It seems that German cinema can't get enough Adolf. After the serious Downfall, we now get a Führer played for laughs, writes Derek Scally
Visitors to Berlin in the coming days shouldn't be alarmed when they see the face of Adolf Hitler staring out at them from every available advertising space. The moustachioed one is undergoing his by now-annual money-making exhumation, this time as the leading man in a new Nazi comedy that, on paper, sells itself.
Step one: issue press releases crowing how a Jewish film director is to makes the first German comedy about the Nazi dictator, promising hilarious results.
Step two: let the Hitler-hungry German journalists write soul-searching articles about whether it's appropriate for Germans to laugh at Hitler, giving the film all the Führer furore it needs.
Step three: collect your takings and head to the bank.
Hitler, it seems, is the gift that keeps on giving: six decades dead yet with a media presence most celebrities can only dream of. German film-makers hit the jackpot with 2005's Downfall, portraying Hitler's last days in Berlin, by generating and steering a public discussion about whether it was responsible for Germans to attempt a life-like film portrayal of the dictator.
But the Hitler magic doesn't appear to have worked this time around.
The first warning sign was the comedy's laboured title: Mein Führer: The Truly Truest Truth about Adolf Hitler. Are you laughing yet? The second warning sign came last week when the film was disowned by its Führer.
"I would have wished that the film turned out differently. I can't laugh at this Hitler," said Helge Schneider, a popular German comedian and musician, who plays the dictator.
Mein Führer begins in familiar territory, Berlin 1944, showing a delusional, drug-addicted, impotent Hitler convinced there is a plot to topple him. He's right: Goebbels is planning to seize power with Himmler by blowing up the dictator during a rally. But to get Hitler back to his pre-war fury, Goebbels hires a coach he hopes the dictator will hate: a once-celebrated German-Jewish actor now interred in a concentration camp.
Controlling his murderous instinct, the actor begins to train Hitler with relaxation and breathing exercises. This provides the film with a few easy laughs: Hitler wearing a mustard-coloured tracksuit, down on his knees barking like a dog, upon which he is mounted by his dog Blondi. There are other comic scenes shoehorned into place: Hitler playing with a battleship in the bath, a barber slicing off half of his moustache, his 10-second sexual encounter with Eva Braun.
Director Dani Levy says Mein Führer is an answer to the self-importance of Downfall, and his film does make some interesting swipes at the almost reverential film treatments of the Nazi era.
"I don't want to give this cynical, psychologically depraved person the honour of a realistic portrayal," said the Swiss-born Levy, whose last film, Go for Zucker, was the lightest and funniest German-language comedy in years. But in the end, he falls into the same trap as Downfall, losing objectivity as he tries to humanise the supposed object of the film's disgust and ridicule. As the film unfolds, a bond builds between the dictator and the actor. An apologetic Hitler tells the Jewish actor that the Nazis' anti-Semitic policies weren't his idea and even reverts to a snivelling child telling how he was abused by his father.
"I have to say that the part about his father hitting him is pretty lame," admitted Helge Schneider in Die Welt newspaper. "Dani tried to say to a young audience with the most economical means: treat your children better, people. I wouldn't have done that. As I've always said: many people were hit by their parents, but they didn't become Hitlers."
Another problem came after the first preview, when 400 people refused to laugh. The film was re-edited to give equal time to the Jewish actor's family, a kitchen-sink drama that distracts from Schneider's often-amusing Hitler. Der Spiegel magazine slated the film with relish: "The film falls apart with an absurd part that isn't absurd enough and a morality part that's too moralistic. You can't make a kosher meal out of a knuckle of pork, no matter how hard you try."
Welt am Sonntag was similarly brutal, attacking the film as "an unfortunate mixture of naivety, dramaturgic ineptness and totally inappropriate empathy".
The Great Dictator succeeded with physical comedy and a poignant wartime appeal to the conscience, and Mel Brooks's The Producers succeeded with dizzying silliness. Mein Führer fails completely with a cop-out voiceover ending saying that, in 100 years, people will still be trying to understand Hitler. "And we probably never will."
With that, Mein Führer wriggles out of answering the great question it aspired to pose: can Germans laugh at a home-produced Hitler comedy? Probably. All we need now is a funny film.
