My family and I are fans of the past decade's amazing string of Marvel superhero movies. In the film Captain America: Civil War, the villain (not really a spoiler, here) is an eastern European military man named Zemo. What's interesting is that in the comic books, Zemo was always Baron Zemo, a Teutonic villain of the Nazis-in-Paraguay school.
Why is that interesting?
It's interesting because it shows something about the shelf life of stereotypes. In comic books published in the 1960s, Baron Zemo was a Nazi bad guy because of World War I.
Here's how it works. World War I was the first conflict I know of in which the democratic governments of the West engaged in large-scale, government-controlled propaganda aimed at their own citizens. (During the American Civil War the newspapers on both sides were notorious for their editorial independence, and even during the Spanish American War the jingoistic press coverage was not coordinated by Washington.)
One of the stock figures in First World War propaganda was, of course, the villainous Prussian aristocrat. It wasn't really surprising: the real German leadership was packed to the rafters with Barons, Counts, and Princes. While armies commanded by guys like Von Kluck, Von Hindenburg, Von Bulow, Von Falkenhayn, and Von Lettow-Vorbeck grappled with the allies on the ground, in the air the Red Baron and Count Zeppelin showed off German techological might. Especially in egalitarian America, a bunch of Teutonic toffs with funny mustaches and spiked helmets made perfect villains.
Fast forward a generation to World War II. The National Socialists were in charge of Germany. Now, the Nazis weren't fond of aristocrats — mostly. Hitler was willing to team up with the old-guard Prussian officer class (until they took up trying to assassinate him) but in general the NSDAP leadership were lower-middle-class or self-proclaimed "artists" like the Fuhrer himself.
But in America, wartime propaganda resolutely ignored the realities of Nazi internal politics and instead resurrected the evil monocled Prussian for another round in the ring. Wartime comic book heroes fought any number of titled German bad guys. And when Stan Lee and Jack Kirby decided to resurrect a World War II superhero, Captain America, they naturally gave him a Rogue's Gallery of old Nazis to fight, including the aristocratic Baron Zemo.
It took the fall of the Berlin Wall, the formation of the European Union, and the death from old age of nearly all Nazis to finally put Baron Zemo to rest. An aristocratic Prussian bad guy in 2016 would have been dreadfully dated, so the moviemakers moved him to the Balkans.
In short, the stereotype of the evil Prussian nobleman took about a hundred years to finally slide out of the public consciousness. Other stereotypes have had a similar shelf life. How many Frenchmen wearing berets and striped shirts just like they did back in the 1920s still crop up in film and cartoons?
It works the other way, too. When I was touring Europe as a college student in the 1980s, whenever I mentioned that I was attending the University of Chicago, the response was inevitable: "Ah, Chicago! Bang-bang-Al-Capone!" (At that point Mr. Capone had been dead for forty years.)
This points up an under-appreciated problem with stereotypes: they get obsolete. But precisely because they are things "everybody knows," we don't notice how out-of-date they're getting, and consequently make decisions based on inaccurate information. That's not just morally wrong, it's stupid.
For stories which are neither wrong nor stupid, check out my ebooks Outlaws and Aliens and Monster Island Tales!
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