“What’s more loathsome than being Hitler’s girlfriend?” asks James St. James at the Wow Report. “Answer: Being Hitler’s girlfriend in blackface and drag!“
From LIFE magazine’s newly published collection of Eva Braun’s Private Photos:
Dear God.
David Schmader—former weed columnist and Stranger associate editor—is the author of the solo plays Straight and Letter to Axl, which he’s performed in Seattle and across the US. His latest... More by David Schmader
Dear God is right. If you read this in, say, Vonnegut or Pynchon or Gunter Grass, people’d be saying “oh, that’s ridiculous, he’s gone too far, that’s not even believable”.
wow! now that’s just over the top.
That is the single most offensive thing that has ever happened. This is beyond hyperbole. All offensive things for all time will now be judged against this baseline.
I think what’s most perplexing about this is Life’s placement of the Facebook “Like” button next to the photo.
I can’t really think of anything more fucked up.
I’m with @3.
I feel like this is an out-take from Inglourious Basterds.
I can’t really think of anything more fucked up.
Hitler banging her before she washes off the makeup?
@7: you got the subject and object reversed there. You know for damn sure she was banging him with a huge black dildo while he was wearing a skirt.
Does my finding this funny make me a terrible person? Probably.
I think something can be so offensive as to pass beyond disgust/horror and into pure hilarity. This has achieved that.
Wait does the fact that she’s in drag make this worse?
What @3 said. The only good that could possibly come from this is if there’s since been invented one of those German compound words that delivers entire concepts that can describe exactly this sort of thing.
@11, everything makes this worse. And when it’s gotten as bad as it’s possible to get, you can go back around to just “Hitler’s girlfriend” and redouble the badness yet again. An infinitely deepening black hole of badness. And yes, hilarious.
The banality of evil, indeed, indeed.
Actually, the first thing I thought when I saw it was that it was a picture of Benny Hill.
Scroll down a bit and you see him in blackface as Idi Amin.
http://runstop.de/faces05.html
KILL IT WITH FIRE
My first thought was that she must be dressing up like that for him. Would that make her GGG?
@9 Then I guess I’m a terrible person as well.
This is just a bit too weird. it’s not even really actual blackface, as there is only hints of actually mocking black people in it – she is wearing a proper suit after all. Also, Germany never really had a tradition of blackface, mostly from the severe lack of black people (especially in the 1930s, when most people would have never even seen a black person in real life). I am genuinely curious as to why that should be considered racist other than the fact that it’s Eva Braun? The wig maybe?
She’s worse than Hitler.
Oh, wait…
A white person in black face, not racist?
What planet do you live on?
The blackface “tradition” also came with jokes acted out by those in black face as stupid “coons”, and singing and dancing exaggerating the idea of “simple” black folk.
Black face performers originated in the American South when the blacks themselves rebelled against portraying themselves as idiots.
Al Jolson was a very cleaned up version of Blackface, which had a horrific history in the 19th century up through the 20th century.
With the Nazis’ racist theology, it seems likely that Eva Braun’s performance would include more than just burnt cork.
I was a small child, but vaguely remember a black face chorus complete with the racist jokes at some charity performance in our small (very white) New Jersey town in the 1950s. And my discomfort with it, even then.
Wow, I was wondering how many comments in we’d get before some chunderhead piped up with “that’s not really racist.”
Some might think, given that it’s a fucking Nazi in blackface, that such things wouldn’t happen. I would say onto them: new to the internet, are we?
@19,
Europeans have been plenty racist toward Africans, even before Africans really started to emigrate to Europe. Also, some African soldiers in WWI married German women and settled down in Germany. There weren’t many, but the Nazis had a policy of sterilizing their children.
Uh, what? Blackface was very popular among working class black people in the late 19th century.
Isn’t this weirdly reminiscent of a Don DeLillo book? Am I the only one here weird enough to have read Don DeLillo?
The name of the book is Running Dog……..
For a second there I thought that was Ayn Rand
for #12 and FTW?: Eva Schwartze
@21: Theres plenty of blackface that isn’t racist. Putting on another face color isn’t inherently racist, and if it is, please explain how. How is this imitating a black person in that picture demeaning? And you were making my point exactly: There’s a whole lot more to blackface that made blackface a horribly racist thing to do – the problem certainly wasn’t the black face, the problem was the rest of the things you described. This picture may evoke those things to an American, but not to a German who had never heard of blackface.
I’m not saying blackface isn’t racist, it is, in the worst way, but the racist part isn’t the facepaint, it’s all the rest they did when they were wearing it. And her outfit doesn’t look stereotypically anything.
I think Germans knew about blackface back then. Both countries were fanatical about the movies and blackface was a top Hollywood draw (e.g. Al Jolson sang in the first Hollywood talkie) If Hitler loved King Kong and Mickey Mouse I’ll bet Eva saw The Jazz Singer.
I mean there”s plenty of incidences where black face makeup isn’t racist. not blackface. the whole point is that blackface is something culturally specific that consists of more than facepaint.
I recall seeing these photos when I was in college, and no I didn’t go to college in Berlin.
@7: My thoughts exactly.
@12: rassistischenhomophobenführersehntschwarzenschwanzsoschlechtkanneresprobieren, I believe. And six will get you ten that Ms Braun owned a large black dildo to go with the outfit.
I guess I’m the only one who looked through the photo collection that LIFE put together. Eva loved dressing up for carnival parties; many of the pictures are related to that. She also loved American movies, and was dressing up specifically as Al Jolson for a costume party. That does not make her a racist.
Being a member/supporter of the Nazi party makes her a racist.
Amazing. I think this is a perfect example to present to frat boys who think going as a black celebrity for halloween is hilarious and somehow clever. We can now tell them, in all honesty, “You know who else wore black face? Hitler’s bitch. You wanna be Hitler’s bitch? Hey, everyopne, look over here! It’s an oversexed mouth breathing douche bag who wants nothing more in the world than to take Hitler’s cock inside him and be Hitler’s bitch!”
@22 well said
Oh come on, isn’t anyone going to OBJECTIFY her? “Hey, she’s kinda cute!” “I’d let her black MY face!” “Fuhrer? I didn’t even TOUCH her!” Etc.
Eva Braun, dressing as a Jew, dressed in Blackface. The Irony should be on a shirt.
@29, GERMANS HAVE DEFINITELY HEARD OF BLACKFACE, and know that it is offensive. And seeing as blackface was part of Hollywood productions pre-WWII, I’m pretty sure Eva Braun was aware of it too. I sincerely hope you are just trolling in order to provide a poignant example of how at least one person will defend anyone white against any accusation of racism. In any case assuming virulently racist Nazi Germans were somehow just too sweet and innocent to mean anything by dressing up as a black person is hilarious.
I hate to bring down the playful tone of this thread, but it’s worth remembering what happened to Afro-Germans during the Holocaust: http://german.about.com/od/culture/a/bla… Between 25,000 and 50,000 died in concentration camps. Many more were forcibly sterilized. All in all I’m pretty sure Fräulein Braun knew what she was up to.