It's always interesting when certain subjects or themes suddenly pop up everywhere at once in art or entertainment. As we know, sometimes that's just faddishness, or the sheep-like instinct of pop culture impresarios' to do what everyone else is doing.

But sometimes it's the zeitgeist at work. Why, for instance are there three movies in the pipeline right now about the young Adolph Hitler?

All three sound sober and ambitious and well-intentioned. Two of these movies are for television, and they're still in production. There's a 4-hour film for CBS, for which the Scottish movie star Ewan McGregor was being recruited to play Hitler. The other is a BBC film by the fine director Michael Radford - it's producers were trying to recruit the Scottish movie star Robert Carlyle to play Hitler. We won't see these two biopics until next year, at the earliest.

The third film is the one that looks the most intriguing, and it's opening in theaters at the end of this month. It's called Max; set in Munich in 1918. It stars John Cusack as a fictional Jewish avant-garde art dealer named Max Rothman. He encourages a fellow World War I veteran and painter to try his hand at wilder, more expressive more styles. That artist is the 29-year-old Hitler.

There are lots of people who think all these films are inherently misguided. They argue that it's simply wrong to dramatize the life of the young Hitler -- the "innocent" Hitler -- and that it's dangerous to depict Hitler as anything but the monstrous, genocidal, middle-aged Nazi Fuhrer, since showing him as a human inevitably makes him sympathetic.

John Cusack tries to answer that criticism in an interview in Salon. "To those who say, 'How dare you give Hitler a set of human characteristics?' -- I say, 'How dare we not? It's easy to portray him as a monster, it's harder and more disturbing to show his humanity and how it became poisoned."

I agree, although I understand the visceral reactions against the very idea of these films. Hitler is one of those subjects a filmmaker or any other artist must think long and hard about dealing with directly. In a movie or a novel even routine storytelling gestures -- like a character saying "I'd like you to meet my friend Adolph Hitler" -- seem almost impossible to pull off. The chances of failure are very, very high.

But to declare as a matter of principle that any subject ought to be forever off-limits to artists seems wrong to me. Hold those artists to the highest possible standards, but let them try -- try and, in all likelihood, fail.

Back to my original question: why this surge of interest in the young Hitler? It may have something to do with our new awareness these last 15 months of politicized, murderous evil at large in the world. How do people become righteous monsters? But even more, I think, the young Hitler seems interesting dramatically because until now, the prevailing aesthetic and moral scruples would not permit mass-media storytellers to go there. Which was fine, for that time. But now, 60 and 80 years after the fact, this particular cultural statute of limitations is expiring. As sooner or later all such taboos must expire.

This is Kurt Andersen, in Studio 360.

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