100 Years of Adolf Hitler - The Last Hour in the Führerbunker

In terms of filmic Uncle Adolfs, you probably cannot do better than kraut queer character actor Udo Kier in 100 Jahre Adolf Hitler - Die letzte Stunde im Führerbunker (1989) aka 100 Years of Adolf Hitler - The Last Hour in the Führerbunker directed by the late great Christoph Schlingensief (United Trash aka The Slit, Die 120 Tage von Bottrop aka The 120 Days of Bottrop), which may not feature the most serious screen depiction of Hitler but it certainly features the most memorable and feces-filled. The first film in the director’s ‘Germany Trilogy’ aka ‘Deutschlandtrilogie’—a sort of remarkably grotesque and oftentimes scatological post-Aktionist equivalent to Prussian conservative auteur Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's own Teutonic celluloid triptych—Schlingensief’s work is a totally tasteless piece of strangely tantalizing Teuton trash running less than 60 minutes that was shot over a 16-hour-long period from the morning of November 28 to the early AM hours of November 29 in a rotting World War II era bunker in the German town of Mühlheim an der Donau in the district Tuttlingen in Baden-Württemberg, Germany where the director used nothing but a mere flashlight that he himself wielded for lighting, thus giving the film a sort of kitschy yet apocalyptic chiaroscuro-like look sort of like the director's previous doomful scatological celluloid National Socialist nightmare Menu total (1986) aka Hymen 2 - Die Schlacht der Vernunft.  A work titled in anti-tribute to the 100 years since Hitler’s birth on April 20, 1889, 100 Years of Adolf Hitler lets the viewer know in a rather rude, crude, and aberrantly aesthetically terroristic yet jovial sort of way that Uncle Adolf might have blow his brains out on April 30, 1945 but the Führer is not dead, at least not in spirit, as Deutschland refuses to come to terms with him and bury him once and for all, or so Herr Schlingensief—a mensch whose lifelong obsession with National Socialism seems to have rivaled that of Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels and whose celluloid caricatures seem to fall somewhere in between that of Der Stürmer founder Julius Streicher and degenerate kraut commie Dadaist George Grosz—wants you to think. An absurdist work of audaciously antagonistic anti-history featuring intentional historical inaccuracies and obscene anachronisms that are ironically no less ridiculous than the myths about Hitler and the Third Reich that many people today accept as fact (i.e. Hitler had one testicle), thus underscoring the innately irrational and almost religious view people have of Austria’s most famous amateur painter, Schlingensief's celluloid (S)hitlerite psychodrama acts as a sort of reverse exorcism for those individuals who like to pretend German history began with the Wirtschaftswunder. In 100 Years of Adolf Hitler, the Führer is not the tragic Wagnerian god who unleashed the world’s greatest Götterdämmerung on Greater Germany and the rest of Europa, but a morbidly melancholy and decidedly dejected bedridden wuss of the drug addicted and Parkinson's-plagued sort who is so rattled with a wacky sort of weltschmerz that he uses excrement as a means of expressing himself before committing suicide in the most pathetic of ways in a cold, dark, and damp technocratic hellhole that was constructed by his regime. A work of overtly self-reflexive metacinema where many of the scenes begin with someone clapping a clapperboard in front of the camera as if Schlingensief did not even bother to have the film properly edited together after shooting it, 100 Years of Adolf Hitler is truly ‘transcendental’ cinema in its purest, rawest, and most unadulterated form as a work that shatters every single cinematic, socio-political, aesthetic, and historical convention imaginable with the ecstasy and anarchistic glee of a brigade of acid dropping berserkers at an enflamed French whorehouse full of whores in Hitlerite drag. 

