In the darkened Berlin cinema, the first voice to speak sounds like a friendly Austrian country priest.
That this is the regular – utterly unrecognisable – speaking voice of Adolf Hitler, in a secret recording from 1942, is the final triumph of Joseph Goebbels.
This is the provocative opening pitch of the new German film Führer und Verführer (Leader and Seducer): Nazi Germany may have lost the second World War but Goebbels won key propaganda battles.
Actor Robert Stadlober, in a relentless and restless performance as the great Nazi seducer, asks early on: “Does anyone know who Stalin’s propaganda chief is, or Churchill’s? Everyone knows who Goebbels is.”
Eight decades after his suicide, this hack turned spindoctor remains a household name. But few realise how effective he was in transforming Hitler from beer-hall bellower into a master of the airwaves, captivating Germans with devastating results.
Nearly 80 years on from the last days of the Nazis, documented 20 years ago in the groundbreaking film Downfall, this new demagoguery drama has a wider focus. And it opens in a different, unsettled Germany.
After spending decades – and millions – on historical research and public education, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) sits in the Bundestag in Berlin – and all 16 state parliaments.
This is the party whose former leader described the Nazi era as “bird s**t in more than 1,000 years of successful German history”. The party that, come September, may win 30 per cent support in three eastern states.
Months after The Zone of Interest took an abstract, arthouse approach to Auschwitz, Führer und Verführer is, by comparison, a cinematic fire axe.
It is not subtle but, judging by the shocked silence at the Berlin premiere on Thursday night, it is brutally effective, exhaustive and, at times, exhausting.
Original propaganda footage is mixed with making-of scenes and juxtaposed with fictional private scenes. First-person Holocaust survivor testimony interrupts the drama while, in a final gut punch, viewers are shown footage of actual shootings, hangings and other Nazi atrocities. Collapsing the distance of decades is intentional.
“The question of how this could happen is not part of our past but our present,” said Joachim A Lang, director and screenwriter, at the premiere. “We are living in a time where far-right populists are on the rise and anti-Semitic crimes and the Third Reich are trivialised.”
His show-don’t-tell approach is a conscious – and controversial – pushback against Germany’s decades-old norm of prioritising the survivor/victim perspective.
But, for some, the film’s “seduction” approach carries uncomfortable memories of the postwar years, when Germans shrugged off responsibility with the argument: it wasn’t me, it was Hitler.
“The greatest failure of this film,” argued Der Spiegel magazine, “is that it largely excludes the seduced.”
For Lang, this was a risk worth taking. After decades of holding up a mirror to the German population – with mixed results – he confronts audiences with the actual crimes of their bystander ancestors, and the real charm of their criminal leaders.
“Showing all these figures as screaming brawlers doesn’t show why our parents and grandparents fell for them,” said Lang.
For German historian Thomas Weber, based at the University of Aberdeen and a consultant on the film, the current emotional domestic debate over what is permissible in a Hitler film is just more German hand-wringing that misses the wood for the trees.
“We are living in a new era of misinformation and demagogues,” he said, “and surely looking at the last war would help us understand better the conditions and mechanisms that led to that war, and how similar they are to what we are seeing today.”
With a remarkable attention to detail – make-up, lighting and clever editing – Lang finds a back door to recreate and deconstruct the original Nazi propaganda – and its mastermind.
His Goebbels enjoys the challenge of maintaining poll ratings despite Hitler’s dithering and contradictory policies. Hammering home repetitive messages of hate and fear, the big-screen Goebbels could be talking about today’s small-screen social media when he likens propaganda to a painting: “It’s not the size that counts but the emotional impact.”
Even Hitler actor Fritz Karl, at times an eerie dictator doppelgänger, admits: “With the right advertising, any fool can take power.”
In this era of political fools, extremes and shocks, Thursday’s premiere audience needed a moment to catch their breath after more than two hours of bombardment.
For Chris Ahnert, a 32-year-old teacher who works with young offenders, taking the perpetrator perspective is a risky but timely approach.
“Increasingly in Germany we have young people who don’t want to engage with this,” he said, “and families not prepared to even admit what happened, that our families were part of this.”
Also in the audience was Georg Friedrich Prinz von Preussen, head of the house of Hohenzollern and great-great-grandson of Wilhelm II, Germany’s last Kaiser.
“This film is painful but necessary,” he said. “People didn’t fall for demons but for other, charming people.”
Decades after postwar Germany adopted “never again” as its motto, this film’s uncomfortable warning is: never say never again.
