German comedy about Hitler criticized

BERLIN - A new German comedy film about Adolf Hitler treads on dangerous ground and could inadvertently lead to increased anti-Semitism, said a top Jewish leader. Stephan Kramer, general secretary of Germany's Central Council of Jews, said Mein Fuehrer, which opened in Germany on Thursday, January 11, could generate empathy for the former Nazi dictator by its portrayal of him as a comic figure who had a bad childhood. "It gets people to suffer with him, to say `this poor guy," said Kramer, who said Wednesday he has seen large parts of the film already. In the film, director Dani Levy, a Swiss-born Jew who lives in Berlin, portrays Hitler as a drug addict who plays with a toy battleship in the bathtub, dresses his dog in a Nazi uniform, and takes acting tips from a Jewish concentration camp inmate. Levy has said that the movie, whose full title is Mein Fuehrer: The Truly Truest Truth about Adolf Hitler, is meant to explain for himself how it was possible for Germans to follow Hitler, ultimately dragging the nation into war and the Holocaust. "I had the feeling that I must do it with another genre, do it by being able to exaggerate through comedy," Levy told The Associated Press. But Kramer said because of the way Hitler is depicted, there is too much room for impressionable people, particularly Germany's younger generation, to be influenced — especially at a time where far-right parties have made inroads in some eastern German states. "People on the street may take it in the wrong way, that Hitler was just a person to laugh about," Kramer said in a telephone interview. "I heard a statement that it is better to laugh about him than not know about him, but I don't know." He said treating Hitler in a comic way is not a taboo subject, citing Charlie Chaplin's classic The Great Dictator as what he considers a good example of how it can be done. He added that Levy's being Jewish did not necessarily give him any special insight. "Being Jewish does not give any guarantee that the filmmaker will succeed with his task, and I think he failed," Kramer said. "Chaplin wasn't Jewish and he succeeded; he did a great job with The Great Dictator; he did it in a cynical way." - AP