By staging a dialogue between the theories of Milan Kundera, Saul
Friedlander, and Umberto Eco, my paper examines differences between communist,
capitalist, and Nazi forms of death kitsch. Kitsch, deriving from the German
word for trash,
falsifies perceptions of reality by evoking
sentimental, prescribed, ready-made responses. The question is often raised
whether kitsch is a universal that crosses cultural boundaries or whether
it differs fundamentally according to socio-cultural-political context. One
way of addressing this question is through the study of death kitsch.
Kundera, Friedlander, and Eco—three of the great theorists of
kitsch—differ in their characterization of death kitsch. Kundera writes
in his 1984 novel Kitsch is a folding screen to curtain off death.
Kundera
illustrates that kitsch deprives death of its import, falsifying people's past
lives through vapid tombstone phrases such as Return After Long
Wanderings
or He Wanted the Kingdom of God on Earth.
The novel's characters and narrator come to realize that
death kitsch crosses socio-cultural boundaries, inducing a sense of
categorical agreement with being
and effacing death's horror.
Kundera's implication that different socio-cultural-political systems have
equivalent
forms of death kitsch may be questioned by contrasting Kundera's theory
with the theories of Friedlander and of Eco. Friedlander argues that Nazi
death kitsch is fundamentally different from the communist death kitsch
described by Kundera. Nazi kitsch does not erase death's horror. Instead,
it presents death through the aesthetic of apocalypticism, eulogizing the
hero's act of self-sacrifice. While Friedlander's studies illustrate the
cultural specificity of Nazi death kitsch, Eco's studies illustrate the
cultural specificity of capitalist death kitsch. Indeed, Eco implies that
one cannot even generalize about capitalist death kitsch as such, since
death kitsch takes on a quite specific form in American culture. Forest
Lawn kitsch is characterized by the presence of authentic
copies of
European Renaissance masterpieces. This aspiration to status through the
imitation of Europe is a culturally specific feature of American death
kitsch. Through a dialogic interplay between texts of Kundera, Friedlander,
and Eco—whose work focuses, respectively, on communist, Nazi, and
capitalist forms of death kitsch—I thus argue that there is no universal
death kitsch but, rather, that death kitsch is highly dependent on the
exigencies of socio-cultural-political context.