Hitler Before the Führer

ecause Menno Meyjes's film "Max" presents a humanized portrait of the young Adolf Hitler as a desperately ambitious young painter, it has been prejudged in some quarters as an inappropriately sympathetic apologia for one of history's monsters. But as the film observes the edgy relationship of Hitler (Noah Taylor) and Max Rothman (John Cusack), the warmly solicitous (and fictional) German-Jewish art dealer who advises him, it presents a fascinating and psychologically credible interpretation of events that may have been crucial to that monster's formation.

The movie has the temerity to imply that had Hitler found a patron, his life might have taken an entirely different turn.

Make no mistake: the 30-year-old Hitler imagined by the film is a thoroughly disagreeable creep. As he skulks through the movie, radiating a clenched, clammy phosphorescence, he could be described (in therapeutic terms) as a humorless, obsessive-compulsive rageaholic with zero tolerance for frustration. He is the sort of killjoy who, when attending a social gathering, would be deemed intriguing for the first 20 minutes but quickly would wear out his welcome with his haranguing intensity, rigid certitude and lack of social grace.

Hitler had charisma, to be sure. But the movie imagines that at this point in his life it manifested itself only on a podium. The scary later scenes, which portray Hitler as a ranting backroom orator, suggest how in a public forum his toxic mixture of high-pitched fury and egomania could strike a spark and ignite mob violence.

When we first meet Hitler, he is an impoverished, shiftless war veteran listlessly hanging around with his fellow soldiers and grumbling about Germany's loss of World War I and the country's humiliation by the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler's anti-Semitism has already coalesced into a bogus theory of racial purity. He professes a grudging admiration for Jewish clannishness, which he believes has given Jews superior intelligence. But that respect is outweighed by an icy strain of paranoid loathing for what he perceives as the contaminating Jewish influence on other cultures.

A fellow soldier, Mayr (Ulrich Thomsen), an army propaganda officer, recognizes Hitler's potential as a forceful public speaker and encourages him to speak out in beer halls. The film subtly portrays the influences of Mayr and Rothman as a tug of war for Hitler's soul.

All that said, "Max" doesn't pretend to be an accurate biography of the youthful Hitler. It is finally more concerned with the fictional Rothman than with his sour, frustrated sometime protégé. The art dealer, himself a painter until he lost his right arm in the war, is an optimistic bon vivant with a wife (Molly Parker), two children and a lover (Leelee Sobieski). This skeptical, warmhearted aesthete is well on his way to becoming a mover and shaker in an art world that the film imagines as an elegant round-the-clock party floating above the misery and desolation of postwar Munich.

"Max," which opens today in New York and Los Angeles, is at its weakest when observing Rothman's chaotic personal life. The scenes with him and his wife and family are frustratingly elliptical and lack emotional focus. But when it is reflecting on art and society, the movie comes alive. Modern art is the aesthetic and spiritual beacon that illuminates this world and points a way toward a thrilling but vague utopian future, and the rising stars circulating through this glamorous demimonde include Max Ernst and George Grosz.

The film has extravagantly stylized visual imagination. Rothman runs a gallery, eccentrically festooned with art, that resembles a giant, casually decorated warehouse. "Max" was filmed in Budapest. (Contemporary Munich looked too sleekly modern.) And the fictional gallery is actually a former locomotive factory 300 yards long. The setting's cavernous, pre-Bauhaus austerity mingles with a shadowy, voluptuous German Expressionist palette to create the overall impression of a monumental, sprawling, timeless Bohemia in which life and art have wound together into a dizzying Modernist dreamland.

This slightly eerie ambience deepens Max and Hitler's continuing aesthetic debates as Max repeatedly goads Hitler to dig into his own psyche and slap his pain and confusion onto his canvases. But the prim young painter, who clings to classical ideals of form and beauty, is too guarded and repressed to understand what Max is talking about. Max's artistic ideas are pungently embodied in a performance piece, involving a giant meat grinder, that epitomizes the kind of art that the Nazis would later condemn as decadent.

Despite his doubts about Hitler, Rothman generously agrees to take some of his paintings on consignment, but the potential customers he locates end up choosing Ernst over Hitler.

The debates between Rothman and Hitler culminate with the movie's conceptual coup, in which Hitler comes up with the iconography of National Socialism, including the swastika, and proudly presents it to Rothman, who is impressed enough to proclaim that Hitler has made his crucial breakthrough. It's a novel idea: Nazism as the art project of a failed painter. Because that iconography has yet to be attached to a political and social movement, Max sees it only as a fantastically inventive work of kitsch, a grand theme park of the imagination that today might be labeled Hitlerworld.

