mon 02/12/2024

Hitler

Nachtland, Young Vic review - German black comedy brings uneasy humour and discomfiting relevance

If Mark Twain thought that a German joke was no laughing matter, what would he make of a German comedy? That quote came to mind more than once during Patrick Marber’s production of Marius von Mayenburg’s 2022 play, Nachtland. I know it’s...

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Good, Harold Pinter Theatre review - brilliant but half-baked

“The bands came in 1933.” So begins C P Taylor’s Good, a play that tries its hardest to resist being Googled. It was first performed by the RSC in 1981; this production, starring David Tennant as a mild-mannered German professor who gradually...

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The Misfortune of the English, Orange Tree Theatre review - don't fret, boys, it's only death

“We all make history, one way or another.” But some of us make more history than others, and a group of 27 English schoolboys who got lost in Southern Germany in 1936 haven’t made much, unfortunately. Scottish playwright Pamela Carter has brushed...

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Q&A Special: Actor Bruno Ganz on playing Hitler

There is nothing quite like the Iffland-Ring in this country. The property of the Austrian state, for two centuries it has been awarded to the most important German-speaking actor of the age, who after a suitable period nominates his successor and...

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DVD/Blu-ray: It Happened Here

Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s It Happened Here surely deserves the acclaim often accorded it as “the most ambitious amateur film ever made”, and the rich supporting extras on this BFI dual-format release make clear why. Best of all is a 65-...

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Robert Harris: Munich review - reselling Hitler

Robert Harris’s first book about Hitler told the story of the hoax diaries which seduced Rupert Murdoch and Hugh Trevor-Roper. After Selling Hitler (1986) came Fatherland (1992), another fake story about the Führer. In that alternative history the...

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13 Minutes

The plot to assassinate Hitler that everyone knows about was on 20 July 1944. It had its Hollywood moment in 2008 with Bryan Singer’s Valkyrie, starring Tom Cruise as Colonel Von Stauffenberg. That film unfortunately arrived on the coattails of...

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Now This Is Not the End, Arcola Theatre

Few cities have been so central to the European imagination as Berlin in the 20th century. At the centre of imperial power, then of Weimar, next the hub of Nazi Germany, then for some 50 years a symbol of a divided Cold War world. In Rose Lewenstein...

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DVD: Turned Towards the Sun

The phrase “improbable life” crops up more than once in Greg Olliver’s highly engaging documentary Turned Towards the Sun about the poet Micky Burn (its title is that of the writer’s autobiography). It’s a contradiction in terms, perhaps, but as a...

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The Decent One

Remember the Hitler diaries? Stern and the Sunday Times were so eager for them to be true they went ahead and published even after historian Hugh Trevor Roper had changed his mind about their authenticity. Such was the hunger for stories about Nazis...

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DVD: Roberto Rossellini - The War Trilogy

Filming in bombed locations around Italy and Germany, the immediate evocation of wartime and post-war moral zeros, ordinary Italian locals and American GIs playing themselves alongside professional actors: all these assets would be enough to make...

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DVD: Night Will Fall

The quotation from which this film’s title is taken runs thus: “Unless the world learns the lessons these pictures teach, night will fall.” It’s drawn from the voiceover of a documentary called German Concentration Camps: Factual Survey that was...

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