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Playing With Hitler: Downfall andIts Ludic UptakeChristopher J. Gilbert

A few years after the release of the film Downfall (2004), which portrays Adolf

Hitler’s final stand and the subsequent fall of the Third Reich, so-called ‘‘Downfall

parodies’’ overtook YouTube. The bulk of the parodies riff on a scene that has Hitler holed

up in an underground bunker learning of the Russian army’s breach of Berlin, recasting

Hitler’s outcry with subtitles that encompass the most politically consequential topics as

well as the most trivial social matters. Given their multiplicity, plus their singular

standpoints, the parodies constitute a unique instance in which the value of rhetorical

play with Hitler can be examined in terms of representational (and, to be sure,

misrepresentational) politics. This essay approaches the image of Hitler as a complex and

collective articulation on which numerous representations converge. I argue in particular

that, in playing with (texts) of Hitler, Downfall parodies trouble a powerful cultural

configuration that operates on a dynamic, and indeed disturbing, interplay of dour

historical realism and utter drollery.

Keywords: Parody; YouTube; Play; Hitler; Representation

[I]n order to bring the world into focus, one has to play games with one’s ownperceptual machinery.

*Richard A. Lanham

Hitler is a vehicle.*Serdar Somuncu

When parodies of the notorious bunker scene in Oliver Hirschbiegel’s film, Downfall

(2004), began to overtake YouTube in late 2007, it was not the first time the figure of

Chris Gilbert is a PhD student in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University,

Bloomington. The author thanks Barbara Klinger for her encouragement and advice, along with the

anonymous reviewers and Kent Ono for their useful feedback. Correspondence to: Chris Gilbert, Department

of Communication and Culture, 800 East Third Street, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA. Email: chrgilbe@

indiana.edu

ISSN 1529-5036 (print)/ISSN 1479-5809 (online) # 2013 National Communication Association

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2012.755052

Critical Studies in Media Communication

Vol. 30, No. 5, December 2013, pp. 407�424

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Hitler had been redeployed to comic ends. In January 1940, the Three Stooges

delivered the cinematic satire, You Nazty Spy!, wherein paperhangers Larry,

Curly, and Moe are made Minister of Propaganda, Field Marshall, and Dictator of

Moronica after munitions workers overthrow the king. Later that year, Charlie

Chaplin produced The Great Dictator and played Adenoid Hynkel, fictional despot of

Tomania. In the film, Hynkel’s incendiary speeches are subtitled with absurd

translations that mimic Hitler’s malice. Technical Sergeant Andrew J. Carter made

a mockery of Hitler in the television show, Hogan’s Heroes (1965�1971), namely in

the episode, ‘‘Will the Real Adolf Hitler Please Stand Up?’’ In 1968, Mel Brooks

released The Producers (remade in 2005 by director Susan Stroman) in which

theatrical producer Max Bialystock colludes with his accountant Leopold Bloom

to produce a Broadway flop. Ironically, the play*Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp

with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden*triumphs when the audience sees it as a

delightful send-up of the Third Reich. A 2007 German comedy entitled Mein Fuhrer:

The Truey Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler ‘‘portrays Hitler as an impotent man who

plays with battleships in the bathtub and wets his bed’’ (Harris, 2007). Plainly, Hitler

is a mobile signifier of evil as well as folly and play.

Yet there is something different in the ‘‘Downfall parodies’’ on YouTube. While

descendants of their Big Media forebears, they feature everyday parodists super-

imposing subtitles (in quite Chaplin-esque style) to riff, primarily, on the moment

when Hitler learns of the Russian army’s breach of Berlin and his imminent defeat.

Their singular politics are plentiful, encompassing Hillary Clinton’s loss of the

presidential nomination to Barack Obama in 2008, footballer Cristiano Ronaldo’s

departure from Manchester United in 2009, problems with Microsoft’s Vista

operating system, the quality of Adam Sandler movies, Hitler’s ostensive sexual

misfortunes, Disney’s acquisition of Marvel Inc., the assassination of Osama Bin

Laden in 2011, the United States debt crisis, and so on, seemingly ad infinitum. While

exploiting the accessibility of a cinematic text, they reinscribe with new meaning

Hitler as an archetype of evil, the cultural burdens of historical atrocity, and Downfall

as a supposedly literal representation of the Fuhrer. Moreover, Downfall parodies

illustrate how much the logic of representation matters as an anchor for authenticity,

especially as they articulate disparate elements together to refigure that for and

against which Hitler stands.

Of course, ‘‘playfulness [is] common to new media environments,’’ and parodies

exist within discourses about user-generated content, democratization, copyright,

fair use, and capitalism (Hess, 2009, p. 427; also Wasko & Erickson, 2009, p. 32).

Rhetorical play on YouTube intimates what Henry Jenkins (1992, 2006) dubs

‘‘poaching’’ or ‘‘participatory’’ cultures. It reconstitutes the ‘‘popular’’ and the

‘‘political,’’ blurring lines between production and consumption (Burgess & Green,

2009; Klinger, 2006; Strangelove, 2010). It also displays the ludic, or a rhetoric of

mimicry, mockery, or ridicule. Parodic videos therefore embody ‘‘[t]he double-edged

character of online society [itself], vacillating between democratic potentiality and

superficial vulgarity’’ (Søorenssen, 2009, p. 142).

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Downfall parodies offer a unique moment in which the value of rhetorical play as

a collective reappropriation of Hitler can be measured in terms of representational

politics. In particular, the parodies offer a critical compass for navigating the

instability of representation and the vulnerability of meaning as complex articula-

tions. By playing into and off of, yet also exhibiting, the machineries of supposed

textual authority (not to mention the apparent ontogenesis of texts on YouTube),

they reconstruct relationships between historical and contemporary conditions.

Furthermore, the parodies re-articulate as they re-present, disrupting linkages

between and among discourses, while pitting rhetorical play as a powerful nodal

point in the serious business of representation.