In its eccentric way, the movie is rather like a theme park. It is a historical fantasy connecting fact and wild supposition into a provocative work of fiction that poses ticklish questions about art and society. And the inability of Rothman, the quintessence of European urbanity and intellectual sophistication, to grasp the implications of Hitlerworld points ominously toward the future.

For Mr. Cusack the role of Max is a huge, successful leap from playing the bluff nerdy guy next door to a jovial cosmopolite, and in making that leap he doesn't sacrifice his characteristic charm and generosity. As the future Führer, Mr. Taylor masters the perilous challenge of depicting a recognizable forerunner to the Hitler we know and despise while keeping that interpretation from turning into a cartoon.

"Max" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian) for sexual situations and one scene of violence.

Written and directed by Menno Meyjes; director of photography, Lajos Koltai; edited by Chris Wyatt; music by Dan Jones; production designer, Ben Van Os; produced by Andras Hamori; released by Lions Gate Films. At the Angelika Film Center, Mercer and Houston Streets, Greenwich Village. Running time: 108 minutes. This film is rated R.

WITH: John Cusack (Max Rothman), Noah Taylor (Adolf Hitler), Leelee Sobieski (Liselore Von Peltz), Molly Parker (Nina Rothman) and Ulrich Thomsen (Captain Mayr).

The problem with imagining a Post-WWI Germany without a Hitler is that a charismatic German "Fuehrer" would surely have emerged from the chaos of the Weimar Republic. This Fuehrer might have been a Moscow-oriented Communist, a Monarchist, a proto-Nazi or an authoritarian military type, but (whatever else he was) he would surely have been bad news for Europe and the world. This alternate Fuehrer would not have suffered from Hitler's peculiar Sado-Masochism and megalomania, which caused him to disregard reflexively the best and brightest of his military, scientific, political and economic advisers.

If the young Hitler's would be instructors at Vienna's High Arts Academy had realized his talents lay in being a gifted architect, history might have taken a turn for the better.

Quite possibly, but it was during his time in Vienna that he was introduced to and became obsessed with the mystical teachings of the occultists who would later form organizations such as the Thule Society and Germanic Order. Two groups that produced the men who later formed the nazi heirarchy. Those beliefs had already taken root in Germanic Europe well before World War I and even the Kaiser ocassionaly spouted off about Aryans and the "master race", something else historians tend to avoid mentioning. It is unfortunate Hitler didn't find a patron or receive more encouragement from his teachers, for it would be a lot nicer to just remember him as a footnote in some forgotten art-history book or architectural digest.

As someone who is an admitted philistine, I find the tenuous connection the film critic is trying to make between modern art lovers and classicists unsettling. I think that modern art is garbage created by frauds as artistically untalented as Hitler. I've read plenty of books about Hitler, but I've never heard of this Roth character. I don't know if there was a Roth-type character in Hitler's past. Hitler's life was strange enough without having to invent things which may not have occurred. But if modern art could get crushed like Nazism, that would be two great evils eliminated.

The Thule society as well as some other roots of Nazism such as Neitzche (sp?) heavily favored and promoted homosexuality and the followers of these included many homosexuals. It is well known that the SA and SS officers were notorious pederasts.

Rohm and the SA were especially nasty. The SS later began to purge itself of these types after they squelched the SA and discovered just how depraved Rohm and others in the SA had become in that regard. There's no telling how many just "went in the closet", so to speak. S&M, homosexuality, and nazism aren't sterotypically linked together by accident.

The interesting thing is if the nitwits in Yugoslavia had never killed Crown Prince Ferdanan (and his lovely wife)...WW I would never have happened...and Hitler would have been a simple housepainter in Austria. Everything is dependent on these Yugoslaiva dimwits who thought they were doing the world a favor. Hitler was destined to be just a plain housepainter after his entry was turned down at the Vienna High Arts Academy. His dad was the towns train station manager and was not of any statue to help the son. Life would be quiet different today under a slightly different scenario.

