SOURCE: "Under Hitler's Spell," in The New Republic, Vol. 191, No. 3637, October 1, 1984, pp. 40-1.

Mintz is an American nonfiction writer and educator who has written extensively on Hebrew literature. In the following positive review of Reflections of Nazism, he examines Friedländer's thesis that the "fusion of kitsch and death" is constitutive of both the original and contemporary fascination with Nazism.

Since World War II a fascination with the prurient details of Nazism has been a staple of American adolescence. In the "adult" world of pornographic pictures and films, the sadistic possibilities of Nazism have long provided the raw material for a hard-core industry of major proportions. But not until recently has Nazism surfaced into the mainstream of contemporary culture, not just as a subject for middlebrow entertainment but as high art. The phenomenon is not to be confused with Holocaust literature. In Hans Jürgen Syberberg's Hitler, a...