#I know what it is to be a victim of Nazism and imperialism

[so-hoshi-nya]

>>> should not be judged just because he did it in the past

>>> his actions should be judged by looking at the time

It's so cute not to be able to read, but to judge others and block them without letting them say a word :)

As soon as you learn to read, find out what the principle of historicism is

[troythings]

happy 2024. yall still have to suffer my rants. sorry

so i think everyone remembers that period from 2015 to 2021 or maybe later, when everyone was creaming themselves over the dead horse scenario of “wHaT iF the NaZiS wOn ThE wAr”

yeah i aint gonna go into specifics but im pretty sure everyone remembers. mostly because of what they wrote with superman.

god people need to stop milking this shit.

so I’ve gone into detail in other posts about how dc is notoriously flimsy and escapist with the subject of nazi germany and just…nazism in general, either they’ll just use it as a vehicle to virtue signal or they straight up deny its horrors. yeah, sad but true. same with this.

except there was someone (obviously non-dc affiliated) who actually got the superman scenario right. not grant morrison, venditti and every other weirdo who had their fingers in this literal dumpster fire. kim newman, who wrote “ubermensch” in 1991, before “red son” and the other superman alternate histories, and showed more empathy for the holocaust and the victims of nazi germany than dc could ever care to.

because. unlike dc, newman wasn’t running on propaganda tradition and cutesy escapism like they were.

continued under the cut.

tw: nazism, the holocaust, genocide, anti-semitism, racism, murder, historical gore, literary mention of israeli imperialism, and nazi propaganda

so right off the bat it’s obvious that newman knows his history. the story takes place in a recently reunified postwar germany at the end of the cold war. metropolis is analogous to berlin, it’s a famous city in-story that was split into an east and west sector. the main character is avram blumenthal, a holocaust survivor turned nazi hunter, much like the real life simon wiesenthal. the superman analogue in this story is held in spandau prison, the real-life facility for nazi war criminals where rudolf hess was imprisoned for the remainder of his life.

just by looking at that. you could never find a dc writer who puts in this much time and effort to research the past and depict it in a non exploitative manner.

there’s also some commentary on western us capitalism/consumerism that defined ‘our’ progress in the cold war (pizza hut and mcdonalds in the ussr anyone) and the “third position” of fascism being the “alternative” between capitalism and communism:

and! newman actually respects superman’s jewish mythos! he includes it in here, which is something i’ve never seen the overman writers do. jerry siegel and joe shuster were both jewish. and, no matter what dc tells you about nazis having ‘superheroes’ of their own, this was actually one of the reasons comics were hated in nazi germany.

newman also integrates the basic superman lore pretty well here, everything is recognizable. a ‘man of steel,’ ‘the man of tomorrow,’ ‘curt kessler’ (which, by the way, is way more creative than dc’s ‘karl kant’) is clark kent, the ‘green stuff’ is kryptonite, so on

newman also isn’t afraid to get dirty with the mythos, unlike the comics which like to play it safe with this (up to and including never talking about the holocaust at all). the johnathan and martha kent analogues of “ubermensch” aren’t the kindly couple that they should be. because this isn’t them and we're not supposed to like them. johann beats his adopted son and curt grows up arrogant. luise lang, the lois analogue, is a snotty propagandist that curt describes in ideologically typical misogynistic terms (another thing to note down dc, nazis did not respect women) who commits suicide to avoid being raped by the red army.

there's also something else that's interesting, the commentary on how harmful propaganda and journalism can be when serving a purpose. its implied a lot in here that the 'supervillains' that curt kessler/übermensch faces are actually all staged by the nazis, or if they're genuine (like the golem), their intentions are twisted to serve the bigger narrative.

curt kessler/übermensch is a state propagandist like luise lang was. the 'tages welt,' daily planet analogue in this story, sounds a lot like a version of der sturmer. he writes his own propaganda narratives to prop up his übermensch persona and vilifies innocent people in the process. the targets of nazi ideology get the names of villains from 1920s german fiction and they're like dogwhistles in itself if you know the context. "orlok" was a vampire that looked uncomfortably similar to anti-semitic caricatures, "mabuse" was a hypnotist "master of disguise" who "operated through a network of agents," characters co-opted and then twisted by nazism in-story. in real life we also have this with racists adopting "sh****k" as a slur from the shakespeare character.

newman also throws a curveball with that whole ‘nazi superhero who actually turns out to be good all along’ or whatever the shit that trope is. whatever. kessler apparently ‘defects,’ like he says here

but before that, he said this.

dude’s the same. sorry guys, no redemption arc here. this becomes relevant later.

kessler still blames "mabuse" for pornography, jazz, cabarets, things that defined progressive weimar germany before the nazis took over and shut it all down. again. another aspect taken from real-life history. and since a "red skull" is also name-dropped here, i'm also thinking that the "hydra" reference in this refers to the marvel organization of the same name.

you know. the one with tentacle iconography, the secret society that's framed in the mcu as controlling the world, starting wars and infiltrating governments everywhere to install global totalitarianism. which makes me wonder what kind of writers at marvel thought nazi germany would accept an organization that exemplifies the kind of fake "international conspiracy" they were railing against but that's another conversation. see here.

blumenthal recalls a time when he was a child in germany who naively hero-worshipped kessler/übermensch because of the propaganda around him. he wished he could fly and he wore a black blanket like a cape. while he was young a rabbi created a golem (the figure in jewish mythology made of clay) who was killed by kessler, and blumenthal swallowed the propaganda. even when his anti-semitic classmates aped kessler and beat him up.

kessler obviously doesn’t give a shit, he’s still brainwashed no matter how he tries to wave it off. he doesn’t care about the tattoo. instead he talks about using his x-ray vision to look at women’s breasts. like real-life racists confronted with their own wrongdoings kessler also resorts to whataboutism and goes “your family is dead but so is my whole planet”.

and he also says he’s only locking himself up because of his guilt. not actually over the atrocities of nazism. it’s that nazi germany is gone and so is his planet so he has nothing else to do and he doesn’t want to do anything. that’s it.

blumenthal retorts with this, which is just great in itself. im not going to outline it, newman does it pretty good already

this is one of the things i really liked. because it’s important and more importantly, relevant!! it’s so relevant because kim newman is fucking right. im reiterating that everything about the world in that second image is true.

i was a kid when charlottesville happened. tmi but that whole time is a blur. when i got older and learned about things, i remember thinking that maybe after that, we would take a good hard look at ourselves and just try to find out where we went wrong.

did we maybe have a history of being eugenicist slaveowning imperialists in the past who inspired nazi polices and still rallied around the flag and the military. did racism and nazism happen to run deep in america before 2017.

why were children and young adults so vulnerable and still are vulnerable to the alt-right pipeline, what are we putting out in media that could be desensitizing them to nazism. what kind of message are we sending when we don’t cover it in detail, and leave them to figure out nazism from shitty comics, or movies.

yeah. the majority of people ever asked that.

here’s what they actually did. especially in art and media, and im going to say, with dc since this is relevant to the image. they doubled down on some of the societal shit that led to that in the first place

you wanna know what the cw, bunch of braindead idiots, did right after charlottesville? pretty much the entire thing from the last paragraph, except with some vanilla bullshit because of course the arrowverse can’t ever portray nazism correctly even if they tried.

there’s an article that covers their failure in detail and also a reddit post which, obviously, some weirdos in the comments are brushing off. and it’s also not coincidental that a comic series came after this and cited the political climate. again. a bunch of important dc people were involved in promoting this. phil jimenez in particular also has a problematic history with depicting modern neo-nazism. grown adults put money into this. their actors and their fans supported them.

want proof?

mmm. alright smart guy. here’s that “different set of ideals” for you.

yeah, apparently they didn’t think through the consequences of a world where the fucking dirlewanger brigade would be celebrated as heroes.

you know what they actually cared about? some fucking stupid comic issue from the 1970s that was suddenly relevant because everyone felt the need to deny our own nazi-sympathizing rotten history and pin it somewhere else, rather than actually take a step back and evaluate where we went wrong as a society.

and actually they essentially made radicalization easier. they showed this bullshit to kids and basement-dwelling adults who don’t know anything about the world and only care about their typical comic high. how do they fucking sleep at night knowing that they’ve whitewashed real life atrocities?

they still are doing that. they casually throw around the words “hitler” and “nazi” to the point where it fucking means nothing. they’re using exploitative images of concentration camps just to get a rise out of people without ever covering their themes seriously. and you wanna know the worst thing about that? only a few people are calling this out. everyone else? nah they’re ready to consume that because it doesn’t matter to them like it does for some people.

in the story blumenthal believes that, without kessler existing, the ‘fire’ won’t start up again. this comes when nazism and genocidal neo-fascism are resurging and the israel bit is also pretty relevant today. like in real life the kids are ignorant because all they know about nazi germany and world war ii is from kessler. again. this man is a living symbol of nazism who has media getting made about him.

blumenthal’s right. because the world actually doesn’t need kessler and it’s better off without him. he passes a kryptonite suicide pill encased with lead, which kessler can bite through. and he gives him a choice.

living swastika kessler who has nothing to live for and is more of a problem than an actual help to humanity, bites the pill and kills himself. that’s it. he dies. his only worthwhile achievement is sucking it up and dying like a human man.

he’s dead. now finally humanity can start to heal.

so to round it all off basically. i think this book is part of a lesson. about swallowing that bitter pill that you don’t want to face and realizing, maybe there’s something problematic how we portray and in a way, whitewash nazism to the population through the comic industry. because the golden age, nobody actually knew about the holocaust when they were writing the whole “punching nazis” schtick. the comics were wartime, jingoistic and often racist propaganda.

and yet!! we’re still doing it. thanks to some escapist tradition that actually does more harm than good. because we actually know about the holocaust, we have the internet and the ability to push ourselves to research. and we don’t. and i think tbh, that is much worse. that the people with money and platforms just don’t care.

it’s in other media too, mostly movies.

chaplin got it right, he said he would’ve never made the great dictator if he knew about the final solution like we did today.

spielberg couldn’t include nazis in indiana jones after making schindler’s list and im pretty sure he said he disowned it, but. it looks like everyone decided to shit on that because of nostalgia.

jojo rabbit was originally adapted from a novel where the protagonist was an unrepentant scumfuck HJ who gaslit, controlled and raped the jewish woman hiding in his house. and for some reason, people hate the novel. why? because it rightfully doesn’t give them the cozy feelgood feeling that the film did. it rightfully portrays a brainwashed child who never got out, was never interested in getting out and grew up to be, you guessed it, a fucking nazi. those jojo rabbit viewers were actually looking forward to this before they got the hard reality. who the fuck in their right mind would ever consider nazism ‘feelgood’?

and i think that’s another thing we need to get in our heads especially with radicalization. tw isis execution being brainwashed as a kid is not funny, it’s not childish or anything to make fun of, and it’s nothing to make a wes anderson movie about. you are being exploited and taken advantage of by people who know you’re angry about things beyond your control and they are molding you and you believe everything. and the ensuing trauma if you ever get out, ends up being a bitch because your brain was still developing and now it sticks for the rest of your life. yeah try taking that in, taika.

so. by all means. wise up and kill the living swastikas wherever you find them. it could be anything, but. get rid of it. because we are going to be so fucked up as humanity otherwise.

[hajime-isayama-official]

i found a post i think you wrote about snk and nazism and i wanted to hear more from you if thats okay? is it definite hes a fascist nazi supporter? i dont want to believe it but. and he still made eldians the victims right? so it shows no matter what or why the marleyans should not have done what they did. and anyone with promarley views are bad guys right?

i think i just dont want to believe it can be taken in the pronazi way because this story means alot to me and i dont know what to do. but i think a both sides are wrong thing doesnt work here because of how they showed it with nazi and holocaust imagery. showing suffering people as just as bad doesnt work. but i understand bad people can come from anywhere. at the same time we support eldians for being the holocaust victims right? im confused now. im sorry for the bother. please help?

No problem, It's always good to look at your favorite stories critically, if you have the energy! That said my point of view is just one of many.

I think it's pretty evident by some things yams has said that his viewpoint is a questionable at best. For example a tweet about how korea had it best under japanese imperial rule (spoiler: they didn't) and his statement of how admirable the ww1 admiral he based pixis on was (another spoiler: he wasn't). Also the combination of German ww1/ww2 military inspiration and the norse mythology inspo are hardly coincidential imo. So I simply don't trust that dude, which might taint my pov. I think he isn't necessarily a nazi supporter in an active sense of running around yelling "Sieg heil", but imo his work is tone deaf at best in quite some regards.

I think especially now, so late in the manga it shows that the story is about getting rid of oppressive hatred, which is a great message! But the way this is done is still pretty... oof. Yes, Marley is bad, but they are not the enemy in the way the story is built. They are a plot device. Eren or by extension Ymir are the enemies (in the sense of that those who are portrayed as the people we are supposed to be rooting for are fighting against him). And that Halucigenica thing, whatever is up with that lol So we're not fighting fascism, we're fight the one who wants to fight fire with fire but who's still from "our own" (in a very interesting sense as Eren was also introduced as the protagonist).

The enemy is basically their own heritage, therefore the problem is not Marley, they are just a symptom, a byproduct if you will. We don't have any prominent characters that have promarley views that could serve as bad guys (correct me if I'm wrong) except the warriors, who are also not the bad guys at this point because they joined forces with Mikasa and friends. Plus they are also Eldian, so actual Marlean people only get very little place in the story in general.

If Ymir lifts the curse of the titans the message we get is that the way to undo oppressive hatred is to denounce your heritage. It says it was actually the Eldian's fault that they were mass murdered and the way this won't happen is if they stop being Eldian alltogether. If the plot ends and ymir doesn't lift the curse we probably get a story of unity through a common enemy which is also horrible, cause that would mean the victims need to forgive their opressors, simply for peace's sake. But that's of course speculation, cause we don't yet know what the last chapter will bring. But in regards to the eldian/Marley conflict I kinda don't see a good way to resolve it (tho i might stand corrected)

Jewish people have pointed out how they feel that the connection of jewish coded characters with the titans is pretty antisemitic. On the other hand some have also said they don't think so. As a gentile I'm not one to weight in on that, but as a German, who's been sensitized to white supremacy dog whistles I definitely see where they are coming from in pointing out antisemitic undertones of the series (see my pinned post).

I think this doesn't have to be a reason to drop the series. I also follow it through, because it's a huge part of my live and i wanna know how it ends. It does have beautiful characters and dynamics. Some parts of the story telling are greatly done. And as I said this is simply my view on it.

[jyndor]

lol i got mad about a thing reylos said. shocking. (tw: nazism, fascism)

just saw a ridiculous post about how people who talk about the first order as being nazis are ignoring history and disrespecting jewish people and let me tell you

that the only reason I didn’t write this on that post is because I think the op is probably jewish and also a kyle ron/reylo fan and lol well. I don’t need to be told I can’t have an opinion on this or that I am attacking them. this is nothing personal, except that reylos have a history of being racist and dismissive about fascism, and so I am honestly shook that someone could be so disingenuous. lol oop that was personal.

if you know anything about film history, you know that george lucas got his inspiration for the empire’s look, and also for certain shots of the rebels, from nazi propaganda made by leni riefenstahl, specifically triumph of the will. (guys don’t go looking it up if you haven’t seen it unless you have a strong stomach because it is really, really disgusting). now, that is more or less what happens when you have a guy who is a student of film history make a movie about, you guessed it, a band of rebels fighting an imperial force but in space. george lucas also put a lot of politics into star wars, specifically anti-fascist messaging. this is like the most basic argument people make when dealing with right-wing fans of sw. this is what we’ve all said to some dumbass white guy who got mad about rey or finn or poe. I would bet that some reylos have also had that conversation, since they care about rey (I guess, although that might be too strong a word; they certainly don’t care about shipping her with a guy who tortured her lol but I digress).

jj abrams took what was already overt fascist imagery from the empire and turned it up to eleven for the first order. this is actually why I found the inclusion of POC as first order OFFICERS (not low level workers Bodhi or stolen baby stormtroopers like Finn) to be kind of fucked up, because it diluted the narrative. do not come at me with some idiotic YESS MORE BLACK IMPERIALS YESS because I am just not here for that brand of idiot representational pinkwashing(? this is a term we use for putting gay shit on monstrous corporate/imperial shit to seem more progressive but it might not be the right term for this).

if you look at the og trilogy, every single imperial officer is a posh white british man, and while I am sure that was partly because diversity was not really something george seemed mindful of, it was also a deliberate thing. like, they clearly wanted to evoke an image of imperialist, and yes FASCIST, rule. this is not that hard to understand so don’t be fucking obtuse just because you like kyle ron or reylo. not that I believe that the intent of the creator is the end all, be all, but in this case it does matter.

yes the anti-alien biases were mainly a product of legends, but I am pretty sure it is also implicit in the original movies because there are no aliens to be found in imperial ranks, and they are everywhere in the rebellion. and yes, I can understand why this might be offensive because you don’t need metaphors to understand why the nazis were bad, and yet. maybe, sometimes, you do need to give people a metaphorical understanding of things they haven’t experienced. and humans have a notoriously difficult time understanding large numbers - so maybe, a visual example of what the fuck genocide might seem like is... idk, helpful for kids? alderaan being death star’d might not be actual history, and it might not represent what jewish/romani/etc victims of the nazis experienced, but it IS chilling. personally I think that tfa did a better job with its death star knock-off because we actually saw people in their last moments. alderaan’s destruction can be rightfully criticized as too distant, since we only see leia’s response, and not what it felt like on the ground. but undoubtedly this is a fictional representation of fascist, imperial might - and all the destruction that comes with it.

it isn’t just visual, and of course the star war isn’t real and no real alderaanians were harmed in the making of the movies. duh. it’s a metaphor, an allegory. like idk who these reylos are kidding, acting like people who criticize you guys for stanning a fascist fuckboy don’t understand that these are just fiction.

the REASON I get mad about reylo and about kyle ron stans, is because nothing exists in a vacuum. NOTHING. not a damn thing. the dumbing down of stormtroopers and imperial ideology (vague though it might be) is actually how Disney gets away with marketing t-shirts with stormtrooper helmets on them to little kids, or like idk how people have convinced themselves that ben solo is just misunderstood and damaged, and not a thirty-year-old man who has made a deliberate choice to commit genocide. his so-called abuse (which we only get to see in a comic? like I’m sorry do better with your sob story) is no excuse for at best being silently complicit in genocide, and at worst actively campaigning for it.

