My Fuehrer: The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler
Directed by: Dani Levy
Language: German, Hebrew, English subtitles, Yiddish
2007 | Germany | 35mm | Color And Black & White | United States Premiere | 89 min
Topics: Holocaust & World War II, History, German/Jewish Relations, Comedy, Anti-Semitism
Screening with 2007 SFJFF Freedom of Expression Award: Dani Levy
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SFJFF's screenings of My Fuehrer are dedicated to the memory of Ulrich Mühe (1953 - 2007).
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Director in person: San Francisco
Admit it: you've giggled at Hogan's Heroes and tapped your toes along with Mel Brooks' "Springtime for Hitler." After all, when Americans–especially American Jews–poke fun at Nazis, it comes with the presumption, "we fought, we won, we earned our right to ridicule." But Germans can't go there; it's verboten.
Now Dani Levy's gleefully wicked and controversial parody My Fuehrer challenges this long-held taboo. Everything about the premise is pointedly outrageous:
It is late 1944. The armies of the Third Reich are in retreat and the empire is crumbling. A depressed and whining Adolf Hitler (Helge Schneider) seems incapable of delivering an important inspirational speech on New Year's Day. In desperation, Hitler's worried staff decides to call upon his former acting teacher, Adolf Gruenbaum, a Jew (played by Ulrich Mühe, so brilliant in the recent The Lives of Others), releasing him from a concentration camp so that he can help Hitler reclaim his lost charisma.
Gruenbaum's sudden access to the Fuehrer is rich turf for staging comic revenge fantasies (Hitler must bark like a dog and parade through the chancellery in a jogging suit), and Levy delights in satirizing the craze for Hitler psychobiography (his harsh father and childhood bed-wetting come up as issues).
Because Levy is a Swiss-born Jew, he may get a free pass for poking a stick in a Nazi's eye; but he has cast and produced the film in Germany as a deliberate provocation, a puncture in the German balloon of political correctness around its Nazi past. And as in Chaplin's The Great Dictator, there is more going on here than mere ridicule. When Gruenbaum and his wife have the chance to do away with the Fuehrer, Levy seems to ask his German public, "What would you do?" And by extension, he is asking us as well.
Levy will accept the 2007 SFJFF Freedom of Expression Award following the San Francisco screening. The screening will be preceded by a conversation about Jewish identity in Germany.
Principal cast: Helge Schneider, Ulrich Mühe, Sylvester Groth, Stefan Kurt, Sergio Kleiner
Co-presented by the Goethe-Institut