A Parody in Berlin

Reading the Obvious and the Ordinary in Historical Violence

Bibliographic Data

ID2989413
AuthorsAndrew Brandel (0000-0001-6201-1635, Harvard University, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume48
Issue1
Pages146-160
Publication date2023-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAnthropology & Humanism (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1548-1409 • E-ISSN: 1559-9167
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/anhu.12409
OpenAlexW4310296710
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited25

The popularity of Timur Vermes's Er ist wieder da (2012), its widespread translation, and the film version (2015) all raised critical hackles in Germany, provoking debate about the perceived risk of normalization associated with satirizing Hitler, or worse, inviting empathy by humanizing him. Hitler escapes his historical demise and awakes in the twenty-first century, where he is misrecognized as an actor and becomes popular on the internet. I read the texts against the grain of its public reception by critics and scholars for whom it offers an obvious critique of Germany's contemporary susceptibility to the allure of charismatic fascism. I argue that it is this obviousness itself that comes under pressure through the two texts: if critics worry that satirizing Hitler even for the sake of such a critique will normalize memory of the Holocaust, it is the ease with which even critics accept the central science fictional device-Hitler's inexplicable return to contemporary Berlin decades after his death-that demands critical attention. Reading a film or a novel's reception anthropologically, in this paper, I make a case for an investigation into what is taken to be obvious and what it is that blocks such an inquiry. [popular culture; Holocaust; parody; public memory; alternative history

Aesthetics · Art · Demise · Literature · MAGIC (telescope · Media studies · Political science · Popular culture · Popularity · Psychoanalysis · Reading (process · Sociology · The Holocaust · Theology · German History and Society · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Philosophy · Psychology

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