, brush, brush” recreate for both Bobby and the reader the trumpets and fanfares of the rallies. While Bobby thus identifies with the crowd, he also increasingly identifies with Hitler, “the man standing on [the platform].” Bobby gives “himself to the platform” from the beginning, an ambiguous phrase that refers both to his manual work and to the mental work of imagining himself there. A little later, the two identities have merged so far that a reference to “him” requires the clarification “the man, that is.” This blending of subjectivities culminates moments later in the penultimate paragraph in the anaphoric usage of the personal pronoun “he.” Three times the “he” clearly refers to Bobby, and these three sentences are focalized through the narrator who once again gives a description of Bobby’s physical features. This further enforces the identification of Bobby with the man on the platform for the readers, serving as a reminder that Bobby looks exactly like the person he is painting. The next sentence does the same for Bobby: “He could hear the people cheering” completes his identification with the subject of his painting. The sentence is focalized through Bobby, and now it is no longer possible to distinguish between Bobby and Hitler. The former imagines that he has assumed the latter’s position on stage and that the crowd is celebrating him. The novel’s last, one-sentence paragraph recreates the distance between Bobby and Hitler with Bobby reflecting on the origins of his fantasy, “those old Hitler movies.” The phrase, and indeed the whole passage, seriously undermines Liebermann’s optimistic evaluation of television as a means for educating people and preventing history from repeating itself. For Bobby, the media-generated images of Hitler that circulate in American culture carry no political meaning and have no educational value. The phrase “Hitler movies” relegates them to the level of “Charlie Chaplin movies” or “John Wayne movies.” They are pure entertainment—tellingly, Bobby compares the person he is drawing to “a singer or comedian”—that differs from other fiction films only in the enormous vision of grandeur they offer. What the scene dramatizes, then, is that the Hitler of the American cultural imaginary has very little in common with the historical figure, but is a product of the American imagination instead.

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In its awareness of the cultural constructedness of America’s version of Hitler and the role the media play in this process, The Boys from Brazil equals the more openly postmodernist texts of the early 1970s; its major intertext is exactly the cultural imaginary whose image of Hitler it copies but also problematizes. Genes might not be the decisive factor in the creation of a new Hitler, the novel suggests, but American culture’s obsession with images of and narratives about the Nazi past, which distract from rather than draw attention to racism within the United States. In this respect, too, Levin’s novel echoes the texts of Bukowski, Goss, and Spinrad. At the same time, The Boys from Brazil differs markedly from those earlier texts, because it never completely allows its readers to forget that the clones share Hitler’s genetic information. The plot constantly downplays this “natural” dimension, but it nevertheless obsessively revolves around it. The novel thus also paves the way for texts such as Gus Weill’s The Führer Seed (1979) that locate the reason for Hitler’s behavior exclusively in his allegedly natural, often biologically conceived, evilness. Externalizing Good and Evil: Gus Weill’s The Führer Seed (1979) Levin’s reworking of the Hitler trope, the replacement of Hitler by Hitler clones, anticipates another variation that emerges during the late 1970s: Hitler’s children. As the culture moves from imagining children instead of clones, however, The Boys from Brazil’s complex negotiation of various conceptualizations of Hitler gives way to an essentialist mode of thinking that locates the reasons for Hitler’s behavior, and by extension for Nazism and the Holocaust, in his generic evil. Whereas The Boys from Brazil still dismisses the interpretation of the Young Jewish Defenders as simplistic, later Hitler Fiction increasingly projects the group’s understanding of Hitler as sound and convincing. In fact, their conceptualization of Hitler as evil incarnate has dominated the genre and American culture ever since. It replaces a focus on ideology, education, and social surrounding, and therefore on the making of a Hitler, with one on ontology: The specific deeds and beliefs are now conceived as following from being Hitler. Unusual for Hitler Fiction, Gus Weill’s The Führer Seed (1979) as well as several other late-1970s novels are not set in an alternate present or in the Nazi past, but in the Federal Republic of Germany.4 As these texts translate the question of “could it happen here in America?” into the statement “it could happen there (in Germany) again,” they displace domestic anxieties. They also prove an exception to the rule that the U.S. cultural imaginary is relatively immune to developments in

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postwar Germany. What I would like to suggest is that at this particular historical moment American culture perceived similarities not only between its own recent history and the rise of Nazism in the 1930s, but also between its own situation and the Federal Republic’s development during the 1970s. Like the United States, Germany was hit by the economic recession caused by the oil crisis; its terrorist problem reminded many Americans of the domestic struggles and the terrorism that had hit their country in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. At the same time, Germany’s 1970s foreign policy was characterized by increased self-confidence that strained relations with the United States for the first time since World War II. Americans were disturbed by Chancellor Brandt’s Ostpolitik and by the way his successor, Helmut Schmidt, repeatedly criticized Israel for its handling of the Palestinian question and the United States for backing the Israeli position. As a consequence, parts of American culture interpreted this combination of civil unrest, economic crisis, and perceived anti-Semitism by actualizing the established narrative template of Nazism. This facilitated Hitler Fiction’s projection of American concerns onto contemporary Germany. The trope of Hitler’s children, though, was first deployed not in fiction but in Jillian Becker’s controversial Hitler’s Children: The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Terrorist Gang (1977). While Becker hardly ever mentions Hitler, she consistently casts the terrorists’ fight for a free Palestine as Nazism’s continued fight against the Jews.5 This is most obvious in her “Prologue,” which is dedicated to the hijacking of an Air France airbus in 1976. A group of ten terrorists, eight Palestinians and two Germans, forced the pilot to fly to Entebbe, Uganda, where the hijackers released most of their prisoners but not the Israeli citizens and the crew. These hostages were rescued a day later when an Israeli special force attacked the plane and killed all hijackers. Becker, however, presents the hijacking as a Baader-Meinhof plot by exclusively focusing on one German hijacker, Wilfried Böse, and emphasizes that “among the hostages at Entebbe there were a few who had been in Hitler’s concentration camps” (18). Her narrative thus metonymically links the hostages’ ordeal to the Nazi death camps, downplaying the ideological differences between Nazism and 1970s terrorism. Instead, she implies that the terrorism of the BaaderMeinhof group is Nazism in a new garb. In this respect, it is crucial that Becker does not forget to stress that Böse’s “name means ‘evil’” (17). What the Nazis and the terrorists share, she suggests, are not primarily ideological convictions, but a common evil that manifests itself in similar actions and attitudes.

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If Becker thus metaphorically casts the German terrorists as Hitler’s children, Hitler Fiction that features Hitler’s son or daughter literalizes this metaphor and translates the metaphorical association into a metonymic link. Weill’s The Führer Seed, Richard Rose’s The Wolf (1980), and Timothy Benford’s Hitler’s Daughter . . . Wants to Occupy the White House (1983) all suggest that Hitler’s children are evil because they are Hitler’s children, because they carry his genetic information. Encoding ontology as biology, these novels differ markedly from Martin Dibner’s A God for Tomorrow (1961), which dismissed the idea that Hitler’s genes had any influence on his son’s development. They also contrast with Levin’s The Boys from Brazil, which suggested that not even one hundred percent genetic identity and a fairly exact copying of the historical Hitler’s family background were enough to create a second Hitler. The Führer Seed foregrounds the importance of biology already in its title, highlighting that Hitler’s semen brings with it the will to power, the tyranny, and anti-Semitism connoted by the term “führer.” Accordingly, the text pays close attention to the new Hitler’s physical features and employs them as indicators of his generic evil. Here is how Lisa, Kurt Hitler’s lover, sees her boyfriend whom she and the reader only know as Kurt Hauser, an ambitious German politician, at this point in the narrative. Looking closely at his face she sees the face of a tragic actor, lean and somehow always in a shadow from which his green eyes seemed to burn. A shock of unmanageable brown hair fell across his forehead. (12)

In Levin’s The Boys from Brazil the clones’ outward features help Liebermann solve the riddle of what Mengele is trying to achieve, but they are not at all sure indicators of the clones’ characters. In The Führer Seed, by contrast, how Lisa sees Kurt Hauser entails a complete interpretation of Kurt Hitler’s character. That she sees a “tragic actor” signifies that his life is dominated by the “tragedy” that he carries Hitler’s genetic information. He never had a chance not to follow in his father’s steps, although he grew up in a loving, liberal household, raised by a wellmeaning foster parent. Told by Martin Bormann, Hitler’s right hand during the war, about his real father on his eighteenth birthday only, he killed his foster father the same night and accepted his destiny. At the same time, the phrase “tragic actor” anticipates the public persona Kurt Hitler will assume once the world has learned who he really is. Claiming to be motivated by “generic guilt” (214), he casts himself as another of “his [father’s] victim[s]” (278). The “shadow” Lisa perceives hints at Kurt’s “dark” plans, the second Holocaust he plans. His “burning eyes”

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signal his unrelenting will and the cruelty with which he pursues his goals. His “unmanageable” forelock connects him to his father. Together with the cruel eyes and moustache (absent here since this is only the son), the forelock belongs to the standard repertoire of Hitler description. Kurt Hitler’s “unmanageable” hair hints at another character trait. Like his father, he is prone to fits and easily loses his temper, but he is also hard to defeat. And that his hair falls in a “shock,” finally, anticipates the shock his first public appearance as Hitler’s son will mean for the world. The passage’s symbolic significance is grounded in the novel’s realist aesthetics. According to the popular realist paradigm, language does not create reality, but offers unobstructed, direct access to the realm of the referents. With its minute description of Hitler’s face motivated by circumstantial realism, the text shifts the conviction that the surface signifies what lies beneath it from linguistics to physiognomy. Hitler’s looks become an indicator of his generic and genetically determined evil. His inner nature leaves traces on the surface that are ultimately unambiguous, although Lisa, through whom this passage is focalized, does not yet quite comprehend what she sees. In Levin’s novel, Liebermann prevents the killing of the clones, convinced that their exterior does not signify their character. In Weill’s realist text, Kurt Hitler is right when he exclaims moments before his assassination: “Am I not being hounded, murdered, not for what I’ve done [ . . . ] but for who I am?” (280). Again he tries to cast himself as an innocent victim, but the text stages his death not as a murder but as just punishment and as the only way to foil his plans and to prevent “another holocaust,” as the novel’s back cover warns in sensationalist fashion. Hitler’s son is killed not for what his father or he has done but for what his nature would make him do in the future if he was allowed to live. Realism, then, is the “natural” mode of representation for Hitler as a “natural” evil, or, put differently, the essentialist conceptualization of Hitler as evil depends on realist strategies of representation. By the same token, the cultural work of projection that late 1970s Hitler Fiction performs is facilitated by realist aesthetics. The allegedly “natural” relation between signs and referents obscures the displacement and deferral actually at work. A postmodernist, self-reflexive text such as Walter Abish’s How German Is It (1980) constantly highlights that the text’s image of Germany is a construction triggered by American concerns. A realist text like The Führer Seed, however, seems at first sight to have nothing to do with American domestic issues of the 1970s. Yet, I wish to argue, The Führer Seed constantly negotiates such interior concerns, which resurface at two key moments in the narrative.

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The first of these moments occurs in chapter 30. Supported by a powerful Nazi conspiracy that includes industrialists, trade union leaders, and NATO generals, Kurt Hitler has won the elections for governing mayor of Berlin. The German people, longing for the grandeur of his father’s rule, fervently love Hitler, and the chancellorship seems the next logical step. His fellow conspirators have the German minister of the interior killed so that Hitler can fill the vacancy and enter the upcoming campaign from an even more favorable position. This is how this murder is depicted: The eighteenth floor of the Steigenberger Hotel in Bonn was ablaze with lights as West German Minister of the Interior Dr. Alfred Naumann entertained his counterpart from India. Security was tight, a subject Dr. Naumann was discussing when he saw a waiter approaching with a silver bread dish full of hot rolls for which the Ambassador [sic] was noted. When the black coated waiter was three paces from the head table, the door to the restaurant was rocked with an explosion. It produced more noise and smoke than danger, but it did cause all heads, particularly those of the security men, to turn in its direction. As they turned, the waiter dropped the bread trap and the royal-blue cloth holding it, exposing his hand, which held the magnum revolver that he fired twice into the Minister of the Interior’s face, blowing his head away. (250)

This scene, I claim, is a fictional reworking of the murder of Robert Kennedy in 1968. Here is Dan E. Moldea’s account of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination: At 12:15 A.M. on June 5, 1968, an assassin shot and mortally wounded Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York in a narrow kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Just moments earlier, the forty-twoyear-old Kennedy had left a ballroom celebration in the wake of winning the California Democratic presidential primary. No fewer than seventyseven people were crowded in the pantry when twenty-four-year-old Palestinian immigrant Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, using an eight-shot .22-caliber revolver, opened fire on the senator. Kennedy was shot three times and died early the following day. (13)

I do not claim, of course, that Weill consciously translated the killing of Robert Kennedy into an event taking place in Germany and among Germans for his novel. Rather, the surprising similarities between the historical event and the fictional text reveal how projection— easily assumed, “but difficult to document,” as Paul Monaco puts it

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(404)—works, how texts relocate the concerns of their own culture and negotiate them under the garb of the other. The similarities between the real murder of Kennedy and the fictional assassination of Dr. Naumann are just too many to ignore: Robert Kennedy, at least according to popular myth, was shot just when his way to the presidency had been cleared. In the novel, Dr. Naumann is killed to pave Hitler’s way to the chancellorship. Kennedy was a former attorney general of the United States, Dr. Naumann occupies the corresponding German office, “Minister of the Interior.” Kennedy was shot in the hotel pantry by someone who professed to work there, and Dr. Naumann is murdered by an assassin who professes to bring food from the kitchen. More importantly, still, Kennedy was shot by Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, a Palestinian whose name, however, is of Indian origin. And Dr. Naumann is “entertaining his counterpart from India” when he is attacked. Sirhan killed Kennedy because of the latter’s allegedly blind support for Israel during the Six Days’ War. Dr. Naumann is killed to free the way for Kurt Hitler, whose aim is that “this time [the Jews] would all die: every one of them” (173). Anti-Semitism thus emerges as the key motivation for both killings. The fictional murder is American culture’s reworking and externalization of the real event. What The Führer Seed displaces, then, are the domestic violence and series of political assassinations that shook the United States during the 1960s and early 1970s. The Hitler conspiracy manages to blame “urban guerrillas”—the term also resonates with the civil unrest of the American 1960s—for the killing of the German minister of the interior (251). In fact, their whole plot unfolds against the background of a country shaken by left-wing terrorism. Just as during the Weimar Republic, the novel thus suggests, violence from the left will ultimately strengthen the extreme right and lead to the collapse of the democratic system. Simultaneously, though, the novel creates strong links between the terrorists and the Nazis, implying that they are basically alike and that ideological differences do not matter. What matters instead, the novel holds, is that both the Nazis and the terrorists are evil. As in Becker’s Hitler’s Children, it is anti-Semitism that unites Nazis and terrorists and that serves as the most important manifestation of their evilness. The terrorists support the Palestinians in their fight against Israel; the Nazis plan the extermination of all Jews. While the two groups never openly collaborate in the novel, they are connected through the historical figure that was emerging as America’s major enemy in the Middle East at this time, Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi. Associating one of the United States’ postwar enemies, Qaddafi, with Hitler by means of metonymy, The Führer Seed anticipates a rhetorical strategy characteristic of later Hitler Fiction. As I will argue in the next

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chapter, texts written from the mid-1980s onwards frequently establish metonymic or metaphoric links between Hitler and America’s new enemies, projecting the postwar conflicts as the continuation or repetition of World War II. In The Führer Seed, though, Qaddafi is not yet overtly cast as America’s enemy, since the novel displaces this dimension of postwar American politics as well. Qaddafi mainly figures as the link between the Nazis and the terrorists. He sponsors both Kurt Hitler’s conspiracy and the Black September terrorist group, which, at one point in the narrative, tries to free some German terrorists by hijacking a Lufthansa jet. If the killing of Dr. Naumann covertly negotiates the United States’ recent history of political assassinations, another passage suggests that the novel’s preoccupation with Nazi anti-Semitism displaces the United States’ racial problems. At the end of the novel, Mossad agent Max Levy finally isolates Kurt Hitler in a dressing room at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Threatened at gun point by the Israeli, Hitler drops his public persona and reveals his true thoughts: “Jew-bastard! He knew! He knew you well and he almost got you. Oh, but he came close. He’s loved for it, did you know that, you Jid cocksucker? They voted for me because I am his son! They still love him, they love me! [ . . . ] The world hates you, did you know that? Your money buys you smiles and courtesy, but we hate you! We all hate you! Your blood contaminates mankind! Your nigger skin pollutes civilization!” (280)

Hitler’s hate speech certainly constitutes one of the ugliest moments of all Hitler Fiction. It confirms once again what the reader, who is privy to Hitler’s thoughts throughout, has known all along. Kurt Hitler is not driven by “generic guilt,” as he repeatedly claims, but by genetically determined anti-Semitism (278). The novel thus justifies that seconds later Max kills the defenseless Hitler and projects this act—as always in Hitler Fiction—as the positive culmination of the narrative, as the action necessary to stop history from repeating itself. Yet, the change in register in Hitler’s last sentence is oddly revealing, because it suddenly recasts the Jews as blacks. What surfaces here, I would argue, is America’s own, highly problematic past of slavery, Jim Crow laws, segregation, and white supremacy. Hitler’s rhetoric thus foregrounds—for a short moment—the novel’s preoccupation with domestic affairs. But whereas The Boys from Brazil negotiated the parallels between Nazi anti-Semitism and U.S. racism more openly, The Führer Seed does not directly address this issue. Overt racism against people of color is restricted to this one sentence, which, moreover, is uttered by Hitler.

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Indeed, the novel, whose last section is set in New York, almost completely avoids the representation of African Americans. Its only black character is a “whore with blood atop the whites of her eyes” who approaches Max and Cassie, a young actress who eventually accompanies him back to Israel. The three meet on Broadway, and the appearance of the prostitute immediately evokes all negative connotations of the slang term “broad.” Through her appearance, she is immediately cast as an unhealthy drug addict and potential carrier of venereal diseases. Her offer “to show [Max and Cassie] something ‘you ain’t never seen’” further stresses her aggressive and potentially dangerous sexuality. It contrasts pointedly with Max’s and Cassie’s sexual clumsiness. They never sleep with each other until the end of the novel. And yet, Cassie dismisses the prostitute’s proposal with the remark “I’ve seen it all” (217). Her answer, together with the stereotypical and racist description of the woman, lays bare the logic of projection that dominates the narrative. Just as Cassie ignores the offer, the novel ignores the problem of domestic racism and only negotiates it implicitly via references to Nazi anti-Semitism. Typical of late 1970s Hitler Fiction, then, The Führer Seed stops short of overtly criticizing the United States. However, the novel does not yet offer a positive reaffirmation of U.S. national identity. Throughout, Americans and America—in the few sentences in which they are mentioned—are depicted as well-meaning, but weak, indecisive, and unable to react to the evil Hitler represents. Kurt Hitler believes that the United States will not help the Jews he targets because “America and noninvolvement [are] synonymous” (173). And indeed, when Black September hijacks the Lufthansa plane, “the U.S. State Department condemn[s] terrorism for the thousandth time” but does not take the appropriate actions (134). Israel, by contrast, features in the narrative as a country of action and determination possessing a competent secret service and a president who orders the assassination of Kurt Hitler because “history does not deal well with Jews who wait to see” (144). Put directly in opposition to the evil of Hitler and his helpers, Israel is thus cast as “good.” In other words, it is depicted as the United States would like to see itself. Just as the text projects the negative dimensions of U.S. history onto Hitler and the Nazis, it projects a positive American self-image onto Israel: It externalizes both good and evil. According to Melani McAlister, Israel’s function as a role model for American culture at that time also comprised a gender dimension: “[As] feminism and women’s political activism shook American culture to its core in the 1970s, the fascination with [Israel’s] military power served to reassert a certain kind of masculinity” (158). The Israeli heroes of popular films and fiction, she suggests, represent not only a “restored national

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pride” but also “revitalized masculinity” (197). As embodiments of the Israeli national character, these protagonists act as men are expected to act. Significantly, The Führer Seed, too, dramatizes the crisis of postVietnam U.S. identity as a crisis of masculinity. Throughout, the novel depicts male Americans as weak and female ones as strong. While the male reporters at JFK airport succumb to Kurt Hitler’s charm, Barbara Walters gives him a hard time when she interviews him on TV; and while Max easily humiliates the male CIA agents that try to follow him through Berlin, he cannot fool Cassie for a second. Despite this, Max is the narrative’s hero, and Cassie never questions his leadership. Moreover, as a Holocaust survivor, Max is also the novel’s voice of moral authority. Traumatized by the murder of his parents he had to witness as a child, he is unable to form genuine relations with other people—until he meets Cassie and until he kills Hitler and overcomes his trauma. As with the issues of political assassinations and racism, though, the novel never spells out its critique of the current state of gender relations and the crisis of masculinity in the United States. While it capitalizes on such cultural anxieties, the narrative does not negotiate them openly. Most importantly, though, the novel’s conceptualization of Hitler as the embodiment of evil negates “the potential for cultural critique” inherent in the projection of the problems of one’s own culture onto another one (Schmundt-Thomas 22). Suggesting that all problems Germany faces arise from the evil inscribed into Kurt Hitler’s genes, the text downplays economic and social factors that might allow drawing parallels between Germany and the United States. Americans, as The Führer Seed presents them, may be weak at the moment, but they are never evil. Since nobody with Hitler’s genetic information is living in the United States, the novel implies, it cannot happen there. Between Projection and Othering: Timothy Benford’s Hitler’s Daughter . . . Wants to Occupy the White House (1983) Published only four years after The Führer Seed, Benford’s novel is characterized by a similar evasion of America’s domestic cultural conflicts. However, written at a time when the Reagan presidency had already managed to reconstruct a more positive American self-image, the novel already performs a much more pronounced othering, presenting the conspiracy to occupy the White house as a threat from the outside, as an occupation in the military sense of invasion. The text no longer externalizes good and evil, but only evil; it casts as its protagonist an American who tries to foil the plot against his country and relegates the Israeli agent it also features to a supporting role.

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Hitler’s Daughter initially is fast-paced and suspenseful, and constitutes a perfect example of “the gripping, dramatic story,” which is, according to Mark Fenster, “at the heart of conspiracy theory” (106). By coincidence, the protagonist gains information about the conspiracy, becomes a target himself, and starts to fight it, gaining more insights into the objectives of his enemies and the scope of the conspiracy over time. After roughly a hundred pages, however, Benford’s novel loses pace completely and disintegrates into a seemingly endless series of disconnected events, before it abruptly ends with Hitler’s daughter achieving her goal. What I wish to argue here is that this narrative collapse is not a postmodernist play with established plot patterns or the result of “poor writing.” Rather, the disintegration of the narrative is fundamentally tied to the novel’s political thrust. Unwilling to cast any American character as a conspirator, the narrative, set in the United States, cannot progress but necessarily collapses. The cultural work of projection necessitates and hinges on this plot development. The conspiracy narrative, as Mark Fenster has convincingly argued, usually begins with “a particular moment in which the central character, through investigative skill or by sheer luck, uncovers convincing evidence of a conspiracy” (111). Fenster calls this the first “narrative pivot,” a moment at which “the protagonist (and, in many narratives, the audience as well) is finally able to make the correct interpretive conclusions” (124). As the story progresses, more narrative pivots follow. Moving rapidly from place to place, the protagonist detects that the conspiracy is seemingly “all encompassing,” that it “is always already (almost) everywhere, always already knows (almost) everything, and has effects everywhere while appearing nowhere” (122). Whoever the hero turns to for help is likely to be involved in the conspiracy already. In the end, however, in most conspiracy narratives, the constant accumulation of knowledge enables the protagonist to foil the conspiratorial plot, bringing the story to a satisfying closure that “reaffirms the protagonist’s agency” as well as “the larger historical structures placed in danger by the conspiracy” (130). The opening chapters of Hitler’s Daughter follow this pattern. The first narrative pivot occurs when White House press aide Ted Scott, a former journalist and now the president’s most important speech writer, learns through Bauman, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, that Hitler had a daughter who was born in the States and who is now on the brink of entering the White House. Before Bauman can give Ted more information he is killed. Attempts on the lives of Ted and his girlfriend Jil follow, because they have come in possession of some of Bauman’s notes. Together with FBI agent Dick Reynolds and Mossad undercover agent Uri, they escape to a safe house on the outskirts of D.C. Checking records and interpreting

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Bauman’s documents they soon manage to reduce the list of suspects to three candidates: Hitler’s daughter, they realize, is the nation’s favorite TV anchorwoman; the wife of the vice president, who is now running for the highest office himself; or a congresswoman from the oppositional party. This interpretative success constitutes the text’s second narrative pivot. However, the narrative does not accelerate again, as it typically would in conspiracy fiction. Instead, it comes to a standstill, and the plot falls almost literally apart. This rather comes as a surprise for the reader since a much more plausible plot development has implicitly been charted by Bauman earlier, who told Ted that Hitler’s daughter “leads a bold, dedicated and well-financed organization. They are Americans born here” (19). But instead of inquiring into the pasts of their three suspects, into how they got where they are now, the group goes over Bauman’s notes again and again. What they find out is what they and the readers know already, namely, that Hitler’s pregnant lover was brought to the United States on board a submarine in the spring of 1945. While the nonsensical plot development is irritating as such, it offers at the same time an important clue to the cultural work the text performs: The typical conspiracy narrative pinpoints what Dwight D. Eisenhower has famously called the “military-industrial complex.” As it casts corrupt politicians, businessmen, and military leaders as the evil agents behind the conspiracy, the standard conspiracy narrative usually expresses “a utopian desire to understand and confront the contradictions and conflicts of contemporary capitalism” (Fenster 116). By having its protagonists defeat their powerful opponents, such narratives, however, finally reestablish faith in the democratic system and capitalism, presenting them as prone to corruption but victorious in the end. Hitler’s Daughter, by contrast, a text set almost entirely in the United States and concerned with a conspiracy operating at the center of the American political system, drives this reaffirmation of American identity and institutions over the top. The novel does not implicate a single American politician, civil servant, or businessman into the conspiracy. The American political and economic system is projected as a perfectly working system, as a “good” system, which can be infiltrated and corrupted from the outside only. The negative characteristics of the U.S. political and economic system are projected onto Hitler’s daughter and her helpers. The cultural anxiety over an internal corruption of institutions is thus externalized. If many conspiracy thrillers suffer from drawing too many characters too fast into the conspiracy, Hitler’s Daughter, then, hardly draws anybody into the conspiracy. In typical popular fiction manner, the narrative crosscuts between Ted and his friends and Hitler’s daughter and her helpers. However, the novel does not stage further confrontations

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between the groups once Ted and his friends have arrived at the safe house. To ensure that its protagonists do not find evidence concerning American conspirators, the novel keeps them mostly confined there in the safe house. As a consequence, two-thirds of its plot are entirely devoid of pace and suspense. Restricted to their hiding place, the protagonists are not only removed from contact with the enemy but also from interaction with the rest of society, and they never try to inform anyone about the conspiracy they are tracing. This prevents—or rescues—the novel from developing the sense of paranoia, of being misunderstood, and finally from doubting one’s own sanity, which is characteristic of the typical conspiracy narrative. Since the group does not tell anybody about the conspiracy, there is nobody who can (profess to) disbelieve their story. The group, of course, cannot stay at the safe house for the rest of the story, as the narrative needs to be brought to some kind of closure, even if the narration cannot causally link the ending to preceding events. Twothirds into the text, therefore, the novel transports its major characters abroad. Ted and Uri travel to Germany to interview a veteran who witnessed the departure of the German submarine from a French port in the spring of 1945. Jil and Dick fly to a Caribbean island to talk to another German veteran who was aboard another submarine that escaped to South America in 1945. The protagonists’ journeys abroad are thus still motivated by a desire to learn more about the distant past and not by interest in the recent pasts of their three suspects. The temporal displacement of conspiracy and inquiry into the far past, which already characterized the endless rereadings of Bauman’s notes at the safe house, is now supplemented and enforced by a spatial displacement to outside of the United States. They meet and fight conspirators abroad, but these enemies are, of course, Germans and not Americans. To move the story toward closure, the text finally stages a kind of pseudopivot for which the characters would not have needed to go abroad. On his way to Munich airport, Ted reads a newspaper article about an accident in which Susan Benedict, the vice president’s wife and one of their suspects, was involved. She was rescued by a “doctor [ . . . ] named Harold Lupo” (203), whom Ted immediately identifies as Helmut Wolf, the SS doctor who accompanied Hitler’s pregnant lover to the United States. Ted and his friends quickly jump to the conclusion, wrong as it will turn out, that Susan Benedict is Hitler’s daughter. Implausible as this plot development is—why would Hitler’s daughter appear in public with her main ally, and why did the group not look for a connection between Wolf and their suspects earlier?—it is perfectly in line with the novel’s narrative logic. Hitler’s Daughter requires the villain to win, because foiling her plot to occupy the White House would

