A few years back, I finally reached the rarified height sought by many and reached among the millions of dedicated TV watchers. I became a Nielsen family.
For a month, I wrote down my TV viewing routine in a diary supplied by the Nielsen organization. Instead of trying to throw the results with something noble, like seven hours of PBS a day or C-SPAN symposiums on labor disputes of the 1970s, I decided to record what I really watched.
The results probably caused some Nielsen data clerk to heave the thing out the nearest window. The diary consisted mainly of:
1. Los Angeles Dodgers broadcasts.
2. The Fox Business Channel’s Countdown to the Closing Bell, but only on days when Liz Clayman showed up for work.
3. Turner Classic Movies.
4. The History Channel and its offshoots for any World War II documentaries.
Or, to be specific, any documentaries dealing with Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. If there’s going to be Nazis in it, I’m there.
It’s hard to tell where my fascination with Nazis began. I recall that I read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer during a junior-high-school summer, and I’ve kept going for another four decades. I’d estimate that I’ve read at least 400 books on various topics, and there are at least 60-odd volumes on the bookshelves here in the house.
It’s hard to find some topic I haven’t explored, from biographies of Hitler’s finance minister to a detailed aesthetic critique of Hitler’s artistic sense and the parallels to how he viewed the world.
Not all the books are dry historical tomes. I’ve read through a number of novels, including the excellent Bernie Gunther series of detective stories by Philip Kerr, as well as David Downing’s “train-station” series with American hero John Russell.
Of course, I’ve also taken in hundreds of hours of films on various aspects of the Third Reich, from Schindler’s List to Swing Kids to old groaners from the 1940s like Hitler’s Children. A wealth of movies came from Germany in the past few years, such as Downfall, North Face and Napoli.
It’s the explosion of documentaries, however, that provide plenty of viewing time. At one point, critics began calling The History Channel by the knock-off of The Hitler Channel, and the broadcaster began wheeling its massive collection off to lesser subsidiaries like Military Channel and that treasure trove of the Third Reich, the Military History Channel.
It’s not unusual that’s I’ll fill an odd hour with a documentary about those naughty Nazis. Most people would think this dull – surely this is just repetitive stuff. After all, Hitler keeps dying in the bunker at the end, doesn’t he?
Well, yes, but the history of Nazi Germany is one of those topics that seem to enrich itself as time goes on. The cottage industry of books about Watergate and the assassination of John Kennedy seem to have played out, but the goods on the Nazis seem to get better and better.
Part of this is an effort – especially among British historians – to dig deeper and find more information. While some of this is terrific (Alan Kershaw’s new look at Hitler with his two-volume biography) and some is just plain silly (the Fuhrer’s drug intake as detailed in the documentary High Hitler).
It’s all fascinating to me. When people ask me why, my stock answer isn’t something about a love of history, or some pining for a revival of fascism. No, I keep watching and reading because I want to spot the Nazis when they come back.
And that’s not said as a joke, either. It may not be with rallies and banners and storm troopers, but that same wave of ideas to save us from peril – at a very high cost – is certain to return. If it happened in an enlightened, cultured and common-sense place like Germany in the 20th century, it can happen anywhere, anytime. It’s the challenge of Spot the Totalitarians; the more you know about the last time it happened, the better prepared you are to stem the next tide.
And, there isn’t going to be any end of this soon, as illustrated by a recent BBC radio documentary called Nazi Gold about the perpetual interest in the Third Reich. The narrator noted the example of the late British humorist Alan Coren, who collected a series of essays and decided on a joke title to boost sales. He teamed up two big trends in publishing – golf and cats – and called the book Golfing for Cats. And, just to jump on the Nazi publishing bandwagon, he put a big swastika on the cover.
The book sold like hotcakes.
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