Hitler is everywhere. It’s impossible to escape him. You just have to look online. There are websites with images of “cats that look like Hitler” and “things that look like Hitler”; you can play a game called “Six Degrees of Hitler”, where the winner is the person who can go from a randomly chosen Wikipedia entry to the article on Hitler in the fewest possible moves; and YouTube now has a vast collection of parodic versions of Bruno Ganz’s rant in the movie Downfall, when Hitler concedes final defeat and rages against those he believes have betrayed him (“Hitler Doesn’t Like How Harry Potter Ends”; “Hitler Reacts to Kim Kardashian’s Divorce”; “Hitler is Informed His Pizza Will Arrive Late” and even “Hitler Rants About the Hitler Parodies”).
Portrayals of Hitler and the Nazis in film now abound, from alternative historical portrayals such as Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009), in which Hitler dies at the end in a hail of bullets, to Iron Sky (2012), in which the Nazis have escaped the chaos of the last days of the war in a giant spaceship and set up a base on the far side of the Moon from where they are preparing to invade the Earth. There are even comedies about Hitler, most notably the novel Er Ist Wieder Da (Look Who’s Back), by Timur Vermes, published in 2013, in which Hitler wakes up, his clothes still soaked in petrol, in present-day Berlin. Exploring the 21st-century German metropolis, he sees everything through Nazi eyes, with predictably comical consequences.
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