Word: hitlering
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...Hitler's Corpse...
...Your admiring review of Walter Langer's The Mind of Adolf Hitler [Oct. 2] smacks of the victor mutilating the corpse of an enemy (acting, no doubt, on the superstition that heaping indignities on the dead somehow diminishes the potency of their misdeeds...
Haven't we had enough ot this kind of psychoanalytic overkill? It seems to be inspired by the pathetic illusion that we can disarm society's malefactors by denying their membership in the human race. This is immensely comforting, but in dehumanizing Hitler, we also dehumanize his crimes...
...there are the Great Men. Churchill, de Gaulle, Petain, and especially Hitler loom up before the Clermont-Ferrand landscape. But they, too, exist as personalities in individual memories: Hitler is recalled as favoring "harmless little liaisons" over inter-marriage, claiming that his soldiers' desire to marry French women was caused "by lack of sexual opportunities." Those famous men who are interviewed, Anthony Eden and Pierre Mendes-France in particular, speak more of the times than of great events. Mendes-France, recalling his escape from prison, is reminded of the modesty of a young woman whose boyfriend propositioned her as they...
Petain becomes a somewhat benign version of Hitler, showing up in newsreels, on innumerable posters, and in the rhetoric of nationalist speakers. In retrospect, Petain is recognized to have been a symbol of safety and accomodation. So many wanted a way out, and Petain was acceptable as an old man who couldn't harm anyone. The film's critique of him is personal--he was very much a defeatist--but it holds him as symbol, not scapegoat. The Sorrow's shame is collective...