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 January 11 is treading ground that once would have been off-limits. This is not Mel Brooks The Producer or Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, but a German movie that dares to treat Hitler as comedy.Mein Fuehrer: The Truly Truest Truth about Adolf Hitler follows the Oscar-nominated Downfall, the 2004 German film which 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 film starts in December 1944, with Berlin in ruins and Hitler too depressed to deliver a 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 and barking like a dog. The farce broadens when Hitler’s barber accidentally shaves off half his mustache. The furious dictator shouts himself hoarse and Gruenbaum has to lip-sync the 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. Meanwhile, the German public’s distance from the events has grown as the World War II generation dwindles. Levy (49), points to Italian Roberto Benigni’s Oscar-winning Life is Beautiful in 1997 as a trendsetter, about a father who uses desperate and hilarious means to shield his son from the horrors of a Nazi death camp and convince him it is all an elaborate game. “I think it is important to create new pictures of the Holocaust, and not always work off the old, realistic pictures, because I think that makes us lazy, and we don’t learn anything from it,” said Levy. Downfall divided critics, with some questioning whether Hitler should be given a human portrayal and objecting that it glossed over the broader historical context, including the Holocaust. The critics haven’t yet commented on Mein Fuehrer. but the weekly Der Spiegel says the new wave of films about Hitler is demonstrating “a need to break the myth down to a normal human . that makes him more everyday, perhaps easier to understand, in any case smaller. The ultimate way to shrink a myth is to make it laughable,” it added. Mein Ball, a musical staged in Hamburg this year, imagined Hitler trying to save Germany by staging the World Cup.
