In the case of the Hitler clone motif, the texts do not depict a nameless mass of blank-faced Stormtroopers, but rather a clone of the Führer himself. Presumably the cloned Hitler would have free will and, as in The Boys from Brazil, his maker could only create conditions in which he might fulfill his intended destiny. Yet the idea of an ‘intended destiny’ already limits certain aspects of the cloned individual’s life if we follow the reasoning of Jürgen Habermas in his 1998 Süddeutsche Zeitung article, ‘Sklavenherrschaft der Gene: Moralische Grenzen des Fortschritts’ (Enslavement of the gene: moral limits of progress). In this article, Habermas frequently refers to a ‘we’, whose genes are a product of Schicksal (fate) versus ‘they’, the products of genetic manipulation.53 According to Habermas, ‘we’ have the opportunity to discover our own purpose and deal with basic questions of our own existence, whereas the clone, a product of someone else’s designs and intentions, does not fully have this opportunity. While we all possess certain inherited characteristics, Habermas reasons, these qualities were not determined by someone else, and we are therefore not subject to anyone else in the same way that the clone would be. In the case of the 94 mini-Hitlers in The Boys from Brazil, their intended purpose is determined by the fictionalized Josef Mengele. In a certain sense, then, the Hitler clones have some qualities in common with the Emperor’s Stormtroopers or the cloned babies of Aldous Huxley’s dystopic Brave New World. The real ‘Führer’ is Mengele.
The mad doctor who wishes to reboot the Third Reich through genetic manipulation (or other biotech interventions) appears in most Nazi clone narratives that I have come across so far. Besides
the fictionalized Mengele in The Boys from Brazil, we find Dr Stern in
‘Anschluss ’77’ and Dr Vogel in The Lucifer Complex (1978). These latter two characters are based loosely on Mengele, and more recent incarna-tions of the Hitler clone motif continue to use this stock character. In the Seventh Son trilogy of podcast novels by J. C. Hutchins,54 the ancient Dr Klaus Bregner continues his postwar work in the US in a secret underground genetics lab. He has developed a method of cloning and the ability to download memories into the new body, so he clones a younger version of himself and downloads his consciousness into it.
He plans to place further copies of his consciousness into the bodies of various world leaders, and the seven ‘inferior’ subjects of his first cloning experiment unite to stop him. The 2003 film Bulletproof Monk features a nonagenarian Nazi in a wheelchair who uses improbable brain scan technology to locate an ancient Tibetan scroll that will give him back his youth. His regained youth will allow him to continue his experiments leading to a Fourth Reich. The 2003 Mexican film El Clon de Hitler tells the story of three Hitler daughters who clone the Führer, again in a bid to bring about a Fourth Reich.55 In the 2010 novel The Dragon Factory by Jonathan Maberry, an evil scientist named Cyrus Jakoby, accompanied by his platinum blonde clone children and his German assistant Otto Wriths,56 works to develop and disseminate a virus designed to wipe out all ‘non-Aryan’ people. Jakoby sees his work as a direct continuation of Mengele’s.57 These texts all reference Mengele and in some way utilize genetics to revive either Hitler or the mad scientist who serves as Hitler’s stand-in. A common thread is the ‘fountain of youth’ device in which the aging Nazi is reborn through cloning or some other means. However preposterous, these stories address a serious possibility also discussed by contemporary philosophers and scientists, namely that Nazi-style eugenics may not stay dormant in the past.
As in Nazisploitation more generally, the Nazi clone motif saw its original heyday in the mid to late 1970s and has undergone something of a renaissance in the last few years. Why Nazi clones, and why now? In the 1970s, the idea of cloning had just reached public consciousness, and in the larger cultural sphere, questions of repro-duction had become major concerns: abortion rights, the women’s movement and shifts in traditional family structures such as rising divorce rates. Ambivalence surrounding the traditional family — and specifically the role of children and motherhood — found expression
in ‘devil child’ movies like It’s Alive (1974, remade in 2008 under the same title) and The Omen (1976, remade in 2006, also under the same title). The Boys from Brazil touches on this motif at certain moments, as in the final shots of ‘devil child’ Bobby Wheelock eerily absorbed in his grisly photography project. At the same time, awareness of the Holocaust and attendant questions concerning the proper carrying out of justice were just starting to enter the wider public consciousness.
For instance, Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower was first published in 1976. Meanwhile, public qualms surrounding the Vietnam War made Nazis an attractive, unambiguous enemy.
The resurgence of the Nazi clone in recent years has arisen out of similar circumstances. In a post-9/11 world in which the ‘enemy’ is a faceless terrorist network rather than a particular individual or army, the revival of an unambiguous enemy like the Nazis makes sense.
With relatively few original Nazis still alive at this point, cloning serves the narrative twofold: as a ‘fountain of youth’ for reviving original Nazis as well as an efficient and historically and more or less scientifi-cally plausible method of creating new ones. Yet, as the possibility of cloning moves closer to reality than mere sci-fi speculation, contem-porary philosophical and scientific discussions of cloning acknowledge the potential abuses suggested by Nazi eugenics in the last century.