The prevalence of YouTube parodies in general raises questions about historical

representation, ethics of civic participation (especially considering victims of extreme

cruelty and suffering, but also authorial responsibility and online anonymity), limits

to our tolerance of textual plurality (and even purity), as well as the capacity of

playful rhetoric to participate in political subversion, historical perversion, and

systematic subservience. Some say Downfall parodies disrupt Hitler’s political and

historical connection to fascism, racial and religious persecution, and genocide;

or that when Hitler voices current events, today’s history seems heavier than

yesterday’s*and the same could be said tomorrow. I argue that Hitler as a vehicle for

social and political commentary is disquieting precisely because parodists are not just

playing with a film text or the figure of Hitler; they are playing with wider cultural

narratives and political problematics, even as the parodies are not*per se*‘‘about’’

Hitler. It is within this framework that the ludic uptake of Downfall merits critical

attention as a point of intersection in a larger cultural configuration that is

collectively imagined in and through a dynamic interplay of grim historical actuality

and comic travesty.

I begin by recollecting some historical roots of the nexus between play and

rhetoric. In foregrounding the ‘‘ludic,’’ I channel ancient precepts of rhetorical play to

posit YouTube as a key site of representational contestation, hosting countless textual

fragments that thrive on replication, repetition, and reiteration. Parody is a distinct

mode of representation and rhetorical play on YouTube, which I detail in brief to

frame the ludic uptake of Downfall. Next, I engage discourses around the film, offer a

critical genealogy of the Downfall parodies, and analyze select exemplars, all to

establish a crisscrossing of discursive, cultural, and political networks. I then evaluate

attempts of the film’s producer, director, and writer to determine Downfall’s

reception against the parodic variations. Finally, I animate some of the constraints

of rhetorical play on YouTube in light of related problems of representation, which

range from anxieties about evil to cultural capitalization to copyright law. I conclude

with a rumination on the potential political import of playful rhetoric on YouTube.

Rhetoric in an Historical Playground

Delineating a playful rhetoric is almost an exercise in redundancy. Rhetoric since the

classical periods has ‘‘assumed a full range of human motive, game, play, and purpose

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in ever-shifting combinations’’ (Lanham, 2003, p. 10). Its infamous progenitors

are the Sophists, that traveling tribe of rhetoricians who emerged when ancient

Greece was transitioning away from mythopoeic traditions and toward the arts

of civic discourse. Such arts borrowed the stylistics and sensibilities of poiesis and

exalted ‘‘[s]how, appearance, art, deception, imitation, illusion, and entertainment’’

(Poulakos, 1995, pp. 39, 41; see also Jarratt, 1991; McComiskey, 2002). Indeed,

Downfall parodies have ancient roots.

But rhetoric is never mere play. Rather, rhetoric entails competition. For Gorgias,

the Sophistic figurehead, ‘‘speech, like the summons at the Olympic games, calls him

who will, but crowns him who can’’ (Sprague, 2001, p. 49). Rhetoric is a display of

skill with words and ideas, but also a contest over whose will win the day. Hence

Plato’s (1961) olden rebuke of rhetors as ‘‘athlete[s] of words’’ (231d�e). Such

gaming metaphors are revealing. They point to ‘‘competition as a [discursive]

practice’’ whereby ‘‘one plays not only for a victory but also for the pleasure inherent

in playing’’ (Poulakos, 1995, p. 65). Today, affirming pleasure (or play, for that

matter) in politics might seem dangerous, especially when representations of

Hitler are the impetus. But it is crucial to keep in mind that every representation

is a misrepresentation.1 Following Kenneth Burke (1969), ‘‘reflections’’ of reality are

also ‘‘selections’’*and ‘‘deflections’’*of reality (p. 59). YouTube is a ludic training

ground that begets a rhetorical playground in which parodists vie for critical

attention, shifting the valences of discourse and promoting civic engagement.

One could easily pinpoint rhetorical play in theories, curricula, and political

moments across historical epochs. One could also note that, though representations

do not beget reality, they certainly have material consequences. They situate bodies

and minds, feelings and perspectives, in the world. The ancient Sophistic dictum that

a thing is what it appears to be is perhaps overreaching, but it is not necessarily

overstated. That a person, image, or idea can both be and not be what it seems to be is

a cornerstone of rhetoric and likewise a central notion to Stuart Hall’s important

observation that culture itself is a constant ‘‘play on contradiction.’’ Representations

do cultural, historical, and rhetorical work, and struggles over (mis)representations

get caught up in a complex of institutions, media, power plays, and role plays, let

alone plays on words and images. They encompass what Lawrence Grossberg (2010)

dubs ‘‘pieces of many different puzzles,’’ overlapping and even overbearing as they

‘‘play against each other’’ (p. 53). To take up the Downfall parodies is consequently to

take up a competition of contradictory representations.

Parody is a particularly salient entry point, since it is so rampant on YouTube

and because it is conducive to ‘‘a very wide variety of tones and moods*from

respectful to playful to scathingly critical’’ (Hutcheon, 2000, p. xii). Through parody,

‘‘limits are exposed,’’ since it ‘‘exceed[s] tacit limits on expression*the appropriate,

the rational’’ (Hariman, 2008, p. 251). In parody, for instance, laughter becomes

decidedly political. Furthermore, texts in the new media milieu are accessible to the

imaginations and machinations of multiple audiences, making meaning the

provenance of publicly vying (and, yes, viable) interpretations. Rhetorical play as

parody promotes a veritable politics of misrepresentation. But lest we forget that,

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while the ludic is game-like and playful, it is also hierarchical. That is, if it can be

situated within the intercessory spaces of rhetorical and cultural production, it

cannot exist without them and their underlying authorial strictures. Parody tests

hierarchies of representation and so rouses controversy if and when it threatens

‘‘official,’’ authorized discourses (Meddaugh, 2010). So while parody tricks the system

of YouTube, we are wise to wonder who gets the last laugh.

