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"Mein Führer" Director Talks

"Hitler Should Have Been in Therapy"

This week, Dani Levy's long-awaited Hitler comedy will open across Germany. But can one really laugh about the Nazi dictator? Absolutely, the director tells SPIEGEL ONLINE in an interview. It's the only way we can get closer to the unfathomable.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: "Shoah" director Claude Lanzemann argues that the Holocaust should only be remembered in traumatic ways. Fictionalizing it would have been out of the question for him. But your approach is to tell a funny story, and even put Hitler on the therapist's couch.

Dani Levy: I believe that every approach -- be it Guido Knopp's, Bernd Eichinger's or Claude Lanzemann's -- satisfies a strong subjective need. For me too this project wasn't the result of long deliberation, it was more like some sort of outburst.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: An outburst caused by your uneasiness about film culture?

Levy: I've watched a lot of films and documentaries on the topic over the years, and I've grown increasingly uneasy. You're always confronted with the same moral attitude that insists on an authoritarian representation of reality and which demonizes the criminals of that time. Humor would be a great help here: It's demystifying to see Blondi mounting Hitler in "Mein Führer." We need other images. We just can't keep on watching images of the Führer running around the Berghof (Hitler's mountain home) as the good uncle or giving amazing speeches.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Documentaries and documentary-based films have made a significant contribution towards raising awareness about Germany's historical guilt. There's nothing wrong with repeating those images.

Levy: Yes, of course. Don't get me wrong: I consider many films, especially films about the Third Reich extremely important. They inform us and clarify moral questions. Even films like "Downfall" or "Schindler's List" are based on facts which victims and survivors actively provide, but this authenticity can be paralyzing. In order to bring something to light a film has to penetrate behind the surface of documentarism. My most important goal was to explore the nature of dictactorial authority. A dictator's authority is based on total submission and any film which requires submission is dangerous because it extends the system of injustice in its own way. A good film is a film which is dialectical and which engages in critical thinking.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Your film "Mein Führer" (which opens in Germany on Jan. 11) suggests that the roots of Hitler's crimes lie in the cruelty he suffered in his childhood, for which he later takes revenge on the Jews. But if you reduce these arguments down to the psychological -- couldn't anything and anyone be understandable and excusable?

Levy: "Understanding something is different from excusing it. On the contrary: Understanding helps prevent premature excuses. But it's dangerous to condemn certain aspects of humanity just to avoid empathy with the inexplicable.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: You refer to the work of psychotherapist Alice Miller who is known for not being very complex. She reduces historical disasters to errors in a person's upbringing.

Levy: I think that it is possible to apply the idea that childhood traumas like violence or chaos are compulsively reproduced in the political system. And I'm not just talking about Hitler but also millions of Germans who grew up with poisonous pedagogy (a now discredited repressive pedagogy). The viewer empathises with Hitler and starts to lose distance, and this is creepy because you're not supposed to have such feelings for Hitler. Intuitively, the viewer tries to rid himself of his compassion, and it's exactly this tension that's enlightening.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Your film is preceded by Tucholsky's dictum "Kiss the fascists wherever you meet." Considering what we know today -- that there has been an unprecedented crime with 6 million victims -- that seems a bit naïve.

Levy: The fascists don't want any kisses, especially not from me. The sentence makes clear what my film is about: that there is a strong tension between belief, understanding and refusal. I dissect the situation and ridicule it. I subvert the respectful, reverent, documentary image that we all got used to, I belittle it. That's the only way to discuss certain questions. What is mean, what is cowardly? Is it possible to hold someone responsible to whom one is related through a collective pedagogical system which turned into terror?

SPIEGEL ONLINE: "I'm a crisis case, please cure me," Hitler pleads in a scene with his Jewish acting coach Adolf Grünbaum. The actor has become a psychoanalyst: Is it the duty of art to heal the sick soul?

Levy: Why not? Perhaps this is one of the qualities that we Jews have: We're interested in human contradictions. You need humor in order to see the human in a monstrous system. And you don't just learn about his childhood but also about the desires of Adolf Hitler the person. He wanted someone to listen to him. He should have been in therapy, not in government.

The interview was conducted by Daniel Haas.