Speaking of German fascism, Walter Benjamin famously wrote, “The logical outcome of fascism is an aestheticizing of political life.” This yearlong series of events seeks to explore this notion by examining movements built through the reappropriation of historical memory into a romanticized ideal that requires the exclusion and elimination of ideas and identities. Our touchstone for this series is the German art festival held in Munich in March 1939, just months before the invasion of Poland and in the shadow of years of anti-Jewish legislation in Germany after 1933. This event is captured in the film Good Morning Mr. Hitler which features color footage of a public event designed to celebrate 2,000 years of German cultural history and includes interviews with participants of the parade and their retrospective thoughts in their celebration of the German Reich. Using this film as a starting point, we seek to explore how the Nazi party and other radical movements have utilized the fetishization of the past to violently erase those out of compliance with their retroactive national norm. We examine historical artifacts as representations–visual art, film, and literature–and how the iconography of these ideologies and their eras has found afterlives in neo-fascist coalitions. This resurgence of an ethos that romanticizes the past is not only present in radical circles, but has spread to the legislative branches of government, determining local, state, and national policy.

Organized in dialogue with contemporary issues, the series is aligned with the current KHC exhibit, The Concentration Camps: Inside the Nazi System of Incarceration and Genocide. Click here for more information about the programs and registration links.