Real-world developments such as controversies surrounding geneti-cally modified food products have lent this topic an urgency it lacked in the 1970s. These texts extrapolate from current technologies in the tradition of science fiction, which has always served as a laboratory for exploring potential future consequences of current events. Although no Dr Mengele lurks in the jungles of South America plotting a revival of the Third Reich, as the trailer from The Boys from Brazil states,
‘the time is the present […] and the threat is real’. Cloning poses challenges that we will have to address in the coming years. Even if the Hitler clone narrative presents a scientifically implausible worst-case scenario, historical precedent nonetheless requires us to take the warning seriously.
Notes
1 J. B. S. Haldane, ‘Biological Possibilities for the Human Species of the Next Ten-Thousand Years’, in Man and His Future, ed. Gordon Wolstenholme (New York: Little, Brown, 1963), 337–61. In the novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley also describes a process analogous to cloning.
2 Movie tagline: ‘Meet the New Master Race’. This film is premised on a
fictionalized Black Panther-like group that goes to fascist extremes, to the point of adopting Nazi iconography and rhetoric.
3 For the purposes of this essay, ‘cloning’ will be defined as any delib-erate human intervention that results in a genetic duplicate of an organism, human or otherwise. This definition encompasses all cloning techniques, from current to as yet untested theoretical technologies, real or fictional.
4 Jack Kirby, Fantastic Four 1, no. 21 (December 1963), Marvel Comics.
5 Marcus Stiglegger, Sadiconazista: Faschismus und Sexualität im Film (St.
Augustin: Gardez!, 1999).
6 Movie tagline: ‘The most terrifying plot ever imagined…takeover by clones!’
A group of Nazi doctors plot world domination by replacing world leaders with lookalike brainwashed clones. A lone UN employee (Robert Vaughn) learns of the plan and is the only one who can save the world. According to the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com), it was made in 1976 and was intended as a feature film but went directly to television in 1978.
7 The episode relates to Wonder Woman’s history as a patriotic DC comic character who first appeared in the 1940s. We see her ‘memories’ in the form of flashbacks that may well consist of uncredited footage from Triumph of the Will. Another episode of possible Nazisploitation interest is the Season 1 episode ‘Fausta, the Nazi Wonder Woman’, a flashback episode wherein Wonder Woman battles an old World War II-era foe. Fausta has a distinctly Ilsa-like appearance and demeanor, and the episode includes an instance of Wonder Woman in rope/chain bondage administered by Fausta.
8 Far more common than fictional representations of Hitler clones are refer-ences to this idea in debates regarding the ethics of cloning. An Internet search with the terms ‘cloning’ and ‘Hitler’ reveals numerous articles and informal forum posts in which arguments inevitably mention Hitler and vaguely reference the Nazi eugenics program. Often, the attendant question, ‘What if they cloned Hitler?’ comes up in this context.
9 Joan Hawkins, Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 4.
10 Mikel Koven, ‘‘The Film You Are About to See Is Based on Documented Fact’: Italian Nazi Sexploitation Cinema’, in Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema since 1945, eds Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik (London: Wallflower, 2004), 27–30. See also Lynn Rapaport, ‘Holocaust Pornography: Profaning the Sacred in Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS’, Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 22, no. 1 (2003): 64–5.
11 The realities of Nazi science were also addressed as part of the recent US Holocaust Museum exhibit ‘Deadly Medicine’, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Website, accessed 27 December 2010. www.ushmm.org/
museum/exhibit/online/deadlymedicine/.
12 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, An Introduction: Part I, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978), 23.
13 Linda Williams, ‘Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess’, Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1991): 2.
14 Koven, ‘“The Film You Are About to See”’. 25–6.
15 Historians have addressed the ‘what-if’ question involving the Third Reich.
For example, see Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate Histories and the Memory of Nazism (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2005).
16 In fact, Mengele was still alive and living in Paraguay at the time this film was made. He died in 1979.
17 This group was probably modeled on the Jewish Defense League, a group particularly active in the late 1970s.
18 Martha Kuhlman, ‘The Uncanny Clone: The X-Files, Popular Culture, and Cloning’, Studies in Popular Culture 26, no. 3 (2004): 78–9.
19 Richard Dawkins, ‘What’s Wrong with Cloning?’ Clones and Clones: Facts and Fantasies about Human Cloning, eds, Martha Nussbaum and Cass R. Sunstein (New York: Norton, 1998), 55.
20 The Boys from Brazil, directed by Frank J. Schaffner (1978; USA: Lions Gate Entertainment, 2009), DVD.
21 Ira Levin, The Boys from Brazil (New York: Random House, 1976), 312.
22 I refer here to the ‘murky’ history of Nazi science in order to differentiate between real scientific advances that occurred under the Nazis (e.g., in rocketry, jet technology, radar technology, cryptography etc.) and unsub-stantiated rumors of their involvement in more far-fetched goals, such as a Nazi atomic bomb and electromagnetic propulsion. In the arena of genetics, the idea of Nazi cloning makes for plausible science fiction based on the Nazi history of experimentation involving twins, sterilization and the infamous Lebensborn homes that served as a literal breeding ground for
‘genetically pure’ children of SS officers. See Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors (New York: Basic Books, 1986) for details.