I think there are good critiques that people make about saying the empire is nazism, because obviously this is fiction. you cannot have it both ways. you cannot say that it is anti-fascist when you are arguing with right-wingers who didn’t get that message, and then turn around when people say your fave is at best neutral on genocide (lol) and say we can’t talk about how he is a fascist.

I saw someone say something like, no one calls darth vader a fascist. LMAO yes we fucking do. now I will be the first to admit that anakin gets a lot more empathy, and part of that is because he is a more beloved character with more nuance than kyle ron. and decades of lore. but also because he didn’t grow up a privileged son of a princess, he grew up enslaved and because of his traumas he went right-wing. which does in fact happen. but yeah, darth vader had to die at the end of rotj for a reason - because no one would forgive him for the crimes he committed against the galaxy. it’s tragic because he had the potential to do great, and he redeems himself by killing the emperor, but approximately no critic of kyle ron would ever say that anakin skywalker deserved to go free and live without consequences for his actions.

if I have more sympathy for him, it is because the movies gave me reason. not because he’s hot. or idk a bad boy.

and after the racist abuse that john boyega got from KYLE RON AND REYLO stans specifically, if I were them I would shut the fuck up about how offended you guys are about calling him a fascist or a nazi. you can like your bad boy wet dream if you want, and you don’t have to even like that people think he is a fascist, and you can deny all you want all of that OVERT FASCIST IMAGERY that jj abrams put into tfa, but it’s there, and we don’t live in a vacuum, and I am not here for people dumbing down cultural phenomenon.

redemptions arcs are great! I believe in rehabilitative justice, and I agree that there is a bit of gatekeeping on who gets to be redeemed in stories. but rehabilitative justice isn’t just like you let people who do bad shit get away with it, it is a long process wherein offenders have to do some serious work on themselves. it is not easy. it is not fun, doesn’t end in sex with daisy ridley. and in many ways, it might be harder than doing hard time.

but I also don’t think we get to just... rehabilitate the lead officers who are complicit in war crimes without dealing with what they’ve done, that is how I feel about george bush, and yes, that is how I feel about kylo ren, no matter how much you try to woobify him. because that is what society already does - we let the monsters at the top of the system get away with war crimes and murder and rape, so maybe we should fight that kind of narrative in fiction, too.

we don’t live in a vacuum.

[random-thought-depository]

History thought: I see a significant parallel between the Aztec empire and Nazi Germany: both took a pre-existing nasty part of their region’s culture (human sacrifice in the case of the Aztecs, racism and eugenics in the case of the Nazis), doubled down on it in more-or-less the most horrific possible way, and built an entire imperialist ideology and state apparatus around it.

Context for that: I don’t know much about pre-Columbian MesoAmerican history, but from reading 1491 and 101-level histories about the Aztecs I have a strong impression that Aztec human sacrifice practices were intensified a lot as part of the process of their society becoming an empire, with a new imperialism-friendly theology providing the justification. Human sacrifice seems to have been part of the cultural background of pre-Columbian South and Central America, the Inca did it too, but I have a strong impression that the Aztecs were unusual in how central human sacrifice was to their state and how much of it they did. I see a parallel between that and what happened with racism and eugenics in Nazi Germany.

Thought proceeding from that: therefore, arguably, the best modern analogy for Cortez’s conquest of the Aztecs would be evil aliens invading an alternate history Nazi victory timeline Earth.

Thought also proceeding from that: I wouldn’t be surprised if other pre-Columbian South and Central American societies have something of an undeserved bad reputation just because the Aztecs are one of the three pre-Columbian South and Central American societies the average person has heard of. Like, imagine that scenario where aliens invade and conquer a Nazi victory timeline Earth; now imagine the history books the aliens might write about pre-conquest Earth society hundreds of years later, imagine what their historical fiction and popular history books about pre-conquest Earth society might look like, imagine what their equivalent of PBS documentaries about pre-conquest Earth society might look like, imagine their pop-cultural memory of pre-conquest Earth society. Imagine how all that might be skewed by a Europe-dominating Nazi empire being one of the three or four pre-conquest human nations the average alien is familiar with.

Speculative fiction concept: a fake history article or book or book review article from a universe where aliens conquered a Nazi victory timeline Earth in the 1950s, written hundreds of years after the conquest in a time when the alien empire has been reformed into a sort of Star Trek United Federation of Planets type set-up and Earth is a thoroughly culturally assimilated member of the aliens’ federation and the aliens have come to regret their earlier imperialist ways. The book or article is basically discussing the political and cultural context in which Nazism existed and its place in that context, with a subtext that it’s trying to show that the Nazis were unusually murderous and cruel within that context and it’s trying to debunk a common historical misconception that pre-conquest Earth culture was just like that.

Speculative fiction concept addendum: possible bonus material: examples of the sort of media that book or article would be reacting against, e.g. an elementary/middle school level textbook chapter about Earth history where there’s a handful of paragraphs about pre-conquest Earth history, a bunch of writing about the military campaigns to conquer the United States of America and the Nazi empire written in a queasy tone of being low-key ashamed of the brutality of the conquest but also horrified at how nasty the Nazi empire was (the conquest of the rest of the planet is described a short footnote paragraph), and the rest is the history of Earth under the Empire and then as a member of the Federation.

Speculative fiction concept addendum: bonus material about uncomfortable implications: some writing about anti-colonial movements on Earth during the late Empire period. Mentioned in passing is that Earth anti-colonial movements often tried to reclaim the Nazis and their iconography (in much the same way that supporters of Hispanic and American indigenous rights in our world often try to reclaim the Aztecs). These attempts at reclamation included revisionist histories that suggested the Nazi empire wasn’t really as bad as conventional histories claim, “the Nazis were brave warriors who heroically resisted the conquest and you should take pride in this noble heritage!” takes, and adoption of Nazi iconography as symbols of resistance, liberation, and cultural pride. Ironically, many of the people “reclaiming” the Nazis in this way were or are people whose ancestors were victims of the Nazis; when Human/alien has been the most important racial distinction for centuries “you’re a Russian Jewish autistic trans gay, the Nazis would literally have wanted to kill you for five different reasons and probably did kill, enslave, torture, and/or rape your ancestors!” tends to get lost in the shuffle of “I’m going to take pride in the cultures of my ancestors that the conquerors spent centuries trying to wipe out!” Uh, yeah, this is totally the sort of thing I could see happening in this scenario, but I think it’d probably be kind of uncomfortable to write or read, probably not something to talk about in much detail unless one can handle it with a sensitivity I’m not sure I’d be capable of.

[recovery-within-the-iris]

Political rant to gain some courage

Once you stop really caring how other people feel about you or your interests, you do become happier.

I get it, being into social justice and removing biase is a good thing and all but not everyone was raised to be completely unbiased and politically correct.

I can go on for days about how privilage truely dose shape the mind but its like your irredeemable if you have one flawed belief on here. People will tear you to shreds, sometimes rightly so but its like they dont know that people do change and they need to be pushed to in a manner that dosent call for their head if they arnt completely woke.

Im white, i recognize this gives me a privilage over colored people. I dont hate myself because im white and im proud of the heritage i have. Im proud of the many european places my ancestors came from and their culture. I may not approve of the actions commited by the government in those place all the time but i understand a whole country cant stand behind something realistically. I know being white dosent make me better than colored people and i advocate for equality for all races. I dont condone violence, missionarism or imperialism.

I have german roots, i enjoy learning about and participating in german culture and its events. I live near a city that has alot of German immigrants in it and is one of the only american cities that wide-spread celebrates Oktoberfest and has a german name. This dose not make me a fucking nazi. This dose not mean i condone the invasions the german military has done in the past aginest jewish, polish, greek etc. People. For fucks sake i have polish immigrant great aunts,uncles and cousins.

I mentioned having a partially german last name and heritage and had a proudly jewish account call me suspicious on the bases of " having an anti-semitic heritage".... What. Are you seriously gonna dehumanize, assume and dismiss an entire culture,country and millions of people based on the actions of one man in charge of the government for a short time?? The actions of his friends and the orders given to soldiers that upheld them? By that logic we can throw just about every single country in existance under the bus for something. This dosnt mean i dont recognise the holocaust, it also dosent mean i condone the active mistreatment jewish people still recieve today. I actively advocate aginest anti-semitism and nazism.

However, If i was an actual nazi per what that account assumed of me, i would be advocating my own death. Im gay, trans, autistic, mentally ill and have polish heritage... I also dont have blue eyes or blonde hair.... And based on the story of how my mom's side of my family came to america... You are spitting in the face of my great grandmother who survived a nazi invasion in holland...holy shit...

Its like people on here dont understand you can be partically privilaged on one side and not on the other and still be a decent person.

I have heavy german heritage and yet i dont comment on jewish issues other than to support the Jewish community.

Im white and yet i dont comment on colored people's issues other than to support the colored community.

I get it, if a privilaged person is over stepping their boundaries, call them out on it but advocating hate towards a whole group of people isnt more progressive or even intelligent.

The goal shouldnt be the oppressed minority attempting to put the privilaged majority in the place of oppression. It dosent teach them anything, your more than likely going to fail and you've gone from victim to bully pretty fucking quickly.

The goal should be equality and fair ness. Instead of this end all be all radical craziness push the scale to the opposite side shit, we should remove the whole fucking scale and everyone stands on equal footing.

No race is better than any other race. No gender is better than any other gender. No country is better than any other country. No religion is better than any other religion.

This isnt even centrism by this point. Its just equalism.

Honestly, being a minority isnt a get out of jail free card for you to harass one person on the actions of others who happen to be apart of it, wether or not by choice.

Example? Sure.

Im transgender. If terfs and transphobes are to be believed, im automatically doomed to rape, murder and torture other people. There are trans people who have raped murdered and tortured other people.But.. Umm.. Ive never raped, murdered or tortured another person... Also cis people have a privilage over me on account of me being of the oppressed minoriy of cis vs trans. Thats over stepping a boundary as most transphobes are cis.

I will call out a cis person or a trans person( looking at you truscum and transmeds) who are openly transphobic. I may call them names like cissy or other things.

I dont call my cis gf a cissy.

I dont call innocent cis people cissy.

What other cis people have done in the past dose not mean that the cis person i am interacting with now is transphobic.

I get it, being trans means you have to be on defence incase the cis person infront of you is openly and/or violently transphobic but its also not fair to assume they are. Yes, this may be considered catering to the majority but its also respectful of other people in a realistic setting.

If i accused a random cis person, who happened to be an aggressive trans ally, of being transphobic just on the basis of being cis. They'd be outraged and rightly so. Accusing someone of being inherently bigoted is... Ignorant.

If i was accused of being inherently racist just on the fact of being white, id be outraged.

If i accused a random binary trans person of being enbyphobic, they'd be outraged.

Any way, though this post has been all over the place, ill give some last concluding thoughts.

If you think your better than someone else who is part of a majority, simpley because you are part of the opposing minority. Your not woke, your not progressive and your really honestly just a dick.

Also being oppressed on one axis dose not erase your privilage on another and opression and privilage dose not exist in a vaccum. No one privilage trumps the rest and no one oppression trumps the rest.

Lastly, dont expect a fucking award for being a decent and respectful person to minorities. Woo hoo, your white and not racist, laa dee fucking da. Your straight and defended a gay person from someone homophobic like any decent person should, you want brownie points? The minority you protected will more than likely thank you but you shouldn't expect more than that.

Thats about it and if your gonna give me shit for pushing for real equality rathur than real superiority( so it pushes out the satire and fun of things like gay superiority or the down with cis bus cause its a joke). You should really reevaluate the last three conclusions of this paragraph and addres your victim/superiority complex, thanks!

Now have a cute gif of zenyatta laughing

[roxannepolice]

I share your desire for complexity but if they wanted to make a grey political story LF would not have invoked neo nazi imagery with the FO. Any time a creator does that it’s a shorthand for b&w conflict bc it’s basically the only b&w conflict we have irl. Individual chars can be redeemed but I have zero doubt that the moral-political axis will remain unchanged in ix. If LF wanted us to question sides their villains would be based on a different analogue.

Ok, so first of all I may get a little foul-mouthed here but tbh to a person raised and living in a country which had dubitable pleasure of being stuck between Third Reich and USSR, has never been full of innocent tolerant lambs in their own right and is currently dealing with the freshest wave of extreme right - because mind you, they’re not neo-nazis, since nazism is only limited to Germany, at least according to them - politicizing GFFA is a laugh but really a cry. So if that’s a sensitive or in any way triggering issue to someone, I apologize and please, just stop here.

I dunno what to tell you, anon. That OT didn’t stray away from Riefenstahl style for rebels too?

That resistance uniforms aren’t exactly immune to their own connotations?

That the broomstick boy has a pose straight from a soviet propaganda poster?

That the story we’re getting basing on the esthetic is so mindnumbingly stupid, useless and self-congratulating Disney-LF would have saved a whole lotta money if they just gave the audience paid oral pleasure or sold ice cream to those below 18 instead of making the sequels and the effect would have been essentially the same? 

Like, really, what’s the f*cking point of this whole trilogy if it’s there to reassure us bad guys™ are still irredeemably bad and there is no other conceivable evil? Because this is what the neo-nazi imagery essentially boils down to when you don’t apply real world politics - fo are neo-empire first and foremost and since empire had nazi imagery, they have neo-nazi imagery. They’re basically the same villains as the ones in OT - which either means that New Republic hasn’t dealt with them as they should have - or DLF really has no better idea than to lick my centro-leftist ass, because as far as making a difference by scaring actual neo-nazis is concerned, make no mistake, they won’t f*cking care about the “jewish propaganda”, they’re romantic rebels on a crusade against an evil globalist empire (unfortunately that video has no english translation and I don’t really want to give it too many views but if someone is interested I can direct them to a video of polish right-wing publicist interpreting TFA. essentially, he gets he’s fo. and has zero f*cks to give). Having fo gratuitously vanquished will accomplish nothing but cheerlead on people who already are against neo-nazis and personally I’m mistrustful of flattery in any form and for any reason. You could argue it will influence the future generation - yet somehow after empire got vanquished we still have the same problem.

And before anyone asks and what would the reintegration accomplish I openly say nothing as well, simply provide better drama which I insist should be a priority here.

A story in which we get essentially the same villains as the last time is the story in which individual redemptions, let alone individual bendemption, are the one thing that won’t happen, because this puts us back at the end of RotJ, especially now that we know Vader wasn’t the only redeemed imperial. And this basically translates to Disney-LF admitting they have nothing interesting to add to SW and are openly going to milk my money banking on nostalgia and stroking activist ego - in which case I admire their honesty but would rather have the ice cream. TSequels’ ending will either have to feature some form of reintegration of numerous fo members - even if that reintegration is imprisonment, prison is still part of the society, unlike exile - or have each and every one of them blown to smithereens - or admit that it was dramatically useless. I’m nost sarcastic here, if someone can give me good dramatic justification for the trilogy which ends in exactly the same place as the previous did, I will be only grateful, because I know what I’m suggeting is controversial - but it’s a result of longish analysis of potential courses the story can take. 

But ok, I also don’t want to sound like I completely dismiss the esthetical implications. By moral ambiguity I definitely don’t mean that the tables will turn a 180° and fo will turn out to be the heroes and resistance villains all along. What I do hope to see is darker and lighter shades of grey, translating to resistance crossing some moral barriers and fo members maybe not being indiscriminately brainwashed evil zombies - which is simply an amplification of what we’ve already seen about rebels and empire in Rouge One and Solo.

I suppose the save middle ground is the stormtrooper rebellion, though again, personally I’d be delighted to see Mitaka’s happy ending and wouldn’t really mind Hux’s epic redemption through taking care of stray cats in the galaxy. The stormtroopers already have a personalized advocate in form of Finn, are very widely aacknowledged as kidnapped and brainwashed children, have their original rather than nazi outfits, and have essentially been there since the clone wars only the new republic decided to put them on the same shelf with the empire. Funnily enough, I’ve actually seen speculations that involve the stormtrooper rebellion but no bendemption - and if thinking we’ll only get individual redemptions is misssing the rythm, this attitude is missing the melody. The individual and political subplots in Star Wars aren’t simply running along, they’re exact mirrors of each other: 

few hours after the Tuscan massacre Palpatine receives emergency powers

Padme gives birth to the twins on the same day that she co-created the rebellion 

Anakin willfully becomes Vader on the same day that the republic became the empire in thunderous applause 

Vader’s husk burns to release Anakin’s spirit simultaneously with empire getting scored the major defeat releasing republic’s spirit 

essentially, the republic rebels wanted to restore was technically empire all along, just as the father Luke searched for was Vader all along 

Kylo kills Han hours after FO destroys the Hosian system. 

This isn’t some ubermeta analysis, it’s just something a sensitive viewer perceives and non-sensitive still likes without conscious recognition.

