jazzeum
Four Star General
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- Apr 23, 2005
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I thought the following article from today's New York Times might be of interest.
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BERLIN, Jan. 10 — Perhaps it was inevitable that the first German-made film comedy about Hitler would get a mixed reception in Germany — a country still haunted, six decades after the fall of the Third Reich, by the mystery of how this strange madman once held it in thrall.
What is more surprising and revealing, perhaps, is the nature of the critiques, which have lambasted the movie but not the idea that Hitler could be the subject of a comedy.
The advance buzz about “Mein Führer: The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler,” which opens here Thursday, has been almost uniformly negative, with German critics and commentators proclaiming the film naïve, bizarre, vulgar and — most ****ing of all — not funny.
“One laughs about two and a half times during the film,” Michael Althen, a critic for the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, wrote, comparing it unfavorably to classic Nazi satires like Charlie Chaplin’s “Great Dictator” or Ernst Lubitsch’s “To Be or Not to Be.”
“Most of the jokes are flat, harmless or stale, and what’s particularly offensive is that Adolf Hitler, of all people, is given quite sympathetic character traits,” wrote Harald Peters in Welt am Sonntag.
Even Helge Schneider, the madcap German comedian and actor who portrays Hitler, has distanced himself from the film, saying in a radio interview here: “It didn’t thrill me. I just don’t find it funny.”
No doubt, some of the bad reaction is a matter of taste. “Mein Führer,” directed by a Jewish filmmaker, depicts Hitler in scenes that could be drawn from a movie by the Farrelly brothers — wetting his bed, playing with a toy battleship in the bath, padding around his office on all fours while barking like a dog and so on.
But the noisy national debate — over what is by all accounts a flawed film that the public has not yet seen — shows that Hitler remains an enduringly uncomfortable topic for many here.
“As soon as you mention Hitler, the entire subject of German history comes up again,” said Henryk M. Broder, a German Jewish journalist who gave “Mein Führer” a mixed review in the magazine Der Spiegel. “Like a congested toilet, everything that was flushed down comes back.”
Two years ago, Germans debated another Hitler movie, “Der Untergang” (“The Downfall”), asking if the filmmakers had broken an unwritten code by portraying Hitler as a human being, given to moments of tenderness, rather than just a monster. At issue now is whether Hitler should be a source of humor — at least in a German-made film.
“Hitler was not some poor soul; he was a fanatic and a mass murderer,” said Lea Rosh, a publicist who lobbied for the construction of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. “One must show a little respect for his victims,” said Ms. Rosh, who has not seen the film and said she had no plans to see it.
To some extent, the critical and commercial success of “The Downfall” helped settle the debate over Hitler’s suitability as a subject in favor of the filmmakers. Ms. Rosh aside, few people here argue that Hitler is not fair game for a comedy — any more than he was off limits for a melodrama about the last days of the Third Reich.
The trouble is, most critics say Germany’s first stab at a humorous Hitler does not have enough laughs.
“Mein Führer” opens in late 1944, with Hitler emotionally paralyzed, contemplating the ruin of Nazi Germany. His advisers, desperate to buck up their leader, recruit a fictional Jewish acting coach, Adolf Grünbaum, to prep the Führer for a New Year’s Day speech aimed at rallying his people.
Grünbaum, whose assignment gives him and his family a temporary reprieve from a concentration camp, makes Hitler wear a mustard-yellow tracksuit and practice exercises, which include dropping to all fours and barking in the manner of his beloved Alsatian, Blondi.
Emotionally stunted, sexually inadequate (“I can’t feel you, my Führer,” Eva Braun wails during a failed encounter), and psychologically scarred by an abusive father, Hitler ends up taking to the couch, in scenes that play like a particularly dark twist on a Woody Allen movie.
“The more grotesque you get in treating this subject, the closer you get to artists who did it better,” said Lutz Hachmeister, who recently made a documentary about Hitler’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels.
