Julie Scherer: Fun with the Führer

Fun with the Führer

Director breaks taboo with first German comedy about the dictator

Germans aren't known either for having a great sense of humour nor for being at ease with their Nazi-Past. Now a movie is trying to change both. The “Truly Truest Truth about Adolf Hitler” by Swiss-born Jewish filmmaker Dani Levy hits German Cinemas this week. It features the German dictator as a bed-wetting, impotent and drug-addicted loony wearing a bright yellow tracksuit. But nothing linked to the NS-Regime will pass Germany without huge fuss and debate. The central Question is: “Are Germans supposed to laugh about Hitler”:

The story is told rather quickly: It's late 1944. Hitler has lost faith in himself and a desperate Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels summons former Jewish acting coach Adolf Grünbaum from a concentration camp to get the dictator back in shape for a mass rally to reinvigorate the German people.

Although it follows the recent trend in Germany to break new ground in dealing with its Nazi history by showing Hitler from a more subjective and personal angle, this movie picks at a taboo. While other nations have a Hitler-character as a regular in all kind of comedy-shows, making fun about their own dictator was still unthinkable in Germany.

Hence, it’s not surprising, that weeks before the movie’s opening there was barely one Newspaper whose feature pages haven’t discussed the topic. While a lot of German celebrities support Levys approach, there is also severe criticism. The Vice President of the Central Consistory of Jews, Dieter Graumann, underlined for example that Hitler hasn’t been a twee bandit or clumsy clown but a mass murderer. In his opinion, the movie, with one of Germans most famous ballyhoo-comedians playing Hitler, trivialises and belittles Hitlers crimes. Being from a holocaust family, it troubles him deeply that Hitler and the holocaust is made into a comedy. One could not just laugh about this topic, Graumann emphasised.

With this statement he shares the qualms of many of his fellow countrymen. But Berlin-based director Levy follows a different approach. “For me too this project wasn't the result of long deliberation, it was more like some sort of outburst”, he said in an Interview with the German internet-magazine "Der Spiegel“. “I've watched a lot of films and documentaries on the topic over the years, and I've grown increasingly uneasy.” One is always confronted with the same moral attitude that insists on an authoritarian representation of reality and which demonisises the criminals of that time, he said.

That's why Levy decided, that humour would be a great help: “It's demystifying to see Blondi (Hitlers alsatian) mounting Hitler in ‘Mein Führer’”, he defines. “We just can't keep on watching images of the Führer running around the Berghof (Hitler's mountain home) as the good uncle or giving amazing speeches over and over again.” Although he considers a lot of films about the Third Reich as extremely important, he believes that all this authenticity could be paralyzing. In order to bring something to light a film has to penetrate behind the surface of documentarism. His aim was not to diabolise Hitler as a monster on a oversized monument, but to butt him from his historical pedestal; Levy explains.

The “Truly Truest Truth about Adolf Hitler” is by far not the first comedy about the leader of the Third Reich. It’s standing in a traditon with Charlie Chaplin's 1940 classic "The Great Dictator" or Mel Brooks “The Producers” but it is still different to make a movie in Germany, where it was necessary to enact a law in order to prosecute the denial of the Holocaust. There is still the pondering question, if a comedy necessarily lampoons the victims of a human tragedy.

But on the other hand a comedy is able to do something, that serious movies and documentaries haven’t been capable of. In “The Truly Truest Truth about Hitler” Levy portraits Hitler as a brutal silly billy who managed to unite the economical, cultural and political demands of a whole nation in his person. It shows the heirs of Hitler that their dictator wasn’t a “Übermensch” at all, but a impotent, sad halfwit.

And being ensnared by this sad halfwit is above all: Embarrassing. Even more for a nation who likes nothing more than seeing itself as victims of the NS-Regime and not as those who voted for Hitler's Party, who saw the Jews vanishing out of the streets and who ignored the smell coming out of the chimneys in the Concentration Camps. It’s like somebody who tells his friends, that he is having an affair with Pamela Anderson, and is seen eventually with a ugly duckling, as the German columnist Henryk M. Broder sums it up.

To cast comedian Helge Schneider as Hitler was another great move. Schneider is famous for songs about cat-litter-pans and although being a great jazz-musician he is the embodiment of silliness. It’s like Levy wants to say: If Hitler was able to play the German Chancellor, Schneider can play Hitler as well. And he is doing really well. But sadly Levy isn’t showing all the moronic behaviour people would expect from this match. So the movie stays at some stages too dutiful, too much caught in the barriers of moralism and ends at large parts as a rather shallow comedy.

Sadly Kiwis won’t be able to see the new Hitler Farce anytime soon. But if this article woke up the desire to laugh out loud about the most famous German, there are heaps of ways to do so on the internet.
The Bunker. A little song about Hilter by German Cartoonist Walter Moers:

A Hitler-Look-a-like-Competition for cats

“You wouldn’t have much fun in Stalingrad…Monty Python doing Hitler

The Hitler-Episode of Family Guy

German Trailor and more

ENDS

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