WHERE HITLER LIVES AGAIN

...Therefore, he is a most fascinating man...

...It is possible...

...He didn't envy Germans who had, he said—they probably lived with a guilty conscience...

...One would rather be rid of the Nazi nightmare once and for all, but it has become too deeply embedded in fantasy life to be quickly or easily denied...

...Konrad Kujau, the enterprising West German forger, has already announced from jail that when he gets out he will produce before the world a sensation far more dramatic than his now-discredited "Hitler Diaries"—namely, Hitler's daughter...

...What is at stake here, then, is not historical credibility but narrativity—stories, emblems, and images that will fascinate and compel...

...For anyone who does not know the facts, the power and the glory still remain, followed by a veritable vengeance of the gods...

...William Gass, one of our most imaginatively resourceful writers, is at work on a novel that invokes Hitler to explore what he calls a "fascism of the heart...

...The Hitler of Beryl Bainbridge's Young Adolf or of George Steiner's The Portage to San Cristbbal of A.H...

...They have done so at a time when "reality" itself has become a more extreme and elusive concept, when our ability to represent it within language has been called into question, and when the political will to misrepresent has become blatant and unrestrained...

...Hitler has become a gag, a piece of the fun...

...As imaginative life domesticates images of Hitler and political life continues to exploit him, one should not be surprised to see the old poison again begin to flow free...

...It is a characteristic of the new narrative modes that distinctions between what is real and what is imagined drop away: historical figures take on fictional dimensions, fictional characters are placed within historical settings, and there is an intermingling of illusion and historically accredited reality...

...can be dispensed with out of hand, because to yield to them would be to yield or to compromise the novelist's own aesthetic honesty...

...But (with the exception of one year) the trend in AFDC has been persistently downward since 1973, even though the poverty population has been persistently expanding...

...Not so the National Lampoon Hitler jokes, which are neither naughty nor funny but mostly just vulgar, tasteless, sick...

...This income limit was adjusted upward by 27 percent between 1969 and 1974, but because it lagged behind the inflation rate, it dropped to 91 percent of the 1974 poverty line...

...Although there were approximately 800,000 fewer people overall in the city in 1982 than in 1970, there were 227,000 more poor people...

...As the Israeli writer Amos Oz recently put it, there are times in the Middle East when it seems as if Adolf Hitler is not only alive and well but on call for active duty by anyone with a grievance or an enemy...

...Play with the symbols of his Reich as if they were harmless toys, and before long the distractions of mind generated by the pleasures of light-hearted amusement weaken the sanctions of historical memory...

...Whatever else he may exemplify, Hitler stands for, appeals to, and calls forth an unprecedented extremity of destructive will...

...Holocaust then comes to mind more readily as a popular television show than as an unprecedented crime within history...

...The role of art in the erosion, as well as the establishment, of historical memory is fundamental, for most people do not have a primary relationship to "the facts" and learn about them second-hand, through the mediations of word and image...

...As for the others, who deliberately set about manipulating historical symbols, the consequences have no doubt been far more precisely calculated by them...

...When, as has been the case, critics call Sophie's Choice a "brilliant historical novel," are we not approaching a point of epistemological risk, at which our ability to know the difference between historical fiction and fictitious history begins to diminish and, for some, may begin to disappear...

...it was not increased again until 1981, when the basic grant was raised, and again in 1984, when the shelter allowance was increased...

...Thus is evidence transformed over the years, thus do memories crumble away...

...George Steiner, in The Portage to San Cristbbal of A.H., invented Jacob Grill— "son of a rabbi, from Poland"—as Hitler's ideological mentor and projected Hitler himself as something of a Torah-inspired visionary...

...With enough sensationalizing publications and other popularizing versions of Hitler, the ranks of the great may soon increase, and one can imagine a day not too far off when at least some people will ask, "Was he really so monstrous a fellow...

...there's only narrative...

...Charles Hamilton, the New York autograph dealer, probably summed up the secret of Hitler's posthumous appeal when, in considering the value of an object alleged to be Hitler's skull, he said simply, "Hitler is the supreme criminal of all times...

...To be sure, they circulate now in an another mood and in a different, less dangerous political climate...

