Drinking alcohol in abundance is part of the cliche of the acting profession. Moritz Bleibtreu left no doubt about that at the bar in Bonn-Muffendorf when he was speaking during the break from Faking Hitler shouts, “What’s the shortest joke?” Look around. Then: “Two actors walk past the pub.” The joke is there with every academic profession, but filmmakers are polite people, the crew manages to tidy giggles. Lars Eidinger also laughs in his own way, at least his upper body twitches.
Then the two continue to play like that star-Reporter Gerd Heidemann (Eidinger) and the jolly painter Konrad Kujau (Bleibtreu) in a bar, drunk, trying to find out how they can smuggle the legendary Hitler diaries from the GDR into the West. To be more precise: to the Hamburg headquarters of the large German popular magazine starwhich was far more important as a companion on the political scene in the early 1980s than it is today.
This is important in order to understand why these diaries had the makings of one of the biggest press scandals. The dimension was breathtaking: 9.3 million marks has the star Paid for 62 fake Hitler diaries in 1983. At an international press conference it was said: “History must be rewritten.” It should be the biggest star-Hour will be. Only one superlative came out: the most legendary disaster.
However, the forger Konrad Kujau, who posed to Heidemann as an art dealer and who knows where the diaries are hidden, had produced the diaries in such a masterly imitated handwriting that several experts had declared them to be genuine. At the star you thought you were on the safe front page. A few days after the PK, a BKA report ruined everything: the paper used by Kujau did not exist during Hitler’s lifetime. Kujau and Heidemann were sentenced to prison terms.
Kujau died in 2000, Heidemann will be 90 on December 4th. And now the story of this spectacular disgrace is being retold in a six-part mini-series on RTL+. And in a way that turns the fact-based fictional processing of this monstrous prankster story with all its surreal moments into an event. The series does not forget the seriousness of the scandal over the slapstick and in turn discovers the comedy of overconfidence, megalomania and denial of reality.
What is needed is a champagne mood. So Bleibtreu and Eidinger tell each other jokes
Two teams shot in parallel for five weeks in a village near Bonn, among other places, where the sensual instinctive man Kujau lives with his partner in the most musty bourgeois comfort. That’s where the man of the world Heidemann came again with his Jaguar – briefing. In a champagne mood! Hm, being drunk sober? Bleibtreu and Eidinger tell each other jokes before each recording to loosen up. Now Eidinger again: If a German comes to the Swiss border. The customs officer asks: “Do you have any goods?” answers the German. “That means: Have you been?” Action!
The jokes aren’t bar roars, the mood is as ambivalent as the whole story: Yes, it was grotesque, yes, it was bizarre, but it’s just as little suitable for thigh-slapping as the subtle jokes of the two main actors.
Eidinger and Moritz Bleibtreu on the set of “Faking Hitler”.
(Photo: Tom Trambow)
When it was filmed, there was a danger of telling a legendary prankish play so silly that it turned into a sleaze comedy. Especially since there is a great role model from 1992: Shtonk! by Helmut Dietl made it onto the nomination list for the Oscar for best foreign film. Shtonk! emphasized the farce with actors like Götz George and Uwe Ochsenknecht and satirical exaggeration. Shtonk! was often glaring and loud, Faking Hitler want to be quiet.
“The banalization of evil is the core,” says the creator of the series
That’s not to say that the man who started this series as showrunner, head writer and idea generator didn’t also see the grotesque. But for the Berlin Ufa fiction producer and radio presenter Tommy Wosch, the story, which he and his co-authors extensively researched and explored in detail on the basis of the recordings of the original telephone calls between Kujau and Heidemann and long research discussions with Heidemann, is above all “a story of non-existing denazification in Germany. The fact alone that something like this could happen in a left-liberal newspaper speaks for itself.”
real or fake? Wosch finds one question much more important: how could a reputable newspaper act so irresponsibly and publish diaries that show the Führer as a completely normal person who is thinking about Eva Braun’s Christmas present? “The banalization of evil is the core,” says Wosch on the phone, “and a society at the beginning of the 1980s that not only would have tolerated historical revisionism to a large extent, but longed for it.”
In order not to forget the historical background of the madness, a fictional plot line was included. A boy starreporter (Sinje Irslinger) researches which SS members have made careers in Germany and finds out that her father, a renowned law professor (Ulrich Tukur), was a 17-year-old member of the Waffen SS. The two directors, Wolfgang Groos and Tobi Baumann, also tell this story, which convincingly broadens the horizon, with a concentrated relaxation that leaves room for many observations of the social color of the early eighties.
The story unfolds slowly, at times quite unspectacularly: How Heidemann is shown Kujau’s forged first diary via a collector, how he senses a great opportunity for himself and his paper, how Kujau lets himself be lured by millions of marks, 62 volumes from the Sucking your fingers, how the two become friends, but one has no idea what a nasty game the other is playing with him, and how all concerns are finally thrown overboard because the prospect of millions, especially from the publishing house management, who signed the deal at the time slipping past the skeptical editor-in-chief with the contemporary history department, clouds the mind.
“Schtonk” let it rip, “Faking Hitler” is quieter. The story is crazy enough
It’s the details of this unbelievable story, the actually small scenes and moments that Faking Hitler give a subtle, humorous tone that eventually leads to the insanity of publication. Moments like when Kujau learns that the diaries are to be reviewed by a reviewer. Then he says – with difficulty concealing his panic: “Well, if you need it, then you probably need it.” Bleibtreu speaks such sentences of the gifted and drunken epicurean with a grandiose mixture of obtuseness and cunning cunning. Eidinger’s Heidemann has none of the star reporter pose that goes nowhere Shtonk!, more like an obsessive accountant who dresses well and has a sudden flash of talent for cunning people-snapping. “The comic should arise from a serious situation, it should speak for itself without being emphasized,” Groos explains the directors’ idea. The two main actors enrich the concept with their reserved comedic art of precision – in addition to a brilliantly performing cast of great character actors.
Luckily, Bleibtreu and Eidinger weren’t interested in a docudrama, as they explain after the pub scene. They wanted to entertain on a fictional level, without the comedy effect that the story already carries, as Bleibtreu says. The most important thing was that it was funny. “But not to slap your thighs, rather to smile.”
Eidinger oddly benefited, making access to a character difficult. As he says, Wosch still didn’t understand Heidemann’s character after 20 encounters. Eidinger explains that it was very accommodating for him that Heidemann couldn’t be reached. He would generally resist making characters understandable to himself. “It’s also not one of my hobbies to embody and copy real people. That limits me too much.” Bleibtreu also wanted to play Kujau the way he had “liked the character in my head” from the beginning: “A mischievous bon vivant who loved life very much, a player, a rascal.” It is a pleasure to see how amazement, anger, astonishment and bewilderment leave the finest devastation in the faces of the two increasingly plagued unlucky ravens. And there is plenty of reason for that.
For example, when Kujau finds out that the old Gothic letter he wrote on the diary pads as the initial “A” for Adolf is actually the “F”. And so the legendary error “FH” arose. A problem? Not for people who only believe in the evidence to support what they want to believe. So everything was fine after all, because “FH” can of course only mean “For Hitler”, right? And for once this is no joke.
The series Faking Hitler was awarded the German Television Prize in the categories “Best Actor” and “Best Drama Series” and can now be seen on Vox from September 14, 8:15 p.m