It's been almost 70 years since the Nazis came to power -- nearly 60 since they were vanquished and World War II ended. Good triumphed heroically over evil, and no one among the forces of good were more heroic than Americans. So it's not surprising that today, six decades later, we Americans are still watching movies and going to plays and reading books about those nightmare years.

But it is interesting to consider the three very different ways our popular culture tells and retells and tries to come to grips with that history. Those three different approaches rise and fall in cycles, each cycle more spectacular than the one before…. and these last few weeks -- all three have been doing big business.

The new Disney movie Pearl Harbor, which 30 million Americans have already seen, represents the prime approach -- epic and sentimental and self-congratulatory. This was the approach of the John Wayne and Audie Murphy movies produced right after the war -- a genre that promptly waned. And then came back in the mid-1960s, when the children of the Americans who fought the war were coming of age: the movies I loved best as a child were the Longest Day, the Great Escape, and the Dirty Dozen, and my favorite TV show at the time was Combat, about an American platoon fighting Nazis in Europe. Then, as baby boomers became temporarily anti-American, World War II action pictures disappeared again. And then reappeared once more, on schedule, 25 years later, bigger than ever:

The second way our popular culture refracts the war years is through stories of the holocaust. A fine new ABC miniseries about Anne Frank aired a couple of weeks ago, during the so-called "sweeps" period, when the networks broadcast the programs they think will draw the largest possible audiences. For the first three decades after the war, the case of Anne Frank was essentially the only holocaust story told and retold in the mass media - both because hers is a true and extraordinarily moving tale and, I think, because it's sanitized…her diary ends before Bergen Belsen.

Hollywood started looking squarely at the ghastliest realities of Nazi genocide only in 1978, with the TV miniseries The Holocaust 1978, the first wave of a two-decade tide of remembrance -- reaching a crest in 1993, the year of Schindlers List , the Holocaust Museum in Washington -- and Maus, Art Speigelman's insanely brilliant graphic novel featuring mice and cats as Jews and Nazis.

The third genre, for obvious reasons the sparsest of all, is World War II comedy - specifically lampoons of silly Nazis. While the war was going on, there was Bugs Bunny's Third Reich slapstick that The Cartoon Network is declining to put on the air right now and Ernst Lubitsch's delightful To Be Or Not to Be with Jack Benny and Carole Lombard.

And then, poof -- for years, no comedy to speak of …until Hogan's Heroes became a huge hit on TV in the mid- 1960s….and a very funny movie starring Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder came out in 1968. Then once again, that was that, for thirty years.

Now a Hollywood studio is preparing to make a feature film of Hogan's Heroes….and, of course, Mel Brooks and The Producers are back, this time on Broadway, a phenomenal Tony-Award-winning blockbuster an order-of-magnitude bigger than the original movie ….and so successful now because its famous mock-shocking signature production number, Springtime for Hitler, is easier to laugh at than ever in this seen-everything, immunized-against-outrage age.

The success of the Producers is probably also a result of an irresistible see-saw effect. Humor lets us cope with the impossible and the irreconcilable even with the struggle between good and evil, even with the Nazis. After the culture's last few years of intense high solemnity about virtues and the horrors of World War II…we were aching I think for a moment of irreverence. There is a reason they call it comic relief.

I'm Kurt Andersen in Studio 360.