Harry Potter and the Dark Lord of the Third Reich

The creation myth of modernity.

I don’t get music before World War II.

The music from the ‘20s, for example, sounds to me like some distant “wah-wah” of brass mixed with the vocal styles of some man scatting about his baby girl. Like classical music, I can appreciate it from afar. I can even experience the alien emotions if I study it long enough. But it’s not like a great conversation in English; it’s more like having a dream in German. It just doesn’t evoke immediate, big mythical emotions in me the way that Eagles, Elvis, or The Beatles do.

I know there are great new artists out there (I try to follow Ted Gioia’s music recommendations). But, again, that stuff always is an effort—a foreign language. I always find myself going back to The Beach Boys or Roger Miller or something. This gravity is not unique to Americans or even English-speakers. As I write this, my Spanish-speaking neighbors are loudly playing Don’t Stop Believin’.

I came of age listening to the indie folk music of the aughts, like Fleet Foxes. It’s not as pioneering as the wanderlust melancholia makes it seem; it’s an impression of Bob Dylan—an echo of the original American beatniks singing about our great wide country. These guys lived in Seattle, not the wild mountains.

The common denominator here is that everything soul-catching is either a reflection or an inversion of the mid-century myths. Something profound happened in 1945 (guess what) and we’ve been playing at that motif ever since.

Our popular culture is built on the founding myth of the Second World War. Everything outside of that myth is speaking a slightly different spiritual language, and is therefore less salient at a glance. That’s why ‘20s music sounds alien to me and why new music can tend to feel like a copy of a copy.

Last week, I was thinking about all this just as I happened to find myself at the source.

I went to the WWII museum in New Orleans near the end of my visit back home. Vast war planes hung overhead. Elderly volunteer veterans guided us kindly from place to place, like mild-mannered priests. The story of the second great war unfolded for us, with key sacred artifacts to marvel at. Good guys were on colorful placards of shining blue and the bad guys on monstrous red and black.

Before we flew out, my step dad told us that his father had photos from the war—of his friends on tanks smoking cigarettes. There was even one distant snap of Mussolini. Five years ago, he brought them to the museum. They fawned, offering to put them on display (if he could be bothered to fill out the paperwork). It reminded me of how alive this story still is: good ol’ Southern boys from nowhere Louisiana left their farms behind to fight the great Nazi war machine. The proof is still right there, sitting in some box in my own hometown.

Sure, the “reality” of the events is more muddled and complicated—but the narrative is pretty damn close to perfect. There are reports all over the world of civilians cheering and crying when the Americans arrived at their camps or towns. The bad guys were so embarrassingly bad that even they now accept their role as villains. I spent some time in Germany, and that population is definitely ashamed of their past. Mentioning Hitler, even as a joke, can quickly ruin the vibe of a house party (sorry).

Recently, people have dared to question this mythos—disputing some of the core pillars on Tucker Carlson’s podcast (was Churchill the real Hitler all along?) This is equivalent to sacrilege and people are predictably outraged. But it doesn’t matter, because that’s still using the grammar of the founding myth (Churchill = Hitler), just inverting it. It will only serve to fortify the original mythos.

Others argue we’ve made WWII too sacred. They point out that you can’t talk about Hitler the same way you’d talk about equally murderous historical figures like Genghis Khan or Mao, for example. But making WWII plain-old-profane history won’t work either because we need a shared mythos grammar to understand the world at all. Like it or not, WWII is our spiritual-political anchor. That isn’t going to change without a disastrous loss of ability to speak coherently to one another. Sure, you can say you want to dismantle it, but our habit for screens and processed food says otherwise.

Our entire global political apparatus is built on this mythos. Since 1945, democratic countries have grown from a handful to about 150. The conversations about social justice, communism, free markets, nukes, and who’s the new Hitler (orange is the new red and black) all circle the inception point of the end of the war. I’m not a political historian, but I think you catch my drift.

In the 4D short film at the museum in New Orleans, Tom Hanks guides you through a journey of midwestern American heroism against the world’s boogeyman while your seat vibrates in sync with the sound of explosions. I’m not even being glib about it—it touches a nerve, although I could tell it was a bit manipulative. I instantly recognized it as the ground-truth of our entire culture. At the same time, I knew it held the seeds to the decay that we are experiencing now. It’s hard to explain, but you’d know what I meant if you saw it.

The archetypes always demand a great sacrifice to renew the world. And History usually demands the Jews. Once the sacrifice is done and the evil accuser is temporarily destroyed, we start from a golden age (post-WWII America), and then, slowly, The Fall. History takes over, making us more and more profane and less attuned to our mythical origins.

The upshot of this: as the creation moment fades into history, we become more and more nostalgic and, at the same time, politically bitter. Chaos threatens. A fresh scapegoat is needed.

These are observations Mircea Eliade made. While reading “The Sacred and the Profane” on this trip to Louisiana, I started to notice the same pattern in other places.