...In Zelig, Woody Allen uses a fake Oswald Pohl, the head of the SS Economic-Administrative Main Office and so the person chiefly responsible for the concentration-camp enterprise, to comment in pseudohistorical terms on a fictitious character whom Pohl allegedly "knew" in Nazi Germany...

...True, much of what has just been described is in the realm of kitsch and quatsch—the detritus of history refashioned into cheap and unworthy artifice—but it was at least partly on the rivers of such junk that Hitler originally floated into power...

...If the maximum income limit had been adjusted in accordance with the poverty threshold, New York City's welfare population would have risen by 40 to 45 percent between 1969 and 1982, instead of contracting by 6 percent...

...Richly illustrated "lives" of Hitler will appear as will expensive, coffee-table albums of concentrationcamp photographs and artwork...

...Most of those involved in popularizing Hitler are probably too busy making money and having fun to give any thought to the social and political consequences of their efforts...

...Here, in the words of Saul Friedlander, is one prominent example of that process: A few months ago I saw Joachim Fest's film, Hitler: A Career, in a movie theater in Munich...

...In both cases, one looks on and laughs...

...q Poverty in Our Richest City...

...223 The fate of symbols is always unpredictable, all the more so when they have behind them as much turbulence and unmastered energy as those that attach to Hitler...

...The aesthetic issues that always attend questions of representation take on a new edge when what is being represented is Hitler and Hitlerism, all the more so at a time when the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews is regularly labeled a "hoax" by the revisionists and when the image of Hitler is undergoing the kinds of transformation evident to any observer of popular culture...

...Since then, the trend in the utilization of this program has been quite irregular: rising between 1975 and 1976, then dropping through 1981, and in the last three years showing once again a strong upward trend, undoubtedly reflecting the rising number of unattached or childless adults who are out of work...

...A brute, an idiotic preoccupation with crude fact is death to a novel, and death to the novelist...

...It is easy to exploit a figure that generates such fascination, far less easy to contain the damage it may do once released into the world...

...The dance they perform, backed by a second chorus line of Valkyries, is called "Springtime for Hitler" and is meant to be a musical burlesque of Nazi antics...

...They don't really mean anything...

...The particular politics of forgetting that is at work here proceeded not only by "semantic infiltration"— Daniel Patrick Moynihan's useful phrase for the gradually emerging propaganda war against Israel—but, more radically, by semantic transumption and usurpation, which aims to undo the memory of Jewish suffering under the Nazis by transferring the symbols that kept that memory alive to Israel's enemies...

...Hans-Mirgen Syberberg The long-legged, high-kicking beauties in Mel Brooks's The Producers look like any other chorus line of dancers but for a single exception: they are suited out in the black uniforms of the SS...

...Because of this cap, by 1979 a four-person family whose income was as little as 46 percent of the prevailing poverty threshold would not qualify for welfare...

...William Styron carries this line of thinking beyond Doctorow's playful agnosticism to his own more deeply felt historical relativism: Facts per se are preposterous...

...In this respect Hitler has won, for he knew better than most that if truth has its appeal, so, too, do certain lies, which are every bit as irrepressible once they catch hold...

...The historical sense does not stand up very well against such popular projections, whose cumulative effect can only work to neutralize the past and make of it something almost benign...

...Cumulatively, the AFDC caseload fell by 19 percent between 1972 and 1983...

...He cited an example...

...What one sees today, in fact, is a double transformation of the historical, for not only is Hitler being fictionalized but so, too, are his victims, and in ways that often substitute and invert the images of the predator and his prey...

...It finds a parallel in Brooks's most recent film, To Be or Not to Be, in a bizarre song-and-dance routine called "Naughty Nazis...

...The number of persons on Home Relief, which primarily serves single adults, fell by 20 percent between 1969 and 1982, despite the 17 percent growth in the number of poor single adults during the 1969-79 period...

...The number of persons on Home Relief grew by 33 percent between 1981 and 1983...

...One can, in this sense, talk about art's implication in a politics of remembrance as well as a politics of forgetting, an implication not lost on any writer who sifts through the debris of history in an effort to reconstruct the past, or on any national leader who is alert to the legendary or mythic dimensions of the past and has the gift of reviving them for his own political objectives...

...Consequently, set loose by a hundred different stories, legends, and myths, the ghost of Hitler now roams through the popular mind in all the shapes that artifice and forgetfulness have combined to give him...