What follows is an evaluation of Downfall and its ludic uptake according to some

of the logics YouTube accommodates. I begin by accounting for a prime rhetorical

device in Downfall parodies: humor. I emphasize humor not only because of its

frequency in parody, but also because of its coincidence with freedom and license

(both in the legal sense and in the perceived ‘‘free’’ play of textual content). I then

examine the politics of parodic representation on YouTube in addition to rhetorical

practices of playing with Hitler.

Humoring Hitler

YouTube contains contradictory logics by coordinating antagonisms and synergies.

The same is true for parody. As Barbara Klinger (2006) attests:

In the process of fusing two or more texts, [parodists] not only exploit clashingcodes, making hybridity ultravisible, but also utilize points of agreement that laya foundation for the intermarriage of texts. This is ‘‘strange bedfellows’’ humor,created out of a choreography of affinities and dissimilarities between texts thatseeks to mine the comic possibilities of dissonance (p. 222).

Parody, in other words, plays off the ambivalence of cultural authority in its creation

of comic dissonance.2 It also exploits a prime function of YouTube, which is to host

user-generated, and corporate, content. If contests of meaning enable dissonant

conflations of bottom-up and top-down representations, Downfall parodies are

simultaneously ‘‘official’’ and ‘‘unofficial’’ instantiations of cultural production. A

look at discourses around Downfall will help contextualize the parodies and the

anxieties they*and the film*induced.

Downfall was released on September 16, 2004 in Germany; February 18, 2005, in

the United States; April 1, 2005 in the United Kingdom; and elsewhere until April

2006 (IDMB). I specify these locations because filmic depictions of Hitler have long

been anathema in Germany (Wallace, 2004). Likewise, ‘‘while laughing at Hitler has

been [appropriate] . . . in the [United States] and Britain, [it has] been unusual*if

not taboo*in Germany’’ (Harris, 2007). This is noteworthy for at least two reasons.

First, Downfall did reasonably well at art house box offices in the United States and

Britain and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Film. Second,

the bulk of Downfall parodies are attributed to these two countries.3

The film adapts Traudl Junge’s autobiography, Until the Final Hour: Hitler’s Last

Secretary, which details Junge’s witness of Hitler’s collapse between the years of

1942 and 1945. It also draws from Joachim Fest’s book, Inside Hitler’s Bunker. Told

primarily from Junge’s perspective, Downfall glimpses Hitler’s final 12 days in an

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underground bunker in Berlin*Soviet forces in striking distance, bombs exploding

about him. While the film centers on the fall of the Third Reich, by most accounts

Downfall is a ‘‘Hitler film’’ (Bathrick, 2007, p. 5). Constantin Film AG (Constantin)

promoted the film’s historical accuracy and its status as a drama of war. This is

overshadowed by the uncanniness of Bruno Ganz’s portrayal of Hitler, which makes

the film equally*if not more of*a biography. As one critic notes, ‘‘Ganz . . . studied

all the archival footage and recordings to catch Hitler’s physical mannerisms as well

as the soft Austrian intonations of his normal speaking voice’’ (Goldberg, 2005).

‘‘One doesn’t see Ganz,’’ says another, ‘‘only Hitler’’ (Bathrick, 2007, p. 8).

Some reviewers were quick to critique ‘‘this fetishized notion of authenticity,’’ but

neither in terms of Downfall’s accuracy nor Ganz’s verisimilitude (Bathrick, 2007,

p. 8). Criticism, instead, converged on Hitler’s humanness. The film displays banal

aspects of Hitler’s life: he eats dinner, converses with friends on a common room

couch, smokes a cigarette, and takes a walk. The film depicts a human being (Denby,

2005; Kershaw, 2004; LaSalle, 2005; Rohrer, 2010). Roger Ebert (2005) summarizes

the sentiment: ‘‘We get the point: Hitler was not a supernatural being; he was

common clay . . . But is this observation a sufficient response to what Hitler actually

did?’’ Surely the idea that there is a ‘‘sufficient’’ response to the atrocities perpetuated

by Hitler and his Nazi regime is absurd. Melissa Muller, Junge’s stenographer, dubbed

Junge’s memoir ‘‘an exorcism’’ (Brook, 2005). Dismissals of Hitler’s humanness (or

devilishness) might be the same. So what to do with this global story that continues

to haunt our collective consciousness?

One response is, evidently, to play with it. Following Mikhail Bakhtin (1981,

p. 121), one of the best responses to a horrid reality is laughter. Seriousness, says

Bakhtin (1983), typifies ‘‘all that is official’’ (p. 94). It oppresses imagination, spoils

laughter, and strangles the reflexivity out of judgment. It demands that representa-

tions be exact reflections of particular realities. Laughter ‘‘liberates from the fear . . .of the sacred, of prohibitions, of the past, of power. It . . . [opens our] eyes on that

which is new’’ (p. 94). It throws a wrench in the spokes of representational

wheelhouses and knee-jerk judgments about them. Rather than exorcizing evil from

our collective psyche, Downfall parodies exercise it as part of our cultural mold.

Interestingly, Downfall does similar work*but without the laughter and with,

apparently, too much ‘‘sympathy for the devil’’ (Wallace, 2004). The parodies and film

both ‘‘humor’’ Hitler and, in capitalizing on his fiendishness, uphold his humanity.

