ZGram - 7/9/2004 - "Hitler taboo about to be broken? Naw!"

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

Zgram - Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever!

July 9, 2004

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Below is a traditional, mainstream write-up, as you can tell already 
from the title.  However, the topic is important, and I am running 
the article as a Zgram for the record:

[START]

New films flout Hitler taboo
Two directors break with tradition as führer moves from cameo role to 
centre stage

  Luke Harding in Berlin /  Monday July 5, 2004 /  The Guardian / 

One of the final taboos in Germany is the portrayal of Adolf Hitler 
in a  central role on screen. He has been depicted sometimes as white 
space, but more usually he has  little more than a cameo part, often 
shot from behind.

But now, nearly 60 years after his death, two lavish German film 
productions set in the Third Reich are breaking that taboo. Later 
this year and early next German viewers will have the chance to see 
two Hitlers - in Bernd Eichinger's spectacular film The Downfall and 
in The  Devil's Architect, a three-part semi-documentary television 
series by  Heinrich Breloer.

Both Eichinger and Breloer are accomplished and award-winning 
directors,  and their projects feature Hitler as a fully formed main 
character. The productions have prompted a debate inside Germany as 
to whether, with  virtually all of Hitler's inner circle now dead, 
the Third Reich is now a  fitting subject for artistic and 
imaginative treatment.

"Obviously Hitler is a very problematic person for Germans," said Dr 
Monika  Flacke, the curator of Berlin's German Historical Museum. "He 
was responsible for world war two and the Holocaust. There is 
something  to the thesis that if you show him on screen you are in 
danger of making  him human and therefore sympathetic."

Other cultural commentators believe that with most of those directly 
involved in the second world war now dead, the traumatic events of 
the Nazi  era are finally slipping into posterity. "If an actor can 
now play Hitler in Germany that means the Third Reich has  become a 
part of history. "It's no longer the painful present," said Hermann 
Kappelhoff, professor of  film studies at Berlin's Free University. 
But he added: "I'm not totally convinced by this argument, however." 
Frank Schirmacher, writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 
added:  "This much is clear: both movies break with the traditional 
German  preoccupation with the Third Reich.

"[They] are the most important historical projects in many years." 
The Downfall deals with the final days of the Nazi regime. It will 
even show Hitler and Eva Braun committing suicide in his Berlin 
bunker on April 30 1945, as Russian soldiers close in. The Devil's 
Architect, meanwhile, will show Hitler's relationship with his 
personal architect, Albert Speer. Other leading Nazis appear in the 
series  as well. Himmler, Göring and Goebbels all make appearances 
alongside other  defendants at the Nuremberg trials. Even Eva Braun 
is included, as are minor figures who served the Third Reich  as 
switchboard operators, cleaners and secretaries.

Breloer meticulously researched Albert Speer, who spent 20 years in 
Spandau  jail after the war, where he wrote his celebrated memoirs. 
The series includes new revelations about Speer, who was also 
Hitler's  minister for armaments, based on Breloer's discoveries in 
Germany's federal  archives. They are apparently alarming. The 
director met Speer in 1980, just before his death in 1981, and 
interviewed 23 people who knew him, including three of his children. 
"We see Hitler in a new light," he said.

Hitler's Reichskanzlei, his Berlin chancellery building, was 
carefully  recreated in a studio in Cologne for the television 
series. To prepare himself for his role as Hitler in Breloer's 
programme, the actor  Tobias Moretti spent hours listening to a tape 
secretly recorded in 1942 by  a Finnish radio technician. The tape, 
discovered only a few years ago, features Hitler speaking in a 
normal voice.

Eichinger is also striving for a realistic portrayal of Hitler in The 
Downfall. The director said recently: "We are making a grand, epic 
feature film.  Authenticity is the top priority." In Eichinger's 
production Bruno Ganz plays the führer. Ganz is Germany's  answer to 
Jeremy Irons, and one of the country's most famous actors.  According 
to reports, he hesitated before taking the role. The film, which was 
shot in Berlin, Munich and St Petersburg, begins on  April 20 1945 - 
Hitler's 56th birthday - with the Soviet army encircling  the German 
capital.

Both films come at a time when the second world war is being freshly 
debated in Germany, amid an explosion of memoirs which deal with the 
trauma  of the Third Reich as personal and family history. One of the 
runaway  bestsellers of the summer in Germany has been My Father's 
Land, written by  the journalist Wibke Bruhns, whose father was 
executed for his involvement  in the unsuccessful July 20 1944 plot 
to kill Hitler. "Everybody in Germany has a picture of Hitler in 
their minds. Up until now  though this has been based on six or seven 
documentaries," Prof Kappelhoff  said. "These films are an experiment 
in something different."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/germany/article/0,2763,1253953,00.html