The Meaning of Hitler succinctly, pointedly, and soberly dissects the fascination that the man with the trimmed moustache exudes, not just "still" but "increasingly anew". Based on Sebastian Haffner's bestseller The Meaning of Hitler, the film offers effective medicine against any attempts at mystifying hyperbole – be it critical or affirmative.

On the basis of Sebastian Haffner's book The Meaning of Hitler, the filmmakers Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker undertake a cinematic attempt at a succinct, pointed and sober de-kitschification of Hitler. For example, a simple visit to a location is enough to invalidate an empty mythification: in Braunau, where Hitler was allegedly born in a small stable, a city historian calmly explains that the only aspect of the tale that is remotely factual is that there were actually stables in the courtyard of the faceless townhouse where Hitler came into the world in 1889. That this fact in no way prevented an ardent partisan and occasional poet from Nuremberg from stylising, in 1938, the lacklustre location into the "Bethlehem of the German Reich" casts a whole new light on the myth.
The Meaning of Hitler questions the fascination and continued existence of the sometimes religious-like fervour surrounding Hitler and National Socialism in pop culture and entertainment – above all in the context of current anti-Semitism, paranoid exclusion hysteria, and xenophobia. Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker have a number of high-profile "witnesses" and "experts" appear in their film to reinforce their assertions, including the writers Martin Amis (Zone of Interest) and Saul Friedländer (Nazi Germany and the Jews). Alongside these authors, and likewise eloquently working to pull the plug on the stubborn vigour of Nazi folklore, are: Klaus Theweleit (Male Fantasies), Sir Richard Evans (The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination), Deborah Lipstadt (Antisemitism: Here and Now), Prof. Gavriel Rosenfeld (Hi Hitler! How the Nazi Past Is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture), and the Nazi hunters Beate and Serge Klarsfeld.
The Meaning of Hitler, however, explicitly foregoes the tonality of common narratives. One learns nothing "new about the unknown Hitler" or any "truths about his dogs, wives and friends". And the film likewise deliberately turns its back on making itself available for "everything you always wanted to know* (*but were afraid to ask)"!
Instead, directors Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker ponder whether anyone has ever noticed how often, in films dealing with Hitler's end, some doors slam shut or the camera pans away or discreetly fades out whenever the moment arrives that Hitler – perhaps!? – held a pistol to his head. Why do Hitler films allow their hero an "honourable" or at least unobserved death, while the countless victims of his policies are systematically denied this discretion? It is almost inevitable that when the iron door of the gas chambers closes, the camera travels up to the observation hole to watch the people inside die.
The mass appeal of Adolf Hitler's almost erotic relationship with his microphone, as a phenomenon of technological history, is likewise discussed and parallelised with Donald Trump's virtuoso mastery of Twitter. Another parallel drawn is the unconditional determination shared by both to free themselves from any assumed victim role, which is exactly what has made both the former American president and the dead Reich Chancellor the template followed by an entire army of emulators – from the conspiracy fantasies of militant White Supremacy groups to the nationalist rhetoric of German Pegida supporters to the bellicose propaganda of Vladimir Putin.
The Meaning of Hitler concludes with the words of the Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer (Rethinking the Holocaust): "Humans are animals who kill other animals of the same species. They also develop the opposite, because we are herd animals. So, we develop sympathy, and love and collaboration and so on because a herd cannot exist without that. And so there are two conflicting elements in all of human society, and all attempts to fight the kind of Hitlerism […] are really the attempt to strengthen one human reaction against another human reaction. The problem that we have is not that the Nazis were inhuman, but that they were human and that we have to prevent ourselves from cannibalising ourselves as a herd."

Ralph Eue (28.03.2022)

Reviews and Commentary:

"An intellectual inquiry with burning present-day resonance. Elegant and incisive."
(The Hollywood Reporter)

"There is a historical detail that seems trivial at first glance but is actually meaningful. Hitler, as we know, was one of the most hypnotic orators of the 20th century. His speeches overflowed with seductiveness and frenzy. But none of it would have been possible had it not been for a revolution in microphone technology in the early 1930s. The older microphone technology (carbon microphones) was based on sound creating pressure fluctuations in the electrical contact resistance of graphite particles, so a speaker had to stand stock-still in front of the microphone. One couldn't move even 20 cm away from it because the signal strength was immediately reduced by half or tended towards zero. The new condenser microphones, however, allowed a speaker to move around the microphone, gesticulate, change the distance, and even use one's whole body for the speech and transform it into a physical as well as vocal performance."
(Audio Test)

Production Year

2020

Duration

Feature-Length Film (61+ Min.)

Type

Documentary

Topic

Europe, Psychology, Holocaust, National Socialism

Available Media

DCP, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Digital Film

Original Version

English (en), German (de)

DCP

Subtitles

German (full), French (fr), Spanish (Latin America), Portuguese (Brazil), Arabic (ar), Chinese (zh), Russian (ru), Czech (cs), English (en)

Note on the Format

DCP sind verschlüsselt. Nur englische Teil-UT vorhanden.

Blu-ray Disc

Subtitles

German (full), English (en), French (fr), Spanish (Latin America), Portuguese (Brazil), Arabic (ar), Chinese (zh), Russian (ru), Czech (cs)

DVD

Subtitles

German (full), German (partly), English (en), French (fr), Spanish (Latin America), Portuguese (Brazil), Arabic (ar), Chinese (zh), Russian (ru), Czech (cs)

Digital Film

Subtitles

German (full), English (en), French (fr), Spanish (Latin America), Portuguese (Brazil), Arabic (ar), Russian (ru), Czech (cs), Chinese (short)

Note on the Format

CC: en