Good guys, bad guys

German soldiers in World War II

Readers continue to devour novels set during World War II, even though most of these readers — and the authors, as well — were not even alive during the war. In recent weeks I have read The Book Spy and The Book of Lost Names, both of them about young women who use their forgery talents to help defeat the Nazis. I have several other World War II novels waiting in line.

An article in The Wall Street Journal observes that the hottest trend in children's books is stories with World War II themes. In one of these, Rescue by Jennifer A. Nielsen, a 12-year-old girl becomes part of a dangerous mission in occupied France during the war.

How does one explain the popularity of these books 80 years after the close of the war? It may have something to do with the clarity of the evil. During that war the Nazis we're so evil and the Japanese so savage that it has always been clear who the bad guys were and who the good guys were.

In today's more relativistic world, it is not so easy to differentiate between heroes and villains. Movie makers seem to wrestle with the problem of identifying a villain all the time. There are certain groups of people who cannot be the bad guys for one reason or another. The Chinese, for example, cannot be bad guys if Hollywood wants their movies shown in China. In the new Mission Impossible movie, the "bad guy" is an artificial intelligence called The Entity to avoid this problem. Meanwhile, the good guys must have enough flaws to be believable. In David Baldacci's novel The Innocent, which I reviewed here a few days ago, the hero is a paid government assassin. 

In a World War II setting, there are no such difficulties. When I was in Germany a few years back, our tour guides readily confessed that their Nazi ancestors did evil things. There is no debate about it. Nobody is offended.

The days when the heroes in western movies wore white hats and the bad guys wore black hats are long over, yet perhaps readers and moviegoers still yearn for a clear distinction. World War II stories give us that.