I never wanted to see Look Who’s Back (Er ist wieder da). The idea of turning Hitler into a comedy always struck me as wrong. But when my daughter began taking an interest in the Third Reich, I thought we might watch it together. Half an hour in, I stopped.
The problem is simple. Hitler cannot be satire. Make him a clown and you trivialize him. Make him a demon and you absolve yourself. Either way, he is taken out of history — turned into something absurd or something inhuman, but never what he was: a man who rose from within a society, not outside it.
It should be the people who enabled him, and the people today who still prefer to imagine he was an alien intrusion rather than their own creation.
In modern Germany, that reflex shows itself again in how the AfD is treated: not by facing the social conditions that make it possible, but by caricaturing it as another Hitler.
It is easier to condemn than to understand, easier to repeat “never again” than to ask why “again” always threatens.
When a people looks away from something, it convinces itself the horror lies elsewhere — in the villain, in the caricature, in the demon.
But the abyss is not out there.
The abyss is within.