Word: hitler
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...film's director Dani Levy, who is Jewish, said he had fully expected a "tsunami of controversy." But he said he was also tired of seeing Hitler depicted only in grainy documentaries whose visual language, he argued, has become "routine...
Despite the tangible presence of reminders of the Third Reich all over Berlin - from the bullet-scarred buildings near the Reichstag to the converted Wehrmacht communications headquarters in which my daughter's school is located - its tragic history is, at the same time, oddly invisible. Depictions of Adolf Hitler and Nazi symbols are mostly outlawed in Germany, and it remains something of a taboo to mention him in day-to-day conversation. So, it has been a bit of a shock in recent days to see posters plastered on subway walls advertising Mein Fuhrer, a new film about the German...
...Even before the film opened in Berlin this week, it had sparked a huge debate in the German commentariat. Critics attacked it for making light of Germany's past. They questioned the idea of humanizing Hitler, even as a pathetic loser, and of treating the Holocaust in a comedy. Rolf Hochhuth, 75, the prominent German dramatist who , coincidentally, is now staging his own play about Hitler, condemned the movie for "tampering with history." Even the film's lead actor, the popular comedian Helge Schneider, admitted he now regrets doing the film. Adjustments in the editing suite focused the film...
...There is a certain kind of laughing that brings knowledge and understanding," Levy said. Not all reviews have been damning. Writing in the weekly magazine Der Spiegel, critic Daniel Haas praised Levy for "dar[ing] the outrageous.... The film is not only about Hitler but about the way in which we are dealing with the brown terror," he said. In fact, after more than a half century of struggling with Hitler's calamitous legacy, Germans do appear to be taking a slightly less tortured view of their past. Downfall, a serious treatment of Hitler's last days, appeared in cinemas...
...father is a small-business owner; a friend is a lawyer; my brother is a doctor. We are not even candidates to be the Person of the Year. The pool of choices should be limited to Presidents, generals, Prime Ministers and Popes. Names like Roosevelt, Truman, Elizabeth II, Hitler, Stalin and John Paul II should be succeeded by other similarly important and influential ones. We are simply people with jobs, families and ordinary lives. The Person of the Year should be extraordinary. Time's choice was anything but. Scott Flatto Brookline, Massachusetts...