“The ancient gigantic cannibal near-man flourishing now, ruling the world once more. We spent a million years escaping him, Frink thought, and now he’s back. And not merely as the adversary . . . but as the master.”1 This comparison of Nazis (“near-men”) and cannibals from The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick (1962), is voiced by the novel’s protagonist, Frank Frink, a Jewish artist in hiding. In this alternate-universe novel, the Axis powers won World War II. In the 1960s equating someone with a cannibal was intended as an extreme denunciation; it did not evoke the Hannibal Lecter portrayed by movie heartthrob Mads Mikkelsen. Nor were the Nazi perpetrators rendered as “sympathetic” family men by stars such as Rufus Sewell, as in the recent TV adaptation of Dick’s novel. Clearly, important changes in the representation of the Nazis and cannibals have occurred in popular culture between the 1960s and the present.In this article I compare how popular culture portrays Nazis and homicidal monsters, such as vampires, cannibals, and serial killers, and argue that their images have evolved in parallel and interconnected ways. Over the past three decades, fictional monsters have transitioned from aberrant criminals to cultural idols, and their humanized forms have influenced the trajectory of the images of Nazis. I suggest that this evolution aligns with broader trends in how popular culture depicts violence against people. An emergent tendency in memory studies and Holocaust studies, the perpetrator turn—which designates a shift of attention from the victims’ perspective to the perpetrators’ perspective—finds parallels in these changing attitudes to monsters and the Nazis in popular culture. The perpetrator turn may be seen as an example of the mutual influences and interactions between popular culture and academic discourse. Indeed, can the rise of the “sympathetic Nazi” as a popular protagonist and the “lively intellectual engagement with perpetrators” be viewed as unrelated phenomena?2 I further argue that the fixation on “empathy” with, and “humanization” of, the perpetrators that has come about in fiction, movies, and scholarship is rooted in an ideological shift in the attitudes to humans. I link this shift to the role that the radical critique of humanism and the rejection of anthropocentrism have played, since the 1990s, in academe and popular culture. Finally, I contest the view that fascism is still universally envisaged in movies and novels as an absolute evil or the incarnation of “a dangerous enemy.” On the contrary, the extraordinary popularity of Nazi characters in early 2000s fiction and cinema, which made one critic title his article “Nazis, Nazis Everywhere,”3 may suggest that the Nazis are invading again—but this time, in popular culture. I do not imply, though, that the traditional ways in which Nazism has been represented have completely disappeared.4 But what interests me here is what the new modes of “engagement” with the Nazi perpetrators and with fictional monsters reveal about the current cultural situation. I also address the reception of these images, because audience expectations play an important role in shaping fictional identities._________To highlight the differences in the representations of Nazis in the 1960s and today, I compare Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle and the Emmy Award–winning TV series of the same name (Amazon Studios, 2015–19), which was at one time rated the “most popular digital series in the US.”5 No reader of The Man in the High Castle is left wondering whether any aspects of Nazism and individual Nazis qualify as having any merit. The only sympathetically portrayed Nazi in the novel is an antifascist, Captain Rudolf Wegener, who acts against the Nazi state. Wegener condemns the Nazi world order in unequivocal terms—“The madmen are in power”—and thinks that Nazism is “evil beyond compare.”6 In the novel, Wegener saves the world from the Nazis’ nuclear apocalypse. The novel’s main antihero is a zealous Nazi, Joe Cinnadella. Juliana, the novel’s protagonist, who revolts against Nazism, calls Joe “a Gestapo assassin” and kills him to protect a dissident writer. This novel belongs to what Gavriel Rosenfeld terms “the era of moralism” in representations of the Nazi past, which he defines as a “continued aura of moralism surrounding a given historical era that helps to define its ‘abnormality.’”7 According to Rosenfeld, “The waning of a moralistic perspective towards the past, by extension, is a crucial component of the larger process of normalization.”8The TV series radically challenges this “moralistic perspective” by altering the disposition of characters. Wegener (Carsten Norgaard) remains an antifascist, but he becomes a secondary character. His cinematic incarnation differs from the novel in two important respects. First, he does not save the world, and second, he does not despise Adolf Hitler. On the contrary, in the final episode of the first season, when