Hitler as human: two German views

COLOGNE, Germany -- Adolf Hitler flickers on old newsreels, a grainy ghost of spastic gesture and rousing speech. Arm slanted skyward, face drenched in sweat, he seems one-dimensional yet beyond comprehension.

Those sinister images will never fade, but today a new Hitler lurks.

He is in color. He speaks in a mannered voice. He attends parties lighted by chandelier. He pinches the cheeks of little boys, walks with friends through snowy forests. He jokes. And in a fleeting moment, when he calms his scowling and ranting, he seems fragile as he conceals a hand shaking from what was believed to have been Parkinson's disease.

For the first time, two German directors are proposing a more human cinematic portrait of the Fuhrer. Once relegated to cameo appearances or skulking in the wings, the Hitler of German film is stepping to center stage.

The movies are attempts to pierce the unfathomable. Imbuing the author of "Mein Kampf" with the foibles of humanity, the directors say, makes him more frightening, his acts more despicable.

"Hitler was a genius seducer, so you have to show that he was charming. You have to show him as a human being," said Heinrich Breloer, director of "The Devil's Architect," one of the two groundbreaking films. "But he is also ruthless, a killer with the eyes of a shark. You have to depict all his nuances. We have to look at the man behind the newsreel images."

The movies coincide with the trend of re-examining the Holocaust, and a widening revisionist scholarship, that is enabling Germans to portray themselves as victims of a madman who were forced to endure the destruction wrought by Allied bombing.

Today, Germany is the world's third-largest economy and a prominent voice for democracy and rights. The age of penance and absolution is over, according to young Germans.

"The younger generation doesn't feel it's part of those crimes anymore," said Rainer Rother, director of the film archives at the German Historical Museum in Berlin. "There's no family guilt. . . . Today's youth are more interested in, 'How did it happen, and what made Hitler and the others tick?' "

The specter of Hitler is more difficult for older generations to come to terms with. Jewish groups are protesting the Sept. 22 opening of the art collection of Friedrich Christian Flick, the grandson of one of Hitler's military contractors, who amassed a fortune using slave labor.

Fleshing Hitler out as a fully formed character, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung newspaper said, "prompts the question whether one should be allowed to feel sympathy" for a leader whose warped ambitions led to the deaths of 50 million.

"The time is ripe for such a film," Bernd Eichinger, the 55-year-old producer and screenwriter of "The Downfall: Hitler and the End of the Third Reich," said at a news conference. "It's important not just to shed light on one's own history superficially, but rather to tell it from within. . . . If you had an overall sympathy for Hitler, then the film has failed in its intention. But to show sympathy in certain moments is, I believe, quite fine."

"What is Germany?" asked Breloer, 62, an archival detective whose film about Hitler's armaments minister, Albert Speer, is a blend of documentary footage and meticulously re-imagined scenes. "I love the Germany of Goethe and Thomas Mann. But the biggest riddle of my life is how Hitler happened. How could a brutal gang win this country? . . . . What was in the hearts of our fathers and grandfathers?"

Breloer's "The Devil's Architect," scheduled to air on German television in May, examines Speer and his relationship with Hitler. Intelligent and politically clever, Speer was tried at Nuremberg in 1946 and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Eichinger's "Downfall," opening in German theaters on Thursday, captures the last moments of the war as Soviet troops stormed Berlin and as Hitler hid in an underground bunker, where he committed suicide with Eva Braun on April 30, 1945.

In Eichinger's film, Hitler is mean, headstrong, and harsh. He stews in a claustrophobic catacomb with Braun, Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels and Goebbels' wife, Magda, and their six children, all of whom will die. Hitler hides his jittery hand as he paces and sweats. His uniform is damp; a critic wrote that one could almost smell his nervous breath. His moods skitter -- at times he acts like a jovial uncle, at others he seems to be a cornered lunatic, awaiting airplanes that never arrive.

There is an eerie humanness to Hitler's demise as, above ground, the battle for Berlin unfolds. "When the war is lost, it doesn't matter at all if the German people are doomed as well," the Fuhrer says. "I wouldn't cry a single tear about that because they wouldn't deserve anything else." He disappears and closes the door. Seconds pass. There is a bang.