Word: hitleritis
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...controversy is really an extension of a long-standing debate: Does explaining Hitler's evil mean excusing it? In fact, Hitler: The Rise of Evil (May 18 and 20, 9 p.m. E.T.) is far from a glowing portrait. "People said, 'Don't you run the risk of humanizing Hitler?''' says executive producer Peter Sussman. "I don't think that's a risk. We're showing that he walked and lived among us." Sussman did take pains to be sensitive, ordering that all the Nazi uniforms and props be burned after shooting, so none would end up on eBay...
When TV provokes a philosophical argument about evil, the subject matter isn't usually more profound than Rob's treachery on Survivor. But CBS tapped deeper passions when it announced its flagship mini-series for the May sweeps: a biography of the young Adolf Hitler from adolescence through his rise to power. Jewish leaders charged that the mini-series might make Hitler sympathetic, by showing him out of the context of the Holocaust, or blame his evil on an unhappy youth. In the New York Times, Maureen Dowd suggested that the network was using the project to court young viewers...
Still, the scrutiny may have helped Hitler avoid a pitfall of TV biopics: focusing on psychology--bad childhoods, thwarted ambitions--to the exclusion of history and society. Why a child becomes a man who would conceive of genocide is significant, but more crucial is how a civilized nation could let him do it. Hitler asks the latter question, admirably and intelligently...
...temptation for an actor fearful of glamorizing Hitler is to play him as either a buffoon or an obvious monster. The first choice trivializes his crimes; the second lets viewers smugly conclude they could never make the same mistake as those evil, stupid Germans. Star Robert Carlyle (The Full Monty) avoids both traps. His Hitler is a humorless paranoid whose anti-Jewish rants are laughed off by his comrades in the trenches of WW I. But after the war, he discovers his gift for rabble-rousing. He is an artist of grievance, and in bitter, between-the-wars Germany, that...
...recalling the 1945 cover of Hitler with an X across his face, you said, "But like Hitler, Saddam became the target of a U.S.-led war" [TO OUR READERS, April 21]. I have the distinct memory that Britain was in the vanguard of the Second World War for several years before the U.S. entered the struggle. Perhaps this was a classic example of leading from behind? JOHN CARR Swansea, Wales...