Treating Hitler as a satirical subject worked for Chaplin, the critics here agree, but he was a cinematic genius. And Chaplin himself said in 1964 that he would not have been able to poke fun at the Nazi leader had he known in 1940 about the horrors of the Holocaust.
“The Producers,” a Mel Brooks musical farce about a Nazi-themed theater production, is not known to have been staged in Germany but the film version opened last spring to no particular controversy.
“Mein Führer” was written and directed by Dani Levy, known for his 2004 film, “Alles auf Zucker!” (“Go for Zucker!”) That film also plowed new ground, with a comic look at two German Jewish brothers reunited after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Mr. Levy said he was resigned to the storm of criticism over “Mein Führer.” “This is not a consensus movie, I know that,” he said, sitting in his sparsely furnished office here. “In Germany, whenever you touch this subject, you’re immediately at the edge of good taste.”
He noted, however, that the film had played well with preview audiences around the country, and Mr. Schneider, the film’s star, said he had softened his criticism after seeing a final cut this week.
Yet even Mr. Levy had to accommodate the sensitivities of a German audience. “Mein Führer” was originally told from the point of view of Hitler, who had survived the war and was plotting his return to power. That version deeply unsettled viewers at a test screening last summer.
So Mr. Levy re-edited the film to give Grünbaum, the Jewish acting coach, and his family a bigger role. They function as a sort of moral counterweight to the banality of Hitler and his henchmen.
“It was always my intention that the movie be a tragedy and a comedy,” Mr. Levy said. One of his inspirations was “Life Is Beautiful,” Roberto Benigni’s bittersweet fable about life in a concentration camp.
Even here, though, Mr. Levy could not satisfy his critics. Mr. Broder, the journalist, who said the movie was not as bad as its reviews, nevertheless complained that the doomed nobility of Grünbaum and his family bogged down what could have been a hard-edged, unapologetic comedy about a nasty man.
But that would be a film, Mr. Broder acknowledged, for which Germans are not ready. “Germans are embarrassed by Hitler,” he said. “Here is someone you wouldn’t want to share a seat on a train with for half an hour, and yet he sat atop the German nation for 12 years.”
********
BERLIN, Jan. 10 — Perhaps it was inevitable that the first German-made film comedy about Hitler would get a mixed reception in Germany — a country still haunted, six decades after the fall of the Third Reich, by the mystery of how this strange madman once held it in thrall.
What is more surprising and revealing, perhaps, is the nature of the critiques, which have lambasted the movie but not the idea that Hitler could be the subject of a comedy.
The advance buzz about “Mein Führer: The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler,” which opens here Thursday, has been almost uniformly negative, with German critics and commentators proclaiming the film naïve, bizarre, vulgar and — most ****ing of all — not funny.
“One laughs about two and a half times during the film,” Michael Althen, a critic for the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, wrote, comparing it unfavorably to classic Nazi satires like Charlie Chaplin’s “Great Dictator” or Ernst Lubitsch’s “To Be or Not to Be.”
“Most of the jokes are flat, harmless or stale, and what’s particularly offensive is that Adolf Hitler, of all people, is given quite sympathetic character traits,” wrote Harald Peters in Welt am Sonntag.
Even Helge Schneider, the madcap German comedian and actor who portrays Hitler, has distanced himself from the film, saying in a radio interview here: “It didn’t thrill me. I just don’t find it funny.”
No doubt, some of the bad reaction is a matter of taste. “Mein Führer,” directed by a Jewish filmmaker, depicts Hitler in scenes that could be drawn from a movie by the Farrelly brothers — wetting his bed, playing with a toy battleship in the bath, padding around his office on all fours while barking like a dog and so on.
But the noisy national debate — over what is by all accounts a flawed film that the public has not yet seen — shows that Hitler remains an enduringly uncomfortable topic for many here.
“As soon as you mention Hitler, the entire subject of German history comes up again,” said Henryk M. Broder, a German Jewish journalist who gave “Mein Führer” a mixed review in the magazine Der Spiegel. “Like a congested toilet, everything that was flushed down comes back.”