...Between 1969 and 1979 alone, the city's poor female-headed households with children rose by 72 percent...

...Someone will turn up missing Hitler watercolors, medical records, astrological charts, automobiles—anything that Hitler may have touched or been touched by...

...The increase in 1981 brought the figure up to 67 percent, and the 1984 raise will keep it at that level...

...The Jews were made out to be "Nazis," the Arabs were suddenly portrayed as the new "Jews," Beirut was likened to "the Warsaw Ghetto," and the charge of "genocide" was broadcast around the world...

...In politics and in literature—and as they relate to Hitler there is the temptation for the two to merge and become almost one—all the signs indicate a flourishing career ahead...

...For example, between 1969 and 1982 the poverty threshold in current dollars for a four-person family rose by 99 percent, from $3,721 to $7,412...

...The Lebanon War becomes the latest phase of a Jewish campaign against the entire Arab nation, as total in its fury as Hitler's war against the Jews, while the Nazi Holocaust, whose genocidal character was actual and not metaphorical, is nullified through the transmutation of its historicity into tropes...

...In both cases, the refashioning of the past need not be determined by any special fidelity to history, as if the latter has been fixed once and for all and is no longer malleable to the pressures of mind or imagination...

...The Israeli press wondered aloud: Was Begin fighting the PLO in Lebanon or the Nazis in Berlin...

...is not the Hitler of the years of Nazi terror but a much less threatening figure...

...Was he exploiting remembrance of the Holocaust as a political instrument or did he really see every enemy of the Jews as a Hitler, every war as a replay of the Holocaust...

...As part of this same market but on a more serious and higher-priced level, there will continue to be a brisk collectors' trade in original Nazi insignia, swords, and other symbols of the Reich, as there will be in oversized picture books on World War II weapons and warfare...

...The "tour" commences with "September 1939— Poland" and concludes with "May 1945— Berlin Bunker...

...We owe to the Czech writer Milan Kundera the insight that such knowledge has the deepest political consequences, indeed that "the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting...

...The following is excerpted from "The Changing Face of Poverty: Trends in New York City's Population in Poverty, 1960-1990," by Emanuel Tobier, prepared for the Community Service Society: The poverty statistics for the 1970s and early 1980s reveal a 19 percent increase in the number of poor people in New York City, and a 31 percent increase in the number of nonelderly poor...

...For years, hobby shops have registered steady sales in model replicas of World War II German tanks and planes—cheaper ones for the children, more expensive ones for their elders...

...As the owner of a London boutique for punk fashion explains, "They like the Nazi things because they are interesting decorations...

...He out-Neroes Nero, he out-Caligulas Caligula...

...It's silly and stupid but probably also just funny enough to get a laugh...

...The categories and conventions of imaginative writing—doppelganger motifs, tropes of transference and substitution, the signs and symbols of historical projection, conjunction, and inversion—are as well known to the professional journalist and the political propagandist as they are to the fiction writer...

...Whichever way, in the place of actual events there had emerged a typology of implacable evil, which projected the ghost of the Nazi Fiihrer across the battlefields of Beirut...

...Call it the blood lusts of primitive instinct or the anarchic and nihilistic impulses that want to be satisfied free of all restraints...

...Now it is hardly news that political commentary can be as much a lying game as literature, but the steady stream of misinformation and willful deception in this instance seemed unprecedented...

...As fact, the "Thousand-Year Reich" lasted little more than a decade, but as fiction it goes on and on...

...The number of children in poverty rose by 15 percent, while the number of children on welfare fell by 8 percent...

...As the novelist E. L. Doctorow put it a while back, "There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction...

...The dazzling rise, the titanic energy, the Luciferian fall: it is all there...

...The pornographers will continue to 222 appeal to their own version of this fascination (a fascism of the loins...

...In both cases, the appeal to the Third Reich, whether for reasons of commercial or political profit, means a perpetuation in image of the very worst that history has given us and a revivification of the prospect that it may come round again...

...The poverty rate climbed from 14.9 percent in 1969 to 24 percent in 1982...

...We weren't even born...

...Well, Haupts said, in recent years some histori224 ans had been leaning toward the view that the Saxons had not been massacred but merely banished...

...According to David Bowie, Hitler was "one of the first rock stars...

