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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Did Hitler have an opinion about parking in Tel Aviv? In 1945, Tel Aviv was under British rule (a League of Nations mandate, to be precise), and its population barely reached 183,000 in 1946, according to UN estimates. It seems unlikely that parking would have been an issue, at the time. Of course we know that Hitler did not really have an opinion on parking in Tel Aviv, especially not 70 plus years in the future. That's why the idea is funny, in part. Or offensive, depending on who you ask. Depending on who you ask, you will get very different answers as to whether it is funny or even OK to ask the question, what would Hitler's opinion have been? But before we can even try to answer these questions, we need to address the broader issue: Why are we talking about Hitler's opinion about parking in Tel Aviv? Here we need to take a step back.
Goodwin's Law of Nazi Analogies reads, “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one” (Goodwin, 1994). Goodwin observed, some 30 plus years ago, that the longer an internet discussion lasted the probability of someone mentioning Hitler as a comparison to someone or something in the discussion increased and so that if the discussion is long enough someone will end up using a Hitler analogy. Thus any sufficiently long discussion of humor on the internet must mention the Hitler Rant parodies.
This chapter therefore discusses some aspects of the meme variously known as Hitler's Rants or Downfall parodies. The anchor text of the meme is the Downfall (Der Untergang) a 2004 film directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, starring Bruno Ganz as Hitler. The parodies focus on a scene toward the end of the movie in which Hitler is told that a counter-offensive on which he had pinned his last hopes to turn around the war has failed. Hitler explodes in a bout of rage, and his staff overhears the outburst and is seen reacting to it with apprehension. The parodies are done by adding subtitles but keeping the original German soundtrack. The first parodies appeared in 2005 or 2006 (Know Your Meme and the Hitler Parody Wiki disagree on the matter). However, there is agreement that they originated in Spanish.
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