If you leave aside the brutality, horror, devastation, and mass slaughter that it caused, Nazism was nothing but showbiz. Legions of commentators and comedians have pointed out the painstakingly manufactured illusion of everything from the Nuremberg rallies— staged for the cameras of Leni Riefenstahl, the Nazi Busby Berkeley—to the diction of Nazi ordinances. Lubitsch and Chaplin kidded the ritualistic posturing of the Third Reich while it was going on; Syberberg displayed its roots in Wagner, Karl May, and other forms of German sentimental kitsch; Victor Klemperer sardonically noted down the "pure Aryan" propaganda machine's every debt to American advertising; and Lenny Bruce imagined Hitler himself as a marketable object... More >>>