In summary - I just can’t look at Kylo Ben and see a broken abuse victim and then indiscriminately shrug my shoulders at fo and stormtroopers - nor can I bank on stormtrooper rebellion and assume Kylo’s an irredeemable psychopath.

[freifraufischer]

I saw you posted a thing about the Germans killing Namas and Hereros in Namibia between 1904 and 1908. I would just like to talk about how the British invented the Concentration Camp during the 1899-1902 2nd Anglo-Boer War on Afrikaans people (or Boers). You can read about it on Wikipedia if you type in “Emily Hobhouse” or “Lizzie van Zyl” (the photos of her are shocking to see). Also, the Americans invented Zyklon B (same gas the Nazis used) to use on Mexicans (Posting for historical accuracy)

While your information about British South African concentration cams is accurate your information about Zyklon B is both inaccurate and misrepresentative.  It was invented by Bruno Tesch, Gerhard Peters and Walter Heerdt for the German company Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung mbH.  I suggest From Cooperation to Complicity: Degussa in the Third Reich by Peter Hayes if you are interested in the history of corporate chemical giants and the Holocaust.  It’s use by the US government on the Mexican border was for delousing clothing (which along with disinfesting ships, warehouses, and trains was the labeled use).  You can find the story inRingside Seat to a Revolution by David Dorado Romo.

It was very racist and very likely killed or harmed many Mexican immigrants but we’re talking about a time when we were much less generally knowledgeable about the health affects of bathing people in pesticides (this picture is DDT).  

Your use of “the Americans invented Zyklon B to use on Mexicans” is inflamatory because for most people they don’t know that Zyklon (grades A, B, C, D, and E) were commercial pesticides not invented by the Nazis for killing humans.  The American government wasn’t trying to exterminate the Mexican farm workers they used Zyklon B on.  They were didn’t spray the people with the chemical in gas chambers as might be implied by your choice to pair the information with a discussion of German concentration camps in Africa.  They sprayed the workers clothing.  Did people very likely die from exposure to the chemicals in their clothing?  Almost certainly.  But that wasn’t the intent.  Anymore than killing people was the intent of the use of DDT.

Moreover the story of British Concentration Camps during the Boer War while horrifying did not have the same purpose that the German camps in German South West Africa did.  Many people died in those camps but the purpose was to guard a civilian population away from places they could provide material support to the Boer armies.  Did people die?  YES.  Are the pictures disturbing!?  YES.  There are many many horrifying aspects of colonialism.  This is a picture from the Madras Famine of 1877.  

I recommend the books Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World by Mike Davis; King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild; The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazismby Casper W. Erichsen and David Olusoga; andImperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya byCaroline Elkins.

If you are interested in the horrors of American Eugenics on the Mexican border I suggest Eugenic Nation:  Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America by Alexandra Minna Stern.  

If you are interested in how race and public health intersected in American government policy Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines by Warwick Anderson.

(because you should get your information on these kinds of things from better sources than WIKIPEDIA).

We should understand the impact and horrors of Colonialism for their victims but what we should not be doing is equating ALL colonial horrors with the Shoah.  The differences here are that the Imperial Germans were trying to exterminate the Namas and Hereros and the Nazis were trying to exterminate the Jewish people.  The British were NOT trying to exterminate the Boer population.  The Nazis were explicitly using Zyklon B to kill people.  The American government was using Zyklon B (which they did not invent) to kill lice.  

Since you are so interested in historical accuracy.

[insideanairport]

Aimé Césaire’s “Discourse on Colonialism“

❍❍❍

The publication of "Discourse on Colonialism” in 1955 was simultaneous with the Bandung Conference, which is considered a major event in the history of decolonial thinking and acting. Publication of this short book paved the way for Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. Through this process of evolution, postcolonialism was matured from its Marxian context to a broader and more encompassing discourse. Fanon was a student of Aimé Césaire. Although Fanon is associated with postcolonialism the most, it was Aimé Césaire who paved the way for Fanon, Said, Spivak, and Bhabha. Aimé Césaire’s early engagement with movements such as Negritude, Surrealism and many anti-capitalist organizations led to his political career at Martinique with the support of the French Communist Party (PCF). His intellectual career is intertwined with his political career which lasted until 2001.

In terms of methodology, Césaire is very much a Marxist, yet sometimes he is using Nietzschean (pre-postmodern postmodern) methods concerning science and universalist scientific thinking. He criticized the European and especially French humanists who theoretically justified colonialism and imperialism. The best example that he mentions in the Discourse is Renan, a racist humanist. An idealist philosopher who paved the way intellectually for colonialism. The burning quote that is extracted from Renan is probably the most racist quote I have ever read in academic texts and is taken from a book title La Refonne intellectuelle et morale [The Intellectual and Moral Refound].

Césaire also criticized M. Mannoni’s psychoanalysis thinking (especially regarding colonialism) as well as Bantu philosophy and its inherent racism, which was aimed to monopolize all the glory for the European race. However, in the Discourse, Césaire describes the European humanists as those “chattering intellectuals who are born stinking out of thighs of Nietzsche”. We also have to remember that Nietzsche seriously attacked Renan as comedian of the moral ideal in “On the Genealogy of Morality”.

Reading classical texts by Césaire and Fanon we realize that the history of postcolonial theory is as much entangled with psychoanalysis as it is with Marxism. This is however from an era in which not only intersectionality but the whole movement of poststructuralism and gender studies didn’t exist. The universities and especially the French philosophical establishment were stuck in universalism and scientific objectivity of pure knowledge. 

Césaire is criticizing M. Mannoni’s existentialism. He believed that M. Mannoni was using existentialism to blame the victims of colonization rather than the colonizers. M. Mannoni perceived French government as moderate in solely arresting the Madagascan deputies during the Madagascans revolts of 1947. Maud and Octave Mannoni were a French psychoanalyst couple who were later associated with Lacanian circle. Octave Mannoni spend some time in Madagascar and returned to France after WWII. He was inspired by Lacan and published some psychoanalytic books and articles. Similar to Aimé Césaire’s criticism of M. Mannoni, Octave's book "Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization" was criticized heavily by Fanon:

“[O.] Mannoni argued that all colonization is based on a relationship between psychological types: the authoritative white man and the dependent black one. Fanon began to see how European models of psychoanalysis located all psychotic conditions in individual psyches while ignoring very real material conditions – such as racism or colonialism. Fanon himself would observe that it was the lived experience of the blacks that induced psychotic behavior.” 

"In another psychoanalytic interpretation, Mannoni argued that when the native, black man dreams of guns, they are essentially phallic images. Fanon is outraged at this interpretation of the gun as a mere symbol. One cannot see only symbolism when the threat is very real, he believed. Fanon argued that the rifle in the hands of the colonized (in his dreams) is no Freudian symbol, or phallic metaphor – it is a real rifle he is dreaming of and one which can injure the black body (Black Skin: 79). One cannot lose sight of the real and be trapped within such fancy symbolism.” (1)

Similar to Nietzsche, Fanon shifts the debate from the individual psyche (conciseness) to a social relation. "The Oedipal is not, in the case of the Africans, rooted in the family (as Freud famously proposed), but in the social.” Pramod K. Nayar writes in his book on Fanon.

Today, we know that racism is not always as simple as a binary of black/white, yes/no, rather it’s a huge spectrum of cultural understanding-misunderstanding by the privileged whites that leads to hate and violence. Racism is not only the skinhead white nationalism of Neo-Nazis in Europe and KKK in the United States or the neo-fascist Islamophobes in India. Theoretical racism was and still is present in many universities and institutions around the world. In the context of post-war Europe, Césaire identified racism and Nazism as something within each and every European. He reminds us that its always easy to blame Hitler, Rosenberg, Jünger, and others. As Hitler is someone who made the white man look bad, who humiliated the white people in the most immediate way. He generated the killing and barbarism that was reserved for the non-whites.

“Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.” (2)

Europe is Moving Toward Savagery

In 1955 Césaire challenged the notion of White Supremacy, asserting that there is nothing superior in whites. He had argued that all non-Western societies were superior to European ones. (3) Césaire talked about the boomerang effect of colonialism. When the “civilized” people want to forcefully civilize the natives they in return become the savages through this forceful violence. He argues that the Idea of barbarism is a European invention. He places ‘Africa’ as the binary opposite of ‘Europe’. He comes up with the iconic mathematical equation Colonization = Thingification, which as its predicate we can discern the archaic colonial justification of colonialism; Christianity = civilization and Paganism = savagery. We all have seen the recent video of a white drunk pastor who is attacking and insulting the black hotel workers in Uganda. That incident can be another visible example of the continuation of this mentality.

Simultaneously, as a Marxist, Césaire analyzed capitalism and bourgeois societies which were very immediately observed in those days of post-WWII. In the Discourse, he asserts that both the Nation and Man is a construction, a bourgeoisie phenomenon. On page 43 he asserts: "I am talking about millions of men in whom fear has been cunningly installed, who have been taught to have an inferiority complex, to tremble, kneel, despair, and behave like flunkeys."

Césaire criticizes knowledge production as well as ethnography as something that only West studies and talks about the rest of the non-Western countries. The ending of the Discourse could have been timelier if he was using the same ending as the interview with René Depestre:

“I remember very well having said to the Martinican Communists in those days, that black people, as you have pointed out, were doubly proletarianized and alienated: in the first place as workers, but also as blacks, because after all we are dealing with the only race which is denied even the notion of humanity.” (2)

Bib.

1. Nayar, Pramod K. Frantz Fanon. s.l. : Routledge, 2013. 2. Césaire, Aimé, Pinkham , Joan and Kelley, Robin D.G. . Discourse on Colonialism. Aimé Césaire, Joan Pinkham, Robin D.G. Kelley : s.n. 3. Loomba, Ania. Colonialism / Postcolonialism (New Critical Idiom). s.l. : Routledge , 2005 (first published 1998).

______________________

[attackfish]

The Force Awakens: Nazism and Holocaust Imagery, a case study

The language of American cinema is full of Nazi imagery. They have become stock villains, symbolic of tyranny, and a convenient shorthand for evil. Villains who are not Nazis are often draped in Nazi-esque imagery, Nuremberg-style pageantry, or uniforms made to resemble Nazi uniforms. American filmmakers love to say “these people are evil because they are like Nazis.”

This has a cheapening effect on the memory of real Nazi atrocities. This use of Nazis and Nazi-esque villains almost never has any connection to the real evils committed by Nazis. Instead, it’s a reflection of the popular American conception of the Nazis as the “bad guys” that the American “good guys” fought and beat in World War II. The American movie and television industries feed off of, and also feed into this collective view of the Nazis, which flattens them down and glosses over what actually made the Nazis so dangerous and terrible, while allowing American audiences to give themselves a little pat on the back for being against Nazis, making it that little bit easier for them to put themselves in the hero’s shoes, saving the day the same way America saved a helpless and prostrate Europe and the Jewish people. This narrative ignores of course that the Americans were far from noble “good guys” who saved the day, and the Nazis were a very specific kind of evil, that Americans were (and more importantly are) not immune to.

This general American ignorance about Nazis and the Holocaust, and worse, the unawareness of this ignorance, leads to many problems, most commonly a lack of ability to distinguish Nazi-esque ideas when spouted by someone not wearing a Nazi uniform, and vulnerability to different forms of Holocaust denial. The most extreme form of Holocaust denial, the idea that the Holocaust didn’t happen, or happened on a much smaller scale is sadly all too common, but not the only form this general ignorance about Nazism can lead to. One more common form is the deracialization of the Holocaust. From the common, yet completely absurd idea that Nazis hated people with brown hair, often with the corollary that Jews were more likely to die because they were disproportionately brown haired, or that blond haired Jews were spared, (one only needs to look at photographs of the Nazi elite to see plenty of brown hair, and blond hair was anything but protective to the Jewish and Rromani targets of Nazi genocide) to the idea that Jewish people were targeted for “their beliefs”, the American understanding of the Holocaust often leaves out the racial nature of the Nazis’ crimes and ideologies, and ignores the way in which the Nazi regime was built on racist lies that scapegoated the Jewish and Rromani people as the ones to blame for Germany’s ills, and as inferior and decietful races, not as a matter of religious belief or even culture, but as a matter of blood.

Related to the deracialization of the Holocaust is the idea that the Nazi ideology arose from out of nowhere and “took over” an otherwise civilized Germany, ignoring the old and extremely well-established European tradition of antisemitic and anti-Rromani violence and mass-murder, and the thoroughly entrenched antisemitic and anti-Rromani ideas in European cultures and societies, including Germany, that Hitler and the Nazis fed off of. This makes it so much easier to view the Nazis as interlopers and corruptors than as an understandable and potentially reoccurring political ideology that can adapt itself to local bigotries.

Contrary to what might be expected, the overt us vs. them, good guys vs. bad guys, Good Americans (and allies, just remember the Americans are the important ones) against the Nazis narrative of World War II and the Holocaust also exacerbates the most extreme form of Holocaust denial that I mentioned above, the denial that it happened or was as large as every credible historian accepts. This is because at some point, a significant number of people run across the hard truth that the United States is nowhere near as virtuous as our grade school American history textbooks would have us believe, or as dedicated to living up to our ideals.  For some people, raised on this good guys vs. bad guys view of the war, it’s easier to flip the narrative to make the Americans the bad guys (and therefore the Nazis the good ones) than to do away with the narrative entirely.  Still others take the normal, even natural path of assuming that good and evil is some kind of zero sum game, so if America is less virtuous than they were taught, the Nazis must be more so.  Sadly this isn’t true, the fact that the Americans were far from flawless doesn’t mean that the Nazis didn’t industrialize mass murder while acting out an ideology that mandates genocide.

I don’t hold Hollywood responsible for the popular American misconceptions about the Nazis and the Holocaust.  I lay those primarily at the feet of the appalling state of history education in the United States, including the history of the Holocaust.  Instead, American film reflects the viewpoints of filmmakers who have themselves absorbed these misconceptions, and produce movies that reinforce them.

This is the film-making tradition that gave birth to the Star Wars original trilogy, and as much as I love Star Wars, it does epitomize this approach to depicting Nazi symbolism in film.  The Empire are bathed in Nazi aesthetic, from their uniforms, to the name of the stormtroopers, to imperial officers with strongly Germanic names.  Yet while the empire is undeniably evil, it isn’t really evil in the same way as the Nazis.  Although the EU took the Nazi symbolism, as well as the lack of visible women or non-humans in the imperial ranks, and extrapolated discriminatory policies towards nonhumans, and even their enslavement and exploitation, as well as rampant sexism in the imperial ranks, this is nowhere to be found in the movie itself, an we have no evidence to suggest that these bigotries are in any way foundational to the empire and to imperial philosophy the way Nazi bigotries were to their ideology.

Interestingly, we do see a genocide depicted onscreen in the original trilogy, when Alderaan is blown up.  However, the destruction of Alderaan is again in no way foundational to imperial ideology.  The Emperor didn’t come to power on the force of galactic hatred for Alderaanians.  Also, and this is crucial, the destruction of Alderaan has no real emotional weight, except to show us how evil the empire is.  The only Alderaanian the audience knows is Leia, and she survives.  It isn’t mentioned after A New Hope, and it just isn’t meant to be that important to the viewers.  This ties in pretty closely with other portrayals of genocide in film and fiction, including the portrayal of the Holocaust, in which the victims are rarely the focus of these stories, and are almost never meant to be figures the audience can identify with.  These tragedies are turned into a backdrop, and the victims into people for the heroes to either save or fail to save.

The prequel trilogy expands on the story of the empire, showcasing Palpatine’s rise to power and toppling of the Republic.  Again another genocide is shown, that of the Jedi, and this one has more emotional weight.  But Palpatine is no Hitler, although they both once held the title of chancellor.  He plays the long game, coming to power slowly, and slowly, carefully using the pretext of war to sap the protections the Republic had in place against someone like him seizing power.  Hitler did not.  He was almost certainly not emotionally or intellectually capable of that kind of manipulation.  Palpatine also carefully stokes anti-Jedi sentiment.  Unlike Hitler, who drew on existing antisemitism and anti-Rromani bigotry in the German population, and who made it the centerpiece of his ideology, Palpatine knows he has to eliminate the Jedi because they pose a real physical threat to him as a possible Sith Emperor, and works hard to make the subjects of the new empire ignore and forget the slaughter of  the Jedi instead making it central to his purpose.  Again, Nazi imagery in the empire is shown to be only a veneer over a very different kind of evil.

In fact, as I discussed a little here: [Link]. The Galactic Empire and Palpatine’s rise to power are much more reflective of American axieties during and shortly after the Nixon administration, and during the George W. Bush administration respectively. Palpatine’s empire is a dark mirror for what the United States might look like as a totalitarian regime and how it could get there. The use of Nazi (and also Soviet) imagery allows American audiences to project those fears off of themselves and onto an outside enemy. This not only cheapens the popular memory of Nazi evil, it also gives American audiences an out, excusing them from grappling with the Americanness of Palpatine’s empire.

The Force Awakens inherited its Nazi imagery-saturated villains from the earlier Star Wars movies.  The filmmakers involved had several choices as to what to do with this inheritance.  Palpatine’s empire was gone.  They had three choices.  They could ignore the Nazi-esque elements of Star Wars’ past imagery and attempt to forge a new visual language, they could continue with Nazi-esque design elements and villains who aside from aesthetics didn’t actually resemble Nazis much at all.  Or they could take that Nazi imagery and actually do something with it.

