Word: hitler
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...measures-including the mass May Day arrests of antiwar protesters in Washington in 1971-were part of a trend toward repression by the Government. Mitchell accurately enough accused the protesters of "bullying people, shouting down those who disagreed with them," but he also venomously compared them with "Hitler's Brownshirts." He seemed unflustered when the U.S. Supreme Court last June declared some of his wiretapping orders unconstitutional...
...same, Adolf Hitler's presence never vanishes. His career is still the fundamental trauma of the century, the wound through which our shared humanity leaks. Yet it is a disconcerting thought that grandparents are alive today who were not born when World War II broke out. Since it ended, Hitler's life has furnished material for a thousand historical theses. But of late it has moved into the twin fields of memoir and entertainment. Since Albert Speer's Inside the Third Reich was published in 1970, one might suppose that everyone who had anything to do with...
...personality: the stiff, corseted movements, the crescendos of temper, the harsh, mesmeric voice grinding out its long postprandial diatribes against traitors, smokers and meat eaters. The words rebound from the elephant-colored walls of the bunker as once they had echoed down the parade grounds of the Third Reich. Hitler's pallid hand, shaking from Dr. Morell's amphetamine capsules, spoons dollops of Schlag onto a slab of chocolate cake. The movie is the world's most overdocumented Grand Guignol, the phantom of history's opera at bay in the foundations of the Fuhrer...
...that is precisely the trouble with the film. Perhaps any dramatic version, no matter how well acted or researched, must end as an opera about an opera, Gödtterddmmerung at two removes. We know about the myth of Hitler. It has saturated our culture. Our stock image of murderous power is not Stalin quietly chewing a pipe, but Hitler noisily chewing a carpet. The details slip; not so many people nowadays know or care who Baldur von Schirach was or what the Roehm putsch signified. But the broad trajectory of Hitler's career, let alone its grisly climax...
This is not, of course, an accident. Hitler himself would have approved the mythic stature (if not the odium) that posterity has accorded him: his entire life was conceived as a prodigious drama - "Qualis artifex pereo!" as Nero is supposed to have said ("What an artist dies with me!"). Even the name of his superstate, the Tausendjahrige Reich, or Thousand-Year Reich, was derived from prophetic myths about the Christian millennium: a time when, after a cosmic battle between Christ and Antichrist, the forces of evil are locked away forever, the dialectic of history is abolished, and a reign...