Modern Germans spontaneously react happily to Hitler actor, claims new film

Führer furore: Oliver Masucci in Er ist Wieder Da (Look Who’s Back).
Kate Connolly in Berlin
Tuesday 6 October 2015 14.53 EDT

As he walked through the Brandenburg Gate, looking a little stunned and grubby, scores of the tourists gathered there with selfie sticks and phones to capture Berlin’s most famous landmark quickly turned their attention to him.

Suddenly Adolf Hitler was surrounded by everyone from German teenagers to giggling Japanese holidaymakers. But the bodyguards accompanying him need not have worried. Some onlookers put their arms around him as they posed for selfies, others pouted and pretended to kiss him on the cheek.

“It was incredible, I was suddenly the attraction, like a popstar,” said Oliver Masucci, the latest actor to play Hitler for the big screen, in the film adaptation of Timur Vermes’s 2012 bestselling fictional satire Er ist Wieder Da (Look Who’s Back).

“People clustered around me. One told me she loved me, and asked me to hug her. One, to my relief, started hitting me. There was also a black woman who said I scared her,” Masucci added, recalling the making of one of the film’s opening scenes last autumn.

On general release across Germany on Thursday, Look Who’s Back offers a sharp departure from a string of previous Hitler depictions, starting with Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 hit The Great Dictator and through to the 2004 German-made Downfall, because it captures the reactions of present-day Germans towards him “ or rather towards a man who bears a striking resemblance to the figure who once terrorised Europe “ and weaves them into the fictional scenes in the film.

˜Our idea was ¦ to ask does he have a chance nowadays,’ David Wnendt told the Guardian. Facebook Twitter Pinterest

“Look Who’s Back” imagines that, 70 years since his demise, Hitler awakes from a coma on the site of his former bunker, now a residential area of Berlin, to find himself in the present “ a Germany at peace, with Angela Merkel at the helm and a society so multicultural he does not recognise it. He is taken to be an impersonator or a method actor of the highest calibre, who subsequently makes a successful television career for himself, using that as a springboard to enter politics.

“Our idea was to find out how people react to Hitler today, and to his ideas and to ask does he have a chance nowadays,” director David Wnendt told the Guardian. His conclusion? “Unfortunately yes.”

He said the film’s main aim was to make people laugh. “Germans should be able to laugh at Hitler, rather than viewing him as monster because that relieves him of responsibility for his deeds and diverts attention from his guilt for the Holocaust,” Wnendt said.

“But it should be the type of laugh that catches in your throat and you’re almost ashamed when you realise what you’re doing.”

Wnendt said his travels around Germany with Masucci as Hitler “ everywhere from the North Sea island of Sylt, a holiday location for wealthy Germans, to small towns in Bavaria where Masucci posed as a postcard painter in a nod to Hitler’s failed attempts at an artistic career “ revealed “a feeling of deep discontent in the population, where people of every social status demonstrated how they were against foreigners and fearful of Islamisation”.

The film’s release at a time when the country is locked in a fierce debate over the mass arrival of refugees and whether it serves as an opportunity for Germany or a threat, could hardly be more timely. The film includes footage of Pegida demonstrators holding anti-foreigner placards, as well as news reels showing recent arson attacks on asylum-seekers’ homes.

˜It was incredible, I was suddenly the attraction, like a popstar,’ said Oliver Masucci. Facebook Twitter Pinterest

“It’s appeared at a time of intense discussion about who is German, who is welcome here, and who is not,” wrote Der Spiegel of the film. “Such questions are only a short juncture away from the topic of Hitler.”

Among Wnendt’s inspirations were the film “Borat,” “the agent provocateur, who entices people to say things they really think”, and “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui,” German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s 1941 satirical allegory about the rise of Hitler, “which shows how his rise would not have been possible without normal German people. He did not hypnotise them, they chose to follow him,” Wnendt said.

The intense range of conversations Masucci, as a rather avuncular Hitler, has “ with everyone from German Shepherd breeders to beekeepers and supporters of the far right, who confide in him everything from their loss of belief in democracy to the need to build labour camps for foreigners as well as admitting that they would vote for him “ are just a fraction of the total 300 hours gathered, to have made the final cut. Those which did, insisted Wnendt were “very representative”.

Some commentators have pointed out the rather bleak mirror the film holds up to German society is considerably at odds with the recent images of Germans welcoming refugees with open arms at Munich’s main station and elsewhere across the country.

