The Führer’s Fake: Presence of an Afterlife

Abstract

Despite the massive amount of information at our disposal, we still do not know for certain what caused Adolf Hitler to do the things that he did.¹ Soviet soldiers may have recovered his skull near the Berlin bunker, but ‘a sure sense of Hitler’s mind’ escapes us.² Both spectral and spectacular, his ever-present countenance remains forever in flux. He may well not have a grave or memorial, but he hardly lacks sites of remembrance.³ Memories of Hitler resonate above all in the sights and sounds of modern media rather than in written traces and printed artifacts. Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will, 1935) has been far more influential in shaping our sense of this personage than Mein Kampf. Indeed, Hitler’s biography and his afterlife remain intimately bound to the various historical shapes of audio-visual technology: photography, the print media, radio, film, and now television and the internet. When Hitler appeared ‘live’, what did the masses see and hear? Now that he is dead, what is left of him? What does the often-noted fascination with Hitler’s presence have to do with the lasting presence of that fascination?