It is for this reason that playing with Hitler is troubling to some. The United States

has long claimed a moral superiority over evil. Even Kenneth Burke, a staunch critic

of American politics, appealed to the ‘‘decent members’’ of America when advocating

for a close reading of Mein Kampf and an intimate understanding of Hitler’s

rhetorical black magic. Burke was concerned with what he called ‘‘Hitler distortions,’’

or representations of Hitler that twisted the ‘‘truth’’ of his treachery. This echoes his

reservations about humor, which, says Burke (1973), ‘‘dwarfs’’ otherwise complex

situations and bends them out of proportion (p. 43). Burke also condemns

demonization. Still, in attempting to keep Hitler demonized, we forget what may

be Burke’s most important admonishment: to err is human. As Burke (1984) attests:

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‘‘The progress of humane enlightenment can go no further than in picturing people

not as vicious, but as mistaken’’ (p. 41). Downfall parodies are, in this way,

humanizing distortions*not humiliating or degrading, but foolish. Imagine, after

all, the Fuhrer spouting off about being duped during the sub-prime mortgage crisis,

about his inability to discover ‘‘where’s Waldo,’’ or about the social nuisance of so-

called ‘‘grammar Nazis.’’ What is more, when taken as a whole, Downfall parodies

amplify the stupidity of Hitler’s battle, while amplifying the power vested in a sense of

community that stems from the pervasiveness of parodic videos that feign how,

idiomatically and ironically, Hitler would react to current events. Humor is, then,

a cooperative enterprise, and variations in play with Hitler’s status as a devil are at

once in compliance with and challenges to authenticity.

As such, Hitler representations are imbrications of ‘‘fictional narratives and

historical accounts’’ (Bathrick, 2007, p. 7). The ‘‘fictional,’’ though, is not necessarily

less ‘‘real.’’ Take Bertolt Brecht’s 1941 play, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. The satire

presents an absurd account of Hitler as Ui, a faux hoodlum in 1930s Chicago bullying

his way into a monopoly on the vegetable market. Mock biography is coupled with

actual accounts of Hitler’s rise to power as Brecht warns about fomenting fascism

with an unwillingness to act against it. The play exemplifies Brecht’s notion of

dialectical alienation, in which an audience is challenged to give gravity and laughter

common ground. ‘‘Alienation’’ follows ‘‘the principle [of] reculer pour mieu sauter’’*literally, the act of stepping back before jumping forward in order to obtain a stronger

stance first (Bentley, 2008, p. 68). Tellingly, Brecht’s play targeted U.S. audiences.

Much like Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, it came off as a joke, but a dour one on us.

But not all humor is created equal in terms of popular demand, rhetorical

distinction, or even seriousness, and the malleability of humor mirrors the

malleability of representation, as seriousness can either precede or follow laughter.4

Humor on YouTube is many sided and multifaceted. It stems from numerous users

and manifold perspectives, rendering a single parodic clip a singular representation

and yet an artifact in and on which multiple meanings converge. Some scholars

censure the ‘‘frivolous interpretations of history’’ on YouTube, in which ‘‘[t]he drive

for entertainment simply outweighs the drive for political knowledge’’ (Morozov,

2011, p. 250, 61). Others police improprieties in democratic participation (Hess,

2009). So it goes that one person’s humor is another’s bile. Political rant for one is

political cant for another. Such criticisms sustain Fredric Jameson’s old logic

of ‘‘blank parodies,’’ or Paul Virilio’s (2002) conception of ‘‘ludic democracy’’ in

which ‘‘infantilized tele-citizens’’ know only a ‘‘virtual democracy’’ (p. 31). They even

intimate Jean Baudrillard’s (1994) equivalence of transgression and submission in the

parodic form (p. 21), failing to accept either that ‘‘playfulness and parody stand in

tandem with other information forms’’ or that YouTube is a significant ‘‘site where

user’s visual and verbal video play often supersedes the intended, official version of a

text’’ (Penrod, 2010, p. 141). Nonetheless, rhetorical play exists in and amongst

meaning formations, raveling and unraveling both permanence and change.

We should therefore see the larger phenomenon for its metonymic states. Downfall

parodies tempt broader anxieties over Hitler, and Downfall, even as they rehearse and

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recreate realities. They are also shared and shareable. The sociality of humor enables

parodies to mock Hitler’s ‘‘untold story,’’ to laugh at its condescension, while

ridiculously revising contemporary concerns (pedestrian or imperative as they may

be). Rather than lament the fact that a particular text represents Hitler as human, we

might consider what it says about cultures that willfully re-present and

re-produce it. Parody in this regard need not be resistant. Most Downfall parodies

actually reaffirm Hitler’s vileness while they reduce it to circumstances that pale in

comparison. They remind us how much rhetorical play on YouTube can serialize

the seriousness of public issues with presidential politics, professional sports,

nationalism, sexuality, corporatism, racism, foreign relations, militarism, national

security, and so on. Ancient Sophists were criticized as deceitful, ignoble, and

untrustworthy. Plato wrongly marked them ‘‘paid hunters’’ of youths, ‘‘merchants’’

and ‘‘retailers’’ of knowledge, ‘‘purgers of souls,’’ and ‘‘practitioners’’ of simulacra

(Poulakos, 1995, p. 85). We make the same mistake if we assume that ludic

engagements with historical representations only cheapen the historical problematics

they simultaneously underline and cross out.

In sum, one does not understand Downfall parodies or their topics outside the

context of Hitler’s wickedness (which includes canonical histories, alternative

histories, and even Holocaust denials). Rhetorical play displays both political realities

that history shapes as well as cultural power plays that cordon off their meanings. It

relies upon history even as it rewrites it. In addition, parodies ‘‘require active

participation in the play of representations, in the construction of experience, and in

the agon of ideas’’ (McComiskey, 2002, p. 83); Downfall parodies are not simply

counter-representations or misrepresentations. They are playful investigations of

meaning, and ‘‘free investigations’’ (and proofs of) larger cultural concerns (Hari-

man, 2008, p. 255). Then again, play is hardly free.

