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Admittedly, the situation resembles the old Sherlock Holmes solution of a crime because of the curious behavior of the dog in the nighttime — curious because the dog did nothing in the nighttime. The banality of this view of Hitler at ease is the message, as always with home movies. Most of Swastika consists of previously unused material from professional Nazi films, mainly propaganda and newsreel, tightly edited together so as to present the illusion that Mora had sent a documentary team 40 years back into the Reich. The home movies make it seem as though Andy Warhol tagged along too.
The Teuton waving his hairy green hat appreciatively at an Alp might be any German tourist, but — you realize with a start — it is Martin Bormann. There are scraps of conversation, no more. Hitler scans a speech manuscript through a large magnifying glass on the breezy terrace with Speer looking over his shoulder. He looks up. "Very interesting," the Führer remarks, in a line straight out of Laugh-In. Hitler's doctor appears; he describes how he has come to suspect a link between smoking and lung cancer. "Disgusting," the patient snaps. Nobody is at ease with him. Goebbels, rigidly clasping an umbrella pole, hastily jettisons a cigarette stub when Hitler appears.
Such disconnected nuances reveal a truth that formal history can hardly capture, and they are in absolute contrast to the craft of acting. In the Guinness film, Eva Braun was played as a glamour puss, vaguely resembling Dominique Sanda. The real version was otherwise: a giggling, curly blonde Aryan squaw, smooching with a rabbit, proudly doing calisthenics on the beach of the Konigssee, or coquettishly persuading the Scourge of History to screen Gone With the Wind just once again because she loves Clark Gable. Allowing for variations of costume and language, these domestic scenes could be happening today, anywhere from San Diego to the Black Sea beaches. Hannah Arendt's famous phrase about the banality of evil acquires a fresh bloom.
It is brilliantly amplified in the "official" footage from which Mora has put together an impressionistic tour of the culture of Nazism. No other film has given so strong a sense of its pervasiveness, or the methodical detail with which it was grafted onto the twin German traditions of folk and high art. Goebbels' cameramen, filming the gnarled peasants at work or the shiny, hopeful faces of village children baking festive rolls in the shape of swastikas, were building on the most popular traditions of 19th century German genre painting—that volkisch sentiment that was Germany's equivalent to America's image of frontier virtue. One sequence says it all: a choir singing carols beneath a light-baubled Christmas tree in a village square. The camera tilts up, slowly and lovingly, to reveal a huge illuminated swastika on top of the tree, dispensing its generous light over the festival. Even today, one cannot laugh at this breathtaking kitsch. It is chilling; no level of folk culture could be impervious to the message. Such was the nature of cultural totalitarianism. Every image was skewed to point to the Führer—but otherwise left intact.