The Force Awakens opens with an act of Nazi-inspired mass murder, the Einsatzgruppen style slaughter of the village on Jakku.  To most Americans, the Holocaust was the death camps and their gas chambers.  However, millions of Jewish and Rromani people in Eastern Europe died at the hands of Nazi killing squads called Einsatzgruppen.  These mobile killing squads would go into a village, round up all of the Jewish and Rromani people, take them to a mass grave, line them up at the edge, and shoot them.  It’s this imagery and not the camps that the slaughter on Jakku evokes.

This scene alone is a tremendous break with the movie-making tradition I outlined above.  Not only does it use an actual example of Nazi-like crimes instead of simply Nazi aesthetic, it also shows the villagers fighting back.  They shoot at the stormtroopers, and yet are slaughtered anyway.  During the Holocaust, many Jewish and Rromani victims and survivors fought as resistance fighters, or partisans, or took part in uprisings in the ghettos and camps.  The American narrative of the Holocaust portrays the victims as going meekly to their deaths, but in reality many of them armed themselves and fought to protect themselves and their communities, and died anyway.

This particular narrative, of the victims of the Holocaust and other genocides as helpless victims who did not fight back is so strong that @lj-writes mentioned to me that she completely forgot the villagers had fought back on Jakku until re-watching the scene, something she mentions again here: [Link].

The other extremely unusual thing about this scene is that we see it happening. Usually if this kind of slaughter of a village does take place, the audience finds out about it when the heroes stumble upon the burned out wreckage, as for example Luke does with his aunt and uncle’s farm.  Instead, not only do we see it happen, but two of our heroes are there to participate, one as a captive and survivor, the other as a stormtrooper refusing to kill.  This act of mass murder is shown as emotionally important to these two heroes, as a major part of their story.  Simply put, Finn’s refusal to murder for the First Order, refusal to go along with Nazi-style atrocities, is central to his storyline.

Equally unique is the fact that not only do we see the slaughter itself, but even though there are two central characters present, one of whom has a storyline intimately bound up in this moment, the camera instead shows us the final act of slaughter from the point of view of the people being fired upon.  In this moment, we the audience are asked to identify with the victims, and see through their eyes.  Depictions of the Holocaust and other genocides so rarely ask us to identify with the victims.  It’s uncomfortable.  It’s frightening.  It’s far easier to make them seem passive and somehow less like humans and more like objects, exactly the way their murderers saw them.  Yet, The Force Awakens, at the very start of a sci-fi adventure movie asks us to do exactly this.

The second scene that is critical to understanding the way The Force Awakens uses Nazi imagery for the First Order is the Nuremberg-style rally on Starkiller base.  In this scene, General Hux is transformed from a smug, sinister but bland bureaucratic cog into a thundering, charismatic, foaming terror, screaming out his articulation of the philosophy behind an act of mass murder.  Along with the speech itself, shot in glorious and disturbing tribute to Triumph of the Will, we are given beautiful and also horrible scenes of that mass murder, and the destruction of planets full of people, forced to watch as their death comes for them.  We are given an immediate association between Nazi-style rhetoric, and this act of genocide.  Nazism leads directly to mass death.

It’s significant I believe that the director of The Force Awakens, and all of the scriptwriters are Jewish.  They bring this Jewishness, and their own perspective on the Holocaust, unique, obviously, from that of Gentile America to their roles as filmmakers, and I believe it shows most profoundly in their treatment of Nazi and Holocaust related imagery and the whys of Nazi-esque villainy in the movie.  A huge part of why this movie and this portrayal of the First Order was so refreshing for me as a Jewish woman is that the views it draws on treat Nazi atrocities as something much more real and relevant, and treats Nazis not as monsters that brave Americans fought, but as a real and present danger, and treats its victims as human beings who might have been us.  This perspective comes from belonging to one of the peoples the Nazis tried so hard to eliminate, and from being forced from childhood to imagine ourselves in the victims’ place.

This is Nazi imagery in filmmaking done right, done respectfully and done effectively.  This use doesn’t simply draw on Nazism to code our villains as villains.  It doesn’t simply say without substance that our villains are evil because they are like Nazis.  Instead The Force Awakens says these people are like Nazis, and this is what Nazis do.  And then it shows us what people should do when faced with Nazis and their ilk, fight it, don’t accept it, refuse to participate, and resist no matter the cost.  The Force Awakens turns the one-sided standard use of Nazi imagery in American film back on itself, making a statement about Nazism as well as a statement about the movie’s own villains.  And in doing so, it turns the Nazi imagery draping their villains from a cliche into something that strengthens and enriches the movie’s storytelling.

[the-merricatherine]

It all starts with the children and with white women. Black Genocide wouldn’t work without white women, who are the hidden key to it. You know, we say genocide is a male military thing, men’s deeds alone: In Germany the gestapo in uniforms, with submachine guns, ordering all the Jews out of their houses into trucks and trains. There’s never any German women in the picture. But that’s not how genocide started, only how it ended. In Germany the campaign to wipe out the Jews began against the children. German women began organizing during the 1920s to stop their children from associating with Jewish children. Mothers warned their children to stay away from all Jews. Jews were characterized as not only 'subhuman' animals, but very dangerous criminals and perverts who wanted to get pure white children into their hands. It was white women’s mission, the Nazis said, to protect their families by keeping the 'Jew' away. Shoppers boycotts of Jewish stores and demands that Jewish children be sent to separate schools were conducted by German women. The movement to push Jews out of every part of German life began with children in the home, and as it gathered strength it extended to the schools, to blocks and then neighborhoods, to rural towns and small cities, then to workplaces. Only then did the government begin to strip the Jewish people of first legal rights and then of German citizenship. The Jewish reservations (death camps) were not the first but the last stage in a complex genocidal machinery. Violent attacks and terrorism against Jews, at first isolated incidents, grew in number over the years. Nazis shouted that they were only protecting German women and children, that Jewish criminality and animal-like behavior forced good Germans to defend themselves. The idea of violence against Jews began to be accepted as normal, just part of life. For years the police pretended to be trying to protect Jews (just like the u.s. police), although it could be seen that many more Jews and revolutionaries were being arrested than Nazis. After 1933 the police and the Nazis merged, with beating and killings of Jews being done under police protection. It wasn’t until nine years after that and 20 years after it all began, when the Jewish community had been already pushed out, dazed and ground down, in 1941, that death camps could begin. While German revolutionary women died trying to stop the Nazis, most German women either supported genocide or said that it was men’s affairs and had nothing to do with them. This was the position adopted by the middle-class white feminist movement. Striving for equal rights with their men was the program of the women’s movement, which argued that German feminists shouldn’t be distracted from their own concerns by what it defined as male political issues (genocide, fascism). And armed struggle against imperialism was viewed by the women’s movement with horror, as unfitting their view of the gentle, nonviolent nature of civilized white women (kind of like the delicate Southern belle and her mate, the slavemaster). Nazism was indeed a male movement, in which even Nazi women held a very subordinate position. But it was dependent upon women. It was women who made genocide possible. Not only were women men’s invaluable supporters, loyally taking care of their Nazi husbands and raising Nazi children, but they played the frontline role in the early stages of genocide. Without women’s help, active and passive, the Nazis could never have justified genocide as necessary for the defense of the white family and children. And how are amerikkkan women different from those German women? On April 20, 1987, a small brick house at 171-27 Gladwin Avenue, Fresh Meadows, Queens, was torched to stop the City from moving in six homeless 'boarder babies', who were presumed to be Black. Rita Amato, the woman who heads the local white citizens council, said happily: 'When I saw what happened to the house I was relieved.' Amato has since been arrested as one of the five who did the arson. Another white woman who lives across the street told reporters: 'Listen, we have nothing against babies. But the mothers, the dope addicts. My husband says, we will never be safe anymore. It’s nothing but dopists.' And the neighborhood white children have been taught to imagine how dangerous these Black infants might be. One sixth-grade girl at the local Catholic school thought it was a moral dilemma: 'It’s good, but it’s bad. Those babies could grow up to be rowdy teenagers. But then, they need to sleep somewhere–you know?' That was a lot better than the 11- year old boy who asked a reporter: 'Are they still going to be here when they grow up?' …What if they were, asked the reporter to whom he had posed the question. Richard shrugged: 'Well, I mean this is a peaceful neighborhood, not noisy. I mean, they’re not brats. Not really brats. But growing up without parents they wouldn’t be the same, you know?' Only 11 years old, and already he has been taught the twisted rationalizations for pushing Black people out. This is a big theme with white women, how they and their families are endangered unless Black people are kept far away. Black people, even infants, are said to be the aggressors. White people when they torch buildings and shoot and conduct hate campaigns are said to only be defending themselves. Like the Germans did. Building the public mood that excuses and prepares people to commit genocide. If even six Black infants without parents are too dangerous, what is safety? What is the logical conclusion? It’s even more interesting how some prominent white women have come out making excuses for the terrorists. Queens Borough President Claire Shulman said that it was the government’s fault for not reassuring the local homeowners that no adult Black people would be moved in: 'Otherwise, they imagine the worst. These are our people, our citizens. You can’t ride roughshod with them, and they’re afraid.' Lynda Spielman, chairperson of Community Board 7, said that the firebombing was caused by 'frustration' from the City’s high-handed attitude. Violent whites are again pictured as the victims not the criminals. Most interesting of all was 'feminist' newspaper columnist Beth Fallon in the New York Post. Her column stated that the real issue is tighter white control over Black people. This column was valuable precisely because it starts to take the wraps off: 'The City is being overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of people who are unable or unwilling to care for themselves or their children, and who abandon the latter to the care of the state… City officials have said that family visits, if any, and visits of prospective foster parents for these infants would be a neutral sites away from the home. It is the unscheduled visits that evoke part of the neighborhood’s fears, and it is these which should be met with immediate, effective control… The issue of control is really the deciding one… Staten Island, indeed, prefers to accept a prison site to sites for the homeless. More control is exercised at a prison, and the threat to the community is therefore perceived as less.' This isn’t hard to de-code: the government should reassure the white majority by 'immediate, effective control' of any Black persons who enter white areas. Perhaps by police passbooks, like in South Africa? Facilities for Black people should become more like prisons, for 'more control' is needed. Any uncontrolled Black people are a threat, and presumably white people are justified in defending themselves. And this is a woman newspaper columnist. It isn’t one journalist who is just loosely mouthing off. There’s a real convergence here. The New York Times has taken up the demand for more prison-like control over Black people. In an editorial about the'“NIMBY syndrome'('Not in My Back Yard'), the most influential newspaper in the u.s. has called for all new homeless shelters to include a built-in police station, so that homeless Black people would be under 24-hour police watch to reassure white people: 'What’s to be done to ease Nimby apprehensions? One response is to introduce a round-the-clock police presence in each of the new facilities. Storefront offices could serve as police sub-stations…' The welfare system and the prison system are really only one system. You should see now what the logical conclusion of this propaganda is, what it is pointing white people towards. Someday everyone will see it, but you should see it now. Time is a thing. If the white majority wants to push Black children out, do the welfare agencies and their group homes represent a decent white alternative? No, for the same reason that Malcolm X used to say that integration is not the opposite of segregation, only a different version of the same thing. In the wake of the firebombing, Mayor Koch rushed out to the Queens house to hold a public meeting. He told local whites, as press and TV surrounded him, that each white neighborhood must overcome its reluctance towards government facilities for Black poor and homeless: 'They all think they’re being asked to do more than everybody else. We are trying to spread the burden.' Beth Fallon and Mayor Koch are saying that Black people are too dangerous to have children. That white people and their government have to be in control over Black children. That Black children have to be taken away. And this is how the Jefferson Plan begins.

Butch Lee

[bluewatsons]

Natalie Scholz, Ghosts and Miracles: The Volkswagen as Imperial Debris in Postwar West Germany, 62 Comp Stud Soc & Hist 487 (2020)

Abstract

Starting with the author's own experience of ghostliness in the archive, the article explores the political meaning of the postwar Volkswagen in West Germany as embodiment of the country's “economic miracle.” The investigation follows the uncanny in texts and images about the Volkswagen between 1945 and 1960 and argues that the car carried with it a “public secret” as a “debris” from the Nazi empire that silently transcended the 1945 divide. This reading of the Volkswagen as well as the methodological path toward it highlight a phenomenon that postcolonial scholars have described as “haunting”: a confusion about the relationship between past and present that also bears on those who study the past. Taking this analysis as an encouragement to revisit the powerful myths and “miracles” of postwar consumer cultures in the West from a new angle, the article calls for historical genealogies of these myths that conceive of the postwar West as a—not yet—postcolonial space and that cross the 1945 threshold.

Getting the Joke

How many Jews fit in a Volkswagen?

Five hundred. Two in the front, three in the back, and the rest in the ashtray.

I remember this joke. Someone at school told it to me in my schooldays in Westphalia, West Germany. The memory is both distinct and vague. I suppose it happened in the early 1980s, when I was around ten years old. I had all but forgotten about the joke until a few years ago. It popped into my mind again like a ghostly apparition after I had begun to study the cultural meaning of the Volkswagen during the 1950s in West Germany.1

“To study social life, one must confront the ghostly aspects of it” writes the sociologist Avery Gordon. “This confrontation requires (or produces) a fundamental change in the way we know and make knowledge.”2 Gordon contends that an uncanny feeling stirred by a surprising encounter in the archive should be taken seriously as important information and therefore should be followed up. Ghostly matters, the title of Gordon's book, are ghostly because they arise insisting that they encapsulate something difficult, painful, and essential to what we study, yet they cannot be captured adequately with any of the conceptual frameworks that we have at our disposal. Confronting the ghostly means starting “with the marginal, with what we normally exclude or banish, or … never even notice.”3How many Jews fit in a Volkswagen?

There is a historiographical tradition which has taken its clues, just as Gordon does, from anthropological insights about the importance of the marginal and of the odd detail as a starting point for studying hidden cultural structures and codes.4 Robert Darnton illuminated eighteenth-century print culture in Paris by attempting to “get the joke” of “the great cat massacre.”5 In such studies, the importance of starting with the odd detail derives in part from the fact that the cultural reality studied is quite far away from the historian's own reality and therefore requires such a method to make sense of it.6 But where does it lead us if we try to “get” the Volkswagen joke in a similar way? Where does it lead us if we take the joke seriously as that marginal element possibly holding the key to “know” differently, and maybe better, an aspect of contemporary history that is all too well known. A contemporary historian who decides to start exploring a culture “where it seems to be most opaque”7 enters a particularly strange terrain. The most opaque may turn out to be the most familiar, the most familiar may turn out to be the most obscure.

We usually assume that bizarre phenomena are either rare in contemporary European history or merely exist on the “margins” of society.8 In that respect “our” extended present often begins shortly after 1945, closely linked to the establishment of “the West” as the dominant political and geographical framework of thinking. It is no coincidence that scholars of postcolonial history have been attuned to the dimensions of estrangement in contemporary history, to the difficulty of recognizing the familiar when it bears the traces of that which society does not want to know about itself. Ann L. Stoler has coined the term “colonial aphasia” to grasp how widespread insights about colonial and postcolonial history become systematically forgotten again, dissociated from the national histories and excluded from the prevalent narratives.9 The Volkswagen's symbolic meaning in contemporary Germany is, as I want to argue, an example of a similar phenomenon.

The Volkswagen started out in 1938 as one of the Third Reich's most heavily propagated people's products. Hitler promised a “people's car” to every family within the racially defined Volksgemeinschaft and the German population received this promise with overwhelming enthusiasm. For years, the car was omnipresent in propaganda publications, various exhibitions, and press coverage. Yet, it was never produced in large numbers in the newly built factory east of Hannover. From 1939 onward, the Volkswagen factory, relying on forced labor, produced weapons instead, as well as around fifty thousand Kübelwagen, a military version of the Volkswagen delivered to the German Wehrmacht. When the production started again in 1946 and increased after 1948, it was the first time that the car as it was originally conceived became a mass-produced reality, populating German streets. Through its enormous success, both in Germany and abroad, the Volkswagen developed into a symbol of the “economic miracle,” of West Germany's new beginning. Eventually it became “one of West Germany's few largely uncontested collective symbols.”10

The latter, post-1945 part of this story constitutes the basis of the established Volkswagen narrative in Germany. This narrative rests on the assumption of a clear-cut cultural dissociation between the post- and the pre-1945 Volkswagen. Yet, how could the Volkswagen in the 1950s so successfully come to symbolize the new, post-fascist Germany, while it started out being so closely connected to the Germany of the Third Reich? Within the framework of interpretations developed in recent decades to better understand postwar West German history, it is far from obvious how to address this question. Neither the rise of consumer culture and the efforts to establish a viable democracy, nor the persistent reality of Nazi penchants, Volksgemeinschaft mentality, and the dominant memory culture of German victimhood suffice as interpretive schemes to grapple with the challenges this question raises.11 Few scholars have brought up the problem lurking behind this question, namely the relationship between the political meanings of mass consumption under Nazism and during the early Federal Republic.12

As an iconic commodity, the Volkswagen epitomizes this problem in a unique way. Until this day, it embodies Germany's successful transformation from the rubble of the Third Reich into a consumer-democratic model of the West. Yet, how did this transformation from the Volkswagen's meanings during the Third Reich to its postwar status as political symbol take place? The success of this transformation entailed burning down the bridges which we would need to properly see its genesis. Making a genesis invisible in turn is how “miracles” come into being. Material from the margins is needed to better understand the historical emergence of Germany's “miracles.” Trying to get the Volkswagen joke means confronting the ghosts lurking behind the trope of “miracles” that worked to make them invisible.13

How many Jews fit in a Volkswagen? In her introduction to the volume Miracle Years, historian Hanna Schissler mentions that she and other historians of her age remember a version of the joke from their childhoods in 1950s West Germany.14 In the early 1980s the American anthropologist Alan Dundes and the German ethnologist Thomas Hauschild collected the Volkswagen joke together with other so-called Auschwitz jokes in the city of Mainz and published their findings in an English journal.15 To publish these anti-Semitic jokes in German they had to overcome their own reluctance as well as their tendency to minimize the scope of what they first thought to be “a marginal phenomenon” but eventually identified as a common linguistic practice in Germans’ daily lives.16

In 1983, the theater-maker George Tabori gave the Volkswagen joke a central function in his play Jubiläum (“Jubilee”), which premiered in Bochum on 31 January 1983, the fiftieth anniversary of Hitler's rise to power to which the title “Jubilee” refers. The main characters are ghosts of dead people who are all either victims of the Nazi regime or of postwar National Socialist attitudes.17 As they talk about their suffering, they expose the ways in which the Nazi past and its afterlife still haunt German society. The Volkswagen joke is uttered three times during the play, tormenting three of those characters.18 It is a central motif that serves to enact on stage the presence of the Nazi past in West German everyday life. George Tabori was born in 1914 into an assimilated Jewish family in Budapest and had lived in Germany since 1968. His father had died in Auschwitz.

