Germans get ready to laugh at Nazis and Hitler

BERLIN: A slapstick comedy about Hitler by a Jewish filmmaker hits German cinemas on Thursday amid a national debate on whether the country, six decades after the war, can laugh at the Nazis.
The high-profile film "My Fuehrer - The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler" by Swiss-born, Berlin-based director Dani Levy sends up history's biggest criminal as an impotent, bed-wetting crybaby who just wanted his father's love.

Even before its premiere, the movie inspired an avalanche of press coverage in a country whose younger generation has only gradually begun to shake off the shame of the Nazi era. Although initial reviews have been mixed, audiences have packed into preview screenings to watch one of Germany's most popular comedians work on the Fuehrer.

But Jewish leaders have attacked what they call a portrayal that makes Hitler seem harmless. The film tells the fictional story of a once prominent Jewish actor who is enlisted by propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels to coach Hitler for a speech on New Year's Day 1945 rallying Germans for a final war offensive.

The actor, Adolf Gruenbaum, is pulled, emaciated and terrified, from a concentration camp and taken to Hitler's sprawling chancellery. Goebbels believes the presence of the refined Jewish man can stoke the source of Hitler's power, his hatred, to turn the sputtering war effort around.

But Gruenbaum impresses the Nazi leader during their first meeting and the coaching turns into a kind of therapy, exposing the childhood trauma that the filmmakers believe partially explains Hitler's viciousness.

Although Gruenbaum would like to take advantage of his unexpected proximity to the Fuehrer to kill him, his humanism gets the better of him when faced with the blubbering wreck of a man in front of him.

Hitler sneaks drugs out of a stash in the giant globe in his office, proves a flop in bed with mistress Eva Braun and wrestles with his German shepherd Blondi, outfitted with her own tiny SS uniform and able to perform the Hitler salute.

"The film shows how insane but also ridiculous he was," Petra Dimitrov, a 53-year-old Berliner, said after a preview screening. "But you never forget how dangerous he was."

However, the vice president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Dieter Graumann, said the film trivialised the suffering of Nazi victims. "I am from a Holocaust family," he told Journal Frankfurt magazine. "That is why I have horrible stomach pains when Hitler and the Holocaust are used as material for a comedy. I cannot laugh along because every laugh would get stuck in my throat."

The initiator of Berlin's Holocaust memorial, Lea Rosh, angrily attacked the film, admittedly before seeing it. "I don't see any way you can make Hitler laughable, unless you're a genius like Charlie Chaplin," she told the daily Luebecker Nachrichten, referring to the 1940 classic Hitler parody "The Great Dictator".

"Among the outtakes that I have seen there was a scene in which Hitler sits in a bathtub and plays with a battleship. In reality it was quite different, it was deadly." Meanwhile the comedian who plays Hitler, Helge Schneider, has distanced himself from the film for other reasons.

"I'm sorry, but I just don't think it is very funny," he told RBB radio. "The movie is not bad, but it doesn't do it for me." Jewish journalist Henryk M. Broder said Levy had tapped into the Germans' shame over falling for a character who was chillingly calculating but also, often, laughable.

"To be seduced by a demon is bad, but to be seduced by a drip is embarrassing," he wrote in this week's Der Spiegel magazine. "That is something the Germans are still suffering over, what they cannot forgive themselves for: the Third Reich is embarrassing to them.

And there is no therapy that can cure that embarrassment, not even near-victory in the football World Cup or the popularity of Porsche in the USA."

The director Levy calls the film a satire of more earnest efforts to delve into the darkest chapter of German history such as the Oscar-nominated 2004 drama "Downfall".

"It is absolutely not the case that I cold-bloodedly disregarded my Jewish identity. It was a high-wire act," he said.
He said he showed the script to his mother, a Holocaust survivor, and she sighed "Do you always have to make things so hard for yourself?"

"Humor is a truly subjective thing. But laughing together is a kind of cleansing process. There is no way to make jokes about the Holocaust. But you can make a mean comedy about those in power and cut them down to size a bit."

The Financial Times Deutschland welcomed the fact that at last Germans appeared ready for a film that ridiculed the brutal Nazi regime. "Comedy is tragedy plus time, as Woody Allen once said. And perhaps it is time at last for the Germans to laugh at Adolf Hitler," it said.