My brother played Harry Potter on the TV while we caught up. The heavenly father of the Harry Potter series, Dumbledore, famously defeated wizard Hitler in his youth. Perfect. Better, a new Shadow Super Hitler threatens to rise again, but nobody believes The Boy Who Lived. Rhymes with what’s going on today, doesn’t it? That resonance is both what made the series inexpressibly popular and also why we hate it—in all the complex ways we hate/love Harry Potter, its readership, and its author.

J.K. Rowling’s recent political turmoil is not arbitrary—she is contending with the inevitable endpoints of the myth that she retold. Her problem, told in short, is that she wrote a Christian story with the more incomplete WWII myth as catchy backdrop. Like a pop song with a deeper message. But her fan base almost exclusively focused on the backdrop. So, in practice, it was no longer a Christian story, but a political one.

I saw a comedian panel show: “I hate when people quote the Bible at me. I don’t quote my favorite book at you, Harry Potter.” (It was something like that). The annoyed judge, the late Norm MacDonald, explained to him: “Rowling is a Christian, and she even said that if you know the scriptures, you could predict the end of the story.”

Fans hardly remember how the story ended—with Harry becoming the Christlike sacrifice to end the eternal recurrence of Voldemort-Satan. Instead, they remember Snape, the tragic antihero, the more political escapades of Hermione, and Dumbledore’s sexuality. These are artifacts of the WWII mythology—how the unlikely heroes (drunks and hicks) won the day, saving marginalized people from purity-tyrants.

I’ve entered touchy territory. But, I’m not making claims either way (which, I know, is also annoying to everyone). Truth is, you can analyze the founding myth of World War II to explain any of your political bugaboos, left or right. Both the progressives and the traditionalists, insofar as they are “fighting the culture war,” are caught in the web of WWII. All efforts to escape it only tangle us more. We all feel it.

There are all these charts of cycles indicating that great cultural shifts come every 80 years or so. We’re all on the edge of our seat, trying to predict the next great calamity and the following utopia. But trying to imagine what the next great myth will be like is like trying to picture a movie you've never heard of.

Maybe if we could all just see beyond this whole WWII myth—to the Truth? Thought leaders like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Yuval Noah Harari urge us to stop believing in myths while they weave their own very profitable myths. In their arguments, The Truth is the meaningless brutality of history. A myth is a lie that protects our soft little heads from that. Don’t worry, though, because they know better (and you can too!) I don’t think that’s right.

The archetypes aren’t lies. Purely expressed, they are truer than banal details of history. What’s more true: that Rome fell because of the rise of Christianity, or that Brutus had a bunion? The Truth, as far as we can understand it, is the pure expression of archetypes, not a nihilistic disillusionment with all meta stories (which is the postmodern argument).

Because WWII is an imperfect representation of the Truth, slowly, disunity inevitably occurs again—like how a slightly misaligned front end eventually shakes your whole car apart. After a period of relative peace, we demand another scapegoat. This has been going on since the beginning of time. Somebody, 100 years from now, will be writing about how all the problems in that world are because of the founding myth that started in 2030 or whatever.

René Girard points out that Christ offers us a final exit from these endless cycles. Each of us is tasked with making this exit, individually. Follow him. My aim is not to convince anyone of anything except how useful that conception is. One microcosm of his behavior is “turn the other cheek,” which, by the way, is a misunderstood metaphor: In the first century, if someone slapped you with their backhand, they're telling you that you're their inferior. But if you turn the other cheek, you offer them to slap you with their open hand. An open-handed slap is what you would give to an equal. Your enemy is faced with an impossible choice: Either walk away from you, making you their superior, or they can slap you with their open hand, making you their equal. Turn the other cheek is not passivity, but creative opposition. A secret third way. The parable is saying: if we are willing to look, there is always a sparkling pathway to implement the highest archetypes in each of our tiny interactions. If we did that in aggregate, maybe we wouldn’t need a big calamity to reset everything. Fat chance. But, still, the offer stands for each of us, individually.

I know, I'm talking about metaphorically taking a slap in the face in the context of World War. What would that even look like, at scale, in practice? Well, we can look to the few people who actually held their ground through the last big calamity. Both Viktor Frankl and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, for example, figured out how to “turn the other cheek” in their respective torture camps (and had the wherewithal to write it down). The books have been helpful to millions of people. And, as a result, they both helped bring their tyrannies down. It's not submissiveness, but an attitude of total faith in Truth beyond the historical circumstances. In extreme times, that faith causes a phase shift in consciousness in anyone who witnesses it.

Yes, the next Cultural Ragnarök is probably coming. No one can say what it will look like because it will break the grammar of the current mythos. On the other side of it, though, will likely be a new, temporary peace. The only question is: what you will align yourself with in the meantime?

Soviet WWII painting by N. Tolkunov. Immortality, 1941.