Playing With (the Text of) Hitler

The first Downfall parody was posted in June 2007 (more than two years after its

DVD release) by Chris Bowley, a university student.5 In the original film, the so-

called ‘‘bunker scene’’ displays Hitler poised with repressed belligerence. He sits at a

small desk as top advisers inform him of his enemy’s breach of the battlefronts and

the failure of counter-assaults. Hitler eyes his military map. His hand quivers as he

removes his glasses. He dismisses all but four: Field Marshalls Keitel and Buchdorf,

Major Alfred Jodl, and S. S. officer Hans Krebs. In the film, ‘‘Hitler flies into a tirade

as the defeat of Nazi Germany looms,’’ condemns his generals for defection, and

declares the war lost (Evangelista, 2010). In Bowley’s parody, Hitler flies into a rage

after Microsoft cancels his Xbox Live account, exemplifying the juxtaposition of

horror and hilarity that appears in so many spoofs on the bunker scene.

In December 2007, Bowley’s parody had received 1.7 million hits and was

earning an average of 10,000 new views each day (Chittenden & Waite, 2007). By

September 2008, it had accrued nearly three million views, and Bowley received

threats of legal action by Constantin over copyright infringement until he removed it

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(Smith & Walker, 2008). Even so, by February 2010, the three-minute-and-40-second

meme had gone ‘‘meta’’ (meaning that, in appropriately self-referential fashion, a

parody) emerged with Hitler himself wanting to craft a Downfall parody (Huffington

Post, 2010; Moses, 2008). This seemed to mark the beginning of its end. Yet in April

2010, some iterations were receiving nearly four million views (Rohrer, 2010). The

phenomenon is variously known today as the ‘‘Downfall meme,’’ the ‘‘Hitler meme,’’

the ‘‘Hitler meltdown,’’ ‘‘Hitler Reacts,’’ and the ‘‘Hitler rant,’’ and its popular appeal

has garnered global traction.6 The question remains, however, as to the cultural

politics of Downfall parodies.

Considered in their singularity, variations in theme and content are obvious. As

one reviewer notes, they are ‘‘topical to a fault’’ (Lloyd, 2010). A clip entitled ‘‘Hitler

finds out Americans are calling each other Nazis,’’ posted in August 2009, confronts

Hitler’s persistence as a symbol of pure evil. In America, Hitler is told, the name of

the Fuhrer is overused and so ‘‘completely trite and meaningless.’’ Hitler’s tirade has

him declaring himself ‘‘The Prince of Darkness,’’ ‘‘belched from the fiery depths of

hell.’’ He clamors at the news of Democrats using the term ‘‘brownshirts’’ and the

iconic swastika as slights against hardline conservatives. He goes ballistic when he

learns his ‘‘little moustache’’ is scrawled upon images of ‘‘political opponents.’’ ‘‘You

cannot be fucking serious,’’ Hitler cries, and then laments the fact that, had he known

his moustache would become a ‘‘convenient talisman’’ of American politics, he could

have fashioned less distinctive whiskers*‘‘Like Stalin!’’ Ultimately, the parody

denounces those who conflate Nazi symbolism with the activities of the Tea Party.

In another clip, entitled ‘‘Hitler finds out no camera in iPod touch,’’ posted in

September 2009, Hitler’s advisers point out locations of Apple stores on Hitler’s

military map. Hitler acknowledges them, but decides to purchase his new iPod touch

online. Then comes the bad news: the new iPod nano was equipped with a camera,

not the iPod touch. ‘‘If you do not want to see me freak the fuck out,’’ Hitler utters,

‘‘leave the room.’’ All depart except three, after which Hitler bellows, ‘‘WHAT IS THIS

FUCKERY?’’ An argument about the nano and the touch ensues. Hitler vents relative

inanities, such as ‘‘El Jobso goes away for how many months? Comes back and fucks

everything up!’’ and ‘‘Think Different my ass.’’ Eventually, he decides to preorder a

Zune HD on Amazon*and to remove the Apple sticker from his Volkswagen.

‘‘Hitler and the vuvuzela at the 2010 FIFA [Federation Internationale de Football

Association] World Cup’’ was a popular clip posted in June 2010. After reviewing

Germany’s schedule, Hitler forecasts a final match against Brazil and anticipates joy

over Brazilian fans’ penchant for singing. Much to his dismay, he is informed:

‘‘Singing is off this year. Also drums and cow bells,’’ and this because ‘‘FIFA . . . failed

to ban the vuvuzela.’’ After Hitler excuses his confederates, he excoriates FIFA for

‘‘Ruining the World Cup with a plastic bloody horn.’’ ‘‘It sounds like a swarm of

bees in my house,’’ he exclaims. ‘‘Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz. That’s all I can bloody hear!’’

One adviser suggests that he adjust the settings on his television, and reminds Hitler

of the vuvuzela’s status as an African cultural icon. Hitler is unimpressed. ‘‘The World

Cup is for EVERYONE,’’ he shouts, and recounts the contemporaneity of the horn

(having been introduced in 2001). In the hall, a secretary weeps as she listens, but is

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comforted by a colleague with the idea of using earplugs. Hitler finally decides to

return his widescreen television and surround sound system. ‘‘I should have joined

that Facebook group,’’ he bemoans. The scene then cuts to an image of the (failed)

petition to ban vuvuzelas.

This is obviously a small sampling, but consider the following: whether or not

one agrees with the use of Hitler as a vehicle, there is pertinence to criticizing those

who utilize Nazism as a symbolic resource for, or recourse to, public reproach. The

first clip relies upon a collective imagination of Hitler as so abominable that no

contemporary dilemma, however bad, is worthy of comparison. And yet it reinforces

the rhetorical force of likening someone to Hitler (or something to the Nazis). One

need only look to a shred of our cultural surround for evidence, such as Glenn Beck

and his countless references to Nazism in diatribes against the Obama administration.

