Focusing particularly on the British context, this study offers the first analysis of contemporary popular and literary fiction, film, TV and art exhibitions about Nazis and Nazism.
'This energetically written book will certainly make an important and timely contribution to current debates on the legacy of the Second World War.' Victoria Stewart, University of Leicester A valuable critical analysis of the resurgence of representations of Nazism in contemporary literature and film In the post-war imaginary of the West, 'the Nazis' became a cultural trope that served as a justification for defending democracy through military intervention. But in films and in fiction, 'the Nazis' were also camped up, laughed at, eroticised and demonised as evil monsters. In fact, the representational rules of engagement with historical fascism have always been remarkably uncertain. Why has the fascination with fascism re-emerged once more after the Cold War? What is its cultural function now, in a global era of commemoration? How can any representation avoid the impasse of either re-evoking fascism's original seduction or merely recycling previous fictional and cinematic clichés? This original study examines a range of genres and topics: alternative history (Robert Harris's Fatherland and Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds), the noir thrillers of Philip Kerr, perpetration (Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones) and resistance (Justin Cartwright's The Song Before It Is Sung and Bryan Singer's Valkyrie). Crucially, it asks how contemporary culture has instrumentalised the Nazi trope for its own agendas. How have 'the Nazis' become 'our Nazis', and what are the risks and responsibilities of such appropriations? Petra Rau is Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of English Modernism, National Identity and the Germans, 1890-1950 (2009), editor of Conflict, Nationhood and Corporality in Modern Literature: Bodies-at-War (2010) and has published on Freudian poetics, literature about the Second World War and travel writing. Cover image: Uncle Rudi (c) Gerhard Richter, 2012. Cover design: [EUP logo] www.euppublishing.com
