Tuesday, January 06, 2009

Hitler?

What do you make of Gladney being a Hitler scholar — and one who doesn't know German? (cl, this may be somewhat related to your observations on pop culture in academia — and the superficial nature of some "studies").
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5 comments:

cl said...

Well, I liked how he explained his decision to take up Hitler.

One, it permitted him to take up a persona more powerful than himself .... one in which he's validated as a man by his robe, his glasses and nickname. I loved how he was thrown into a funk after a colleague sized him up off-campus, so he took the family on a wild shopping spree to justify his existence.

But more on topic, I thought perhaps the author wanted to critique the self-marketing critical to flourishing in academia. It's another form of "publish or perish" -- you have to promote yourself as the expert, and if your specialty is a "sexy" topic, all the better. Gladney looked at the market, found an unmined, flashy topic and claimed it. Novelists and screenwriters do it all the time, I guess.

Loved that he had managed all that time without learning German. And just as good -- his close friend Murray is Jewish!

6:42 PM, January 07, 2009
cl said...

And again, there's the morality -- not that Hitler's history isn't worthy of study, but it's like Murray's casual acceptance (even social manipulation) of Gladney's specialty, that he appreciates what it's done for Jack at the expense of wondering what kind of madman wants to become an expert on one of the most evil people in recent history.

6:45 PM, January 07, 2009
Erin said...

Yeah, that was interesting. It reminded me of how people refer to the History Channel as the Hitler Channel because it seems like he's always on there. Hitler is trashy-tabloid history. He's sensational and shocking and larger than life.

1:41 PM, January 08, 2009
Ben said...

I thought having a Department of Hitler Studies was perfect. Farcical and plausible all at once -- like so much of the book.

And there sure wasn't any detail about Hitler in the book. And he didn't know German. And why would he carry around Mein Kampf all the time? It was as though all he did was be the first person to claim to be a Hitler scholar, and that made him not only a Hitler scholar, but the foremost one!

11:32 PM, January 09, 2009
cl said...

Ben, I think that copy of Mein Kampf must have been his security blanket.

Erin, your comment on another thread about the nuns has me thinking whether Jack's repulsion for the German language was sort of his values checking in on a subconscious level -- that he couldn't find any beauty in the language despite how powerfully Hitler used it, or reconcile it with anything civilized. I don't know. Maybe there's nothing to do with that. It's certainly not a pretty language.

4:39 PM, January 10, 2009

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