The impossibility of representing the Holocaust “properly” has preoccupied filmmakers, as well as philosophers of the image, for a long time. Some have chosen the radical refusal of any archival imagery when revisiting the genocide, while others have taken the opposite route, by claiming that we must come face to face with the horror.
With The Meaning of Hitler, filmmakers Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker approach Adolf Hitler through a self-reflective process that’s highly cognizant of him as non-original subject matter. We do see plenty of images of the man himself, but they’re often framed by narrating voices reminding us of Hitler’s status as a pathetic facsimile of history. Nazi aesthetics are exposed as a tasteless form of pageantry, with Hitler as its campiest queen.
The documentary’s engaging narration, alternating between the contemplative voice of a woman and the purposefully theatrical voice of a man, warns the viewer against the spell of what may be described as Nazi porn, but which Epperlein and Tucker call “fascinating fascism.” The Meaning of Hitler’s singularity compared to so many other documentaries about Hitler and the Holocaust lies in its essayistic layers, as the filmmakers anxiously trade lecturing for thinking out loud and foreground scrutiny of the cinematic process.
The film’s essayistic qualities are manifested in the clicking of a clapperboard, which punctuates the narrative, exposing deconstruction as a form of construction itself. In more “meta” moments we see Epperlein in the frame, riding a train and browsing the pages of Sebastian Haffner’s book on which the documentary is based. The awareness of the futility of an etiological quest for truth pervades the film. Its commitment to subjectivity is always creeping into the more traditional footage of talking heads (historians, novelists, Nazi hunters, and conspiracy theorists). And the archival images of Hitler aren’t presented as larger than life, but put on the same level as experimental sequences shot in the present day.
Epperlein and Tucker’s strategy highlights the theatricality of Nazi imagery, making visible the pitiful failures lying behind the spectacle. The Hitler we see is the failed artist, the incapable sportsman, the coward fraud even after death. And Triumph of the Will isn’t seen as anything more than a mass-scale, and tackier, version of the Radio City Rockettes.
True to its essayistic bent, The Meaning of Hitler often goes back to making visible the decision-making process and anxieties of its own cinematic machinations. A feminine narrating voice asks tedious rhetorical questions like “Has history lost all meaning?” but also whether it’s possible to make a film “like this” without contributing to Nazi propaganda.
It’s when The Meaning of Hitler loses sight of its subjective tendencies that it becomes the kind of documentary about Hitler and the Holocaust that so many filmmakers before Epperlein and Tucker always feared making. Though there may be points of intersection between Hitler and Trump, Nazi hysteria and Beatlemania, as well as a kinship between fascist rallies of yore and today’s acting out of “great replacement” fantasies, the film exposes such links by making facile one-to-one editing comparisons. This adds unevenness to a documentary that’s otherwise clever about avoiding age-old conundrums regarding the disavowal or display of the language of horror by returning to the inherent fakeness of visual language writ large.
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