Watched in the cinema (113th visit in 2024)

Autumn 1938: Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels (Robert Stadlober) is in the deepest crisis of his life, both politically and privately. The "Führer" Adolf Hitler (Fritz Karl) has just forbidden him to see his Czech lover Lida Baarova (Katia Fellin) again, with whom he actually wanted to live together. Instead, he has to continue his marriage to Magda Goebbels (Franziska Weisz). In addition, his dream of becoming the second man in the state has receded into the distance. After the "Connection" of Austria and the annexation of the Sudetenland, Hitler wants open war, although the Germans, also encouraged by Goebbels' propaganda, are in the mood for peace. In the dark hours of the depressive phase, the great seducer of the people rallies for a fatal offensive: He wants to get the Germans behind Hitler's wars with disinformation that is as perfidious as it is perfected.

Director Joachim A. Lang uses the years leading up to the downfall of 1945 as a prime example to analyze the mechanisms of "fake news" manipulation that are still rampant today. To be more precise: to track them down to the thinnest ramifications, almost as if under a microscope. At the beginning, only a voice is heard off-screen, the screen remains black for the time being. A man muses in a jovial conversational tone about the combat capability of tanks in winter. Then a sign: Do you recognize this voice? It is that of Adolf Hitler, recorded in the only private tape recording that exists of the "Führer" when he was not speaking on the radio or in front of crowds. The contrast is striking: here the normal conversation of a relaxed man, there the public artificial figure of a drooling, overexcited, demagogic whipper-in. It is clear from the outset what director Lang is getting at with his semi-fictional lesson: what we know of Goebbels and Hitler is a deception for propaganda purposes. If you want to know how they enforced their policies on the people, you have to look behind the scenes and see the precise planning of exaggerations, false reports and staged mass events.

This is the great merit of the film: thanks to it, we learn in every historically verifiable detail how Goebbels proceeded to anchor the extermination of the Jews and the necessity of war in the minds of his subjects. These are the same mechanisms that are still being used today by right-wing populists, dictators and even some governments within the EU. For example, the most complete possible domination of the press and media. Many will remember the debate triggered by Chancellor Angela Merkel's public trembling. Hitler trembled too, as captured by a newsreel cameraman. But this image never reached the public, because Goebbels had all the material submitted that was to be shown in these news pictures, which were shown before the film in the cinemas, which were full at the time. And then it was said quite simply, in a commanding tone of indignation: "The Führer does not tremble". And: "I decide what is true".

The alleged mass marches were also a complete staging. Goebbels determined exactly which professional groups were brought in, who stood or sat where and when a little girl would hand the "Führer" a flower in a passing car. However: "It all had to look spontaneous and natural". Otherwise the purpose of the influence would be lost. The art lies in concealing its mechanisms. The same applies to instrumentalization through feature films. The infamous "Jud Süß" by Veit Harlan disguised its anti-Semitic thrust under the cloak of entertainment, but proved so effective in inciting hatred of the Jews that it was shown to the firing squads before the murder of millions of innocent people. Almost all other instruments seem almost harmless in comparison, since they are so widespread today: Xenophobia as well as omission, exaggeration, twisting of facts, and even deliberate fabrication.

"Führer und Verführer" will probably not trigger the same debates as Oliver Hirschbiegel's "Downfall", which also showed Hitler and his top cronies not as mere monsters or caricatures, but as people of flesh and blood. The illusion is broken by Joachim A. Lang's virtuoso montage of parallels between fiction and archive material, and even more so by the inclusion of interviews with Holocaust survivors such as Margot Friedländer and Charlotte Knobloch. The actors are also reluctant to penetrate the souls of their characters, especially Robert Stadlober, who portrays Goebbels as a fragile and vain person. Stadlober's distance goes so far that his performance seems strangely wooden and contrived - weaknesses that we have never really seen from him before.

Moreover, the film does not limit itself to dissecting the manipulation techniques, but shows the atrocities and extreme contempt for humanity of the Nazi perpetrators with full force. Presumably his intention is that no one should identify with these people. But in this respect he achieves the opposite of his educational intention. For one thing, the Hitler clique is unique in history and cannot be compared with the deeds of today's right-wing populists, whom the intention was actually to expose. And secondly, Hitler's lust for murder appears to be his private idea, with which he even surprised his close confidant Goebbels. The fact that it was the masses of people who made the war and the extermination of the Jews possible in the first place is thus unwillingly lost from view.