WITHu Hitler, it was thought, everything has been said in the cinema. Chaplin, Alec Guinness and Anthony Hopkins played it, and then Bruno Ganz finally burned the dying dictatorship with roars and fingers into the collective memory of images. The rest are supporting roles. But that is deceptive. The character is alive, and you can tell by the fact that she repeatedly stimulates great actors to make unique adaptations. The last in line for the time being is Ulrich Matthes – of all people, Matthes, of all Hitler actors after Chaplin, probably the one who looks the least like Hitler. In Oliver Hirschbiegel’s “Downfall” he played the hollow-cheeked, hollow-eyed Joseph Goebbels in the shadow of Bruno Ganz with icy verve. In Christian Schwochow’s film adaptation of Robert Harris’ novel about the Munich Conference, he now embodies the “Führer”.
In short, “Munich – Facing the War” is about Hitler losing out in the diplomatic poker game that took place in Munich on September 29 and 30, 1938, even though he has the better cards: a narrative that is somewhat at odds with the classic interpretations of what happened. To make it plausible, Harris constructed a kind of dramaturgical square in which the historical protagonists, i.e. the German dictator and the British Prime Minister Chamberlain, are each assigned a fictional character.
In the case of Hitler, this is the diplomat Paul von Hartmann, who is played in the film by Jannis Niewöhner. In his 2017 novel, Harris was about saving the honor of Chamberlain, whose policy of appeasement gave the British Empire the necessary deadline to retrofit its fleet and air force. Schwochow, on the other hand, also wants to save the honor of German diplomacy. That is why he turns the scene in which von Hartmann confronts Hitler in his private apartment in Munich into a key historical moment.
It is the last of four encounters between von Hartmann and the sole ruler of the “Third Reich” and the decisive one. At the first three meetings, Hitler provoked and mocked the young attaché, dismissed him as a smartass, borrowed his watch and returned it to him amid the laughter of the evening table company in the “Führerbau”. This time, however, von Hartmann is holding a pistol in his hand. He hides it in a folder with press reports to hand over to Hitler, and he is determined to use it. But he hesitates, his hand trembles, as he replies to the dictator’s question about the mood among the people that the Germans are afraid of a coming war.
The “Führer” has the look of a reptile
At this moment everything depends on Ulrich Matthes. During the shooting, Matthes stepped in for Martin Wuttke, who played the brown chancellor in Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds”. Wuttke’s Hitler was someone who could be shot (which then happened with Tarantino). It is not Matthes’ Hitler. He has the tension of an android and the look of a reptile. But the most amazing thing is what Matthes does with his voice. He always holds it just below the threshold at which it cuts, just as his mouth always pauses just before it snaps shut. Matthes translates the much-invoked charisma of the “Führer” into a mechanism of self-control. Hitler’s paladins love him because he spares them. The dictator’s aura cannot be described in a colder, more precise manner.
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