Wegener gets the chance to assassinate Hitler (Wolf Muser), the arch-Nazi is portrayed as a reasonable person and charismatic personality who persuades Wegener to commit suicide instead of going ahead with the assassination.Breaking free from the novel, the TV series introduces three new characters: SS Obergruppenführer John Smith (Rufus Sewell); his son, Thomas Smith (Quinn Lord); and Joe Blake (Luke Kleintank), all devoted Nazis, who take center stage. The reaction of the reviewers and viewers to these new characters offers interesting insights into the show’s reception and its audience’s expectations of images of the Nazis. Most reviewers agree that the Nazis are represented as “sympathetic” and more often than not consider that the series’ prime achievement. Critics admit that John Smith is initially represented as “the ruthless SS Obergruppenführer” and “a vicious killer with hideous beliefs and menacing bone structure.”9 However, he is later portrayed as a family man “humanized” by the show. His “compelling villain turn” is complicated by the hereditary disease of his son, Thomas, which makes this devoted father disobey the Nazi eugenics laws and kill the family doctor to protect his son’s secret. In turn, Thomas, fully dedicated to Nazi ideology (including its institutionalized racism and laws against people with disabilities), is shown as a sensitive and touching young man. John Smith also has a wife and two little girls, a perfect little Nazi family. The mass-murderer Obergruppenführer is humanized by “a seemingly idyllic suburban family life, in which everyone waves ‘Sieg Heil’ while they’re taking out the trash.”10 The show immerses the audience in the comfortable everyday of this Nazi family, as the “discrete charm of the bourgeoisie” is transformed into the discrete charm of the executioners.Another sympathetic Nazi and romantic hero—Joe Blake—is also shown as a compassionate young man. Initially, he has doubts about Nazi ideology, and he occasionally disobeys his superior, Obergruppenführer Smith. However, later he embraces the power and privileges of the Nazi state. The third season brings this character slightly closer to Dick’s concept of Joe Cinnadella by placing him in conflict with Juliana (Alexa Davalos), who cuts his throat.The perspectives of the perpetrators, and especially those of the Smiths and Joe, are integral to the series’ plot. For example, the episode titled “The End of the World” is not the one in which Frink’s sister is shown gassed together with her two small children but the one in which a Nazi family finds out about their son’s hereditary disease. In contrast, the episode in which Frank’s sister and her children are murdered is titled “Sunrise.”While some critics praise these portrayals of Nazi perpetrators and supporters as the series’ major accomplishment—“But slowly, The Man in the High Castle humanizes even some Nazis”11—for other reviewers there was still not enough empathy and “complexity” in the show’s engagement with Nazi characters. But this is an unfair reproach to the series. Juliana, a member of the resistance, sympathizes with Thomas, the young Nazi. The second season closes with the prophecy that this empathy is the only hope for saving the world. As for the nuclear apocalypse, the world is rescued by Obergruppenführer Smith, Hitler’s loyal man, who, despite his family drama, stands—quite heroically and elegantly—against the conspirators and exposes them to his Führer. According to one critic, “In the first season, Smith was the show’s most instantly compelling character—it was easy to see how he would have been a highly decorated American war hero in our reality but had been only too happy to collaborate with Nazis in the show’s reality.”12 Some of the series’ fans are even more explicit in their reaction to Sewell’s character, commenting on his looks in a Nazi uniform: “Morals: No, no, no! Libido: Yes, yes, yes!”13 This reaction calls to mind Susan Sontag’s analysis of the appeal of the Nazi aesthetic: “The definitely sexual lure of fascism . . . seems impervious to deflation by irony or overfamiliarity.”14The Resistance fighters are often shown as cynical, manipulative, and cruel, no different in their inhumane methods from the Nazis themselves. They are brutal killers and often driven by revenge: Gary Connell, the leader of the West Coast Resistance, and other Resistance members try to kill Juliana to avenge their friend’s death. The novel “has little of the pulp melodrama . . . ; there are no torture scenes, no supervillains, and not even a single scene set in the repressive Nazi-controlled region of the former U.S.”15 Unlike the novel, the series has all that and more. Among the images that excited its audience were the swastika waving over New York and the demolished Statue of Liberty.16This analysis does not imply that the series producers were seduced by Nazi ideology. But to be competitive in the current world of entertainment, their show capitalizes on the attractiveness of a certain