A disturbing new film on Hitler has attracted more than 350,000 spectators to sixty first-run West German theaters in only six weeks. Hitler, eine Karriere, consisting entirely of documentary footage from the Nazi period, is the work of Joachim Fest, a popular historian who in 1973 wrote a bestselling biography of Hitler. The author is no Nazi (his position as co-publisher of the Frankfurter Allge-meine Zeitung offers sufficient evidence of his stability), and his concern in making the film was in large part to bring his fellow citizens face to face with the underlying causes of Hitler’s appeal to an entire generation. But the film has been roundly condemned from many sides as actually presenting Hitler in a positive light. The French weekly news magazine Le Point concluded its article on the film with the warning: “The German newspapers have every right to be disturbed. This film wakes sleeping demons: Germany will no longer be able to forget Hitler. If the biographers continue in this vein, Hitler will soon become Germany’s Napoleon.”
How valid are such criticisms? I went to see for myself. In fairness to the author-producer, the film is certainly intended to offer a panoramic criticism of Nazism, and is in no sense an effort to whitewash Hitler. Viewers are spared neither the banality of his speeches—his constant repetition of the same propaganda lines (e.g., “Marxism must die in order for the nation to rise again”; “The Führer is the party and the party is the Führer”)—nor his unconscious descents into the absurd (his appearance in a leather flying helmet, entirely worthy of Charlie Chaplin’s “Great Dictator”). Moreover, some attempt is made to relate the Hitler phenomenon to dangerous German ideological antecedents such as Wagner. But the critics have a real point nonetheless.
Hitler-a Career unwittingly gives the Nazi era a kind of grandeur. The incredible rallies. The torchlight parades. The successful completion of the Autobahn (superhighway) system. Hitler’s own architectural models of the urban “Germania,” by which he intended to surpass ancient Babylon. The gigantic sculptures of Aryan supermen. And—above all—the enraptured faces of children and adults of all ages who saw in Hitler nothing less than a national and personal savior. Such imagery can leave the viewer with the feeling that Hitler’s career was a kind of classical tragedy—that he ought to have succeeded but was destroyed through a fatal flaw.
The new film unwittingly gives the Nazi era a kind of grandeur. Incredible rallies. The torchlight parades. Enraptured faces of children and adults as they watched Hitler.
In part, this cinematographic impression is the natural result of using so much footage prepared as propaganda under Hitler’s own direction. But Fest should have been aware of this danger and should have provided greater balance by giving equal time to the horrors and destructiveness of the Third Reich. In fact, less than half an hour of the two hour and forty-five minute film depicts the collapse of the “thousand year Reich.” Even the film’s title was insensitively chosen: would one speak of Lucifer’s “career”? For a Satan or a Hitler, “fall,” not “career,” is the mot juste.
The problem of viewer reaction is heightened in the Germany of 1977 by the fact that a generation has had virtually no exposure to the Führer through its schooling. The weekly Der Spiegel recently published extracts from a forthcoming book containing the opinions of some 3,000 German youth, ages ten to nineteen, as to who Hitler was; not at all atypical were comments such as: “creator of the Federal Republic [West Germany]”; “a communist”; “a killer of 50,000 [sic] Jews”; “as my grandfather says, under him there were no hippies or terrorists and you could take a walk at night without being attacked.” Such appalling ignorance of the real Hitler is what makes Fest’s film so potentially dangerous: in the materialist vacuum of the West Germany of the moment, where even West Berlin’s Free University is a focal center of leftist radicalism, the Hitler of Fest’s documentary could well elicit nostalgia for a supposed lost ideal rather than repentance for and disgust over the idolatry of worshiping one of history’s most demonic anti-heroes.
What are the concrete lessons to be learned from Hitler—a Career? Here are a few that were particularly driven home to me. Hitler continually played on the (legitimate) fears of Marxism to gain support. May we evangelicals mature sufficiently not to allow the spectre of the left to drive us to a political, economic, or social rightism that can be as foreign to the Gospel as is the radicalism we oppose. Hitler had a gigantic following—representing all ages. The Third Reich simply cannot be treated as an alien system imposed on unwilling subjects by a few maniacs. When Hitler returned to Berlin after celebrating in Paris the rape of France, the common people literally made the Berlin streets into a carpet of flowers for him. Austria entered the Reich not by force but by referendum. But even if Hitler’s rule could be considered a “popular” government, would it have been any less wrong? Hitler should always remind us of the dangers of uncontrolled national sovereignty (even our own), and of the fact that popular movements can themselves be thoroughly perverse. Human rights are more fundamental than any political theory (including democracy), and God’s scriptural ethic must be the final judge of the acts of men. Hitler possessed genuine charisma. A generation was captured by his sincerity and thoroughgoing belief in his own messianic dream, his spellbinding oratorical skill in conveying his message, his expressions of love for children and animals, and his willingness to accept religious reverence and adulation. The pietists (a not insignificant segment of our evangelical community), characterized by eagerness to recognize and follow “spiritual leadership” and cults of personality, should be among the first to learn from the example of Hitler that “many false Christs and false prophets are gone out into the world” (Mark 13:22; 1 John 4:1), and that the spirits of the age are only rightly discerned by the word of the scriptural Christ.
