In Munich, near the university, there's an old cafe called Schelling Salon. It first opened it's doors in 1872 and it's one of the few buildings in the district that was not blown up by bombs in the 2nd World War. It served good beers (according to my German friend with whom I stayed a few years ago around Heidelberg, but we travelled all over Germany's to other cities for fun and theatres) and Bavarian food (which I liked).
The air in that place was musty, and the atmosphere cold, smelling of onion, with hardly any clients, on that particular day anyway. Perhaps it's not fair for me to judge, but I discovered that decadent air so accentuated was probably due to the fact that Hitler used to frequent there during his student days, about a century ago. Not only elephants that don't ever forget.
The repulsion Hitler always provokes was strong, & deserved. Throughout the history, no one had represented the 'Badness' in the way so symbolic and at the same time so concrete. There had been other genocide with mass murderers responsible for millions of innocent deaths - Josef Stalin, Mao ZeDong, Pol Pot -, but none with such unforgettable and unforgivable fame as Adolf Hitler and the Nazism.
Evil and malice sometimes resurge in sickly fascination, also a sort of tabu, not apt for humour, although, humour has been often linked to combat the turpitude, ill will or devilment. Remember Charles Chaplin's 'The great dictator'?
There was no particular reason for me to suddenly talk about Hitler. Maybe because I just received an email from this German friend who took me to that cafe. And, the way the film director Lars von Trier made such a fool of himself for what he said in Cannes in reference to Hitler and Nazis.
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