Or to the now infamous protest sign that emerged from Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore

Sanity (largely in response to Beck), which read: ‘‘I disagree with you, but I’m pretty

sure you’re not Hitler.’’ Or to the Tea Party’s scathing portrayals of President Barack

Obama as Hitler, and his campaign for universal healthcare as akin to the Action T4

program. And so on. The outrage (and outrageousness) of Hitler is, in the parody,

leveraged for a droll critique of those who would use it to arouse anger or fear in

other contexts. The irony, of course, should not be lost.

One cannot understand the second clip without knowledge of the popularity and

prosperity of Apple, not to mention its reputation for being on the cutting edge of

technology. One also cannot sense the absurdity without prior knowledge of Hitler as

the archetype of evil. Hitler as a dissatisfied consumer is far less threatening than

Hitler as a genocidal maniac, and the idea that he would be so enraged is ludicrous.

But this is the point: the unhappy consumer is not ‘‘really’’ Hitler. It is a mass of

disappointed Apple devotees whose collective voice resounded, as in an article on

gizmodo.com entitled, ‘‘Why There Is No Camera In the iPod Touch and Why That

Sucks.’’ Hitler’s use of chemical technologies (in gas chambers) and martial

technologies (in military equipment) notwithstanding, the parody is an expression

of Western capitalism (which, one should note, Hitler actually admired) condensed

into a display of consumer indignation. It is also a glum retrospective as one imagines

the legacy of Steve Jobs*‘‘El Jobso’’*and his battle with cancer, even as the punch

line (un)sticks consumer loyalty with the mention of a German automaker.

The third clip is similar to the others with respect to topicality. Not unlike the

iPod ‘‘controversy,’’ the hullabaloo about vuvuzelas was widespread. They were a

nuisance to many during the 2010 World Cup, including on-field referees and

TV producers, and there was a brief period in which organizers considered a ban.

Articles and forums cropped up across the Internet condemning the horns.

The parody echoes this popular complaint. But in so doing, Hitler is depicted as

both culturally and racially sensitive (he lends privilege to neither the South African

hosts nor the German nation), and even nods to the import of new media as a

democratizing influence, if used correctly. He does not campaign to censor any and

all things unrelated to Nazi propaganda. Perversely, he is one of us. And once again,

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the penultimate scene of Hitler’s demise is reframed as an outlet for what some might

see as the most trivial of grievances.

Despite these examples, the significance of rhetorical play in new media contexts is

partly a function of sheer magnitude. Going viral plays a large part in the cultural

politics of YouTube parodies. Hence, Downfall parodies are as singularly political as

they are political en masse. Early in YouTube’s history, viral videos were single videos,

usually funny*such as ‘‘Lazy Sunday,’’ ‘‘David After Dentist,’’ ‘‘Star Wars Kid,’’

‘‘Potter Puppet Pals in ‘The Mysterious Ticking Noise’’’*that were popularized to

the point of public saturation. The Downfall parody ‘‘virus’’ was unique in that it was

widely shared as variations on a meme. As a template, the bunker scene enables

audiences to create (or view) parodies without ever seeing the original film.

Rhetorical formations of Hitler provide about as much history as one needs to

ascertain the comic twists. Moreover, their proliferation suggests that one need only

be familiar with world news and the parodies themselves to ‘‘get’’ the parodic

element, let alone the intertextual allusions. But what might this tell us about

collective rhetorical play with representations of Hitler?

Rhetorical play in this case relies upon manipulations of scale. Parody depends on

imitation, exaggeration, and incongruity. What stands out in the juxtaposition of the

three clips above, though, is how differently proportioned are the contemporary

topics and historical references. In the first clip, the cultural iconicity of Hitler looms

large, mainly because of an effort to retain (or perhaps reclaim) Hitler’s image as evil

incarnate. No one else, in other words, measures up, and it is important to put the

devil in his place. Ironically, Hitler attempts to save his own face. Still, as the clip

promotes more or less appropriate meanings, so does it demonstrate the vulnerability

thereof. The second and third clips are even further out of proportion, even though

the reappropriation of Hitler is (as in so many clips) absolutely unapologetic. Hitler is

a buffoon, and one could just as easily be left thinking that Hitler’s anger over iPod

nanos or vuvuzelas is as foolish as the controversies themselves. One could also be left

imagining, if the analogy is carried out*and, for example, Apple is the enemy*against whom and what are our contemporary (culture) wars being waged. Perhaps,

in part, we are battling both triviality and consequence. Or, perhaps each is a cultural

ally. As much is clear given the diminution of any singular representation, along with

the prominence of the mass of representations, over time. Even a small selection

illustrates that while parody can be ‘‘an arresting form of rebuttal,’’ it is ‘‘mounted in

the main by [people] with mixed motives’’ (Klinger, 2006, p. 227; see also Lanham,

1994, p. 246). But this mixture goes beyond parody, since it is in turn ‘‘offered to

anyone who might be played for a laugh, that is, anyone in the most wide-open,

mixed-up, unfettered public audience’’ (Hariman, 2008, p. 255).

Parody and YouTube are, in this sense, virtually symbiotic: they both contain and

let loose contradictions of representation and thus contradictory politics. The

displacement of Downfall parodies to other media channels and their infiltration in

to wider cultural imaginaries also bespeaks the incestuousness of media collaboration

and competition, despite a sense that ‘‘parody creates a virtual world in which one

may play with what has been said and so think about it without direct consequences

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of reprimand, censorship, or punishment’’ (Hariman, 2008, p. 255). Obviously, as

I indicate above and expand on below, this is not the case on YouTube. Furthermore,

it is precisely this utopian ideal that goads the questionable politics of Downfall

parodies and fears about the misguided hope for an Internet that truly bolsters

democratic practices. In the end, both succumb at least partially to the structural and

symbolic constraints of YouTube as a political medium.

Meaning Making Hell-Heaven

Eventually, the makers of Downfall remarked on the parodies. In an interview in

October 2009, writer and co-producer Bernd Eichinger said, ‘‘I find those parodies

tremendously amusing! Obviously, the film and this [bunker] scene in particular is a

real fire starter for people’s imagination. What else can you hope for as a filmmaker?