How did the joke work and what can it tell us about the Volkswagen? The joke takes the car that has become a symbol of postwar West Germany and links it to the group of Jews, the very people that the Federal Republic's predecessor polity, the Third Reich, had set out to annihilate. How many Jews fit in a Volkswagen? Why ask this question? Would Jews fit differently in the car than other people? The first part of the answer is a surprise, the number of Jews is much higher than the spatial dimensions of the Volkswagen would allow. The second part of the answer resolves the surprise by, first, reducing the number to the usual five and by, second, transforming the remaining Jews from living human passengers into the dead material of ashes that perfectly fits in the car's ashtray.

From a psychological perspective one could say that the joke manages anti-Semitic aggression and feelings of superiority as well as a German consciousness of the Holocaust—possibly accompanied by feelings of shame. Following psychological and sociological theories of humor, it seems appropriate to assume that the Volkswagen joke, when it “works,” releases those impulses and feelings, which are usually repressed due to a social taboo, into their expression in the form of laughter.19 But this effect requires that the joke builds and dissolves a tension through some form of witty joke-work. In this case, the joke-work is constructed around the Volkswagen. The Volkswagen joke, as any joke, uses the tension between the normal and the forbidden. It evokes something that was well-known and recognizable and at the same time unspeakable. The joke does not only connect the mass murder of the Holocaust directly to the object of this specific car. More importantly, it expresses the broken relationship between Germans and Jews through the object of the Volkswagen.

Such a reading, however, seems to contradict the existing Volkswagen historiography as well as all those stories about and images of the car that were widespread in West Germany after 1948. We are used to detecting in these images and stories the following messages: The production and export success of the Volkswagen turned Germany into a once again accepted, even respected member of the Western world. Its ubiquity on West German streets marked the end of postwar misery and the beginning of economic recovery. For millions, the car represented the promise of a better life. It epitomized feelings of freedom and the joy of driving through West Germany's rebuilt cities and idyllic landscapes, of going on a weekend trip with the family, or even of traveling to foreign countries. The Volkswagen imaginary, in short, made Germany a radiant modern society, for which the past of the lost war became almost as elusive as a bad dream, or as unoffending as a challenge that was successfully overcome.

How do all those well-known meanings of the postwar Volkswagen relate to the past of a Germany re-modelled as a racial community? How do they relate to the past of a greater German Reich that, as Alon Confino has convincingly argued, was imagined in many ways as “a world without Jews” long before it put this imagination into the practice of mass murder?20 The postwar success of the Volkswagen represents, both in collective memory and in historiography, the development of West Germany into a Western, consumer-oriented society.21 But something is missing from this story that has never been seriously addressed.22

By using the joke and an advertisement as my entry points to follow the traces of the ghostly in texts and images about the Volkswagen, a different meaning of the car during the years between 1945 and 1960 has come to the surface. This meaning was both obvious and not obvious at the same time, similar to what Michael Taussig has named a “public secret,” defining it as “that which is generally known but cannot be articulated.”23 Although “public secrets” can emerge in many forms, their characteristics match what scholars of material culture have claimed about the specific ways in which material objects become culturally significant. Due to their durability in time and their physical presence in space, material objects can be invested with a highly affective quality that differs from the significance of immaterial symbols. Concrete objects derive their meanings both from linguistic and visual discourses about them just as well as from the bodily interactions between people, places, and objects.24 In this way a material object can incorporate conflicting and contradictory meanings without difficulty.25 In other words, it lends itself to creating a silent presence of that which is generally known but cannot be articulated, next to, and possibly contradicting, that which is generally known and can be articulated. The Volkswagen, this mass-produced material object, was the vehicle in which millions of postwar Germans imagined driving away from their past. But they were also driving “debris” from the Nazi empire.26 The presence of this “imperial debris” was made invisible and transformed into ghostliness through the postwar trope of (consumer) miracles, inviting us to further explore the post-fascist and postcolonial cultural conditions of postwar Western dreamscapes of consumption.

Genealogy of an Advertisement

A Volkswagen advertisement was published in August 1960 in the high-brow cultural magazine magnum (image 1) The text says: “Young people—‘critical generation’—chrome-sparkling catchwords and mere promises have ceased to impress them already long ago. They try to find the meaning behind the things, they ask—and expect clear answers, they calculate—and expect a reasonable, reliable value. Young people (of every age) examine the Volkswagen—and then drive Volkswagen again and again.”27 The photo shows a group of young people inspecting the Volkswagen from different angles. The text presents the young generation as rational consumers who choose the Volkswagen for its reliable value for money. The ad gives the already existing meaning of the Volkswagen as a symbol of West Germany's economic recovery a twist by associating it with an informed approach to things that is necessary for a functioning democracy. It shows the Volkswagen as a central element of the new, economically successful, and democratic West German society. Germans’ capability to dispassionately scrutinize and subsequently choose the Volkswagen becomes proof of the vehicle's good quality. Or is it the other way around? Does the ad promote the quality of the car, or does it promote the quality of the German people?

Image 1. Volkswagen advertisement, published in Magnum 31 (Aug. 1960). © Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft.

These young people are different than people used to be, the text tells us, because “chrome sparkling catchwords and mere promises have ceased to impress them already long ago [my emphasis].” This sentence clearly evokes a change of mentality. The “long ago” leaves the earlier mentality in a foggy past, but in order to make sense the reader probably had to assume that this past was situated prior to May 1945. The text therefore conveys the idea that choosing the Volkswagen implies choosing a different Germany than the Germany of the Nazi past.28 The image, however, seems completely situated in the timeless presence of a rational modernity. Or does it? This effect appears in a different light when we juxtapose the photo with a series of other photos from 1938 and from the following years of the Nazi regime's intensive propaganda for the Volkswagen, or “KdF-car” as it was also called after the Nazi leisure time organization “Strength through Joy” (Kraft durch Freude).29 A group of people surrounding and examining the Volkswagen was a standard motif of that campaign, starting with the presentation of the first small model to Hitler by Ferdinand Porsche in 1938 (image 2), and continuing with photos of the public presentation of test cars all over Germany in the subsequent years (image 3). These are the images of a German people that was developing a “KdF-car psychosis,” as the Social Democratic opposition put it in one of their clandestine reports in 1939.30

Image 2. Adolf Hitler receives a Volkswagen model for his forty-ninth birthday. © bpk/Heinrich Hoffmann.

Image 3. Volkswagen in front of Sanssouci palace in Potsdam, 1938, photographer: Scherl, 28 Sept. 1938. © Süddeutsche Zeitung/HH.

A different interpretation of the advertisement now becomes plausible. The advertisement stages the car as an object that manifestly ensures the transformation of a society into a democracy by latently calling to mind its totalitarian past. The iconographic effect thus appears powerful not although there is this second layer of meaning, but precisely because of it. The question is: If the Volkswagen's success in the early Federal Republic had all been about leaving behind the Nazi past, why would the Volkswagen company in the year 1960 have had any interest in publishing an advertisement whose text, even if implicitly, conjured up precisely this past?

The car had obtained a sacrosanct status as a national symbol in the course of the 1950s. This status reached a peak three months after the Allied occupation of West Germany officially ended, when the production of the millionth Volkswagen was celebrated with great pomp at the factory in Wolfsburg on 5 August 1955. Yet, in 1957 and in 1959 a curious thing happened. The Volkswagen was attacked in prominent periodicals. Less than a year before the magnum ad, Der Spiegel, the most important political magazine in West Germany, started a full-blown offensive against this popular German symbol.31 The magazine's cover story consisted of a long interview with Heinrich Nordhoff, director of the Volkswagen plant.32 Under the headline “Is the VW outdated?” the interviewers confronted Nordhoff with their conviction that the existing Volkswagen model, with its streamlined body and bug shape, was decidedly behind the times. Nordhoff pointed to the commercial success of the Volkswagen as his main argument against such critique.

As the interview goes on endlessly about technical details, there is a mismatch between this matter-of-fact content and the journalists’ aggressive expressions of dissatisfaction with the car. But then, there is one short moment, appearing out of the blue, like the “strange accidents” that can be associated with instances of defacement,33 when the journalists of Der Spiegel articulate a very different form of discontent: “DER SPIEGEL: The automobile, as it is now, is, one could say, a homunculus, an artificial creation after a socio-political model, we all know after which one.”34 Nordhoff agrees with the claim, but pushes it away by saying, “This is not important in this context,” that it is “history,” that they should stay “with the matter itself.”35

In this passage, a problem comes to the surface that was obviously difficult to express openly, namely the perception that, together with the Volkswagen, something of the spirit out of which it was born remained present. The Volkswagen embodied a “homunculus,” an artificially created human being stemming from the Nazi past. As they try to argue that this past is still relevant, and problematically so, for the present Volkswagen, the journalists break an unwritten rule. Nordhoff strives to reestablish the threatened division between past and present. The public secret—“we all know after which one”—is not to be spoken about.

It had, however, already been written about. In 1957, the illustrated magazine Der Stern published an article by Alexander Spoerl, also under the title “Is the VW outdated?”36 “The Volkswagen,” the author stated, “has long ceased to be an automobile. It is a catchword. Yet, in everything that has to do with “Volk,” concepts are dangerous.” By complaining about how difficult it had become to say anything critical about it, Spoerl denounces the sacred status of the car. He formulates his own critique by presenting the Volkswagen as having an unusual “father”: “His mother was a very sound construction idea. His father was faith,” namely the “unflinching faith” of the Germans who believed the promises of the Third Reich. The words “unflinching faith” are put in quotation marks to identify them as Nazi language.37

In order to capture the true Nazi meaning of the car, a joke is told about a worker in the Volkswagen factory of the Third Reich who stole all the pieces of the KdF-Car to put them together at home. When his friend asks why he still hasn't assembled the car, he answers: “However I screw together the parts, it never becomes a car, but always a cannon.” These cannons, Spoerl claims, were in reality Volkswagen, namely the military Volkswagen-Kübel which is then presented as an anthropomorphic entity living through recent German history: “The VW-Kübel became the most loyal comrade of the German soldier. Afterwards he was the first ‘war criminal’ to be de-Nazified. He put on the Limousine again, the occupying soldiers fell in love with him, Wolfsburg received steel and the license for reconstruction. His off-road construction and the front-line experience made him well-suited for the slightly uneven postwar Germany. That is how he acquired his steadfast reputation.”38 Spoerl crossed the line of the usually unsaid by identifying the Volkswagen and the enthusiasm attached to it with the Germans’ “faith” in the Nazi movement and its promises. The article apparently caused a great stir, as references to it in automobile magazines indicate. Yet, the resulting discussion focused solely on the technical aspects and left the political dimension in the realm of the unsaid.39

This is the context in which we must read the cover story interview in Der Spiegel. It is also the context in which we should place the magnum advertisement. In 1957, Spoerl had exposed the public secret in an explicit and witty effort to desecrate the holy status of the Volkswagen. In 1959, the interview in Der Spiegel showed both a consciousness of the exposed secret and the impossibility of consistently naming it. Yet, in 1960 it was apparently sufficiently exposed to publish an advertisement which both evoked it and at the same time covered it up with another layer of meaning in order to make it disappear again.

These three examples are the most outspoken ones among occasional expressions of discomfort about the car and the unmanageable presence of its Nazi past, occurring often in the form of humor and irony, both in journalistic writings and in some of the advertisings for the Volkswagen during the 1950s.40 In 1952, a Volkswagen advertisement stated: “What has made [the Volkswagen] well-known and popular, what has made it the top-selling and much sought-after German car is not its history of origins, but the harmony of its technical and economical features its value as a utility vehicle without unnecessary and expensive freight [my emphasis].”41

The Volkswagen's history of origins that this ad explicitly tried to push away consisted first and foremost of the massive propaganda campaign which the National Socialists had organized to promote the Volkswagen and which had continued even during the war. According to historian Paul Kluke, writing in 1960, the Nazi Volkswagenpropaganda had a “magic effect” and the success of that campaign “nearly” turned the Volkswagen into a “symbol of National Socialist propaganda technique” and “of the blind confidence of all German social classes.”42 This campaign had produced the “chrome-sparkling catchwords and mere promises” that resonated so deeply into the postwar era that the postwar “critical generation” had to be declared immune to them in the magnum advertisement that was published in the same year as Kluke's analysis.

Taken together, the three examples discussed above make it possible to expose to a certain extent the workings of the public secret. Spoerl and the journalists of Der Spiegel expressed an uneasiness with what the Volkswagen silently embodied in the German public sphere and thereby tried to expose the secret and undermine its untouchable status. The 1960 ad implicitly referred to this uneasiness in a way that arguably paved the way for a conversion of the postwar public secret into something ungraspable for the younger generation. In 1962, Volkswagen started its first big ad campaign in the postwar German press with the German branch of the New York agency “Doyle Dane Bernbach” that had promoted the VW in the United States since 1959.43 Against the background of the growing discomfort about the Volkswagen at the end of the 1950s, the DDB campaign of the early 1960s can be interpreted as implicitly addressing the criticism that the car would be outdated (image 4).

Image 4. Volkswagen advertisement, “Es gibt Formen, die man nicht verbessern kann” (Some shapes are hard to improve on), published in Der Spiegel and Hörzu, 16 Dec. 1962. © Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft.

The brilliant irony and humor of the campaign broke with the dominant forms in which the car had been promoted during the 1950s. It thereby prepared the car's appropriation by a younger generation. The campaign brought about what the magnum ad of 1960 had already attempted, namely lifting the perception of the car out of its still present but usually subliminal implication in the Nazi project. It thus managed to transform the car's public secret of the 1950s into a different form of secret, one that encapsulated information about the early postwar period that was henceforth not “generally known” anymore. It thereby arguably generated a cultural condition of aphasia for younger Germans. The public secret and the attempts to unveil it during the 1950s spoke above all to the older generation. Younger Germans who had never directly been exposed to Nazi propaganda, Volkswagen or otherwise, were less able to properly “get” such coded messages.44 The 1962 campaign then started a process of rebranding that was largely successful given the subsequent absence of critical discussions about the postwar symbol's relationship with the Nazi era.45 What this process eventually left in its wake were ghostly matters in the form of nearly unreadable traces in the archive.

Driving the Volkswagen Through Space and Time

What were the narratives, metaphors, and images used in the postwar period that may have incited such expressions of discomfort about the Volkswagen? And what can those cultural scripts tell us about the hidden meanings of the car that eventually transformed into ghostly apparitions? When Spoerl identified the car with the German man in Der Stern, he took up an existing narrative. Already in 1949, the car magazine Motor-Rundschau presented the vicissitude of the Volkswagen since 1938 as the story of a young man named “Vinzenz.” This identification of the car and the German man through the change of times implied a physical continuity of both that included as one and the same car the Wehrmacht's Volkswagen, the Kübelwagen. During the war, Vinzenz the Volkswagen “proved himself as a loyal comrade and served in France, Russia, and Africa. Neither the cold in the east nor the heat in the desert sand harmed his primordially healthy constitution.”46 The Kübel seemed to enable the idea of a continuous existence of the Volkswagen through the change of times and, eight years later, Spoerl ironically criticized exactly this idea and its implications.

