I WAS writing here recently about Godwin's Law, which predicts that sooner or later in any online debate, however trivial, somebody will compare his opponent's world view with that of Hitler and the Nazis, writes Frank McNally
The irony (at least I think it's an irony - Socratic, most likely) is that literary and dramatic treatments of the actual Nazis often have to deal with the subject by avoiding it. Or at any rate by not meeting it head-on, but using parallels and metaphors instead.
From The Great Dictator, in which Charlie Chaplin portrayed the rise of "Adenoid Hynkel" in a country called "Tomainia", right up to John Boyne's best-selling fable The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, some of the most effective versions of the story have been told from oblique angles.
Even before Boyne's book, the tactic of portraying the horror through the all-seeing but unknowing eyes of a child was particularly popular. In Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum, the boy hero's response to the world around him is to refuse to grow up. And in the 1999 film Life is Beautiful, Roberto Benigni's character convinces his son that life in the concentration camp is an elaborate game, the aim of which is to accumulate enough points to win a tank (which the child does in the end by surviving to see the camp liberated).
Bertolt Brecht's The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui, now at the Abbey, opts for a far-fetched comic allegory, moving the story to 1930s Chicago and having the Nazis as a gang of mobsters trying to break into the green goods market - specifically cauliflowers.
It's a radical approach. But even so I must say that, before Tuesday night's opening, I found the prospect of spending three hours in Brecht's company rather daunting. This was partly due to lingering trauma from the last Brecht performance I remember attending, which to this day remains the only time I have seen a performer booed off stage.
His name was Philip Chevron - formerly of the Radiators and later the Pogues - and on the night in question he was warm-up act for Moving Hearts. Warming up for anyone is a delicate art. You don't want to sound too much like the main act; but if you're opening for a heavy metal band, you probably don't want to perform the greatest hits of Marcel Marceau either.
I'm not sure what you should do for an electric trad-rock-jazz fusion group. But in the event, Chevron chose a solo set of songs from the 1929 Brecht musical (co-written with Kurt Weill) Happy End. And a happy end it wasn't. The audience grew restless after about five minutes of his performance and openly hostile after 10. Thereafter, the relationship went downhill.
Fair play to Chevron: despite the abuse being howled at him, he managed a theatrical bow at the end, and a killer riposte - albeit delivered backstage and relayed to the audience by Christy Moore - to the effect that the songs had been similarly received in pre-war Berlin. In fact, the 1929 show closed after a week and was not revived until 1956.
So in the circumstances, the Abbey seemed to be providing hostages to fortune on Tuesday night by having cauliflowers strewn all over the stage. But the risk of them being used against the cast never arose, because the play was riveting from the outset and remained so throughout. So I thought, anyway.
It's true that Brecht compensates for any unintended subtlety in his allegory by having an MC appear between scenes, using a loud-hailer to explain the significance of the action in terms of specific events in the Nazis' actual rise to power. This is a bit like the cast throwing cauliflowers at us.
Also, having hit the jackpot by presenting a depression-era play at a time when history seems to be repeating itself, the production squanders some of the credit with an implied Fascism/Bushism parallel that seems badly mistimed a week after Obama's election.
But it is a thoroughly absorbing production, nonetheless. And heavy-handed as they are, I was grateful even for the reminders of real-life milestones, which sent me back to my history books afterwards for further revision.
Violence played an important part in Hitler's rise, being used both against his enemies and his former friends. In Arturo Ui, for example, a sort of St Valentine's Day Massacre deputises for the "Night of the Long Knives", when the party's new élite - the Blackshirts - turned on the old one - the Brownshirts - with their master's blessing.
But the easier-to-forget truth of Hitler's ascent is that he did it through participation in the democratic process and at the freely-given invitation of those already in high office. After his one attempt to take power by force - the beer-hall putsch fiasco - he learned his lesson. From then on, with his thugs orchestrating the background music, he concentrated on using the machinery legally available.
This infamously included the popular referendum, exploited so effectively that Germans would ever after be wary of plebiscites, on Lisbon or anything else.
But before persuading the public to give him unlimited powers, Hitler had already become chancellor: anointed as such by rival politicians who thought they were using him until, too late, they discovered it was the other way around. As Norman Davies has written: "In his final path to the summit, he did not breach the constitution once."
• fmcnally@irish-times.ie