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
4 - The Good German: The Stauffenberg Plot and its Discontents
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
In 1998 Piotr Uklański mounted his installation Untitled (The Nazis) at the Photographers Gallery in London. It consisted of 166 captionless stills, publicity posters and photographs showing well-known actors in Nazi roles, mostly from Hollywood productions with some shots from European arthouse films. Cinema, more than any other art form let alone history education, has shaped our visual inventory of ‘fascism’. This seemed an obvious point to make but it was not a welcome one. There were protests outside the gallery accusing the artist of glamorising fascism. When Uklanski's photo frieze was mounted at the Zachęta Gallery in Warsaw two years later, the actor Daniel Olbrychski, whose photo was part of the installation, slashed some of the images with a sword. Subsequently the Polish minister for culture demanded that Uklański provide captions that clarified his condemnation of Nazism or the exhibition would close. Close it did. Another two years later, Norman Kleeblatt curated a group exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York under the title Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art. It included Uklański's frieze and a number of artworks that pointed at the commercialisation of the Holocaust such as Zbigniew Libera's Lego Concentration Camp Set, Tom Sachs's Prada Deathcamp and Roee Rosen's Live and Die as Eva Braun. This exhibition too drew protests for aestheticising fascism. Such controversies indicate that a new generation of artists has begun to challenge the doxas of Holocaust piety, pointing to the fact that Western culture has merely paid lip service to it while commodifying fascism and Holocaust as entertainment.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Our NazisRepresentations of Fascism in Contemporary Literature and Film, pp. 125 - 157Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013