Arts & Entertainment

What Accounts For
German Fascism?

Oscar-nominated The White Ribbon
ponders the question but doesn't
necessarily provide the answer.

Eric Herschthal
New York Jewish Week

T

hough Michael Haneke's film
The White Ribbon — win-
ner of the prestigious Palme
d'Or prize at the Cannes Film Festival,
a Golden Globe winner for Best Foreign
Film and Oscar-nominated not only for
Best Foreign Language Film but for Best
Cinematography — focuses on one small
German village, in 1914, the director has
made it clear that the issues it raises are
much larger.
"Why do people follow an ideology?"
the director asks in the film's official
press release. "German fascism is the
best-known example of ideological delu-
sion," he adds, and while his film is not an
explanation of German fascism per se, he
certainly encourages viewers to ponder
the relationship.
In the opening scene, the narrator even
says that he hopes the story about to
unfold might "clarify things that happened
later in our country"
In the rest of the film, viewers are greet-
ed with haunting images of parents who
whip their children for the most modest
infractions, a pastor who does the same
for boys caught masturbating and spousal
arrangements so dominated by imperious
men that it makes one pain for the days of

burning bras.
Haneke has said he wants viewers to
come to their own conclusions about what
the film means. But at least one possible
suggestion seems obvious: a society domi-
nated by authoritarian figures is bound to
fall under the sway of despots.
But is that a sufficient explanation for
the how the Nazis came to power? Variants
of the idea have long circulated among the
general public and even historians, but few
scholars today are willing to accept it. In
fact, in recent years scholars have largely
moved away from the idea that the appeal of
the Nazis can be traced to any distant past,
let alone psychological theories, and are
much more likely to emphasize the strange
fortuity of Hitler and his party's rise.
In so doing, they not only appear to dis-
credit Haneke's theory of Nazism, however
obliquely made, but also challenge some
widely held beliefs about Nazi Germany
itself.
"It's an open question whether a major-
ity of Germans were ever Nazis in an ideo-
logical sense," Adam Tooze, a professor
of German history at Yale, told the Jewish
Week. He highlighted some better-known
facts to buttress his point, such as the one
that Hitler never gained more than 37 per-
cent of the popular vote, and that he never
actually won an election.
But Tooze emphasized less appar-

In The White Ribbon, strange accidents and misfortunes befall citizens of Eichwald,
gradually taking on the character of a punishment ritual. But who is behind it all?

ent ones, too, like the idea that even as
Germans grew more supportive of the
Nazi platform after they conquered Paris
in 1940 and victory seemed imminent,
anti-Semitism was only part of their
appeal. To be fair, he said, the related idea
of Aryanism — that all Germans shared
the same blood and were therefore equals
— was widely embraced. But it was not
because of whom it excluded, but rather
whom it included.
"What the Nazis are saying is that we're
all part of the same racial group;' Tooze
said. "For workers" — and Germans who
felt excluded from power — "this was a
major upgrade!' He noted that Jews, barely
1 percent of the German population,
suffered terribly under Aryanism, but it
actually expanded the tent for millions of
other Germans.
A related point is also made by the
British historian Richard Evans, whose
trilogy about the Nazis published over the
last decade is perhaps the most authorita-
tive to date. "If the time-traveler invited
the contemporary to guess which it would
be" — to exterminate its Jewish popula-
tion — "the chances were that he would
have pointed to France, where the Dreyfus

affair had recently led to a massive out-
break of virulent popular anti-Semitism:'
Evans writes in The Coming of the Third
Reich. He adds, "that Germany, with its
highly acculturated Jewish community
and its comparative lack of overt or violent
political anti-Semitism" — prior to the
1930s — "would be the nation to launch
this exterminatory campaign would have
hardly occurred to him."
While Evans highlights some continuities
dating to German unification in 1871, par-
ticularly Prussian militarism, he stresses the
unique circumstances after the First World
War that made the Nazis' rise possible.
Before the worldwide depression hit
Germany in 1930, the Nazis' extreme
nationalism lent them only fringe appeal.
But when it became clear that the liberal
Weimar republic, Germany's first demo-
cratically elected government, was unable
to handle the country's financial prob-
lems, not to mention the lawlessness that
transpired, Hitler's message of German
regeneration became especially appeal-
ing. Add to that the lingering humiliation
of defeat and the onerous reparations
imposed after World War I, and one begins
to understand how a radical agenda might

ews

•Tolv

Nate Bloom
Special to the Jewish News

m a Tasty? You Decide

ik Steve Buscemi stars in St. John of
Cl
Las Vegas, a black comedy somewhat
MU,

based on Dante's Inferno, that opens
Friday, Feb.19. Buscemi plays John,
it" a compulsive gambler who flees Las
Vegas and seeks a normal life work-
ing for an auto-insurance company in
Albuquerque.
For a time, John's life goes smooth-
ly; he even begins a romance with a
quirky co-worker (Sarah Silverman,
39). Then his boss asks John to inves-
tigate a car accident near Las Vegas,
and John is scared that his proximity

t

40

February 18 • 2010

to the city will revive
his bad habit.
John hits the road
with a co-worker,
and along the way
they meet a series of
colorful characters,
including a nude
Tim Blake
militant (Tim Blake
Nelson
Nelson, 45) and the
car-accident claimant, a stripper in
a wheelchair with the improbable
name of "Tasty D Lite" (Emmanuelle
Chriqui, 31, just named the world's
"most desirable woman" by Askmen.
com ).

Sarah's New Guy

Speaking of Silverman – last year she

broke up with talk-show host Jimmy
Kimmel (who isn't Jewish) after a
five-year relationship. Silverman
just told Page Six Magazine that her
new boyfriend is Alec Sulkin, 37, a
writer and producer of the animated
TV series The Family Guy.
Silverman says:
"[Sulkin] is so awe-
some ... not my typi-
cal fare. He's really
skinny. Usually I like
pudgy, macho-ish
guys. But I think I
mistook macho-ish
Sarah
for strong emotion-
Silverman
ally. And I think it's
really the opposite."

Sulkin, like Silverman, grew up in an

upper middle-class Reform Jewish
home (she in New Hampshire, Sulkin
about 50 miles away in a Boston
suburb). Both were the comedians
in their families – with siblings who
choose more "serious" career paths.
Silverman's oldest sister is a rabbi;
Sulkin's sister is a Pulitzer Prize-
nominated historian.
Sulkin, by the way,
issues funny Twitter
tweets almost daily.
Here's a recent one:
"Jewish moms make
their sons feel spe-
cial; then we spend
the rest of our
Alec Sulkin
lives proving them
wrong." 0