This common conflation of Volkswagen, Kübelwagen, and the German man directly counteracts the notion that the Volkswagen was a symbol of a new beginning and harks back to an heroic image of the Nazi war, an image closely associated with the conquering of geographic space.47 The postwar habit of describing the Volkswagen Kübel as a “loyal comrade,” of insisting that it was essentially the same car as the civilian Volkswagen and of conflating it with the German soldier, stemmed directly from Nazi propaganda. From May 1941 onwards, the magazine Arbeitertum, the nationwide organ of the German Labor Front, used the name “KdF-Car” or “Volkswagen” interchangeably for the military Kübelwagen that had just demonstrated its quality through its successful services for the German Africa corps.48 In an article from March 1942 car and driver merged into one: “Quickly advancing to the enemy, versatile in combat,” the Volkswagen was even more resilient than the German soldier. He conquered “the wide snow fields of Russia” and “the stony deserts of destroyed Soviet cities” as well as he resisted “North Africa's glittering sun.”49

Already in December 1940, an Arbeitertum cover article reiterated the promise that after the war “every German worker will own his Volkswagen and drive on German highways from Klagenfurt to Narvik. […] the German worker will not have to deal with time and space—due to his social status he will own the world!”50 This Nazi propaganda envisioned the postwar experience of owning and driving a Volkswagen as a form of conquering time and space. The promise that the “Volkswagen” would be available for every “German worker” came with the promise of a new (European) order under German leadership, including greater social equality within the racially defined “Volk.” The car functioned as a medium to imagine this future world in a concrete way: The German worker would drive his Volkswagen on the German Autobahn through the expanded German Reich, from the Austrian Klagenfurt to the Norwegian Narvik. Driving the car meant belonging to the German people, being part of the “people's body,” and—dominating the world.51

Traces of this envisioned future were still alive in the postwar imagination. The car transported the past's dream of the future into the postwar present. Yet, as the previously discussed articulations of discomfort indicate, the transition of these Nazi fantasies about the Volkswagen into the postwar presence was not self-evident. Indeed, it required a mythology. Such a mythology was delivered in 1951 when the young author Horst Mönnich published his first novel, Die Autostadt. It became an immediate success, selling more than a hundred thousand copies.52 Mönnich's novel is the most sophisticated and explicit postwar attempt to re-narrate the story of the Volkswagen. In 1968, Mönnich, a former Hitler youth and soldier during the war, summarized his 1945 moment of disillusionment with the question: “But where […], if this, in which we had wrongly believed, had never been Germany—where had Germany then been?”53 His novel's answer was: the real Germany had been contained, and had survived, in the form of the Volkswagen and in the form of the city and factory that produced it.54 Volkswagen director Heinrich Nordhoff praised the book in his foreword to the first edition as uncovering “truths” that “lie deeper than the visible, that touch the true core of events.”55

The text orchestrates the experiences of the German population during the Third Reich, the war, and its aftermath by looking through the prism of the Volkswagen, the factory, and the city. Like a force of nature, the machines, the factory, the streets, and the buildings of Wolfsburg form the glue that binds together all the different German characters from all regions of the former German Reich, many of them refugees. Large parts of the novel use organic metaphors to describe a mystic link between the people, the place, the factory, and the car: the organization of the city is compared to a human organism, the factory is “a being that has an autonomous life” which, together with the German workers, engenders another living being: the Volkswagen.56

The novel's transcendental worldview of organic wholeness ties in with many elements of Nazi culture and is reminiscent of what Jeffrey Herf has called “reactionary modernism.”57 It is the dream of a society without social differences, a redeemed organic entity realized through the workings of a soulful and animated technology embodied miraculously in the Volkswagen. Die Autostadt is, at its core, a founding myth that makes sense of Germany's historical rupture by presenting the Volkswagen as an object with magical qualities. The car that is repeatedly referred to as “the miracle” ensures the postwar resurrection of a West Germany rising from the ashes and ready to bring about its postwar economic recovery.58 The military Volkswagen Kübel plays a key role in enabling this mythical transformation.

The section dedicated to the Kübel's war exploits marks the transition from the car's and the city's Third Reich history to their new postwar life. While the car is depicted as a living being with superhuman capacities, the identity of the Kübelwagen, the Volkswagen, and the German soldier becomes an important element of the Volkswagen's transfer to the postwar world.59 The object of a rotating globe frames scenes that gradually display the various theaters of the German war of expansion. The moment of defeat is captured in the form of a burnt down Volkswagen followed by the standstill of the globe. This zero moment of standstill contains the seed of rebirth: The sun shines its light exactly on the place which will induce the car's and the people's resurgence, namely the city in the North of Germany where the Kübelwagen was produced and where the civilian Volkswagen will follow in its military brother's footsteps, conquering the world once again, this time as a commodity. The novel presents the beginning postwar mass production and export of the car as filling a void created at the dark hour of Germany's war defeat. The “miracle car” enables German superiority, seemingly destined for the dustbin of history in 1945, to transform itself from its military manifestations into its civilian form of international trade relations.60 The text thus uses the notion of a “zero hour” in combination with the Volkswagen as an enchanted commodity to create a myth that was meant to ensure cultural continuity.

How did this novel relate to the Volkswagen imaginary available in the German public sphere? The official Volkswagen advertising in West Germany, limited in general, was characterized by a lack of innovative elements that could have clearly separated the meaning of the car from its Nazi legacy.61 Volkswagen's most important advertising activity during the decade after 1949 consisted of producing and disseminating promotional films.62 Most of these films, especially until the middle of the decade, used an audio-visual language that continued the aesthetics of the Weimar and the Nazi Kulturfilme. 63 If the Nazi educational films “infused” the avant-garde cinema of the 1920s “with new ideological meanings,” these Volkswagen films in turn transported many elements of this Nazified aesthetics into the postwar era.64 The most important of them, “Aus eigener Kraft” (“From one's own strength”) from 1954, is a symphonic film in Agfacolor that stages city life, factory buildings, assembly line production, and industrious workers as a natural, flowing process of matter and bodies that magically engenders this hugely successful car “from” the people's “own strength.”65

The film performs an identification of the Volkswagen and Germany through two maneuvers: On the explicit level, the Volkswagen appears as a phenomenon floating in the timeless space of an ideal modernity, disconnected from both its Nazi past and the concrete conditions of its early postwar relaunch. On the implicit level, the film stages the transfiguration of the car's industrial production into a constitutive element of an organicist model of society, thereby continuing a connection of the Volkswagen to National Socialist fantasies of social harmony, racial exclusivity, and German superiority. This combination of the outspoken and the silent generates, again, the mythical character of this miracle story about the people's and the car's regeneration.66

While the film celebrates the expansion of Volkswagen's export, the images and the language used to tell this civilian story call to mind the imperial tropes used by the Nazi campaign for the Kübelwagen. At the end of the film, the finished car rolls from the assembly line onto the streets and the narrator captures the moment with pathos: “Here, finally, he can touch the earth. The earth has him and he has the earth, the whole wide earth for himself.” Earlier postwar Volkswagen films had staged how the car conquers the globe in a similarly emphatic way. The ending of the 1949 film “Symphony of a car” showed Volkswagen rolling out of the factory followed by rows of VWs on a train and then a shot from a highway bridge on an endless line of VWs on the autobahn (image 5). In the last—animated—sequence, the viewer sees a globe from afar with Germany roughly in the middle, while an endless number of Volkswagen cars are streaming out of Germany, toward the viewer and into outer space (image 6).67

Image 5. Screenshot, “Sinfonie eines Autos,” Germany 1949, UKA Film-Produktion, directed by Ulrich Kayser and Werner Liesfeld, © Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft.

Image 6. Screenshot, “Sinfonie eines Autos,” Germany 1949, UKA Film-Produktion, directed by Ulrich Kayser and Werner Liesfeld, © Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft.

Genesis of a Miracle

The connection between the Volkswagen and a National Socialist body politic was a cultural phenomenon that left many traces in the archive. They can be found on the margins, on those occasions when an uneasiness about this connection was expressed. They can also be found in the way rhetoric and aesthetic patterns were continued after 1945. The mismatch between these findings and the meaning of the Volkswagen as symbolizing a West Germany that was defined away from its own past must have created an interpretive void, or, psychologically speaking, a cognitive dissonance. The concept of the “miraculous” seems to have filled this void by smoothing over the intrinsic cultural contradictions of how Germany's Western reconstruction happened.68

Mönnich's novel about the “miracle car” was published in 1951. Around 1952, West Germans began to agree that the term “German miracle” (initially more rarely “economic miracle”) was suitable to describe the development of their country after the currency reform.69 As a phrase that encapsulated the whole process of West Germany's postwar reconstitution, the “German miracle” redirected attention away from the concrete occurrence of cultural transformation, especially from those dissonant parts which undermined the coherence of the narrative. Referring to the economic boom and the Volkswagen's as well as other German commodities’ success as a “miracle” both acknowledged and brushed aside the unlikeliness of a new West German identity built on these phenomena.70

In order to understand the genesis of the Volkswagen as this kind of “miracle,” we have to revisit the postwar process of cultural transformation from a different angle. As Peter Fritzsche put it, “the idea of Germany had been covertly Nazified as well as Aryanized” after January 1933.71 National Socialism's total war defeat and the loss of state sovereignty resulted in a deep crisis of identity, a collectively shattered “unconscious self-confidence.”72 This experience followed a twelve-year period of extreme collective self-aggrandizement at the expense of the Third Reich's proclaimed enemies and the racial community's “others.” Before the war, an excess of national symbols, rituals, and other aesthetic materializations constantly provided the presence, and thereby an experienced reality, of these ideas in the public sphere. After the war, the state of Germany's national non-existence was reflected in the destruction of some of these symbols by the allies and their subsequent absence from the public sphere in which a different sovereignty ruled.73

A crisis of identity, a world view in shambles, and the resulting disorientation play out above all on the level of affects and emotions. In the German case, this crisis was necessarily intensified by the allies’ efforts to de-Nazify the population by confronting them with their collective responsibility for the mass murder committed in their name.74 Collectivities need narratives and symbols to make sense of themselves. An individual's sense of self also depends on the acknowledgment he or she receives from other human beings. On the level of a society this entails being recognized by other countries. After Germans had embarked on coercing such “recognition” or “respect” from other nations through the brutal force of war and mass crime, they suddenly found themselves at the mercy of how the world in general and the occupation forces, in particular, looked at them. The gradual genesis of the Volkswagen as a national symbol of West Germany is inextricably entwined with such dynamics of real or imagined external perceptions and the affects evoked by them.

To get a better grip on how the Volkswagen became the symbol of the postwar “economic miracle,” it is useful to pay attention to the affective sensibilities emerging around this object in journalistic discourses from the years of allied occupation onward. Any object's symbolic power derives from the affects it is able to provoke, affects which may spring from more complex narratives and interpretations and at the same time contain these (possibly contradictory) narratives in a condensed form.75 If we follow the car in this way through its random occurrences in the press, the emotional reactions around the Volkswagen can roughly be summarized as a journey from resentment to pride.76 Focusing on the expression of these kinds of emotions throws a sharp light on how the object of the Volkswagen served to mediate and embody the changing relationship between (West) Germans and the occupation forces as well as the Western world outside of Germany.

The first Volkswagen to come off the assembly line in 1946 and 1947 were not available for Germans, but were nearly exclusively delivered to the occupation forces.77 Thus, in the initial period, the car that the Nazis had previously made into a symbol of the imperial German postwar order of affluence had fallen into the hands of Germany's former enemies. The earliest appearances of the Volkswagen in the press testify to a complicated constellation of sensibilities linked to this situation. In August 1947, Der Spiegel reported on the preparation of the export exhibition in Hannover, mentioning twenty-five new Volkswagen deployed as official taxis. The road traffic department had issued a special decree for this occasion in order to prevent “that the taxis would only be entered by foreigners full of calories and nicotine.”78 In January 1948, Jan Molitor wrote in Die Zeit about the celebration of the twenty thousandth Volkswagen. The disappointment of the workers that the car is only available to the occupation forces is a central theme of the article. Summing up their frustration, Molitor reports: “‘The Volkswagen?’ the workers say. ‘The car runs and the people watch from the outside.’”79 The mood is not celebratory due to the workers’ bitterness about the war defeat caused by Hitler, and to their disappointment about the foreign sovereignty over, as well as exclusive use of, the newly fabricated Volkswagen.

The currency reform, however, marks a clear break with this early period of heightened resentment surrounding the postwar status of the car. After the production of the Volkswagen had increased and the car became available both for export and for German customers,80 the most dominant theme in the press became the success of the car outside of Germany. In October 1948, Quick printed a photo of a Volkswagen on the Dam square in Amsterdam with a caption stating that “our small Volkswagen” could be found on every street corner in Holland. Two weeks later another photo showed American workers at the port of Hamburg admiring a Volkswagen as a “nice little car.” This tendency culminated in May 1949, right after the founding of the Federal Republic, with a headline on the big success of the German Industry fair in New York and a photo of the Volkswagen surrounded by admiring visitors.81

That the specter of national shame could still loom large behind the new spectacle of national pride became apparent in a report on the same event in the magazine Neue Illustrierte. Here, the photo of the admired Volkswagen was placed beneath an equally large one showing a picket line of protesters in New York carrying banners with slogans such as “We don't want soap manufactured from Jewish bodies,” and “Boycott this Nazi show.” In the caption the magazine informed its readers about another slogan, namely “Today People's Car—Tomorrow Death Car.”82 The reader was thus confronted with the fact that presenting German commodities, and especially the Volkswagen, in a city with a large Jewish community was not self-evidently generating enthusiasm, but rather brought to the surface a reminder of the close connection between German industrial production, in particular of this car, and the mass murder of Jews.83

Der Spiegel's first cover story on the Volkswagen, from May 1950, established the image of the car as an epitome of West Germany's regained power and authority as well as an important source of national pride. The first paragraph set the tone by citing a Life magazine story in which the Volkswagen was presented as a “symbol of German ‘Reconstruction’ [English in the original]: Symbol of the sturdy German proficiency.”84 American experts in New York, American soldiers in Hamburg, Dutch customers in Amsterdam, and many more foreigners enter the stage in 1948, 1949, and 1950 to affirm again and again to German readers that there are good reasons to be proud—of the Volkswagen in particular, and of West Germany's steps toward economic and political recovery in general. Taken together, these examples indicate that the perception of how Germany was seen from the outside fulfilled a crucial, if not decisive role for the Volkswagen to emerge as the quintessential object of postwar national pride and as the symbolic center of the evolving miracle narrative.

What kind of perceptions from the outside were available to Germans in this period? Der Spiegel's remark about Life referred clearly to the latter magazine's photo report on West Germany from 1949 entitled “Recovery in the West.” The report gave special attention to the Volkswagen with a full-page photo showing rows of Volkswagens in front of the factory in Wolfsburg.85 This story, however, is merely one reflection of a much larger effort from the outside to reinterpret Germany's position in the world. Between 1948 and 1952, the Marshall Plan propaganda campaign, “the largest international propaganda operation ever seen in peacetime,”86 accompanied the European Recovery Program (ERP) all over Europe. This campaign in many ways established the most important features of the new postwar political imaginary of the West. As Sheryl Kroen's recent work makes clear, the campaign staged the event of Western Europe's “recovery” based on the principles of free trade, productivity, and international cooperation.87 In the context of this endeavor Germany, the author of Europe's postwar crisis, was rebranded as a West Germany without history, a new entity rising out of the rubble, a model country of Western production and export whose inhabitants were praised for their “almost fanatical reverence for toil.”88 This process of rebranding culminated on the occasion of the 1950 Berlin Industries Fair, which was broadcast around the world.89 In the exhibition, Germany's official appearance as national entity happened in the form of a hand-drawn figure named “Herr X.” The exhibition showed “the transformation of Herr X—from a soldier in uniform, marching, producing destruction, annihilation and extermination all over Europe, into a hard-working, vital participant in the recovery, wearing a new suit.”90

West Germans appropriated this Marshall Plan story of Germany's recovery and turned it into a popular narrative of national regeneration. In the emerging West German version, the Western Allies were relegated to the sidelines, from where they were acknowledged as shouting approving remarks that confirmed a recuperated German self-confidence. Even before the term “German miracle” came into use, the 1948 currency reform was already labeled “the great miracle.”91 But it was not only the abundance of commodities suddenly filling German stores that were perceived as a “miracle.” The greatest miracle for postwar West Germans was the recognition of their country as a vital member of the Western community in the context of the emerging Cold War.

“One should not accuse a person of the bad manners of his past,” wrote the magazine Motor-Rundschau in 1949 about the Volkswagen. “Now, after the currency reform, the great miracle, he appears spick and span, with really good manners and therefore: young man from a good family.”92 Herr X, and his anthropomorphized mirror-image, the German Volkswagen, were not marching any more. Although the war was mentioned in this article as an experience that had shaped the Volkswagen's—or the German soldier's—character in a positive way, the Western framework of “the recovery” instilled a different meaning into the same narrative, one that could eclipse the fact that the “good family” the article evoked may have been uncomfortably interwoven with the Third Reich's racial community.

Haunting Miracles

In the course of this article I have spun together the different knots of the marginal and uncanny popping up in the archive around the Volkswagen and I have tried to knit them into a connected, but necessarily not altogether coherent, web of readings. A physical activity like knitting is perhaps a fitting metaphor for the work needed to understand “the ‘unexpected capacity of objects to fade out of focus’ as they ‘remain peripheral to our vision’ and yet potent in marking partitioned lives.” Stoler aptly uses Daniel Miller's words to get to the core of what the study of “imperial debris” means. “Imperial formations,” she writes, are defined by racialized relations of force. Their “political forms … endure beyond the formal exclusions.” After the imperial formation has officially ended, much of its “rot” remains, which defies the clear demarcation between before and after. Material objects become the carriers, “peripheral to our vision,” of the still ongoing past. “Imperial debris” disobey a totalizing notion of continuity and rupture. They can only be “debris” because something has become past. They can only assert their power because something is still present. But they remain also, in spite of all their cultural force, a fragile phenomenon, an “ungraspable moment.” Or rather, their force is in part due to the very fact that they “fade out of focus.”93

Between 1946 and 1962, the Volkswagen became a sacrosanct national symbol of Germany's postwar “miracles” through its capacity to silently transcend the 1945 divide. That capacity derived from the fact that it was not merely a symbol. The Volkswagen became a mass-produced material object that could be perceived and experienced as an embodiment of an organic German body politic. The car was associated with dreams of a harmonious and superior racial community, it was linked to the desire and experience of belonging to an invincible people's body, and it combined promises of timelessness with imperialist fantasies of conquering and dominating exoticized geographical space. The Volkswagen could keep something alive that was supposed to be dead. It could bridge the gap between the Germany before and after 1945. It could do all this, not although, but because it could simultaneously be the opposite, namely an innocent technical commodity, driving into the future and fading out of the political observer's focus.

