Trendy Monsters: The Nazis, the Perpetrator Turn, and Popular Culture

“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...