We are fast forgetting how to be guilty about the past

Kate Williams says that Tarantino’s reduction of Nazi atrocities to entertainment is part of a dangerous trend in which the great evils of history become show business

One of this summer’s big screen openings is Quentin Tarantino’s hyperbolic battle movie, Inglourious Basterds. Featuring Brad Pitt demanding his men search for ‘100 Nazi scalps’, this ironic shootfest is bloody, explosive, rowdily entertaining — and a fantasy. ‘You haven’t seen war,’ screams the trailer, ‘until you have seen it through the eyes of Quentin Tarantino.’ As the pound falls and Germany under Merkel is resurgent, 2009 is the year in which our representations of the Third Reich and the second world war have turned towards areas that we would have seen as excessive only a few years back.

At a time when we are seemingly more obsessed with Hitler than ever, Tarantino has released an historical film in which history is irrelevant. Now, when most of those who fought in the 1940s are dead, the war is becoming not so much a memory, but a series of images, as fit for creative revision and ridicule as the Boleyn sisters and Henry VIII.

‘We are going to laugh at Hitler,’ declared Max Falk, the manager of the Admiral Theatre in Berlin, on the first staging of Mel Brooks’s musical The Producers in May. German audiences had never been exposed to a goose-stepping Hitler singing ‘Heil Myself’ and dancing stormtroopers. For Falk, the production was a ‘great step forward for Germany’.

Brooks’s tale of two New Yorkers creating the most tasteless musical possible in order to fleece their backers is a piquant comment on modern culture. The weighty seriousness of films focusing on the victims of the Holocaust such as Schindler’s List and Sophie’s Choice seems a thing of the past.