Regarding the SS purging of Rohm and many leaders of the SA (the Night of the Long Knives)- it was publicly pretending to be purging depravity, but according to "The Pink Swastika" by Lively (I mentioned earlier in this thread) it was a power struggle between the SA and the SS. Many of the leaders who weren't killed were just as depraved and perverted as some of the ones who were. Many political opponents -leaders of other political parties were killed that night.
The Nazis often publicly denounced homosexuality/perversion but it was essentially a publicity ploy. There was also division among the homosexual elements, the "butches" and the "femmes". Hitler surrounded himself with homosexuals, before and after the purge.

What about Hitler's neice Geli? She was a child when she began this horrible affair with him and then he had her killed!

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1582340080/103-3443868-6694245?vi=glance

Few people know of the affair Adolf Hitler had with his niece, Geli Raubal. The couple shared a strangely intense, passionate relationship, but it was always dogged by Hitler's intolerance, his chauvinistic attitude to womanhood and his possessive jealousy.

In 1931, aged 23, Geli Raubal was found dead in the Munich flat she shared with Hitler, his revolver on the floor and an unfinished letter on the table. Hitler was shattered by his niece's death, and for the rest of his life couldn't speak...

What about Hitler's neice Geli?

That was defintely one twisted relationship. Old onesy's incestuous partnering was clearly not the action of a well-balanced person, especially if it was excercised as mentioned on the page you linked. I pulled the following Hitler quote from one of the reviews. A psychoanalyst would have a field day with this one:

"I never feel tired when my storm troopers and soldiers march past me and I stand at this salute. I never move. My arm is like granite, rigid and unbending. But Goering can't stand it.... He is flabby. But I am hard."

....no comment...(snicker)

Sounds like Brother Theodore (a man who ironically died the same week as Ed Big Daddy Roth and Joey Ramone).

Brother Theodore fled Hitler's Germany and reportedly got assistance entering America from Albert Einstein. He recorded dark spoken word "rants" in the 1950s and continued performing up to the end. He found new fame from repeated appearances on David Letterman's show.

The swastika was a good luck sign until Hitler appropriated it. It would be comparable to Radical Islamists using the Smiley Face to identify their movement (Religion of Peace TM).

There are those in recent years who have sought to "take back" the swastika.

Avagara Review: Can the Swastika be Re-sanctified?

Gentle Swastika by Man Woman

...and eventually, as we all should know, leads one of the most homicidal performance art pieces ever, which probably ground up Max as well.

There was someone (a professor or writer) who tried to appraise the destruction of the WTC towers as a phenomenal performance art piece and then he tried to defend his statement by saying that he in no way supported the action but could distance himself from the horror and look at it detatched. Postmodernism and postmodernists' lack of "black and white"/"good and evil" ended that day although they've fallen back into their old habits.

It was definitely the result of a power struggle between Rohm and the prudish Himmler, and it wasn't easy for Himmler to overcome Adolf's protective and tolerating opinion of Rohm. That in itself has to make one wonder, because Hitler knew how extremely depraved the pervert Rohm had become, and protected him anyway. Himmler had to convince him that Rohm posed a direct political threat to his leadership before Adolf would let Himmler make his move on the SA. Himmler was so uptight about certain things that he could be a poster child for 'repressed tendencies', if you know what I mean. No doubt many of his people were like Rohm's, but they were smart enough to hide it from Heinrich, who was very image concious. He may have been the only straight one there, but still twisted in a thousand other ways.

While we are at this topic, how about the historically recorded psychotherapy of Hitler when he went blind from mustard gas in WWI? The stupid doctor used a hypnotic trance in which he convinced Hitler that he was some sort of a demi-God, sent by Providence once every few centuries to redeem the German people - a superman, if you will.

Of course, the idea was to help Hitler to regain his sight...but in Mein Kamph, Hitler describes the experience of regaining his sight as having the "scales fall from my eyes" - an obvious Pauline reference there...

and what of the good doctor?

well, both the good doctor and his biographer, who wrote about patient "A.H.'s" treatment in a book published shortly prior to the Nazis' rise to power, met quick and mysterious deaths shortly after the presumed "Patient A.H." assumed supreme power.....

of course, many rational people have described psychothrapy for years in basically the same terms as y'all are discussing "occultic teachings".....especially the variety invented by that fellow Freund....

Trivia question: The founders of what three major world religions arguably did so in order to legitimize their own misogynistic lusts after the fairer sex?

A: Muhammed

Joseph Smith

Sigmund Freund

I am sure I've missed a few.

A hint to the wise: if your guru is a bit too preoccupied with behavior that the common morality sees as obscene, his inspiration is of gonadic, rather than God-based, origin.

Now y'all have learned something you did not know.

Good Night.

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