Ridiculous Men

I WAS PROMPTED to write this article by two photos of Hitler I came across in a copy of . We have become so accustomed to images of Hitler that we barely notice them any more; he has become an icon of evil so well-known and so often reproduced—so ubiquitous—that we tend to gloss over such images, to ignore them, to dismiss them briskly with a meaning and a name: ah, yes, Hitler. His face has become somehow all too , so familiar that we find it neither strange nor shocking: what you might call a normalized anomaly. There are hundreds of images in which Hitler appears, and because of this he has become, in a way, a deactivated icon, divested of all his real horror, as is also the case with the more hackneyed versions of the Devil, complete with horns and hooves, trident and tail. Nowadays almost no one fears or takes seriously such a figure, not even when depicted by those who did once believe in his existence, a belief that now arouses feelings of either pity or laughter.