Encountering Hitler: Seductive Charisma and Memory Spaces in Heinrich Breloer’s Speer & Hitler

Abstract

An encounter with a film usually begins with its title, and in the case of Heinrich Breloer’s Speer und Er (Speer & Hitler: The Devil’s Architect, 2005), this is especially telling. At first sight, the pronoun ‘Er’ does not demand explication, since the connection between the life of Albert Speer, which symbolically illustrates Germany’s post-war struggle with questions of guilt and responsibility, and the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler is apparently self-evident. The German viewing public could obviously be expected to recognize such an allusion in advance, and it responded to the prospect of the film with great interest.¹ In May 2005, shortly after the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War II, an average of 3.84 million viewers followed the prime-time transmission of Breloer’s three-part docudrama on the German state television channel ARD, a figure almost as high as that attracted by his film Die Manns — Ein Jahrhundertroman (The Manns: Novel of a Century, 2001).² Of course, the implicit reference to Hitler in the German title Speer und Er serves to underline the significance of his persona for the film. On the one hand, it presents him as a legendary and almost godlike figure, and is thus uncomfortably reminiscent of the rhetoric of Nazi propaganda. On the other, the specularity of the title’s visual design, with its mirroring of the syllable Er (which also encodes the missing ‘Hitl’er), already hints at the narcissistic relation between Speer & Hitler projected by the docudrama.