Guest lecture by Dr Michael Butter, University of Bonn

SUMMARY: US - American culture is obsessed with Adolf Hitler. He is frequently evoked in speeches about Iraq, Iran, or North Korea, and employed in attempts to disqualify domestic political opponents, while several websites collect images of cats that allegedly resemble him. Unsurprisingly, then, the culture has also produced an astonishing number of films and novels that feature him as character. In these stories, Hitler appears as a science-fiction writer living in New York, as a vampire in love with Evita Péron, is called back from hell to rule from the White House, or has children that try to assume power in the US or in Germany. Moving from Charlie Chaplin to George W. Bush, the talk will investigate the various kinds of cultural work that US-representations of Hitler have performed over the last sixty years.

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