The book on which HITLER THE MOVIE will be based

The dust jacket says “Claus Hant is a German scriptwriter …” –  and  so this “non-fiction novel” was written with HITLER THE MOVIE in mind.  All that remains to be seen is who will direct the movie (Steven Spielberg, I hope, who has already portrayed a  Nuremberg rally with admirable integrity in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK), and who will be the actor chosen to play Hitler.  (George Clooney?  Hugh Laurie?  Jude Law?)  After such a compelling narrative of Hitler’s rise to power, and 66 years after the end of  WW2, I would like to think such a film would now be possible and welcomed. 

Hitler is seen through the eyes of his friend Martl (a character who is really an amalgam of four friends of Hitler during his salad days). 

The scenes where Hitler makes his immortal pronouncements are already cinematically staged.  Picture, if you will, Hitler being offered a cigarette and his response, “Thank you, dear, but smoking kills everyone, not just the racially inferior.”

There are many such scenes portraying Hitler as a personality – a son fearful of his mother’s death, being infuriating and irritating, quoting philosophers, being reckless, demanding and unreasonable, and of him being unnervingly prescient and prophetic while explaining his theories …

Hitler comforts  his dying comrade Frederick in the battlefield:

A huge pool of blood had collected around his crotch.  I knelt down beside him.  “You’re going to be okay,” I lied.  “It’s not as bad as it looks.’

“Really,” he groaned, gritting his teeth from the agonizing pain. 

“I’ll get you a medic!”  I scrambled back up the bank to look out over the field.  But there were no medics, just freshly dead bodies. 

“Dolferl! [Hitler’s nickname] I screamed.

He turned and with his head cocked inquisitively, he ran back.

“Just be calm,” Dolferl told Frederic, crouching down.  “Have you ever read Schopenhauer?”

“Only a little,” Frederick admitted.

“In The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer talks of a leaf that is afraid to fall of the tree in autumn,” said Dolferl, calmingly.  ‘ “Foolish leaf!” says Schopenhauer, “where do you think you’re going? And where do you think the new leaves will come from?  Where is the oblivion you so dread?  It is part of you!”

“Where’s the medic?” Frederick asked. 

Yet another challenging scene for any Hitler-playing actor:

“I’m not afraid of death,” Dolferl said, staring me straight in the eye. 

“No?”

“ ‘If death seems so cruel because we dread the thought of not existing, then we would have to dread the time before we were born as well.  Our non-existence after death can’t be any different to our non-existence before we were born.  An eternity passed before we were born but that doesn’t sadden us at all …’ ”

I sighed. 

“That’s the beauty of Schopenhauer,” he said , took the gun out of his holster, pointed the barrel at his temple, and cocked it.

“Dolferl!” I screamed.  “What are you doing?”

Slowly, he lowered the gun, un-cocked it and put it back. 

“As long as you have an exit strategy,” he said, “you will always be okay.”

As well as cinematic story-telling, its appendix on racism, anti-Semitism and the mystical background of the Thule Society are a historian’s delight.  The psychological insight too is rewarding: “For Hitler’s career to succeed, three prerequisites had to be fulfilled: 1) a nation longing for a new beginning after defeat in a war, famine, revolutionary turmoil, national humiliation and economic chaos; 2) a man convinced of his ‘mission’ beyond all doubt; and 3) a group of believers who were awaiting just such a man.

Indeed.  The Hitler Phenomenon could happen to any Western industrial nation.  We have been warned.