...Styron's desires as a novelist—or the imperatives of what he calls his "own aesthetic honesty"—brought him, in writing Sophie's Choice, to refashion Hans Frank, the Nazi governor-general of a large part of occupied Poland, as a Jew, and to make Rudolf Miss, the Commandant of Auschwitz, seem almost a decent man...

...Nevertheless, they continue to appear, so someone must like them...

...What happens to our sense of reality as a consequence of these developments is obvious to any reader of contemporary fiction or any observer of contemporary politics...

...The crucial point—crucial for being selfperpetuating, inexhaustible, and endlessly marketable—is simply to maintain "the Third Reich, in the person of its Fiihrer, Adolf Hitler, [as] the greatest plot device the world has ever known...

...For anyone who does not know the facts, the mystical communion with the brownshirt revolution and its martyrs still remains...

...Is the "Henry Kissinger" named by name in Joseph Heller's Good as Gold the Henry Kissinger we know from the Washington years or is he not...

...One could multiply these examples many times over, but that would only belabor the obvious: the signs and symbols of the Third Reich have become part of the common language of popular culture and are today all around us...

...To popularize the man and his crimes is to trivialize them and, in time, to render them almost invisible...

...A skit on the popular television show Saturday Night Live portrays Hitler and Eva Braun fumbling over one another like two clumsy teenagers in heat...

...These questions are not new and could be asked as well about works of literature that date back as far as Shakespeare's history plays and about the fiction of Scott and Tolstoy, but in recent years they have assumed a greater degree of seriousness and even taken on a certain urgency...

...Haupts said goodnaturedly that he wondered whether concentration camps were destined to be remembered...

...It is not high scholarship or high art, let alone high ideals, that sustains him but something a good deal further down in consciousness and culture...

...Minuscule in 1969, the Food Stamp program in 1981 was adding approximately $1,500 to the annual purchasing power of a family of four on public assistance...

...Is it the same crowd that listens to the popular singer David Bowie croon about "visions of swastikas in my head...

...They are like the fuzz that collects in the top of dirty closets...

...With few exceptions, we "see" what we are given to see, "know" what we are given to know, and thus come to retain in memory what impresses itself on us as vision and knowledge...

...An inconsequential shadow of this grandiose tableau...

...To catch him in a musical setting, you can, if you wish, listen to some of the songs of "Pink Floyd" or tune in to the English rock opera Der Fiihrer and hear Eva Braun sing, in a voice of moony enchantment, "When I'm leaning against his shoulder, the bad times are over...

...As an indication of what happens to collective memory as the processes of mythification take over, one can hardly do better than note the following episode from Daniel Lang's A Backward Look: Germans Remember: Haupts [Leo Haupts, a professor of modern history at Cologne University] had known of the deportation of Jews during the war, he told me, but that was all...

...Why, then, the impulse to "Nazify" the Lebanon War and to convert its combatants into inverted types of the Holocaust...

...As for the extermination of the Jews, a few words in passing, no more...

...A novelist deal220 ing with history has to be able to say that such and such a fact is totally irrelevant, and to hell with the person who insists that it has any real, utmost relevance...

...Among historians, he informed me, it had long been accepted that Charlemagne had decapitated four thousand Saxons in the eighth century for stealing cattle from the Franks...

...How much of the historical Nat Turner survived in William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner and how much was passed over, made over, fundamentally changed...

...The issue became especially acute during the 1982 Israeli–PLO war in Lebanon...

...The National Lampoon will recycle more of its Hitler jokes, the National Examiner will report sensational new sightings of fugitive Nazis, the revisionists will announce new "evidence" that the Holocaust never happened...

...The chief reason for the pronounced divergence between the population on welfare and the population in poverty is explained by the radical change that developed during the late 1970s in the relationship between the poverty threshold, as defined by the federal government, and the statedefined eligibility levels for public assistance...

...that snaps up the premier number of Larry Flynt's new magazine, the Rebel, because it features a huge swastika on its cover...

...Napoleon was condemned and reviled, but history has come to recognize that he was a great man...

...For years the image of the man and his times has been broadly and successfully projected through the work of novelists, filmmakers, and other fictioneers, and it is they who have assumed and directed the narrative destiny of the Nazi period...