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necessarily mean identifying some Americans as “un-American” conspirators. If the villain succeeds, however, her domestic allies can remain in the dark, and the illusion that they are all Nazi infiltrators can be maintained. Significantly, Ted and his group unwillingly help Hitler’s daughter win by publicly embarrassing Susan Benedict and her husband. This causes the vice president to lose the presidential election against a candidate whose running mate is another suspect, Congresswoman Leona Gordon. On the novel’s last page, Leona Gordon emerges as Hitler’s daughter; she has the new president and the members of Ted’s group killed and occupies the White House. The conspiracy therefore finally succeeds because of the group’s well-meant attempt to foil it. To a certain degree, then, the misled protagonists figure as exactly the American helpers of Hitler’s daughter the novel is unwilling to admit to. However, just as Susan Benedict and her husband, they are ultimately cast as victims of a foreign conspiracy—a narrative move that implies that Americans in general tend to be innocent victims. It is possible that Benford adopted the idea of having those who are trying to foil the conspiracy inadvertently bring about its success from one of the most successful conspiracy thrillers of the time: Robert Ludlum’s The Holcroft Covenant (1978) also draws on the idea of Hitler’s, albeit here only metaphorical, children creating the Fourth Reich. Just as Hitler’s Daughter, Ludlum’s novel opens with a prologue set in 1945 that relates how a giant Nazi conspiracy smuggles hundreds of Aryan children out of Europe in submarines. These children are to assume positions of power all over the world. Thirty years later, Ludlum’s protagonist, Noel Holcroft, who believes that he is engaged in making amends for Holocaust victims, is used by the Nazi organization to release the funds they need to finance their operations. Unlike Benford’s small group, however, Holcroft finishes his interpretive work correctly, and the novel ends with him setting out to kill the conspirators. The Holcroft Covenant externalizes evil to a considerable degree by centering the conspiracy on a group of people who are German by birth and, as the narrative logic implies, also by blood and character. However, the novel also implicates other nationalities, including Americans, and most notably the protagonist’s American mother, in the conspiracy. Thus, The Holcroft Covenant undermines the nationalized binary of good and evil. Ludlum’s villain, Johann von Tiebolt, “a ruthless Nazi villain with a number of distinguishing characteristics,” may be the conspiracy’s leader, but even he is only a “part of a larger conspiracy [with] a much wider economic base,” which also counts several American businessmen among its ranks (Cobley 153). Hitler’s Daughter, by contrast, features a

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Nazi villain who seems to succeed without an American network, although she is, unlike von Tiebolt, operating in America only. Mostly absent from the narrative but constantly talked about, Hitler’s daughter seems to wield absolute power even without American helpers. This creates the impression that she is indeed a larger-than-life figure, the incarnation of evil, as such. Blaming Hitler enables the novel to avoid overtly addressing U.S. cultural and political conflicts. In Hitler’s Daughter there is no “militaryindustrial complex” behind the conspiracy as in virtually all conspiracy texts that do without Hitler or his offspring. The novel thus whitewashes the U.S. capitalist economy and implicitly defends it against the frequent allegations raised in most other conspiracy novels and films. Moreover, by externalizing domestic threats to consensus and the democratic system as such and by projecting them onto Hitler, the text shuns away from exploring possible reasons for distrust in one’s own government. Whereas the protagonists of most fictional and factual 1970s conspiracy narratives are journalists—often modeled after the examples of Woodward and Bernstein in their coauthored All the President’s Men (1974)—who expose the administration’s complicity in conspiracies, Benford’s protagonist, Ted, is a member of the administration. The people he is working for are cast as victims, not as villains. This, in fact, goes for the whole political system. The novel keeps the party membership of Hitler’s daughter open, presenting neither the Democratic nor the Republican Party explicitly as “Hitler’s party” and suggesting that the real danger is infiltration from the outside. For a text set in political Washington, with a protagonist who is working for the president, and a plot that ends with a presidential election that allows the enemy “to occupy” the highest office in American politics, Hitler’s Daughter manages almost perfectly to hide all its characters’ allegiances within the party system. There is only one sentence in the text that seems to identify Ted as press aide to a Republican president and Hitler’s daughter, Leona, as a Democratic politician. It is uttered fairly early in the novel during a party scene set in the White House. It is one of the few times that Ted and Jil leave the safe house, and they attend the party because all three suspects will be there. During the party, all conversations revolve around Leona’s immigration bill for which she seeks the president’s endorsement, a topic that has been alluded to earlier in the novel. Throughout, though, the content of the bill remains as vague as party memberships. The only exception is a remark by Leona’s administrative aide who tells Ted that “Chandler [the president] finds Leona’s bill pretty good. [ . . . ] The old Conservative likes the fact that it finally puts a lid on some of the crud that’s been creeping

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up our shores for years” (89). An alien more dangerous than those targeted by her plan, Leona has written a bill that aims at restricting immigration. More importantly, though, it seems as if Leona poses as a Democratic politician. Yet, the remark could also be ironic, suggesting that by endorsing the bill a Democratic president is proving to be a Conservative at heart. And this moment of clarity is further undermined a paragraph later when Ted and the aide agree that the president and his vice president, who opposes the bill, form “the most mismatched ticket in American political history [which makes] the Kennedy-Johnson and Reagan-Bush duets seem like they were made in heaven” (89). The reference to a Democratic and a Republican couple inscribes the pair they are talking about in neither party history, but suggests instead a bipartisan position. The party allegiances of Ted and Hitler’s daughter are thus kept in the balance. At a time when the emerging culture wars were driving the country further apart, the novel maintains—despite its dystopian plot—an optimistic vision of the United States. Dissent between the two major parties, it suggests, exists only on the surface, because both parties share a bipartisan commitment to and belief in America. The political system, the novel holds, is intact; there are serious, dedicated politicians working on either side, and it actually does not matter which side governs and which forms the “loyal opposition” (170). As it draws a sharp distinction between “good” Americans and “evil” Nazis, the text projects a domestic threat onto an alien other and implies that this other’s evilness will always be un-American, even if it has already crossed the borders, invaded the United States, and prevails in the end. The novel’s actual stance on domestic politics, its “political unconscious,” to borrow Fredric Jameson’s term, however, is far less neutral than it seems. Casting as the “real” threat to U.S. democracy the ultimate other already fought during World War II, the novel aims to recreate the national unity and optimism that American collective memory has come to associate with the war years. The text reflects and supports the effort of the Reagan administration to bridge the (in reality) ever-widening rift between the political parties and parts of the population. During the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, the figure of various alien others was frequently employed by (neo)conservatives to homogenize the domestic political landscape and to fuel nationalism.6 The novel’s endorsement of a positive and seemingly apolitical post-Vietnam American identity that denies internal differences thus emerges as a distinctively right-wing move. The text’s conservative reconstruction of national and personal identity is most obvious in its representation of gender roles, which echoes the

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crisis of U.S. masculinity dramatized by The Führer Seed. While casting American men as weak and women as strong, Weill’s novel, however, never spells out its critique of gender relations directly. Hitler’s Daughter, by contrast, depicts women—and especially professional women— openly as a threat to the social order. At the party, Ted and Jil’s half-serious attempt to identify Hitler’s daughter is doomed to fail because all three suspects are basically alike. Intelligent, ruthless, cold, and powerdriven, they are, in Ted’s words, “for all their beauty [ . . . ] three of the most undesirable women I’ve ever met” (92). While Ted evaluates the women by their sexual attractiveness only, the fact that Hitler’s daughter does not fundamentally differ from American “career women” delivers an extremely negative evaluation of all women who leave the domestic sphere. In contrast to the male politicians in the story who fight hard but fair, the women are frequently shown trying to drive them apart. Thus, and independent of the fact that one of them is Hitler’s daughter, all female politicians are cast as endangering the national and political unity the novel wants its readers to believe in. Democracy and order, the novel implies, depend on “benevolent” and “natural” masculine supremacy. In contrast to Jil, who, as a stewardess, does not pose a challenge to Ted’s position of power, the professional success of all three potential Hitlers expresses the deep-seated conservative anxieties about women in positions of power and the threat to patriarchy they pose. With regard to the novel’s gendering of good and evil, it is fascinating to note the relation of Benford’s 1983 novel to the 1984 presidential elections. In the novel, Hitler’s daughter enters the White House after the 1984 election as the running mate of a (probably) Democratic president she then disposes of. In reality, Republican Ronald Reagan won the 1984 election against Walter Mondale, who broke ground by making Geraldine Ferraro his running mate, the first woman ever to contend for the office of vice president. The disastrous outcome of the Mondale campaign, it would appear, was not only the result of Reagan’s immense popularity but also of the deep conservative mistrust against women in positions of power. As Susan Faludi has convincingly argued, the conservative backlash against women’s rights, which “[b]y the early 1980s [ . . . ] had shouldered its way into government,” “convinced the public that women’s ‘liberation’ was the true contemporary scourge—the source of an endless laundry list of personal, social and economic problems” (13, 12). Hitler’s Daughter contributes to the conservative fight against feminism through its negative characterization of professional women and by staging one of the declared goals of the feminist movement—a female president—as an alien occupation. Nevertheless, Benford’s novel cannot yet present American masculinity as strong enough to prevail over Hitler.

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It foreshadows, however, the inner-American othering for which the Hitler trope has increasingly been employed by the right since the 1990s. Casting their political opponents as un-American by associating them with Hitler, conservatives have for the last twenty years frequently referred to feminists derogatorily as “feminazis.” If the gendering of good and evil unveils the novel’s political agenda most clearly, its disastrous ending—Hitler’s daughter emerges victorious— puts to the fore that the cover story of an external enemy cannot completely dissolve the internal conflicts and contradictions the text tries to project onto the Nazi other. The novel is unable to present the United States as strong enough to defeat Hitler’s daughter, mostly because, I have argued above, it shrinks away from implicating Americans into the conspiracy. Whereas the traditional conspiracy narrative tends to end with the at least provisional defeat of the conspirators, the country falls prey to Hitler’s daughter in Benford’s novel—despite the text’s optimistic stance on the American economic and political system. This reworking of the established plotline can be read as indicative of the very challenges to the progressive narrative that the text otherwise aims to counter and dismiss. The ending therefore severely undermines the cultural work the text tries to perform, leaving the readers the narrative is geared at disappointed. However, the novel nevertheless suggests to them that their country’s political system is working well and that except for the danger career women pose, threats to this system only lurk on the outside. The novel thus not only projects U.S. internal concerns and conflicts onto an external other. It also already performs the kind of othering that is characteristic of Hitler Fiction written after 1985.

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Chapter 5

Hitler, Stalin, and bin Laden: External and Internal Othering since the Mid-1980s The idea that Hitler fathered children or was cloned has become less important over the last twenty years, but it has not lost all of its cultural power. Capitalizing on the myth, on November 18, 2003, the tabloid Weekly World News declared that “OSAMA RECRUITS CLONED HITLER!” The photo montage on the cover—bin Laden and the Hitler clone together on the back of a camel—establishes through spatial proximity and physical contact a metonymic link between the two figures, implying that bin Laden himself is a Hitler clone. The photo thus visualizes and literalizes that metaphor, popular in the United States since 9/11, that bin Laden is the “new Hitler.” The magazine thus satirizes the notion that both are of the same evil, an evil that manifests itself as anti-Semitism and hatred of “natural” U.S. values such as liberty and democracy. Bin Laden, of course, is not the first of America’s postwar enemies who has been likened or linked to Hitler. Bill Clinton, for example, compared Slobodan Milosěvic´ to Hitler when arguing for a military intervention in the Kosovo; and both George Herbert Walker Bush and George W. Bush have, at different times, done the same with Saddam Hussein. In fact, such rhetoric has steadily proliferated in U.S. political and cultural discourses since the early 1980s. It has been frequently employed by the right—and much more sparingly by the left—in order to chart national, international, or personal conflicts. Bill Clinton, Howard Dean, Arnold

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Schwarzenegger, and many others have been compared by opponents to Hitler at some point, Ted Turner has done the same with Fox News, and in 1991 Madonna even likened AIDS to Hitler.1 As far as international conflicts such as wars between nations or the war on terrorism are concerned, this rhetoric testifies to the reconstruction of a positive national self-image. Aligning a new foreign enemy with Hitler frames the new conflict as the continuation or repetition of World War II. Over the past decades, World War II—highly unpopular when it was fought—has increasingly figured in the American cultural imaginary as the mythical battle between good and evil, as a fight in which the United States definitely fought on the right side. Accordingly, the reference to World War II allows the culture to cast U.S. soldiers, whose image had been severely tarnished by the Vietnam War, again as liberators and morally integer, as those fighting a just fight. Aligning the new enemy with Hitler legitimizes U.S. military intervention and presents it as the only way to stop the enemy’s imperialist aggression. Moreover, as World War II has been increasingly misremembered as a war to stop the Holocaust, the new confrontation is projected as an effort to prevent another Holocaust. Like Hitler before him, the comparisons and metaphors imply, the new enemy will not listen to reason, cannot be negotiated with, and must not be appeased. Such rhetorical efforts are usually not concerned with the ideological parallels between Hitler and those who are compared to him, with belief systems and political convictions, that is. Rather, the Hitler comparisons are part of the shift from ideology to ontology, whose influence on conceiving of Hitler as evil incarnate I trace in this book. When the focus is on ontology, it does not matter that Hitler and the new enemy often hold diametrically opposed convictions. What matters is that both are perceived as manifestations of the same ontological evil, and that their beliefs—those they share and those they do not share—are seen as symptoms of this evil. Hitler can try to provide Arafat with nuclear weapons— as in James Marino’s The Asgard Solution (1983)—or his clone can ride with bin Laden on a camel because differences in ideology are downplayed. The complex causes for international conflicts are personalized and reduced to the opposition of good and evil. The United States is projected as good, as a peaceful, democratic nation that, devoid of any selfinterest, promotes human rights and democracy on a global scale, aides the oppressed, and fights evil everywhere. And so are, because they side with the United States against evil, America’s old and new allies—Israel, Britain, and, frequently now, Germany. Hitler Fiction participates in this mapping out of allegiances and enmities, in the cultural work of othering, as I would like to call it.

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By the mid-1980s othering replaces projection as the major cultural function of the genre. Significantly, literary texts can forge even more powerful connections between Hitler and the new enemy. Whereas politicians talking about Osama bin Laden, for example, are restricted to comparisons (bin Laden is like Hitler) or metaphors (bin Laden is the new Hitler), novels can present plots that have Hitler and bin Laden “really” conspiring together. Facilitated by the genre’s realism, Hitler Fiction thus tends to replace metaphoric association with metonymic contiguity, thereby naturalizing the link between Hitler and the new enemy. As a borderline case that blurs the distinction between fact and fiction, the sensationalist Weekly World News can function like fiction. More “serious” magazines, however, cannot. When the weekly World reported in 1990 that U.S. troops had captured the hundred-year-old Adolf Hitler on Iraqi territory, thereby forging a metonymic link between Hitler and Hussein, the magazine quickly had to withdraw the article, because the information was, of course, incorrect.2 Hitler Fiction, by contrast, faces no such constraints. Testifying to a renewed national self-confidence, which they foster and produce at the same time, novels written from the mid-1980s onwards usually feature a male American hero whose fight against Hitler is supported by minor characters from countries allied with the United States. This hero synecdochically represents the United States and embodies what the texts construct as positive American values. Moreover, the hero neither depends on an Israeli agent to do the dirty work anymore (although he is often supported by one) nor does he have problems with women, as the 1970s heroes repeatedly experienced. Embodying a conservative notion of masculinity, the American protagonist knows what to do in every situation, acts accordingly, and overcomes the threat Hitler poses in the end. In this chapter I first interpret two paradigmatic texts that perform the cultural work of othering at two different historical moments. Revolving around Russian heroes, Joseph Heywood’s The Berkut (1987) still resonates with the displacement of positive American character traits so characteristic of earlier texts. However, The Berkut utilizes this element of projection differently. A bestselling book-of-the-month-club selection, the novel attempts a cultural legitimation of the politics of rapprochement toward the Soviet Union that characterized Ronald Reagan’s second term of office. Similarly, David Charnay’s 2002 novel Operation Lucifer: The Chase, Capture and Trial of Adolf Hitler associates Hitler with bin Laden and tries to legitimize the war on terror. In Charnay, there is never the slightest doubt that Americans are the best, the brightest, and the bravest—and that their enemies represent absolute evil. I end the

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chapter with an interpretation of Robert Pielke’s Hitler the Cat Goes West (1995) to show how, since the 1990s, Hitler has been increasingly used to map inner-American conflicts, and how the trope has been carefully reappropriated by the American left. The reappropriation by the left, I argue, entails a return to postmodernist writing strategies. Remapping Russia: Joseph Heywood’s The Berkut (1987) Toward the end of Joseph Heywood’s The Berkut, Beau Valentine, an American secret agent, returns to his girlfriend in the States. He tells her how he spent the last year tracing a group of Russian agents and how he finally realized that they, in turn, were following Adolf Hitler, who had escaped from the bunker: Valentine looked at her. “Yes, the Russians have Hitler. Alive.” “And you?” He laughed a cruel laugh. “What would I do with him? They can have the bastard. Poetic justice. Of all of us, they had the best reasons for wanting him. For us it’s more a matter of principle, an academic need for justice or completion. Americans are big on finishing things. For the Russians it’s necessity; they want their vengeance.” [...] “What will they do with him?” Valentine leaned his head back against the trunk of the tree and smiled. “That’s a hell of a question,” he said, as he slipped his arm around her and pulled her close. “A hell of a question.” (558)

While the chapter thus ends on a note of suspense, causing the readers to guess what kind of punishment Stalin has devised for his prisoner and preparing them for the book’s finale, the dialogue also casts Valentine once again in the role he has played throughout: interpreter and evaluator of the novel’s plot and the other characters’ actions and motives. Just as a literary critic follows the traces of meaning through a text to arrive at some final interpretation, Valentine has followed the Russians through Germany and Italy and read the signs they have left. Now he delivers his final interpretation and moral evaluation of the events he either reconstructed or witnessed, distinguishing between an American academic interest in justice and the practical Russian need for “vengeance.” Obviously, projection is at work here again. The binary Valentine constructs between U.S. rationality and Russian emotionality displaces an American desire for vengeance. Echoing the projection of desired character traits on Israel during the late 1970s, in this

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scene as well as in others, the Russians act as the Americans, it seems, would like to. Yet, Valentine also undermines this binary between justice and vengeance when he calls it “poetic justice” that the Russians have captured Hitler. When it comes to Hitler, his reasoning implies, justice and vengeance are the same. More importantly, Valentine’s words also tear down his “us-them” binary and transcend the Cold War rhetoric reheated during the early 1980s. Anticipating the end of the Cold War, his words suggest that the Russians are different from the Americans, they are “they,” but they are nevertheless part of a larger “us.” This array of different identities revolves around Hitler as the ultimate other whose evilness renders the differences between Russians and Americans secondary. Since the Russians opposed Hitler, they belong to the good ones; and if they are singled out, then only because they suffered most and therefore deserve to get hold of Hitler. The division of the world into good and evil is implicit in the concept of “poetic justice” Valentine refers to. The arguably most famous definition of this concept is given in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), where Miss Prism apodictically declares that in her lost novel “[t]he good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means” (341). While Miss Prism’s statement does not apply to all fiction, it certainly applies to The Berkut. Valentine and Ermine, the good Americans, are finally united, and so are, a few pages earlier, Ezdovo and Talia, two of the Russian agents that capture Hitler. While the good ones live happily ever after, Hitler ends distinctively unhappily, as the penultimate chapter, set seven years after the dialogue between Ermine and Valentine, shows. It begins harmlessly enough, though, with Major Vasily Petrov, called “the berkut” in reference to a Kirghizian eagle famed for hunting wolves, entering the basement of the Poteshny Palace in Moscow. Petrov is the one who captured Hitler for Stalin. “In the middle of the room” he now enters, suspended from the ceiling, was a cage of stainless steel bars, and in it, a living thing that looked vaguely human squatted. There was not enough room for it either to stand or lie down. Stalin had designed the cage and personally overseen its construction by captured German engineers. Over the years it had become increasingly difficult to keep the beast alive. Sores had formed on its legs and induced gangrene, causing an amputation of the left leg above the knee, and later of the right leg just above the ankle. Dr. Gnedin [another member of the team] had performed the operations, with Petrov assisting. Technically the beast lived, but it was no longer a man. To be sure, there was a body in the cage and its heart beat, but its mind and soul had long ago evaporated and it had not spoken in five years. (561)

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The “living thing” is, of course, Hitler. What Stalin has “designed” for him is arguably the cruelest punishment inflicted on him in all Hitler Fiction, which frequently sees him hanged, shot, knifed, or sent (back) to hell. While Valentine thought it “a hell of a question” to guess how the Russians might deal with Hitler (558), for Stalin, who decided this all alone, it was a question of creating hell on earth for his prisoner. Hitler’s mutilated, incomprehensive state foreshadows the tortures inflicted on him by Americans in Guantanamo in Charnay’s Operation Lucifer fifteen years later. Significantly, though, the torture scene in The Berkut does not only anticipate Charnay’s novel. It also reworks a similar scene from Edwin Fadiman Jr.’s Who Will Watch the Watchers? (1971), a text I discussed briefly in Chapter 3. Having learned that “[t]he Beast is still alive!” Debbie, Fadiman’s Jewish heroine, dreams of possible punishments for Hitler. She envisions him displayed in Times Square, in a cage “hung from a smartly colored crane, its steel bars glittering” (218). In Debbie’s dream, Hitler is urinated upon by the people around the cage, among them her dead father. And Debbie realizes that she suddenly has a penis too, which she can use “like a gun.” Her urine has a particularly devastating effect on Hitler: “Where it touched him the uniform smoked. Under it, the man’s skin charred” (219). Her fantasy of justice and phallic self-empowerment culminates moments later. She spits at Hitler and her saliva “like a bullet” “smashed his bones and turned his nose, his lips, his mustache and his forehead into a red crushed mass” (220). In Who Will Watch the Watchers? Hitler’s torture and execution remains a dream. Hitler eludes punishment, because the Gentile Americans running the CIA feel little sympathy for Debbie’s desire for justice and vengeance. In The Berkut, by contrast, Debbie’s dream, which Fadiman’s novel projects as the most desirable outcome already, comes true. As in Fadiman, the torture of Hitler is staged not as an act of cruelty but as one of justice. Hitler, the novel implies, deserves whatever he gets. Accordingly, othering Hitler only entails a very limited othering of the Russians as torturers. What happens to Hitler in Russia is the fulfillment of an American fantasy of revenge, one, however, that the text does not yet dare to have Americans act out. Moreover, it is not the Russians as such who are responsible for Hitler’s treatment, but Stalin, who is set in opposition to ordinary Russians throughout. Stalin has “designed the cage personally” and, in a highly ironic move, forced captured Germans to build it. The only other Russian involved in Hitler’s punishment is Petrov, who feels bound to Stalin by an oath of loyalty, although he disapproves of most of his decisions. However, he does not disagree with Stalin on how Hitler should be treated. He has been to the room every

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day to feed the prisoner, but even to him, Hitler is “no longer a man,” but only “a living thing,” “a beast,” “a monster” (561), or simply a “creature” (562). The radical othering of Hitler as an animal that the scene performs—a complete dehumanization that literalizes the metaphor of the “monster”—culminates a few moments later in “the beast void[ing] itself, spraying the cage with feces” (563). Hitler’s inability to control his bodily functions relates back to similar episodes earlier in the narrative and suggests that his dehumanized state at the end of the story is not a radical break with his life in freedom but rather its logical climax. The first of these episodes takes place halfway through the text and is set in a secret mountain retreat in the forests of the Harz. Hitler has been escorted to this hiding place by Colonel Günter Brumm, who, together with Sergeant Rau, has rescued him from the bunker and shot a body double in his place. On their way from Berlin to the mountains the group has picked up five young women, fervent Nazis eager to serve their leader. Together they spend the winter in a (fairly comfortable) cave, intending to escape to Italy in spring. Living arrangements are lax, and both Brumm and Rau frequently have intercourse with the girls. Hitler, however, turns down all the girls’ offers. Unlike the others, he seems to be not interested in sex. Instead, he spends most of his time in his small, personal cave, a setting that foreshadows his later imprisonment in Stalin’s cage. Hitler insists on sharing his personal quarters with Razia, a Jewish girl who escaped from a concentration camp and whom the group captured in the forest. Hitler, who is from the outset represented as mentally deranged, takes Razia for his dead niece Geli Raubal.3 What he does with her in his room remains a mystery to the rest of the group, especially since “sometimes passersby caught whiffs of unpleasant odors from the interior” (292). These odors hint, of course, at deviant sexual practices revolving around urine and feces, practices the historical Hitler is sometimes said to have engaged in.4 Practiced in secret and denied in public where he poses as abstinent, Hitler’s sexuality is cast as perverse. What is more, to satisfy his desires, he abuses a mentally disturbed Jewess his racist regime sent to a concentration camp. His sexuality thus contrasts pointedly with the consensual, loving, and mutually satisfactory encounters between Brumm and Rau and the girls, which, in the case of Brumm and Gretchen, even lead to romantic love. In the larger context of the narrative, it also contrasts with the sexually fulfilling love of Ezdovo and Talia, and aligns Hitler with two child abusers, a female German concentration camp guard and a Russian general. Whereas The Führer Seed and Hitler’s Daughter . . . Wants to Occupy the White House synecdochically connect Hitler to what the texts perceive as

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the negative traits of the German national character, The Berkut draws a sharp distinction between Hitler (and some die-hard Nazis) and ordinary Germans, no matter if they are civilians or soldiers. This difference is established in terms of sexuality but also through various other binaries. Hitler sometimes produces sounds “one might hear in a mental ward” (347); he is weak and, during their flight, often “near physical collapse” (445); and, as another passage that his fouling himself in the cage relates back to shows, he is a coward. When he is finally arrested by the Russians, he does not fight but gives “a long, high-pitched shriek of terror and void[s] himself ” (546). Brumm, Rau, and the girls, by contrast, are positive characters who are shown to be honest and courageous. While the narrative is never focalized through Hitler and always renders him an object of the gaze and perceptions of the others, the reader frequently shares the perspectives of Brumm, Rau, or Gretchen, who all very quickly become disaffected with Hitler, whom they admired as long as they did not know him. The girls quickly begin to treat him “as if he were their grandfather,” and Brumm starts ignoring his orders (198). In spite of the novel’s explicit deconstruction of the Hitler myth, though, Brumm feels bound by his oath of loyalty and remains determined to take Hitler to safety in South America. He even kills the girls because they would slow down the group and, a little later, Rau, to distract their Russian pursuers for a few hours. When Hitler soils himself in front of the Russians, “[t]he foulness of his leader assault[s] his ears and nose,” and Brumm mentally compares Hitler’s behavior with the “equanimity” with which Rau and Gretchen accepted their fates (546). Highlighting that, moments before his death, Brumm feels “free at last,” the narrative casts him as Hitler’s last victim (548). He represents the German people whose “implicit trust” in Hitler made them commit wrongs and whose oaths of loyalty prevented them from turning against their leader (289). Under the right—American—direction, the novel implies, the Germans are perfectly capable of democratic behavior, thus retrospectively justifying the quick inclusion of the German enemy into the ranks of America’s allies during the Cold War. Distinguishing between Hitler and the Nazis on the one side and the rest of the Germans on the other is, of course, very common to postwar American discourses. In The Berkut, though, it is notable for two reasons: First, within the genre of Hitler Fiction, it marks a return to this cultural strategy after texts of the late 1970s and early 1980s often suggested that all Germans were like Hitler. Second, with Brumm, the novel includes an SS officer among the innocent Germans. This constitutes a provocative move given the fact that President Reagan’s appearance at the military cemetery of Bitburg on May 5, 1985, where he and Chancellor Kohl

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honored Waffen-SS soldiers, drew harsh criticism from the American public. Reagan famously defended his visit by arguing that “those young men are victims of Nazism also, even though they were fighting in the German uniform, drafted into service to carry out the hateful wishes of the Nazis. They were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camp” (“Remarks”). Significantly, the novel also draws this parallel by including concentration camp escapee Razia among those victims Hitler is personally responsible for. The sufferings of Brumm, Rau, and the girls are thus associated with Razia’s ordeal both in the death camp and in the cave. Together, they signify Hitler’s betrayal of all Germans, Jewish and non-Jewish. Moreover, the novel goes to some length to emphasize that even SS officer Brumm did not know what was going on in the concentration camps (“Babies cut from the womb? Disgusting, he thought” [269]). The Holocaust and other atrocities committed in the camps are projected as the crimes of a few, while the majority of Germans is cast as innocent. In similar fashion, the novel’s representation of the Russians is revolutionary for Hitler Fiction and can be directly linked to the rapprochement between the United States and the Soviet Union in the years after 1985. While the novel casts the Germans around Brumm almost as idealized American Indians, as noble savages, who squat in nature and are good at heart, but have yet to learn from the Americans about the great good of civilization that is democracy, the five Russians who hunt them are the text’s heroes. Their representation resonates with images of the first white settlers of the American west who, according to myth, civilized the savage indigenous population. Like the pioneers in these accounts, the Russians bring law and order to the moral wilderness that is Nazi Germany. They punish (war) criminals and support the well-meaning majority of the population. Focalizing most of the action through them, the narrative invites its American readers to identify with them and admire their ingenuity and courage. In this respect, Valentine’s frequent acknowledgements of their professionalism and powers of deduction in the search for Hitler and his final evaluation of their actions are crucial. As the “ideal” reader and interpreter of their plot, he transcends the limits of the text and prefigures the real readers’ interpretation. Just as Brumm, for whom the Russians, in turn, feel “great admiration” (548), and his group are distinguished from Hitler and some cruel Nazis, Petrov and his four agents are explicitly contrasted with the cruel, despotic communists that populate countless Cold War novels. During their hunt for Hitler they do not only punish guilty Nazis such as a child-abusing concentration camp guard, but also guilty Russians such as child-abusing Red Army general, whom Petrov kills personally (218).