This is moviemaking heaven!’’ (Huffman, 2009). Director Oliver Hirschbiegel

expressed three months later in an interview with New York Magazine:

Someone sends me the links every time there’s a new one. I think I’ve seen about145 of them! Of course, I have to put the sound down when I watch. Many timesthe lines are so funny, I laugh out loud, and I’m laughing about the scene that Istaged myself! You couldn’t get a better compliment as a director (Rosenblum,2010).

Reflecting on Downfall’s overall thematic, Hirschbiegel went on:

The point of the film was to kick these terrible people off the throne that madethem demons, making them real and their actions reality. I think it’s only fair ifnow it’s taken as part of our history, and used for whatever purposes people like.If only I got royalties for it, then I’d be even happier (Rosenblum, 2010).

While both writer and director pronounce the significance of the parodies, it is

interesting*if not unsurprising*that they moralize (and aggrandize) their motives,

and reassert the film’s historical veracity. On the contrary, official responses and

counteractions of Constantin stressed the parodies’ violation of Downfall’s meaning

and its artistic integrity. Within this play of authenticity and faithfulness rests a

central anxiety of both rhetorical and cultural production.

On April 20, 2010, ‘‘coincidentally’’ the anniversary of Hitler’s retreat into the

bunkers below the German Chancellory, the corporation began to pull parodies from

YouTube and elsewhere. As Martin Moszkowicz, head of film and TV at Constantin,

confessed, the company tried to curtail Downfall parodies from their inception, but

to little avail. Early in 2010, ‘‘the studio began using YouTube’s computerized tool for

identifying copyright-protected video to scan for Downfall clips’’ (Evangelista, 2010).

Soon thereafter, numerous parodies became black screens overwritten with the

following caveat: ‘‘This video contains content from Constantin Film AG, who has

blocked it on copyright grounds.’’ In an official statement, Moszkowicz wrote: ‘‘We as

a corporation have a bit of an ambivalent view . . . On the one hand we are proud the

picture has such a huge fanbase and that people are using it for parody. On the other

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hand we are trying to protect the artists’’ (Rohrer, 2010). Though Moszkowicz

equivocates, his position is evident: ‘‘Obviously, some parts are in good taste and

other parts of it are in bad taste. As a company, we don’t want to be in a position to

say what is good humor, what is bad humor. We want to protect our copyright

material, and we want to protect our actors’’ (Evangelista, 2010). Such claims to

legitimacy and protection are themselves rhetorical plays, and they betray the notion

that investors and buyers are the writers of history.

Through discourses of copyright infringement, ‘‘fair use’’ is pitted against the

primacy of proprietary textual content. Free market logics of capitalism butt up

against the fettered structures of new (and old) media, rendering rhetorical play less a

problem of returns on democracy than returns on investment. Two days after

Constantin’s initiative began, at least 68 versions remained on YouTube and others

were posted to sister sites. One, entitled ‘‘Hitler rants about the Downfall Parodies

being blocked,’’ was posted by user hitlerrantsparodies with a black screen, the

copyright message from Constantin, and subtitles criticizing the company’s actions.

Six months later, the same user posted on a ‘‘Downfall Parodies Forum’’: ‘‘It seems

Constantin Film may now be finally allowing parodies on YouTube, they are now

placing ads on some of my parodies instead of blocking them.’’ Constantin, it seems,

had given up its witch-hunt.

But it is the witch-hunt that should give us pause. As James Boyle, Lawrence Lessig,

Kembrew McLeod, and others have demonstrated, authoritative policies of command

and control are commonplace for Big Media cultural producers. This is especially

disconcerting when authority over media content impinges upon the social and

political authority of any one text, and thus any one voice, as when free speech

becomes stolen property. Downfall parodies persist, but the point has (again) been

made: there is a right and a wrong text; there is a legitimate progeny of cultural

meaning, and a litany of bastard children. Linda Hutcheon labels parody an

‘‘authorized transgression.’’ But at what cost is it authorized? And by whom? No

transgression of meaning is free.

The controversy over Downfall parodies typifies tensions between avowedly

‘‘proper’’ ways to represent Hitler and ‘‘proper’’ ways to represent media texts. On

the one hand, the authenticity of Downfall relies upon historical realism, which is

said by some to be protected only when commercial interest trumps textual clash. On

the other hand, Downfall is but another text in a cultural network that spans space

and time and is therefore open to both consumption and re-creation*chips fall

where they may. As a result, do parodies come at the expense of history (or of

commercialism), or vice versa? Perhaps they are mutually complementary. Regard-

less, rhetorical play, when it accords with hazy copyright law, is rendered as rhetoric

proper. When it is discordant or disruptive, it is an unauthorized swindle. Public

opinion becomes secondary, user-generated content is a bane, and shared resources

such as public memory and symbolism come with a purchase price (even if it is not

always monetary). Downfall parodies represent an ‘‘ancient’’ problematic, indeed.

They likewise indicate a problem of historical representation and rhetorical play

insofar as they concern the authenticity and integrity of texts. Tellingly, Constantin

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did not ‘‘stop’’ its initiative, but modified it. The potency of a parody is diminished,

for instance, when overlaid by an ad for DISH Network or T-Mobile or . . . . If legal

action is a dull antivirus, the implantation of advertisements within user-generated

texts is a proviral marketing tactic of the new media age. It promotes what Kenneth

Burke might call ‘‘commercial uses’’ of Hitler representations, reaffirming the status

of political economies and economic predispositions (while driving YouTube to

support contradictory forms of cultural authority), and reframing potentially

useful*or at least democratically legitimate*political agendas as depoliticized

play. It follows that the politics of these original-derivative works are neither

guaranteed nor legitimate(d) just because they are legal (Striphas, 2009). Hitler, then,

really is a vehicle.

