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Ed Webb

Endtime for Hitler: On the Downfall of the Downfall Parodies - Mark Dery - Doom Patrol:... - 1 views

  • Endtime for Hitler: On the Downfall of the Downfall Parodies
  • Hitler left an inexhaustible fund of unforgettable images; Riefenstahl’sTriumph of the Will alone is enough to make him a household deity of the TV age.
  • The Third Reich was the first thoroughly modern totalitarian horror, scripted by Hitler and mass-marketed by Goebbels, a tour de force of media spectacle and opinion management that America’s hidden persuaders—admen, P.R. flacks, political campaign managers—studied assiduously.  A Mad Man in both senses, Hitler sold the German volk on a racially cleansed utopia, a thousand-year empire whose kitschy grandeur was strictly Forest Lawn Parthenon.
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  • Hitler, unlike Stalin or Mao, was an intuitive master of media stagecraft. David Bowie’s too-clever quip that Hitler was the first rock star, for which Bowie was widely reviled at the time, was spot-on.
  • the media like Hitler because Hitler liked the media
  • Perhaps that’s why he continues to mesmerize us: because he flickers, irresolvably, between the seemingly inhuman and the all too human.
  • His psychopathology is a queasy funhouse reflection, straight out of Nightmare Alley, of the instrumental rationality of the machine age. The genocidal assembly lines of Hitler’s death camps are a grotesque parody of Fordist mechanization, just as the Nazis’ fastidious recycling of every remnant of their victims but their smoke—their gold fillings melted down for bullion, their hair woven into socks for U-boat crewmen—is a depraved caricature of the Taylorist mania for workplace efficiency.
  • there’s something perversely comforting about Hitler’s unchallenged status as the metaphysical gravitational center of all our attempts at philosophizing evil
  • he prefigured postmodernity: the annexation of politics by Hollywood and Madison Avenue, the rise of the celebrity as a secular icon, the confusion of image and reality in a Matrix world. He regarded existence “as a kind of permanent parade before a gigantic audience” (Fest), calculating the visual impact of every histrionic pose, every propaganda tagline, every monumental building
  • By denying everyone’s capability, at least in theory, for Hitlerian evil, we let ourselves off the hook
  • Yet Hitler, paradoxically, is also a shriveled untermensch, the protypical nonentity; a face in the crowd in an age of crowds, instantly forgettable despite his calculated efforts to brand himself (the toothbrush mustache of the military man coupled with the flopping forelock of the art-school bohemian)
  • there was always a comic distance between the public image of the world-bestriding, godlike Fuhrer and his Inner Adolf, a nail-biting nebbish tormented by flatulence. Knowingly or not, the Downfall parodies dance in the gap between the two. More immediately, they rely on the tried-and-true gimmick of bathos. What makes the Downfall parodies so consistently hilarious is the incongruity of whatever viral topic is making the Fuhrer go ballistic and the outsized scale of his gotterdammerung-strength tirade
  • The Downfall meme dramatizes the cultural logic of our remixed, mashed-up times, when digital technology allows us to loot recorded history, prying loose any signifier that catches our magpie eyes and repurposing it to any end. The near-instantaneous speed with which parodists use these viral videos to respond to current events underscores the extent to which the social Web, unlike the media ecologies of Hitler’s day, is a many-to-many phenomenon, more collective cacophony than one-way rant. As well, the furor (forgive pun) over YouTube’s decision to capitulate to the movie studio’s takedown demand, rather than standing fast in defense of Fair Use (a provision in copyright law that protects the re-use of a work for purposes of parody), indicates the extent to which ordinary people feel that commercial culture is somehow theirs, to misread or misuse as the spirit moves them.
  • the closest thing we have to a folk culture, the connective tissue that binds us as a society
  • SPIEGEL: Can you also get your revenge on him by using comedy? Brooks: Yes, absolutely. Of course it is impossible to take revenge for 6 million murdered Jews. But by using the medium of comedy, we can try to rob Hitler of his posthumous power and myths. [...] We take away from him the holy seriousness that always surrounded him and protected him like a cordon.”
  • risking the noose, some Germans laughed off their fears and mocked the Orwellian boot stamping on the human face, giving vent to covert opposition through flüsterwitze (“whispered jokes”). Incredibly, even Jews joked about their plight, drawing on the absurdist humor that is quintessentially Jewish to mock the Nazis even as they lightened the intolerable burden of Jewish life in the shadow of the swastika. Rapaport offers a sample of Jewish humor in Hitler’s Germany: “A Jew is arrested during the war, having been denounced for killing a Nazi at 10 P.M. and even eating the brain of his victim. This is his defense: In the first place, a Nazi hasn’t got any brain. Secondly, a Jew doesn’t eat anything that comes from a pig. And thirdly, he could not have killed the Nazi at 10 P.M. because at that time everybody listens to the BBC broadcast.”
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    Brilliant
Ed Webb

BBC News - Google answers privacy questions posed by commissioners - 0 views

  • "Respecting privacy is a part of every Googler's job,"
  • In Germany there has been criticism of the Street View service because it has recorded the details of private wi-fi networks. Germany's Federal Commissioner for Data Protection Peter Schaar has complained to Google. A legal claim in February 2009 by a Pittsburgh couple who said that Street View violated their privacy was thrown out by a federal judge.
Ed Webb

Scientific blinders: Learning from the moral failings of Nazi physicists - Bulletin of ... - 0 views

  • As the evening progressed, more and more questions concerning justice and ethics occurred to the physicists: Are atomic weapons inherently inhumane, and should they never be used? If the Germans had come to possess such weapons, what would be the world’s fate? What constitutes real patriotism in Nazi Germany—working for the regime’s success, or its defeat? The scientists expressed surprise and bafflement at their colleagues’ opinions, and their own views sometimes evolved from one moment to the next. The scattered, changing opinions captured in the Farm Hall transcripts highlight that, in their five years on the Nazi nuclear program, the German physicists had likely failed to wrestle meaningfully with these critical questions.
  • looking back at the Uranium Club serves to remind us scientists of how easy it is to focus on technical matters and avoid considering moral ones. This is especially true when the moral issues are perplexing, when any negative impacts seem distant, and when the science is exciting.
  • engineers who develop tracking or facial-recognition systems may be creating tools that can be purchased by repressive regimes intent on spying on and suppressing dissent. Accordingly, those researchers have a certain obligation to consider their role and the impact of their work.
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  • reflecting seriously on the societal context of a research position may prompt a scientist to accept the job—and to take it upon herself or himself to help restrain unthinking innovation at work, by raising questions about whether every feature that can be added should in fact be implemented. (The same goes for whether certain lines of research should be pursued and particular findings published.)
  • The challenge for each of us, moving forward, is to ask ourselves and one another, hopefully far earlier in the research process than did Germany’s Walther Gerlach: “What are we working for?”
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    If you get the opportunity see, or at least read, the plays The Physicists (Die Physiker) by Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Copenhagen by Michael Frayn.
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