Mark Reviews Movies: THE MEANING OF HITLER

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 12, 2021

Directors Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker aren't certain how to make this documentary. It's a dissection of Adolf Hitler and the perverse legend that has formed around him, but wouldn't any attempt to comprehend the man, understand his life, analyze his psychology, and/or simply portray him on screen help in maintaining that legend?

Right away, The Meaning of Hitler is off to an intentionally rocky start, but that's why the film works. It's constantly engaging with and questioning itself—its goals, its tactics, its form and structure, what it should show, why it shouldn't show other things, whether or not it will be of any historical, social, cultural, or political use.

The documentary's title comes from the 1978 book of the same name, written by a journalist under the penname Sebastian Haffner. The film's structure comes from the book, as well—serving as a guide and a guiding principle of sorts, to return to whenever a topic has run its course, made its point, or become a bit too unfocused.

Haffner lived in Berlin as Hitler and the Nazis came to power, before emigrating from Germany for the United Kingdom in 1938. As a consequence, he saw first-hand how the beginning happened and how Hitler used populism, an invented sense of mass victimhood, and a cult of personality to rise to power, with the active or passive support of most German people.

It was all there—the nationalism, the anti-Semitism, the willingness and ability to detain or murder opponents or "undesirables"—from the start, but too many people couldn't see it, refused to acknowledge it, or were fine with it. There were deniers and supporters back then. The current fear is that, with too much time passing and with the odd sense of legend that has formed around Hitler, the number of deniers and/or supporters will increase in the present day, blanketed by internet-savvy irony or draped in horrifying sincerity.

We are, perhaps, getting a bit ahead of the point here, so like Epperlein and Tucker throughout this film, it might be a good time to return to some grounding. Initially, the filmmakers present the case of Hitler's continuing legend in the usual way of so many historical documentaries on film or television: with lots and lots of archival footage. This is the wrong approach, the directors determine, because it preserves and highlights a falsity.

After all, most of the film and photos we have of Hitler were commissioned by the man or by the Nazi state as a form of propaganda. It was Hitler, the "great leader," cheered by throngs of people in Triumph of the Will or commanding an entire military, as an ordinary man of the country, from his home in the mountains.

The mountain house was destroyed after the war, and the view of and the path leading to it were blocked by trees. That hasn't stopped tourists from trying to re-create some of those photos or carving pro-Nazi things into those trees. Maybe the persistence of other details might have worked better as a deterrent to Hitler as a legend. There's the fact, for example, that his regular filmed and photographed hikes in the mountains were always downhill. When he had to return, Hitler had a car waiting for the uphill trek. It's not just what you show people that creates a legend. It's also—and sometimes more vitally—what you don't allow to be seen.

One of those unseen things still persists today, in the countless dramatizations of Hitler's life and, more importantly, his death. Epperlein and Tucker show us footage from plenty of these movies, and there's always a constant when it comes to that final scene in the bunker. The actor playing Hitler takes a cyanide capsule (or doesn't) and readies his pistol, and the camera always moves away or is obscured by a closing metal door before the fatal shot is fired. In such a way, Hitler, the filmmakers argue, is granted more respect than any of his victims ever are in those or other movies, which show us plenty of terror and bloody violence in the concentration or death camps.

Maybe decades of seeing Hitler's final moment would have helped us avoid the theories that he somehow survived or faked his death. Perhaps portraying that the man tested a cyanide pill on his "beloved" dog before taking one himself would have added a final note of cruelty to a man who so cruelly elevated his own station.

Such thoughts and plenty more emerge, as Epperlein and Tucker go through Hitler's biography, intercutting interviews with an assortment of experts and academics and psychologists to cut through and dismantle the lies, the rumors, the speculation, the propaganda, and all of that posthumous legend-building. Hitler, for example, likely wasn't mentally ill, as so many have considered or definitively pronounced. To claim such is to deny the lesson that an ordinary person can be capable of such horror. If Hitler is a once-in-a-centuries anomaly of a monster, the mistaken lesson is that it can't happen again—here, there, or anywhere.

It's an excuse, similar to the way Holocaust-deniers have tried to claim that Hitler didn't order or was unaware of his own state's genocidal actions. One of those deniers, briefly followed by the filmmakers here, is David Irving, a court-of-law-proven liar, who's still rambling with his nonsense, giving tours, and playing games with his political beliefs and his connections to neo-Nazis. The directors catch him on an open mic, freely joking about the event he publicly insists didn't happen.

Irving and those even worse than him are out there, right now, as are others prone to the ideas these people are pushing. The Meaning of Hitler shows us how we got to this point of re-vitalized, potentially destructive nationalism around the world and, if not too late, some ideas for halting it.

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