One of the final taboos in Germany is the portrayal of Adolf Hitler in a central role on screen.
He has been depicted sometimes as white space, but more usually he has little more than a cameo part, often shot from behind.
But now, nearly 60 years after his death, two lavish German film productions set in the Third Reich are breaking that taboo.
Later this year and early next German viewers will have the chance to see two Hitlers — in Bernd Eichinger’s spectacular film The Downfall and in The Devil’s Architect, a three-part semi-documentary television series by Heinrich Breloer.
Both Eichinger and Breloer are accomplished and award-winning directors, and their projects feature Hitler as a fully formed main character.
The productions have prompted a debate inside Germany as to whether, with virtually all of Hitler’s inner circle now dead, the Third Reich is now a fitting subject for artistic and imaginative treatment.
”Obviously Hitler is a very problematic person for Germans,” said Dr Monika Flacke, the curator of Berlin’s German Historical Museum.
”He was responsible for WW II and the Holocaust. There is something to the thesis that if you show him on screen you are in danger of making him human and therefore sympathetic.”
Other cultural commentators believe that with most of those directly involved in the second world war now dead, the traumatic events of the Nazi era are finally slipping into posterity.
”If an actor can now play Hitler in Germany that means the Third Reich has become a part of history.
”It’s no longer the painful present,” said Hermann Kappelhoff, professor of film studies at Berlin’s Free University.
But he added: ”I’m not totally convinced by this argument, however.”
Frank Schirmacher, writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, added: ”This much is clear: both movies break with the traditional German preoccupation with the Third Reich.
”[They] are the most important historical projects in many years.”
The Downfall deals with the final days of the Nazi regime.
It will even show Hitler and Eva Braun committing suicide in his Berlin bunker on April 30 1945, as Russian soldiers close in.
The Devil’s Architect, meanwhile, will show Hitler’s relationship with his personal architect, Albert Speer. Other leading Nazis appear in the series as well.
Himmler, Göring and Goebbels all make appearances alongside other defendants at the Nuremberg trials.
Even Eva Braun is included, as are minor figures who served the Third Reich as switchboard operators, cleaners and secretaries.
Breloer meticulously researched Albert Speer, who spent 20 years in Spandau jail after the war, where he wrote his celebrated memoirs.
The series includes new revelations about Speer, who was also Hitler’s minister for armaments, based on Breloer’s discoveries in Germany’s federal archives. They are apparently alarming.
The director met Speer in 1980, just before his death in 1981, and interviewed 23 people who knew him, including three of his children.
”We see Hitler in a new light,” he said.
Hitler’s Reichskanzlei, his Berlin chancellery building, was carefully recreated in a studio in Cologne for the television series.
To prepare himself for his role as Hitler in Breloer’s programme, the actor Tobias Moretti spent hours listening to a tape secretly recorded in 1942 by a Finnish radio technician.
The tape, discovered only a few years ago, features Hitler speaking in a normal voice.
Eichinger is also striving for a realistic portrayal of Hitler in The Downfall.
The director said recently: ”We are making a grand, epic feature film. Authenticity is the top priority.”
In Eichinger’s production Bruno Ganz plays the führer. Ganz is Germany’s answer to Jeremy Irons, and one of the country’s most famous actors. According to reports, he hesitated before taking the role.
The film, which was shot in Berlin, Munich and St Petersburg, begins on April 20 1945 — Hitler’s 56th birthday — with the Soviet army encircling the German capital.
Both films come at a time when WW II is being freshly debated in Germany, amid an explosion of memoirs which deal with the trauma of the Third Reich as personal and family history. One of the runaway bestsellers of the summer in Germany has been My Father’s Land, written by the journalist Wibke Bruhns, whose father was executed for his involvement in the unsuccessful July 20 1944 plot to kill Hitler.
”Everybody in Germany has a picture of Hitler in their minds. Up until now though this has been based on six or seven documentaries,” Kappelhoff said.
”These films are an experiment in something different.” – Guardian Unlimited Â