Read news from:
Austria
SHARE
COPY LINK

HITLER

Hitler actor warns of threat to democracy

Oliver Masucci, the actor who plays Hitler in satirical film Er Ist Wieder Da (Look Who's Back), told ARD news on Monday that Germany must be careful to safeguard its democracy after a barrage of far-right comments from ordinary people.

Published: 6 October 2015 11:08 CEST
Hitler actor warns of threat to democracy
Oliver Massuci in costume as Hitler stretches a fist out over Berlin. Photo: Constantin Film Verleih GmbH/DPA

With director David Wnendt, Masucci travelled around the country by car for a month, interacting with ordinary people while dressed as the Nazi leader and filming the results with two cameras.

“They forgot relatively quickly that the two cameras were running and began to pour their hearts out to this man, to say what was really on their minds,” Masucci told ARD public television.

“And then shortly afterwards we saw that in the Pegida movement, that didn't surprise us that they suddenly went into the streets. Because this middle-class that's swinging to the right, we'd already seen all that on camera.”

After Pegida (“Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West”) burst onto the national scene with increasingly large anti-Islam demonstrations in Dresden, they were often referred to as “Pinstripe Nazis” by commentators because of the movement's predominantly middle-class participants.

Not just Dresden

But the phenomenon was far from restricted to Dresden or the former communist east German states, Wnendt told ARD.

Rather than insulting Hitler or confronting him, people seemed happy to see and chat with the man behind history's most infamous genocide.

“By the end of our filming, our questions had totally changed. How can it be that so many people react so positively to Hitler, accept him like that?” he asked.

The pair pointed to one incident when they paid an actor to shout anti-Germany slogans among football fans in Berlin during the 2014 World Cup.

He was set upon by a violent group and Wnendt had to call security “so that he didn't end up hung from the nearest tree”.

“We wanted to see if you could escalate something like that, if it works. And sadly it did work,” Masucci said.

'Trivializing effect'

Wnendt's film – in cinemas on Thursday – is based on the 2012 book of the same name by comic Timur Vermes, which imagines the consequences after Hitler wakes up hale and hearty in Berlin in 2011.

By force of will and the public's ability to find him funny rather than terrifying, he gradually gains a fanbase for his own TV show and online presence.

Critics were divided in their reaction to the book, with Die Zeit calling it “shockingly plausible” while the Süddeutsche Zeitung argued that it “had a trivializing effect by showing Hitler as a funny guy”.

By August 2015, the book had sold more than two million copies in German as well as 300,000 audiobooks, and was being licensed for publication in more than 40 countries.

OPERA

Hitler’s justly forgotten opera attempt goes on display in Austria

Adolf Hitler's admiration for German composer Richard Wagner is well-documented, but that the Nazi dictator attempted to write an opera himself will come as a surprise to many.

Published: 1 March 2020 07:34 CET
Hitler's justly forgotten opera attempt goes on display in Austria
A page from 'Wieland the Smith' on display at the museum. Photo: Joe Klamar/AFP
Nevertheless, a page of the work, entitled “Wieland der Schmied” (Wieland the Smith), goes on display to the public for the first time in a new exhibition on the “Young Hitler” opening in Austria this weekend.
   
A piano sketch of the first page, made by one of Hitler's few friends as a young man, August Kubizek, dates from 1908 when the future Nazi leader would have been around 20.   
 
Long speculated about, but never before seen in public, the manuscript was apparently written after Hitler had had only a few months of piano lessons, says Christian Rapp, one of the exhibition's curators.
   
And it clearly demonstrated the future dictator's “inflated sense of his own abilities”, Rapp told AFP.
   
The single sheet is believed to be the only surviving page of an ambitious project based on Germanic mythology that closely apes an unfinished work of the same name by Wagner himself.
   
The exhibition, entitled “Young Hitler: the Formative Years of a Dictator”, opens in Sankt Poelten in Lower Austria on Saturday and among the exhibits is a range of objects belonging to Hitler collected by Kubizek between 1907 and
1920.
 
Grandiose delusions
 
Kubizek initially kept them as mementos of his own youth before later realising they might be of historical importance.
   
They include letters and postcards written by Hitler to Kubizek, as well as paintings and architectural sketches by the young man — who was born on April 20, 1889 in the Austrian town of Braunau am Inn and whose artistic abilities
regularly fell short of his grandiose ambitions.
   
He sat the entrance examination for admission to Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts in both 1907 and 1908, but failed both times. Nevertheless, Hitler was always quick to find a scapegoat for his failures, said Rapp.
   
“Whenever something went wrong, it was always somebody else's fault, not his own,” the expert said.
   
Co-curator Hannes Leidinger said that even those who knew Hitler at a tender age in Austria testified to his “intransigent, aggressive” character.
 
For Rapp, the young Hitler “was already 'a bomb', if you like. World War I provided the fuse and then it was ignited in Germany — but you can make out the ingredients during his time here in Austria”.
   
In addition to tracing Hitler's personal history, the exhibition also seeks to explore the political and social context in Austria at the turn of the 20th century.
   
In particular, it tries to explain how many of the ideas that would gain such prominence in Nazi ideology — racism, anti-Semitism, militarism — had long since reached the mainstream of Austrian society, including among
sections of the left.
   
Austria has had a complex relationship with its Nazi past. For decades after World War II, successive Austrian governments insisted the country was a victim of the Nazi regime and sought to downplay the
complicity of many Austrians in the Nazis' crimes.
   
The curators said they hoped the exhibition would help shed light on Hitler's character, and also dispel the ideas that underpinned his genocidal ideology.
   
“Ways of thinking take so long to become widespread in a society, and they take as long to be dismantled… we will have work at that for decades,” Rapp said.