Back in the 1970s, boys still played war games that re-enacted the Allied defeat of Nazi Germany. Our block was transformed into an urban battle zone, in the imaginary sense only. Life in my working-class Jewish neighborhood was pretty safe. That's my most people had moved there from the Bronx or Upper Manhattan. So the battle zone was in our heads, but real enough.
As the only German kid around, I was always asked but never agreed to play the Nazi. There was nothing worse than being the target of a dozen machine gun totting kids who all wanted to make up for the horrors of the War and the Holocaust. Speaking German made me a Nazi anyway, and I got beaten up for it lots, but in war games I was always an American, and as such we all wanted to kill Hitler.
"What would you do if your saw Hitler?" Standard question in the back yards and play grounds. "I'd shoot a million rounds of ammo into him with my machine gun." "I'd blow his head off with a grenade." I had the same answers as all the other kids to this rather transparent loyalty test, the trick was coming up with another way to destroy the Führer. And in my day dreams I imagined running into Hitler and firing away at him with my machine gun. In the hail of bullets, I remember discovering a rage that went far beyond the normal play ground combativeness. I hated Hitler not just cause he was the number one evil guy in the world, but because he had ruined my life, made me the object of daily scorn, burdened me with a guilt I would never wear off. So as I fired clip after clip into his writhing body, I discovered the real reason I hated Hitler, he had fucked up my life.
All this came back to me as I watched Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds, a movie my students recommended to me after a semester of showing them Emil Jannings, Leni Riefenstahl, and Bruno Ganz movies.
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