“We’re not denying that side exists,” Wnendt said. “But neither can we ignore the fact that we met many Germans who were quite ready to reconcile with him and see him as something of a father figure.” The weekly Die Zeit drew the disturbing conclusion that, 70 years on, Hitler has an enduring allure for Germans across the board. “The German public in this film accompanies Hitler as someone who dominates the stage ¦ he embodies a history that is incomplete,” it wrote.

The film also highlights, with the use of newsreels, the rising threat of the far right across Europe, including footage from speeches by the French Front National’s Marine Le Pen and the Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders, as well as from Ukip rallies. “We’re highlighting that the danger of a resurgence is very much alive,” Wnendt added.

Critics have so far been overwhelmingly impressed by Masucci’s ability to capture a character that, Wndent said, “poses the great acting challenge to German actors, as opposed to Hamlet or Macbeth in the UK, because everyone has to find their own way of interpreting him”.
Germany asks: is it OK to laugh at Hitler?

The 46-year-old Masucci said he initially thought he was unsuited to the role. “For a start, I’m 1m 88cm,” (about 10cm taller than Hitler) he said, “and my physiognomy is completely different.” The casting process included having to cold-call the Deutsche Oper in Berlin, pretending to be Hitler asking for tickets to a Wagner opera, as well as reciting one of his speeches.

“Once I got the part, I told my neighbours they shouldn’t wonder if they hear me yelling the place down. Later I spent two weeks locked in a Berlin hotel room with a language coach, studying his dialogue and style,” Masucci said.

In addition, he put on 26kg, and a make-up artist gave him a false nose, tear ducts, wrinkles and even a false upper lip for the toothbrush moustache, a look that took two hours to apply, before he was sent out among the German public, accompanied by bodyguards in case he was attacked.

“I remained in the role the whole time ¦ some people completely forgot that I was only an actor in make-up and costume. They talked to me in a deeply earnest way. I quickly realised how they ticked and that they hadn’t learnt much from history,” he said.

Hitler on screen
Masucci is the latest of a long list of an estimated 120 actors to have played Adolf Hitler on the big screen over the past 75 years, beginning with Charlie Chaplin, who portrayed Anton Hynkel, a thin disguise for Hitler, in his 1940 satire The Great Dictator.

Hynkel spouts a quick-fire mix of nonsense syllables and the odd German word whenever he holds one of his aggressive speeches. It was Chaplin’s first sound film but it didn’t make it to German cinemas until 1958, 18 years after its New York premiere.

The Americans apparently didn’t feel the Germans were mature enough to cope with a Hitler satire before then. Chaplin said after the war, he would never have made the film had he had a clue of what was going on in the Nazi concentration camps.

The first ever German-language movie depiction of Hitler was the 1955 German-Austrian coproduction Der Letzte Akt (The Last Deed) in which the Viennese actor Albin Skoda played the Führer , which focused on the last 10 days in the Hitler bunker. There was much criticism of Skoda’s psychopathic and unrealistic portrayal.

In 1973 Alec Guinness played Hitler in Ennio De Concini’s film “The Last Ten Days,” which starts with Hitler’s 56th birthday and ends with his suicide.

The Bunker from 1981 was based on the eponymous book by James P O’Donnell, and had Anthony Hopkins in the starring role. Hopkins won an Emmy for the CBS drama, with claims from those on the set that he was so authentic, people reacted to him as if he was Hitler.

Ian McKellen was Hitler in the 1989 drama “Countdown to War,” whose script was based on Hitler’s own speeches and writings.

The German film actor Armin Mueller-Stahl played a 103-year-old Hitler who survived in his Bunker, and encounters an American journalist who gets an interview with the man he considers to be a con artist, in “Gespräch mit dem Biest” in 1996.

Kai Wessel’s 2000 TV comedy Goebbels und Geduldig saw Jürgen Schornagel playing Hitler, and caused a huge debate in Germany.

Robert Carlyle played Hitler in the 2003 Canadian TV mini-series “The Rise of Evil,” which concentrates on the early years of Hitler after World War I. Ewan McGregor turned down the role.

Bruno Ganz gave one of the most memorable Hitler performances of recent years in “Downfall” (Der Untergang) in 2004, in which he depicted an old and sick Hitler. Based on the memories of Hitler’s secretary, Traudl Junge, it was a worldwide success.

Martin Wuttke was Hitler in Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” from 2009. Wuttke initially turned down the role but gave into pressure from his girlfriend, who wanted to see him in a Tarantino film.