White Noise

“Every semester I arranged for a screening of background footage. This consisted of propaganda films, scenes shot at party congress, outtakes from mystical epics featuring parades of gymnasts and mountaineers—a collection I’d edited into an impressionistic eighty-minute documentary” (25).
In the moment above, he is trying to give his students a primary account of the Nazis. But by editing the raw footage into his own documentary, he is putting his own imprint on it, almost making it more about what he thinks is important, as opposed to just being about the historical facts. It’s still very valuable for the students (it’s obviously important to see what a major scholar of Hitler believes to be important), but it’s interesting that Gladney doesn’t necessarily seem to realize that he is shaping the history, as opposed to just presenting the facts.

“He now knows he won’t go down in history.”
“Neither will I.”
“But you’ve got Hitler.”
“Yes, I gave, haven’t I?” (45)
The Hitler studies program is Gladney’s legacy. It was the first program in North America, and for that, he will be remembered. But Gladney seems sort of unaware of his importance in the field, or that his work is something worth remembering.

“My dog-eared copy of Mein Kampf rested on the floor at the side of the chair” (95).
I thought that this moment was hilarious- I love that he obsessively reads Mein Mampf, is a prominent Hitler scholar, but can’t even read or speak German. The picture of him reading an English translation of the most important text in his field is priceless.

We see that Gladney has a complicated relationship with history. He has dedicated his life to history, but in some very weird way, I almost got the impression that he doesn’t completely respect history. Really, how can someone specialize in Hitler studies without learning German? He has to know that translations are never perfect. Since he only ‘knows ‘Hitler in translation, he doesn’t really know Hitler at all. He doesn’t know what he really wrote in Mein Kampf, and he doesn’t really know what anyone is saying in the propaganda films (assuming they’re in German). But yet he has dedicated his life to history, loves it, and his Hitler studies department is how he will be remembered. I can’t really figure out what I think his relationship with/feelings towards history are.