Cinema: The leader doesn’t tremble!

Should we be interested in Adolf Hitler and his helpers? Shouldn’t we rather remember their many – often nameless – victims? Some people demand this, but it is wrong. This ignores the fact that a social model was established in Germany in 1933 that ruthlessly enforced its own political and economic interests. That’s why it’s right to target Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, because he shaped the image of the so-called Third Reich.

The leader and people model must be analyzed again and again in order to prevent imitators from being successful. That’s why the former Buchenwald prisoner Eugen Kogon wrote his book “The SS State” and the Swiss psychoanalyst Max Picard showed in 1945 with his study “Hitler in Ourselves” that totalitarian regimes are not tied to individual figures. He had asked himself how authoritarian structures based on mere loyalty could become established. Conditions where simply being against it – Rosa Luxemburg’s “Freedom is always the freedom of those who think differently” – costs your head. For Picard, barbarism begins at the moment when free speech is degraded to a slogan, when dissent is first shouted down and then clubbed down.

nd.DieWoche – our weekly newsletter

With our weekly newsletter nd.DieWoche look at the most important topics of the week and read them Highlights our Saturday edition on Friday. Get your free subscription here.

“Leaders and Seducers” by Joachim A. Lang starts here, both historically and structurally. You have to give him credit for his enlightening intention. Without media staging, propaganda lies and manipulation, Hitler would not have become the celebrated “Leader” who made no secret of his crimes. But to do this he needed a helper who knew his craft. Hitler found Goebbels to be the ultimate unscrupulous intellectual, careerist, opportunist and fanatic all in one. Having failed as a writer and journalist (which he justified with a Jewish conspiracy in the publishing houses), he wanted to do his doctorate under the renowned Jewish scholar Friedrich Gundolf, but that also failed. It was the prevented painter Hitler who gave the prevented author Goebbels the political stage for a barbaric smear piece.

But how exactly does seduction work that relies on the fascination of technically created images and sounds? Goebbels acts as a dramaturge of Hitler’s performances, supported by Leni Riefenstahl’s overwhelming aesthetic, which was able to stage the masses, directed by individuals, in such a way that even the lowest things seemed sublime. “Leader and Seducer” has some strong moments here. When does the little girl give a bouquet of flowers to Hitler as he drives past in an open car? Goebbels leaves nothing to chance. According to the propaganda minister, he decides what reality is.

When Hitler came out of his Führerbunker again in the spring of 1945, when the Red Army was already fighting in Berlin, to honor the last contingent of the “thousand-year Reich”, children with bazookas, his violently shaking hand also came into the picture. Goebbels rages: “The Führer doesn’t tremble!” This is the demagoguery that, blindly denying all reality, goes to its own death and drags everyone else down with it.

“The Leader and Seducer” begins in 1938 – when Hitler begins to implement his policy of conquest. How can one so suddenly switch from the previously practiced peace rhetoric to war propaganda? The assassination attempt on the German diplomat Ernst von Rath by the 17-year-old Jewish Pole Herschel Grünspan in Paris provides the reason for this. Now retaliation follows, according to Goebbels’ propaganda apparatus, which stages the pogrom night of November 9th as spontaneous anti-Jewish popular anger.

The 135 minute long film needs, above all, as paradoxical as it sounds, a convincing Goebbels actor. Because if a mere sham comedy were played here, the horror associated with this real figure would also lose credibility. But they are not tragic figures, but Hitler’s court crooks, political gamblers, who are actually performing a smear comedy of the bloodiest kind! Certainly, but art follows its own aesthetic laws. There must be something that interests us about these evil characters, we must want to discover something new, otherwise we wouldn’t need any more films about Goebbels and Hitler. Guido Knopp has already provided us with plenty of archive Berghof images in his Hitler films from the 90s.

Every actor knows how tricky it is to play Hitler or Goebbels. Bruno Ganz couldn’t get rid of his emphatically played Hitler in the bunker from “Downfall” (2004), while Ulrich Matthes as Goebbels kept a smart distance. Ulrich bother was also the propaganda minister and at the same time his double in “Goebbels and Patient” in 2001, in the Lubitsch successor to “To be or not to be”. He did it so convincingly that the film was only shown years later – and after painfully long discussions about whether it was even allowed.

So Robert Stadlober was warned when he took on the Goebbels role. He didn’t really get involved with this faun-like fanatic. The fact that he perfected the techniques of marketing and manipulation in the sense of exercising absolute power via radio and television is more often claimed than shown. Stadlober remains quite vague in his portrayal, carrying the unsympathetic nature of this careerist who wants to become the second man in the state like a protective shield.

Perhaps there is no more to be gained from this type of vassal? Yes, one thinks of Rolf Hoppe as Hermann Göring – ice cold and jovial at the same time – in István Szabó’s film adaptation of Klaus Mann’s “Mephisto” (1981) about Gustaf Gründgens as an ambitious actor and state theater director. The artist who enters into a devil’s pact with the criminal power! That was great cinema with Klaus Maria Brandauer as Gründgens, in terms of seduction – and its price! – plumbed deeply.

But Lang, who came up with an over-sweetened “Mackie Messer – Brecht’s Threepenny Film” in 2018, is not Szabó. And the Stadlober, who is too sedate, does not become a Brandauer because he lacks the restless drive of the player, which becomes nefarious. The ecstasy of the self-intoxicated egomaniac Goebbels only finds its self-destructive fulfillment in the world conflagration, which he, notoriously mendacious, celebrates as the highest sacrifice.

Despite some good scenes, “Leader and Seducer” lacks the dangerous escalation of the matter itself. There is historical documentary material, the inclusion of which seems sensible in the style of Heinrich Breloer’s docu-dramas. Holocaust survivors such as Margot Friedländer and Charlotte Knobloch also have their say. But that takes some of the dynamism out of the game scenes and also obscures the fact that this is a film explicitly about one of the main perpetrators of the Nazi regime. A psychogram by Joseph Goebbels, who was the first to use the media virtuoso to heroize crimes – most recently the murder of his own children. It’s enough to point out evil, you don’t have to label it as such.

But instead of pushing the repulsive effect of his negative hero aesthetically, Lang relies on the moral appeal. This doesn’t seem to be in the spirit of Brecht, which he likes to claim for himself.

“Leaders and Seducers”: Germany 2023. Director/writer: Joachim A. Lang. With: Robert Stadlober, Fritz Karl, Franziska Weisz. 135 min. Start: July 10th.

#ndstays – Get active and order a promotional package

Regardless of whether it is pubs, cafés, festivals or other meeting places – we want to become more visible and reach everyone who values ​​independent journalism with an attitude. We have put together a campaign package with stickers, flyers, posters and buttons that you can use to get active and support your newspaper.
To the promotional package