Hitler: A man for our time.... or for any time.... or a nightmare

The satirical German comedy 'Look Who's Back' hit so many nails on the head that I find my head still spinning long after watching it. The feature-length movie includes documentary-style shots and unrehearsed scenes with ordinary passersby. Showing Hitler on screen is one thing, showing him as a man of the moment who finds many modern Germans agreeing with his views and ideas, that is new in the German experience. Not too long ago such matter-of-fact in-your-face honest film making that shakes the very core of German society, its identity and values, showing real Germans voicing agreement with the ideas of a 125-year-old Hitler, would have been unthinkable. How can this be true, after all Germany is considered one of the main support pillars holding up the whole edifice of the EU, a beacon for democracy and the highest human values.

This movie represents a watershed moment for a nation that for 70 years has had to look long and hard into the mirror of its own past and face the evil that their great grandparents' votes once unleashed on to this world. They have learned to accept that they carry within them, and indeed that all of us carry within us, such a capacity for evil. Most understand how easy it is to release that evil, it just takes a charismatic orator/leader a few appealing sound bites and emotion-laden words that hit home and evil can be unleashed again from its Pandora's-box-like prison.

Comedy is often used as a vehicle to relay very serious ideas in a way that does not preach or patronise or talk down to an audience. We live in an age that is challenging in so many ways, an age that tests the patience of even the most angelic, peace loving and hospitable of host nations: the age of the migrant. Don't get me wrong, there have always been migrants, there have always been wars and massacres that have instigated mass migration and there have always been host countries that have feared cultural dilution, that have feared the migrant and what that migrant will take away from them, instead of focusing on what that migrant will add to their society. These things are not new. What is new is the unique times we live in.

The typical modern migrant is a social-media-connected savvy shopper of sorts. He/she knows exactly what they want. They don't want to settle in second-best host nations (Lebanon, Turkey, Serbia, etc...) Their minds are made up, they know their final destination because that place has been pumped up and spun up through culture and social media, through television and all manner of propaganda and word of mouth to resemble a paradise. 

In reality, Europe is not a paradise, how can it be, its full of people! Its full of human beings struggling every day to pay bills, tied to jobs they probably don't like very much because if they don't work they can't pay their phone bill, or treat their friends to drinks at the pub, or have self respect. Europe is full of normal people, that are a product of their consumer age, just like the rest of us are, they are not blessed, at least no more than the rest of us are, and like the rest of us they carry with them the gene for evil.

Normally, that gene only becomes active in a small proportion of people in any society; criminals are as a rule outside society and are not admired or praised or emulated. But, we must remember, humans are primates and as primates we are driven by violent instinct to protect what is ours. Migrants are often innocents, the youngest and most naive of their society who think that Europeans have evolved beyond that violent primate instinct. Of course, they are wrong.

This movie often shows 'Hitler' interacting with ordinary people in Germany (i.e. not actors). He is shown talking to them as a friend chats with a friend at the park or in the pub or coffee house, talking about ordinary people's troubles and woes: unemployment, child poverty, old age poverty, violent migrant gangs, and so on and so forth. These people are not coached, I don't think, and their reaction is for the most part to laugh at what is surely a comedian dressed up as Hitler immersed in his role. They laugh and smile and take a selfie with Hitler. But others speak their mind, talk about bringing back labor camps, sending migrants back from where they came, one even said (off camera) that he would follow Hitler if he came back from the grave. Many others looked bemused and disoriented, as if cognisant and suddenly aware of the presence of the camera they seemed to be mentally fishing for an appropriate response that would be socially acceptable. In fact, the most violent response to Hitler in the film was from an actress playing a part, she rails violently against Hitler calling him criminal and shouts at him to leave her apartment.

The film ends with a very convincing Hitler sitting in full uniform in the back seat of a 1970's open-top Mercedes Benz with his new 'strong woman'/press officer/media consultant sitting beside him, being driven around modern Berlin waving to people who for the most part smile and wave back. Is this a dystopian nightmarish vision of a new world catastrophe about to unfold? Perhaps, but perhaps it is just ordinary people smiling at a funny man in a moustache and slicked black hair.

Just like so many of us in the Arab world have dismissed and laughed at our outlandish dictators in their amusing garb and their dark sunglasses riding their open-top German luxury mobiles, so too modern Europeans find Hitler, it would seem, funny. But, dangerous? The only one who thinks that finds himself in a padded room in the film.

The artist Sacha Baron Cohen caught on to this huge reservoir of potential comedic energy inherent in every unhinged dictator and put it to brilliant use in his Borat films. But, while it is palatable to laugh away and dismiss such visions on screen, it should be remembered that often comedy comes out of tragedy, out of a very dark place. Words spoken in jest come from very real and very human first hand experiences with evil, the evil that resides in each of us no matter what our origins, skin colour or faith. We are primates, violence is an instinctive human response option, whereas evil is a term used by human cultures to describe aspects of human behaviour that shake us to our very core. But this word is not like the imaginary menagerie of mythic creatures carved on to cathedral battlements, evil describes something very real. Evil requires no fanfare, it does not announce its presence too loudly, it whispers in our ears.

This movie is a badly needed look in the mirror for so many Europeans and indeed for all of us, it should spur us on to refocus away from the migrant as the source of all woes in society and remember 1933. How Trump-like Adolf must have seemed to many German voters back then. Today, we see evil rising again, its siren's call so mesmerising and compelling. If we think it is unthinkable for a madman to be elected to the highest public office in any first world Western country, we should think again. In 1933, the people of Europe and the Americas were quite modern. The 1920s were referred to as the 'Modern Age', and people then thought of themselves as very avant-garde indeed, and who could argue, just look at the huge social changes of the roaring 20s. Who back then could have imagined Hitler's nightmare.