Two years ago, Germans debated another Hitler movie, “Der Untergang” (“The Downfall”), asking if the filmmakers had broken an unwritten code by portraying Hitler as a human being, given to moments of tenderness, rather than just a monster. At issue now is whether Hitler should be a source of humor — at least in a German-made film.
“Hitler was not some poor soul; he was a fanatic and a mass murderer,” said Lea Rosh, a publicist who lobbied for the construction of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. “One must show a little respect for his victims,” said Ms. Rosh, who has not seen the film and said she had no plans to see it.
To some extent, the critical and commercial success of “The Downfall” helped settle the debate over Hitler’s suitability as a subject in favor of the filmmakers. Ms. Rosh aside, few people here argue that Hitler is not fair game for a comedy — any more than he was off limits for a melodrama about the last days of the Third Reich.
The trouble is, most critics say Germany’s first stab at a humorous Hitler does not have enough laughs.
“Mein Führer” opens in late 1944, with Hitler emotionally paralyzed, contemplating the ruin of Nazi Germany. His advisers, desperate to buck up their leader, recruit a fictional Jewish acting coach, Adolf Grünbaum, to prep the Führer for a New Year’s Day speech aimed at rallying his people.
Grünbaum, whose assignment gives him and his family a temporary reprieve from a concentration camp, makes Hitler wear a mustard-yellow tracksuit and practice exercises, which include dropping to all fours and barking in the manner of his beloved Alsatian, Blondi.
Emotionally stunted, sexually inadequate (“I can’t feel you, my Führer,” Eva Braun wails during a failed encounter), and psychologically scarred by an abusive father, Hitler ends up taking to the couch, in scenes that play like a particularly dark twist on a Woody Allen movie.
“The more grotesque you get in treating this subject, the closer you get to artists who did it better,” said Lutz Hachmeister, who recently made a documentary about Hitler’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels.
Treating Hitler as a satirical subject worked for Chaplin, the critics here agree, but he was a cinematic genius. And Chaplin himself said in 1964 that he would not have been able to poke fun at the Nazi leader had he known in 1940 about the horrors of the Holocaust.
“The Producers,” a Mel Brooks musical farce about a Nazi-themed theater production, is not known to have been staged in Germany but the film version opened last spring to no particular controversy.
“Mein Führer” was written and directed by Dani Levy, known for his 2004 film, “Alles auf Zucker!” (“Go for Zucker!”) That film also plowed new ground, with a comic look at two German Jewish brothers reunited after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Mr. Levy said he was resigned to the storm of criticism over “Mein Führer.” “This is not a consensus movie, I know that,” he said, sitting in his sparsely furnished office here. “In Germany, whenever you touch this subject, you’re immediately at the edge of good taste.”
He noted, however, that the film had played well with preview audiences around the country, and Mr. Schneider, the film’s star, said he had softened his criticism after seeing a final cut this week.
Yet even Mr. Levy had to accommodate the sensitivities of a German audience. “Mein Führer” was originally told from the point of view of Hitler, who had survived the war and was plotting his return to power. That version deeply unsettled viewers at a test screening last summer.
So Mr. Levy re-edited the film to give Grünbaum, the Jewish acting coach, and his family a bigger role. They function as a sort of moral counterweight to the banality of Hitler and his henchmen.
“It was always my intention that the movie be a tragedy and a comedy,” Mr. Levy said. One of his inspirations was “Life Is Beautiful,” Roberto Benigni’s bittersweet fable about life in a concentration camp.
Even here, though, Mr. Levy could not satisfy his critics. Mr. Broder, the journalist, who said the movie was not as bad as its reviews, nevertheless complained that the doomed nobility of Grünbaum and his family bogged down what could have been a hard-edged, unapologetic comedy about a nasty man.
But that would be a film, Mr. Broder acknowledged, for which Germans are not ready. “Germans are embarrassed by Hitler,” he said. “Here is someone you wouldn’t want to share a seat on a train with for half an hour, and yet he sat atop the German nation for 12 years.”