Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Sources of Illustrations
- Series Editors' Preface
- Introduction: “Having Your Nazi Cake and Eating it”
- 1 Nazi Noir: Hardboiled Masculinity and Fascist Sensibility from Ambler and Greene to Philip Kerr
- 2 The Fascist Corpus in the Age of Holocaust Remembrance: Robert Harris's Fatherland and Ian McEwan‘s Black Dogs
- 3 ‘Fascism’ as Excess and Abjection: Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones
- 4 The Good German: The Stauffenberg Plot and its Discontents
- 5 ‘Operation Kino’: Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds as Meta-cinematic Farce
- Coda
- Bibliography
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Sources of Illustrations
- Series Editors' Preface
- Introduction: “Having Your Nazi Cake and Eating it”
- 1 Nazi Noir: Hardboiled Masculinity and Fascist Sensibility from Ambler and Greene to Philip Kerr
- 2 The Fascist Corpus in the Age of Holocaust Remembrance: Robert Harris's Fatherland and Ian McEwan‘s Black Dogs
- 3 ‘Fascism’ as Excess and Abjection: Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones
- 4 The Good German: The Stauffenberg Plot and its Discontents
- 5 ‘Operation Kino’: Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds as Meta-cinematic Farce
- Coda
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In the summer of 2011, the Chapman Brothers mounted a widely reviewed installation entitled Jake or Dinos Chapman at the White Cube in London, one part in Hoxton, one part in the Mason's Yard gallery off The Strand. As I descended the stairs to the basement gallery of the central London venue, I caught a glimpse of the main exhibit before I fully entered the room. I remember that I froze on the steps although it is not clear to me precisely what I felt – shock, horror, fear, or a mixture of all three. I had seen the reviews, most of which came with photographs of the most controversial exhibit, but they had evidently not prepared me for how I would affectively respond to what I saw, or thought I saw. The large white room was filled with over a dozen tall black-fleshed mannequins in black uniforms which looked like SS uniforms, complete with swastika armbands, insignia, boots and helmets. They stood in groups contemplating drawings on the wall or abstract art exhibits (cardboard models, deformed mutant child mannequins, stuffed ravens on steel frames), some of them visibly amused and joking, others ostensibly so bored they started sodomising one another. On closer inspection, the identical black mannequins, all with the same bared white teeth and popping eyeballs, did not wear swastika armbands above their Sütterlin cuff bands but smiley faces.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Our NazisRepresentations of Fascism in Contemporary Literature and Film, pp. 190 - 194Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013