23 At the time of this writing, a trailer for an as yet unfinished film Iron Sky can be viewed on YouTube. This Finnish/German/Australian production plays on one-time rumors of a would-be Nazi space program, most likely fueled by the very real advances in rocketry under Hitler. The premise is that a Nazi space programme continued in Antarctica after World War II and resulted in a Nazi base on the moon. Tagline: ‘In 1945, the Nazis went to the moon.
In 2018, they are coming back’.
24 The Lucifer Complex, directed by Kenneth Hartford and David L. Hewitt (1978; USA: Miracle Pictures, 2005), DVD.
25 Koven, ‘“The Film You Are About to See”’, 27.
26 Ibid., 30.
27 For an in-depth historical perspective on the value of what-if scenarios, see Gavriel Rosenfeld, The World Hitler Never Made (see note 15 above). See also Niall Ferguson, Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (New York:
Basic Books, 1997).
28 Robert A. Heinlein, ‘Science Fiction: Its Nature, Faults, and Virtues’, in Turning Points: Essays on the Art of Science Fiction, ed. Damon Knight, 3-28 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 9.
29 Lifton, The Nazi Doctors.
30 Shock Waves, directed by Ken Wiederhorn (1977; USA: Image Entertainment, 2002), DVD.
31 Orson Scott Card, How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (Cincinnati, OH:
Writer’s Digest Books, 1990), 61. Renowned sci-fi author, critic and editor Orson Scott Card explains the need for ‘rules’ that carefully extrapolate from real-world, contemporary hard science in order to make a science fiction story plausible. According to him, once an author establishes the
‘rulebook’ for his or her speculative universe, rigorous adherence to these
rules wins the trust of sci-fi audiences.
32 Roger Caillois, quoted in Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 26.
33 Wonder Woman, ‘Anschluss ’77’, Episode no. 20, Season 2, first broadcast September 23, 1977 by ABC, directed by Alan Crosland.
34 The fictional Agent Trevor may well have been referring to the real discovery detailed in Kevin Struhl and R. W. Davis, ‘Genetic Selections and the Cloning of Prokaryotic and Eukaryotic Genes’, Symposium of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Los Angeles, UCLA, 1976.
35 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVII (1917–1919), eds James Strachey et al. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955), 241–2.
36 Susan Sontag, ‘Fascinating Fascism’, in Under the Sign of Saturn, 73-105 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), 102.
37 This is especially so if we consider the origin of ‘fascination’ which relates to spell-casting or enchantment, meant to transform people’s perception and/
or influence them in a particular direction, as in a love spell. Both exploi-tation cinema and fascism have this element to them, in that both attempt to ‘cast a spell’ on audiences by exciting the emotions.
38 Eric Schaefer, ‘Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!’: A History of Exploitation Films, 1919–1959 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 111.
39 The Boys from Brazil trailer is (as of January 14, 2011) viewable on the Turner Classic Movies website at www.tcm.com.
40 Grindhouse (Planet Terror and Death Proof), directed by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. (2007; USA: The Weinstein Company, 2007), 41 Maitland McDonagh, ‘The Exploitation Generation, Or: How Marginal DVD.
Movies Came in from the Cold’, in The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s, eds, Thomas Elasesser, Alexander Horwath, and Noel King, 107–30 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2004), 107.
42 Ibid., 113–14.
43 Richard Schickel, ‘Cinema: Cloning Around’, Time, October 9, 1978, 100–1.
44 Ibid., 101.
45 Caroline Picart and David A. Frank, eds, Frames of Evil: The Holocaust as Horror in American Film (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006), 28.
46 Susan Sontag, ‘Fascinating Fascism’, 75–81.
47 Jürgen Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, trans. Hella Beister, Max Pensky and William Rehg (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003).
48 Michael J. Sandel, The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
49 Peter Sloterdijk, Regeln für den Menschenpark: Ein Antwortschreiben zu Heideggers Brief über den Humanismus. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999.
50 Susan M. Lindee and Dorothy Nelkin, The DNA Mystique: The Gene as Cultural Icon (New York: W.H. Freeman, 1995), 32.
51 Triumph of the Will, directed by Leni Riefenstahl (1934; USA: Synapse Films, 2006), DVD.
52 Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, 236.
53 Jürgen Habermas, ‘Sklavenherrschaft der Gene. Moralische Grenzen des
Fortschritts’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, January 17/18, 1998, 4.
54 J. C. Hutchins, ‘Seventh Son: Deceit’, Podcast. Episode 4:
October 3, 2006, accessed December 27, 2010, www.7thsonnovel.
com/7th-son-the-beta-version/7th-son-book-2/.
55 El Clon de Hitler, directed by Christian Gonzalez (2003; USA: Distrimax Distribution, 2006), DVD.
56 Presumably he is named in reference to Eduard Wriths, the chief doctor at Auschwitz.
57 Jonathan Maberry, The Dragon Factory, (New York: St. Martin’s, 2010).