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Those “Downfall” videos — 10 Comments

  1. Hitler came to power, he killed millions and was responsible for the death of many millions more and for untold suffering. We cannot bring them back to life or undo that suffering.

    Whatever name or tag you chose to call this human monster it can not fit him with what he done to millions of innocents under his control or run after to kill them.

    But do we learn some thing from that disaster of humanity?

    This is the question of today we still have “millions killed, millions we are responsible for their death of many millions more and for untold suffering. We cannot bring them back to life but we may able to undo that suffering.”

  2. Virginia Heffernan had a very different take on the videos:

    But what’s the larger point of the “Downfall” remixes? “Hillary’s Downfall,” from May [2008], has Ganz in his Hitler garb speak for Hillary Clinton. Desperately denying that Obama will be the Democratic nominee, she says: “These little state primaries are not important. The superdelegates will secure my victory.”

    That’s when Ganz takes off his glasses, his left hand shaking. In the best parodies – and “Hillary’s Downfall” is a good one – Ganz embodies the role assigned him by the parodist by the time his glasses come off. This is the moment in the original film after Hitler has been informed that he cannot win; as he eases up on denial, he’s coming down on fury. In “Hillary’s Downfall,” you can’t believe how quickly the haircut and costume recede and the Hitler factor fades, eclipsed by Ganz’s tough old fork-tongued grandpa performance. Hitler becomes not the author of the Holocaust but a salty dog who, though all is lost, doesn’t stop piercing pretense and speaking in slangy, heartfelt language, expressing the most deeply felt needs of the human id. We may have repressed that speak-for-the-people Hitler, the one he decided to be in “Mein Kampf”; but in the form of these videos, he has returned.

    Isn’t that the outcome that Adolf Hitler, the historical figure, sought? Didn’t he see himself as the brute voice of the everyman unconscious?

    How grim – how perplexing, how unsettling – that after more than 60 years of trying to cast and recast Hitler to make sense of him, we may have arrived at a version of Hitler that takes him exactly at his word.

  3. “the power to make Hitler in all his raging vileness a figure of ludicrousness.”
    Like Chaplin did with the “Great Dictator”. Strangely enough he, nor anyone else, gave the same treatment to “Uncle Joe” or Lenin, Trotski, …

    I have to say I rather like (some of) the downfall parodies. But they tend to reduce “evil” to Hitler and reducing everything to Hitler has been done more than enough. The pit we are in today isn’t the result of Hitler or Hitler’s heirs but of marxism and its practitioners.

  4. Ernst Lubitsch’s “To Be or Not to Be” is another. Release before America entered WWII, it ridicules Hitler while recognizing his capacity for evil.

  5. It’s more like Godwin on steroids. It’s using Hitler to apply to today’s figures.

    I’m not sure it’s much about Hitler so much as the performance of going on a rage while having people obey you in fear.

  6. Godwin was talking about losing arguments in debate, but the way these videos are done is using rhetoric to convince, it’s not a cheap debate trick that can lose.

  7. Part of the reason why I find Mel Brooks’ “The Producers” such a great film. The film works on its own; its a good story, you care about the characters, and it’s extraordinarily funny, but it also makes a complete and utter mockery of Hitler, the Nazis, the German people, German culture, Germn language…

    It’s more damaging to Hitler and the legacy of the Nazis that their movement be a laughingstock, than a pwerful regime that is to be feared. It’s a wonderful testament to Mr. Brooks’ talent that he so successfully made a ridicule of Hitler. It is an example of the pen being mightier than the sword regarding historical perspective.

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