Hitler is Germany's current drug of choice. Put his face on the cover of any magazine and watch sales explode. Lately, he is everywhere. In movie theaters, he is living out his final diabolical lunacy in Bernd Eichinger's "The Downfall." On television, he just catapulted to power in the BBC docu-drama "The Rise of Evil," which recently aired on German television. His henchman are just as popular. In early October, a mini-series about the life of Third Reich propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels topped the television charts. One about Hitler's favorite architect Albert Speer will air soon.

Not in 60 years have the Nazis been so prevalent. The trend has not escaped notice. In the influential weekly newspaper Die Zeit, historian Norbert Frei notes, "Never before have we had so much Hitler." Last month, amid the fury over the Eichinger film, the French daily paper Liberation spoke of Germany's "Hitlermania" while the London Times questioned the "absurd dimensions" the hype over the film acquired.

And while Hitler may be big now, just wait. On Oct. 21, Germany entered what will be a year-long cycle of un-Happy Birthdays -- 60th anniversaries of bloody battles, concentration camp liberations and absurd Hitler pronouncements marking the beginning of the end of Nazi Germany. The long string of dates culminates on May 8, the official end of World War II in Europe.

In Berlin, the May anniversary will be marked by the opening of the much-hyped, �28 million Holocaust memorial. It is the first central monument dedicated to murdered Jews in Germany and sits on four football fields of space near the Brandenburg Gate in central Berlin. The monument is long overdue. It is also an astonishing testament to German humility. It is not everyday that a society erects a vast monument to its own beastiality and puts it smack in the middle of its rebuilt capital.

Fascination with Evil

Sixty years of guilt and democracy have clearly fostered an evolved level of Holocaust discourse. Now, it seems, Germans are embarking on a much harder task. Rather than studying the Holocaust from the point of view of the victims, they seem intent on taking a serious look at themselves as perpetrators. Hence all the docu-dramas.

Today's portrayals of Goebbels, Speer and others are stunningly different from the one-dimensional depictions seen in American and British films from the 1950s-1980s. Gone are the heel-clicking caricatures whose every third word was Achtung or schweinhund. Today, Germans are producing films in which Nazis, even Hitler, appear as human beings with soft underbellies. We still see Magda Goebbels poisoning her six children in the Hitler bunker, but we are also getting Nazi Oeberfuehrers sitting with their children at dinner and Hitler patting his dog, bouncing babies on his knee and praising his spaghetti. In the Eichinger film, we see soldiers fighting so valiantly to protect Berlin that we almost want to root for them.

What is going on? And why is this happening now and not 10 years ago, when the world celebrated the 50th anniversary of all these dates? Perhaps it is simple math: 60 years is 10 more than 50 and by now, most of the perpetrators have died. Even the boys who made up the last straggling band of Berlin Hitler Youth (who Hitler famously praised days before his suicide) are likely retired if not buried. It seems Germans finally have enough historical distance to appraise themselves objectively without feeling emotionally implicated. The Nazi era can, 60 years after its demise, become a part of history, rather than memory.

"There has been a clear generational turnover," said Knut Krakau, professor of German history at Berlin's Free University. "This generation has never seen the living Hitler. They have no personal connection to him. That makes it easier for them to create and accept a fictional one."

Ten years ago, such perspective was not possible, Krakau said. The country was in the middle of nursing another 20th century wound -- reunification. When East and West joined, two starkly different versions of German history collided. East Germans, swallowed for so long by the Soviet Union, had spent decades hiding behind the mantra that they were good communists and therefore had been Nazi victims, not loyal party members.

Now, 15 years into reunification, the edge has faded. Germans, says Krakau, are developing a "ripeness" towards the past. And, they have a need to re-humanize a history that by its very monstrousness has become both abstract and so well-trodden that it borders on pop-culture.

So will portraying Nazis as complicated human beings help Germany digest its hard-to-swallow past? It's hard to say. The efforts and intent are as praiseworthy as the results are dangerous. Personalizing history opens it to error, and, by signalling out individuals as guilty, a population lessens its collective guilt. "I worry that young people will point at individual perpetrators and blame them rather than accepting the collective guilt we all share," Krakau said. "We must never forget we belong to a society that created a climate in which these horrors were possible."