Historical OCD

A good friend sent me this link to an article in the Guardian, talking about Britain's "Nazi obsession" and the tendency to use Nazism as a go-to by-word for "evil".  Any quick stop on the History Channel, or in the European/German history section of any US bookshop, will tell you that this obsession is not isolated to Britain! It makes my point of "not mentioning the war", or at least not mentioning it unnecessarily, perfectly.

Interesting outtake, my favorite part is in italics:

'What is extraordinary is that the use of the Third Reich as an all-purpose metaphor for evil extends to every area of culture. The sculptors, the Chapman brothers, seem to derive some artistic drive from Nazism. Theatre directors feel obliged to pump up Richard III, Macbeth, even Hamlet's Denmark, by depicting them in 1940s Germany. The parallel has gone beyond cliched to seem obsessive, and shows no sign of relenting. Only football supporters seem at last to have moved on.

I am baffled as to what it must be like to be a German in modern Britain – as if I were living in Paris awash in references to Hundred Years War atrocities. German friends respond with a weary patience, like the Fawlty Towers guests suffering Basil's antics at their expense. Nor is it just a matter of the constant identification of Germany with the Third Reich. There is little attempt to set it in proportion to other more creditable aspects of German history. This is strange given that Anglo-Saxons were nothing if not Germans. As Simon Winder notes in his entertaining book Germania, Britain and Germany are "the mad twins of Europe, Protestant, aggressive… with superiority complexes of a kind that have, for good or ill, reshaped the world".'