The miniseries “Faking Hitler” on TV Now – Medien

The copious consumption of alcohol is one of the stereotypes of the acting profession. Moritz Bleibtreu leaves no doubt about that at the counter of a bar in Bonn-Muffendorf when he is during the break from Faking Hitler calls: “What’s the shortest joke?” Look around. Then: “Two actors walk past the bar.” The joke is with every academic profession, but filmmakers are polite people, the crew gathers muted giggles. Lars Eidinger also laughs in his subtle way, at least his upper body twitches.

Then the two of them continue playing like him star-Reporter Gerd Heidemann (Eidinger) and the cheerful painter Konrad Kujau (Bleibtreu) are drunk in a bar and discuss how they can smuggle the fabulous Hitler diaries from the GDR into the West. To be more precise: To the Hamburg headquarters of the large German popular magazine star, which was far more important as a companion on the political scene at the beginning of the 1980s than it is today.

This is important to understand why these diaries had what it takes to become one of the biggest press scandals. The dimensions were breathtaking: he has 9.3 million marks 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 greatest star-Less will be. The result was only one superlative: the most legendary disaster.

However, the forger Konrad Kujau, who pretended to be an art dealer to Heidemann, who knows where the diaries are hidden, this Konrad Kujau had created the diaries in such a masterfully imitated handwriting that they were declared to be genuine by a number of experts. 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 yet exist during Hitler’s lifetime. Kujau and Heidemann were sentenced to prison terms.

Kujau died in 2000, Heidemann will be 90 years old 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 makes the fact-based fictional processing of this monstrous rogue story with all its surreal moments an event. The series doesn’t forget the seriousness of the scandal and in turn discovers the comedy of overestimation of oneself, megalomania and denial of reality.

What is needed is a champagne mood. So Bleibtreu and Eidinger tell each other jokes

The film was shot for five weeks in parallel with two teams, including in a village near Bonn, where the sensual instinct person Kujau lives with his partner in the musty petty-bourgeois coziness. The cosmopolitan Heidemann came there again with his Jaguar – situation briefing. In a champagne mood! Hm, be 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. Asks the customs officer: “Do you have any goods?” The German answers. “That means: have you been?” Action!

The jokes are not screams at the bar, the mood is as ambivalent as the whole story: yes, it was grotesque, yes, it was bizarre, but it is as unsuitable for thigh-thumping as the subtle jokes of the two main characters.

When it was made into the film, there was a risk of telling a legendary rogue piece so silly that it turned into a smear comedy. Especially since there is a great model from 1992: Schtonk! von Helmut Dietl made it to the nomination list for the Oscar for best foreign film. Schtonk! emphasized the farce with actors like Götz George and Uwe Ochsenknecht and satirical exaggeration. Schtonk! was often bright and loud, Faking Hitler want to be quiet.

“The trivialization 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, lead writer, and idea generator didn’t see the grotesque too. But for the Berlin-based Ufa fiction producer and radio host Tommy Wosch, the story that he and his co-authors researched extensively, based on the recordings of the original phone calls from Kujau and Heidemann and long research discussions with Heidemann, is above all “a story of.” There is no denazification in Germany. The fact that something like this could happen in what was actually a left-liberal newspaper speaks for this. “

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 the Christmas present for Eva Braun? “The trivialization of evil is the core,” says Wosch over the phone, “and a society at the beginning of the 1980s that not only would have allowed historical revisionism to a large extent, but also longed for it.”

In order not to forget the historical background over the madness, a fictional storyline was drawn in. A boy starReporter (Sinje Irslinger) researches which SS members have made careers in the FRG 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 broadened the horizon, with a concentrated relaxation that allows space for many observations of the social color scheme of the early eighties.

The story unfolds slowly, sometimes quite unspectacularly: How Heidemann is shown the first diary forged by Kujau through a collector, how he senses the great opportunity for himself and his paper, how Kujau lets himself be lured by millions of marks, to 62 volumes from the To suck fingers, how the two become friends, but one has no idea what bad game the other is playing with him, and how finally all concerns are thrown overboard because the prospect of millions, especially the publishing house management, who made the deal back then threaded past the skeptical editor-in-chief with the contemporary history department, obscuring the spirit.

“Schtonk” let it rip, “Faking Hitler” is quieter. The story is crazy enough

It’s the details of this incredible story, the actually little scenes and moments, that Faking Hitler give a fine, humorous tone that ultimately leads to the madness of the publication. Moments like the one when Kujau learns that the diaries should be checked by an appraiser. Then he says – laboriously concealing his panic: “Good, if you need it, then you probably need it.” Bleibtreu speaks such sentences of the gifted and drunk gourmets with a grandiose mixture of ignorance and cunning cunning. Eidinger’s Heidemann has nothing to do with the star reporter pose that runs nowhere Schtonk!, rather something of an obsessed accountant who dresses well and suddenly has a talent for shrewd man-trapping. “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 precision art – in addition to a brilliant cast of great character actors.

Fortunately, Bleibtreu and Eidinger were not interested in a docudrama, as they tell after the pub scene. They wanted to entertain on a fictitiously narrated level, without the comedy effect that the story already has, as Bleibtreu says. The most important thing was that it was fun. “But not to knock your thighs, rather to smile.”

Curiously, Eidinger benefited from what makes access to a figure difficult. As he says, Wosch did not understand Heidemann’s character even after 20 encounters. Eidinger explains that it was very helpful for him not to be able to grab Heidemann. He would generally be reluctant to make characters understandable for himself. “It is also not a hobby of mine to embody and copy real people. That restricts me too much.” Bleibtreu also wanted to play Kujau the way he had “liked the character in my head” from the start: “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 time and again leave the finest devastation on the faces of the two increasingly troubled unlucky ravens. And there is plenty of reason for that.

For example, when Kujau learns that the ancient Gothic letter he wrote on the diary books as the initial “A” for Adolf is actually the “F”. And so the legendary mistake “FH” came about. A problem? Not for people who only believe in the evidence to confirm what they want to believe. So everything was okay after all, because “FH” can of course only mean “For Hitler”, right? And that’s not a joke for once.

Faking Hitler, six parts, RTL +, from November 1st