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In addition, Petrov’s group displays a 1980s American awareness of the Holocaust, which culminates in their posing as Jews on the ship where they eventually arrest Hitler. This masquerade is not only a clever plot device but also carries larger symbolic significance. Momentarily recasting them in the role of and thus aligning themselves with Hitler’s prototypical victims, the text reinforces Valentine’s interpretation that the Russians deserved to get Hitler because they suffered most. Arguing for a distinction between “good” Russians and “evil” communists, whose deviant sexual desires reflect their perverted political convictions, the novel attempts to remap the American cultural imaginary of Russia. Consequently, the group around Petrov is cast as strong supporters of values and principles commonly associated with the United States. Petrov’s men favor an American-style democratic individualism because “you prefer having responsibility for your own decisions and actions” (251). By the same token, they are presented as deeply religious: “We are not all atheists. People still go to churches, but the churches and priests can’t interfere in matters of the state. I believe your American constitution also separates church and state,” one member of the group tells American soldiers (160). His argument echoes a scene in Michael Young’s 1944 novel The Trial of Adolf Hitler in which Joseph Stalin counters Hitler’s allegation that all Russians are atheists by declaring that he is “a deeply religious man” himself but that the true freedom of religion in Russia requires “that the state and the government do not recognize, encourage or show partiality to any religion” (Young 188, 187).5 Talia, another crew member, “[l]ike millions of her countrymen [ . . . ] believed in God and in life after death. To her the Devil was real. What struck her as ironic was that the Roman Catholic Church might be shielding Adolf Hitler, the cause of twenty million Russian deaths” (435). Although The Berkut implicates the Roman Catholic Church in the plot to save Hitler, drawing on the familiar allegations against Pope Pius XII that first surfaced during the 1960s, it still upholds the value of religious belief. However, the passage does more than simply dispel the image of heathen communists by replacing it with the image of a Christian Russia, which is not too different from Americans. Holding Hitler alone responsible for the enormous loss of Russian lives in a sentence that follows a reference to the devil, the passage also implicitly casts Adolf Hitler as the devil. As it dwells on the irony that the church is protecting the devil, it reminds American readers of the one factor that united them and the Russians during World War II: the fight against Hitler. Significantly, the novel does not unite Americans and Russians in the fight against Germany but only in the fight against Hitler to whom the psychonarration of Talia’s thoughts ascribes the sole responsibility for German atrocities in World War II.

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If the novel thus casts the “good” Russians as Americans, it also casts them as “good” Germans by subtly setting them in opposition to Stalin, just as the Germans are contrasted with Hitler. Moreover, through parallels in structure and characterization The Berkut metaphorically associates Stalin with Hitler. “Our army needs orders,” Petrov reminds Stalin in an analepsis set immediately after the German attack on the Soviet Union. “Fuck the army!” Stalin replies, “Hitler is all I care about” (68). While this remark, and indeed the whole plot, sets Stalin in opposition to Hitler on one level, his disregard for the sufferings of his people aligns him with his Nazi counterpart on another. World War II is reconfigured as a conflict between two cruel, and potentially mad, dictators in which their respective peoples are pawns sacrificed without a moment’s thought. Consequently, the behavior of Stalin and Hitler is strikingly similar, an effect at times heightened through explicit juxtaposition in chapters immediately following each other. Like Hitler, Stalin is extremely emotional, cruel, prone to fits, and quickly changes his moods. And while Hitler refers to himself as “Europe’s greatest actor” (46), Stalin is an actor too: “Meals with Stalin were deceiving. Always he seemed the gracious host, urging his guests to sample everything, but Petrov knew it was not hospitality that motivated him. His leader feared poisoning by his enemies” (148). Stalin’s fear of being assassinated mirrors, of course, Hitler’s cowardice, which causes him to lose control of his bowels at key moments in the narrative. Finally, Stalin’s asexuality—he is always alone and a woman is never mentioned—reflects on Hitler’s “perverted” sexuality and puts the two in opposition to the positive characters’ “healthy” sexuality. Like Brumm for Hitler, Petrov feels little sympathy for Stalin but cannot express these feelings as openly as Brumm because Stalin is still master over life and death in the Soviet Union. It is only at the very end of the narrative that Petrov’s true feelings emerge. In the epilogue set in 1953, from which I already quoted the description of Hitler in the cage, Petrov kills Hitler because it is Stalin’s last wish that he survive his archenemy. Informed by Petrov that Hitler is dead, Stalin passes away. Petrov then finally “set his Red Badge [Stalin’s personal seal that gives its bearer supreme authority] on the end of the bed, put on his hat, took a last look and left. Finally it had ended” (564). The last sentence of the novel, focalized through Petrov, echoes the last sentence the text dedicates to Brumm and his perspective—“Finally he was free” (548)—and thus clearly aligns Petrov and Brumm once again as righteous characters who felt bound by soldierly duty, a virtue the text values highly, to serve vicious masters. This link between Brumm and Petrov corresponds to and contrasts with the link the novel’s ending establishes once again between Hitler

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and Stalin by synchronizing their deaths and making them mirror each other. The fictional simultaneity of these two events that, in reality, took place eight years apart underlines one last time the parallels between Hitler and Stalin and foregrounds the perceived similarities between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. It casts both as epochs completely dominated by totalitarian rulers that left little or no space for resistance or disobedience on the part of the citizens who, in turn, are projected as victims. Moreover, the narrative synchronizes these events with a third historical moment, namely, the year 1987, in which The Berkut was published and to whose reality the reader returns after Stalin’s death on the last page of the novel. Read against the background of Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika, which where being implemented at exactly this time and which led to a rapprochement between the United States and the Soviet Union, Stalin’s death does not only signify the end of Stalinism. As a synecdoche for what the American cultural imaginary perceives as the evils of communism in general, it also signifies the end of communism as such. Petrov’s disposal of the Red Badge can thus be read as the symbolic rejection of communist ideology and its state apparatus by the Soviet people once they are no longer cruelly forced to abide by it, suggesting that with end of the Cold War the Russians will embrace capitalism, individualism, and democracy just as the Germans did after the end of World War II. The victory of liberty The Berkut stages anticipates Francis Fukuyama’s controversial thesis of “the end of history,” which he would formulate only five years later. And significantly, the novel never even hints at the possibility of a Nazi conspiracy that Hitler would head after a successful escape, let alone at a rebirth of Nazism. In the teleological understanding of history that informs the narrative, there is no room for detours and backlashes. Once a nation has been liberated from totalitarian rule, this reconstruction of the progressive narrative suggests, it will continue to embrace the values epitomized by the United States, because this is what people “naturally” want. Thus, The Berkut testifies to a renewed national self-confidence that stands in stark contrast to the escapist fantasies of (a) Hitler’s return to power that characterized Hitler Fiction of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Fostering and reflecting a positive image of the United States and its role in international history, the novel’s optimistic plot anticipated and maybe helped pave the way for the contemporaneous Reaganite policy of rapprochement with the Soviet Union. The secret that the secret history that is The Berkut shares with its readers is that the Russians are ultimately like Americans: They are “good.”

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Hitler in Guantanamo: David Charnay’s Operation Lucifer: The Chase, Capture, and Trial of Adolf Hitler (2002) David Charnay’s Operation Lucifer is not a particularly complex novel. In light of recent political events, though, the story of Hitler’s capture, trial, and execution by U.S. authorities is nevertheless fascinating because it features Hitler being detained and tortured in Guantanamo. Moreover, the novel’s epilogue, added after the events of September 11, 2001, seeks to associate 9/11 with the Holocaust and Osama bin Laden with Hitler. Due to his connections on Capitol Hill, Charnay, a former adviser to various Conservative presidential politicians, seems to have received support from the Pentagon in writing the book.6 Published almost simultaneously with the arrival of the first prisoners in Guantanamo, the novel reflects the U.S. administration’s attitude toward those who are at the present moment still detained and who have been stripped of basic human and constitutional rights. By having Hitler imprisoned in Guantanamo before the events of 9/11 took place, the novel also confirms Amy Kaplan’s observation that “the ‘legal black hole’ of Guantánamo did not suddenly appear after September 11, 2001, but is filled with a long imperial history.” Torturing Hitler there is possible, and, as the novel implies, also legal, because “[t]he government’s argument that the United States lacks sovereignty over the territory of Guantánamo has long facilitated rather than limited the actual implementation of sovereign power in the region” (837).7 The novel opens early in 1952 when the CIA discovers that Hitler has escaped from the bunker. Having undergone plastic surgery, he now poses as a Jew, and, with all the money he has stolen from the victims of the Holocaust, he is now the richest man in the world. He sells weapons to North Korea, sponsors neo-Nazi groups throughout the world, and supports virtually every existing terrorist group, the Hamas as well as the ETA, the Basque separatist organization. That these organizations were, in reality, only founded after the events described in the novel (the ETA in 1959, the Hamas as late as 1987) indicates the narrative’s presentist orientation from the outset: The novel projects concerns of the late 1990s back to the 1950s. Colonel Bart Milburn, the story’s hero, finally captures Hitler together with Martin Bormann and some minor Nazis in Havana, and brings him to Guantanamo. While the real prisoners of Guantanamo are classified as “illegal combatants” only and denied the status of “prisoners of war,” Hitler and the other Nazis arrested with him are treated as prisoners of war. In practice, though, this classification does not protect them from torture. “We will get the truth out of your

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foul lips,” Bart Milburn informs Hitler on his first day in Guantanamo, “if we have to pull every nail off your fingers and toes before we chop them off one at a time. After that, we’ll give you a full circumcision, removing your penis and your one testicle” (I: 264). When Hitler asks about “the Geneva convention rules,” Bart answers: “We’ll abide by it just the way you Nazi bastards did” (I: 265). What Bart, the text’s chief ideologist and voice of authority, lays out here is the worldview put forward by the narrative and the logic of “an eye for an eye” that follows from it. The world of Operation Lucifer is firmly divided into good and evil, and there are no shades of grey. The Americans, the Israelis, the French, and the British are good; the Nazis, the Soviets, the Arabs, and the North Koreans are evil. As a consequence, for the novel, there are no good and evil methods as such: Everything the good do is good, and everything the evil do is evil. Bart’s threat resonates with the atrocities the Jewish victims of the Holocaust suffered in the camps because of their religion and ethnicity, and their fate serves as justification of everything that one might do to Hitler or the other Nazi prisoners. Since they are all cast as evil and shown to be guilty of committing horrible crimes and planning new ones, every method to punish them and to gain information about their plans is perceived as legitimate. This logic informs almost all texts written after the late 1970s, which have Hitler tortured, executed, or assassinated by American, Israeli, or Russian heroes. The acts of violence performed by Hitler Fiction’s positive characters do not compromise their goodness and moral superiority but rather confirm them. When it comes to Hitler, according to this Manichean worldview, justice and vengeance, punishment and cruelty are identical. In Operation Lucifer—grimly foreshadowing what happened in Abu Ghraib in 2003—the torture that remained a fantasy in Fadiman’s Who Will Watch the Watchers? (1971) and that was projected onto the Russians in The Berkut (1987) is now performed by American characters. Hitler and the other prisoners are left shackled and gagged for days; they have to lie in their own excrement, they are threatened with instant execution, deprived of sleep, and frequently beaten. Here is the description of Bart’s second visit to Hitler’s cell: The steel door was opened to the glaring ceiling light focused on the motionless, debilitated prisoner in a fetal position on an iron cot. The padded windowless cell had a foul smell of urine and feces. Bart stared at the shackled body. Musing, he recalled the biblical aphorism How are the mighty fallen, epitomized by the sight of the helpless wretch before him. The stench was unbearable. He applied a handkerchief over his nostrils, walked to the cell door and pulled it open. Coughing, he directed

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Philip to ask the guards to bring a disinfectant spray or deodorant quickly. It was not an unusual request, the guards said, as they handed a couple of cans of Lysol to Philip. With one container in each hand, Bart more than generously sprayed the compartment and the prisoner. (I: 300–301)

The passage projects Hitler as evil and also weak, as the other whose defeat guarantees the righteousness and prevalence of American values. Hitler’s suffering is staged as divine punishment, casting the Americans as those who are doing God’s will. Significantly, the scene draws more attention to Bart’s discomfort than to the torture inflicted on Hitler, which is mentioned in passing only. Highlighting that “the stench was unbearable” to Bart, the narrative presents Hitler’s torture as yet another assault on an American, turning the victim into the perpetrator. The guard’s comment (“It was not an unusual request”) indicates that the other prisoners are not treated any better. Bart’s remedy against the stench, the deployment of the disinfectant against Hitler, reduces the latter to the state of vermin and dehumanizes him even further. The scene thus echoes both the reports of the actual tortures at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and the punishment scenes from The Berkut and Who Will Watch the Watchers? While it does not quite equal Heywood’s description in its cruelty, this passage, too, strips away Hitler’s humanity along with his clothes and presents him as an animal. As in The Berkut, casting Hitler as inhuman is one of many techniques used to draw a distinction between the Americans and Hitler. While the Americans are a churchgoing, religious group who abide by the Ten Commandments, the narrative throughout conceives of Hitler, as the novel’s title, Operation Lucifer, indicates already, as “the devil incarnate” (II: 40) or “the most evil man in history” (II: 328). Hitler’s evilness affects all areas of his life. Unlike the Americans who constitute a “healthy” heterosexual community in which couples meet, marry, engage in “normal” sexual intercourse, and have lots of children, Hitler is cast as a pervert. Allegedly, he “had an incestuous affair [with his niece Geli]” (I: 302), and enjoys whipping girls (I: 130, 147). In addition, and especially during the trial, Hitler is presented as a raving madman, as a “crazy son of a bitch” whose irrationality contrasts pointedly with the calm, rational approach of the Americans (I: 192). Finally, he is cast as a coward, who, like the other Nazis, quickly breaks under the threat of harsher torture—a plot device that limits the severity of torture actually inflicted but which also legitimizes the threat as well as the possible infliction of even harsher measures. Since Hitler is so weak, the Americans and their allies defeat him fairly easily. During the various arrests and gunfights they do not lose a single man, they foil all of Hitler’s plans and are always one step ahead.

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This simultaneous conceptualization of Hitler as the epitome of evil and as a weak other is as revealing as it is contradictory. By pushing the psychology of the character beyond the realist paradigm that remains otherwise unchallenged, it puts to the fore the immense symbolic power inherent in any reference to or representation of Hitler in contemporary American culture, a figure that embodies absolute evil but is otherwise extremely flexible and open to reconfigurations. In the case of Operation Lucifer, I would like to argue, the contradictory representation of Hitler is necessitated by the narrative’s attempt to completely reconstruct the progressive narrative of U.S. exceptionalism. Whereas The Berkut metaphorically likened Stalin to Hitler, Operation Lucifer projects the Cold War as the continuation of World War II. Hitler is cast as an agent in the Cold War; he is behind weapon deliveries from the Soviets to North Korea, and he “has also fed Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq” (I: 33) with weapons. The novel thus dramatizes and enforces the popular U.S. belief that “those communist bastards are just as bad as the Nazis” (I: 356) and that with the transition from World War II to the Cold War the enemy had merely changed its colors but not its “nature.” Most importantly, linking both conflicts allows the novel to suggest that the United States will emerge victorious from the Cold War too. The establishment of the metonymic (Hitler is an actor in the Cold War) and metaphoric (both systems are presented as manifestations of evil) links between Nazism and communism is facilitated by the text’s complete disregard for ideological differences. The narrative casts all ideologies per se as evil, implying that the actions and motives of the Americans and their allies are free of ideology and guided by common sense, “natural” goodness, and respect for values such as democracy, liberty, capitalism, religion, and marriage. Moreover, Operation Lucifer also refutes the idea that Hitler and the Nazis were driven by ideological conviction. Apart from their “natural” evilness, which “necessarily” puts them in opposition to the United States and everything it represents, the text locates the reasons for their actions and particularly for their antiSemitism simply in their greed: Hitler and his closest circle are the “Nazi Mafia” (II: 214). Thus, and although the text repeatedly warns of the evils of antiSemitism, it simultaneously constructs a narrative in which, as Bormann explains to Bart, the Jews were not persecuted and exterminated because of any racist or ideological prejudice. Instead, “[Hitler] was merely using them as scapegoats to arouse the German people. That is how he came into power” (I: 215). Later, Bormann continues, the “property of the Jews brought in a lot of money. The country was ravaging the victims. We stripped the Jews of everything, even their clothes” (236). This economic

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interpretation of anti-Semitism—Bormann’s words are left unchallenged by the narrative—echoes attempts at explaining Hitler undertaken in popular fiction and Hollywood movies during World War II. Films such as The Hitler Gang (1944) or novels such as The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler (1939) cast the inner Nazi circle as a bunch of criminals targeting the Jews because of their money. For Hollywood, this interpretation of Nazism was attractive because it allowed grafting the Nazi theme onto the established genre of the gangster film, and it avoided the exploration of abstract (and alien) ideologies. Moreover, this approach facilitated upholding the clear distinction between a small group of perpetrators and the innocent majority of the population, which propaganda sought to maintain except for a short period of time in 1944 and 1945. If the novel shifts the motives of the perpetrators to the personal level and empties them of ideological content, it also personalizes the experience of the Holocaust victims. Almost all witnesses who testify during Hitler’s trial in Kansas—“God’s country” as Bart calls it (II: 238)— recognize their own and their families’ tormentors among the accused. They boldly identify and attack them in the courtroom—a move that foreshadows the many death sentences carried out at the end of the book and restores agency to the formerly helpless victims. These passages invariably project the Holocaust as violence by individual perpetrators against individual victims, as motivated by personal greed and perversity, which figure as the outward manifestations of the perpetrators’ evilness, their “demonic bestiality” (II: 265). That an American court gives the victims the opportunity to tell the world about their ordeal and that all perpetrators are tried and duly punished by the Americans establish the United States as the sole guarantor of global justice. The simplistic pattern of identification by the witness and punishment by the U.S. court presents the country as the place where the wrongs committed in other places are set right again. This is particularly evident with regard to the most important witness during the trial, Bart’s Jewish wife Elisabeth, whom he rescued personally from a concentration camp. Wearing “a Star of David” during her testimony, she synecdochically stands for all Jews who depend on heroic American support (II: 264). Her happy marriage with Bart, who, of course, embodies all positive American values, restores the symbolic union of Gentiles and Jews whose breakup Who Will Watch the Watchers? dramatized so forcefully. Operation Lucifer reaffirms the “special relationship” between the United States and Israel by casting Bart, and thus the American Gentile, as the stronger partner, while his wife Elisabeth figures as the prototypical Jewess who depends on U.S. support.

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By the same token, Operation Lucifer projects the background histories of the other Holocaust victims invariably as instances of the American dream come true. All victims who testify during the trial are highly cultured and successful middle- or upper-class individuals to whom the United States has proven to be a safe haven.8 Born in Europe, they all immigrated to America after the Holocaust, where they now lead successful and happy lives as “Seventh Avenue dress manufacturer,” or “member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic” (II: 135). And while the novel dwells for almost 300 pages on the atrocities they endured, these witnesses are neither traumatized nor unhappy—because they live in America now. To all of them implicitly applies what one survivor proudly tells the court: Becoming an American citizen was his “proudest day” (II: 108). For the novel, then, the extermination of the European Jewry figures as an event corrected and healed by America. The Holocaust, then, is not employed to challenge but to reaffirm the progressive narrative. In fact, with its persistent belief in overcoming the past, the novel is in line with the official American Holocaust commemoration at the turn of the millennium. As Sabine Sielke has shown, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which does much more justice to the trauma the survivors suffered, though, tells almost exactly the same story: “The Holocaust Museum [ . . . ] abstracts from America’s (idealized) role as ‘liberator’ of the concentration camps [and also haven for the survivors] to celebrate (the ideal of ) liberty as such” (87). And just as Operation Lucifer, the museum also presents “the rebirth of the Jewish people [in Israel and in the United States] as subject of a progressive history” (89).9 Operation Lucifer, however, not only presents the United States as protector of and haven to the oppressed and guarantor of liberty, as the museum does. The novel also attempts to rewrite the history of Holocaust memory in the United States. Hitler’s public trial gives Bart the opportunity to “air every atrocity in an attempt to shock the world with the gravity of these crimes” and to raise a 1990s Holocaust awareness in the 1950s, at a time, that is, when the term (and the concept) had not even been established in U.S. discourses (I: 492). As his author’s mouthpiece, Bart is equipped with his creator’s Holocaust awareness. He anticipates the construction of “a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum” in the future and predicts that “[t]he battle for the Jewish funds illegally held by the Swiss will continue to the end of this century” (II: 199, II: 278). American Holocaust commemoration is thus projected as a linear trajectory of ever-growing awareness and compassion. Although it of course unwillingly does so, this awareness is not intended to pinpoint comparable tendencies in America or draw attention

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to similar instances in U.S. history. A dialogue between one of Bart’s colleagues and a Nazi prisoner makes this clear. Confronted with the Nazi war crimes, the prisoner replies: “Was that any different than what your soldiers did to the American Indians, or the Spanish-American War, or what happened in your Civil War, brother against brother? What about General Pershing’s war against Mexico? What are you doing in Korea now? [ . . . ] Besides, look how the Negroes are treated in the South.” “That’s a specious argument. Apples and oranges.” “Specious? Apples and oranges . . .?” Berger cut him off. “Specious means inaccurate and untrue. Apples and oranges are two different items; you can’t compare them to each other.” (I: 411)

What the prisoner assumes here is a distinctively left-wing position, which holds that Holocaust awareness necessitates a reinterpretation of America’s allegedly “glorious” past that acknowledges human rights violations, imperialism, and atrocities. The novel, however, bluntly disqualifies this argument. The guard—exemplifying the novel’s overall agenda—insists on the incomparability of the Holocaust—at least when the comparison would entail crimes committed by the United States. The use of the word “specious” allows him to transform a political discussion into a linguistic one and to suggest that the Nazi’s argument is inappropriate rhetoric and not grounded in facts. Americans, the novel holds, are, have always been, and will forever remain the “good guys.” Accordingly, the metaphoric and metonymic connections that the narrative forges between Hitler and the communists preserve this heroic role of the United States for the entire postwar era. The novel’s specific temporality—a 1990s Holocaust awareness that is projected back to the 1950s—allows the construction of a narrative of U.S. exceptionalism that completely bypasses the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the domestic struggles of the Civil Rights Movement. The last chapter of the novel moves the action from 1953 to 1999, to “the end of the NATO war against Serbia” as another effort by the United States to stop and punish genocide across the globe (II: 364). The synchronization of this event with the eventual agreement on a “[f ]und for WWII Slave Labor” (II: 365), financed by German companies, highlights one last time the continuity in U.S. policy from World War II to the present that the narrative constructs. Unlike other alternate histories that dwell on the contrast between the dystopian vision they develop and the allegedly utopian reality, Operation Lucifer does not reverse the course of history completely. The effect, though, is much the same. The novel’s little changes

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to the historical record underscore the utopian thrust of the progressive narrative. Operation Lucifer, however, does not only construct connections between Hitler and the communists. The first version of the novel, published a few weeks before 9/11 in the summer of 2001, already reconfigures Hitler as a terrorist and projects “terrorist action by Hitler’s cohorts against the Allies” as the continuation of World War II by other means (I: 303). The novel’s plot explicitly aligns Hitler with terrorist groups such as the IRA, but most notably with Islamist groups like the Hamas and the Islamic Jihad. However, the text never devotes a single line to exploring the various political, social, or cultural contexts from which these groups historically emerged. What makes them allies is neither a common ideology nor political expediency, but their shared evilness that, according to the logic of the text, turns the United States into their natural enemy. Similar to the way the narrative empties Nazism and communism of their incompatible ideological thrusts and projects them as outward signs of evilness, the novel suggest that terrorism, too, is a manifestation of evil. The reason why the Americans do not hesitate to torture Hitler and his terrorist friends in Guantanamo, and threaten their Arab prisoners to “bathe [them] in a barrel of hot pig fat” (I: 421), is that Hitler has worked out a “revenge plan” (I: 317) that consists of terrorist attacks on political and cultural symbols throughout the Western world such as Westminster Abbey or the Pentagon. The prisoners’ treatment is thus justified as a preemptive measure in the fight against terrorism, as the necessary and only way to protect peace-loving Americans and their allies. Hence, Operation Lucifer testifies to a cultural climate that existed in the United States well before September 11, 2001, and that was strengthened but not created by the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. While the novel, especially with the epilogue added after 9/11, explicitly aims to support the Bush administration’s reading of the events, it also implicitly challenges the conceptualization of 9/11 as a rupture that changed everything. In Operation Lucifer, the war on terrorism has begun long before 9/11; it is the continued fight against the evil that Hitler prototypically represents. The epilogue with which the novel was reissued in spring 2002, however, takes this interpretation a step further, attempting to link 9/11 to the Holocaust and bin Laden to Hitler. The novel’s new dedication adds “the victims and the families of the victims of the terrorist attacks [. . .] our military men and women in the war against terrorism [and] President George W. Bush, his Cabinet Members and Staff in leading the battles against the terrorists” to “the victims of the Holocaust” to whom the first edition

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was dedicated (n. p.). Whereas the juxtaposition on the same page likens and already implicitly links 9/11 to the Holocaust, the connection becomes explicit in the novel’s representation and immediate evaluation of the actual attacks. Here is how the aged Bart and his wife experience them: As they entered the room, they saw the flames on one of the two towers. Suddenly, they observed a second jumbo jet flying directly toward the twin tower and the final impact. Elizabeth screamed. Barton was silent. His jaws clenched. He reached over and pulled his wife into his arms. “Bart,” she whimpered, tears streaming down her cheeks, “what is happening?” “Darling, this is a dastardly attack on America by the same terrorists that bombed our embassies in North Africa. The Jihad, Hamas, Mujahideen and other fanatic madmen who have been suicide-bombing Israeli civilians. Now, they have brought Holocaust II to America.” (II: 369–70)

9/11 here is no longer merely metaphorically likened to the Holocaust; it is projected as another Holocaust with a capital “H,” as “Holocaust II.” This metonymic link rests on the numerical denotation that signifies that Bart, and thus the novel, regards the terrorist attacks not just as an event similar to the Nazi Holocaust, but as a direct consequence of the extermination of the Jews. The two events are linked as cause and effect: Holocaust II could not exist without Holocaust I. This, of course, is a highly problematic move, since it challenges the Holocaust’s exceptionality, which the novel has worked to maintain so far. Moreover, conceiving of 9/11 as a consequence of the Holocaust equates the American victims with the Jewish victims of the Nazis. It reaffirms the special relationship between the United States and Israel, and casts the war against terrorism as a repetition of World War II—with the crucial difference that the Americans now do not come to rescue the victims but are victims themselves. According to the text, a new holocaust can still happen anywhere, even on American territory, but if it happens there, then only because the American borders are no longer impenetrable and not because Americans are capable of being and doing evil themselves. Bart can deliver his evaluation of the situation immediately, because he does not acknowledge any ideological difference between different terrorist groups. For him as well as for the text, all terrorists collaborate and are all “fanatic madmen.” Ignoring the ideological roots of terrorism, the novel suggests that the reason for the attacks of 9/11 consists in the generic evil that bin Laden and Hitler share and that “naturally” turns them into America’s enemies.