...by turning out formulaic fiction that links eroticism with nazism...

...In the words of the same author: "What's real and what isn't—I used to know, but I've forgotten...

...Undoubtedly, there will be television replays of Holocaust, of The Last Days of Hitler, The Winds of War, The Bunker, Blood and Honor, the Speer memoirs—all of which succeed in keeping images of the Third Reich steadily before the viewing public...

...The idea is to delegitimize Jewish history and thereby discredit the notion that, as a result of their exceptional suffering, the Jews have any special claim on the world's sympathy...

...he demanded indignantly...

...These conjunctions of fact and fiction are manifest in a wide body of contemporary literature and everywhere raise the same kinds of questions...

...The license for the release of new fictions is almost always to be found in prior fictions—in this case, the 1975 United Nations resolution that equated Zionism with racism—but the motives for indulging and perpetuating the fictive sense are more deeply psychological and political...

...To what degree can an author play with, reshape, or distort our sense of the past without doing damage to our overall sense of reality...

...By stealing the language of the Holocaust from the Jews and awarding it to the Arabs—in essence, by translating the Palestinians into "Jews" and the real Jews into their would-be assassins—a prior Jewish claim on the conscience of the West can be vitiated and an enormous and unwanted burden of guilt finally be thrown off...

...In time, the professor observed, facts could turn fuzzy, lending themselves to revision...

...The Home Relief caseload, on the other hand, began to contract in 1969 and by 1974 had fallen by 27 percent...

...Is it possible that it never crossed the lady's mind that "the Nazi things" have a history of some consequence behind them...

...He will not go away soon...

...It is predictable that a rock group will emerge that will outdo all others in raucous exhibitionism of Nazi sentiment and paraphernalia and that new New-Style boutiques will highlight Storm-Trooper uniforms for men and something equally brutal for women as the latest craze in fashion...

...One recalls an insight of Elias Canetti, whose notebook jottings of 1942 include the following entry: "Some sentences release their poison only years after...

...It is true, however, that a significant offset to the erosion in living standards of a family reliant on AFDC has been provided by the increasing availability and value of so-called noncash-benefit programs, such as Food Stamps...

...Menachem Begin, Israel's prime minister at the time, was "Hitler," his defense minister was "Eichmann," and the two together were said to be planning a "final solution of the Palestinian question" every bit as ruthless and comprehensive in its design as Hitler's EndlOsung...

...I asked Michael [his son] whether any legacy of guilt had come down to young Germans, and he shook his head...

...that likes wearing punk styles that use Nazi symbols as fashionable emblems of a new social defiance...

...A prolonged dalliance with 219 Nazi-inspired fun and games—with countless jokes, fads, films, fictionalizations, the whole run of popular and pornographic indulgences— not only dulls political awareness but dissipates and ultimately defeats the historical sense...

...Haupts concluded, "It's only speculation, of course, but it may be that there will come a day when people will ask, 'Were there really concentration camps, or was that just a myth?' " Professor Haupts recalls a character in Richard Hugo's recent novel, The Hitler Diaries, who argued that "history is a court whose judgments are always appealed...

...Why should it...

...The fact that there never was such a daughter really does not matter, for when it comes to keeping Hitler alive and before the public's hungry eyes for news, frauds and fictions serve as well as facts...

...If one cannot yet talk about the arrival of Nazi chic, one can say that it is easy—and in no way regarded as a sign of gross social deviance—to indulge a taste for the stylistic gestures of a latter-day pop fascism, although a fascism commonly regarded as being without political implications...

...The extensions, distortions, and exploitations of Nazi symbolism have by now become part of the history of the Nazi era as it has penetrated contemporary consciousness...

...But even taking Food Stamps into account, the benefits for such a family in New York still amount to only 83 percent of the official federal poverty threshold and still leave the family 15 percent below its 1969 level of living...

...Hitler and his people were the best performers of those things...

...What one witnessed then, and can observe still today, was a transposition of the language of the Holocaust onto a situation that in no way resembled it...

...Yet during this period the number of people receiving benefits from the two public-assistance programs—Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and Home Relief—that aid the under65 age group, fell by 6 percent, from 911,000 to 859,200...

...Whether Canetti had been listening to one of Hitler's speeches when he wrote these words is unknown, but one readily sees how they could apply to the rhetoric of the Third Reich and how they might apply as well today, when the words and images of that era have assumed such popular currency...

