In the post-war imaginary of the West, ‘the Nazis’ became a cultural trope that served as a justification for defending democracy through military intervention. But in films and in fiction, the Nazis were also camped up, laughed at, eroticised and demonised as evil monsters. In fact, the representational rules of engagement with historical fascism have always been remarkably uncertain. This book examines why and how the penomenon of ‘fascinating Fascism’ has re-emerged once more after the end of the Cold War. What is its cultural function now, in a global era of Holocaust commemoration? How ca ... More

In the post-war imaginary of the West, ‘the Nazis’ became a cultural trope that served as a justification for defending democracy through military intervention. But in films and in fiction, the Nazis were also camped up, laughed at, eroticised and demonised as evil monsters. In fact, the representational rules of engagement with historical fascism have always been remarkably uncertain. This book examines why and how the penomenon of ‘fascinating Fascism’ has re-emerged once more after the end of the Cold War. What is its cultural function now, in a global era of Holocaust commemoration? How can any representation avoid the impasse of either re-evoking fascism’s original seduction or merely recycling previous fictional and cinematic clichés? This study discusses alternative history (Robert Harris’s Fatherland and Quenting Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds), the noir thrillers of Philip Kerr, perpetrator fiction (Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones) and resistance (Synger’s Valkyrie and Cartwright’s The Song Before It Is Sung). Crucially it suggests that contemporary culture has instrumentalised the Nazi trope for its own agandas: ‘the Nazis’ have become ‘our Nazis’. The book also points to some of the risks and responsibilities attendant on this appropriation as one of the peculiar, late legacies of the Second World War.