type of protagonist and on the earlier representations of perpetrators and monsters in popular culture. Indeed, the Smiths and Joe Blake do not stand alone in the entertainment market: they are the tardy offspring of a previous generation of Nazi characters that emerged at the turn of the second millennium. This lineage of protagonists is exemplified by Jonathan Littell’s novel Les bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones), which launched “the era of the perpetrators.”17In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a whole range of historical movies and novels “complicated” and “humanized” high Nazi officials—representing Heinrich Himmler as a family man and Hitler as a failed artist or an abused child.18 The early 2000s saw an avalanche of films featuring Hitler at various stages of his life. Hitler: The Rise of Evil (dir. Christian Duguay, 2003) focuses on his early days, while the much-acclaimed movie Max (dir. Menno Meyjes, 2002) depicts a young artist who missed his calling as a painter and became a fascist dictator. Other movies, such as Moloch (Moлox, dir. Alexander Sokurov, 1999), Downfall (Der Untergang, dir. Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2004), and My Führer: The Really Truest Truth about Adolf Hitler (Mein Führer—Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler, dir. Dany Levi, 2007), depicting Hitler’s personal life, his last days, and his death, may implicitly predispose viewers to empathize with his “all-too-human” condition. By presenting Hitler as a human being, these films differ from their predecessors, which instead maintained a moral distance from him.19 Rosenfeld argues that “most Hitler films prior to the turn of the millennium displayed a preference for moralism,” whereas “recent films, by contrast, have adopted a less judgmental stance and depicted Hitler as a human being who can be understood in conventional historical terms. In the process, these motion pictures have both reflected and contributed to the increasing normalization of the Nazi past.”20 Rosenfeld traces the emergence of this normalization back to the early 1970s–1980s, when “a wide range of cultural works . . . shifted their narrative focus away from the Nazi regime’s barbarous crimes towards an aesthetic interest in its bombastic style and a prurient interest in its lurid projections of sex and violence.”21 My approach moves the optics of this discussion to the analysis of a broader cultural dynamic, by including the normalization of the Nazis into a larger trend of representations of violence in popular culture and the changing attitudes to other monsters—vampires, cannibals, and serial killers._________A significant step toward making a devoted Nazi perpetrator into a novel’s main hero was taken by Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, or The Nature of the Offence (1991). The story is told in reverse chronology from the death of a former Auschwitz doctor, Tod T. Friendly. The narrator is his apparently “innocent” soul, which is unaware of the crimes committed by Tod in his lifetime. The novel is construed by Amis as an attempt to “write the unwritable.” Arguing against the notion that writing on the Holocaust is impossible, Amis views his novel as an attempt to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive.22 Even if Tod is not depicted as a sympathetic man (unlike, say, Thomas Smith), the novel created controversy precisely because of Amis’s decision to have a Nazi perpetrator as his protagonist: one critic called the novel “morally upright as even he [Amis] could wish,”23 while others accused Amis of antisemitism. Early in the story, even before we understand that he is a former Nazi perpetrator, we learn that Tod has “solitary . . . sins,” which are hard not to find repugnant. For example, he “takes toys from children, on the street . . . with what I believe is called a shit-eating grin. The child’s face turns blank, or closes. Both toy and smile are gone: he takes both toy and smile. Then he heads for the store, to cash it in. For a couple of bucks. Can you believe this guy?”24 Undoubtedly, Amis wanted his novel to offer his readers a moral lesson: “The reader has to do all the morality because these terrible events are described as benevolent, but also in such a way that, I hope, there is a sort of disgust and an unreality and self-delusion in the way it is shown. . . . So it’s there, but the narrator can’t spot it, the reader has to do all that.”25 The descriptions of concentration camp atrocities in this novel are not uncalled-for—they are included to make Amis’s readership aware of the Nazis’ crimes.A similar argument in favor of descriptions of violence in young adult literature (YAL) was advanced by Roald Dahl, one of the founding fathers of the genre. In the late 1970s, more than a decade prior to Amis’s novel, Dahl contested the prevailing ideas of pedagogical theory, namely, that sadistic impulses should be tamed in children by education and culture. He