No.on Holocaust Remembrance Day 2022 and alone in some rooms – here the complete list – you can see The sense of Hitlerdocumentary directed by Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker on the Führer’s nefarious influence in politics (and culture) Contemporary.
Analyzing period films – but also cinema, art and platforms such as TikTok – the documentary makers traveled around the world looking for answers to a fundamental and unfortunately unanswered question: “Why does Hitler’s ideology still find support today despite everything?“. To help them in the discussion of intellectuals, writers and historians.
The sense of Hitler: the documentary
Starting from the 1978 book (unpublished in Italy) The Meaning Of Hitler by Sebastian Haffner, the film is constructed as an irreverent and provocative investigation into the fascination that our culture feels Hitler and Nazism. For example with the current, and super alarming, rise of white supremacyespecially in the United States.
Filmed in nine different countriesthe film traces the political technique and the rise to power of Hitler. A fascinating and diabolical parable illustrated by professionals including Deborah Lipstadt, Martin Amis and the famous Nazi hunters Beate and Serge Klarsfeld. Keen observers who trace the lines of contact in contemporary thought between the’violent ideology of the Nazi leader and the recrudescences of the univocal and dictatorial approach to complexity.
The falsity of myths is thus deconstructed, misinterpretations of the past and the difficult process of compromising in a very delicate historical moment. Made of immigration, new minorities, border walls and nationalisms.
The genesis of the film and the book by Sebastian Haffner
Made over the course of four years, the reflection of The sense of Hitler begins with the Brexit of 2016, when far-right nationalists were gaining ground across Europe. While America was grappling with the unlikely idea of Donald Trump President of the United States.
“It felt like the world was slipping back into darkness», Declared the directors,« How was it possible? Had the story lost all meaning? Therefore we went looking for answers and we immediately stumbled upon Haffner’s essay ».
A small volume of less than 200 pages with the value of direct testimony, because the German journalist – born in Berlin in 1907 – witnessed the rise of Hitler, amazed by the fascination he exercised on elites and masses.
He then fled to London, from his exile he argued that to “get it over with” the dictator there was only one way: to kill him. Not only him but also the institution, the memory, the legend. In opposition to the biographers of his time, guilty of softening Hitler’s character calling him a man whose entire identity was centered on the realization of a fanatical project born from the radicalization of his own victimhood.
The essay’s thesis and its contemporaneity
For Haffnern, therefore, Hitlerism was basically a sect: his most fervent follower Hitler himself. Above all, even the fate of Germany. To achieve this, he has deployed a kind of controlled chaos, in which the institutions of the state have been dismantled to ensure the indispensable centralization of power.
As filmmakers Epperlein and Tucker put it: “Reading the book in the first year of the Trump presidency one gets the impression that it is talking about the present. But even if Trump is not Hitler, it is important to analyze the elements that make him a figure similar to the Führer ».
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