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Accordingly, Operation Lucifer also seeks to establish a link between bin Laden and Hitler. A connection between the two is implicit already in the main body of the narrative through Hitler’s terrorist revenge plan and his collaboration with virtually every existing terrorist group. In the epilogue, the staging of 9/11 as “Holocaust II” further enforces this, because Hitler is synecdochically connected to the Holocaust and bin Laden to “Holocaust II.” Moreover, the epilogue aligns them metaphorically, because it suggests that both figures share crucial characteristics, most notably anti-Semitism and hatred of America and its values, and metonymically, as it implies that they are manifestations of the same evil. Therefore it does not come as a surprise that Bart is called to the White House to assist “in the chase, capture and trial of Osama bin Laden” (II: 370). The novel dramatizes what its author, David Charnay, stated explicitly in a speech that he gave at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles on October 25, 2001, and in which he called bin Laden “a clone of Hitler’s mentality” (“Novelist”)—which takes us back to the cover of the Weekly World News I began with. At the same time, Operation Lucifer unwittingly lays bare how problematic it is to divide the world into good and evil. It is, after all, only the idea of evil as something that exists independently of historical, cultural, and social circumstances that enables this association of two historical figures that have very little in common in terms of beliefs and convictions. Only an essentialist mode of thinking can link Hitler to bin Laden, because both are “evil men”—and then link both to Saddam Hussein, as Bart does later.10 Such an approach is problematic because it is ultimately unable to understand and engage the roots of Islamist terrorism. To reduce Nazism and Islamist terrorism to the evilness of Hitler and bin Laden, respectively, may be very reassuring for U.S. culture because it draws a strict boundary between its own goodness and the evil various others come to embody. However, it prevents the culture from taking into account the historical and political conditions that give rise to terrorism when devising strategies to combat it. Applying what Alan Steinweis has called the “Auschwitz analogy” to 9/11 and to the problem of terrorism is equally problematic (542). Not only does it prevent an inquiry into the origins of terrorism. In the long run it will also affect the conceptualization of the Holocaust, at least in the United States. During the 1990s, when Holocaust awareness peaked throughout the Western world, Bill Clinton’s special representative for Holocaust issues, Stuart E. Eizenstat could argue that “[t]he horrors of the Holocaust [provide] a lesson applicable to [. . .] human rights violations from Chechnya to China” (“Statement”). Since 9/11, however, the connection between human rights issues and the Holocaust has been

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weakened, as conflicts have increasingly been framed not as human rights violations but as acts of terrorism. The term “holocaust” has recently been used much more sparingly to pinpoint state violence against ethnic or religious minorities. Instead, the term has been ever more employed to designate and condemn rebellions and guerilla activities against states or global capital. Thus, the association of the Holocaust trope with terrorism now frequently works to legitimize human rights violations conducted by the state and to silence criticism, as the examples of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and America’s post-9/11 stance on Chechnya show. Moreover, linking Hitler, the Holocaust, and terrorism and casting the victims of terrorism as victims of a “holocaust,” second or other, will transform the memory of what we then would have to call the “first” Holocaust. In this respect, Operation Lucifer might be anticipating terrorism as a new master trope that could partly replace or supplement the Holocaust. Just as with the Holocaust, though, the rhetoric of terrorism continues to draw on Hitler as the incarnation of evil. The Left-Wing Reappropriation of the Hitler Trope: Robert Pielke’s Hitler the Cat Goes West (1995) Operation Lucifer externalizes evil by drawing a distinction between Americans whom the text casts as good and others, most notably Hitler, who are cast as evil, and whose evilness, in turn, confirms American goodness. At rare moments, though, the narrative others Americans as well. While Hitler is on trial in Kansas, the novel stages a street battle between “one hundred Ku Kluxers, skinheads and neo-Nazis” demonstrating for Hitler and “Christian Crusaders” who oppose them (II: 81). The text, however, projects this battle not as a fight among Americans but as a fight between “real” Americans, the Christians, and un-American neo-Nazis. While the latter might be Americans nominally, the text suggests, they are not American by nature because they lack the essential(ist) qualities that, according to the novel, characterize Americans. The novel therefore testifies to the further proliferation of the Hitler trope since the late 1980s. Up to then, the trope had hardly been deployed for internal othering. With the advent of the culture wars between left and right, though, conservative political discourse quickly appropriated the trope to attack and disqualify leftist positions and Democratic politicians. By contrast, Robert Pielke’s Hitler the Cat Goes West, a short novel published in 1995, marks the reappropriation of Hitler by the left, a development that later culminates in the frequent Bush-Hitler comparisons circulated on the internet. Significantly, this reappropriation occurs in connection with a return to a postmodernist aesthetics that puts

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Hitler the Cat in a line with Hitler Fiction of the early 1970s. Like the texts of Goss and Spinrad more than two decades earlier, Pielke’s novel does not cast a particular group of Americans, in this case a sect of militant Christians, as un-American but rather argues that the fascism of their “Puritan revolution” is at the very center of the American project (20). The regime of terror and self-righteousness the fundamentalist Christians seek to establish, the novel suggests, is inextricably tied to America’s religiously inflected exceptionalist agenda. The abolition of civil liberties is presented not as an aberration but as the logical consequence of evangelical ideology. The novel, a dystopian future history, is set on the territory of today’s United States in 2090. Twenty years earlier, the union dissolved into six fragmentary states after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and ruled that all participants in an abortion were subject to the death penalty. Hit by economic crisis and still torn over the issue of abortion, these new states are thrown into further turmoil when their heads of state are assassinated one after the other. Behind the killings is the True Way, a group of militant Puritan Christians that seeks to reunite the country in order to establish a fundamentalist theocracy. In the six states the traditional allegiance to the nation has already been replaced by a different sense of community by the time the novel sets in. Each state favors a particular specimen of Christian religion that it more or less imposes on its subjects. The Catholics in California are extremely tolerant; the True Way in New England is not. Hitler the Cat, a professional killer, is hired by the militant Christians to assassinate the bishop of the Vatican-governed Republic of Southern California. Hitler in fact has little sympathy for the Protestants as they had his wife executed years ago following an abortion she had because she “could no longer bear a child safely” (29). Nevertheless, he is determined to kill the bishop because it was he who informed the Protestants about the abortion to cash in on the reward. A series of dramatic events and hilarious plot twists enables Hitler not only to have his revenge but also to deal a serious blow to the Puritans. Pielke’s Hitler, who narrates parts of the novel, makes clear in his very first line that he is not connected to the historical Hitler: “Hitler’s the name . . . No Relation” (6). And indeed, he only carries this name because it was assigned to him by the “Universal Renaming Act” undertaken during the last years of the United States in order to “eradicate ethnic and racial prejudice” (11). While the name “Hitler” functions in most other texts as an immediate indicator of its bearer’s generic evil, the novel challenges this seemingly natural connection between signifier and signified. That the protagonist was renamed Hitler in a lottery highlights the arbitrary relationship between a sign and its meaning instead. Self-reflexively

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taking on the associations of the name “Hitler,” the novel suggests that the name as such does not signify anything, that it is the culture that has naturalized the connections between the name and its connotations. To Miss Hope, his True Way contact, Hitler may thus appear as “the pure embodiment of evil” at first (101). Later, however, she joins his party and finally turns out to be the long-missing daughter that was taken from him after his wife’s execution and his imprisonment. While the culturally established connotations of the word “Hitler” resonate with her until she gets to know better the person behind the name, the other positive characters in the novel, who do not know Hitler’s name, take an immediate liking to him. Much the same goes for the reader who shares Hitler’s point of view at every important moment in the narrative through the alternation of passages narrated by him and passages told by a heterodiegetic narrator with changing focalization.11 In similar fashion, Hitler the Cat challenges other culturally established concepts such as the “abortion Holocaust” in order to unveil what the text perceives as the fascist character of militant antiabortionist groups. At first sight, the novel seems to underwrite the metaphor of the “abortion Holocaust.” The text casts its Hitler as somebody who supports the right to have an abortion, thus superficially deploying the established metonymic link between Hitler and the Holocaust to reconfigure abortion as mass murder. By and by, however, the novel self-consciously takes apart this rhetoric and reveals it as propaganda. One prominent example of this process is the story Hitler’s daughter, Miss Hope, has been told by the True Way about what happened to her mother, a story that completely reverses the actual course of events: After the Great Dissolution, and shortly before the Compromises of 2073, the warfare between the Preservers of Life and the Abortionists had become more violent that ever. Guerilla groups from both sides began raiding each other’s enclaves. Deaths were beginning to reach into the thousands. Her mother, as the story went, decided that even one more abortion was more than she could stand. She decided to join a picket line in front of the largest abortion clinic in the Commonwealth. The mob trying to break through so that they could kill more babies got out of hand, and began to trample some of the peaceful protesters. At this point, her mother became a martyr, and allowed herself to be trampled. (57)

Working with an array of binary oppositions (death vs. life; violent vs. peaceful; out of hand vs. calm; murderer vs. martyr), the story concocted by Miss Hope’s foster father, a True Way dignitary, dramatizes the struggle over abortion as a conflict between good and evil, between “the Preservers of Life” and those who want to “kill more babies.” It presents

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the latter as favoring the act of killing itself and not a woman’s right to choose. This interpretation is enforced by the term “Abortionists,” which suggests that everyone who defends the right to have an abortion is actually a “proabortionist” who prefers abortion to giving birth. However, following several passages narrated by Hitler that unveil the internal struggles he and his wife underwent until they decided to have an abortion, this rhetoric rings false and simplistic. The reason why Hitler’s wife had an abortion was to save her life, a fact ignored by the “Preservers of Life,” who sentenced her to death. Moreover, the passage reveals the hypocrisy of the antiabortion league by ironically taking the story the True Way has invented over the top: In their account, the “Abortionists” are not only eager “to kill more babies”; in their murderous rage they also “trample some of the peaceful protesters.” The True Way, which mercilessly prosecutes and executes all those who participate in an abortion, thus casts its members as victims of violence themselves. Dwelling on these obvious contradictions between the militant Christians’ self-fashioning as protectors of life and their murderous behavior—they are, after all, also behind all the assassinations—the novel unveils their propagandistic distortions of reality. Against the backdrop of frequent references to Hitler and the Third Reich, this strategy implicitly casts the True Way, and not the “Abortionists,” as the story’s “real” Nazis because how they misrepresent reality echoes Goebbels’s propaganda. The Christians’ seemingly neutral, or even positive, term for the assassinations they order, “purification” (93), resonates with the Nazis’ attempt to hide genocide behind the equally neutral term “final solution.” Exposing the violence veiled by such euphemistic rhetoric echoes the efforts of Mary MacCarthy’s Vietnam (1967) and Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream (1972) to expose how the U.S. military tried to make palatable the deployment of napalm in Vietnam through the use of seemingly innocent terms. Like the texts from the early 1970s, then, Hitler the Cat challenges official U.S. policies and histories, in this case religious fanaticism and intolerance. Depicting the True Way’s efforts to reunite the country as another “Puritan revolution” (20), a revolution from above, the narrative constructs a continuity between the first Puritan settlers of the past who tried to convert the native population and the militant Christians of the future, suggesting that the project of the “New World” has from the very beginning been infected by religious fanaticism. Yet, Hitler the Cat takes on not only Protestantism but religion in general, trying to reveal creed as a means of power by which the elite—the priests or ministers— controls and exploits the lives of the majority.

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The novel parodies two of the most important elements of the Christian religion, the resurrection and the crucifixion. The resurrection of Christ is satirized early when Hitler comments on his impotence by declaring that “Jesus still hasn’t come again and, hell, neither have I” (6).12 The criticism this comment entails is taken further later, when, with the help of the bishop’s twin brother, Hitler stages a resurrection to deal a serious blow to the fundamentalists and to disqualify religion altogether. Posing as his assassinated brother, the twin seemingly returns from the dead and declares that he is “Jesus, returned in the flesh to bring about the Final Days” (140). The travesty culminates three years later in a second crucifixion. Disaffected, because the return of the alleged Jesus has not made their lives any easier, a mob of poor Californians kills the false savior in the time-honored way. He, however, remains true to his part until the very end. A newspaper reports his last words as “Oh no, not again” (146). Hitler’s blatant deception of the public causes serious problems for the True Way and its philosophy, as it foregrounds the theatricality of religious rites in general and exposes religion as a drama staged by those in power to secure their privileged positions and to keep the suffering masses from revolting. The clearly fictitious nature of the second crucifixion implies that the stories about Christ’s passion are conscious fabrications as well. Just as Hitler and his friends benefit financially from the hype around their Christ, the novel suggests, the churches have profited from the Christian legend for two thousand years. And yet, while Hitler has brought the most important Christian narrative to a closure, the fact that the group eventually leaves the American mainland indicates that he has not been able to stop the Puritan movement. He has to retire to the one area of the former United States that has yet remained unaffected by religious radicalism. Hitler the Cat thus echoes in more than one way the critical attitude of Spinrad’s The Iron Dream or Goss’s Hitler’s Daughter. The novel does for religion what these texts did for Vietnam and U.S. imperialism. As a future history that draws a bleak picture of what might become of America if the forces of conservative religious fundamentalism prevail in the culture wars, it functions as a warning to contemporary U.S. society. And just as early-1970s postmodernist texts, Hitler the Cat highlights its own ontological status as fiction (through the self-conscious staging of Christ’s Second Coming and second crucifixion) and displays a high awareness of the tropological status of representations of Hitler. In addition, the text abandons not merely essentialist notions of good and evil but also of identity in general by presenting allegiances never as fixed or “natural,” but as constantly shifting. Hitler the Cat’s daughter changes

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sides, and so do the bishop’s twin brother and various other characters. The positive characters persistently redefine who they are and what kind of life they want to lead, performing their chosen identities almost at will. Yet, Hitler the Cat also suggests that the alternative lifestyles they favor are increasingly criminalized in the United States, that, although they still find their niches, on a more general level “[g]enuine individuality isn’t possible” anymore—and might be even less possible in the future (67). Within the novel, a happy ending for the protagonists is imaginable only at the westernmost point of the United States, away from the mainland, in the “Independent Kingdom of Hawaii” (146). There are, however, also crucial differences between Hitler the Cat and early-1970s texts. Whereas the narratives of Bukowski, Goss, and Spinrad are examples of early, more playful, albeit inherently political, postmodernist fiction, Pielke’s novel with its focus on multiple lifestyles and ethnicities is an exemplar of what Hans Bertens has called the “postmodernism of difference” (11). The novel celebrates alcohol and marihuana consumption, pre- and extramarital sex, homosexuality, and transvestism as alternative lifestyles that enable moments of successful resistance, resistance, though, that remains private and never turns political on a larger scale. Instead of openly confronting the Puritan movement, the positive characters stage the resurrection of Christ as a means of personal enrichment and flee to Hawaii where they can lead a life without sorrows. The novel bemoans the loss of individualism that allegedly was once possible in the United States, but it never explores the connections between the logic of individualism and the corruption of American values that it criticizes. What is more: The Iron Dream did not feature a single positive American character but depicted the whole of postwar U.S. culture as fascist; Hitler’s Daughter employed a Mexican as its protagonist and depicted the whole history of the United States as an imperialist endeavor, in which dissenting voices, like Cynthia Hitler’s, are silenced or manipulated. Hitler the Cat, by contrast, revolves around the struggle of a whole group of characters—who are not all American by birth, but who believe in the concept of American individualism—against forces from within that try to redefine what America will stand for in the future. Although the novel rejects essentialist categories and does not cast the Puritan fundamentalists as un-American—highlighting the central role of their beliefs for U.S. society ever since the seventeenth century instead—it still performs an internal othering. It does not return to the self-critique of earlier postmodernist Hitler Fiction, but reappropriates the Hitler trope for its own kind of othering instead.

Chapter 6

Redeeming Hitler? Steve Erickson’s Tours of the Black Clock (1989) The three preceding chapters have traced the development of Hitler Fiction from the early 1970s into the new millennium, from the Vietnam era to the post-9/11 period. Over the last thirty years, I have argued, American culture has transformed the figure of Hitler into the epitome of evil; the Hitler trope has been turned from a means of left-wing critique into a rhetorical device to affirm right-wing accounts of American exceptionalism and to reconstruct the progressive narrative; and the dominant cultural function of Hitler Fiction has changed accordingly from self-critique to projection and then to othering. Since the mid-1990s, though, texts such as Robert Pielke’s Hitler the Cat Goes West (1995) have reappropriated the trope for their left-wing critique of American society. Unlike its far more numerous realist counterparts, Pielke’s postmodernist novel rejects essentialist notions of good and evil, and even casts (a) Hitler as its hero. However, the text does not as extensively and selfconsciously explore how the trope works and what meanings the figure of Hitler transports for American culture at the end of the twentieth century, as early-1970s texts did for their time. During the last two decades only texts that frequently mention but never represent Hitler, most notably Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985) and William Gass’s The Tunnel (1995), have tackled these questions in any detail. Among the 1980s and 1990s texts that feature Hitler as a character, there is only one that constantly and carefully negotiates these issues, Steve Erickson’s novel Tours of the Black Clock (1989).

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Published before the left-wing reappropriation of the trope began, Tours of the Black Clock challenges the conceptual and terminological framework I have employed so far, as the novel defies such simple classifications as “revisionist” or “affirmative.” Instead, it simultaneously invites and subverts realist and postmodernist readings, deploys and deconstructs the Hitler trope, undermines and relies on the rhetoric of good and evil, and critiques the progressive narrative while acknowledging the need for it. A veritable tour de force, the novel embraces a postmodern worldview but also suggests that classic humanist themes such as redemption and forgiveness remain pressing. This chapter is dedicated exclusively to this text, although I will make short detours to other texts that engage related issues. Tours of the Black Clock cuts across generic boundaries and merges alternate history, fantasy, historical fiction, and the autobiographical confession narrative on various reality levels, generating the “diegetic uncertainty” that, according to Lee Sphinks, characterizes Erickson’s fiction in general (226). The novel’s various plotlines, which stretch across two different versions of the twentieth century as well as into the future, are united by a common theme: men’s potentially fatal obsession with (younger) women. This theme is introduced even before the actual narrative begins by a lengthy excerpt from William Shirer’s classic study The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960) dedicated to Hitler’s love for his niece Geli Raubal, who was found shot dead in his apartment in Munich in 1931. Hitler’s relationship with Geli is subsequently mirrored in Banning Jainlight’s obsession with Dania, a young girl he sees for a moment in a Vienna window in 1938, and then, early in the twenty-first century, in the passion Dania’s son Marc feels for a young girl named Kara. While the historical Hitler probably drove Geli to suicide, Banning makes Dania the object of the pornographic stories he writes for highranking Nazis. His fantasies about Dania rekindle memories of Geli in Hitler, who is distracted from his plans to such a degree that the course of history is changed. Thus, Banning’s pornography brings about an alternate twentieth century in which Russia is never attacked, England is conquered, and the fighting continues for decades after 1945. While Banning inhabits this alternate history, Dania continues to live in the world the reader knows, but is even there haunted by visions of Banning’s nightly visits. Since two versions of the twentieth century exist next to each other, Tours of the Black Clock is, nominally, a parallel-world story. However, as I argue in the first part of the chapter, the novel suggests through Banning that the alternate history he has created should be read not as ontologically real, but rather as a counternarrative about the twentieth

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century that challenges the progressive narrative so firmly rooted in American culture while simultaneously granting this template a certain kind of legitimacy. In similar fashion, I suggest in the next section, Tours of the Black Clock’s careful and intricate negotiation of the workings of the Hitler trope deconstructs the notion of Hitler’s evil while nevertheless acknowledging the dependence of American constructions of identity on it and deploying it for a critique of postwar American politics. In the final section I explore an issue closely related to but even more controversial than Hitler’s demystification: the possibility of Hitler being forgiven and redeemed. Tours of the Black Clock, I argue, casts love and asking for forgiveness as necessary conditions for redemption. Moreover, the novel provides an ambiguous answer to the question of whether learning from the mistakes of others, and thus from history, is possible, an answer that depends on the text’s understanding of time as both linear and circular. “No Measure of Time that God Understands”: Tours of the Black Clock’s Post-Einsteinian Worldview It has been the premise of this study that literature performs cultural work, that Hitler Fiction not only reflects but also creates its contexts, that, in short, narratives matter. The cultural work of Tours of the Black Clock may have been rather limited, because the text’s challenge to established narratives and binaries never reached a broader audience. Yet the novel dramatizes the belief in the material effects of fiction. The pornographic texts that Banning Jainlight, an Ohio-born American emigre, who had to flee from the United States because he killed his brother and crippled his father, writes “literally [shape] the world” within the fictional universe of Tours of the Black Clock (Kincaid, “Defying Rational Chronology” 37). The texts he produces after seeing Dania, a fifteenyear-old girl, in a Vienna window in 1938 “[razor] the Twentieth Century down its middle” (122). They create a parallel world in which Hitler, obsessed with Banning’s re-creation of his lost love, his niece Geli, is too distracted to attack Russia, and in which therefore the war is still going on as late as 1970. The power of Banning’s fiction even reaches from one version of the twentieth century into the other: Banning later impregnates Dania by writing a story about Hitler impregnating Geli. As Erickson’s novel thus casts Hitler as an avid consumer of Americanmade pornography, it alludes to, reverses, and ironically exaggerates the degree to which Hitler and Nazism have become part of the American pornographic imaginary and the degree to which certain sexual, especially sadomasochistic, fantasies have been tied to Nazi imagery. By tying Hitler’s fantasy life explicitly to the course of world history, the novel also

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exposes how American attempts at understanding the Third Reich have singled out Hitler. In addition, by having its American protagonist create a version of Hitler obviously irreconcilable with established historical facts, the novel suggests that most representations of Hitler circulating in U.S. culture are fantasies fabricated for specific purposes that have little or nothing to do with the historical figure. The creation of parallel worlds is, of course, an established trope of science fiction. Tours of the Black Clock, however, is not a science-fiction text concerned with the question whether multiple worlds are possible in terms of physics. Instead, confirming that “science fiction [is] the sister genre of high postmodernist fiction,” as Hilary Dannenberg observes with reference to Brian McHale, the novel’s “ontological pluralization” functions in much the same way as the simultaneous presence of contradictory narrative accounts functions in historiographic metafiction (Dannenberg 223, 222). The two versions of the twentieth century that the novel projects need be read as different memories of a single history, as contesting narratives about the meaning of the twentieth century. Banning himself regards the version of history and thus the bleak narrative he has created as the adequate one. He makes this perfectly clear in a particularly reflexive passage that I will quote at length, because it contains most of the issues the novel negotiates as well as its central symbols in extremely condensed form. The passage is part of Banning’s confessional autodiegetic narrative, which he delivers in his dying moments at the feet of Dania and which makes for roughly two-thirds of the text. The “you” he addresses is Dania: What I saw from my window was the other Twentieth Century rolling on by my own, like the other branch of a river that’s been forked by an island long and narrow and knifelike: the same river but flowing by different shorelines and banks. This was the river of the Twentieth Century that was forked at the very moment I saw you in the window of your house [ . . . ]; this Twentieth Century I saw from my own window today was the one in which I never saw you at all. In which I never saw you and never wrote of you, and your invention never came to the attention of special clients. In which no evil mind was ever distracted by the reincarnation of a past obsession, no Barbarossas [the code name for the German attack on the Soviet Union] were suspended and therefore evil came to rule the world; or else such suspended invasions were the catastrophe Holtz [the contact between Banning and Hitler] predicted, and evil therefore collapsed altogether. I longed for this century [ . . . ] but I also knew such a version of the Twentieth Century was utterly counterfeit. That neither the rule of evil nor its collapse could be anything but an aberration in such a century, because this is the century in which another German, small with wild

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white hair, has written away with his new wild poetry every Absolute; in which the black clock of the century is stripped of hands and numbers. A time in which there’s no measure of time that God understands: in such a time memories mean nothing but the fever that invents them: before such memories and beyond such clocks, good views evil in the same way as the man on a passing train who stands still to himself but soars to the eyes of the countryside (167–68).

Banning’s reflection begins with a little twist to two familiar metaphors. The linear movement of time has for centuries been imagined as and likened to the flow of a river. The image of the forked path is almost as conventionally employed in texts that revolve around a split in history and the subsequent existence of parallel worlds.1 Banning, who speaks these words on an island, now fuses these two metaphors, creating the image of “a river that’s been forked by an island.” He thus indicates already that the two time streams will eventually merge again at the end of the novel just as the two branches of the river do at the end of the island. Yet, he describes the island (“long and narrow and knifelike”) as a weapon used for cutting rather than forking, relating the metaphor back to the central image of the century being cut into two. Both metaphors resonate with the sense of violence (Nazis beating up a Jew, a stone hitting Dania) that characterizes the moment when Banning glimpses Dania in a Vienna window in 1938, the moment that splits history into two by triggering Banning’s fantasies about Dania. Moreover, the metaphors anticipate the violence that dominates both versions of the century that the novel projects, as well as Banning’s violent relationship with Dania. In addition, the metaphor of the “forking island” implies that the island itself is simultaneously inside and outside history. Significantly, Davenhall Island, where Banning speaks these words, can be read as a literalization of this metaphor, as it is exactly such a paradoxical place. It is inside history because people can come there and leave again, but it lies also outside history because it is the place where those fleeing from the forces of history like Dania and Banning finally arrive at.2 The image of the island from which Banning envisions watching history flowing by is taken up at the very end of the quoted passage in the image of the man standing on a train “still to himself ” and watching the countryside flow by. This is an allusion to the famous example Albert Einstein used to illustrate his theory of relativity. Viewed from the train, the countryside is moving; and viewed from the countryside, the train is moving—and time is passing at a different speed for someone on the train and someone in the countryside. The reader has been prepared a few lines above for this reference through an even more direct hint at

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Einstein himself, who is, of course, the “German, small with wild white hair” who has “written away [ . . . ] every Absolute.” In the postEinsteinian world of the twentieth century, Banning implies, time is utterly relative, “the black clock of the century [has been] stripped of hands and numbers” and thus of any objective means of measuring time. As Banning emphasizes, replacing the notion of absoluteness with that of relativity does not only affect time. History is replaced by memories that “mean nothing but the fever that invents them,” memories that are subjective, provisional, and constantly re-created. Moreover, according to Banning—but not to Einstein—the theory of relativity entails a loss of transcendence. If God no longer “understands” “the measure of time,” he has lost his divine and transcendental status and ceases to exist. This, then, has moral consequences: Just as speed, movement, and the passage of time now depend on one’s subject position, so do moral evaluations. For Banning, concepts such as “good” and “evil” have lost their absolute, ontological character; they do no longer exist independently of subjects and of their specific perspectives, just as “the man on a passing train” moves or does not move depending on the observer’s position. The novel thus critiques transcendence and destabilizes absolutes in Pynchonesque fashion. It takes seriously the findings of modern physics and applies them to other areas. In Tours of the Black Clock, values and judgments are always relative and provisional, because they are the result of specific temporal, spatial, moral, and ideological positions. According to Banning, the implications of Einstein’s theory affect both versions of the twentieth century. He maintains, though, that they are acknowledged only in the world he created, where the perpetual warfare between Nazi Germany and its enemies has long abolished any clear distinction between good and evil, and where both sides stand undefeated and can therefore continue to claim that they are fighting for the good cause. By contrast, in the version of the twentieth century that Dania inhabits and that the reader knows, good and evil continue to be thought of in absolute terms. The clear outcome of World War II—Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union was “the catastrophe Holtz predicted”—facilitated a narrativization that dramatizes the conflict as one in which good triumphed and “evil [ . . . ] collapsed altogether.”3 What Banning suggests here is that the course history took in our world has prevented the inferences of the theory of relativity from being taken seriously and that only in the world he created the true essence of the century comes to the fore. What the novel Tours of the Black Clock negotiates, then, through Banning’s creation of an alternative version of history, I would like to suggest, is how certain narrative accounts of history depend on and at the same time produce essentialist and absolute conceptions of good and evil.

