The Kitsch that Never was.: Considerations on Saul Friedländer’s Reflections of Nazism

Abstract

This article proposes to reconsider Reflections of Nazism (1982), the first scholar book to deal with “fascinating” images of Nazism in massive culture. For that purpose, it develops, in the first place, a rereading of the notion “new discourse on Nazism” and its central characteristic: the tense correlation between kitsch sensibility and motives associated with death and the apocalypse. A critique of this conception is subsequently developed, pointing out that the kitsch-death correlation and its derivations do not define a particularity of the object but extensive aspects of a big portion of contemporary culture. Lastly, it is concluded that Friedländer’s conception conceals the historicity of this kind of discourse as well as one of its most crucial aspects, to which Michel Foucault and Susan Sontag had early given the name “eroticization”.