(JNi.media) He went under the Brandenburg Gate, looking somewhat worse for wear and more than a bit dazed, and the tourists began to recognize him and gathered around him, snapping their iPhones and looking to score a quick selfie. It was Berlin, the fall of 2014, and there was Adolf Hitler, as if he never left.
“It was incredible, I was suddenly the attraction, like a pop star,” Oliver Masucci, the actor who plays Hitler in the film adaptation of Timur Vermes’s 2012 best-selling satire “Look Who’s Back,” recalled the filming of the movie’s opening scene. He described his experience: “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.”
The film has Hitler coming out of a coma in his bunker, 70 years later, and explores how he would respond to Angela Merkel’s Germany. The film, which will be released on Thursday in Germany, shows Hitler using his fame and skills to re-enter politics.
Director David Wnendt told The Guardian: “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. Unfortunately yes.” In his opinion, “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. But it should be the type of laugh that catches in your throat and you’re almost ashamed when you realize what you’re doing.”
Wnendt said his journey around Germany with Masucci as Hitler, from the North Sea to Bavaria, revealed “a feeling of deep discontent in the population, where people of every social status demonstrated how they were against foreigners and fearful of Islamization.”
Der Spiegel summed up the film experience: “It’s appeared at a time of intense discussion about who is German, who is welcome here, and who is not. Such questions are only a short juncture away from the topic of Hitler.”