Conclusion: Play of the Profane

By November 2008, an estimated 150 original Downfall parodies existed on YouTube

(Rees, 2008). The Telegraph published a ‘‘Best of ’’ list in October 2009, and in

February 2010, The New York Times posted step-by-step instructions on how to

‘‘Create Your Own Parodies for Downfall and Other Films.’’ The user

hitlerrantsparodies created a blog archiving countless videos. In September 2010,

BBC comedy show Dead Ringers aired a Downfall parody of Tony Blair in Hitler’s

bunker. An entire section of an exhibit dedicated to Hitler in the German Historical

Museum was devoted to Downfall parodies in October 2010. And in 2011, a

customized YouTube site featured the ‘‘Top 24 Downfall parodies’’ of the year*and

acquired nearly 500,000 views. Put simply, the ludic potential of Downfall is taken

quite seriously. But what of the last laugh?

There is an enduring concern that the malevolence of Hitler has escaped a once

‘‘profane, political sphere . . . to the cultural sphere,’’ and been transformed to a ‘‘mere

aesthetic experience’’ (Berghahn & Hermand, 2007, p. 8; see also Buttsworth &

Abbenhuis, 2010). This presumes, however, that culture is any less profane than*or

even all that different from*politics. As the Downfall parodies illustrate, rhetorical

play is a nodal point in larger processes of articulation, which accommodate

profanities and their attendant orthodoxies. That we remain at once attracted to and

repulsed by representations of Hitler is no less evidence of the power of collective

imagination than the disconnects between historical ‘‘reality’’ and parodic ‘‘farce’’

emergent in each altered subtitle, in each textual revision. This does not mean that

any one parody supplants historical actuality, from which the power of Downfall

parodies to foster multiple orders of meaning and ‘‘rewrite’’ history is derived.

Representation often exceeds meaning, and vice versa. As Brecht observed, yesterday’s

evil can become tomorrow’s political reality, while the future remains as uncertain as

any past we attempt to preserve. Herein lies the democratic potentiality of rhetorical

play: its capacity to manipulate the most grave of cultural texts and open them up to

revaluation. Herein lies the democratic danger of rhetorical play: its capacity to

manipulate the most grave of cultural texts and open them up to revaluation!

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Though Downfall parodies might elide context, they hardly decontextualize the

figure of Hitler as a symbol of evil. Instead, they disrupt familiar tendencies to tear

down the edifices of Truth while building new understandings of present realities.

Jacques Derrida (1978) dubs this type of play with history a ‘‘disruption of presence’’

(p. 292). Michael Calvin McGee (1990) observes in it the fragmentation of texts,

not to mention culture. Such disruption and fragmentation could certainly presage

instability and indeterminacy, except for a certain measure of accord in the

cacophony of Downfall parodies. Divergent motives and political agendas aside,

there is something politically enervating about the larger phenomenon. The prime

discordance comes from coordinated attempts to reify capitalistic logic as the means

of securing the most appropriate representations. So McGee (1990) admonishes us to

attend to textual, and thus cultural, formations*or, in this instance, occasions in

which texts and contexts come together, clash, and conflict. Moving forward, we

should continually consider what it means for American politics when Hitler is the

‘‘go to’’ for condemnations of both the momentous and the mundane, especially as

exaggeration and embellishment seem to typify the popular political milieu. We

should also recognize that, increasingly, formations of controversies are the thing.

But there is more.

Engaging the Downfall parodies as a formation enables a critical (re)vision of

YouTube as a political medium, specifically one that through chicanery can foster a

critical mass, in both senses of the term. This does not mean that we should submit to

the social pathologies of Hitler myths, or privilege the pleasure derived in l’jouer pour

l’jouer. Instead, we should imagine rhetorical play as that which respects ‘‘all that [is]

ready-made and completed,’’ and yet open to ‘‘ever changing, playful, undefined

forms’’ (Bakhtin, 1983, p. 11). Parody as a playful rhetoric is a potentially powerful

way to laugh off the neurotic tendencies of modernism*tendencies toward truth and

authenticity*still embedded in the capitalistic discourses of new media. It is also a

rhetorical mode that reminds us how quickly capitalistic rather than, say, social

strictures declare a text ‘‘off limits.’’ Rhetorical play humors us to watch closely the

discourses around our own ideological pathologies as well as our cultural pathogens.

We should not lament the historical disconnects in representations of Hitler; instead,

we should ponder the ways in which parodic depictions reconnect historical and

historiographical forces with the predicaments of the present.

Notes

[1] It should be noted that this is basically the political factor par excellence for Slavoj Zizek’s

conception of enjoyment.

[2] Perhaps it is ironic, then, that Downfall’s DVD release (August) virtually corresponded

with the official launch of YouTube (November) in 2005, and even more that the DVD was

released in the UK on April 1, 2005, April Fool’s Day.

[3] Note that, though a German language film, Downfall was released with regionally

appropriate subtitles. Many parodic subtitles appear in many different languages and

dialects. I focus on parodies that are transcribed in English.

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[4] It is easy to parse terms over what constitutes the comic or the humorous: in general, the

latter an orientation toward the incongruities of human life, the former a way to harness

incongruity with laughter as a telos. In many ways, Downfall parodies (and parodies writ

large) embody both of these conditions. It is important, however, to recognize the ways in

which humor on YouTube works on narrower appeals.

[5] According to Smith and Walker (2008), ‘‘The first Downfall parody appears to have been

made in Spain. Posted on YouTube by a user called DReaperF4 on 10 August 2006, it shows

the clip of Hitler in the map room with Spanish subtitles in which the subject is a new flight

simulator game.’’ A vast majority of sources, however, cite Bowley’s as the first.

[6] Parodic clips have emerged out of countless countries around the world, and even encompass

different scenes from Downfall or other Hitler films entirely.

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