H-German Rippey on , 'Hitler: The Rise of Evil' Review published on Thursday, May 1, 2003 Hitler: The Rise of Evil. Alliance Atlantis. Reviewed by Theodore Rippey Published on H-German (May, 2003) High Stakes, Small Screen Only in his wildest speculation could Nietzsche have foreseen the uses and abuses to which history would be put in its age of technical reproducibility, and Marx could scarcely have imagined the farce- potential formed by the convergence of history and television. Were that they were here with us to witness the culture industry's latest self-aggrandizing attempt to Say Something Important. They could have made plenty of hay of <cite>Hitler: The Rise of Evil</cite>. Farcical indeed (even if unintentionally so) and abusive in any number of ways, the two-part series also offers plenty of fuel for the effort to continue Karl's musings on base/superstructure and re-hash Friedrich's principle of eternal recurrence. <p> <br> The Hitler Story <p> We have known at least since <cite>The Great Dictator</cite> that one can use Hitler to make a hit, and the Fuehrer's allure (before, during, and after the Third Reich) has been grappled with through the years by such able practitioners of pen- and/or camera craft as Brecht, Tabori, Syberberg, Delillo, and Mel Brooks, to name but a few. Whether comic or deadpan, creative works have as often sidestepped the psychological-realist pretense of traditional historical fiction when it comes to this particular man as they have tried to explain who Hitler was. Ironically, charting the chilling labyrinth of Hitler's psyche has been a task largely left to historians (of all kinds), and since no one actually reads the academic stuff, the History Channel (which my grad school roommate dubbed The Hitler Channel) has provided society at large a convenient and compelling thumbnail that I will call The Hitler Story. It goes like this: Hitler was a nasty and hateful guy, and he especially hated the Jews. He was crazy, but he was also a genius. He had the power to mesmerize people, and he used his evil gifts to line up an entire nation in lock-step behind him and march them into destruction. Anyone who resisted his charismatic pull was run out of the country, tossed in jail, or shot on the spot. That's about it. <p> CBS allotted Alliance and Duguay four hours of air to tell their tale. The series's Web site flaunts its scholar-consultants and claims the film focuses "closely on how the embittered, politically fragmented and economically buffeted German society after World War I made that ascent possible." But what do they really make of their chance to challenge and enlighten the sweeps-week audience? Did they add something new to The Hitler Story, or is their "television event of the season!" just more of the same? <p> <br> Night 1 <p> Segment 1: Strength, Determination, Purity, and a Naked Blonde <p> Fasten your seatbelts. It's time to go from Linz, 1899, to the Western Front, 1918, in seventeen minutes. Before the opening credits even conclude, we've seen young "Adi" beaten by his father (who cites Parsifal as the embodiment of the above-mentioned virtues) and doted on by Mutti Clara (Stockard Channing). Even as a boy, Hitler has that look in his eye (Duguay is liberal with his close-ups right from the outset), and the score's generous helpings of creepy, low-register strings (Normand Corbeil) prod us into visceral acknowledgment of the presence of evil. One telling scene begins with an extreme close-up of young Adolf's fork as it pierces the skin of that classic German phallic symbol, a sausage. The next thing we know, papa is collapsing in his death throes as a steely Adi turns back to his plate rather Citation: H-Net Reviews. Rippey on , 'Hitler: The Rise of Evil'. H-German. 09-30-2014. https://networks.h-net.org/node/35008/reviews/45540/rippey-hitler-rise-evil Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-German than help. Nothing if not determined, a juvenile Hitler castigates his breast-cancer-stricken mother for doing "anything to ruin my career." He makes it to the art academy nonetheless, but as we see (in full view--good way to stop the accidental viewer from changing channels), Hitler folds in the face of the figure-drawing model's blond-braided, bare glory. Life is hard for a budding artist with minimal talent, a castrating father, and a smothering mother, it would appear. (It is Vienna, after all, so the writers take the opportunity to play Freud.) Already penniless, Hitler is told by his teacher that the people in his paintings "have no life to