Are we normalizing Hitler too much?

There are now websites dedicated to “kitlers” (cats that look like Hitler),YouTube videos that remix documentary footage to turn Hitler into a dexterous disco dancer, and innumerable parodic appropriations of Bruno Ganz’s psychotic rants in Oliver Hirschbiegel’s film Downfall that are refashioned to criticize a plethora of contemporary cultural discontents ranging from Kim Kardashian, traffic jams and Indian call centres to Rebecca Black’s song “Friday.”  Disparate as they may sound, thse phenomena are, according to the American historian Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, all signs of a widespread “normalization” of Nazism in contemporary culture.

That is from Anna Katharina Schaffner’s review of Rosenfeld’s Hi Hitler! How the Nazi Past is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture, September 11th issue of the TLS.

In that same TLS is this extraordinary Lidija Haas review of Ferrante, one of the best book reviews I’ve read in years.

And here is an interesting article on Nazi porcelain.