Hitler: A different take

Berlin, Jan. 1 (AP): Coming soon to German cinemas: a demoralised, drug-addled Adolf Hitler who plays with a toy battleship in the bathtub, dresses his dog in Nazi uniform and takes acting tips from a Jewish concentration camp inmate.

The movie, opening on January 11, is treading ground that once would have been off-limits. This is not Mel Brooks’ The Producers or Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, but a German movie that dares to treat Hitler as comedy.

Mein Fuehrer: Die Wirklich Wahrste Wahrheit Ueber Adolf Hitler (Mein Fuehrer: The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler) follows the Oscar-nominated Downfall, the 2004 German film that broke new ground in portraying Hitler from a German perspective, offering a controversially intimate and lifelike portrait of his last days.

Mein Fuehrer director Dani Levy, a Swiss-born Jew who lives in Berlin, says he has long felt the need to explain for himself how it was possible for Germans to follow Hitler, ultimately dragging the nation into war and the Holocaust.

“I had the feeling that I must do it with another genre, do it by being able to exaggerate through comedy,” Levy said in an interview.

Levy’s plot starts in December 1944, with Berlin in ruins and Hitler too depressed to deliver a much-awaited speech to rally his people.

His propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, finds a solution in Adolf Gruenbaum, a fictional Jewish actor who coached Hitler at the beginning of his career and is now in a concentration camp. “We need someone who can ignite our Fuehrer’s greatest strength — and that strength is his hatred,” Goebbels explains.

Gruenbaum uses the mission to try to kill Hitler, but fails. So he puts him through humiliating exercises, such as crawling around barking like a dog.

The farce broadens when Hitler’s barber accidentally shaves off half his moustache; the enraged dictator shouts himself hoarse and Gruenbaum has to lip-sync the big speech, but deviates from the script to make Hitler look even sillier.

All this would have been unthinkable a decade ago, when Germans were engrossed in “a very serious appraisal of Nazism” and how to commemorate its victims, said Paul Nolte, a professor of contemporary history at Berlin’s Free University. Today they find it “easier to go beyond that and enter other genres”, he said.

“The ultimate way to shrink a myth is to make it laughable,” the weekly Der Spiegel said of the recent wave of films about Hitler.