believed that violence should be depicted in the interest of moral retribution and should produce moral revolt in the reader: “Children . . . like a touch of the macabre as long as it’s funny, too. . . . And my nastiness is never gratuitous. It’s retribution. Beastly people must be punished.”26 Already by the 1990s, however, any idea of moral retribution in descriptions of violence had become only peripherally applicable to YAL, which by then had been inundated, to the same extent as the rest of popular culture, by gratuitous violence.27Another significant step in promoting the sympathetic portrayal of Nazis was advanced by Bernhard Schlink in his novel The Reader (Der Vorleser, 1995), set in postwar Germany. The first-person narrator is the fifteen-year-old lover of a thirty-six-year-old woman with many redeeming qualities despite her past as an Auschwitz guard: Hanna is beautiful, loving, and caring, and she is aestheticized through several sexual scenes. Some minor episodes of her anger do not cast serious doubts on her character, let alone present her as a monster. Later, during her trial, she is convicted for giving orders to burn three hundred women alive and is punished for it with much greater strictness than other defendant-perpetrators, because she is ashamed to admit her illiteracy and therefore cannot properly defend herself. In prison, she is described as a supporter of other inmates, and she is given early release for good behavior. After she learns to read, she encounters the memoirs of one of her victims who escaped death and described her experience in the concentration camp. This text enlightens Hanna with an understanding of her crimes, and she hangs herself. Her good nature is further highlighted by the fact that she donates all her prison savings to a charity that promotes literacy. No matter how unrealistic this perpetrator’s story may seem—Schlink does not let the reader witness Hanna’s moral transformation or explain the reasons for it (other than an ability to read!)—what we have here is a “sympathetic perpetrator” as a protagonist of a new type.28 One interpretation of this novel is that the Nazi perpetrator “sinned” without fully realizing what she was doing—as if the idea that one should not torture and burn people alive could not be grasped without literacy. Written by a German author shortly after the Historikerstreit, the “historians’ dispute” over the question of the historical responsibility for the Holocaust, this novel represents, according to Ernestine Schlant, the “confusion and lack of moral compass inherent in a comparison of the numbness of the prisoners in the death camp and that of the perpetrator . . . , surely needs no comment.”29 Yet, for the theorists of the perpetrator turn, Schlink’s novel, “contrary to the critical consensus, stages an attempted identification with the perpetrator generation” that seeks to overcome “the binarism of German cultural memory” and is commended for a “strategic identification with a perpetrator, made possible by admitting such a common ground of humanity, [that] would allow us to see where the representation of fascism and the fascism of representations might converge.”30Despite attempts made in the early 2000s to introduce a sympathetic Nazi perpetrator, the perpetrator turn in fiction acquired its true dimensions only in 2006, when Littell published Les bienveillantes. In the words of one reviewer, this novel uncovered “the secrets of the perpetrators’ psychology.”31 Indeed, Littell engages with the perpetrator on a whole new level. Max Aue, the novel’s memoirist, is a committed Nazi, an SS officer who serves in Einsatzkommando 4a in Ukraine in 1941. Through his eyes, readers witness his participation in the mass killings at Babi Yar. Littell invites readers to explore Aue’s feelings about the murder of women and small children. This book exemplified the new trend by making an unrepentant Nazi perpetrator a first-person narrator with whom the reader is supposed to sympathize and identify.The book sparked considerable controversy.32 Critics of the novel were numerous. Claude Lanzmann called the entire book “an elaboration of Littell’s fascination for dirt, nightmare, and the grotesque of sexual perversion, which fails to realize its purpose and its character, causing malaise, revolt, without even understanding against who or what.”33 Charlotte Lacoste, in one of the most detailed criticisms of the novel, argues that Littell’s premise is that “each of us is a perpetrator” and that the novel represents a court in which the reader is to play the role of the jury, Aue that of the accused, and Littell that of his advocate.34 As Désirée Lamoureux aptly points out, Lacoste shows that Littell’s novel “promotes the ideology of the perpetrator by usurping the place of the victims and by banalizing genocide.”35 Lacoste’s main point is that Littell crafts “a real martyr of extermination,” because the reader is shown “how much the Nazis suffer: we see members of the SS in tears, witness