100 Years of Adolf Hitler (1989)

 

Director: Christoph Schlingensief            

Screenplay: Christoph Schlingensief      

Cast: Udo Kier as Adolf Hitler; Alfred Edel as Hermann Goering; Margit Carstensen as Martha Goebbels; Volker Spengler as Fegelein; Andreas Kunze as Martin Bormann; Dietrich Kuhlbrodt as Joseph Goebbels; Marie-Lou Sellem as Tochter Goebbels; Asia Verdi as Nurse Morell; Brigitte Kausch as Eva Braun

An Abstract List Candidate

 

Enjoy them, the nuts of the Germans.

[Major Plot Thread Spoilers]

From the year of my birth, enfant terrible Christoph Schlingensief shot this film improvised in an actual World War II bunker, documenting the last days or so of Adolf Hitler and his inner circle before their world collapsed. You could say it is tasteless, not comparable to a serious take like Downfall (2004) with the late Bruno Ganz as Hitler. Yet, with the added irony of the Wim Wenders connection this film has which we will get into, and how most now know Downfall for turning the scene of Ganz's Hitler getting angry into an internet meme, whether about video games and films, how one deals with the legacy of the Nazis especially as a German is salient to the project's point and a fixation Schlingensief has been pointed on.

In a 2005 documentary Christoph Schlingensief and His Films, effectively an extended sit-down interview with Schlingensief by director Frieder Schlaich over his career at that point, one of the points Schlingensief made, and is contrasted by the broadness (and for me misfiring) nature of Terror 2000 (1992), is really profound to consider. That of how he talks of Germany having been ultra-tentative about Nazi history, saying that if they had left it open and let it corrode in public, there may have been less concern of its fetishisation and a rise in Neo-Nazism. German law, even to the point videogames had to be censored, understandably had a strong reaction to trying to deal with this history even if you are against censorship. One of the bleakest moments in their history is a difficult one to deal with, and yet 100 Years of Adolf Hitler cannot be said to be trivialising it either, even this perverse farce having a profoundness when, because of the evil he committed in real life, Hitler is reduced to Udo Kier as a drug addict, Eva Braun clearly being more attracted to Martha Goebbels, and Goebbels himself carrying on incest with his daughter. In fact, no one in the group of male party members still alive really likes Goebbels, more fixated on getting the Reich Councillor position and hoping to oust him even in a bunker they are all stuck in.

Terror 2000, which was made in the post-Soviet Union fall and tackling the question of migrants in German culture eventually did become merely uncomfortable, as for a subject which has been a discussion for the country even decades later, it never really was a film about the migrants themselves and does eventually, particularly with its attempt to mix corpse humour with content like rape, end up missing its target. Here the mix is right, even when it does cross into taboos like sexuality that dances a dangerous line in that territory too in one scene. It would almost being tragic seeing these people lost and broken until you remember that the real figures led to World War II and the Holocaust, the follies of people who acted worse than beasts yet tragically still human. These tragic figures a small cast of actors play in 100 Years... bicker, feel cornered, argue about who gets a higher rank when all this blows over, even Hitler's origins when he originally wanted to be a painter evoked even if reduced now to Udo Kier making arse prints in paint on canvases. Theirs is also one of the bleakest depictions of Christmas celebration you could get only screen to, with scrawny trees in the darkened corner. At fifty five minutes too, this never skips over into dragging on, and the last days of Hitler are not told the same as real life.

Case in point, Hitler does die, and yet you can become the Fuhrer, and can only take that name and that of "Hitler", if you have the moustache, which Eva Braun eventually does. It would almost be subversive in another way, were it not for the specific figures involved, that Eva and Martha Goebbels are romantically attracted to each other from their introduction, and are married at one point, even if it leads to Martha dying and her birthing a (cloth doll) child at the same time that will be put in a river like Moses in a wicker basket.

Though a film made in little time, it is a striking production, actually shot in a bunker, with the film also shot in stark monochrome and using only the lighting available from the production as the only lighting source. It neither hides its artifice either, based on a play, as you will see the clapboard multiple time and calls for "Action!" in many scenes, a film openly admitting its improvisation. So much so as I leave the most curious aspect which bookmarks the film at the end of this review, as it is the most open to interpretation. Wim Wender's 1984 Palme D'Or win at that year's Cannes Film Festival, for Paris, Texas, which could be seen as the most profane aspect of this entire film even in lieu to its trivialisation of the evil of Nazis, with the footage of the German auteur's award speech, about the potential of art, contrasted to the film it has the footage within which is about the worst of their culture being turned into a profane farce. With Kier speaking directly to camera the names of highly regards high art filmmakers and actors in his first scene onscreen, like Wenders to Margaret von Trotta, there is a sense however that, next to the emotionally tender Paris, Texas, this as Schlingensief's 'career would continue is a pit stop into the grotesque on his end. Certainly he is not pulling his punches, with malice, when he cuts to a figure by the end of the film talking of how, if you do not talk of politics at the time, the German people should have been proud of their achievements and resilience during and after World War II. In the modern day even if a misinterpretation that really skates the dangerous line of forgetting Germany's guilt and why it exists in the first place, more so footage used in a film from the nineteen eighties. Even this film bastardising and trivialising the Nazis never forgets their sins, merely mocks them.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None