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The fictional existence of the twentieth century Banning has brought about challenges what I have called the progressive narrative throughout this study. Erickson’s novel articulates its critique of the celebratory accounts of twentieth-century history in much the same fashion as Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1961) did almost thirty years earlier. As I argued in Chapter 2, Dick’s novel stages an intricate interplay of the diegetic vision of a Nazi victory in World War II and the intradiegetic vision of what could have been done better after an Allied victory. The tension between a dystopian and a utopian alternative to the course history actually took suggests that America may have won the war, but that for the Third World the effects are largely the same as after a Nazi victory. However, the critique put forth by Tours of the Black Clock is more complex, since the novel, once again through Banning, simultaneously acknowledges the need for a progressive narrative. Banning, after all, yearns for a world like the one he has done away with throughout. And later, in 1969, when he decides to flee to America with a senile Hitler, he casts this flight as a search for the century “that doesn’t exist, except in the sense that one needs to believe in it, as one once used to believe in God” (288). Literally, his journey to Mexico, New York, and, finally, Davenhall Island is the search for a passage into the parallel world; symbolically, he is looking for a way to reconcile in his mind two markedly distinct memories of, two contesting narratives about, the twentieth century. He acknowledges that ultimately both he and people in general desire a trajectory with a “utopian telos,” outdated and inappropriate as it may be, in which the notions of good and evil are clearly separated (Alexander 24). “The Humanity of His Evil”: Demystifying Hitler If the novel’s stance on the progressive narrative is thus highly paradoxical, the same ambiguity characterizes the text’s—and also its protagonist’s— attitude toward the rhetoric of good and evil. While Banning, as we have seen, challenges the validity of the concepts for a post-Einsteinian world, he still continues to call Hitler evil. In fact, throughout his narrative, Banning never uses the name “Hitler” even once. Except for the short excerpt from Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich that precedes the actual narrative, Tours of the Black Clock only ever refers to Hitler as “Client Z”—the name Holtz uses when he tells Banning that somebody more important than Goebbels has developed a taste for his writings—or through the antonomastic substitution of his name by the label “evil.” That there is never any doubt whom Banning has in mind is partly due, of course, to the quotation from Shirer that hints at Hitler’s importance

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for the story from the outset. And yet, when Banning, in a prolepsis, refers to Hitler for the first time, there has hardly been any other allusion to Nazi Germany, let alone to its leader, on the almost eighty pages between the passage from Shirer and Banning’s sudden narrative leap into the future. The reader may have forgotten about Hitler for a while, but the phrase “the most evil man who ever lived” together with a hint that these events take place in Vienna in 1942 immediately identifies as Hitler the person who “watches” Banning “ravish” a girl yet unknown to the reader (79). While the reader is left wondering how Banning will get to Vienna, who the girl is, and why Hitler is watching them, not the slightest doubt remains that “the most evil man” is Hitler. The identification works because Tours of the Black Clock can draw on the established conceptualization of Hitler as evil incarnate. Since the late 1960s, I have argued, American culture has turned the figure of Hitler into the epitome of evil and forged a seemingly natural connection, a metonymic link between Hitler and evil. Consistently substituting the phrase “most evil man” for the name “Hitler,” Tours of the Black Clock now turns around this metonymic chain. If the word “Hitler” usually evokes evil, throughout the novel, references to evil signify Hitler. Thus, through a simple reversal, the novel exposes the power that the word “Hitler” carries for U.S. culture and lays bare its connotations. Negotiating what American culture associates with the figure of Hitler, Tours of the Black Clock echoes Richard Grayson’s short story “With Hitler in New York,” published ten years earlier, in 1979. Grayson’s story achieves a very similar effect by way of very different formal means. Erickson’s Hitler is obviously a version of the historical Hitler, although the novel withholds the name. Grayson attaches Hitler’s name to a character that seems to have little or nothing in common with the historical figure. “With Hitler in New York” persistently evokes and questions the image of Hitler as the epitome of evil that the reader is familiar with. The story is set in the 1970s and revolves around Hitler’s trip to New York where he visits his Jewish girlfriend Ellen and an unnamed male narrator. The narrator and Ellen pick Hitler up at the airport, and over the following days they go sightseeing, have dinner with Ellen’s parents, and sit outside “on the stop smoking a joint and eating vanilla ice cream” (15). The sense of the ordinary thus created, however, is persistently undermined by the presence of the name “Hitler.” The participation of a figure named Hitler in these everyday activities compels the reader to view otherwise harmless events in a different light. Hitler’s comment about the heat in the airport’s arrival hall—“It’s like a bathroom” (14)—for example, inconspicuous if uttered by anybody else, takes on a darker meaning, as the phrase echoes the lie Jews were told on

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their way to the gas chamber, namely, that they were going to take a shower. In addition, the narrator frequently compares the Hitler he chaperones around New York with the image he previously had of Hitler. Realizing that Hitler “looks handsomer than [he] remembered him as being” or that he “never realized [Hitler] was so witty,” he adjusts his view (14, 16). And the reader, of course, constantly compares the version of Hitler the story presents to what he or she knows about the historical figure. The effect the story thus produces, however, is not, as Alvin H. Rosenfeld has argued, “the neutralization of the historical Hitler and the normalization of a new image of the man” (72). To claim that “With Hitler in New York” presents a “de-Nazified Hitler” means to read the story realistically and to determine that the character it features is indeed an aged version of the historical figure (73). The story of course invites but simultaneously discourages this identification. However, it is ultimately interested neither in the historical nor in its own “Hitler.” Instead, “With Hitler in New York” explores what is commonly associated with Hitler. It denaturalizes connections between Hitler on the one hand, and evil, sadism, or anti-Semitism on the other, urging its readers to acknowledge how stereotypical these connotations have become. And yet, “With Hitler in New York” does not attempt to reconfigure the meaning of Hitler for U.S. culture. The story neither offers a different set of associations nor does it invite a revisionist interpretation of the historical Hitler. By contrast, Tours of the Black Clock pushes its critique several steps further, since the text, as I have argued above, questions the validity of the category “evil” as such. The last part of the novel, which depicts Banning’s flight with the old Hitler, then, deconstructs the notion that Hitler is evil, although it also acknowledges the need of those who suffered under or fought Hitler to cast him that way. The novel’s most powerful means for challenging the established conceptualization of Hitler is its rendering of an aged and senile version of Hitler, a Hitler who most of the time does not remember who he is, what he has done, or what continues to be done by the regime he once headed. Banning blames Hitler for the death of his wife and little daughter whom Goebbels killed in 1942. Yet, faced with the eighty-year-old man, he cannot continue to regard him as evil incarnate: What came to repulse me most was how time made the client’s evil so feeble and therefore shredded the illusion that his evil was inhuman. It was utterly human. I saw the humanity the day the doctor came and changed Z’s clothes and cleaned him from fouling himself. His fouling himself was specific to his oldness, but not to his evil. His shit stank, but it stank human, not evil. (257)

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While Hitler “fouling himself ” is a means of othering in Heywood’s The Berkut (1987) and Charnay’s Operation Lucifer (2002), an indicator of both his cowardice and his inhumanity, it works exactly the other way round here. For Banning, Hitler’s inability to control his bodily functions is typical of old age, not of evil. It is what he shares with other people, not what distinguishes him from them. As it challenges Hitler’s exceptionality that is at the heart of the myth of the epitome of evil, the passage also performs a critique of evil as an ontological category. In line with the novel’s post-Einsteinian stance on absolutes, Banning’s reasoning suggests that evil as such does not exist and that it depends on one’s personal perspective what one views as evil. Hitler may be called evil, but his evil is “human.” It has been shaped by historical, biographical, and other influences and therefore does not constitute evil in the traditional metaphysical sense. Yet, knowing what Hitler was responsible for in the past and what continues to be done in his name, Banning still regards Hitler as somebody who is beyond redemption. However, he simultaneously wonders “how history would bear this evidence of his humanity” (257). It is exactly this question that the last part of the novel explores by staging a series of encounters between Hitler and his victims and enemies during the flight from Venice to New York. The answer the novel offers is invariably the same: Since nobody recognizes the feeble old man as Hitler, nobody, except Banning, needs to come to terms with this new version of Hitler. The Italian fishermen who help Banning escape from Venice see in Hitler merely “an old man” (281). Accordingly, they take particular care of him and praise Banning for not leaving him behind. Indeed, most of the time during their flight, Banning too treats Hitler just as one might treat any ill old man, feeding and cleaning him when necessary. However, whenever Banning remembers the still ongoing atrocities the younger Hitler set in motion, his mood changes and he starts attacking and offending the old Hitler, thus puzzling those who see in Hitler only an old man. This is what happens during the night that Banning hides a family of Jews, escapees from the nearby death camp, in the small room he shares with Hitler. While they praise him for his kindness and courage at first, the mood changes completely when the young Jewish girl sits down next to Hitler and helps him eat. As Banning cannot stand witnessing the victim unknowingly taking care of the perpetrator, he asks her to stop, telling her that “he’s a piece of shit” (289). Calling Hitler “shit” of course refers back to the passage I quoted above, in which Hitler’s inability to control his bodily functions figures as a sign of his humanness. Banning’s own metaphor therefore undermines his argument and puts to the fore what the Jewish girl sees in

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Hitler: an old man simply too old to eat alone without dirtying himself. Accordingly, for the Jewish family, it is suddenly Banning who represents the inhumanity under which they are suffering. Their hostile reaction only confirms what Banning suspected after his first meeting with the old Hitler, when he realized that “[he] was now more him [Hitler] than he was” (258). For the people Banning and Hitler meet, it is Banning who embodies the monstrosity they would expect to find in Hitler. The change of roles that Banning and Hitler have undergone in the eyes of others is most powerfully brought to the fore during the time they spend with Mexican guerrilla fighters who take good care of Hitler, but are highly suspicious of Banning. One day the group comes to a village whose inhabitants have just been massacred by German soldiers. When Banning finds the raped and mutilated body of a little girl, he attacks Hitler more violently than ever before: Another virgin for the Leader, is all I keep saying to myself. [ . . . ] Silently, without a word, I just begin to beat him [Hitler, that is]. I beat him and he’s staring up at me with his eyes popping out, and the guerrillas come along and pull me off him when I’m within an inch of his life. They pull me off and it’s clear that, in their own rage over the village, I’ve become to them the German who murders old people and children. [ . . . ] For a moment I’m about to tell them. [ . . . ] And then I know I won’t tell them. I won’t because I believe it’s better they villainize me, a big violent man my whole life, than an old weak sick man. Because there’s always one awful chance that they will believe me, [ . . . ] at which point the pure righteous wrath of their fight would have to accommodate the humanity of his evil. (297–98)

For the Mexicans, Banning’s violence confirms their suspicions about the generic evilness of the enemy they fight. For the reader, though, the situation is more complicated. On the one hand, Banning is indeed partly responsible for the crime, as his texts changed the course of history and thus brought the war to Mexico. On the other hand, his family was killed by the Nazis, and he was imprisoned. He is therefore both victim and perpetrator at the same time, and it seems to be most of all the awareness of his own precarious position that makes him snap. Abusing Dania for the pornography he used to write for Hitler, he has, albeit symbolically, also sacrificed a “virgin for the Leader”—just as the sign puts it, that an unknown German soldier has attached to the dead body of the Mexican girl. Yet, her mutilated body reminds Banning not only of his own guilt but also of Hitler’s, whose Nazi charges killed Banning’s daughter in Vienna in 1941. Hitler is in the same situation. He did not issue the command to attack Mexico or this particular village. Yet, the Nazis

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continue to commit their atrocities in his name, and what they do is a direct consequence of his policies. Thus, Banning’s attack on Hitler dramatizes the confusion of the categories of victim and perpetrator and good and evil that the novel has staged throughout. Ironically, though, in the eyes of the guerrillas, Banning’s violence confirms and stabilizes the absolute notions of good and evil that his outbreak challenges for the reader (298). In a post-Einsteinian world, Banning has persistently suggested, truth is relative and depends on the subject’s perspective. However, as Banning concedes in the second part of the passage, people require and desire absolutes to make sense of their lives. Consequently, Banning does not take the risk that the Mexicans might have “to accommodate the humanity of [Hitler’s] evil.” Instead of resisting, he actively supports their “villainiz[ing]” him. While the passage thus emphasizes that there are no moral or other absolutes, it also recognizes the necessity to at least temporarily ignore this fact and to conceive the world in such strict and stable binaries as absolute good and absolute evil. In yet another of its many ironic moves, the novel highlights that the image of Hitler as evil incarnate that the Mexicans believe in and that dominates American culture is close to the image of Hitler painted by Nazi propaganda. As early as 1948 in Banning’s world, German propaganda starts replacing the live broadcasts of Hitler’s weekly radio addresses with tapes recorded during the 1920s and 1930s on which he still sounds as people expect him to sound. Later, during Banning’s time in Venice, he frequently sees Hitler on TV, but these images, too, do not show the man as he is now but a still vigorous version. For the Nazis, the image of the younger and determined Hitler has thus “become a myth” that those now in charge need to foster and preserve (248). Significantly, the same is true of American culture. When Banning and Hitler finally enter the United States, one of the first things they see is a poster of Hitler: “As on the German television broadcasts, the image is of the man nearly forty years ago, and printed across the image is a large black X. Beneath the image and its X is the single word, in large black letters, NEVER” (302). The German and the American propaganda image of Hitler, it appears, are exactly the same; what differs is how the image is deployed. For the Nazis, the image of Hitler functions as a means of identification with Hitler and the values he represents. For the Americans, conversely, the image of Hitler functions as a means of identification against Hitler and his values. What counts as American national values is thus defined through their negation by the other that is Hitler. And yet, through the juxtaposition of the American and the German Hitler myth with the senile Hitler, the novel highlights that both images

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are constructions. It also suggests, and this is of course in line with the novel’s deconstruction of absolutes and stable binaries, that the American self has more in common with its Nazi other than American culture usually acknowledges. Accordingly, Tours of the Black Clock oscillates between othering and self-critique in its deployment of the Hitler trope. The novel uses the trope and the notion of Hitler’s evil connected to it to address “the national guilt of America” that “forms a constant theme in Erickson’s work” (Kincaid, “Secret Maps” 35). As I argued above, the alternative version of the twentieth century, real as it may be within the diegetic world, should be understood not as a real alternative, but rather as a different and, from Banning’s perspective, better way to relate the history of the century. Keeping this in mind, Hitler’s arrival in the United States in “July 1970” aptly dramatizes the challenges to the progressive narrative the various events of the late 1960s and early 1970s led to (300). What Banning smuggles into the country is, after all, “the enemy, the withered dying husk of an old man who will soon break apart only for bits of him to blow across America and settle in its land and take root” (301). What spreads through America, then, from this moment onwards is the evil that Hitler embodies. If, as Erickson once stressed in an interview, World War II was a “redeeming experience” for Americans “where [they] could say, without any real fear of history contradicting [them], that [they] were the good guys,” various events of the 1960s and 1970 seriously challenged this positive self-conception (McCaffery 407).4 For Erickson as well as for most Americans, America definitely was on the right side in the fight against Hitler, but not, for example, during the Vietnam War. Significantly, the scene in which Banning nearly beats Hitler to death evokes the Vietnam War. The familiar ingredients are all there: The year is 1970, the setting is the jungle, and what happens is that a group of indigenous guerrilla fighters discovers a war crime committed by a superiorly equipped occupying army. The trajectory of Hitler Fiction I have traced in this study comes full circle here. Tours of the Black Clock’s staging of the village massacre echoes the many comparable scenes in Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream (1972). By turning Hitler into the author of the Vietnam War, I have argued, Spinrad’s novel links the American war in Vietnam to Hitler’s war of extermination against the Soviet Union and suggests that American soldiers were acting as the Nazis had before. In Erickson’s novel, too, authorship is the crucial factor. On one level, Hitler is the author of the massacre, as the German soldiers are fighting for a regime that he established and that he is still nominally heading. On a different level, though, Banning—and thus an American—is the author of the massacre, because he created the world in

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which the war came to Mexico. While he is “the German who murders old people and children” for the Mexicans in the alternate world, for the real-world reader, he also signifies the war crimes committed by the U.S. military in Vietnam. Tours of the Black Clock, though, surpasses The Iron Dream in complexity. Spinrad’s novel deploys the Hitler trope for self-critique only, challenging the distinction between American self and Nazi other. Replacing America’s war in Vietnam with a Nazi war in Mexico, Tours of the Black Clock additionally foregrounds how conceiving of World War II in terms of good and evil has worked to keep the progressive narrative in place and helped to reconstruct it after it had been challenged by texts such as Spinrad’s. The novel projects a historical trajectory in which the Vietnam War does not take place, and has German rather than American soldiers burn down villages. It thus exposes how the progressive narrative traditionally bypasses the darker chapters of American history. And yet, as I argued above, the novel not only criticizes this template but also concedes the need to tell the story of the twentieth century in this fashion. Thus, Tours of the Black Clock is also reminiscent of Charles Bukowski’s “ ” (1972). Bukowski’s short story deploys the Hitler trope for critiquing U.S. politics while examining how the crossing of cultural borders affects the trope. If Bukowski’s short story suggests that, by 1970, “Hitler” had, apart from a then still vague sense of evilness, become almost an empty signifier for American culture, Erickson’s novel paradoxically both deconstructs and maintains the notion of evil that the figure of Hitler has come to embody since then. Redeeming Hitler? Redeeming Banning! After his first encounter with the senile Hitler in Venice, Banning not only wonders “how history would bear this evidence of his humanity.” Cutting in the opposite direction, he also asks “how anyone could ever believe in redemption again” now that the events triggered by himself and Hitler seem to have disqualified the notion for good (257). Even in a state of mental and physical decay, Hitler remains in Banning’s eyes at first “a man who could not be redeemed” (258). This, of course, is the conclusion most Hitler Fiction arrives at; and, in fact, texts that cast Hitler as the epitome of evil usually never touch upon the issue of redemption, because they seem to regard it as both unthinkable and undesirable. Instead, most texts employ madness or the inability to control bodily functions to further dehumanize and other Hitler. In different fashion, the desire to maintain the distinction between Hitler and those who fight him is also at the heart of Immanuel Lieber’s

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radio address to the Israeli agents who have caught Hitler in the South American jungle in George Steiner’s The Portage to San Cristóbal of A.H. (1979). Lieber, the mastermind behind the Mossad operation to bring Hitler to justice, is fully aware that regarding Hitler simply as “[t]he very old man” his comrades encounter will weaken their determination (7). Consequently, he urges them to take certain precautionary measures: Do not let him speak freely. You will hear the crack of age in his voice. He is old. Old as the loathing which dogs us since Abraham. Let him speak to you and you will think of him as a man. With sores on his skin and need in his bowels, sweating and hungering like yourselves, short of sleep. If he asks for water fill the cup. If he asked twice he would no longer be a stranger. Give him fresh linen before he needs it. Those who speak to us of their dirt and the itch in the groin are no longer enemies. (45)

Lieber—most probably a mouthpiece of the author—advises his men to preserve the image of Hitler as inhuman. They are to ignore everything that would draw attention to his humanness, his ability to speak as well as the workings of his body. Like Tours of the Black Clock, Steiner’s novel thus acknowledges the similarities of self and other—Hitler is “like [them]selves.” Yet, the novel insists more determinedly than Erickson’s text on the need to other Hitler, to conceive of him as “a stranger” and the “enem[y].” What is to guard the men against acknowledging Hitler’s humanity is the memory of those who perished because of him. Accordingly, Lieber devotes most of his speech to a desperate attempt to refresh the awareness of the suffering Hitler caused. Influenced by this speech, the possibility that Hitler might be redeemed never arises for the Israelis, who eventually try Hitler in the jungle to prevent the Americans or Russians from taking Hitler from their hands. Almost twenty years later, Stephen Vicchio’s Ivan & Adolf: The Last Man in Hell (1997) takes up again the notion that if there is a man who cannot be redeemed, then it is Hitler. Subtitled A Rather Dark Comedy or a Perhaps Hopeful Tragedy, the play is set in a hell that has been emptied out almost completely. Everyone has been redeemed and forgiven, except for Ivan Karamasov, Tolstoi’s literary character, and Adolf Hitler, U.S. culture’s epitome of evil. While Hitler has not yet been forgiven by God when the play sets in, Ivan is still being punished for his inability to forgive others. Throughout the play Ivan keeps complaining to Sophie, their maid and keeper, that he, a righteous man, is forced to live together with someone “more evil than the Devil himself ” (19). By contrast, Hitler’s attitude changes over the course of the three acts, which span “perhaps years, decades, or even centuries” (31). Whereas Ivan is still proposing

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“a three-strikes-and-you’re-out rule” for heaven by Act III, Hitler has by then finally acknowledged his guilt (63).5 Consequently Hitler is eventually forgiven by God and invited to heaven. However, as he now cares about others, he decides to keep Ivan company, a decision that seems to finally trigger a transformation in Ivan as well, as their first-ever game of chess suggests as the curtain falls. Arguing that even Hitler is not beyond redemption, Ivan & Adolf implies that it is the greatest sin not to forgive the sins of others, and that, as Sophie puts it, “[f ]orgiveness [ . . . ] is as close as humans come to creating something out of nothing—the same way God made the universe” (45). Tours of the Black Clock, by contrast, negotiates the possibility of redemption on very different premises, since it does not accept the metaphysical framework on which notions of redemption hinge in Vicchio’s play, where it is finally granted by God. In the fictional universe of Erickson’s novel, neither God nor any other absolute exists anymore, and good and evil have lost their stable meanings. And yet, I wish to argue, the way to forgiveness that the novel proposes is remarkably similar to the path laid out in Ivan & Adolf, since love, albeit human love in this case, is cast as the way to forgiveness. Most importantly, though, Tours of the Black Clock examines the possibility of redemption not only with regard to Hitler. The novel stages a series of disastrous relationships between men and women, in which men do wrong and depend on women for forgiveness: Hitler drives Geli into suicide; Banning ravishes Dania for decades in his and her dreams and finally impregnates her with a child she does not want; years later, this child, Marc, stalks Kara, a girl he meets on the ferry to Davenhall Island one day. Yet, these three relationships also entail a learning process. Banning eventually does not repeat Hitler’s mistake, and Marc acts with more consideration than both of them. However, this positive development is undermined immediately by the circular model of time that, as the novel’s ending implies, exists alongside the linear one, on which learning and progress depend. In fact, until far into the novel, redemption seems impossible to achieve. In Banning’s eyes, he and Hitler are definitely and for good beyond redemption from a God he does not believe in anyway. Certain that he will never be granted forgiveness for what he did to Dania and history, Banning’s mind is focused on revenge during the months he spends with Hitler in Venice. He makes Hitler believe that he has given Dania, whom Hitler still takes for Geli, Hitler’s child, thus seemingly providing him with the heir he always hoped for. His true intention, however, is to have Dania give birth to a monster, “concoct[ed from] the garbage of evil, of which [Hitler] is the father,” a monster that Banning regards as the appropriate incarnation of the century. He hopes that when

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Hitler, expecting a normal child, sees this monster, “he’ll either kill it or it will kill him” so that Banning will finally have his revenge (263). Dania, however, haunted by recurring nightmares of a monster growing inside her, eventually foils Banning’s plan. Giving birth, she opts for the “single choice” she has, “and that is to love it. Whatever comes from her, in all its monstrousness, she can only love it. It’s such a pitiful weapon” (275). Dania, whose thoughts and feelings we are privy to in these parts of the novel, is wrong of course. For her and for the novel, love is not “a pitiful weapon” but a tool more powerful than Banning comes up with in his desire for revenge. Simplistic and sentimental as this way out may appear to some readers after almost three hundred pages of tragic events, it works perfectly well within the fictional universe of Tours of the Black Clock. Through her unconditional and unselfish love Dania transforms the monster into a normal and human son, leaving Banning stunned how “one small act of will has defied the soul of a century bent on finding its true dark literal form” and proving once again that within the novel everything lies in the eye of the beholder and that thoughts, feelings, and desires have material effects (276, 277). Incapable of killing the newborn human child with his writing, Banning begins to realize that even he might still be able to gain redemption and forgiveness. This notion is extended to Hitler a little later, when he asks Banning if his son is well and Banning notices that “[h]e says it as though he means me” (287). The question not only confirms Banning’s suspicion that he is by now much more like Hitler than the son he has given him and thus a more faithful incarnation of the violence that characterizes the century; it also proves that even Hitler is capable of love and that therefore redemption seems no longer impossible for either of them. Love may be the precondition for redemption in Tours of the Black Clock; however, love alone is not enough to achieve it, as Hitler’s death and Banning’s reaction to it make perfectly clear. Hitler dies in New York, in the small room where Banning wrote his pornography during the 1930s and where Blaine, the private eye who allowed Banning to escape to Europe, brought Dania one day in 1952 when she collapsed on the street. In this room, among the dust and uncollected mail, Banning finds the “blueprint” of a house that looks quite normal. However, part of the map is “a room in the corner of the basement; its lines have emerged literally out of brown age” (304). This map has been left behind by Dania; it is the blueprint her father smuggled out of Russia in 1917 and which he believed to be “the map of the Twentieth Century [ . . . ] with a hidden room that is its conscience” (203). It is Banning who finds this room, and, significantly, just as the conscience of the century emerges, Banning realizes that Hitler has finally died. This synchronization

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highlights the fact that Hitler and the crimes he is responsible for have become moral reference points to judge other atrocities by. The Holocaust, as the progressive narrative has it, has heightened moral awareness throughout the Western world. Thus, in a certain sense, the very events that seem to have proven that the century has no conscience have created this conscience. This dimension, though, remains hidden to Banning, who has no idea what the map represents and who destroys it immediately afterwards: I tear from the blueprint the emergent room in the basement corner and pin it to his shirt. In the middle I write not an explanation or an epitaph or an excuse, just a mystery for someone better at mysteries, any random investigator who passes this way. It reads: “Aber ich liebte sie. (But I loved her.) A.H.” (305)

Like almost everything in the novel, this action, too, is highly ambiguous. It works against the reading of the conscience of the century I have just proposed. Instead, it suggests that Hitler and what he stands for have bereaved the century of its conscience. At the same time, Banning’s act implies that even Hitler had a conscience; and his note challenges one last time the conceptualization of Hitler as the epitome of evil incapable of such humane feelings as love. That he confirms this capability in German, that he relegates the English translation to brackets, and that he introduces the sentence with the conjunction “but” highlight that this likely dimension of the historical Hitler’s character is hardly ever part of the figure of Hitler the American cultural imaginary has constructed. When Hitler is perceived as the epitome of evil, there is no space even for the smallest shade of grey: The fact that he loved someone “stands out as one of the mysteries of his strange life,” as Shirer concludes in the lengthy excerpt that opens the novel (qtd. in Erickson 10). This “mystery” is now translated onto a different level and passed on to the “random investigator” Banning imagines. For the “random investigator” that is the reader, though, Banning’s sentence is also to a degree “explanation,” “epitaph,” and “excuse,” even if Banning thinks it is not. The sentence is an epitaph because it echoes the Shirer epitaph; an explanation because it stresses one last time that only Hitler’s obsession with Geli, fed by Banning’s writing, made possible a world in which the senile Hitler dies in America; and it is at least partly an excuse, because it ascribes to Hitler an all too human motive: love. Yet, Tours of the Black Clock does not whitewash Hitler; the novel merely suggests that nobody, not even Hitler, is beyond redemption. In Ivan & Adolf, where Hitler is eventually redeemed at some point far into

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the future, the precondition for this act of divine forgiveness is that Hitler acknowledges his own guilt and repents. Erickson’s novel presents a related argument, though one devoid of the religious framework the play relies on. However, the novel reintroduces God in highly ambiguous fashion on the very last pages. While Banning’s writing of the note in Hitler’s name and signing with his initials emphasize again how much he identifies with him, the parallels stop there. Banning concludes that he will not repeat what he regards as Hitler’s major mistake, namely, that he never asked for forgiveness from any living being, be it Geli or one of his later victims. For Banning, on the contrary, “[t]hat [Dania] would not or could not give forgiveness isn’t what matters; what matters is the act of my begging” (307). Since Banning does not believe in God, there is no longer a transcendental position to which he might appeal. Instead, forgiveness seems to become an entirely human affair, granted or denied by those who have been wronged. And Banning, as he claims, does not even expect to be forgiven, but strives for his and Dania’s acknowledgement of the “act” of asking. Even asking for forgiveness, though, is not an easy thing to accomplish. It takes Banning seventeen years after his arrival on Davenhall Island, where Dania has lived since the early 1950s, to finally work up enough courage. He spends these years as a kind of ghost between two versions of the century, heard by Dania and Marc, but never seen. Only when death is approaching does he materialize in front of Dania to relate his story and to speak his last words: “Dania. Forgive me” (310). These two sentences, however, are not only a plea. Equally importantly, they also entail the recognition of her specific identity, which he has never acknowledged before. In fact, he has violently imposed a different identity on her throughout by calling her “Geli” and shaping her into a version of Geli in his pornography (161). While these are Banning’s last spoken words, his narrative continues even after his death, as he eagerly waits for a sign of her forgiveness. However, it takes her ten days before she forgives him by acknowledging his identity in turn. “His name was Banning Jainlight” (314), she eventually tells the Chinese inhabitants of the island, thus allowing them to bury the corpse, which they have hung outside in a tree. Between death and burial, between asking for and being granted forgiveness, something happens that superficially seems to imply that even in the postEinsteinian world of Tours of the Black Clock, forgiveness and redemption hinge on divine intervention after all. While he is hanging in a Christ-like pose in the tree, God suddenly becomes important for Banning again. Although he tells himself to the very end that “whatever God exists is the God of revenge,” the last

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sentence of his narration suddenly speaks of God’s “blue redemptive face” (313). The apparition Banning experiences should not be taken at face value, however. Instead, the return of God indicates that in the version of the twentieth century that Banning has returned to through his confession, belief in God is still possible and widely practiced, that, in fact, the belief in moral absolutes is what makes this narrative version of the century possible. At the same time, though, God remains an illusion and a construction. The “blue” color of God’s face associates the God Banning sees with the blueprint that contains the conscience of the century. What I would like to suggest here is that whereas conscience remains external to Hitler—Banning attaches the note written on the blueprint to his chest after his death—Banning has developed an internal conscience through his narration. He has confessed his guilt and asked for forgiveness. Thus, he has to a certain degree put into practice what Hawthorne’s narrator demands in the final chapter of The Scarlet Letter: “Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!” (260).6 Banning has revealed himself and acknowledged his own identity. In Vicchio’s Ivan & Adolf, a play that does not challenge the JudeoChristian metaphysical framework, “God forgave Adolf a long time ago.” “It’s only Adolf that needs to be convinced of it” to gain redemption, Sophie explains to Ivan in the third act (57). In Tours of the Black Clock, Banning needs to understand that he is not beyond redemption, because in a post-Einsteinian world that has done away with all absolutes, “perhaps one small good thing owns a universe unto itself.” And he has done good deeds, since he has not killed the child and has finally confessed his guilt. This realization, I would argue, makes it possible for Dania to forgive him, an act that turns the bleak twentieth century into “the century of redemption after all” (313). Contrary to Vicchio’s play, though, Erickson’s novel locates the power to redeem and forgive not in God but in the individual’s conscience alone. Tours of the Black Clock treats God as it treats the progressive narrative and the notions of absolute good and evil, as a construction that provides the necessary illusion of an absolute, but as a construction nevertheless. Thus, while the construction of God is cast as a precondition to believe in redemption, it is, paradoxically, the absence of God—the liberation from a metaphysical absolute—that facilitates Banning’s redemption, since this liberation entails that good and evil deeds need not be balanced equally. A similar paradox characterizes Tours of the Black Clock’s attitude toward progress and the possibility of learning from the mistakes of others. The last pages of the novel—related, like the beginning, by a heterodiegetic narrator with shifting focalization—pick up again the story

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of Marc. Marc leaves home at the age of nineteen when he finds Banning dead on the floor and his mother watching over him, and spends fifteen years on the ferry that connects Davenhall Island with the mainland without ever returning home or speaking to his mother again. He only steps on the island again when Kara, a young girl of around fifteen— Dania’s age when Banning first saw her in Vienna, that is—whom he shipped to the island, disappears and stays on the island. Immediately as obsessed with her as Hitler was with Geli and Banning with Dania, he starts looking for her, encounters his mother, and, as if by magic, “together they listen to the voice of a man who hasn’t been alive for fifteen years” and thus to a story Marc has not heard before (41). He finds Kara after listening to Banning, and they spend a night together. And just as Banning learned from Hitler’s death, Marc learns from Banning’s narration. The knowledge and experience Banning passes on in his story is not lost on him, but initiates a learning process that enables him to avoid repeating their mistakes. When Kara leaves him again, he follows her for seven years but keeps at a distance when he finally finds her, “accepting that she had chosen to live by herself ” (319). Accordingly, the novel ends on a very peaceful image. After Dania’s death, Marc travels to the “polar sea” and dies contentedly on an ice block “that melt[s] in time to the beating of his heart” (320). Here, in a decidedly anti-Einsteinian move, external and internal time—at odds throughout the novel—are synchronized again, signifying the harmony Marc has achieved with his surrounding. However, the notions of harmony and progress thus evoked are deceptive. Shortly before his serene death, Marc “exit[s] the century at one end and enter[s] it again at the other [in] 1901” (320): As “the soul of [the] century” (277), he is unable to move beyond it. The circular structure of time thus created undermines any notion of progress. As the linear concept of time is replaced by a mythical understanding of time, the progressive narrative of Marc’s learning from Banning and Hitler is rewritten as a tragic narrative of reoccurrence: History will repeat itself, and the same (or similar) atrocities will be committed again. Dania’s love may have transformed Marc from a monster into a human being. Now that he is dead, however, the novel implies, the peaceful beginning of the century—indicated by his calm death—will soon give way (again) to the violent history of the twentieth century, and thus, among others, to Hitler and the Holocaust. The novel’s oscillation between the linear and the circular, and between the tragic and the progressive, I wish to argue in conclusion here, also dramatizes how Hitler, the Holocaust, and World War II have fared in American culture over the last decades, providing a literary “summary”

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of my overall argument. On the one hand, the memory of Hitler, Tours of the Black Clock suggests, has heightened moral sensibility in the United States. When Banning likens “the good taut yank of a rope snapping in Louisiana” to “the wet smack of a head that falls from a German axe,” the text stages how the awareness of Nazi crimes has provided a new perspective on domestic racism and violence (50). And it implies that just as Marc learns, the culture as a whole has learned. On the other hand, such episodes as the one in the Mexican jungle challenge this progressive narrative and put to the fore how the memory of the “good war,” of the fight against Hitler and the Nazis, has frequently been employed to externalize what one might choose to call evil, to essentialize the differences between Americans and others, and to cast the former as naturally good. By projecting a Hitler who has been shaped by an American writer, the novel dramatizes how both kinds of cultural work depend on specific American conceptualizations of Hitler; by presenting an old and senile Hitler, the text parodies the most powerful conceptualization of the figure: Hitler as the epitome of evil.

