The Banality of Coffee

Juan Valdez

According to a Times story Migros, a Swiss retailer put pictures of Hitler on its “mini-cream containers.” (“For Swiss, Distasteful Jolt With Coffee: Hitler Creamer,” NYT, 10/22/14). The Times quotes Tristan Cerf of Migros as saying, “Usually the labels have pleasant images like trains, landscapes and dogs—nothing polemic that can pose a problem…You cannot put Pol Pot or a terrorist on a milk container. It’s unacceptable.” According to The Times article, this isn’t the first time this kind of mishap has occurred. The writer of the Times piece, Dan Bilefsky, comments, “In the spring, a German furniture chain apologized for selling ceramic mugs with Hitler’s face on them.” Can we say that rather than this being a wake up call about the banality of evil, that it’s a case of the banality of evil providing a wake up call? Or shall we assume that this is just a matter of one manufacturer dealing with the problem of the banality of coffee which has never been a match for NoDoz. Usually people drink coffee for the caffeine so seeing Hitler on a creamer or a mug is naturally going to add to the jolt. Apologies are really not necessary. The idea of putting Hitler’s face on common household goods is likely to keep a lot of people on their feet. It wouldn’t be surprising if stock in Red Bull took a tumble when Migros started to add the faces of Hitler and Mussolini to its creamer. And if its line of Hitler and Mussolini creamers proves successful, it won’t be long before we see other giants of annihilation like Osama bin Laden and even Abu bakr al-Baghdadi on the labels (in place of more beneficent faces like that of Elsie the Cow or that  famous representative of the Columbian coffee bean Juan Valdez). Of course, any creamer maker worth its salt is going to claim, as Migros has done, that it’s all a big mistake.  But that, as they say, goes with the territory. 

Chaos and Classicism

It is disconcerting to find oneself enchanted by the images of Leni Riefenstahl’s prologue to the Festival of Nations, from the 1936 Olympics, which is literally the apex of the current Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy and Germany 1918-1936 show at the Guggenheim. The Temple of Zeus at Olympia, the Acropolis and the famed Discobolus superimposed over a shot of the German decathlete Erwin Huber all serve to tie Teutonic with classical Greek and Roman culture. It’s also a testament to the profoundly immoral intelligence of the fascist project and propaganda machine that aestheticization of the human figure was conscripted in the war against mankind. “I love Caesar,” the curators of the exhibit quote Musssolini as saying. “He was the only one who united the will of the warrior and the genius of the wise man.” Mussolini coined the term “uomo nuovo” to characterize the classical model for the new superman during his march on Rome in 1922. Ironically, the futurist Marinetti, who was a follower of Mussolini, eschewed classicism, but the flirtation with classical forms in the work of Italian artists like Morandi, De Chirico and Severini, and amongst Picasso and other artists and filmmakers who were anti-fascist (segments of Cocteau’s surrealist film masterpiece The Blood of a Poet are shown in the exhibit) are indicative of how pervasive the aspiration to what Cocteau termed the “rappel à l’ordre” was on both ends of the political spectrum during the interwar period. Interestingly, representations of ideal forms could apotheosize the human face or return as satiric jeremiads against regimentation amongst those who foresaw the looming threat of totalitarianism.