...The particular cross-cultural larceny at work here, in other words, brings about a fundamental change in political perception and alters the historical character of two wars...

...Laugh at Hitler often enough, dress him up as a stage villain, convert him into a cartoon of frightful or of ridiculous demeanor, and in time you will no longer know who or what he was...

...In England, according to the Alternative Holiday Catalogue, one can even "vacation in a Nazi-style camp, complete with barbed wire, searchlights, watch towers, and fifty guards in SS uniforms...

...rather, the appeal to the past follows the course of feeling—of dream, impulse, hope, or wish—and makes of the "facts" new fictions of desire...

...With such goings-on, the bad times may be only just beginning...

...Certain facts...

...Just where it will go and what damage it may do is anybody's guess...

...As for Hitler, rendered commonplace, he becomes a conventional focus of the leisure and entertainment industries, even something of a pop hero...

...For those with a voyeur's taste for such things, there will soon be a film version of The White Hotel, which, one imagines, will offer moviegoers the opportunity to stare in open-mouthed wonder at the nude bodies lying about Babi Yar...

...This idea of Auschwitz-as-theme park has not yet crossed over to this side of the Atlantic, but there is still plenty of opportunity for those who want to fantasize about the "naughty Nazis...

...Menachem Begin was also caught in a web of tropological thinking, for as his soldiers began to close in on the PLO in Beirut, the Israeli prime minister could conceive of the cornered Arafat only in terms of Hitler holed up in his Fiihrerbunker...

...He said he had known nothing about concentration camps...

...A willed blurring of distinctions between Nazis and Jews and, at its most politically pernicious, a willed equation of the two, is detectable not only in the pages of fiction but in the programmatic deceptions of political life...

...In 1974, however, the maximum income limit was capped by the New York State government...

...As the New York City economy underwent a rapid and dramatic contraction, the AFDC caseload grew by 20 percent...

...For the children, there is When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit and such "simulation games" as Gestapo: A Learning Experience about the Holocaust...

...While probably none of this is specifically intended as "pro-Nazi," its inevitable effect is to undermine any sane vision of culture and ultimately to erase the fingerprints of Hitler from a history of mass murder...

...The same can be said for the Hitler of Joachim Fest's film biography and of Hans-JUrgen Syberberg's celebrated Hitler: A Film from Germany...

...Hitler is not about to be demobilized soon...

...The AFDC program expanded along with the poverty population between 1969 and 1972...

...In 1969 the maximum income limit for welfare eligibility for such a family was $3,612 in New York City, or 97 percent of that year's poverty threshold...

...One need only pay attention to the political discourse at the United Nations and other international forums to realize that "factions," frauds, and other 221 forms of fictitious history are hardly confined to literature...

...How much of the "real" Richard Nixon, for instance, are we to call to mind when we meet a "character" named Richard Nixon in Robert Coover's The Public Burning...

...The AFDC program, which overwhelmingly enrolls poor female-headed households with dependent children, decreased by 3 percent between 1969 and 1982...

...As of this writing, the newest and raciest clothing items in London's Petticoat Lane are Hitler T-shirts, which feature a picture of the Fiihrer under the heading "European Tour 1939-1945...

...And as it goes on, it inevitably thins out, changes shape, begins to look like something else...

...The number mixes mock-politics with female flesh, highspirited farce with showy extravaganza...

...You can giggle over the Nazi buffoons of popular television shows, flaunt the swastika as your personal badge of disaffection, ogle the girls in the high black boots...

...Moreover, the ruse was being performed not only by the professional propagandists directly involved in the fighting—that one expects in warfare—but by a large number of other, seemingly "neutral" observers, who should have had no immediate cause to participate in the elaboration of such a blatant fiction...

...For a change-off, one can also pick up black T-shirts at the stalls, emblazoned with the word "Bundeswehr...

...Our sense of the "family side" of the man will be teased by new revelations about Eva Braun, Biondi, a "mystery woman," a "lost son...

...Or call it, as Hitler himself called it, the mad ambition of "Weltmacht oder Niedergang"—"world power or ruin...

...All the same, there is inherent in the image of nazism a venom that, once released onto the page and into the mind, has the potential to turn lethal...