I would like to offer a few comments on the television film, "Hitler: the
Rise of Evil."  This is not a formal review.  Although the moderator of the
list asked originally that I write such a review, I declined because, as
anyone who visits the web site for the film, or who has an eagle eye at the
very end, will see, I am acknowledged as a consultant.  A word about the
extent of that participation: the producer of the film, Peter Sussman, asked
me to review the script and then the rough film "cuts" late in the process.
I did so and sent several letters pointing out certain errors or
misconceptions, but at a point where most of the project was already
completed.  A few of my observations could be incorporated; others could not
be.  For the record, I did so without compensation.  I realize that one
participates in such a project at one's risk: to refuse to allow an
acknowledgment is to conceal what was in fact some degree of interaction
with the producers; but to allow an acknowledgment is obviously to provide
some degree of legitimation.  However, after I worked with Peter Sussman by
e-mail, telephone, and one meeting in person, I was convinced of his good
faith in trying to tackle this very challenging task.  Of course, this was a
commercial film, not made for public television, as was the film he made on
Nuremberg a few years ago.  And like many historical dramatizations it takes
liberties for the sake of a dramatic narrative.

In light of the critiques that have been posted, let me make offer some
comments.  I think we as historians remain immensely uneasy not just when a
dramatization commits errors, but when it simplifies events or goes beyond
the record that we can document.  I certainly do.  I imagine that is why, as
was widely reported about two months before the showing, Ian Kershaw felt he
could not be publicly associated with the film.  I personally felt uneasy
with history in part because of shortcuts that had to be taken, but also
because ultimately there is still much about Hitler we cannot know. I would
feel uneasy with almost any version that might have finally been chosen
since it would necessarily end the uncertainty I retain about Hitler's
psychological make-up and behavior.  I do not believe that the personality
as portrayed is necessarily wrong.  Remember how historians such as Robert
Waite, Rudolph Binion (and Eric Erikson) have attributed different
psychological or psychoanalytical impulses to Hitler.  My feeling was that
any such version must be speculative.  So far as I know nothing in the film
is precluded by the biographical sources that we have.  The recollections of
the Hanfstaengls may be distorted, but one could extract the Hitler that was
portrayed from this source.  Geli, according to Kershaw, was a brunette, not
a blonde, but we know that Hitler's efforts at control were suffocating.
Hitler's passionate kiss of Geli in the car and the backing away from
consummating a sexual encounter with Eva Braun (whom I found too much of a
Betty Boop character) must be poetic license and, of course, they transgress
what we allow in our own narratives; but they are not excluded by  what we
know.  (Remember how historians have speculated endlessly--some denying
vociferously, some absolutely certain of its actuality, and the most recent
filmmaker confident enough to adopt the story--about Jefferson's liaison
with Sally Hemmings.)  To portray Hitler as conflicted in his erotic life (I
do not think the scenes absolutely indicated impotence) seems quite
consistent with the versions we have.

As for the early family background, my own feeling was that it too was
within the bounds of the plausible.  The beginning of the film is far more
compressed than it was at first, when there was a scene about war origins
and Hitler's earlier family life was dealt with more explicitly.  Of course
these brief scenes as well as those of Hitler's youth in Vienna provide a
dramatization of events that must necessarily be highly speculative.  Would
Hitler's mother's physician have worn what appears to be a yarmulke in
conducting a medical exam or what appears to be a chassidic hat in
sympathizing with the young Hitler?  Doubtful, and I am uneasy with that
stylization.  Still, the film did not attempt to resolve the issue that is
argued over in different biographies as to whether the Jewish physician was
hated for his inability to cure a fatal breast cancer or perhaps appreciated
for his efforts.  I agree with the critic who wrote that the scene with the
dog in the trenches seems a gratuitous effort to show cruelty and the
alleged confrontation with the Jewish officer about his medal was also
unnecessary.

Of course, there are many details that could have been fixed.  The doctor at
Pasewalk announces a "surrender," not an armistice: but would the American
audience have appreciated the distinction?  And, in fact, the terms of the
armistice seemed to many tantamount to a surrender.  The mobs in the Munich
revolution of April 1919 yell "Death to the Kaiser," when the Kaiser had
been in exile for five months, Hitler says a loaf of bread costs half a
million marks in late September l923, by which time it may have been costing
much more, etc., etc.  But these are very crowded and complicated events and
such simplifications or minor errors don't really invalidate the project.  I
am not sure that I agree with Gerhard Weinberg that an audience must have
found the Putsch portrayal confusing; those events seemed to me relatively
well done although Ludendorff, I think, is too avuncular and Kahr too slick.
What I fear an audience would find hopelessly confusing was the political
chronology from Bruening's fall to Hitler's nomination.  The
Papen-Schleicher-Hitler sequence is too skeletally done. I would like to
have seen some brief presentation of the parliamentary crisis of 1930
although one must be grateful that that breakthrough election was included.
However, the election of November 1932 and its implications for the
fragility of Hitler's tactics are omitted; the pressures on Hindenburg from
his entourage to name Hitler go unmentioned.  Still, the sense of
parliamentary intractability and breakdown is conveyed.  I would have
preferred the film to distinguish between the emergency decree of early
March l933 that suspended constitutional liberties and in effect outlawed
the Communist Party and removed its parliamentary delegation from the
Enabling Act of March 23 that gave Hitler almost total power for five years.
And of course, there was no mention of the Catholic Center's role in
providing the two-thirds majority.  And yes, it was not Roehm who was found
in bed with one of his "boys" at Wiessee on June 30, 1934, but one of his
lieutenants.  Etc., etc.

