He did not hypnotise them, they chose to follow him,” Wnendt said. “Such questions are only a short juncture away from the topic of Hitler.”Īmong Wnendt’s inspirations were the film Borat, “the agent provocateur, who entices people to say things they really think”, and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s 1941 satirical allegory about the rise of Hitler, “which shows how his rise would not have been possible without normal German people. “It’s appeared at a time of intense discussion about who is German, who is welcome here, and who is not,” wrote Der Spiegel of the film.
‘It was incredible, I was suddenly the attraction, like a popstar,’ said Oliver Masucci.
The film includes footage of Pegida demonstrators holding anti-foreigner placards, as well as news reels showing recent arson attacks on asylum-seekers’ homes. The film’s release at a time when the country is locked in a fierce debate over the mass arrival of refugees and whether it serves as an opportunity for Germany or a threat, could hardly be more timely. Wnendt said his travels around Germany with Masucci as Hitler – everywhere from the North Sea island of Sylt, a holiday location for wealthy Germans, to small towns in Bavaria where Masucci posed as a postcard painter in a nod to Hitler’s failed attempts at an artistic career – revealed “a feeling of deep discontent in the population, where people of every social status demonstrated how they were against foreigners and fearful of Islamisation”. “But it should be the type of laugh that catches in your throat and you’re almost ashamed when you realise what you’re doing.” “Germans should be able to laugh at Hitler, rather than viewing him as monster because that relieves him of responsibility for his deeds and diverts attention from his guilt for the Holocaust,” Wnendt said. He said the film’s main aim was to make people laugh. “Our idea was to find out how people react to Hitler today, and to his ideas and to ask does he have a chance nowadays,” director David Wnendt told the Guardian. He is taken to be an impersonator or a method actor of the highest calibre, who subsequently makes a successful television career for himself, using that as a springboard to enter politics. Look Who’s Back imagines that, 70 years since his demise, Hitler awakes from a coma on the site of his former bunker, now a residential area of Berlin, to find himself in the present – a Germany at peace, with Angela Merkel at the helm and a society so multicultural he does not recognise it. ‘Our idea was … to ask does he have a chance nowadays,’ David Wnendt told the Guardian.
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