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Taboo-busting German comedy skewers bed-wetting, impotent Hitler
2007-01-02
Six decades after World War II, a Jewish filmmaker has made a taboo-smashing German comedy about Hitler that will premiere this month. And, against all the odds, it is actually funny. "My Fuehrer -- The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler", which will hit German theaters January 11, presents the Nazi leader as an impotent, bed-wetting, whimpering drug addict who just wanted to be loved by his father. Only two years ago Germany made the Oscar-nominated picture "Downfall", a groundbreaking drama portraying Hitler as a deeply flawed human being instead of a monster. Swiss director Dani Levy admits he is now walking a tightrope with "My Fuehrer". "I had plenty of crises about whether you're even allowed to do this kind of thing," the 49-year-old told the audience at a packed preview screening. Levy made a splash in 2005 with the first German Jewish comedy since World War II, "Alles Auf Zucker" (Go for Zucker), which was a critical success here and abroad. His new film tells the fictional story of a renowned 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 plot is rich with explosive potential and Levy milks it for all it's worth. The actor, Adolf Gruenbaum, is yanked from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp outside Berlin and taken to Hitler's sprawling chancellery where he is promptly served a decidedly non-kosher ham sandwich. As he waits for an audience with the Fuehrer, he peels the offending meat off the bread and tries to hide it under the rug when Goebbels walks in, only to capture the attention of Hitler's hungry German shepherd Blondi. Gruenbaum impresses the Nazi leader during their first meeting and begins to delve deep into his psyche and his unhappy childhood to unlock his oratory talents, which have vanished as defeats on the battlefield take their toll. There is actually some historical basis in fact for the script -- Hitler had an acting coach named Paul Devrient in the 1930s. But the rest is purely the product of a warped imagination. A usually shaggy-haired comedian best known until now for his gag song "Kitty Litter", Helge Schneider, plays the infantile Fuehrer. He is shown sneaking drugs out of a stash hidden in the giant globe in his office, playing with a plastic battleship in the bathtub and wrestling with Blondi, outfitted with her own tiny SS uniform and able to perform the Hitler salute. But his attempted seduction of Eva Braun is a humiliating washout. The largely German audience at the screening roared at such scenes, and at deeply cynical lines such as Goebbels's advice to Gruenbaum: "You shouldn't take the whole Final Solution thing personally." Gruenbaum, played by this year's European Film Prize winner for best actor, Ulrich Muehe, recognises the top Nazis need him and manages to win the release of his family from a concentration camp. His wife Elsa and son pressure him to seize his chance and kill Hitler but the humanist Gruenbaum cannot bring himself to do it. In a later uproarious scene Elsa, using a pillow, takes matters into her own hands... With its anti-Jewish cracks that make the anti-Semites the butt of the joke, "My Fuehrer" has already drawn comparisons with the international blockbuster "Borat". In that film, British Jewish comic Sacha Baron Cohen plays a fictional Kazakh journalist who lures unsuspecting Americans to share in his provincial bigotry. "Borat is for me a classic example of being Jewish, also of relentlessness and testing the boundaries of tastelessness. I watched the film and laughed my head off. An important aspect of that was the shock in the audience," Levy said. "I think it is important to be ready to do the forbidden, the things that are morally taboo. That is the only way you can really confront the issues." Levy has criticised Holocaust dramas such as Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List" for purporting to present a definitive depiction of the Jewish genocide -- a claim he mocks in his own film's title. "It irritated me that the image was created of a phenomenon that I do not think can be captured in an image and morally ought not be captured," he told the German press. "At that time I thought that something absurd, obstinate and at the end of the day more free-thinking should be created." His film has also been billed as a parody of "Downfall", in which an all-star German cast gave an intensely earnest portrayal of the Third Reich's final days. "All the Nazis who are being ennobled at the cinema have got to be toppled from their pedestals," Levy said. He felt more inspired by Charlie Chaplin's "The Great Dictator" and Roberto Benigni's Oscar-winning "Life is Beautiful", with its fairy-tale portrayal of a father who attempts to make a concentration camp bearable for his young son. Levy said that film used comedy to great, life-affirming effect -- an experience he wanted to recreate while cutting even closer to the bone. "I know I am dancing on mass graves," he said. "(But) I have always believed in the liberating effect of laughter. Laughing is a deeply political experience." Even the filming of "My Fuehrer" caused a stir when Levy hung giant Nazi flags in the center of Berlin and enlisted 700 extras to shout "Heil Hitler" for the climactic final scene. The influential news weekly Der Spiegel warned that the country's notoriously excitable critics may not get the joke. "The politically correct are already lurking. Funny man Helge Schneider as Germany's biggest mass murderer? The Holocaust as a knee-slapper?" its film critic wrote. The leader of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Paul Spiegel, gave his blessing to the film before his death in April. "Both Helge Schneider and Dani Levy are certainly capable of bringing the necessary sensitivity to this project," he said.
Tears, jeers and cross-dressing: Oscar night drama in store (2009-02-17)Taboo-busting German comedy skewers bed-wetting, impotent Hitler (2007-01-02)Awards aside, Oscars night always provides unexpected drama (2006-03-03)Films tackle terror with comedy and real accounts (2006-02-20)
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