them." (Get it? He's a sociopath.) His existential dilemma and economic plight make his mind fertile ground for anti-Semitic conspiracy theory--he happens along to a Karl Luegar speech in one scene--and he's soon off to Germany, then to the trenches to fight for his people. During the war we "learn" that Hitler is manipulative, cruel (he beats his dog), and obsessively anti-Semitic. <p> Segment 2: Emergency <p> Hitler finally meets a man he can look up to, a certain Captain Roehm (Peter Stormare), who rolls in with a Freikorps detachment as the scene opens to gun down some reds and restore German order and pride. (The score in this sequence is disturbingly heroic.) Hired as an informant by the army after the Bavarian Soviet is bloodily dispatched, Hitler informs a superior officer that the Jews should and (crucially) could be got rid of. Duguay frames Carlyle's face tightly and shoots him from below as he poses the ominous question, "Can you imagine a world without them?" Again, the strings are there to underscore the point. In the next shot, Roehm looks on with interest, and Hitler has begun to catch others' interest as well. The crowds for his beer-hall speeches are growing, and journalist Fritz Gerlich (our Good German for the evening, played by Matthew Modine) is in the seats for one particularly fiery session. The TV audience of course knows what the beer-hall audience doesn't, but we are encouraged to sympathize (empathize?) with them as they are swept away by the gifted orator. Duguay reaches into his bag of tricks to take us to that emotional place: he uses a dizzying, <cite>ER</cite>-style, 360-degree tracking shot to whirl us around Hitler as he delivers a rousing bit about purifying the nation. No shock, then, that nurse Carol Hathaway enters the story in the next sequence. Julianna Margulies plays Helene Hanfstaengl, and she and her husband, Ernst (Liev Schreiber), later introduce Hitler to his first deep pockets. <p> Segment 3: "One Big Political Brawl" <p> More beer-hall bluster, and Duguay starts quoting Riefenstahl here with the occasional low camera angle and nifty bit of mass- leader choreography. We spend some time in Friedrich Hollaender's Tingel-Tangel cabaret (he and Hanfstaengl were school pals), but we get more insight into Blandine Ebinger/Nicole Marischka's bustier than into leftist satire. Hollaender does note that he's going to see Hitler because he "needs new material," and Hanfstaengl, curious, tags along. Hanfstaengl becomes smitten, and the alliance of capitalism and fascism is struck. As Hitler leads the crowd in repeated cheers of "we will triumph," we're treated to another dramatic swoop of the camera. (This one hurtles over the heads of the crowd right into the Fuehrer's face). The next day, Hanfstaengl's piano rendition of Wagner jerks a tear from Adolf, and the businessman explains to the corporal the importance of rich backers. Gerlich is warming up to Hitler as well, or at least finding him a fascinating contributor to the "big political brawl" that should yield Germany a new leader and a new sense of direction. <p> Segment 4: "I Think It's Very Hypnotic" <p> Hitler shows up in his best Lederhosen for a society dinner at the Hanfstaengls. He alienates a baron whose father was Jewish but wins new supporters, among them another captain (Goering, played by Chris Larkin). Hitler takes the warm reception as an opportunity to reveal his new party symbol. With the swastika poster stretched across his midsection, he turns to Frau Hanfstaengl and asks her opinion. She scans the artist's work (but only that? Margulies's eye movements and facial expressions are expertly ambivalent here) and characterizes what she sees as "very hypnotic." It looks like she's an easy mark for Adolf--her dress and shawl mark her pre-existing Citation: H-Net Reviews. Rippey on , 'Hitler: The Rise of Evil'. H-German. 09-30-2014. https://networks.h-net.org/node/35008/reviews/45540/rippey-hitler-rise-evil Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-German preference for red and black. More beer-hall oratory follows, and Hitler maneuvers Anton Drexler out of, and himself into, control of the party. It is 1921. <p> Segment 5: Hitler Was a Crumby Guy <p> Remember the post-war German inflation? It has only now come to the writers' minds, and they "teach" us about it by having Hitler snarl something about wheelbarrows not being large enough to haul all the money it takes to buy a loaf of bread. Commissar von Kahr orders Hitler to desist, so Hitler visits the influential Gerlich on Hanfstaengl's advice.