Fictional Representations of Hitler

One of Michael Butter's findings in The Epitome of Evil: Hitler in American Fiction 1939Fiction -2000 is that the realist mode of representation aims to show the moral superiority of America, whereas the later postmodern approach is less based on the good-evil dichotomy.In her chapter on Hitler in Perpetrators in Holocaust Narratives, Joanne Pettitt discerns two opposing trends: one towards mythologizing and demonizing Hitler, placing him outside history and even outside humanity, and one towards humanizing him.She largely agrees with Rosenfeld that texts in this latter trend run the risk of trivializing him.On the one hand she acknowledges that seeing the Holocaust perpetrator, in this case Hitler, as the embodiment of evil, as the mythologizers do, stands in the way of a better understanding of their motivations.On the other hand, in the process of humanization, she identifies the creation of a "space for justifications and normalization."9Neither Rosenfeld nor Pettitt expresses the view that humanizing Hitler can offer a more disturbing representation than a demonic Hitler because it puts our own way of being into question.Michael Butter aptly asserted: "To call the historical Hitler evil forecloses explanation."10It is easy to relegate Hitler and the people who followed him to the outskirts of history and humanity by demonizing him/them.Showing a shared humanity with him invokes deeper probing, unsettling questions about the nature of evil and of being human.This strategy may be ethically more valuable than shrugging Hitler off as an otherworldly monster, as the more traditional, demonizing portrayals do.Bragana concludes that the Vichy situation led to a difference in approach: "It is not towards alternative histories/stories that French novelists turned their attention after 1968 but towards Vichy.Consequently, Hitler only appears intermittently in these novels, before and after 1968.In other words, Hitler never became France's 'significant other' as he did in American culture.In fact, Hitler has hardly ever been the 'other' of other characters in French fiction; on the contrary, he has increasingly become a 'significant self' in French novels since the 1970s."11Erin McGlothlin designed a taxonomy of readers' empathic identifications with Holocaust perpetrators in fiction.12The autodiegetic narration of Nazi perpetrators, in which the perpetrator is the I-narrator, emphasizes the humanity of these protagonists.McGlothlin acknowledges the possibility, or 9 Pettitt, Perpetrators in Holocaust Narratives, 118

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