their sexual impotence, and are encouraged to reflect that they too are victims.”36 In support of her interpretation, Lacoste quotes one critic who affirms that Aue “is not a perpetrator” but merely “a man who lived his life.”37 Michel Murat compared the novel to “what Americans call Gestaporn,”38 pointing especially to the scenes of mass killings, in which the narrator tells, for example, how he killed “a beautiful young woman, almost naked but very elegant” by firing bullets into her head until it “exploded like a fruit.”39 This scene contains a sentimental description of the Nazi pitying his female victim, making Murat consider this mixture of “horror and sentimentality as ingredients of kitsch” and conclude that “there is certainly something insulting to the victims in these descriptions, who become objects of consumption.”40 Indeed, the scene and many other graphic scenes written in naturalistic detail reveal that this Nazi finds nothing revolting about his crimes (except for sporadic bouts of vomiting afterward). “That such a novel should win two of France’s top literary prizes is . . . a measure of how drastically literary attitudes toward the Holocaust have changed in the last few decades,” writes Michiko Kakutani in her review for the New York Times.41 In fact, the novel’s reception in the United States was a far cry from its success with the French audience.Those who considered the awarding of the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie Française and the Prix Goncourt well merited praised the novel precisely because the consciousness of the Nazi perpetrator is depicted as free of any moral remorse and declared it a major achievement in the post-nineteenth-century novel genre. According to Pierre Cormary, “The fire of Les Bienveillantes is produced by intellectual, mental, not moral, suffering.”42 The absence of the moral aspect is what the reader is expected to find so alluring. As Christian Ingrao puts it: “Readers are fascinated because they feel that in order to understand the mass murder, the atrocities, one needs to enter the discourse of the perpetrators, not that of victims innocent by definition. I am not surprised therefore by the success of Les Bienveillantes. This is a seductive novel.”43 This ability to psychologically identify with the Holocaust perpetrator as he murders his victims was lauded not only by the critics but also by the proponents of the perpetrator turn in historiography, because the novel provides, especially through the intimacy of first-person narration,44 “a unique insight into the perpetrator.”45Aue appeared as a protagonist of a new type because he is a cultivated man and an intellectual: a sharp-minded philosopher and a sublime linguist, a fine connoisseur of music and the arts (and not at all a hysterical antisemite, Littell explains). As Cormay puts it: “Yesterday, the scandal was to say that the perpetrator was an ordinary man. Today the scandal is to say that the perpetrator is a brilliant intellectual.”46 Outstanding as he is in every respect, Aue is presented by the novel as a cultural model, especially because Littell himself admits that he identifies with his protagonist: “I know that this message carries a very ambiguous meaning, but I have modeled this protagonist after myself. His worldview is not that far from mine, even if I am on one side, and he is on another.”47 In other words, even the author falls under the spell of this “classy criminal,” transforming the Nazi perpetrator into “a model for humanity.”48 (Sewell, when asked by an interviewer if he identified with John Smith as a father figure, responded in no uncertain terms that he felt for and sympathized with his protagonist.)49However new it was, back in 2006, to see an unrepentant Gestapo mass murderer as a “classy criminal,” Aue is not an unprecedented innovation: his behavior, his outstanding talents and cultural skills, and his demeanor resemble other murderous monsters who came into prominence well before him—vampires and cannibals, even though, unlike them, Aue does not consume his victims’ blood or flesh. The idealization of these murderous monsters emerged in the 1990s and culminated in its current trendy incarnation, Hannibal Lecter, a cannibal played by Mikkelsen in the much-admired TV series Hannibal (Bryan Fuller, 2013–15)._________Indeed, the comparison of “classy Nazi” and “classy cannibal,” Aue and Lecter, reveals some striking similarities: the evolution of the “sympathetic” Nazi perpetrator and that of the “sympathetic” cannibal has followed the same pattern and undergone the same semantic shift. The similarities in the trajectory of these images becomes apparent in two comparisons. The first up is Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a cannibalistic serial killer and a former psychiatrist in the novel The Silence of the Lambs (Thomas Harris, 1988), and in the movie of the same name (dir. Jonathan Demme, 1991), on one hand, and the Hannibal Lecter of the 2015 TV series, on the other. In