It would seem from their comments that any
entertainment with a Nazi theme must be anti-Semitic and therefore condemned. They
appear to want Hitler and his cohorts to be buried in history, never mentioned
except perhaps in bland documentaries and the occasional academic paper.
But to turn our backs on the era would be the
height of folly. Young people by and large are not particularly interested in
documentaries or history books, but they do attend events such as the Fringe
Festival and for some on that night it may well have been the first time they ever
had to think about Nazism and Hitler.
Far better that it should be a strip show that
clearly lampoons the fuehrer
than at a street corner listening to the rantings of some potential demagogue. As
World War II and its origins fade from living memory, there is a dangerous
vacuum being created that is already being filled by Holocaust deniers and
those who would seek to twist the Nazi philosophy for their own purposes.
I know an American diplomat, who some years
ago was packing up her Washington flat in preparation for an overseas posting
and had secured help from the daughter of a friend, a bright girl on holiday
from her university.
As she was helping she noticed some books on
the Holocaust on the diplomat’s shelves. “Why do you have that rubbish – it never
happened you know,” she said.
I have no wish to comment on the good taste or
otherwise of the skit – except to say that tastes change and there are
television shows now where the language would have burned the ears off a viewer
in the 1970s – but what the audience apparently saw was a girl dressed up as a silly
little man with a moustache who stripped down to her undies. Hardly promotional
material for a Fourth Reich.
There is one acid test for whether this performance
in any way promotes Nazism: What would have happened to the organisers if they
had put it on in Hamburg in 1938?
I don’t think they would have been awarded the
Iron Cross.
No comments:
Post a Comment