The reich stuff

Top ranking Nazi architect Albert Speer once noted that “If you want to understand Hitler, you have to understand he was an artist first.”

The Dutch-born, Oscar nominated screenwriter (The Color Purple, Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade) Menno Meyjes has courageously attempted to explore this notion in his directorial debut, Max. Set in Munich, 1918, the film explores the relationship between a fictional character, a one-armed German-Jewish art-gallery owner (John Cusack), and the then young, homeless artist Hitler, essayed to breathtaking effect by Australian actor Noah Taylor. Naturally, this controversial film has divided critics and observers alike, with some dismissing Meyjes’ film as an inacurate or glib treatment of history’s least appealing tyrant. Others have championed Max as a richly textured and intelligent deconstruction of fascism. Movie House caught up with Menno recently to discuss this fascinating and contentious new film.

TB: However did you manage to get a film about a youthful Adolf Hitler made?

MM: “Yes, I have wondered that when I’ve watched the movie myself! It’s a completely mad movie, I know it is.”

TB: Well, I suppose John Cusack’s involvement must have helped?

MM: “Oh yes. It helped tremendously. On balance though, I would say that his biggest contribution to the film was an artistic one. He was incredible as a creative presence. Of course, he did also help get the movie made, and his commitment was extraordinary. He went to his agent and said I’m not making another movie until I’ve done Max. And that really helped us, because the agent wanted to get the movie out of the way!”

TB: And to thank him, you almost put him in hospital...

MM: “Yes, we almost did. I don’t know if you noticed with the credits, but there were six doctors on the set. People must think we were complete hypochondriacs! But all of them were there solely to work overtime on John Cusack.”

TB: Given the nature of the film you must have spent months doing research and sitting in front of Ian Kershaw’s Hubris and the like?

MM: “I read Kershaw’s book, and I think that Kershaw is interesting. I think the great thing about Kershaw was his discovery that Hitler had always been in the service of the German army, or certainly since the Great War. But there were other books I relied on. This whole thing of Hitler using art as propaganda, and the elevation of propaganda to the level of an art form has been around in academic circles for years – mostly through a guy called George Mossey. He wrote a very influential book called The Fascist Revolution. I was really leaning on that book when I wrote the script.”

TB: For many reasons though, the idea of Hitler as a frustrated artist is routinely ignored by biographers...

MM: “Well, it’s not only very overlooked, it’s something that’s actively resisted. What I found very disappointing about the responses to this movie was how it was misread. With some notable exceptions, Max has been read as a what-if. It never was a what-if. It was about fascism, and how fascism is the art of disappointment. It’s the art of the impotent, the art of frustration. I thought I had included too many scenes with Hitler standing beside that huge white canvas in the studio, and he’s literally unable to penetrate the canvas. Scenes where he would retreat into his little notebook with fascist drawings. I think that the residue of his failure as an artist directly led to the establishment of the Third Reich.”

TB: Everyone knows how the very turbulent forces between the wars impacted on Hitler, but very few people are prepared to discuss how his flirtation with the anarchic artistic movement Dadaism shaped what he became...

MM: “Oh yes, absolutely. There’s another great book actually, called Rites Of Spring by Modris Ekstein on that very subject. There are two views that you can take of Hitler. Either he occurred in a vacuum – just someone with total tunnel vision, or he was aware of what was around him, and as an artist he had to very much aware of the turbulent art around him. Fascism and the avant-garde were two anti-bourgeois movements competing with one another between the wars, and Hitler was aware of both. Just go to the index of Mien Kampf, and look at the index, and you’ll find Dadaism. And Hitler stole from it. He stole from the street-theatre of the avant-garde for his oration. And yet he hated Dadaism for its subversion. Cusack would always say to me – and this is so right – ‘The other title of this movie should be The Thief.’ No, Hitler was aware of these things. He was familiar with Russian Constructivism – the ideas that art should no longer be elitist. He writes about that too. He completely took that on board, for his own purposes.”

TB: Something else you’ve woven into the tapestry of the film is the idea that stringent punitive measures such as the Versailles treaty, will ultimately produce monsters – Mr. Blair and co. should surely take note?

MM: “Absolutely. Of course that’s relevant. Often, when we decide that a country is a terrorist state, you make that prediction come true. When Osama bin Laden called the West crusaders, it wasn’t true, but now it is. And we don’t need to impose political or physical measures on a society. By bombarding them with the superiority of others, it creates something festering.”

TB: Well, that’s the thing about history. It’s always written by the victors, and of course, some would say that Nazism is revisited too often in all media, for that reason. ..

MM: “History is always written by winners, but I don’t think that the focus on Nazis is necessarily a triumphalist, Anglo-Saxon thing. I think it’s just such an unbelievable thing, and even such an unbelievable metaphor, but my whole point would be that there’s nothing mysterious about Nazism. It’s the religion or politics of frustration and anger. Those are emotions that none of us are a stranger to. So either you think there will never be another Hitler, but if you think that there could be someone like that again, then I think we’re on to something. Some people seem to have missed out on the fact that Max doesn’t claim extenuating circumstances for Hitler. Instead what Max lays at Hitler’s feet is that he committed the greatest evil of all – he made a choice to be evil, because he had the potential to be otherwise.”

TB: How did you actually go about writing this into the script. Wasn’t it emotionally draining to sit down, and fictionalise Hitler, and give him a voice?

MM: “Unbelievably so. It was really hard. At first I wrote a draft and called him Harry.”

TB: Yes, it must have been nearly impossible to write ‘Hitler’, and then add dialogue...

MM: “Exactly. I even ended up toying with the idea of just doing a script without a fictional politician, but I decided that that would have been a cop-out. And once I began writing him, it actually became easy. You just access all the jealous and spiteful and hungry and frustrated feelings you’ve ever had, and you squeeze that onto the page. Just remember, when you take out the Aryan ideas about blood and so on, Hitler was able to sell an aspirational, bourgeois lifestyle to Germans because he understood feelings that everyone has.”

TB: And of course that’s where you’ve come under fire – for ‘humanising Hitler’, which is an inherently riduculous notion, given that Hitler was undeniably of the same species as the rest of us...

MM: “Yes, of course. In Britain, a lot of critics have just dwelled on the fact that the Max character is haute-bourgeois – and so there’s been the charge that I wrote this stereotypical rich Jew, who created envy in the poor German soldier, but that charge says more about the person who makes it than it does about the film. Of course, Hitler is human. His humanity is clear, That’s what we need to accept. And that’s what we should be afraid of.”