the second, the changes in these depictions of Lecter, separated by two decades, should be matched against those of the Nazi protagonists in Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle and the TV series of the same name discussed above.Although the Harris/Hopkins Lecter has a sinister, vampire-like allure and possesses an outstanding intellect,50 these descriptions still fall short of idealizing him as an aristocrat of the spirit. His charisma notwithstanding, Lecter is unmistakably an abhorrent criminal. In the novel and the 1991 movie, he is depicted as a monster, and his cannibalism is presented as a horrific crime.51 In the novel Harris does not describe him as “sexy” or handsome: he appears “small” and “sleek.”52 In the 1991 movie Lecter is portrayed not by a handsome Hollywood megastar but by a venerable actor, and, unlike the Lecter of 2015, the image that Hopkins creates is free from any erotic connotations. The contrast between Lecter’s great intellectual and cultural sophistication and his penchant for cannibalism has made him a controversial and groundbreaking protagonist.In 2015 Mikkelsen’s Lecter is a handsome man, with manners, taste, and social skills beyond reproach, and a brilliant intellectual—an outstanding psychiatrist, a connoisseur of classical music and fine arts. His violence and cruelty are not expected to provoke repulsion in the audience: on the contrary, they are supposed to add to his overall charm and attraction. His pairing of cooked human flesh with exquisite wine is nothing short of a guide for sophisticated urban living.53The TV series enjoyed an enthusiastic reception: it was praised as “deliciously subversive” and “the testiest drama” by Entertainment Weekly, Variety, Metacritic, the New York Post, HitFix, Review, and the Chicago Sun-Times, among many other publications.54 The first episode of Hannibal’s first season was watched by 4.36 million viewers in the United States alone, logging higher ratings of viewer and critic approval than even Game of Thrones.55The evolution of Hannibal as a character and the public’s response offer just one example of how the image of the cannibal and serial killer had evolved in popular culture over a few decades from a grotesque criminal to a cult figure.56 The rapidly developing serial-killer celebrity culture and the growing market for murderabilia paved the way for this evolution, along with the intense interest in equating humans to objects of predation. While cannibalism had been previously categorized as a prehistoric atavism, by the late 1990s representing people as food had become an overarching cultural theme.The semantic shift from psychotic criminal antagonist to sympathetic, appealing, and humanized protagonist undergone by Hannibal Lecter matches the transition of images of Nazis between Dick’s Man in the High Castle and the TV series._________The change in popular representations of homicidal monsters from abhorrent antagonists to idealized protagonists, which I analyze in my book The Celebration of Death in Contemporary Culture, was pioneered by the vampire, the most popular of all monsters.57 As several studies have demonstrated, in the late 1980s and early 1990s the images of the cannibal and the serial killer merged with that of the vampire.58 “Humanized” vampires may be traced back to Louis in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976), but this new interpretation of homicidal monsters as sympathetic protagonists did not dominate popular culture on an international scale until the 1990s. The distinctive characteristic of novels and films featuring vampires from the eighteenth-century English gothic novel to the mid-1970s was that people, not vampires, were the heroes of the tale. Despite some sexualized descriptions, vampires were invariably shown as ghastly creatures, and the risk they posed to human life was deemed by creators and audience alike a horrendous crime. In no way were humans thought of as the vampire’s natural prey and food. But since the 1990s, in a remarkable departure from the gothic tradition, vampire stories have prompted the audience to identify with the vampires’ feelings and desires. Vampires are elegant and artistically gifted, have good taste, and display unsurpassed intelligence and social skills. In addition, vampires are magically beautiful and immortal and possess supernatural powers: it is not surprising that they are constantly called “godlike,”59 which is why inferior human characters in these narratives (as well as fans of these movies and fiction) yearn so passionately to “get turned.” Perhaps the most telling example of this trend is the film Only Lovers Left Alive (dir. Jim Jarmusch, 2013), in which all the achievements of human culture are ascribed to vampires, who have composed the world’s greatest music and written most of Shakespeare’s plays. This is not to say that the traditional vampire tale has completely disappeared from the entertainment market: it is still present in movies and fiction