I Felt Bad for Hitler

Pick your least favorite character in all of John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. Pick the three that seemed completely irrelevant to the story, the three that you could not wrap your mind around, the three that seemed to simply exist without purpose, and so on. Now become them. Envelop their very existence; you have now taken the name of Timmy, Liz, Dr. Talc, and many others that you just judged so harshly. When I needed to write a poem on a character I felt had no purpose in the story; a character that I despised for wasting time in the book I panicked, I had no idea how I could pull off such a personal thing like writing a poem from their perspective. The only time I had felt similar to how I felt after writing my poem from the perspective or Mr. Gonzalez (said emotion could simply get categorized as an odd feeling of sympathy despite still holding strong negative feelings) was when I sympathized with Hitler that one time.

Okay, wait, hold on one minute, let me explain myself.

Said moment happened while I watched the German film "Der Untergang", translated to "Downfall", which follows Hitler's secretary during the final days of World War II in the Fuhrer-Bunker in Berlin (you might have seen a scene from the film with false subtitles on YouTube, just by searching the man's last name results in one of these parodies as the number one hit). The people in this film, all Nazi's by the way, go from a sense of naive optimism to crushing depression and hopelessness, and Hitler comes as no exemption to this. One still gets reminded of his horrible regime and the atrocities he committed, but one also sees his entire life fall apart, and that does not come easily for anyone. The film gets you with this emotion, it knows that you felt bad for Hitler, the evilest man to ever live, and then it makes you think about the implications of it and forces you to see why you exactly felt sympathetic to his misery. Do not be fooled through, the film does not try to show him in any kind of positive light, it just wants you to realize how one can feel pity and sympathy with even the personification of evil and atrocity.

Now I'm not saying that writing a poem from Mr. Gonzalez's perspective had nearly as much of an impact as feeling sympathy for Adolph Hitler, but the same emotions occurred at both events, so I thought it would be appropriate. I feel it appropriate to stress the point that such action comes as a reminder for us humans that nobody has a completely evil persona, despite views.

Finally, for fun, I'll give you a hypothetical question on ethics: "It is 1933. You are in Berlin, Germany. Somehow, you find yourself in a position where you can effortlessly steal Adolf Hitler's wallet. This theft will not effect Hitler's rise to power, the nature of World War II, or the Holocaust. There is no important identification in the wallet, but the act will cost Hitler forty Reichsmarks and completely ruin his evening. You do not need the money...Do you steal Hitler's wallet?"