And still, it seems to me that the producers did convey the sense of much of
the political confusions as well as the brutality of these events.  I
personally think Carlyle's performance is a gifted one; he does the ranting
well, but he also conveys the political skill in small groups, and he likes
his pastries.  Peter O'Toole struck me as too much of a caricature; the
portrayal of Goebbels, I thought, lacked a sense of the arrogance cum
personal subjection.  If the chubby post-adolescent was Goering (he does
lead the parliamentary delegation after all), the role was totally
underdeveloped.  I don't know whether Roehm was Roehm, but he was
dramatically authentic and the issue of his aspirations to make the SA into
a military force and his standing up to "Adolf," emerged effectively.  But
each of us will have differing reactions to these dramatizations, as we must
when we watched portrayals of Kennedy or Roosevelt or any other political
leaders.

I was not happy with the Edmund Burke quotation and motif.  The problem was
not only that many good men (and women) did nothing; indeed many did seek to
oppose the Nazis at high personal cost, and the film itself makes one of
them, Fritz Gerlach, into its counter-protagonist.  And many men did not
merely do nothing, but did really stupid and/or bad things.  Yes, evil is
hypostasized or ontologized by the title and the overall title.  But in
contemporary America, to my own great regret, we seem to be into making evil
(as in axis of...) as such into a major historical agent.  The political
effects of this trend will, I am convinced, be far more adverse than the
aesthetic effects.

In general, I am not a partisan of biographical approaches to history; I
like those "deep impersonal forces..." no matter what the epistemological
problems.  Still, Hitler made a difference and biography is perhaps more
prevalent an approach than ever.  Yes, it would have been better had the
economic catastrophe of the Depression been emphasized.  To my mind,
Hitler's antisemitism is over-played, not as part of his make-up, but as the
source of his success.  One gets little sense how he could mock the results
of proportional representation, promise solutions to the crisis of the
economy or of parliamentarism, etc.  Still, we know how the issue of
antisemitism and the Holocaust have become so overwhelmingly present in the
professional discipline as well as the popular consciousness.  The producers
of this film represent this stage of historical consciousness.  Fifty years
ago one might have emphasized the ingrained German love of authority.

After I reviewed this material, I told Peter Sussman that he should have had
historians in from the beginning of the project, not just at the end.  It is
not that he didn't try to read the English-language material, including
Kershaw, whose first volume was obviously indispensable for the film makers.
Sussman and his scriptwriter did a lot of homework, and at many junctures
one can see how much they want to include this or that development.  But we
historians should be able to make a case that filming history involves far
more.  One needs to have a participant in the enterprise who can discuss
background factors and uncertainties, and debate what to emphasize or to
omit.   The historian has to speak for alternative interpretations and above
all for making context clear.  How a film can continually present a spectrum
of possible interpretative approaches is not clear to me.  (To tell the
possible story of Weimar's collapse is harder than to take on the task, for
instance, of presenting the alternative stories in "Copenhagen.") The media,
moreover, have popularized the docudrama genre, where the audience tends to
judge the product on how well the actors impersonate the personalities the
audience remembers.  I am not sure that we as historians have provided those
who try to work in a visual and popular medium models for conveying the
larger trends convulsing society, or how we might organize ourselves to make
this service available.  I believe that had a historian(s) been recruited
earlier one might have been able to work in some dramatic strategy for
conveying economic catastrophe as well as nationalist bitterness.  (Remember
how Hans Fellada handled this with "Little Man, What Now?")

Still, while no doubt my objectivity is limited, I do not think the result
was really so flawed as our critics have said.  Viewers who knew little of
this period would come away with some sense of the nationalist resentments,
the role of a private army, some of the dynamic within the NSDAP, some of
the institutional stalemates in Weimar, the process of imposing
authoritarianism, etc.  They saw how a radically authoritarian and
antisemitic movement could come to power without ascribing militarism,
antisemitism, authoritarianism as socially culturally impregnated national
characteristics--indeed, no doubt, some historians would say that too little
preexisting German susceptibility for Nazism was allowed for.  They could
learn a lot of admittedly confusing and fragmented history.  Yes, the
dialectic of the "normal" and the extreme did not emerge, and it was
unlikely to in a dramatization that focused on Hitler.  Yes, there was a
teleological tendency: we knew that his particular political leader was
chosen because of the denouements, not just the events depicted.
Nonetheless, in this case, while we might all lament the simplifications, I
tend to think that there was value in this enterprise and those who made the
film deserve more than just a catalogue of deficiencies.  We should remain
critical--filmmakers, dramatists, novelists should all be critiqued, just as
we are--but not on exactly the same criteria and not without asking what the
non-historian audience might learn as well as mis-learn.

Charles Maier

Humanities & Social
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