‘Look Who’s Back’—Hitler’s Funny and Frightening Return to Berlin
A hidden gem of the German film industry that’ll really make you think.
If you don’t care about foreign-language movies, you probably won’t have heard of a German film called Look Who’s Back released in 2015. Given its ridiculous premise and controversial subject matter, you might’ve even seen it while scrolling Netflix and just ignored it.
Well, you might want to give it a second chance.
The original title in German is Er Ist Wieder Da, which can be literally translated as “he’s here again.” And the “he” in question is none other than Adolf Hitler—the 20th-century fascist dictator and chancellor of Germany who, having started World War II and masterminded the horrors of the Holocaust, is regarded as the most evil human being to ever live.
And now he’s back.
The Story
Having found himself mysteriously transported through time into modern day Berlin, Hitler struggles to figure out what’s going on. Still wearing his military uniform, complete with peaked visor cap and Nazi insignia, everyone thinks he’s an actor costume for a World War II movie. Soon enough he figures out where he is and starts catching up on seventy years of history.
Once out of uniform and in normal clothes, everyone thinks he’s a comedian with a side-splitting Hitler impression. It’s so funny to everyone that he quickly wins over executives at a German TV station who decide to feature him on their full lineup of talk shows to boost ratings. Hitler allows this assumption to continue, using it as the perfect disguise to resurrect his politics and worldview with the same charisma and powerful oratory that made him popular in the 1920s and 30s—not to mention his way of preying on people’s darkest fears to manipulate them.
By the time anyone realizes that he might in fact be the real Adolf Hitler, it’s too late; the entire country has fallen in love with this ‘comedian’ who through television, movies and social media has once again started to build a following on a new rise to power.
It’s really great. If you can stomach an hour and fifty-six minutes of reading subtitles, you have to see it. Here’s a trailer:
The Production
The film is based on a novel of the same name by German author Timur Vermes. While it differs in many details from its source material, the film presents some truly remarkable themes that might make you think a little differently about history, humanity and the world we live in.
It’s also very funny.
The novel is written in first-person perspective as if Hitler were the author, using comically outdated language and expressing a worldview that is woefully incompatible with today’s mainstream global culture.
The film follows this same formula, with Hitler narrating his experience of waking up at the site of the Führer Bunker in modern day Berlin (a magical event that is never explained) and kicking off another rise to power. As you can imagine, it gets pretty dark, but there’s also plenty of jokes and mockumentary-style hijinks to balance things out.
The part of The Führer is played by German actor Oliver Masucci, who completely steals the show. His voice, accent, mannerisms and general presence match perfectly to what we know about Hitler from all those grainy, black-and-white speeches we’ve seen in History Channel documentaries. The only thing historically inaccurate is that he’s too tall; Hitler was only 5’7” whereas Masucci towers above him at 6’2”. But the same kind of movie magic that makes Tom Cruise look tall works well enough to make Masucci look short, and the illusion is pretty good.
The Themes
Here’s a few interesting things that surprised me about this film, ideas which lingered in my mind enough to re-watch it this year and, of course, to write an article about it.
Hitler’s no fool
Based on the premise, you might expect a lot of ‘fish out of water’ humor when such a historical figure is presented with the shockingly advanced technology and culture of the future. Like when Napoleon goes bowling in 1989’s Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. There’s a bit of that in Look Who’s Back, but more striking is how at home Hitler is in the twenty-first century.
Hitler is not dumbfounded or confused by the future. On the contrary, he understands technology very well and greatly admires the incredible advances that human beings have made. So much so that it even brings him to tears when he first discovers the instant access and extensive knowledge available from Wikipedia. Hitler quickly becomes an avid internet user, watcher of television and consumer of mainstream culture in order to learn all he can about the modern world—and how to manipulate it.
Despite Hitler’s composure in being miraculously transported to the future, you might also expect this once influential persona to be laughable in the eyes of modern people. I don’t mean funny, in this sense; I mean easily dismissed as wildly out of touch. But Hitler quickly adapts himself and his political strategy for modern times, refusing to fall victim to obsolescence despite a few hiccups and the traps laid by those around him. For instance, at one point he ignores cue cards filled with racist jokes written by a TV producer and delivers a new treatise on cultural decline caused by reality TV; it quickly skyrockets him into further fame.
Hitler’s charisma is familiar
While this is of course a work of fiction and by no means indicates what would happen in reality, if you suspend your disbelief for just a second you can get a feeling of why Hitler was such an influential figure in his time. And as the film proposes, people today are not so different in what we admire about our beloved public figures—for better or worse.
At one point in the film, Hitler is on a talk show being interview by the host who is giving the ‘comedian’ a hard time, suggesting that he with his Hitler impression is nothing more than an obnoxious provocateur. Hitler defends himself by explaining his devotion to the people; Mozart was nothing without his piano, and thus is The Führer nothing without the support of das Volk, the people. He even says:
Ich spiele auf dem Volk Klavier.