Conclusion Drawing on Hitler’s obsession with Geli, Steve Erickson’s Tours of the Black Clock proved highly prophetic. Over the next fifteen years, not only Ronald Hayman’s Hitler & Geli (1999), a popularized historiographic account, but also several novels engaged this issue. The “Geli novels,” as one might call them, of the 1990s and early 2000s, however, do not equal Tours of the Black Clock in complexity. Characterized by the mimetic realism so typical of most other Hitler Fiction, Kris Rusch’s Hitler’s Angel (1998), Ron Hansen’s Hitler’s Niece (1998), and Andrew Nagorski’s Last Stop Vienna (2002) perform the cultural work of othering in various fashions. Whereas Erickson’s novel undermines the notion of Hitler’s otherness, these texts insist on his otherness and cast him as the epitome of evil. All three novels suggest more or less explicitly that history would have taken a better course if Hitler had been punished for his presumed murder of Geli. Without Hitler, they imply, the Nazi movement would have collapsed quickly and the carnage of World War II and the Holocaust could have been avoided. With their focus on what they conceive as a decisive moment in Hitler’s life, the “Geli novels” belong to the small group of fictional (auto)biographies of Hitler that U.S. culture has produced since the mid1970s.1 I have not addressed these texts in detail, because the cultural functions of these novels are similar to the ones I discussed with regard to alternate, secret, and future histories in Chapters 4 and 5. Just as their counterfactual counterparts, these novels either project U.S. domestic concerns onto Nazi Germany or openly reaffirm celebratory accounts of American exceptionalism. Mark Anthony Kostrubala’s Dark Legacy (1996), for instance, casts Hitler as “the most evil of all evil” whose legacy can only be overcome by the inherent goodness of ordinary Americans (5). In similar vein, Norman Mailer’s The Castle in the Forest (2007) presents Hitler as formed by the “Evil One,” as a product of the dark forces that

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a post-Enlightenment world allegedly no longer understands (68). Mailer’s novel is remarkable as it testifies to how parts of the American left by now tend to embrace an essentialist, ontological mode of thinking—at least when it comes to Hitler. At the end of the novel, the devil-narrator tells the reader that he and Satan, “The Maestro,” will “mov[e their] operations to America” now (464). This puts the novel, despite its belief in absolute evil, in line with the similar, albeit much more sophisticated, texts by Bukowski, Goss, Spinrad, Pielke, and Erickson. What distinguishes fictional Hitler biographies from the bulk of Hitler Fiction is their often serious (though, as in Mailer, frequently silly) effort to understand Hitler, his appeal to the Germans, and his personal responsibility for the Holocaust. Their attempts to explain Hitler would merit further analysis, but I have decided to follow a different path instead. In this conclusion I wish to widen the scope of my study in twofold fashion, sketching trajectories on which my analysis might be continued. By way of Ron Rosenbaum’s journalistic bestseller Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil (1998), I will move from fiction to nonfiction. In closing, I will then cross the Atlantic and quickly engage contesting conceptualizations of Hitler in German culture. * * * Ron Rosenbaum’s bestselling Explaining Hitler offers an overview of the works and (to a degree) also the lives of those who have thought and written about Hitler from a historiographic, philosophical, or theological perspective. Rosenbaum reads and also interviews famous, infamous, and forgotten Hitler scholars such as Alan Bullock, George Steiner, Claude Lanzmann, Yehuda Bauer, Emil Fackenheim, Daniel Goldhagen, Lucy S. Dawidowicz, and David Irving. In fact, his study is fairly comprehensive, as it addresses basically all existing attempts at understanding Hitler.2 Though ultimately not scholarly but journalistic, Rosenbaum’s approach shares certain characteristics with my analysis of Hitler Fiction. To begin with, we were both inspired by Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985) and the “Hitler studies” pursued by the novel’s protagonist, Jack Gladney. While I have traced the literary discourse on Hitler in the United States in this book, Rosenbaum investigates “what passes for ‘Hitler studies’ in the academy” (xxvii). More importantly, though, we share a fundamental assumption. Rosenbaum holds “that Hitler explanations [. . .] are cultural self-portraits” that reveal more about certain cultural perspectives than about the historical Hitler (xx). Quite similarly, it has been the premise of my study that representations of Hitler in American literature and culture tell us more about this culture, its desires and anxieties, than

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about German history. Accordingly, I have engaged the specific forms of cultural work that Hitler as a trope performs within American culture at different historical moments. Both Rosenbaum’s and my own book connect Hitler to the concept of “evil” throughout. For Rosenbaum, “evil” is at the center of all discourse on Hitler. As he remarks early, echoing Raymond Carver, “what we talk about when we talk about Hitler is often not the Hitler of history but the meaning of evil” (xx). While I share this assumption, this is where alliances end and a crucial difference emerges: Throughout this study I have treated “evil” as a category that requires analysis, obscures in-depth explanation, and lends itself to questionable political objectives. Rosenbaum, on the contrary, considers theories that explain Hitler’s character and ultimately also the Holocaust through the concept of evil as equivalent to theories that foreground social, historical, and cultural factors. In fact, Rosenbaum sets out by observing “that ‘two cultures’ of Hitler discourse have emerged” (xxvii). According to him, there is, on the one hand, the small group of scholars who focus on Hitler and his personal responsibility and who often do not hesitate to call him evil. On the other, there is the huge majority of academics who favor “purportedly more sophisticated explanatory modes—Great Abstraction theories, the ones that emphasize ‘deeper’ trends in history, society and ideology.” These theories, Rosenbaum points out, are usually regarded as superior to the “much-reproved Great Man Theory of History” (xxvii). However, how he introduces these alternatives is revealing: “Great Abstraction theories” are only “purportedly more sophisticated” than approaches that focus on Hitler’s evil. His choices of words therefore underlines from the outset that he favors theories that cast Hitler as the epitome of evil over those that downplay his personal role and regard him as the product of social and other forces. Accordingly, when Rosenbaum sets out observing “the pronounced reluctance of so many to call Adolf Hitler evil,” he has a twofold agenda in mind (xxi). On the one hand, Explaining Hitler is a fair and often fascinating account of Hitler explanations. On the other, though, the book offers an at times passionate argument for regarding Hitler as evil. Rosenbaum repeatedly dismisses attempts to explain Hitler’s character and politics psychologically or sociologically as, say, the product of an oppressive and violent family structure or through the prevailing anti-Semitism of the culture and society he grew up in. Such explanations, Rosenbaum argues, “tend to exculpate if not excuse” Hitler, because they cast him “as a victim” of insanity, childhood abuse, or ideology (xxxii, xxix).

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Rosenbaum’s arguments against the various psychohistorical and psychoanalytical interpretations the historical figure has been subjected to are convincing. Yet, the alternative he offers is at least equally problematic. In his penultimate chapter Rosenbaum discusses Daniel Goldhagen’s argument that the Holocaust would have happened even if Hitler had never lived because of the genocidal character of German anti-Semitism. This theory, in which Hitler is rendered completely insignificant, sets the scene for the last chapter, which Rosenbaum devotes to the works of Lucy S. Dawidowicz and Milton Himmelfarb, theorists, that is, who insist on the exceptionality of Hitler’s evil. In her 1975 book The War against the Jews, Dawidowicz argues that Hitler decided to exterminate the Jews as early as 1918, that he consciously veiled his intentions for more than two decades because he knew he was plotting evil, and that, as her title suggests, World War II was waged to get hold of the Jews of Eastern Europe. In an equally Hitler-centered fashion, Milton Himmelfarb argues the same point in a 1984 essay entitled “No Hitler, No Holocaust.” Rosenbaum thus explicitly juxtaposes ideological (Goldhagen) and ontological explanations (Dawidowicz, Himmelfarb) at the very end of his book. And by granting the last word to the ontologists, he finally shifts the balance in favor of those who call Hitler evil. In fact, he even calls Dawidowicz’s book “the equivalent of a therapeutic slap in the face” and concludes that with regard to Hitler one must attempt “to seek explanation but also to resist explanation” (373, 395). By contrast, I have highlighted throughout that calling Hitler evil does not explain anything, but forecloses explanation—a fact many fictional texts exploit to push their specific agendas. Over the last two decades, I have argued, Hitler Fiction has predominantly deployed the Hitler trope to confirm apparently natural American values by insisting on the essential difference between American goodness and Hitler’s evilness. Many novels forge a link between the notion of Hitler as evil incarnate and the idea of American exceptionalism. Significantly, Rosenbaum’s Explaining Hitler implicitly constructs the same connection. Following Himmelfarb, Rosenbaum employs the term “exceptionalism” to describe the nature of Hitler’s evil. For him, “Hitler is a singularity, an exception not explicable in terms of what has been experienced before.” He then goes on to explain the concept of exceptionalism through a reference to “‘American exceptionalism’” (391). While he never openly links Hitler’s alleged exceptionality to ideas about U.S. exceptionalism, his insistence on Hitler’s absolute evil echoes those texts that employ Hitler’s evil to affirm the belief in the superiority of American values. Rosenbaum’s book also displays another tendency that I have traced throughout the development of Hitler Fiction: Hitler and the Holocaust

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are treated by American culture as if they were two sides of the same coin. The discourse on Hitler’s exceptional evil is intrinsically tied to the discourse on the uniqueness and unspeakability of the Holocaust. For Rosenbaum, explaining Hitler ultimately comes down to explaining the Holocaust, as his final focus on Dawidowicz and Himmelfarb shows. While Himmelfarb is solely concerned with the extermination of the Jews and not with the general history of World War II, Dawidowicz recasts the whole of World War II as “the war against the Jews.” Rosenbaum implicitly confirms this view by granting Himmelfarb and Dawidowicz, two fervent advocates of the Holocaust’s uniqueness, the last word. That his book was generally praised for its fair and balanced argument indicates the considerable degree to which Americans today remember World War II predominantly as a war to stop the Holocaust. And it is surely no coincidence that both Dawidowicz and Himmelfarb are counted among the ranks of (neo)conservative intellectuals known for promoting traditional notions of U.S. exceptionalism and America’s alleged global mission. Accordingly, it does not come as a surprise that Rosenbaum also remains blind to a further implication of regarding Hitler as a manifestation of evil. He never touches on how dehistoricizing Hitler by recasting him as a force of evil prevents the understanding and evaluation of conflicts in which the enemy is projected as a new Hitler. If Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Mahmud Ahmadineschad, or others are cast as incarnations of the ontological evil Hitler prototypically embodies, the ideological differences between them, their distinct historical contexts, and diverse political agendas are downplayed, disregarded, and dismissed. Consequently, the figures and the conflicts they are involved in remain inexplicable, and the prospects of solving them disappear. Instead, political and literary rhetoric that associates, for example, bin Laden with Hitler and Islamism with fascism frames the new conflict as a continuation of World War II, which figures in U.S. collective memory as the “good war” (Studs Terkel) or even as “the best war ever” (Michael Adams). It projects global history as a Manichean struggle between the forces of pure good and pure evil, and suggests that the United States, due to its role in World War II, is always automatically on the right side, and, as back then, will prevail in the new fight too and prevent another Holocaust. Forging connections between Hitler and new threats, then, works to reconstruct what I have called with Jeffrey Alexander the progressive narrative. Political and literary discourses differ, though, in how they associate the new enemy with Hitler. Whereas politicians must be content with metaphors and comparisons, many popular fiction novels forge

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metonymic links between Hitler and the current foe, utilizing the conventions of popular realism—the apparent transparency of language that their readers take for granted—to naturalize the connections between Hitler and others and to essentialize good and evil. However, not all texts attempt this. Postmodernist Hitler Fiction, I have shown, favors metaphor over metonymy. Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream (1972), Gary Goss’s Hitler’s Daughter (1973), or Robert Pielke’s Hitler the Cat (1995) all imply that what has happened, is happening, or might happen in the United States can be compared to what happened in Germany, but never suggest that there is a “real” or causal connection between Hitler and events in the United States. As I already emphasized in Chapter 2, what I am proposing here is of course not a generalizing argument about either popular fiction or realist modes of representation. What I would like to emphasize, however, are two general conclusions that can be drawn from my analysis of Hitler Fiction: First, there exists a tradition of realist popular fiction that has remained largely untouched by modernist, postmodernist, and neorealist aesthetics. This is not to say that the realisms of twentieth-century alternate histories, historical novels, or fictional (auto)biographies correspond to the realism of the nineteenth century, as realism appears in various garbs in different periods and different genres. Yet, these realisms nevertheless share certain fundamental assumptions such as faith in the representational function of language or the principle of verisimilitude. This fundamentally distinguishes them from the various types of modernist, postmodernist, or neorealist writing. We therefore need to acknowledge that “the narrative of realism giving way to modernism giving way to postmodernism” is simplistic and wrong, even though “it continues to provide the lens through which [. . .] American fiction is [still very often] viewed” (Rebein 6). Rather, as, among others, Robert Rebein and Heinz Ickstadt have suggested, these aesthetics exist simultaneously and next to each other in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Second, I have shown that it would be a mistake to argue for the necessarily subversive dimension of popular fiction, as it is still fashionable among critics seeking to legitimize their interest in such texts. Popular realist texts can of course revise and thus subvert dominant narratives. Edwin Fadiman Jr.’s Who Will Watch the Watchers? and Kenneth Brown’s Hitler’s Analyst (2001), for instance, perform exactly this cultural function. On the whole, however, subversion of established narratives and seemingly natural concepts tends to occur far more frequently in postmodernist “literary” texts. The bulk of realist Hitler Fiction performs affirmative cultural work and projects a Manichean worldview that conceives of the world in terms of absolute good (Americans) and absolute evil (Hitler).

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Another important conclusion to be drawn from my study, then, concerns what Gavriel Rosenfeld has termed the danger of “normalization.” For Rosenfeld, texts that challenge the established—and, as he assumes, correct—sense of Hitler’s and “Nazism’s absolute evil” testify to an alleged “waning of a moralistic perspective” (18, 16). The texts he has in mind here are, rather unsurprisingly, stories such as Grayson’s “With Hitler in New York” or Spinrad’s The Iron Dream. As my analysis has shown, however, Rosenfeld’s worries are unfounded. Most Hitler Fiction perpetuates the image of Hitler and Nazism as the epitome of evil, which he regards as morally right and epistemologically correct. What is more, stories like “With Hitler in New York” or novels like Steve Erickson’s Tours of the Black Clock only work through the contrast between the established image of Hitler that their readers have in mind and the challenge they enact. Thus, even these texts tend to indirectly perpetuate the established image of Hitler by negotiating the cultural power the figure of Hitler wields. Most importantly, however, in my opinion, a revision that is normalizing in the sense that it challenges Hitler’s alleged evilness would have positive political effects. As I have suggested above, a less personalized approach, an approach that highlights cultural and ideological influences instead of ontological evil, would transcend reductive Manichean rhetoric and prevent new conflicts from being perceived simplistically in terms of good and evil. * * * Just as in the United States, the tendency to conceive of Hitler as evil and therefore chiefly or even exclusively responsible for the horrors of the Third Reich has in recent years proliferated in Germany as well. I would therefore like to use the last pages of this book to address this problematic tendency at least in cursory fashion. Immediately after World War II, most Germans were happy to blame Hitler and a small group of Nazis for all that had happened between 1933 and 1945. Hitler and his circle were cast by ordinary Germans, but also by historians like Golo Mann, as demonic seducers or criminals who had imposed their will on the innocent German people.3 Since the Germans figured in this narrative as the Nazis’ first victims, it absolved the population from any responsibility for the crimes against humanity and genocide committed during the Nazi era. During the 1960s and 1970s, then, a very different and more selfcritical account emerged that emphasized and insisted on the responsibility of a large number of Germans. The growing interest in the Holocaust, the student movement that demanded answers from parents and teachers alike, as well as more sophisticated historiographic

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approaches, which downplayed the role of individual actors and highlighted social, cultural, and ideological factors instead, all contributed to this development. When I went to school during the 1980s and 1990s, we learned hardly anything about Hitler’s biography and never discussed his abusive family background or the question if he was gay, as American friends of mine did. What we were taught was why the Weimar Republic failed, how somebody like Hitler could become chancellor, or why the Holocaust could happen. Diagnosing complicity on the part of many Germans, the new narrative promoted the acceptance of at least some moral responsibility for Nazi crimes on a collective level. It is still in place in German schools and universities; and it is also the narrative favored by the vast majority of professional historians in Germany and elsewhere. Ron Rosenbaum’s observation that Hitler studies are mostly absent from the academy confirms this observation. Most scholars simply focus on issues other than Hitler because they regard them as more important. Yet, as indicated by the German origin of the term “Hitler Wave” (Hitler-Welle), which is used to describe the increased historiographic interest in Hitler during the 1970s, German historiography did not lose sight of Hitler completely. In fact, the decade’s most widely read publication about Hitler, Joachim C. Fest’s biography of Hitler (1973), still powerfully presented Hitler as the demonic seducer of the German people. And so did the Hitler film that Fest produced and directed two years later. In 1986, during the controversy that has become known as the Historikerstreit, Fest then sided with Ernst Nolte, who challenged the uniqueness of the Holocaust and tried to present it as a preemptive reaction to the communist threat.4 The Historikerstreit was maybe the first serious manifestation of a shift in thinking about German guilt that the conservative government under Helmut Kohl, who came to office in 1982, carefully promoted. Kohl’s and Ronald Reagan’s honoring of SS soldiers at Bitburg cemetery in 1985—an event I touched upon in Chapter 5—is another example of the attempt to establish a different narrative about the past. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, public and popular discourse remained largely unaffected by this (re)turn to a simplistic perspective on the Nazi era. It was only during the second half the 1990s and thus after Germany’s reunification that the conceptualization of Hitler as an irresistible evil that overwhelmed Germans became acceptable for a broader public. Unfortunately, public German television played a crucial role in legitimizing this revisionist narrative. Recently, Hannes Herr has suggested that January 14, 1997, was the day when the “blame-Hitler-narrative” emerged as a real alternative to

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the one that stressed collective responsibility (161). That evening, the ZDF, one of Germany’s two major public television stations, aired the first episode of Hitlers Helfer [Hitler’s helpers], a documentary miniseries that traces the careers of Rudolf Heß, Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, and several others who belonged to Hitler’s inner circle. Devised, directed, and produced by ZDF chief historian Guido Knopp, the miniseries became the most widely watched documentary in the history of German television. It was followed over the next years by other series such as Hitlers Krieger [Hitler’s warriors] or Hitlers Frauen [Hitler’s women]. The titles, already constructing a relation between Hitler and others, indicate that the documentaries project the history of the Third Reich as the history of certain individuals whose lives are only of interest because they were somehow connected to Hitler. As Heer convincingly argues, Knopp’s documentaries continually cast Hitler as a demonic, Mephistophelean character and the German people in turn as “seduced or deceived victims” (178).5 Through the rapid montage of historical material and reconstructed scenes, scenes that invariably end in close-ups on the protagonists, social and cultural causes for the rise of Hitler and the Nazis dissolve; a sophisticated historical argument is never even attempted. Although Knopp’s films only insinuate this and never spell it out, Hitler’s alleged evil thus becomes the major factor for understanding the Third Reich. Unlike Fest, however, who discussed Hitler’s greatness at length in his biography, Knopp combines his shift from ideology to ontology, from historical explanation to the pseudoexplanation of evil, with a moralistic perspective. Persistently, he condemns both the Holocaust and the war of extermination in the East. However, as Heer points out, this moral evaluation at the same time absolves many close to Hitler and large parts of the German population of responsibility. Most Germans, Knopp’s documentaries insist, did not know what was happening (193). It need not be said that this perspective on the Nazi era, of which Knopp is the most prominent and influential exponent, is highly problematic. As Peter Novick has argued, German insistence on the uniqueness of the Holocaust usually works against “evasion of moral and historical responsibility,” since it insists on the continued “confrontation with a painful national past” (15). However, the same insistence becomes a strategy for evasion once the uniqueness of the Holocaust is causally linked to Hitler’s exceptional evil. Just as in the United States, the conceptualization of Hitler as the epitome of evil is a strategy to construct a positive collective identity, in this case a German one based on the notion of victimhood. As in the accounts Ron Rosenbaum favors, Hitler is here cast as chiefly or alone responsible for the Holocaust. If Dawidowicz and

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Himmelfarb try to have it both ways and—correctly, of course—blame “ordinary” Germans as well, Knopp’s documentaries draw the logical— though wrong—conclusion from casting Hitler as evil incarnate: They free the majority of Germans from their responsibility for what happened. The image of Hitler that Rosenbaum or scholars like the Rosenfelds regard as the correct one thus has problematic political implications not only in the United States but also in Germany. Accordingly, the recent proliferation of German popular cultural representations of Hitler has to be understood in the context of the negotiation of two contesting memories of the Third Reich, with one memory stressing collective responsibility and the other blaming chiefly Hitler and a small number of Nazis.6 The 2004 movie Der Untergang, tellingly based on a book by Joachim Fest on the last ten days in the Führer bunker in April 1945, clearly favors the second variant. Hitler’s power as a demonic seducer is particularly apparent in those scenes that explore the relationship between Hitler (played by Bruno Ganz) and his young and beautiful secretary Traudel Junge (Alexandra Maria Lara). Junge, the film suggests through some voyeuristic shots from her point of view, mainly decides to stay in the bunker because Eva Braun, whose more intimate relationship with Hitler she envies, decides to stay first. Only Hitler’s death releases her from the spell he has cast upon her and enables her to think of escape and survival. The final minutes of the movie, then, explicitly transform her and a disillusioned member of the Hitler Youth into allegories of the German people. After passing a company of Russian soldiers—potential rapists and murderers, as camerawork and dialogue imply—Junge and the boy cycle west toward the area that would later become the Federal Republic, toward, the film implies, the better, democratic future that all Germans, freed from Hitler’s shadow, long for. Paradoxically, some of those cultural texts that consciously try to counter such simplistic version of the history of the Third Reich have been severely criticized. Gavriel Rosenfeld blames, for example, Walter Moers’s graphic novel Adolf (1998–2006) for “humaniz[ing] Hitler through satire” (262). Although he concedes that Moers “demeans [Hitler] consistently,” he claims that “Moers’s Hitler [is] the most humanized of the postwar era” (263). Humanizing through satire, as I argued in Chapter 1, was a technique favored by the Allied propaganda of World War II and aimed at destroying the image of “Hitler the superman” concocted by Nazi propaganda. What is more, Rosenfeld overlooks that the object of Moers’s satire is not the historical Hitler but the sense of absolute evil ascribed to him retrospectively. On the basis of the assumption that Hitler escaped from the bunker and somehow survived for fifty years in the canalization of Berlin, volumes one and two of Adolf

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employ the convenient device of a time-travel helmet to transport Hitler through 2,000 years of history and into the future. Among others, Hitler nearly crucifies Jesus; sinks the Titanic; kills Archduke Franz Ferdinand and thus triggers World War I; assassinates, by accident, John F. Kennedy; prevents, also by accident, World War III; and finally, far in the future, unintentionally launches this war after all. By satirically holding Hitler, and Hitler alone, responsible for almost every disaster and murder and not only for those committed between 1933 and 1945, Adolf parodies the “blame Hitler” narrative projected by Knopp’s documentaries and Der Untergang, and suggests that during the Third Reich, too, forces other than Hitler’s evil were at work. Moers may thus be humanizing Hitler, but, as Thomas Jung argues, “one never suspects from Moers’s treatment that Hitler and the crimes of his system should be trivialized” (251). Instead, the comic critiques historical trajectories that imply that there was no system and that nobody other than Hitler (and maybe a few Nazis) was accountable for the genocide and the atrocities committed during the Nazi era. The most recent and direct response to Der Untergang’s attempt to blame Hitler alone is Dani Levy’s film Mein Führer (2007) in which the German comedian Helge Schneider plays Adolf Hitler. If Der Untergang professes to paint a realistic picture of the last ten days in the bunker, Mein Führer challenges these claims to authenticity through excessive intertextuality, stressing that representations, and even cinematic ones, do not offer any privileged access to “the real” but refer to and depend on other representations instead. Levy’s film thus lays bare and satirizes what Eichinger’s film tries to veil. It does not offer “the truest truth about Adolf Hitler,” as its subtitle ironically promises, but adds one more clearly fictional version of Hitler to the already rich archive of representations of that figure. Moreover, casting Hitler as a case for the psychiatrist, Levy’s film deconstructs exactly the demonic exceptionality that Eichinger’s film grants the figure. And by depicting, albeit in comical fashion, the inhuman workings of the Nazi bureaucratic machinery, the film, like Moers, persistently stresses that the roots of the Third Reich and the origins of the Holocaust must not be reduced to Hitler’s personality and his childhood traumas, but that larger structural and social forces were at work there. In similar fashion, the German entertainer Harald Schmidt, who hosts a David-Letterman-style late-night show on German television, has frequently integrated jokes about Hitler and the Nazi era into his program. As with Moers and Levy, the butt of his jokes is not the historical figure but the way Hitler is projected by the likes of Guido Knopp and Bernd Eichinger, the producer of Der Untergang. When Hitlers Helfer was first

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aired, Schmidt suggested that the logical sequel to Hitlers Helfer would be Hitlers Höschen [Hitler’s panties], implying that Knopp could not go much lower. On February 18, 2005, then, while Der Untergang was still successfully running in German cinemas, Schmidt—dressed just as actor Bruno Ganz was dressed in Der Untergang—posed as Hitler in a sketch entitled “Der Führer warnt” [The leader delivers a warning]. In this costume he called on young Germans to resist hatred, racism, and antiSemitism.7 The irony here is of course that Hitler is the most unlikely person to speak out against right-wing violence and intolerance. But by having Hitler himself deliver a stern warning against neo-Nazism—“This can only end in disaster. I know what I’m talking about”8—Schmidt’s sketch achieves much more. Combining an allusion to Der Untergang’s presentation of Hitler as the evil seducer of the innocent German people with a pressing social concern, the parody highlights a fundamental problem of much contemporary discourse about the Nazi past: A society that increasingly puts most, if not all of the blame on Hitler and continues to be fascinated by this figure—Hitler is frequently on the cover of the German weekly Der Spiegel—faces huge problems when it comes to controlling the fascination with Hitler. It may thus ultimately lack the means to counter neo-Nazi tendencies. If ontology replaces ideology, if Hitler and Nazism are increasingly conceived of as manifestations of evil and no longer as phenomena that can be explained and understood rationally, it becomes difficult to learn lessons from the past. I do not intend to imply, of course, that Germany is on the brink of a Nazi takeover. The memory of Nazism and Hitler as forces of evil that overwhelmed “ordinary” people is still far from being the dominant one in Germany. However, this narrative is currently gaining strength and acceptance. In a few years, Hitler might be remembered in Germany as he is in the United States, as an evil against which positive versions of national identity are constructed. Yet, German and U.S. perspectives will never be exactly the same, because the Americans fought Hitler and the Germans obviously did not. The American identity will thus remain one of victors, the German one might develop into one of victims. In addition, it seems more likely that Hitler will for the foreseeable future remain more of a taboo in Germany than in the United States. There will probably continue to be more restrictions to the contexts in which “Hitler rhetoric” can be employed without sanctions. Whereas German cultural texts recently have begun to represent Hitler as U.S. culture has been doing for several decades, political discourse in both countries still differs considerably in that respect. In Germany, comparing a political opponent to Hitler is still very much a taboo; in the United States, by

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contrast, such comparisons are by now an integral part of right-wing rhetoric. As of this writing, the last prominent victim to suffer such an alignment was Al Gore, whose film about global warning, An Inconvenient Truth (2006), according to the Albuquerque Tribune, was compared “to Adolf Hitler’s book Mein Kampf ” by Senator James Inhofe from Oklahoma (Brosnan). Gore may be the latest, but he is surely not the last to suffer such a comparison, as everything indicates that the figure of Hitler will retain its persistent and perturbing presence in American culture.

