In a film that is! Director Daniel Levy is making a new movie called " My Führer-the real truth about Adolf Hitler " which should be a comedy based on the film Downfall. In order to make the film huge Swastika flags/boards are raised in Lustgarten. Adolf Hitler´s role will be played by Helge Schneider. ---------- I only saw the article and pics of the swastikas in a local newspaper. The movie has been filmed since january 20006. I cannot find much in English in the net unfortunately... 9 December 2005 DUESSELDORF - Dani Levy, the Jewish film director who shocked German sensibilities with a comedy about a Jewish family feud, is planning a send-up movie about Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler next, he told Deutsche Presse-Agentur on Friday. The Swiss-born director's award-winning 2004 comedy, "Alles auf Zucker", breached an unwritten rule in the German movie and television industry against poking fun at Jewish characters and introduced millions of Germans to Jewish humour. Levy, 48, speaking from the western city of Duesseldorf, said that he would start shooting his next movie, "My Fuehrer", in January with a star-studded cast. The comedy would be serve as a counterpoint to recent German documentary-style movies about the Nazis. "Those films tended too much to put the characters on a pedestal," he said. ----------- http://www.laut.de/vorlaut/news/2006/02/22/01472/index.htm
There was a report about this in The Times today, and here's the online version.... http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,13509-2072666,00.html I rather like the comment of the tourist from Bavaria, saying : 'Things seem to have changed much less than we expected' Very droll !
Anyway, what could you expect in this world. Only a Jewish film director could bring the swastikas back in Berlin...This definitely can be called irony...
I guess Mr Levy thinks very much the same way like Mel brooks: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/doubleissue/heroes/brooks.htm I was never crazy about Hitler," says Mel Brooks. Who was? But even now, more than 50 years after the fall of the Third Reich, the man who masterminded the extermination of more than 7 million people is still handled with care, as if the magnitude of his crime demands no less. Brooks had the guts, and gall, to realize that the simplest way to demolish Hitler was to mock him. "If you stand on a soapbox and trade rhetoric with a dictator you never win," says Brooks, 75. "That's what they do so well; they seduce people. But if you ridicule them, bring them down with laughter–they can't win. You show how crazy they are." --------- I do think it´s ok to make a parody out of them. I just hope that people remember more than just that " oh yeah, Adolf was the funny guy in that movie...he could not hurt a fly, I think !!! ( The last part from Norman bates )
I have the movie, THE DOWNFALL, and I didn't feel sorry for Adolf Hitler, or Eva, and especially for the Goebbels (I did for their children), etc. Put them on pedistals? I think the movie was very well done and showed what it was like at the end with the roof and walls coming down on these people's heads. I felt sorry for the soldiers who had to fight to the last man, the civilians who were caught up in the fighting and trying to survive, for the young Hitlerjugend, who had been brain-washed into thinking they were going to turn the whole war around, etc. I felt sorry for the men who were considered shirkers and hung on the lampposts and disdain for those who hung them at that hour. Pedistals are reserved for those we worship... worship Adolf Hitler? No way! Bob
I agree with you there....I cannot quite understand the criticism levelled at 'Downfall' that it made Hitler look 'human', etc. I thought the portrait chillingly accurate - charm,megalomania,charisma, paranoia and sudden rages superbly portrayed. In no way did I consider that the character was idolised at all.
The criticism may come from those who think this film glories Hitler. Far from it the film showed the bloody end of Hitler's Reich as for the man himself a broken leader with advance Parkinson’s disease locked away in his own prison. Who was trying to hang on to life as long as possible, before ending his wretched life. The balance of the film was just right, makes a change to watch a good film in this day and age.
But Martin, the lesson that needs to be learned is that Hitler was a human being. He wasn't a demon from Hell. The lesson is that human beings can do this: gain power and do the very things that were done. It is within the power of the human being to do this, the cruelty of man over man. I took a history course with the University of North Carolina called Germany in the 20th Century - 1914 to 1945. As part of that course we read Hitler: A Study in Tyranny by Alan Bullock and the bottom line on Hitler was that he never changed, never learned a damned thing. In his last will and testament, Traudl Junge was shocked to hear Hitler using the same old words and phrases that he had used all those years she had known him. He was still spouting the same old hatreds, etc. He never learned! Bob
I think you're absolutely right, Bob - to me, portraying Hitler as inhuman or 'the Devil's Disciple' is an easy cop-out in many ways. He was human, and in many ways a seriously less-than-impressive one ; and despite ready ( too ) many books, I still can't really fathom out how he did what he did.
The ability of humans to do in-human things is an impressive and confusing thing. There are so many examples and we shake our heads at each one. I place more blame on the people. The leaders who have been responsible for the deaths of so many people are just a single person. They somehow draw to them others who prop up their leader and give them power. The more people who do this, the more power the leader has. It is our own capacity to do these evil things that have been done, and other people's capacity to unleash it, that must be feared. I have not seen Downfall, but it sounds as though the portrayal is similar to other films. When you watch it you wonder, "Why did anyone every follow this man?" Why does anyone follow any leader? Why would we be willing to do anything vile, hideous and evil because someone else tells us it is alright? I am not talking about going to war, but maybe I should. To kill another human being is one of our most basic phobias. It runs against the human phyche, but the urge to do violence, to kill, always lurks there. To kill someone is Murder and we find it abhorrent in normal circumstances. When we call it war, it is expected, demanded, and rewarded. The more efficient someone is at it, the higher they are elevated in our esteem. Maybe this is the power of someone like Hitler, the ability to take our more hideous lurking tendancies and desires and unleashing them, focusing them, and rewarding them.
Hitler was the right man in the right place at the right time. As we know his rise to power was slow and he was voted in to power, many factors worked in his favour. He gabled on every move and won every move before the war. Barbarossa was his biggest gamble and he lost, it was the beginning of the end. What makes the situation even worst was he laid it out in his book, granted badly written but never the less his grand vision for all to read. A dream that became a vision that became a real nightmare. Europe just sat there and watched it unfold step by step and did nothing until Europe had to act and paid the price. Hitler was a clever evil person and we let him loose, a terrible mistake.
