Salt Lake Tribune, UT
April 29 2005
Dyer: Hitler cannot be allowed to fade into the past
Gwynne Dyer
Adolf Hitler has now been dead slightly longer than he was alive, and
he is about to stop being real. So long as the generation whose lives
he terrorized is still with us, he remains a live issue, but the 60th
anniversary of his death on April 30 is the last big one that will be
celebrated by those who survived his evil and knew his victims. By
the time the 75th anniversary comes around, they will almost all be
gone. And then Hitler will slip away into history.
It’s a process that is almost impossible to avert, because basic
human psychology is at work here. Once enough time has passed that
all the people involved in a given set of events would be dead by now
anyway, we stop treating them as real people whose triumphs and
tragedies matter, and only the loving attention of a filmmaker,
dramatist or a novelist can bring them to life again for us even
briefly.
Federico Fellini made the point once and for all in his 1969 film
“Satyricon,” a story set in the ancient Mediterranean world that
really makes its characters emerge from the classical myths and live.
For about a hundred minutes you really care about them, in a strange
way. The last shot shows the hero emerging from the labyrinth into
the fresh air and the sunlight – and then, with no warning, in the
middle of a sentence, the frame freezes and morphs into a time-worn
fresco of the same scene. Fade to black.
It’s shocking because Fellini makes you understand the true
nature of your relationship with the past. Its people have been dust
for hundreds or thousands of years, and for all that we try to give
them the respect and the weight that we give to living and recently
dead people, the fact is that we can’t. The point when historical
characters, good or bad, make the transition from flesh-and-blood
heroes and villains to mere frescoes on a wall is the point where
living people no longer remember them with love or hate. With Hitler,
we are nearing that point.
You don’t think that could happen? Consider the way we now treat
the “Corsican ogre,” Napoleon Bonaparte. He has become a veritable
industry for military historians, and is revered by half the
population of France because he ruled the country at the height of
its power and led the French to several dozen great military
victories before his boundless ambition finally plunged them into
total defeat. Nobody seems particularly perturbed by the fact that
his wars caused the deaths of about 4 million people.
That is a far smaller number than the 30 million or so deaths
that Hitler was responsible for, but Europe’s population was a great
deal smaller in Napoleon’s heyday. Europeans
actually stood about the same chance of dying as a result of
Napoleon’s actions at the height of his power in 1808 as they did
from Hitler’s actions in 1943 – and Napoleon has been forgiven by
history. So if all of those who died in Hitler’s war are soon to
enter the same weightless category of the long-dead, what is to keep
history from forgiving him, too?
There is one profound difference between Napoleon and Hitler.
Both were tyrants and conquerors, but only Hitler committed a
deliberate genocide. Most of the people who fought and died in the
war didn’t even know about the Nazi death camps at the time, but in
retrospect it is the Holocaust, the 6 million Jews who died not in
the war but in the camps, that has come to define our attitudes
toward Hitler, and has transformed him into an icon of absolute evil.
So he should remain, but history is mostly about forgetting,
and not very much survives the winnowing of the generations. Jews are
right to want this piece of history not to be forgotten, and the rest
of us need it too, because remembering the astonishing amount of pain
and loss that a man like Hitler could cause by manipulating hatreds
is an essential part of our defences against a recurrence. But the
bitter truth is that from now on it will be increasingly uphill work.
I would not raise this question at Passover if the anniversary of
Hitler’s suicide did not make it the one right time to do so. I also
understand why most Jews have zealously defended the unique status of
the calamity that befell their people and resisted any link with
other, smaller but not utterly dissimilar tragedies that have
befallen other peoples: the Armenian massacres, the Cambodian
genocide, Rwanda and the rest.
We cannot afford to let Hitler fade into the past because we
need him to remind us of our duty to the present and the future. If
the memory of the Holocaust is to stay alive – not just for Jews but
for the whole world – it may be time to start rethinking how to
present it to 21st-century audiences for whom the Second World War
and the Second Punic War seem equally lost in the unremembered past.
Was it only about the Jews, or should we see it as a warning to us
all?
—
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose
articles are published in 45 countries.