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Appendix American Hitler Fiction, 1939–2002 1939 1940 1941

1942 1943

1944

1945 1946 1947 1948

Anonymous, The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler Anonymous, The Man Who Killed Hitler Fred Allhoff, Lightning in the Night Peter Fleming, The Flying Visit Milne Farley, “I Killed Hitler” Jacob Zavel Jacobson, Joy Cometh in the Morning: A Symbolic Disputation in Free Verse Alfred Noyes, If Judgement Comes Upton Sinclair, Between Two Worlds Upton Sinclair, Dragon’s Teeth Carroll John Atchinson, “Heel Hitler” and Company Max Radin, The Day of Reckoning William Richard Schneider, The Last Twenty Minutes of Hitler, Goering, Goebbels and Himmler: A One Act Play Upton Sinclair, Wide Is the Gate Sholem Ash, Hitler’s Geburt A. M. Klein, The Hitleriad William Gilmore Beymer, 12:20 p.m. Erwin Lessner, Phantom Victory: A Fictional History of the Fourth Reich, 1945–1960 Upton Sinclair, Presidential Agent Michael Young, The Trial of Adolf Hitler Allan G. Field, “Pharaoh Meets Hitler” Upton Sinclair, Dragon Harvest Upton Sinclair, A World to Win Upton Sinclair, Presidential Mission Upton Sinclair, One Clear Call

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1950 1951 1952 1956 1957 1960 1961 1964 1968 1971 1972 1973 1975 1976 1977 1978

1979

1980

1982 1983

Appendix

Frances Bonker, The Mad Dictator: A Novel of Adolph Hitler Paul MacNamara, “The Man from Liberty Street” Thomas Bell Sweeney, “Adolf Hitler” Robert Donald Locke, “Demotion” André Richard, Lisa: A Novel of the Postwar Life of Adolph Hitler George K. Gardener, Operation Hair Tonic Abraham Duker, “Hitler Meets Haman” Martin Dibner, A God for Tomorrow Gladys Cluff, “These Good Children” Ted White and Dave van Arnam, Sideslip Edwin Fadiman, Jr., Who Will Watch the Watchers? Herman Wouk, The Winds of War Charles Bukowski, “ ” Roland Puccetti, The Death of the Führer Norman Spinrad, The Iron Dream Gary Goss, Hitler’s Daughter Robinson Jeffers, Tragedy Has Obligations Fritz Leiber, “Catch that Zeppelin!” Ray Bradbury, “Darling Adolf ” James D. Forman, The White Crow Ira Levin, The Boys from Brazil William Snodgrass, The Führer Bunker: A Cycle of Poems in Progress Harlan Ellison, “Hitler Painted Roses” Stephen Marlowe, The Valkyrie Encounter Jay Moon, Chancellor of Mars Philippe van Rjndt, The Trial of Adolf Hitler Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance Gillian Freeman, Diary of a Nazi Lady Richard Grayson, “With Hitler in New York” Drake Teufels, “The Real Adolf Hitler” Gus Weill, The Führer Seed Joseph DiMona, To the Eagle’s Nest R. Page Jones, The Man Who Killed Hitler William Overgard, The Divide Richard Rose, The Wolf Paul West, The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg Brad Linaweaver, “Moon of Ice” Timothy B. Benford, Hitler’s Daughter . . . Wants to Occupy the White House Katherine Kurtz, Lammas Night

Appendix

1984 1985 1986 1987

1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997

1998 1999 2000

James Marino, The Asgard Solution Fred Saberhagen, A Century of Progress Ib Melchior, Eva Jerry Yulsman, Elleander Morning James P. Hogan, The Proteus Operation Gregory Benford, “Valhalla” Irving Wallace, The Seventh Secret J. R. Dunn, “Long Knives” David Dvorkin, Budspy David Gurr, The Ring Master Joseph Heywood, The Berkut Jacques Levine, Hitler’s Secret Diaries Brad Linaweaver, Moon of Ice Steve Erickson, Tours of the Black Clock George T. McGuire, A Gentle Wind Came with Us Harry Turtledove, “Ready for the Fatherland” Barry N. Malzberg, “Kingfish” Jack Nimersheim, “A Fireside Chat” Paul Riebenfeld, “On the Death of Hitler’s Assassin” Ben Bova, Triumph E. M. Nathanson, Knight’s Cross W. R. Thompson, “The Plot to Save Hitler” Gene Corpening, Harlequin Hitler Barbara Delaplace, “Painted Bridges” Barry N. Malzberg, “Hitler at Nuremberg” Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen, 1945 Robert Pielke, Hitler the Cat Goes West William Snodgrass, The Führer Bunker: The Complete Cycle Mark Anthony Kostrubala, Dark Legacy Alison Leslie Gold, The Devil’s Mistress: The Diary of Eva Braun William Pridgen, Night of Dragon’s Blood Stephen Vicchio, Ivan & Adolf: The Last Man in Hell Robert van Kampen, The Fourth Reich Philip N. Moore, What If Hitler Won the War? Kris Rusch, Hitler’s Angel Jon Stewart, “Adolf Hitler: The Larry King Interview” Edward A. Cooper, Triumph of the Third Reich Ron Hansen, Hitler’s Niece James Dykes, Hitler’s Journal: A New Look into the Mind of the Leader Paul West, The Dry Danube: A Hitler Forgery

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2001

2002

Appendix

Fred Bauman, Hitler’s Son Burt Boyar, Hitler Stopped by Franco Kenneth H. Brown, Hitler’s Analyst Dwight Fiscus, Monk Business: Adolf Hitler’s Return Randall Boyll, katastrophe David B. Charnay, Operation Lucifer: The Chase, Capture and Trial of Adolf Hitler George Thomas Clark. Hitler Here: A Biographical Novel Paul D. Cook, The Last Interviews with Hitler August Franza, The Murder of Hitler David Hamlet, The Reckoning: Hitler’s Final 42 Hours Kenneth S. Murray, The Final Plan Andrew Nagorski, Last Stop Vienna

Notes Introduction 1. I have adopted the term “cultural imaginary” from the German critic Winfried Fluck, who uses it to refer to the images, affects, and desires a particular culture projects at a certain historical moment (cf. Das kulturelle Imaginäre). 2. I use the expression “the historical Hitler” whenever I refer to the historical figure and not to a representation. While I know that no representation of Hitler offers direct or privileged access to the referent, I have heuristically chosen to accept Ian Kershaw’s version of Adolf Hitler as the historically most accurate one for this study. Thus, whenever I say “the historical Hitler,” I have in mind the version of Hitler constructed in Kershaw’s biography. 3. One reason why I focus on literature in this study is that literary representations of Hitler are far more diverse than cinematic ones. In American films from the 1940s to the 1990s, Hitler almost invariably represents the threatening other, against which Americans need to unite and through which allegedly natural American values are confirmed. In addition, there is also a filmic tradition of representing Hitler in a comical fashion, which can in fact be traced through all visual media. From literature, though, this “comic Hitler” disappears completely after 1945. I have analyzed elsewhere in detail the various reasons for these different representational strategies, which include, among others, media difference and the conventionalized notion that Hitler’s physical appearance, which reminded many of Charlie Chaplin, is inherently comical (cf. Butter, “Just a Man”). 4. Cf. Bruner on individual memory, and Halbwachs on collective and cultural remembering. 5. Unless indicated otherwise, throughout this book all emphases and italics are in the original. 6. See, among others, the studies by Mandel and Trezise for this new trend in Holocaust studies. 7. What Kershaw also implicitly attacks here is a particularly strong version of the so-called intentionalist take on the Holocaust. Intentionalism and the antagonistic approach of functionalism, dominated the debate about Hitler’s role in the Holocaust during the 1970s and 1980s.

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Intentionalists hold that Hitler and the Nazi leadership had planned to exterminate the Jews all along and had consciously worked for two decades to achieve this goal; functionalists, by contrast, take seriously the plans developed during the 1930s to expel the Jews from Europe and explain the Holocaust as the result of the complex interplay of the power structures of the Nazi state, the personal motives of underlings, and the rivalry among those close to Hitler. Intentionalists thus hold Hitler chiefly responsible for the Holocaust and often (explicitly or implicitly) cast him as evil; functionalists tend to downplay his role to a sometimes amazing degree. In recent years, more sophisticated theories such as Kershaw’s concept of “working towards the Leader” have overcome the dichotomy between the two positions. Kershaw develops his concept in the final chapter of volume 1 of his Hitler biography (I: 527–91) and applies it to the extermination of the Jews in the chapter “Fulfilling the ‘Prophecy’” in volume 2 (II: 459–95). Although he generally regards Hitler as the “chief exponent” and “not [the] prime cause” of the “Nazi assault on the roots of civilization” (I: xxx), Kershaw concludes with regard to the Holocaust that “Hitler’s role had been decisive and indispensable in the road to the ‘Final Solution’” (II: 495). While the significance of Hitler for the Holocaust is thus not denied but carefully put into perspective, most Hitler Fiction, projecting Hitler as evil by nature, falls back behind this elaborate understanding. 8. Obviously, my use of the terms “postmodernist” and “realist” does not do justice to the many existing “postmodernisms” and “realisms,” their complex histories, and relations. And of course I do not mean to imply that realist representations are more realistic than postmodernist ones.

Chapter 1 1. Both phenomena—the Americanization of the Holocaust and the growing obsession with Adolf Hitler—are tied to the ever-growing idealization of the United States’ role in World War II. Unpopular as it was before and through its duration, World War II has since then come to be remembered as a mythical battle in which good and evil could still be clearly separated and as a time of national unity, a feeling that was lost with the Vietnam War. 2. The interpretations of Hitler that the two 1939 novels arrive at anticipate the findings of the professional psychoanalyst Walter Langer, whom the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the wartime precursor of the CIA, asked to study the personality of Adolf Hitler early in 1943. In his report, Langer diagnoses Hitler as suffering from an array of neuroses and complexes, and prophetically concludes that Hitler “might commit suicide” (211). 3. Faced with the predominant noninterventionist mood, numerous American writers painted an ever bleaker picture of the situation in Europe and attacked Nazi Germany in 1940 and 1941, but they rarely

Notes

4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

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became openly interventionist. And much to the frustration of many European directors and actors who had come to Hollywood with the intention to fight Nazism in their films, Hollywood movies tended to completely ignore what was happening in Europe until after Pearl Harbor. Unlike literature, film did not enjoy the constitutional protection of freedom of speech at this time. Restricting the official function of movies to entertainment, the Production Code, the film industry’s selfimposed instrument of censorship, forbade the representation of living politicians like Hitler and the tackling of any controversial political issue. Moreover, studio bosses were afraid that critical films would alienate domestic audiences and close off the important foreign markets increasingly controlled by the Nazis. The only studio that pursued a slightly different policy in 1939 already was Warner Brothers, which produced Confessions of a Nazi Spy as a response to the Nazis’ murder of Joe Kaufman, the studio’s representative in Germany. Charlie Chaplin had to produce The Great Dictator (1940)—the first filmic attempt to represent (and ridicule) Hitler—independently with United Artists, because none of the major studios wanted to do the film. When, under the impression of the Battle of Britain in June 1940, some studio representatives finally formed the Motion Picture Committee Cooperating for National Defense and produced roughly two dozen mildly interventionist feature films, they quickly ran into trouble with other studio bosses and politicians. With Pearl Harbor, of course, all this changed completely. As early as December 18, 1941, President Roosevelt appointed a “Coordinator of Motion Picture Affairs,” and Hollywood produced more than a hundred movies that tried to boost American morale over the next three years. See Mitchell for an extensive list of filmic representations of Hitler, including comic ones. Cf. Casey 184–95 for a conclusive analysis of the public’s opposition to the Morgenthau plan. Rumors of Hitler’s survival somewhere in South America were circulated throughout the 1950s in magazines such as the Police Gazette, but they never fuelled the public imagination to the degree they have done since the late 1960s. Cf. McKale 47–49. Alexander writes in a footnote: “The present analysis fundamentally departs from Novick’s. Whereas Novick describes a particularization of the Holocaust—its being captured by Jewish identity politics—I will describe a universalization. Where Novick describes a nationalization, I trace an internationalization. Where Novick expresses skepticism about the metaphorical transferability of the ‘Holocaust,’ I will describe such metaphorical bridging as essential to the social process of moral engagement” (73). From a philosopher’s point of view, my remarks in this and the next paragraph must appear hopelessly inadequate. I am of course not proposing a coherent theory of “evil” here, but trying to get as quickly as possible

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into a discussion of the various ways in which Hitler has been labeled “evil” in American culture. 9. Andrew Delbanco, who, mistakenly I believe, bemoans that Americans have lost the sense of evil in recent years, stresses that the fight against Hitler was unquestionably “a confrontation with evil” (6). In similar fashion, Colin McGinn takes Hitler’s evilness for granted when he discusses how people search Hitler’s face for traces of his evil (145). 10. Although Michaels links the beginning of this shift to the emergence of postmodernism, his notion of ontology must not be confused with the one developed by Brian McHale in Postmodernist Fiction (1987). For McHale, the shift from modernism to postmodernism is the shift from epistemology to ontology, from gaining and representing knowledge about the world to the creation of multiple fictional worlds. Michaels, by contrast, employs the term to describe the shift from ideology and politics proper to identity politics and the primacy of the subject position.

Chapter 2 1. As in Contact (1997), with which I began, the Hitler trope and the alien trope are related, but they are not yet as interchangeable as in the more recent movie. Like Hitler, most of the aliens are unlike Americans— they do not believe in freedom and democracy for all humans—but they are in many ways also like the Americans. In the parallel world, they occupy much the same position of technological and military supremacy that is implicitly ascribed to the Americans in the real world. Ultimately, the novel can be read as a justification of America exerting influence over formerly colonized countries in Asia, Africa, and South America. Just as the Angels “would have to remain in de facto power for a time” in those countries “not ready” for democracy yet (184), the United States has to supervise processes of democratization in the real world so that these countries do not fall to dictators or communists, the novel implies. 2. I employ the term “alternate” history (and not the grammatically correct one, “alternative” history) because it is the term used in the more recent publications by Dannenberg, Hellekson, and Gavriel Rosenfeld. Moreover, it is the term preferred by the writers and readers of such narratives. 3. Less than twenty texts of the genre written until 2002 qualify as traditional historical novels. About a dozen of these are fictional biographies of Hitler, five other texts—Burt Boyar’s Hitler Stopped by Franco (2001), Gillian Freeman’s Diary of a Nazi Lady (1979), Paul West’s The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg (1980), and Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War (1971) and its sequel War and Remembrance (1978)—are panoramic historical novels that feature Hitler only as a minor character, as one among many historical figures who interact with the invented characters on which the narrative focuses.

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4. I do not want to get into a lengthy argument about the definition of science fiction here, a genre which hardly two scholars seem to define alike. For me, apart from the futuristic setting, science fiction is characterized by the importance of advanced technologies and gadgets for the stories told. These elements are completely unimportant for most alternate histories. 5. See the studies by Hellekson, McKnight Jr., and Collins for an argument that alternate history is (a subgenre of ) science fiction. These critics’ insistence may to a large degree be due to the fact that for the American context, Harry Harrison’s observation seems accurate that alternate history was “[b]orn in SF” (6). Whereas the counterfactual tradition in Europe reaches back to the nineteenth century (see Rodiek, “Potentielle Historie” 41–42), the earliest American alternate histories were exclusively written by science-fiction writers such as Philip K. Dick and Fritz Leiber. 6. Since Nünning’s book is only available in German, I will not quote from his text but merely summarize his argument. 7. Cf. Helbig, Erfundene Vergangenheit, 132–41 for a discussion of the development and characteristics of both secret and future histories. 8. Much more popular in Europe than in the United States, “imagology attempted to redefine the task of European comparative literature as the historical and systematic study of the images of other countries in a given national literature” (Schmundt-Thomas 24). Whereas the interest in such images has considerably decreased in comparative literature since the 1970s, other disciplines have become more and more concerned with the images that groups, cultures, or nations develop of themselves and of their various others. 9. The most thorough exploration of images of Germans in American culture is Zacharasiewicz’s Das Deutschlandbild in der amerikanischen Literatur, a 400-page tome that moves from Puritanism to postmodernism. Unfortunately for me, his discussion of post-World War II images is restricted to works of “high” literature and hardly touches on popular culture. 10. Scholars have repeatedly emphasized the immense proliferation of alternate histories over the past forty years and speculated about the connections between the genre and the era of postmodernity, but, in my opinion, they have not yet come up with a satisfactory explanation. Jörg Helbig argues that alternate history challenges in postmodernist fashion the boundary between historiography and literature and highlights the constructedness of reality (170). He thus situates the genre close to historiographic metafiction, but, as I argued above, only a small group of self-reflexive alternate histories resembles historiographic metafiction. Paul Alkon sees an intrinsic relationship between alternate history and “the attitudes toward time identified as postmodern,” namely, a focus on contingency, coincidence, and the effacing of historical consciousness altogether (68).

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11. The debate on “the renewal and revitalization of the realist mode” in American literature is led on both sides of the Atlantic, and the terms “neorealism” and “new realism” are often used interchangeably, with some critics preferring the designation “realism” to stress that the increased artistic and critical attention signals “not the return of realism but rather its continuing relevance” (Rebein 18, 19). 12. This is not to downplay the important difference between these identity formations. While affirmative alternate histories assure their male American readers of the superiority, courage, individualism, and decisive role male Americans can play in shaping history, romances keep their female readers firmly within the patriarchal order by suggesting that women can find happiness only in marriage.

Chapter 3 1. To refer to Hitler by the code “18” is very common among neo-Nazi and fascist groups. A British terrorist organization, for instance, named itself “Combat 18.” 2. The stories Bukowski wrote in 1967 and 1968 were later published as Notes of a Dirty Old Man (Brewer 45). 3. Cf. McKale 42–49 for an overview of such rumors. 4. It is a sad irony, indeed, that the phrase “defeated by the Americans” continues to other the Indians and to write them out of “American” history. 5. See the chapter “The Vietnam War as American Science Fiction and Fantasy” in Franklin, especially 151–54 on the petition and 159–60 on Spinrad’s “The Big Flash.”

Chapter 4 1. It is no coincidence that many of the 1970s texts that feature Hitler as a character—apart from being secret or future histories—can also be classified as thrillers. During that decade, as Paul Cobley has argued, “the material of thrillers—conspiracy, espionage, secrecy, crime and so forth—was a prominent part of other discourses in the social formation of America” (6). 2. The parallels between Mengele and Wheelock are further stressed by the fact that both function as father figures for Bobby Wheelock, the Hitler clone living in the family. Mengele is the doctor who inserted the nucleus of one of Hitler’s body cells into an egg cell whose nucleus had been destroyed before. As the notion of penetration implicit in the description of this laboratory work suggests, his task roughly corresponded to the impregnation that, in the case of a “normal” child, is performed by the child’s biological father. Wheelock, by contrast, is the child’s social father. 3. Mengele’s approach, though, is representative of a school of psychological historiography that arose with the Hitler Wave of the 1970s and that

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locates the reasons for Hitler’s worldview and especially his anti-Semitism in various events of his childhood. Historians, psychologists, and novelists have tried to identify those moments and factors in Hitler’s life that determined the future course of his life. During this interpretive process, events that would be regarded as unimportant in other people’s biographies suddenly seem extremely meaningful. By having Mengele deliver a prophetic interpretation of the Hitler clone’s future, The Boys from Brazil gives this mode of interpretation a particular twist. Knowing the life of the donor, Mengele reads even the most general biographical parallels between Hitler and his clone as predetermining the clone’s fate and delivers an extremely unconvincing interpretation. The narrative thus lays bare the extremely shaky grounds on which this interpretive approach to the historical Hitler usually rests. 4. In Richard Rose’s The Wolf (1980), Hitler’s son becomes German chancellor and, supported by a vast conspiracy of German Nazis, triggers an international conflict that ends in the mutual nuclear destruction of the United States and the Soviet Union. Philippe van Rjndt’s The Trial of Adolf Hitler (1978) has Hitler live incognito in a Bavarian village for more than thirty years after the war. When he is finally tried by a UN tribunal, the villagers, who synecdochically stand for all Germans, are enraged by what is done to their beloved citizen and a wave of neo-Nazism washes over Germany. 5. I am not concerned here with the degree to which Baader, Meinhof, and the other terrorists were really anti-Semites nor with the question of how their anti-Semitism would compare to Hitler’s. I am interested in how the connection between Baader-Meinhof and Nazism is established rhetorically and what cultural function it performs. 6. Significantly, Hitler’s Daughter . . . Wants to Occupy the White House was reissued in 2000, just after the culture wars and partisan politics had peaked with the attempt to impeach President Clinton.

Chapter 5 1. Cf. the section “In the Future, Everyone Will be Hitler for Fifteen Minutes” on the website beautifulatrocitites.com for these and many more instances. 2. See Adams 5 on this episode. 3. Hitler’s niece, Angelika (Geli) Raubal, was found dead in Hitler’s apartment in Munich on September 19, 1931, “shot with his pistol” (Kershaw I: 351). While rumors that Hitler murdered her himself or had her killed were quickly spread by his political enemies and have never been completely dispelled, suicide “seems the most likely explanation” (I: 354). 4. As Kershaw puts it: “[L]urid stories of alleged deviant sexual practices put about by Otto Strasser [one of Hitler’s contenders for party leadership] ought to be viewed as the fanciful anti-Hitler propaganda of an outright political enemy” (I: 352).

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5. Casting Stalin as a positive character, The Trial of Adolf Hitler was part of the considerable U.S. propaganda effort to depict Russia as an ally and as a democratic country. The most prominent example of this effort is the movie Mission to Moscow (1943), “an elaborate panegyric lauding the USSR while watering down the evils of communism” (Fyne 197). 6. In his “Acknowledgements” he particularly mentions the support of “Judge Wilford H. Ross, Administrative Judge of the Defense Office of Hearings and Appeals” (n. p.), who apparently influenced the plotting and setting of the narrative to a considerable degree. 7. Unlike Kaplan, I have decided to write “Guantanamo” without the accent on the second “a” to indicate that I am dealing with a U.S. imperial space that must be distinguished from the Cuban Guantánamo. 8. While Bart, at one point in the novel, intends to bring in some of “the poor, bottom-of-the-scale types who somehow managed to survive and tell” (II: 218), their testimonies are only summarized in two paragraphs later (see II: 325). 9. Exactly like Operation Lucifer, the museum, according to Sielke, “acknowledges that as a bystander the United States “share in the guilt— a confession which itself, however, serves to prove their moral and political superiority” (87). 10. After a meeting at the White House, he tells one of his friends that “[t]he real villain is Saddam Hussein. Iraq may be the next battleground” (II, 372). That Bart anticipates the 2003 invasion of Iraq that early shows how quickly the Conservative circles that advised Charnay on his book constructed a connection between bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. 11. The second part of Hitler’s name, “the cat,” is his deliberate choice. As it resonates with a multitude of literary texts—from T. S. Eliot’s 1930s poems about Old Possum to Tennessee William’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955)—“the cat” enforces the notion that names do not possess fixed, “natural” meanings. Yet, “the cat” is also a version of “Thécat,” the name of Hitler’s dead wife (135). When he finally mentions this to Miss Hope, she recognizes him as her father because even the “reprogramming” she underwent before the adoption was “not able to erase [this memory] completely” (135). Miss Hope has been named by the Puritan fundamentalist who adopted her after her mother’s execution. All militant Christians in the novel have names that signal peacefulness and forgiveness and that thus contrast pointedly with the cruelty and selfrighteousness they display. In Miss Hope’s case, though, the name is telling in the literal sense after all, since she personifies the hope that people can be rescued from evangelical indoctrination. 12. Hitler has lost his sexual potency after the death of his wife, but he wins it back toward the end of the novel through the reunion with his daughter and the new love he experiences with a Japanese prostitute—a move that resonates with Nazi Germany’s alliance with Japan and works to overcome the historical and often racialized enmity between the United States and Japan.

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Chapter 6 1. The metaphor of the forked path can be traced back to the myth of Heracles. In the twentieth century it was Jose Luis Borges’s short story “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941) that first employed the metaphor to describe the existence of an endless number of possible worlds. 2. The notion that Davenhall Island lies outside history is enforced through a number of allusions that intertextually associate the island with Hades, the mythical Greek realm of the dead. The only way to enter the island is via the ferry of Old Zeno, a Charon-like figure, who charges the obolus of one quarter and thus only one coin from each passenger. While these coins—unlike the ones that the Greek placed under the tongues of their dead to pay their fare to Hades—are not made of gold, Zeno’s coat is full of gold buttons, which the old man uses like money and bets with during his nightly poker games with Mark. At the same time, the name Old Zeno is an allusion to the Greek philosopher Zenon, who is famous for his paradoxes about motion, most notably the one about Achilles and the tortoise. 3. The other version he outlines that keeps the binary of good versus evil in place—the one in which “evil came to rule the world” (168)—is dramatized by the countless dystopian alternate histories that imagine a Nazi victory in World War II. As I argued above and as Banning anticipates, the cultural work of these stories mainly consists in confirming and essentializing American goodness by playing it out against the Nazis’ allegedly generic evilness. 4. Erickson calls World War II a “redeeming experience,” because it allowed Americans to make up for some of their nineteenth-century crimes, most notably slavery, which is a prominent theme in his novel Rubicon Beach (1986) and his travelogue Leap Year (1989). 5. Ivan’s advocating the “three-strikes-and-you’re-out rule” is of course a comment on the controversial Californian law passed in 1994 and indicates that the play not only explores grand metaphysical questions of guilt, forgiveness, and redemption, but also engages the politics of the day. 6. Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Tours of the Black Clock are connected through an intricate intertextual relationship, which I cannot explore in detail here. Suffice it to say that Dania is a Hester Prynne figure. She lives as an outcast among the Chinese population of Davenhall Island just as Hester lives as an outcast among the Puritans of Salem. Both do not share the open religiosity of those around them, but make token concessions occasionally. The Puritans in Hawthorne call Hester a prostitute, because she bore a child out of wedlock, and Dania indeed earns her living by selling her body. Moreover, both women give birth to a fatherless “love child.” Hester loves her child, while others regard it as the physical token of her sin; and Dania’s love transforms the monster Banning aims to create into a normal human child. Hester refuses to tell the public about the child’s father, while Dania herself wonders how she got pregnant. By the same token, Banning shares certain characteristics with

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Dimmesdale, as both take long to acknowledge their guilt and die immediately afterwards.