How many Jews fit in a Volkswagen? Was the question meant as a provocation when it was asked during the 1950s? At the very least, the question must have reminded Germans of the fact that the postwar Volkswagen was different from the Volkswagen promised before 1945. Jews were now allowed to enter and drive it, something that was certainly never intended by the Nazi regime.94 Telling the joke, in any case, assumed a laughing audience of Aryan Germans. It thereby performed, and repeated, a cultural practice of exclusion and dehumanization. As a speech act the joke painfully gives linguistic presence to the mass murder that had been the result of precisely the kind of body politic that the Volkswagen had silently continued to manifest after the war.

Paying attention to the uncanny has proved to be a helpful methodological tool for exposing rarely acknowledged meanings of this powerful icon of postwar West Germany and by extension postwar modernity. It has enabled me to identify as a “ghost” a personal memory of the joke and an archival encounter with an advertisement that seemed to make no sense. Experiencing the ghostly aspects of these apparitions has meant to recognize their unique characteristic of lingering in a limbo between past and present, disrupting the usually unproblematic separation between a “then” and a “now,” a disavowed and objectified past and a present that is owned as one's own. This is what makes the postwar Volkswagen an “imperial debris,” a manifestation of a disorienting and therefore haunting cultural formation.95

Postcolonial studies scholars have started to resort to the notion of haunting in order to grasp the ongoing presence of the colonial past after the formal end of empire, the bewildering ways in which “the complex colonial legacy [is] still circulating in and between former imperialist centers and their peripheries.”96 Homi Bhabha's text “The World and the Home” (1992) has played an influential role in these conversations. Bhabha declared the “unhomely” and the haunting “a paradigmatic post-colonial experience.”97 Whereas the ghostly can also be approached as an object of study, in the context of postcolonial studies the concept is used in particular to reflect on how the confusion about the relationship between past and present bears on those who study the past.98 The case of the Volkswagen as an “imperial debris” speaks to this latter dimension and encourages us to think about postwar West Germany as a postcolonial society shaped by the unruly presence of a double colonialist past.99 The image of a Volkswagen whose “healthy constitution” could neither be “harmed” by “the cold in the east nor the heat in the desert sand” is a reminder of the manifold entanglements between Germany's earlier colonial presence outside of Europe and the Nazi version of a colonial project on European grounds, entanglements that are the object of recent academic debates and a growing body of historical scholarship.100

While “imperial debris” have mostly been identified in former colonies, the concept applies here to a metropolitan culture after empire.101 The Volkswagen as a postwar symbol emerged fully after, as Robert Young has put it, Europe's “own postcoloniality with respect to the Nazi empire was instituted.” The process to formally end the imperial regimes of the other European countries, however, took much longer, thereby producing a long-lasting “postcolonial condition” and carving out the terrain in which “imperial debris” can still haunt the present.102 Yet, the “ruination” of social relations that the Volkswagen carried into the postwar present was hidden behind and within its “miraculous” existence as a timeless commodity.

This Volkswagen story, then, is not only about ghosts, but also about miracles. The car did not only haunt West German society as unspeakable debris of the Nazi empire, but it also enchanted postwar West German society as the symbol of the “economic miracle.” Ghostliness turns up in relation to that which society “knows and does not know”103 about itself and which it therefore cannot articulate. The trope of the “economic miracle” can be defined as a collective myth, a story about an improbable and therefore wonderful occurrence that society willfully identifies with. In the case of the Volkswagen, the ghostly and the miraculous belong together. The Volkswagen and the miracle that it embodied exemplify an enchantment that is about un-seeing the ongoing presence of a disavowed past and turning it into something that is hidden in plain sight yet never properly graspable.

Is this configuration of the ghostly and the enchanted limited to the Volkswagen case and to the “economic miracle” of West Germany? The previous paragraph has indicated the extent to which the Volkswagen “miracle” was imagined as a global phenomenon by West Germans and how this imagination was enabled through a transnational, and especially transatlantic production of meaning. We should think of it, therefore, as a piece in a larger transformation of the political and cultural framework during the formative postwar years between 1945 and 1960. During these years the notion of the “West” as a cultural-geographic sphere binding together societies with a common history, a “modern” culture, and liberal political norms became dominant.104 At the same time, free trade and a Taylorist emphasis on productivity were promoted intensely in the context of the Marshall Plan as the definitive formula to solve Western Europe's social, economic, and political problems. Part of this endeavor was to imbue the resulting consumer objects with a socially and politically redemptive, or miraculous, quality. Considering both of these newly established frameworks of meaning as well as their interdependence is important to understanding how the Nazi Volkswagen could reemerge as Germany's favorite “miracle car.”

The emergence of the idea of the “West” at the beginning of the twentieth century was closely and ambiguously intertwined with the history and legacy of European imperialism.105 Both the focus on the Cold War framework and the acceptance of the 1945 divide, which usually accompanies it, have dominated scholarly interpretations and collective memory to such an extent that the ramifications of imperialism and colonialism on the postwar histories of Western societies are still far from being fully understood. This is particularly true regarding consumer culture and the postwar “modern.” The relationship between the political dimensions of postwar consumer cultures and the previous colonialist and fascist politicization of the commercial sphere—during high imperialism, the interwar period, and World War II—has only recently become a topic of historical scrutiny.106 The same holds true for the racial dimensions of U.S. postwar consumerism as well as for the connections between the imaginaries of postwar European consumer cultures and the context of decolonization.107

The influence of postcolonial studies is now felt strongly all across the discipline of history, not the least in the debates about “modernity” as a guiding concept.108 An increasing awareness of the problems engrained in the concept of “modernity” and its naturalized connection to “the West” seems to open up a space to develop new perspectives also for the postwar period. Meanwhile, and on a par with the latter, scholars have begun to study different forms of “enchantment” as a significant, if not constitutive, part of not only non-Western but also Western cultures of modernity.109

The enchantment of mass-produced commodities as markers of a modern and Western way of life formed an indispensable ingredient of postwar political imaginaries. French intellectuals, in particular, were puzzled and fascinated by what they saw as the overdetermination of consumer objects in their time.110 Roland Barthes’ call to examine the “decorative display” in popular culture of the “what-goes-without-saying” strongly influenced the rise of cultural studies in the following decades. Although Barthes stated in his “Mythologies” that every myth “transforms history into nature,” he himself refrained from studying the myths of his own time historically by tracing their genesis back in time.111 The ghostly aspects of the Volkswagen's meanings in West Germany teach us that if we are to expand our understanding of the powerful consumer myths and miracles of the postwar period in the West then we need to closely study their concrete emergence in time and in a—not yet—postcolonial space. To pursue this, we need genealogies that systematically bridge the 1945 threshold and we need to develop an awareness of the possible effects of haunting, including on us as scholars.112

When Aimé Césaire reflected in 1955 about what the experience of Nazism meant for his contemporaries, he stated provocatively that Europe and the whole of “Western” civilization experienced it as a “choc en retour.”113 According to Césaire, Europeans recognized an aspect of themselves in the horrors of the Nazi empire, an aspect which their own frameworks of perception had rendered invisible before, yet they simultaneously hid this realization from themselves. Césaire's insight invites us to ask how postwar societies may have developed and cultivated certain forms of “colonial aphasia” specifically in reaction to the Third Reich's “choc en retour.” This might enable us to get a better handle on how the postwar economic recovery, its accompanying dreamscapes, and the symbolic role of a rebranded West Germany produced their own subcutaneous spheres of haunting.

Footnotes

1 I use the name “Volkswagen” for the Volkswagen Beetle. The car was known as the Volkswagen in Germany until the launching of the “Golf” in 1974.

2 Gordon, Avery, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis, 2008), 7Google Scholar.

3Ibid., 24–25.

4 See the work of historians such as Robert Darnton, Natalie Z. Davis, and Carlo Ginzburg.

5 Darnton, Robert, “Worker's Revolt: The Great Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint-Séverin,” in Darnton, R., The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, 1984), 75–104Google Scholar.

6 Geertz, Clifford, “History and Anthropology,” New Literary History 21, 2 (1990): 321–35CrossRef | Google Scholar. This might be why early modern and medieval historians have embraced a certain strand in anthropology more enthusiastically than have historians studying later periods.

7 Darnton, “Workers’ Revolt,” 78.

8 Till van Rahden has convincingly called for approaches in contemporary history that are “similar to those of scholars who explore stories of magic and miracles … to understand late medieval and early modern cultures in their ways of envisioning normality and enforcing norms”; “Clumsy Democrats: Moral Passions in the Federal Republic,” German History 29, 3 (2011): 485–504.

9 Stoler, Ann L., “Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France,” Public Culture 23, 1 (2011): 121–56CrossRef | Google Scholar; Stoler, Ann L., ed., Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination (Durham, 2013)CrossRef | Google Scholar.

10 Rieger, Bernhard, The People's Car: A Global History of the Volkswagen Beetle (Cambridge, 2013), 126CrossRef | Google Scholar.

11 Some relevant examples from a vast body of scholarship are: Stern, Frank, The Whitewashing of the Yellow Badge: Antisemitism and Philosemitism in Postwar Germany (Oxford, 1992)Google Scholar; Schildt, Axel, Moderne Zeiten: Freizeit, Massenmedien und “Zeitgeist” in der Bundesrepublik der 50er Jahre (Hamburg, 1995)Google Scholar; Fehrenbach, Heide, Cinema in Democratizing Germany: Reconstructing National Identity after Hitler (Chapel Hill, 1995)Google Scholar; Frei, Norbert, Vergangenheitspolitik: Die Anfänge der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und die NS-Vergangenheit (Munich, 1996)Google Scholar; Carter, Erica, How German Is She? Postwar West German Reconstruction and the Consuming Woman (Ann Arbor, 1997)Google Scholar; Jarausch, Konrad, After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945–1995 (Oxford, 2006)CrossRef | Google Scholar; Swett, Pamela E., Wiesen, S. Jonathan, and Zatlin, Jonathan R., eds., Selling Modernity: Advertising in Twentieth-Century Germany (Durham, 2007)CrossRef | Google Scholar; Verheyen, Nina, Diskussionslust: Eine Kulturgeschichte des ‘besseren Arguments’ in Westdeutschland (Göttingen, 2010)CrossRef | Google Scholar; Fulda, Daniel et al. , eds. Demokratie im Schatten der Gewalt: Geschichten des Privaten im deutschen Nachkrieg (Göttingen, 2010)Google Scholar; Moeller, Robert, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley, 2001)Google Scholar; Schmiechen-Ackermann, Detlef, ed., “Volksgemeinschaft”: Mythos, wirkungsmächtige soziale Verheißung oder soziale Realität im “dritten Reich”? Zwischenbilanz einer kontroversen Debatte (Paderborn, 2012)CrossRef | Google Scholar.

12 König, Wolfgang, Volkswagen, Volksempfänger, Volksgemeinschaft, “Volksprodukte” im Dritten Reich: Vom Scheitern einer nationalsozialistischen Konsumgesellschaft (Paderborn, 2004), 262Google Scholar; Schäfer, Hans Dieter, Das Gespaltene Bewusstsein: Vom Dritten Reich bis zu den langen Fünfziger Jahren (Göttingen, rev. ed. 2009[1981]), esp. 9–87Google Scholar; Confino, Alon, “Traveling as a Culture of Remembrance: Traces of National Socialism in West Germany, 1945–1960,” History and Memory 12, 2 (2000): 92–121Google Scholar; Betts, Paul, The Authority of Everyday Objects: A Cultural History of West German Industrial Design (Berkeley, 2004)CrossRef | Google Scholar; Swett, Pamela, Selling under the Swastika: Advertising and Commercial Culture in Nazi Germany (Stanford, 2014)Google Scholar.

13 On the “miracle” trope in connection to consumer exhibitions, see Wiesen, Jonathan S., “Miracles for Sale: Consumer Displays and Advertising in Postwar West Germany,” in Crew, David F., ed., Consuming Germany in the Cold War (Oxford, 2003), 151–78Google Scholar. See also Black, Monica, “Miracles in the Shadow of the Economic Miracle: The ‘Supernatural ‘50s’ in West Germany,” Journal of Modern History 84, 4 (2012): 833–60CrossRef | Google Scholar.

14 Schissler, Hanna, “Writing about 1950s West Germany,” in Schissler, Hanna, ed., The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949–1968 (Princeton, 2001), 3–15Google Scholar, 11.

15 Dundes, Alan and Hauschild, Thomas, “Auschwitz Jokes,” Western Folklore 42, 4 (1983): 249–60CrossRef | Google Scholar, 250.

16 Dundes, and Hauschild, , “Kennt der Witz kein Tabu? Zynische Erzählformen als Versuch der Bewältigung nationalsozialistischer Vergangenheit,” Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 83, 1 (1987): 21–31Google Scholar, esp. 22.

17 George Tabori, Theaterstücke 2, translated from English by Ursula Grützmacher-Tabori (Munich, 1994), 49–86. See also Feinberg, Anat, “George Tabori's Mourning Work in Jubiläum,” in Schumacher, Claude, ed., Staging the Holocaust: The Shoah in Drama and Performance (Cambridge, 1998), 267–80Google Scholar.

18 See Tabori, Theaterstücke 2, 59, 68, 77.

19 Martin, Rod A., The Psychology of Humor: An Integrative Approach (Burlington, 2007), 34CrossRef | Google Scholar. See also Kuipers, Giselinde, “The Sociology of Humor,” in Raskin, Victor, ed., The Primer of Humor Research (Berlin, 2008), 361–98CrossRef | Google Scholar; Feinberg, “George Tabori's Mourning Work,” 279.

20 Confino, Alon, A World without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (New Haven, 2014)Google Scholar.

21 Bernhard Rieger, People's Car; Rieger, Bernhard, ”The “Good German” Goes Global: The Volkswagen Beetle as an Icon in the Federal Republic,” History Workshop Journal 68, 1 (2009): 3–26CrossRef | Google Scholar; Schütz, Erhard, “Der Volkswagen,” in François, Etienne and Schulze, Hagen, ed., Deutsche Erinnerungsorte: Eine Auswahl (Munich, 2005), 351–68Google Scholar; Sachsse, Rolf, “Der 3000. Volkswagen für Luxemburg: Zur visuellen Inszenierung von Produktionsjubiläen in der bundesdeutschen Nachkriegsindustrie,” Zeithistorische Forschungen 6, 2 (2009): 290–301Google Scholar; Hütter, Hans Walter, VW Käfer … und läuft und läuft und läuft (Bonn, 2005)Google Scholar. The classic social and economic history of the Volkswagen during the Third Reich is Hans Mommsen and Manfred Grieger, Das Volkswagenwerk und seine Arbeiter im Dritten Reich (Düsseldorf, 1996).

22 Only Gregor M. Rinn has argued convincingly that the virtue of usefulness was attached to the conception of the German automobile before and after 1945 and was embodied by the Volkswagen. See Gregor M. Rinn, Das Automobil als nationales Identifikationssymbol: Zur politischen Bedeutung des Kraftfahrzeugs in Modernitätskonzeptionen des “Dritten Reichs” und der Bundesrepublik (PhD diss., Humboldt University Berlin, 2008).

23 Taussig, Michael T., Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford, 1999), 5Google Scholar.

24 Miller, Daniel, Material Culture and Mass Consumption (Oxford, 1987)Google Scholar; Auslander, Leora, “Beyond Words,” American Historical Review 110, 4 (2005): 1015–45CrossRef | Google Scholar; Jones, Siân, “Negotiating Authentic Objects and Authentic Selves: Beyond the Deconstruction of Authenticity,” Journal of Material Culture 15, 2 (2010): 181–203CrossRef | Google Scholar; Navaro-Yashin, Yael, The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity (Durham, 2012)CrossRef | Google Scholar.

25 On the role of banal objects for German communities in South America, see Penny, H. Glenn, “Material Connections: German Schools, Things, and Soft Power in Argentina and Chile from the 1880s through the Interwar Period,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 59, 3 (2017): 519–49CrossRef | Google Scholar.

26 See Stoler, ed., Imperial Debris.

27 Volkswagen ad published in magnum 31 (Aug. 1960): 61.

28 “Chrome-sparkling” was a term used to describe bulky American cars. The catchword “critical generation” is reminiscent of the famous sociological study on young West Germans by Helmut Schelsky, Die skeptische Generation: Eine Soziologie der deutschen Jugend (Düsseldorf, 1957).

29 “Kraft durch Freude” was part of the German Labor Front. See Baranowski, Shelley, Strength through Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the Third Reich (Cambridge, 2004)Google Scholar.

30 Deutschland-Berichte der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands (Sopade) 1934–1940, vol. 6, 1939 (Frankfurt/M.: Zweitausenteinds, 1980), 480–90, 488.

31 “Ist der VW veraltet? Ein Spiegel-Gespräch mit dem Generaldirektor des Volkswagenwerks, Professor Dr.-Ing. Heinz Nordhoff,” Der Spiegel 40 (30 Sept. 1959): 40–58.

32 The headline of the same Der Spiegel number's cover (no. 40, 1959) was: “Another Million of the Same Type.”

33 Taussig, Defacement, 3.

34 “Ist der VW veraltet?” 47.

35Ibid.

36 Spoerl, born in 1917, worked as an engineer until 1945 and published humorist novels and stories after the war; “Spoerl, Alexander,” in Munzinger Online/Personen, Internationales Biographisches Archiv, http://www.munzinger.de/document/00000006988 (last accessed 8 Aug. 2019).

