Hitler’s head

Goodbye Sian Berry, the 150th anniversary of Emmeline Pankhurst plus Tom Quinn, our Mormon correspon

First my thanks to Sian Berry who has been a regular contributor on newstatesman.com since we relaunched on 30 November 2006.

Having spent a great deal of the past 18 months in the public eye as Green co-principal speaker and then as their candidate in the London mayoral elections, she is off to work in a key role in her party’s press office. We wish her well. You can read her final blog entry here.

Another farewell goes to Tom Quinn who came over here from California to do a work placement. Tom is an excellent writer who turned his wry gaze on both his own religion, Mormonism, but also on a number of other subjects including the curious tale of Stuart Hill
who declared his remote island in the Shetlands to be independent of the United Kingdom to the Voodoo-esque religion of Umbanda.

Look out too for our article on the suffragettes. To mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Emmeline Pankhurst we asked author Frances Pugh to write on the contribution of the Women’s Social and Political Union and that of Mrs Pankhurst in particular.

Now, news someone ripped the head off Hitler’s figure in the Berlin Tussauds put me in a brief reverie.

Hitler’s head was ripped off at the Berlin branch of Madame Tussauds

For, a few years ago, I spent some time working at the more famous London branch of the waxworks museum.

It was 1993 and, thanks to the combined efforts of John Major and Norman Lamont, the only job I could find after graduating was as a ‘guide’.

This basically meant standing for hours on end saying ‘Don’t touch that’ to irritating tourists as they tried to feel up Kylie Minogue. Every half an hour someone would come up to you and prod you in the ribs saying: “Are you real?”. It was really, really funny.

In the Baker Street Tussauds was a Hitler too but he was kept behind a glass case for fear of people spitting on him.

In another room there was a likeness of Yasser Arafat and one day a party of Orthodox Israelis came round the museum and lined up to be photographed throttling him and – despite my best efforts – Yasser looked quite dishevelled by the end.

He kept his head though.

Of course the Berlin episode continues because the ever-adept marketing lot at Tussauds are insisting on courting more controversy by sticking the fuhrer’s head back on.

I think they should stop counting euros for a few minutes and consider the remark by a German MP, Frank Zimmermann, who said the decapitation was of much more artistic value than putting it on display in the first place.

There’s not much room for art in a waxworks museum though.