Conclusion 1. These novels are James D. Forman’s The White Crow (1976), Jacque Levine’s Hitler’s Secret Diaries (1988), Alison Leslie Gold’s The Devil’s Mistress: The Diary of Eva Braun (1997), James Dykes’s Hitler’s Journal: A New Look into the Mind of the Leader (2000), Paul West’s The Dry Danube: A Hitler Forgery (2000), George Thomas Clark’s Hitler Here: A Biographical Novel (2000), Paul D. Cook’s The Last Interviews with Hitler (2002), David Hamlet’s The Reckoning: Hitler’s Final 42 Hours (2002), and Norman Mailer’s The Castle in the Forest (2007). 2. In fact, the only explanations that Rosenbaum leaves out, as Carolyn Dean has emphasized (187), are those theories, popular between the 1930s and 1970s, that center on Hitler’s alleged homosexuality and an assumed connection between latent homosexuality and Nazism. 3. The trajectory I am outlining here is based on the introduction to Hannes Heer’s excellent study Hitler war’s. Heer quotes, among others, Golo Mann’s statement that the Nazis behaved toward the German population as if they were “foreign invaders” (qtd. in Heer 6; my translation). When I quote German sources in the following pages, I use my own translation in the main text and provide the original in an endnote. 4. Cf. Maier for an extensive analysis of the controversy. 5. “als verführtes oder getäuschtes Opfer” 6. Despite this proliferation, German cultural representations of Hitler are still much rarer than American ones. Marcel Atze, for instance, analyses twenty-three postwar texts in his “Unser Hitler.” These narratives, he claims, are the only German texts that feature Hitler as a character. 7. The clip is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCLralhpcdI. 8. “Das endet in der Katastrophe. Ich weiß, wovon ich rede.”

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INDEX “ ”, 14, 68–75, 83, 101, 146, 160, 170; as symbol, 74 9/11, 119, 131; linked to Holocaust in Operation Lucifer, 138–41 12:20 p.m., 23 Abish, Walter, 104 abortion, 142–44 Abu Ghraib, 132–33, 141 Ackroyd, Peter, 52 Adams, Michael C. C., 173, 193n2 Adolf, 178–79 Ahmadineschad, Mahmud, 173 AIDS, 120 Albuquerque Tribune, 181 Alexander, Jeffrey, 12, 20, 29–30, 32, 35–41, 153, 173, 189n7 alien, trope of, 3–4, 48, 190n1 Alkon, Paul, 56, 191n10 All the President’s Men, 114 Allhoff, Fred, 22, 26 Alpers, Benjamin, 22–23, 25–27 Alteration, The, 53 alternate history, 2, 9, 13, 45, 48–57, 62–66, 93, 148, 174, 190n2, 191n10; affirmative type, 13, 53–55, 61, 64–66, 109–18, 122–41, 148, 174, 192n12; cultural work of, 9, 49, 53, 62; historical fiction and, 49–51; readers, 63–66; realism and, 62–66; revisionist type, 13, 55–56, 61, 66,

67–90, 148; science fiction and, 49–50, 191n4, 191n5; utopian and dystopian elements, 49–50, 53–54, 64, 137, 195n3. See also future history; secret histories Americanization of the Holocaust, 11–12, 20, 29–38, 81–82, 92, 188n1, 189n7; explanations for, 29–38. See also Alexander, Jeffrey; Novick, Peter Amis, Kingsley, 53 Anderson, Poul, 55 Anschluss, 21 anti-Semitism, 28, 34, 36, 95, 106, 119, 134, 140, 171–72, 180, 193n5; related to racism in the United States, 48, 97, 101, 107–8 Arafat, Yasser, 120 Arendt, Hannah, 40 Asgard Solution, The, 120 Asimov, Isaac, 90 Atchinson, Caroll John, 25 Atze, Marcel, 196n5 Auschwitz, 28 Auster, Paul, 62 Baader, Andreas, 193n5 Baader-Meinhof group, 102–3 Ballard, J. G., 51 Barnes, Julian, 52 Barthes, Roland, 62, 65

210

Index

Bauer, Yehuda, 170 Becker, Jillian, 102, 106 Benford, Timothy, 14, 93, 103, 109–17 Benjamin, Walter, 75 Berenbaum, Michael, 40–41 Berkut, The, 6, 8, 15, 121–30, 132–33, 156 Bernstein, Carl, 114 Bertens, Hans, 146 Between Two Worlds, 21 Beymer, W. G., 23 “Big Flash, The,” 90, 192n5 bin Laden, Osama, 17, 119–21, 131, 173, 194n10; compared to Hitler in Operation Lucifer, 138–40 Bismarck, Otto von, 26 Bitburg cemetery, 126–27, 176 Black Panthers, 68 Black September terrorist group, 107, 108 Borges, Jorge Luis, 195n1 Bormann, Martin, 103, 131, 134–35 Böse, Wilfried, 102 Boyar, Burt, 190n3 Boyer Reinstein, Julia, 81 Boys from Brazil, The, 8, 14, 93–101, 103–4, 107, 192–93n3 Bradbury, Malcolm, 70 Brandt, Willy, 102 Braun, Eva, 178 Bredella, Lothar, 58 Brewer, Gay, 192n2 Brooks, Mel, 47 Brosnan, James W., 181 Brown, Kenneth, 66, 174 Bruner, Jerome S., 187n4 Bukowski, Charles, 14, 68–75, 101, 146, 160, 170, 192n2 Bullock, Alan, 170 Bush, George H. W., 114, 119 Bush, George W., 44, 119, 138, 141 Butler, Judith, 2

Butler, Octavia, 43 Butter, Michael, 187n3 Caputo, Philip, 86–88 Carver, Raymond, 171 Casey, Steven, 189n5 Castle in the Forest, The, 169–70, 196n1 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 194n11 Cervantes, Miguel de, 76 Chaplin, Charles, 24, 100, 187n3, 189n3 Charnay, David B., 15, 121, 124, 131–41, 156, 194n10 Civil Rights Movement, 34, 102, 137 Clark, George Thomas, 196n1 Clinton, William J., 119, 140, 193n6 cloning, 93–101; as trope, 93–95. See also Hitler clones Cobley, Paul, 113, 192n1 Cold War, 27, 30–31, 42–44, 83, 86, 88 Collins, William Joseph, 191n5 communism, 27, 30–31, 44, 78, 84, 86, 127–30, 194n5 Confessions of a Nazi Spy, 189n3 conspiracy narrative formula, 93, 110; collapse in Hitler’s Daughter . . . Wants to Occupy the White House, 110–15, 117 conspiracy theories, 71–74, 83, 91, 109–15, 117. See also paranoid interpretation; paranoid style Contact, 1–4, 7, 11, 190n1 Cook, Paul D., 196n1 Cooper, James Fenimore, 23 Crawford, Beverly, 58 Crucible, The, 78 cultural imaginary, American, 3, 5, 47, 74, 100–01, 120, 128, 130, 164, 187n1 culture wars, 115, 141, 145, 193n6

Index

Dannenberg, Hilary, 50, 62, 150, 190n2 Dark Legacy, 169 Dawidowicz, Lucy S., 170, 172–73, 177–78 Day of Reckoning, The, 23 Dean, Carolyn, 196n2 Dean, Howard, 119 Delbanco, Andrew, 38, 190n9 DelCorso’s Gallery, 86–88 DeLillo, Don, 5, 47, 92, 147, 170 Denning, Michael, 92 Der Fuehrer’s Face, 24 Devil with Hitler, The, 24 Devil’s Mistress: The Secret Diary of Eva Braun, The, 196n1 Diary of a Nazi Lady, 190n3 Dibner, Martin, 32, 103 Dick, Philip K., 55, 90, 153, 191n5 Disney, Walt, 24 Divide, The, 54 Doherty, Thomas, 24 Dragon Harvest, 24 Dry Danube: A Hitler Forgery, The, 196n1 Duker, Abraham G., 33 Durkheim, Emile, 40 Dykes, James, 196n1 Eichinger, Bernd, 179 Eichmann, Adolf, 40–41 Eichmann trial, 33, 36, 40–41 Einstein, Albert, 151–52 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 111 Eizenstat, Stuart E., 140 Eliot, T. S., 194n11 Ellison, Harlan, 90 Empire of the Sun, The, 51 Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness, 69 Erickson, Steve, 8, 15, 147–68, 169, 170, 175, 195n4 evil, 9–11, 38–45, 102, 119–20, 138, 152, 166, 189n8, 190n9; “axis of,” 44; banality of,

211

40–41: essentialism and, 11, 15, 38–45, 104, 140, 174, 195n3; as explanation, 38, 41; ontology and, 9–10, 38–45, 68, 101, 119–20, 134, 152, 156; postmodernism and, 10, realism and, 103–4; “sacred,” 40–41; strong v. weak notion, 38–42. See also Hitler, Adolf, evil and exceptionalism, American, 17, 54–55, 96–97, 141, 169, 172; challenges to, 12, 17, 55–56, 66–67, 88–90, 97; confirmations of, 11, 17, 23, 37, 54–55, 64–66, 134, 137. See also progressive narrative Fackenheim, Emil, 170 Fadiman Jr., Edwin, 66–68, 124, 132, 174 Faludi, Susan, 115 “feminazis,” 117. See also masculinity, crisis of feminism, backlash against, 116–17. See also masculinity, crisis of Fenster, Mark, 73, 110–11 Ferraro, Geraldine, 115 Fest, Joachim C., 176, 177, 178 Field, Allan G., 31 Flaubert’s Parrot, 52 Fleming, Peter, 24 Fluck, Winfried, 62–63, 65, 187n1 Flying Visit, The, 24 Forman, James D., 196n1 Foster, Jodie, 1, 3–4 Franklin, H. Bruce, 89, 90, 192n5 Frederick the Great, 26 Freeman, Gillian, 190n3 Freese, Peter, 23, 57–60 Führer Seed, The, 14, 93, 101–9, 125 Fukuyama, Francis, 130 Fussell, Paul, 21

212

Index

future history, 56–57, 62, 91, 141–46, 191n7. See also alternate history Fyne, Robert, 194n5 Ganz, Bruno, 178, 180 “Garden of Forking Paths, The,” 195n1 Gass, William, 147 Geddes, Jennifer L., 10 Geli. See Raubal, Angelika gender relations, critiqued in Hitler’s Daughter, 78–80 Germans: national character, 22, 32, 39, 58, 60, 126; stereotypes of, 13, 22–23, 25, 57–61, 94, 191n9. See also Nazis, relationship to “ordinary” Germans Geyh, Paula, 62 God for Tomorrow, A, 32–33, 103 Goebbels, Joseph, 144, 177 Gold, Alison Leslie, 196n1 Goldhagen, Daniel J., 170, 172 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 130 Gore, Al, 181 Göring, Hermann, 84 Goss, Gary, 8, 14, 68, 75–82, 90, 101, 142, 145–46, 170, 174 Gravity’s Rainbow, 49 Gray, John, 10 Grayson, Richard, 154–55, 175 Great Dictator, The, 24, 189n3 Guantanamo, 15–16, 48, 131, 133, 138, 141, 194n7 Halbwachs, Maurice, 29, 187n4 Haman, 33 Hamlet, David, 196n1 Hansen, Ron, 169 Harrison, Harry, 191n5 Hawksmoor, 52 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 62–63, 78, 166, 195n6 Hayman, Ronald, 169 Heer, Hannes, 176–77, 196n3

Helbig, Jörg, 191n7, 191n10 Hellekson, Karen, 49–50, 54–55, 190n2, 191n5 Hellman, Lillian, 22 Heß, Rudolf, 177 Heydrich, Reinhard, 28 Heywood, Joseph, 6–8, 15, 48, 121–30, 133, 156 Hilberg, Raul, 40–41 Himmelfarb, Milton, 172–73, 178 Himmler, Heinrich, 89, 177 Hindenburg, Paul von, 26 historical fiction, 51–53, 55, 174; documentary historical novel, 51; historiographic metafiction, 49, 50, 52, 75, 150, 191n10; metahistorical novel, 52; realist historical novel, 49, 51, 53–55, 63; revisionist historical novel, 49, 51–52, 55–56 Historikerstreit, 176, 196n4 History Man, The, 70 Hitler, Adolf: American culture’s image of, 1, 2, 5, 20, 30–31, 41–42, 73–74, 100–01, 134, 154–56, 168, 179–81; in American drama, 24–25; in American film, 1–5, 23–24, 27, 31, 47, 135, 187n3, 189n3; analogies and comparisons, 42, 119–21, 129, 131, 141, 173–74, 180–81, 193n1; comic figure, 24–25, 178–80, 187n3; evil and, 9–11, 14–16, 41–45, 47, 54, 61, 74, 91–93, 95, 101, 114, 119–21, 133–34, 143–44, 147, 153–61, 169, 171–75, 177–80, 188n7, 190n8, 190n9; in German fiction, 178–79, 196n6; in German film, 178–80; historical figure, 1, 5, 11, 20–21, 24, 33, 74, 84, 89, 96–99, 103, 125, 148, 150, 155, 170–73, 187n2,

Index

192–93n3, 193n3, 196n2; in historiography, 170–73; image in postwar Germany, 175–80; in Nazi propaganda, 24, 100, 126, 158, 178; as other of American values, 22–23, 42, 57–61, 123–24, 133, 158; significance for American culture, 2–3, 7, 16, 57–61; survival myth, 76, 91, 189n6, 192n3; as trope, 2–5, 9, 11, 13–15, 17, 19–20, 26–27, 29–30, 33, 37, 47–48, 57, 68–69, 74, 76, 83, 91, 93–95, 101, 141, 147, 160, 171–72, 190n1; in World War II propaganda, 12, 23–27, 135 Hitler the Cat Goes West, 15, 122, 141–46, 147, 170, 174 Hitler clones, 119–20; in fiction, 93–101, 192n1. See also cloning Hitler Fiction, 5–15, 47–66, 91–93, 98, 121, 169–70, 187n3, 190n3, 196n1; authors and readers, 7–8, 63–66; cultural work, 2–3, 6–7, 10, 13–15, 17, 19–20, 38, 45, 47–66, 147, 149, 168; development, 12–14, 19–20, 27, 31–33, 37–38, 48, 66, 91–93, 147; earlier criticism, 8–10 Hitler Gang, The, 23, 27, 135 Hitler Here: A Biographical Novel, 196n1 “Hitler Meets Haman,” 33–34 Hitler Stopped by Franco, 190n3 Hitler Wave, 37, 176 Hitler—Dead or Alive, 24 Hitler’s Analyst, 66, 174 Hitler’s Angel, 169 Hitler’s children, 101–17; as trope, 102–3; in fiction 32–33, 91, 101–17; inheriting Hitler’s evil, 32–33, 103–4, 107; rumors of, 119

213

Hitler’s Children: The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Terrorist Gang, 102, 106 Hitler’s Daughter . . . Wants to Occupy the White House, 14, 93, 103, 109–17, 125, 193n6 Hitler’s Daughter, 8, 14, 68, 75–82, 83, 90, 101, 142, 145, 146, 170, 174 Hitler’s Journal: A New Look into the Mind of the Leader, 196n1 Hitler’s Niece, 169 Hitler’s Secret Diaries, 196n1 Hitlers Frauen, 177 Hitlers Helfer, 177 Hitlers Krieger, 177 Hofstadter, Richard, 16, 73 Holcroft Covenant, The, 113 Holocaust, 34, 92 Holocaust, 1, 3, 10–11, 27–31, 33–38, 40–41, 44, 59, 68, 77, 81, 90, 127, 136, 164, 167, 169, 171–73, 175–79; 9/11 and, 139–41; analogies and comparisons, 35, 140–41, 143–44; evil and, 20, 40; inexplicability, 37, 41; intentionalist v. functionalist explanations, 172–73, 187–88n7; literature, 37; studies, 10, 37, 187n6; threat of another, 37, 103–4, 120; uniqueness, 14, 16, 30, 33–36, 40–41, 135, 139, 173, 176–77; uniqueness related to Hitler’s uniqueness, 20, 33, 37, 172–73. See also Americanization of the Holocaust; identity, Jewish American Holocaust Memorial Museum, United States, 136, 194n9 House of the Seven Gables, The, 63 How German Is It?, 104 How to Seduce a Woman, 24 Hussein, Saddam, 119, 121, 140, 173, 194n10

214

Index

Hutcheon, Linda, 49, 75, 76 Hutchinson, Anne, 76 Ickstadt, Heinz, 174 identity, 42–45; American, 38, 42–43, 45, 64–65, 67, 91–92, 108–9, 111, 115–16, 121, 130, 149, 180, 190n10, 192n12; German, 175–80; Jewish American, 33–36, 67–68 ideology, 22, 42, 44, 101–2, 120, 134–35, 138, 172. See also ontology imagology, 57–61, 191n8. See also self, image of related to image of the other Importance of Being Earnest, The, 123 Inconvenient Truth, An, 181 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, 24 Inhofe, James, 181 Iron Dream, The, 14, 68, 83–90, 101, 142, 144–46, 159–60, 170, 174–75 Iron Heel, The, 83, 88 Irving, David, 170 Israel, 33, 34, 36, 61, 102, 135, 139; as role-model for United States, 92, 108–9, 122 Ivan & Adolf: The Last Man in Hell, 161–62, 164, 166 Jäckel, Eberhard, 37 James, Jesse, 82 Jameson, Fredric, 85, 114 Jewish Spectator, 31, 33 Johnson, Lyndon B., 72–73, 114 Junge, Traudel, 178 Kaplan, Amy, 131, 194n7 Kaufman, Joe, 189n3 Kenneally, Thomas, 51 Kennedy, John F., 3, 71–73, 114, 179 Kennedy, Robert, 3, 71–73, 105–6 Kershaw, Ian, 11, 17, 74, 187n1, 187–88n7, 193n3, 193n4

Kincaid, Paul, 149, 159 King, Martin Luther, 3, 71, 73 Knopp, Guido, 177, 178, 179–80 Kohl, Helmut, 126, 176 Kostrubala, Mark Anthony, 169 Kristallnacht, 21, 28 Ku-Klux-Klan, 68 Lang, Berel, 34 Langer, Walter, 188n2 Lanzmann, Claude, 170 Lara, Alexandra Maria, 178 Last Interviews with Hitler, The, 196n1 Last Stop Vienna, 169 Last Twenty Minutes of Hitler, Goebbels, Göring and Himmler, The, 24 Le Guin, Ursula, 84–85 Leap Year, 195n4 Leiber, Fritz, 191n5 Lessner, Erwin, 25, 26 Letterman, David, 179 Levin, Ira, 8, 14, 93–101, 103–4 Levine, Jacques, 196n1 Levy, Dani, 179 Liberty Magazine, 22 Lidice, 28 Lightning in the Night, 22–23, 25–26 Lisa: A Novel of the Postwar Life of Adolph Hitler, 31–33 Lodge, David, 70, 72 London, Jack, 83, 88 Ludlum, Robert, 113 Madonna, 120 Maier, Charles, 196n4 Mailer, Norman, 169–70, 196n1 Makers of War, 31 Malaparte, Curzio, 80–82 Man in the High Castle, The, 55–56, 153 Man Who Killed Hitler, The, 21 Mandel, Naomi, 10, 187n6 Mann, Golo, 175, 196n3

Index

Marino, James, 120 Martel, James, 58 Martin, Charles, 24 masculinity, 108–9, 115–17, 121; crisis of, 108–9, 115–17. See also feminism, backlash against McAlister, Melani, 92, 108–9 McCaffery, Larry, 159 McCarthy, Joseph, 3 McCarthy, Mary, 89, 144 McGinn, Colin, 190n9 McGregor, Ross, 86, 87 McHale, Brian, 63, 150, 190n10 McKale, Donald M., 189n6, 192n3 McKnight Jr., Edgar V., 191n5 Mein Führer, 179 Meinhof, Ulrike, 193n5 Mekong Delta, 86 Melley, Timothy, 71–72 Mengele, Josef, as character in The Boys from Brazil, 94–99, 103, 192–93n2 Michaels, Walter Benn, 13, 42–45, 190n10 Midnight’s Children, 49, 52 military-industrial complex, 111, 114 Miller, Arthur, 78 Milosěvć, Slobodan, 119 Mission to Moscow, 194n5 Mitchell, Charles P., 189n4 Moers, Walter, 178–79 Moldea, Dan E., 105 Monaco, Paul, 3, 57–59, 105–6 Mondale, Walter, 115 Moon Is Down, The, 22 Moore, David, 82 Morgenthau plan, 27, 189n5 Morris, Pam, 65 Munich Agreement, 20–21 My Lai massacre, 89 Nagorski, Andrew, 169 National Opinion Research Center, 26

215

Nazis: as America’s significant other, 3–4, 7, 38, 57–61, 64–66, 113–14; relationship to “ordinary” Germans, 22–23, 25–27, 60; stereotypes of, 13, 25, 54, 57–61, 113, 115, 180 Nazism. See Nazis neo-Nazism, 33, 180, 192n1; in fiction, 33, 96, 131, 141, 193n4 neorealism, 61–62, 65, 174, 192n11 Nixon, Richard, 69, 72–74, 83; as character in “ ”, 72–74 Nolte, Ernst, 176 Novick, Peter, 20, 28–30, 34–37, 38, 40, 67, 177, 189n7 Nünning, Ansgar, 49, 51–53, 55, 191n6 O Shepherd, Speak, 27 Office of Strategic Services (OSS), 188n2 Office of Wartime Information (OWI), 22, 25, 28 ontology, 10, 38–45, 68, 120–21, 138, 172, 190n10; encoded as biology, 14, 65, 103; shift from ideology to, 13, 20, 38–45, 92, 101, 120, 177, 180, 190n10. See also evil Operation Lucifer: The Chase, Capture and Trial of Adolf Hitler, 15, 121, 124, 131–41, 156, 194n9 Ostpolitik, 102 other. See self, image of related to image of the other othering, cultural work of, 7, 13, 23, 39, 60, 64–66, 92–93, 109, 119–46, 140, 156, 169; internal v. external, 117, 141, 146–47 Overgard, William, 54 Palmer, Jerry, 62 paranoid interpretation, 69–72 paranoid style, 16, 69, 73. See also Hofstadter, Richard

216

Index

Parrot, George, 82 Pearl Harbor, 3, 21–22, 24, 189n3 Péron, Evita, 2 Phantom Victory, 25–26 “Pharaoh Meets Hitler,” 31, 33 Pielke, Robert, 15, 122, 141–47, 170, 174 Pius XII, Pope, 128 Police Gazette, 76, 189n6 Portage to San Cristóbal of A. H., The, 161 postmodernism of difference, 146 postmodernist fiction, 11–15, 42–43, 61–62, 65–66, 68–90, 93–101, 141–46, 174, 188n8, 190n10 Presidential Agent, 23 Presidential Mission, 27 Producers, The, 47 Production Code, 189n3 progressive narrative, 12, 19–45, 164–65; challenges to, 12, 56, 59, 66–90, 117, 147, 153, 167; collapse and transition to tragic narrative, 35–37, 167, reconstructions of, 15, 36–37, 117, 130, 134, 136, 138, 147, 160, 164–65, 173. See also Alexander, Jeffrey projection, cultural work of, 13, 61, 91–117, 121–23, 147 propaganda, 19, 22; image of Hitler in, 22–27; Nazi, 24, 178; World War I, 28, World War II, 12, 22–29, 39, 42, 58–59, 178, 189n3, 194n5. See also Hitler, Adolf, in World War II propaganda Pynchon, Thomas, 49 Qaddafi, Muammar el-, as character in The Führer Seed, 106–7 racism, 48, 97, 101, 107–8. See also anti-Semitism Radin, Max, 23

Radway, Janice, 49, 63–65 Raubal, Angelika, 125, 133, 148–49, 162, 164–66, 169, 193n3; novels about, 169 Reagan, Ronald, 14–15, 44, 91, 109, 114–15, 121, 126–27, 130, 176 realism and realist fiction, 11–14, 42, 61–66, 69, 92–93, 101–17, 121–41, 174 reality effect, 62, 72 Rebein, Robert, 62, 174, 192n11 Reckoning: Hitler’s Final 42 Hours, The, 196n1 Reichardt, Ulfried, 6 Return of Lanny Budd, The, 27 Richard, André, 31 Riefenstahl, Leni, 100 Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, The, 148, 153–54, 164 Rjndt, Philippe van, 193n4 Rodiek, Christoph, 49, 54, 191n5 Roe v. Wade, 142 Rogin, Michael, 44 romance, 62–65, 192n12 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 3, 23–24, 27, 189n3 Rose, Richard, 93, 193n4 Rosenbaum, Ron, 15, 170–73, 176–78, 196n2 Rosenfeld, Alvin H., 8–9, 155, 178 Rosenfeld, Gavriel D., 8–10, 50, 56–57, 90, 175, 178, 190n2 Rubicon Beach, 195n4 Rusch, Kris, 169 Rushdie, Salman, 49, 52 Sanders, Todd, 72 Scarlet Letter, The, 78, 166, 195n6 Schindler’s Ark, 51 Schmidt, Harald, 179–80 Schmidt, Helmut, 102 Schmundt-Thomas, Georg, 57, 59–60, 109, 191n8 Schneider, Helge, 179 Schneider, William Richard, 24

Index

Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 119–20 Scott, Walter, 51 secret histories, 56–57, 62, 67–83, 91, 93–117, 122–30, 191n7. See also alternate history self, image of related to image of the other, 4, 13, 45, 57–61, 67, 81, 120, 133, 140, 158–61 self-critique, cultural work of, 7, 13, 60, 66, 67–90, 91, 93, 146–47 Shakespeare, William, 76 Shirer, William, 20, 148, 153, 154, 164 Shuttlecock, 52 Sideslip, 48, 60 Sideways, 2 Sielke, Sabine, 136, 194n9 Sinclair, Upton, 20–21, 23, 27, 31 Sirhan, Sirhan Bishara, 105–6 Six Days’ War, 34, 36, 106 Skin, The, 82 Sphinks, Lee, 148 Spiegel, Der, 180 Spielberg, Steven, 24 Spinrad, Norman, 14, 68, 83–90, 101, 142, 144–46, 159–60, 170, 174–75, 192n5 Stalin, Joseph, 15, 27, 30–31, 129–30, 133; as character in The Berkut, 122–24, 129–30, 194n5; as character in The Trial of Adolf Hitler (Young), 128 Star Wars, 94 Steinbeck, John, 22 Steiner, George, 161, 170 Steinweis, Alan, 140 stereotypes, 57–61, 65. See also Germans; Nazis Strange Death of Adolf Hitler, The, 21, 135 Strasser, Otto, 193n4 Sutherland, John, 93 Sweeney, Thomas, 31 Swift, Graham, 52

217

Terkel, Studs, 173 terrorism, 102, 106–8, 131–32, 138, 140, 193n5 They Saved Hitler’s Brain, 31, 69 Thompson, Dorothy, 20 Time magazine, 21 Tolstoi, Leo, 161 Tompkins, Jane, 6–7 Torgovnick, Marianna, 23, 41 totalitarianism, 30, 32, 40–42, 130 Tours of the Black Clock, 8, 15, 147–69, 170, 175, 195n6 Trezise, Thomas, 187n6 Trial of Adolf Hitler, The (Rjndt), 193n4 Trial of Adolf Hitler, The (Young), 23, 25–26, 28, 57, 128, 194n5 Truman, Harry, 27 Tunnel, The, 147 Turner, Ted, 120 Untergang, Der, 178–79, 180 van Arnam, Dave, 48 Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg, The, 190n3 Vicchio, Stephen, 161–62 Vietnam, 89, 144 Vietnam War, 12, 17, 34, 68, 73, 80, 86, 102, 145, 159, 188n1; critiqued in The Iron Dream, 83, 86–90, 159–60; critiqued in Tours of the Black Clock, 159–60 Walters, Barbara, 109 War and Remembrance, 54, 190n3 War on terror, 121 Watch on the Rhine, The, 22 Watergate, 2, 37, 137 Wayne, John, 100 Weatherman Group, 68 Webb, Janeen, 96 Weekly World News, 119, 121, 140 Weill, Gus, 14, 93, 101–9 Wesseling, Elisabeth, 49, 53–54

218

Index

West, Harry G., 72 West, Paul, 190n3, 196n1 White, Ted, 48 White Crow, The, 196n1 White Noise, 5–6, 47, 92, 147, 170 Who Will Watch the Watchers?, 66–68, 124, 132–33, 135, 174 Wide Is the Gate, 23 Wiesel, Elie, 20, 40–41 Wiesenthal, Simon, 94 Wilde, Oscar, 123 Williams, Tennessee, 194n11 Williamson, Roger, 78 Winds of War, The, 54, 190n3 Wings, 20 “With Hitler in New York,” 154–55, 175 Wolf, The, 103 Wolfe, Tom, 62 Woodward, Bob, 114

World, 121 World to Win, A, 27 World War II, 1, 3, 20–27, 31, 39, 44, 59, 67, 86–90, 128, 167, 169, 172–73, 195n4; memory of, 15, 30–31, 115, 120, 168, 173; postwar conflicts as continuation of, 107, 120, 139, 173. See also propaganda, World War II World’s End, 20–21 World’s End Series, 20, 23, 27, 31 Wouk, Herman, 54, 190n3 Yom Kippur War, 34 Young, Michael, 23, 25–26, 28, 57, 128 Zacharasiewicz, Waldemar, 191n9 Zemeckis, Robert, 1