37 A. Spoerl, “Ist der VW veraltet?” Der Stern 43 (26 Oct. 1957): 54–61, quotations 56.

38Ibid., 57.

39 Korp, D., “Alter oder neuer Volkswagen: Kluge Reden am falschen Kamin,” Das Auto—Motor und Sport 1 (1959): 9–11Google Scholar.

40 See “Volkswagenwerk in König Nordhoffs Reich,” Der Spiegel 33 (1 Aug. 1955): 16–26; “Neue Wege zur Nazisuche,” Die Zeit 5 (29 Jan. 1953), http://www.zeit.de/1953/05/neue-wege-zur-nazisuche (last accessed 7 Feb. 2020)]; Franz Ulrich Glass, “Tankwart Herbert meint…,” Gute Fahrt 1 (1950): 15; Volkswagen-Geschichten, Herbert Kruchen, director, Melodia-Film Produktion Werner Grünbauer (Hamburg, 1950), 10 min.; “Unproduktive Botschaft: In Bildung inbegriffen,” Der Spiegel 25 (19 June 1948): 16–17.

41 “Der VW setzt sich durch,” Volkswagen advertisement published in Quick 2 (13 Jan. 1952): 22–23.

42 Kluke, Paul, “Hitler und das Volkswagenprojekt,” Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 8 (1960) 4: 341–83Google Scholar, 341. Between 1953 and 1959, Paul Kluke was head of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich, which was founded in May 1949.

43 Rieger, People's Car, 212–16, 227–28; see also Dirk Schlinkert, “Von der Reklame zum Marketing,” in 50 Jahre Volkswagenwerbung (Hamburg, 2002), 8–17.

44 For an (autobiographical) reflection on how the younger generation experienced the enigmatic and ungraspable presence of the Nazi past in postwar West Germany, see Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, After 1945: Latency as Origin of the Present (Stanford, 2013), esp. 201, 162.

45 It is beyond the scope of this article to explore the short- and long-term cultural effects of the 1962 campaign in more detail. A documentary by Hartmut Bitomsky (b. 1942) on the Volkswagen from the year 1989 might be taken as an example of the younger generation's difficulty in connecting the dots although they develop a critical perspective. The film combines reporting on the production process and the city of Wolfsburg with historical footage from before and after 1945. An elusive sense of unease about the importance of the Volkswagen for West Germany pervades the film, which mentions the joke about the car being assembled as a cannon, yet states that Germans had told the joke during the Third Reich and thereby dissociates it from the postwar period. Der VW-Komplex, Hartmut Bitomsky, director, Big Sky Film/Fas-Film, Germany, 1989, 93 min.

46 Windecker, C. O., “MR-Reisetest. Volkswagen: Vinzenz auf dem besten Wege,” Motor-Rundschau 22 (25 Nov. 1949): 563–64Google Scholar, 563.

47 See, in a similar vein, “Porsche von Fallersleben: Geschichte eines Automobils,” Der Spiegel 18 (4 May 1950): 21–26, 21.

48 “KdF.-Wagen auf den Wegen des Sieges,” Arbeitertum 28 (May 1941): n.p.

49 “Die Front bestätigt es: Der Volkswagen hat alle Erwartungen übertroffen,” Arbeitertum, 1st March number (1942): 6–7.

50 “Sieben Jahre “Kraft durch Freude,” Auch im Kriege kein Stillstand—Große Zukunftspläne,” Arbeitertum 18 (Dec. 1940): 2–3. The Norwegian city of Narvik had been occupied by the German Wehrmacht in the spring of 1940.

51 On the Nazi vision of a “New Order“ in Europe, see Harvey, Elizabeth, “International Networks and Cross-Border Cooperation: National Socialist Women and the Vision of a ‘New Order’ in Europe,” Politics, Religion & Ideology 13, 2 (2012): 141–58CrossRef | Google Scholar; Mazower, Mark, Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (London, 2008)Google Scholar; Corbach, Paul, “Soziales Europa von Morgen,” Arbeitertum 2 (Feb. 1942): 4Google Scholar.

52 Horst Mönnich, Die Autostadt: Roman (Frankfurt/M., 1951). The novel's success enabled Mönnich to become a member of the Gruppe 47 and to build a career as a writer.

53 Mönnich, Horst, Geboren Neunzehn-Hundert-Achtzehn: Von einem Ende zum anderen (Munich, 1993), 53Google Scholar.

54 The city in which the Volkswagen is produced, Wolfsburg, was previously called the “City of the KdF-Car” and had already partly been built as a model city of the Third Reich.

55 Grieger, Manfred, “Eine Meistererzählung vom Volkswagen und der dazugehörenden Stadt: Der Roman Die Autostadt von Horst Mönnich aus dem Jahr 1951,” in Stölzl, Christoph, ed., Wolfsburg-Saga (Stuttgart, 2008), 144–47Google Scholar, 145.

56 Mönnich, Die Autostadt, 21.

57 Herf, Jeffrey, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1984)Google Scholar.

58 For the Volkswagen being named a “miracle,” see Mönnich, Die Autostadt, 56, 275, 277.

59Ibid., 182–93.

60 In the first part of the novel, a woman moves around pinheads representing Volkswagen dealers on the factory's “ordnance map.” The pinheads are compared to “an army” (ibid., 82).

61 On the limited scope of VW advertising, see Michael Kriegeskorte, Automobilwerbung in Deutschland 1948–1968 (Cologne, 1994), 120. There is no in-depth study of the whole variety of early Volkswagen advertising activities.

62 Between 1949 and 1961, at least twenty-one films were produced for Volkswagen and shown in cinemas and at car dealerships and automobile exhibitions, reaching several hundred thousand viewers. Günter Riederer, Auto-Kino: Unternehmensfilme von Volkswagen in den Wirtschaftswunderjahren (Wolfsburg, 2011), 12–34.

63 Some films reproduced earlier Volkswagen films released under the Third Reich, or reused titles of other Nazi Kulturfilme. On the continuities between Nazi Kulturfilme and Volkswagen films; see ibid., 13, 22, 33, 50, 143.

64 Fulks, Barry, “Walter Ruttmann, the Avant-Garde Film, and Nazi Modernism,” Film & History 14, 2 (1984): 26–46Google Scholar, quotation 4. See also Heller, Heinz B., “‘Stählerne Romantik’ und Avantgarde: Beobachtungen und Anmerkungen zu Ruttmanns Industriefilmen,” in Zimmermann, Peter, ed., Triumph der Bilder: Kultur- und Dokumentarfilme vor 1945 im internationalen Vergleich (Konstanz, 2003), 105–18Google Scholar.

65 Aus eigener Kraft, Franz Schroedter, director, Franzs Schroedter Studio, Germany, 1954, 74 minutes. In 1942–1943, UFA had released a documentary with the same title narrating how National Socialism had brought economic success to a Germany worn down by the Great Depression. Aus eigener Kraft, Günther Salje, director, Ufa, Germany, 1942, British Film Institute database, http://collections-search.bfi.org.uk/web/Details/ChoiceFilmWorks/150014083 (last accessed 11 May 2020).

66 The film premiered on 30 March 1954 in cinemas in Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, and Frankfurt Main. Federal government and parliamentary officials attended a special premiere in Bonn. The film found its audience mainly through matinees organized by contract dealers and two big tours of special screenings. It won a prize at a documentary film festival in Venice and was assessed as “worthy” (wertvoll) by the West German office of film evaluation, although only after a “long and intensive debate.” Riederer, Auto-Kino, 42, 35–53.

67 Sinfonie eines Autos, Ulrich Kayser and Werner Liesfeld, directors, UKA Film-Produktion, Germany 1949, 14 minutes.

68 For an elaboration on the modern uses of the concept of “miracle,” see Falko Schneider, “Unfassbares Produzieren: Zur politischen Epistemologie des Wunderbegriffs im 20. Jahrhundert,” in Alexander Geppert and Till Kössler, eds., Wunder: Poetik und Politik des Staunens im 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 2001), 305–31.

69 “Adenauer fordert Mut zur Entscheidung,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (8 Mar. 1952): 1; “Das deutsche Wirtschaftswunder: Unsere Korrespondenten berichten, was das Ausland dazu sagt,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (29 Mar. 1952): 7; “Es gibt kein Deutsches Wunder,” Der Spiegel 37 (9 Sept. 1953): cover and 11–17. The Nazis used the “German miracle” and the “economic miracle” to label the Third Reich's successes. This was not forgotten after the war: see Bucerius, Gerd, “Hintergründe eines Wirtschaftswunders: Ein Beitrag zum Fall Schacht,” Die Zeit 14 (3 Apr. 1947): 2Google Scholar; Daniel, Jens, “Das Zwinkern mit dem Wunder,” Der Spiegel 47 (17 Nov. 1954): 4Google Scholar; Schäfer, Das Gespaltene Bewusstsein, 10.

70 This analysis overlaps with Falko Schneider's, in “Unfassbares Produzieren,” 323.

71 Fritzsche, Peter, Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge, 2008), 268Google Scholar.

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73 See Kathleen J. Nawyn, “Striking at the Roots of German Militarism”: Efforts to Demilitarize German Society and Culture in American-Occupied Württemberg-Baden, 1945–1949 (PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2008); and Goldstein, Cora Sol, Capturing the German Eye: American Visual Propaganda in Occupied Germany (Chicago, 2009)CrossRef | Google Scholar. For the discussion of fascist aesthetics, see Mosse, George, “Fascist Aesthetics and Society: Some Considerations,” Journal of Contemporary History 31, 2 (1996): 242–52CrossRef | Google Scholar; Koepnick, Lutz P., “Fascist Aesthetics Revisited,” Modernism/Modernity 6, 1 (1999): 51–73CrossRef | Google Scholar; Brockhaus, Gudrun, Schauder und Idylle: Faschismus als Erlebnisangebot (Munich, 1997)Google Scholar.

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75 The focus on objects thus allows for an integration of the symbolic and the affective, that is bodily, dimensions in the evolution of identities. When it comes to objects, affects, and the workings of self-consciousness, Donald Winnicott's ideas about “transitional objects” are still the most important reference: Playing and Reality (New York, 2005), esp. 1–34.

76 On resentment, see Fassin, Didier, “On Resentment and Ressentiment: The Politics and Ethics of Moral Emotions,” Current Anthropology 54, 3 (2013): 249–67CrossRef | Google Scholar, 252; and Parkinson, Emotional State, 67–112. On the psychology of pride, see Tracey, Jessica L. and Robins, Richard W., “The Nature of Pride,” in Tracey, Jessica L., Robins, Richard W., and Tangney, June Price, eds., The Self-Conscious Emotions: Theory and Research (New York, 2007), 263–82Google Scholar.

77 “Keine Liefermöglichkeit für den Volkswagen,” Das Auto 10 (1947): 18.

78 “Strömt herbei…? Messebesucher haben es leicht,” Der Spiegel (2 Aug. 1947): 15. See also “Melken mit der Hand: Und was sagt die Kuh dazu?” Der Spiegel (6 Sept. 1947): 3; “Steine statt Brot: Ein Amt zweifelt an sich selber,” Der Spiegel 14 (1947); 1–2; “Ruhr Hunger March: Workers’ Protest, British Army Cars Overturned,” Times (London) (29 Mar. 1947): 4; “Der Mann im Auto,” Das Auto 8 (1947): 25.

79 Molitor, Jan, “People's Car” auf neuen Wegen: Jubiläumsbesuch im Volkswagenwerk zu Wolfsburg,” Die Zeit 5 (29 Jan. 1948): 2Google Scholar.

80 Rieger, People's Car, 113.

81 “Neues Leben in Rotterdam,” and “Unser kleiner Volkswagen,” Quick 14 (17 Oct. 1948): 6–7; “A Nice Little Car,” Quick 16 (31 Oct. 1948): 6; “Millionen-Geschäft in New York,” Quick 20 (15 May 1949): 4–5. See also “Wir machen uns auf den Weg: Frischer Wind von Ortega,” Der Spiegel (1 Sept. 1949): 25–26.

82 “Deutschland stellt aus,” Neue Illustrierte (Cologne) 19 (12 May 1949): 6–7. Quick also mentioned the boycott but did not report on the slogans.

83 Herbert Engst, “New York übertraf alle Erwartungen,” Die Zeit (28 Apr. 1949), http://www.zeit.de/1949/17/new-york-uebertraf-erwartungen (7 Feb. 2020), contained no sign of any presence of a shameful past.

84 “Porsche von Fallersleben: Geschichte eines Automobils,” Der Spiegel 18 (4 May 1950): 21–26, 21.

85 Life (16 May 1949): 37, 38–40, 41, 42–43. In 1954, Time published a cover story on the Volkswagen and Germany under the title, “The Fabulous Recovery,” Time Magazine (15 Feb. 1954): cover and 86–93.

86 Ellwood, David W., Rebuilding Europe: Western Europe, America and Postwar Reconstruction (London, 1992), 162Google Scholar.

87 Sheryl Kroen, “Liberal Tales of Origin at the Berlin Industries Fair,” unpub. MSS. Thanks to the author for giving me access to this manuscript. See also Sheryl Kroen, “Robinson Charley: The Ideological Underpinnings of Atlantic History,” in Lisa A. Lindsay and John Wood Sweed, eds., Biography and the Black Atlantic (Philadelphia, 2014), 66–89, 295–299; Brian Angus McKenzie, Remaking France: Americanization, Public Diplomacy, and the Marshall Plan (New York, 2005); David W. Ellwood, “The Propaganda of the Marshall Plan in Italy in a Cold War Context,” Intelligence and National Security 18, 2 (2003): 225–36; Greg Castillo, “Domesticating the Cold War: Household Consumption as Propaganda in Marshall Plan Germany,” Journal of Contemporary History 40, 2 (2005): 261–88.

88 “Gateway to Germany,” KA, B140 299, publication on behalf of German Federal Ministry of the Marshall Plan (Bonn, 1952), quoted in Kroen, “Liberal Tales of Origin.”

89 The event became the theme of the Marshall Plan film Air of Freedom, produced by the HICOG Film Section for the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA), Germany, 1950.

90 Kroen, “Liberal Tales of Origin.”

91 See, for example, “Wolfgang Weber machte einen Besuch am D-Mark-Strand,” Neue Illustrierte 19 (2 Sept. 1948): 8–9.

92 C. O. Windecker, “MR-Reisetest,” 563.

93 Ann Laura Stoler, “Introduction: ‘The Rot Remains’: From Ruins to Ruination,” in Ann Stoler, ed., Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination (Durham, 2013), 1–35, 5, 8 and 28.

94 In May 1938 Hitler laid the foundation stone for the Volkswagen plant. A decree from 3 December 1938 prohibited German Jews from driving. See Klaus W. Tofahrn, Chronologie des Dritten Reiches: Ereignisse, Personen, Begriffe (Darmstadt, 2003), 60, 65.

95 Ann L. Stoler, “Intimidations of Empire. Predicaments of the Tactile and Unseen,” in A. L. Stoler, ed., Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham, 2006), 1.

96 Michael F. O'Riley, “Postcolonial Haunting: Anxiety, Affect, and the Situated Encounter,” Postcolonial Text 3, 4 (2007): 1–15, 11. See, among others, Fiona Barclay, Writing Postcolonial France: Haunting, Literature, and the Maghreb (Lanham, 2011); Emilie Cameron, “Indigenous Spectrality and the Politics of Postcolonial Ghosts,” Cultural Geographies 15, 3 (2008): 383–93; Cheryl McEwan, “A Very Modern Ghost: Postcolonialism and the Politics of Enchantment,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26, 1 (2007): 29–44.

97 Homi Bhabha, “The World and the Home,” Social Text 31/32 (1992): 141–53, 142.

98 This can even be the case with a story that happened in the eighteenth century. See Ian Baucom, Spectres of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, 2005), esp. 3–17.

99 As Ella Shohat remarked, there are many different versions of what is called “postcolonial.” The “postcolonial” of metropoles has to be distinguished from that of former colonies or settler-colonies. See her “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial,’” Social Text 31/32 (1992): 99–113. In all cases it seems, though, that the temporal murkiness of the term's “post-,” positing not only a critical but also a historical distance from the colonial, has inspired recent discussions about “ghostliness” in all forms of postcolonial societies and with respect to different positionalities and experiences.

100 See Berghahn, Volker, “German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler,” German Studies Review 40, 1 (2017): 147–62CrossRef | Google Scholar; and Poiger, Uta G., “Imperialism and Empire in Twentieth-Century Germany,” History & Memory 17, 1/2 (2005): 117–43CrossRef | Google Scholar.

101 This is consistent with the move towards studying the effects of empire at home. See Hall, Catherine and Rose, Sonya O., At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge, 2006)CrossRef | Google Scholar. In her introduction, Stoler includes the metropole in the concept of “imperial debris”; “Introduction,” 15, 19.

102 Young, Robert J. C., “The Postcolonial Condition,” in Stone, Dan, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History (Oxford, 2012) 600–11Google Scholar, 604. For a systematic historical account of how the intricacies of the long decolonization process marked the postwar period in Europe, see Elizabeth Buettner, Europe after Empire: Decolonization, Society, and Culture (Cambridge, 2016).

103 “L'européen sait et ne sait pas,” in Frantz Fanon, Peau noir, masques blancs (Paris, 1952), 181.

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112 Rashkin, Esther, Unspeakable Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Culture (Albany, 2008), 1–24Google Scholar.

113 Césaire, Aimé, Discours sur le colonialisme (Paris, 1955), 13Google Scholar. The expression was translated into English as “boomerang effect,” which lacks the psychological aspect of “shock.” See Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, Joan Pinkham, trans. (New York, 2000), 36.