How We Forget What We Must Remember
The Holocaust Museum has a traveling exhibition on the subject of “Propaganda”, specifically Nazi propaganda. Yesterday, my wife and I saw it, on its last weekend at the Bullock State Historical Museum in Austin, Texas.
It was a moving experience, but it was tainted by a remarkable unintended irony.
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Nazism is of course a fascinating and gruesome topic.
For myself, Nazism isn’t as much of an abstraction as it is for most North Americans. My parents spent the war hiding, because they happened to be Jews in Slovakia. My mother’s brother, Erno, actually found himself on one of the infamous cattle cars. A young man, vigorous though small, he managed to squeeze himself through a rotting hole in the side of the rail car to escape the moving train. His first wife, and his first son (my oldest cousin), were probably on the same train, which he saw vanishing into the distance toward Thereisenstadt. They were never heard from again.
The purpose of the Holocaust Museum, and of museum exhibits like the one at the Bullock, is to keep the memory of these atrocities alive as the last of those who suffered them directly vanish from the world. How did such a thing happen? How can it be prevented from recurring? This is the key historical question of the twentieth century.
The “Propaganda” exhibition makes the case that systematic, appealing presentation of grotesque and brazen falsehoods was key. It swung enough of the population to adulation of Adolf Hitler to allow the 1940s to descend into hellish conflagration. Systematic intimidation then silenced those who could see through the lies and might be willing to challenge them.
Some argue that few people believed the lies. The Nazis’ mere ability to assert such vile absurd abuse without much challenge is itself an assertion of immense power. Perhaps it’s not so much that people were persuaded to believe. People were, rather, convinced to act as if they believed. That was enough to murder my oldest cousin and millions of others.
There was graphic genius behind the propaganda. Appealing films and posters were key to the demonization of my people and the aggrandizement of the supposedly heroic Nazi archetype. It’s easy to forget the purpose of these pieces and focus on their clever visual impact.
Persuasion wasn’t the point. Stirring and misdirecting vile emotions was the point. Images and innuendo are powerful methods of short-circuiting reason, ethics, and the norms of civilization. Propaganda appeals to the gut, not to the intellect.
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The context in which we saw the show, though, was mightily peculiar.
The Bullock Museum supports itself in part by hosting Austin’s best IMAX screen, and running commercial movies. They are currently showing Rogue One, the most recent of the Star Wars movies. Indeed, Irene and I had visited the Bullock earlier that same week to see it, and indeed that reminded us to catch the Propaganda exhibit. But we weren’t aware that the very day we were going to the exhibit was also going to be Star Wars Fan Day at the Bullock.
When we arrived for the Nazi propaganda exhibit, the lobby was mobbed with families and costumed presenters sporting very high quality props and costumes. A guy in a convincing fishlike mask was there taking pictures with children, for instance. People dressed as alliance rebels and as empire militia mock-battled with red and blue light sabers. Most strikingly, there were perhaps a dozen people in Hollywood quality white armor. Darth Vader’s “stormtroopers” in the jargon of the Star Wars universe. We were literally greeted by uniformed stormtroopers on approaching the Nazi propaganda exhibit.
The first piece of propaganda we saw on entering the Bullock was not one of the Nazis’, but one of the galactic empire’s.
I don’t think the jarring juxtaposition with the Nazi propaganda exhibit was on the minds of those who planned Star Wars Fan Day. Still, I was immediately struck by how much this “recruitment poster” for the Empire resembled Nazi propaganda in style and spirit.
The scene reminded me of how uncomfortable I was with Rogue One as an entertainment experience aimed at children. In all the other Star Wars movies, there was a clear delineation between “good guys” and “bad guys”, between the light and dark side of The Force. In Rogue One, the story, what little could be sandwiched between the endless explosions and battles, revealed little reason to side with the violent, vengeful rebels over the violent, vengeful authoritarians. I left the film wondering if the usual “moral of the story” had been buried under a mere celebration of belligerence. What are children to make of this?
The story gets stranger still. I had forgotten our Bullock membership cards in the car and went back to retrieve them, leaving Irene in the giftshop. By the time I returned, a long line was snaking out the door of the Bullock and into the plaza.
The line was for children to get their picture taken with Darth Vader.
Let’s be clear about this. When the first Star Wars movies were made, the memories of the evils of the mid-century were fresh in the minds of free people everywhere. Darth Vader was a strange, intimidating man of enormous power who ruled by terror over a vast, subjugated empire, a terror enforced by “stormtroopers”. Darth Vader, in other words, was explicitly modeled on Adolf Hitler. Yet a few yards from an exhibit warning about Nazi propaganda, media geniuses have convinced our children to stand in line to get their picture taken with him as though he were Santa Claus.
