[Below is one of three responses to the miniseries solicited by the
editors.]


On the Limits and Opportunities of Historical Representation in "Hitler: The
Rise of Evil"

More than fifty years after its demise, the history of Nazism and its leader
is constantly rewritten and revised. Historians such as John Lukacs, David
Welch, and Ian Kershaw have contributed the most recent round of studies on
Hitler. The award-winning movie "The Pianist" by Roman Polanski testifies to
the ongoing interest in Nazism and the Holocaust as topics of major feature
films. There is barely an American television series that has not presented
at least one episode in which the heroine or hero's evil antagonist turned
out to be a Nazi or neo-Nazi. Despite the enormous research of the last
decades, the history of Nazism and Auschwitz, to paraphrase Dan Diner, has
only just begun.

The recently aired CBS mini-series "Hitler: The Rise of Evil" by director
Christian Duguay represents one of the latest examples of this larger
phenomenon in popular culture. CBS, Duguay and his team had a major
opportunity to offer a coherent and engaging explanation of Nazism and
Hitler's rise to power to a large television audience. Yet, as a number of
eloquent reviewers have shown on this list, the mini-series' shortcomings
are as striking as numerous. A major opportunity has arguably been lost. It
is pivotal, however, not only to focus on the series' factual mistakes and
inconsistencies in interpretation.  Instead, the inherent conventions of the
medium of film to which academic historians are more and more warming up to
have to be taken into account and the specific American cultural context has
likewise to be considered.

In his review, Gerhard Weinberg has aptly revealed serious factual mistakes
such as the flawed portrayal of the emergency decrees of the spring of 1933.
The freedom of the press did not end with the Enabling Law of March 23, but
largely with the two emergency decrees of February 1933. The 1931 "reforms"
of the authoritarian Bruening administration, however, had already heavily
limited the press' work.  Other (minor) flaws could be added. The series'
second part suggests that the Nazi party's September 1930 breakthrough at
the polls, for example, coincided with Geli Raubal's suicide of September
1931. The educational guide, too, identifies Bavaria as "the largest German
state," ignoring Prussia that still covered more than half of Weimar
Germany.

"The Rise of Evil'"s shortcomings in interpreting the Hitler movement are,
as Andrew Stuart Bergerson points out, all too apparent.  To summarize the
movement's rise with the catchwords "power," "intimidation," and "fear," as
CBS' trailer does, cannot make up for the mini-series' tacit explanation of
economic misery and its focus on Hitler as a hypnotic manipulator of the
masses.  The lack of exploration of structural factors and Weimar political
culture and discourses is, however, to some extent inherent in the very
genre of biographies. The genre's overemphasis on one person lends itself to
reducing complex phenomena to a question of pathological character and
ideological intent. Even if newer collective biographies, for example,
Michael Wildt's "Die Generation des Unbedingten," his study of the RSHA
leadership, avoided some of these pitfalls, the CBS mini-series mostly
rehashed crude elements of what Theodore Rippey termed the "Hitler story."

This said, the mini-series rarely, but occasionally succeeds in
incorporating newer works and emphases of research. The montage of the
regime's atrocities at the end of the second part no longer presents the
Wannsee conference as the site where the Nazis made the decision to kill the
European Jews. Instead, it points to the conference participants as involved
in "work[ing] out ways to extend" the already ongoing Holocaust. More
importantly, the series follows Kershaw's recent Hitler biography in its
emphasis on Hitler's anti-Semitism and his "war" against the Jews. Duguay
avoids the shortcomings of earlier biographers such as Alan Bullock and
Joachim Fest who marginalized these crucial aspects in their biographies.

To apply the same rigorous criticism to an analysis of the mini-series as to
a monograph by an academic scholar, however, is in danger of missing a
fundamental point. Each medium has its own language and artistic as well as
discursive conventions. We simply do not know, for example, the color of the
dress Ms. Hanfstaengl wore during the reception that connected the still
obscure Hitler with prominent exponents of Bavarian politics and culture. As
Theodore Rippey implies in his review that nicely illuminates some of the
key components of the medium of film, the director and his crew consciously
made this choice in an act of heavy-handed symbolism. Yet, Duguay did not
have a choice, but to present her visually, in an outfit. Historians, on the
other hand, have the luxury of not having to write about something that they
do not know. In fact, they would face the criticism of their peers for
fabrication or not producing evidence to support this claim. Filmmakers are
forced by their medium to make a choice concerning visual representation.

The producers by necessity draw on the languages and conventions available
to them. Moreover, especially on network television, they cater to the likes
and viewing habits of their American audience. College students, for
instance, have repeatedly complained to me about the "boring" 10-minute
shots in Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will." The CBS mini-series'
trailer, by contrast, presented a fast-moving succession of cuts that
bordered on sensationalizing Nazi violence. It used similar devises than the
trailers to the season finale of the television series CSI that featured
prominently during the commercial breaks of the series in the CBS viewing
area in North Carolina.

While the dust jacket of a historical study may place the book in its
historiographical context or a title promises, like the series, another
seemingly "untold" story, network television and film offer their own
prescriptions on how to view a product. They encompass what scholars such as
Philipp Sarasin have conceptualized as a film or publication's "paratext"
that helped viewers and reader in the appropriating of texts and symbols.
Paratexts can be understood as components of a visual or printed text,
including titles, that give hints for its proper use and what is expected of
its consumers. In the context of the mini-series, sections of the paid
"messages" during the breaks played an important role in the product's
paratext. Both the Anti-Defamation-League and the Freedom Center ran, as
Andrew S. Bergerson's review briefly mentions in one of his footnotes, ads
that focused on contemporary racism in the US. The ADL ad's voice-over
alluded to a young African-American girl hearing the "'n'-word" and to kids
hearing and spreading this and other "words of prejudice." The final
statement that these racist expressions would have "no place" in US society
affirmed a set of prescribed rules and values of multi-culturalism and
ethnic integration. To run the ad directly before the next segment of the
mini-series only strengthened the mutual interaction between the two. The
viewer should interpret the portrayal of anti-Semitic violence and hate
speech as having "no place" in US society. The construal of Nazism as the
most despicable form of evil in US popular culture today also supports the
struggle against racism directed at African-Americans. To hate them means to
be like the Nazis.

The different conventions, languages, and paratexts of film and television
do not have to be seen as always problematic. On the contrary, they also
offer new and different possibilities not or only barely achieved in
historical studies. The montage sequence in the series' first part that
switched back and forth between a cabaret scene and a Hitler beer hall
speech offered a stylistic element that likewise shaped the segment's
meaning and interpretation. It served as an entryway into further
understanding the aesthetic dimensions of fascist policies and practices and
the use of political language.

There are many ways in which historians can fruitfully work with film and
historical media footage. Using the series in the classroom, especially
making use of techniques offered in the mostly instructive educational
guide, can serve as an example in analyses of messages presented in the
media and the interpretation involved.  Working with the medium of film is
likewise an exciting chance for historians to reach a much wider audience
that would not read their elaborate studies. One of the challenges
historians face is the misuse of their seal of approval for a product that
is, as Eric Ehrenreich pointedly said, often "poor history." But the
opportunities for historians in working with film far outweigh the
limitations. A more pronounced focus on the conventions and the languages of
film leads us back to the crucial topic of representation and its limits in
writing history. This focus on historical representation further enhances
the ongoing quest to study and "understand" the history of Nazism and its
leader.

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