Lots and lots of interesting email on the “Hitler’s Cross” restaurant topic. If this blog had comment threads, it’d be a hell of a good one. Fortunately, I’ve set up a thread for discussion purposes over at the Cafe. Beyond that, let me just quote one message from D.G. because I went to summer camp with him he’s a bona fide Jewish resident of Bombay:
I just wanted to weigh in on the whole Hitler’s Cross Restaurant thing as an honest to god Jewish resident of Bombay. (No kidding, I don’t know if you heard, but I got sick of Washington and wanted an adventure. I have outsourced myself to Bombay. It’s actually pretty awesome, Hitler theme restaurants aside.) First of all, though it’s obvious, I think it’s important to note that the guy fairly explicitly wants, and has received, attention, and he’s gotten it, even if he’s already been forced to change the name. He’s really more Paris Hilton than David Duke. Secondly, Hitler would almost certainly not be terribly pleased with the of idea of an Indian restaurant/hookah bar bearing his name. It’s a little ethnic for him.
That being said, there is an incredible amount of Hitler fascination in India, often tinged with Nazi-sympathy. I noticed this weeks ago, well before this whole restaurant thing blew up. I think there are two reasons for this. A) Hitler and the Indians were to some extent on the same side, and even though Indians know that they shouldn’t like him, they tend to appreciate his role in breaking Britain’s back, and B) they think that if anyone could have made the trains run on time in this country it would have been Hitler. (They’re wrong in that respect, by the way. No one could organize this place.)
I had a surprising conversation with a friend who said that yes, the holocaust was bad, but he heard that the autobahn is the best highway system in the world, and you have to keep things in perspective. (Given that Bombay’s big modern highway has a posted speed limit of 50 km/h, which it’s hard to imagine anyone ever achieving, building an awesome highway system does probably overshadow 13 million or so murders.) Another friend told me about how her husband used to learn all about how great Hitler was by the priests at his catholic school (one wonders what Pope Ratzinger would think about this.) She did, however, seem a bit freaked out by that. You can buy Mein Kampf at the Indian equivalent of Barnes and Noble, with a forward by some Indian guy talking about how everything must be read in it’s context blah blah blah. Anyway, the holocaust is all quite far from here, as are most Jews and Gypsies and (at least uncloseted) Gays. My friends are very concerned about my feeling uncomfortable, but once they realized I wasn’t particularly horrified, they all wanted to be the first to take me.
Food for thought? It’s certainly something. At any rate, in my initial post I wasn’t trying to say that Nazi kitsch and Soviet kitsch are exactly the same. Rather, I just wanted to note that our conventions in the USA treat them very differently for reasons that are non-obvious and possibly not totally comprehensible to people approaching these questions from a different historical background.
