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This is not, of course, an accident. Hitler himself would have approved the mythic stature (if not the odium) that posterity has accorded him: his entire life was conceived as a prodigious drama — "Qualis artifex pereo!" as Nero is supposed to have said ("What an artist dies with me!"). Even the name of his superstate, the Tausendjahrige Reich, or Thousand-Year Reich, was derived from prophetic myths about the Christian millennium: a time when, after a cosmic battle between Christ and Antichrist, the forces of evil are locked away forever, the dialectic of history is abolished, and a reign of permanent, static harmony prevails over the earth. So it happens that who ever plays Hitler in a movie, or how well, is not of much more than aesthetic consequence — no more, say, than the comparisons between one Siegfried and another. The role is always greater than its actors, and its nightmarish content has become somewhat abstract. Nor will the rise of some future Hitler be discouraged by the belief that the Führer was a demon. The demonic, in human affairs, is generally an oversimplification. With Hitler, it is also a refuge. We do not like to diminish ourselves by admitting him to our species; so we take his own delusions at face value, and tend to suppose that he was not human, but an embodiment of some elemental will of history. The only corrective is to see him for what he was: a man.
If the present revival of interest in Hitler signifies anything beyond kinky fashion and souvenir hunting — the sort of impulse that, for years, has retained the jackboot and Hakenkreuz as essential furniture in the theater of sado masochistic imagination — it means that a degree of impatience with the demonic image has set in. What concerns the modern audience, and made Speer's memoir the bestseller it deservedly was, is not Hitler's myth but his documentary truth. What, beginning with his humanness, did he have in common with the people around us and with ourselves? What on earth was he like?
No movie can fully answer that question, but any film that can give a partial reply, in documentary terms, seems automatically destined for success. The only candidate for honors among the revival flicks is a remarkable documentary called Swastika. Produced by 36-year-old Englishman Sanford Lieberson (Performance) and directed by a 23-year-old Australian newcomer named Philippe Mora, it began as a research job on the copious surviving archives of Nazi film after Lieberson bought the rights to Speer's Inside the Third Reich. But what altered the film makers' intentions was the discovery, by Film Historian Lutz Becker, of Hitler's own home movies — some five hours of Agfacolor stock, shot mainly by Eva Braun and her friends, of the Führer and his court relaxing (if that is the word) in his mountain retreat at Obersalzberg. The film had been lying un noticed in the U.S. Marine archives in Washington since 1946. Only a fraction of it was usable, partly because Eva Braun had a dumb love of mountain views, and expended miles of film in slow, jiggly pans across the misty peaks. What remains is the only off-the-record view that exists of Hitler's home life, and it lends Swastika an extraordinary fascination.