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The first German attempt at a film comedy on Adolf Hitler has failed to click, reports
Tony Paterson in Berlin
Mein Fuehrer: The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler by the Jewish director Danny Levy was meant to be Germany’s long-awaited answer to classic film satires about the Nazi leader such as Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator or To Be or Not to Be by Ernst Lubistch. Perhaps more important, the 89-minute production was intended to show that after 60 years of soul-searching and guilt-ridden debate about the Third Reich, today’s generation of Germans had finally reached a point where they were able to laugh about Hitler. But as Mein Fuehrer went on general release at cinemas throughout Germany yesterday, the critics were united in their condemnation of the film and the actor who plays the part of Hitler in the production admitted that even he didn’t find the movie amusing. "It didn’t excite me much. Having seen the final cut, I don’t find it funny," said Helga Schneider, the well-known German comedian who plays Hitler in the film. Harald Peters, a film critic for Germany’s Welt am Sonntag newspaper concluded: "The drama is inconsistent and most of the jokes are flat, harmless or stale. But what’s particularly offensive is that Hitler of all people is given quite sympathetic character traits," he added. German moviegoers who emerged from Berlin’s Cinemaxx cinema into a rain washed afternoon yesterday were equally critical: "This was supposed to be a comedy?" asked Marion Schmidbauer, a teacher in her forties, "I only managed to laugh twice during the entire film," she added. Noel Hauser, a 16-year-old schoolboy who watched the film with three of his classmates also gave Mein Fuehrer the thumbs down. "It didn’t make me laugh and it didn’t teach me anything I didn’t already know about Hitler," he insisted. Mein Fuehrer portrays Hitler as a bed-wetting, drug addict, who dresses his pet Alsatian dog Blondi, in Nazi S.S. uniform, plays with toy battleships in the bath and proves incapable of sexually gratifying his mistress, Eva Braun. The unlikely plot begins at the end of 1944 with a desperate Hitler who has clearly lost all faith in his ability to inspire the German people. In an attempt to turn the tide, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister recruits a fictional Jewish actor called Adolf Gruenbaum from a concentration camp to train the dictator for a mass rally designed to re-invigorate the masses. The job gives Gruenbaum and his family temporary respite from the horrors of the concentration camps. In the meantime viewers are treated to a couple of genuinely humorous incidents: one in which Hitler is forced to bark like a dog provoking a sexual advance from Blondi, and another when the Fuehrer’s make up artist unintentionally shaves of half of his moustache. Yet most critics agreed that the portrayal of the suffering Jewish family plucked from a concentration camp alongside an emotional Hitler who attributes his genocidal behaviour to the fact that his father beat him, jarred badly. Levy, who recently completed a ground-breaking comedy film about Jews in Germany admitted yesterday that he was resigned to the storm of criticism that his latest film had invoked: "This is not a consensus movie, I know that. Whenever you touch on this subject in Germany, you are immediately on the edge of good taste," he insisted. By arrangement with The Independent
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