This means: “I play the people piano.”
If you think this sounds familiar, you’re right, because Steve Jobs said something incredibly similar:
The musicians play their instruments. I play the orchestra.
Steve Jobs has a cult following based on his achievements with Apple, Pixar and the entire tech industry, and his followers eat up shit like this all day long.
Steve Jobs also appears to have had a dark side, yet most people are completely willing to overlook this and still spend huge amounts of money on products that his company creates and are continuing to do so long after his death.
So just how dark of a past is humanity willing to forgive when the man in question is just so damn charming on a talk show? This movie will make you wonder about your favorite public figures.
Hitler connects with Germans
There’s one element that might escape you if you watch this movie as a non-German speaker. To Americans, for example, characters from history like Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and even some more recent ones like Kim Jung Il, Muammar Gaddafi and Fidel Castro can be seen as comical. The have whacky hair styles, strange clothes, eccentric tastes, funny languages and accents—they’re like clowns to us, making it hard to understand how these people could ever have been taken seriously.
Even though we have our own clowns in the English-speaking world like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, we do take most of our politicians and leaders seriously. But how seriously did Germans, Italians or Russians take Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Winston Churchill?
FDR was a C student who tried to hide his confinement to a wheel chair and who sanctioned the internment of Japanese Americans. Churchill was a fat, crude, cigar-smoking drunk in a top hat who at one point bombed French ports to keep them out of German hands, almost causing France to declare war. But both of these men gave powerful speeches, the words of which are etched into our minds.
Who can forget FDR’s “Day of Infamy” speech:
Yesterday, December 7, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan . . . No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.
And Churchill had quite a way with words as exemplified in his “We’ll Do Our Best” speech:
We will have no truce or parley with you, or the grisly gang who work your wicked will. You do your worst and we will do our best . . . We shall never turn from our purpose, however sombre the road, however grievous the cost, because we know that out of this time of trial and tribulation will be born a new freedom and glory for all mankind.
Oh man, I get goosebumps reading these. Hitler was talking about deplorable stuff in his speeches from the same era, but he delivered them in German with the same goosebump-inducing power that FDR and Churchill did in English.
The creators of Look Who’s Back brilliantly extended this style of speech and rhetoric to show how it could once again be used to sway even modern people towards believing in the worldview Hitler presents. The translations in the subtitles do a good enough job so you can follow the story and get the point, but when you unpack the actual words used by Hitler, it’s not everyday language; it’s Churchillian—the same kind of epic, poetic rhetoric used to influence with great effect.
People tolerate Hitler
This is one of the few instances where a film deviating from the book on which it is based has actually done a great service to the source material instead of garnering the usual feedback of “Trust me, the book was much better.” Parts of the film include man-on-the-street interviews with real people where actor Oliver Masucci remains in character and costume as Adolf Hitler resurrected.
The result? Of the interviews and segments that made the final cut of the film, there’s a very broad range of reactions exhibited by people seeing a man walking around the streets of German cities dressed as Adolf Hitler and followed by a camera crew.
You might expect total, aggressive outrage at such a distasteful display. This is shown only once when a passerby gets very offended and says that someone parading around like that in public is horrible for Germany, and if it were up to him he’d have the whole film crew punished.
But most other people aren’t really that upset. Some people appear to know so little about history that they do not even know how offensive it truly is to see what they are seeing. Others are foreign tourists who think this is some kind of themed gimmick, like seeing Mickey Mouse at Disney Land. Others are stupid, drunk kids who want to take selfies with Hitler. And still others know it’s all a gag but happily laugh along at Masucci’s incredible improvisations.
And yet another category of people are those with far-right political views who appear not to get the joke that the production is laying on them as they agree with all the racist, homophobic and xenophobic things that ‘Hitler’ says. In fact, the situation seems to have made these folks comfortable enough to unleash their own intolerant views, mostly complaining about the then-topical European migrant crisis that saw over a million people coming from Africa and the Middle East to countries like Germany. The film was timed perfectly to capture the nascent far-right backlash against policies from politicians like Angela Merkel who promised to welcome an unlimited amount of asylum seekers into the country.
Go see it!
If you never plan to see the film, hopefully this article has given you enough of a glimpse into the concepts explored, and it maybe makes you realize just how fragile our democracy actually is—that we’re just one smooth-talking, maniacal politician away from descending back into chaos.
When you take a look at men like Trump, Putin and Xi Jinping who are or have been at the helm of the biggest, most powerful countries in the world, it should really make you think a little bit harder about who you are voting for next time—if you’re lucky enough to have that option.
In any case, I would encourage you to find it on Netflix or rent it on Amazon Prime because it’s super funny and watching a foreign film every once in a while is good for you culturally. Look Who’s Back is guaranteed to make you laugh and broaden you horizons at least a little bit.
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