Playing With Hitler:<i>Downfall</i>and Its Ludic Uptake

Abstract

A few years after the release of the film Downfall (2004), which portrays Adolf Hitler's final stand and the subsequent fall of the Third Reich, so-called “Downfall parodies” overtook YouTube. The bulk of the parodies riff on a scene that has Hitler holed up in an underground bunker learning of the Russian army's breach of Berlin, recasting Hitler's outcry with subtitles that encompass the most politically consequential topics as well as the most trivial social matters. Given their multiplicity, plus their singular standpoints, the parodies constitute a unique instance in which the value of rhetorical play with Hitler can be examined in terms of representational (and, to be sure, misrepresentational) politics. This essay approaches the image of Hitler as a complex and collective articulation on which numerous representations converge. I argue in particular that, in playing with (texts) of Hitler, Downfall parodies trouble a powerful cultural configuration that operates on a dynamic, and indeed disturbing, interplay of dour historical realism and utter drollery.