Mel Brooks it isn’t.
“Improperly written and sloppily directed,” Claudius Seidl wrote in Frankfurter Allegemeine Sonntagszeitung.
“Most of the jokes are flat, harmless or stale,” according to Harald Peters, writing in Welt am Sonntag.
“It’s simply not funny,” said Gustav Seibt in Sueddeutsche Zeitung.
The much-anticipated German comedy “Mein Fuehrer: The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler,” is, to be brutally truthful, a stinker.
But it still represents a milestone in film history: It marks the first time a German filmmaker has dared to play Hitler for laughs. And despite being a dismal movie, “Mein Fuehrer” contains revealing lessons about how humor works–or doesn’t–in different cultures.
“Mein Fuehrer” tells the story of Hitler as the end of the war approaches. Berlin is under siege and Germany’s defeat is close at hand. A broken Hitler needs bucking up, so Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister, summons a renowned Jewish drama coach named Adolf Grunbaum from the Terezin concentration camp to help the fuehrer recapture the old magic. At the same time, Goebbels is secretly plotting Hitler’s assassination.
Hitler and Grunbaum get to know each other, perhaps even like each other a little. Along the way, Grunbaum learns that Hitler is a simpering bed-wetter who likes to play with toy battleships in the bathtub.
On the day Hitler is to address a mass rally, his barber accidentally shaves off half of his signature mustache. Hitler flies into a fury and loses his voice. But the show must go on, so Grunbaum, concealed beneath the podium, is recruited to give the speech while the fuehrer mouths the words. Grunbaum departs from the script.
After watching a screening at a mostly empty theater in Berlin last week, Sebastian Schmidt, a 27-year-old graduate student, was a little more charitable than the film critics.
“It was rather boring,” he said. “But it was not politically incorrect. It was not offensive; it just wasn’t so funny. They should have made it one hour instead of two.”
Marion Gerhardt and her partner, Gernot Zeglien, had high hopes for the film. Both are fans of Helge Schneider, the popular comic actor who plays Hitler, and Dani Levy, a German director with a string of successful comedies.
“I was expecting something more intelligent,” Gerhardt said.
`Not funny’ but `dumb’
“But a German shepherd who raises his paw for Heil Hitler? That’s not funny, that’s dumb,” said Zeglien, who added that the characters seemed to be straight out of “Hogan’s Heroes.”
“The problem was that in the end I started to feel sorry for this Hitler because he was such a sad guy–and that feeling made me feel uncomfortable,” Gerhardt said.
One thing that movie critics and audiences agree on is that “Mein Fueher” could not have been attempted by a non-Jewish German.
“We all love [director] Dani Levy (the name as published has been corrected here and in subsequent references in this text). He’s a really nice guy, and because he is Jewish, it took some of the pressure off. We know he wasn’t making this film for the wrong reasons,” said Alexander Soyez, a movie critic for Berlin and Brandenburg public radio.
“But I think he was too cautious,” Soyez said. “He didn’t trust his film.”
Given the understandable German nervousness about offending Jewish sensibilities, one might have thought that Sacha Baron Cohen’s surprise hit “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan” would have made German audiences uneasy. Borat, the fictitious Kazakh TV reporter played by Cohen, thinks Jews can turn themselves into cockroaches, and he refuses to fly on airplanes in America “in case the Jews repeat their attack of 9/11.”
But “Borat” is having a successful run in Germany. Critics have lavished praise on it, comparing it with Michael Moore’s lampoons of America, while German audiences have laughed heartily, apparently for all the right reasons.
“The anti-Semitism in `Borat’ is so overdone everybody understands the joke,” said Niels Kadritzke, a German writer.
`Great Dictator’ comparisons
“Mein Fueher” inevitably reminded some Germans of the sparkling brilliance of Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 classic, “The Great Dictator.”
There is no evidence that Hitler ever saw that lampoon of himself, but it was shown to a small number of Germans in 1946 as part of the de-Nazification program supervised by the Allied occupation, according to Kadritzke, who has written about the subject.
After the screenings, the audience was given a questionnaire. Many favored the idea of showing the film to a wider German audience, but most declined to take part in the survey.
“I assume that meant they were against it,” Kadritzke said. “The feeling was: `It’s too close to us; leave it alone. We suffered a lot from fascism and we don’t want to be reminded.'”
“The Great Dictator” was not shown again in Germany until 1958. Although it was hailed by German critics, it died at the box office. German audiences were still reluctant to confront their past, Kadritzke said.
These days, the Chaplin film is widely regarded by Germans as a masterpiece. “Mein Fueher” seems destined to be quickly forgotten. Probably its only hope for commercial salvation is the British market, where one prominent commentator, apparently reflecting his nation’s insatiable appetite for jokes at Hitler’s expense, described the film as “rip-roaringly funny.”
———-
thundley@tribune.com
