Abstract

In the introduction to his study, Hitler war’s: Die Befreiung der Deutschen von ihrer Vergangenheit, Hannes Heer offers an insightful survey of the ways in which German intellectuals have sought to ‘come to terms’ with the Nazi past over the last 60 years.1 I would like to sketch this narrative here before turning to Der Untergang (Downfall, 2004) and Mein Führer — Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler (Mein Führer: The Truly Truest Truth about Adolf Hitler, 2007), two films that reflect and simultaneously shape the image of Hitler that informs the new discourse of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) in twenty-first century Germany. These two films, as I will argue below, are representative of two contesting conceptualizations of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi past which are currently prevalent in German culture. They offer powerful projections of Hitler that perform two markedly different kinds of cultural work.2

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