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
Introduction: “Having Your Nazi Cake and Eating it”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2013
- 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
To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy, modified by revulsion.
(Sontag [1964] 1994: 276)I remember seeing one of those funny little dioramas by fetishist modelmakers, with a little humpback bridge, with a little stream of fresh water running through and a little boy fishing, and over the bridge is a little unit of Panzers and soldiers … the interesting thing is when you look at these dioramas they're always SS, they're always the worst of the worst, they're always the hyper-Nazis – they're never the enlisted, well-intentioned German who couldn't help himself – it's always the ideological fascist, the ones who are after genes, they're annihilating genes rather than people – but there's one little thing that says ‘life goes on’. So the kind of displacement in this little diorama is this little boy fishing, having your Nazi cake and eating it. But in actual fact, the Nazi-ness of the work is also a red herring.
(Jake Chapman, in Harris 2010: 181)Models are always more and less than the reality they ostensibly replicate. They are a fantasy and an interpretation as well as an approximation en miniature. What precisely constitutes ‘Nazi-ness’ in a model, a film, a piece of fiction? The comments of artist Jake Chapman above indicate that reproduction is not merely an attempt at verisimilitude but already contains some excess in the very effort to replicate.
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- Information
- Our NazisRepresentations of Fascism in Contemporary Literature and Film, pp. 1 - 42Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013