Die Hitler-Chronik
Hermann Pölking-Eiken, Germany, 2018, 1 Seasono
Almost eighty years after his death, the figure and phenomenon of Adolf Hitler have still not been fully explained. Based on the most comprehensive compilation of archive material to date, Hitler's life story is presented parallel to the social and political history of the first half of the 20th century: Everyday European life between 1889 and 1945 becomes tangible in uncommented text, sound, photo and film documents.
This documentary series from 2018 is the radical counterpart to dramas such as The Zone of Interest and The Pianist, which reconstruct the real events surrounding the Nazi era and the Second World War using the means of fiction film. Free of any commentary, she assembles exclusively original documents from the years between 1899 and 1945 (Hitler's lifetime) to create a panorama of everyday, social and political life in Germany and the surrounding countries of those years: quotes and sound recordings from historical figures and "ordinary people", photos and often astonishing film footage (surprisingly many of which are in color). The result is striking in two respects: a biography of Hitler from the perspective of schoolmates, fanatical supporters and bitter opponents, and at the same time a portrait of the German national soul in and between the wars. One cannot help but get the impression that Hitler not only set up one of the most criminal regimes in history, but also found an alarming number of "willing executors" (Daniel Goldhagen) of his murderous ideology among the humiliated Germans after the First World War. - The English dubbed version is available on our English and French-language site, the original version on our German-language site.
Andreas Furler