 Opening with Uncle Adolf as portrayed by Udo Kier declaring “Schnapps, Wim, Trotta, Nico, etc.,” 100 Years of Adolf Hitler immediately lets the viewer know that Herr Schlingensief has a bone to pick with some of the more popular and, in turn, more banal and conformist filmmakers of New German Cinema, namely Wim Wenders and, to a lesser extent, feminist hag Margarethe von Trotta.  It should be noted that the film seems to be, at least partly, a sardonic celluloid revenge against Wenders, who walked out of the 1986 Berlinale screening of Schlingensief's film Menu total after being highly offended by the work, which was labelled as 'fascistic' by the German press and even the director's former mentor Werner Nekes.  After Hitler mumbles a couple of words, one bears witness to Wenders making the following bullshit and conspicuously cliched (sub)humanistic speech at the 40th Cannes Film Festival on a grainy TV screen, “We can improve the pictures of this world and with that this world can be improved.” As the rest of the film will demonstrate with a sort of insanely incendiary iconoclasm, Schlingensief thinks Wenders is a cowardly cardboard humanist fraud who makes soulless celluloid swill to appease shallow left-wing film critics and to demonstrate he is not a big mean Nazi monster like his parents and grandparents' generation, as if Germany’s National Socialist past spiritually castrated him. From there, a little boy that looks like a blond Ashkenazi Israelite sings a butchered children’s song that concludes with the goofy-looking child making reference to Wenders and the most artistically restrained yet internationally successful ‘auteur’ of New German Cinema, Volker Schlöndorff. As 100 Years of Adolf Hitler reveals, Schlingensief is not surprisingly a Rainer Werner kind of guy as he is a fellow ‘enfant terrible,’ as the film features Fassbinder superstars Volker Spengler (Satan’s Brew, In a Year with 13 Moons), Margit Carstensen (The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Martha, Fear of Fear), and Mr. Kier (Berlin Alexanderplatz, Lili Marleen) in rather raunchy roles that seem to pay tribute to the most anarchistic of Fass-bande productions, like Satansbraten (1976) aka Satan's Brew and Die Dritte Generation (1979) aka The Third Generation. It is 30 April 1945 at 5pm and the last day of Hitler’s god forsaken life and he is planning to go out with a bang in the Führerbunker, but not before he gets in touch with his inner fecal side. Hitler’s mistress-turned-wife Eva Braun (Schlingensief superstar Brigitte Kausch) is dyking out with Magda Goebbels in a bunker bathroom. Braun’s traitor brother-in-law SS-Gruppenführer Hermann Fegelein (Volker Spengler) is running around the bunker like a bumbling buffoon while grabbing his nipples like an Guido tranny stripper. Meanwhile, Hermann Göring (Alfred Edel), Martin Bormann (Andreas Kunze), and Dr. Joseph Goebbels (film critic/Schlingensief superstar Dietrich Kuhlbrodt) babble on about pointless bullshit. Indeed, it seems that everyone in the Führerbunker is either suffering from cabin fever and/or autism, among other things. 

 Although it is the end of April, everyone in the bunker is celebrating Christmas by eating a large festive feast, but Big H is nowhere in sight, so Bormann complains regarding the missing Führer, “he’s never on time…since Stalingrad…he just stays in bed, drunk, and ignores meals,” to which Eva replies in defense of her MIA lover, “That’s his way to celebrate, that’s right.” Hermann Göring is also unnerved by Hitler's glaring absence and rhetorically asks Eva, “What do you mean he’s celebrating? Millions are running into the knives of the Bolsheviks…and he is celebrating says?,” to which Dr. Goebbels eloquently replies, “Brother Göring, you’re so stupid you should have been Reich Chancellor.” Unfortunately, Herr Göring takes Goebbels’ sarcastic remark quite seriously and he decides that he does indeed want to be the Reich Chancellor. Out of nowhere, Uncle Adolf finally appears like a creepy rotting great-grandfather lurking in the shadows in a craven attempt to get a quick peek of his unclad great-granddaughter and Braun is so aroused by his presence that she seems to have a spontaneous orgasm, but her best beau barely pays her any mind as he grabs a bottle of wine from the cellar. Indeed, Adolf is only interested in his somewhat sexy Mediterranean-like Nurse Morell (Asia Verdi)—a transsexualized version of the real Hitler’s personal physician Theodor Morell, who got him hooked on a cocktail of drugs and who many Nazis seemed to believe was Jewish (notably, Morell claimed to have studied under Russian Jewish bacteriologist Élie Metchnikoff)—because she provides him with the only solace in his miserable forlorn life, morphine injections. While receiving an injection in a rather erotic fashion from Miss Morell, Hitler declares, “I’m still the greatest…Not just the leader and hero…I am myself! Straight, strong and simple!,” as if to only convince himself that he is not the most monolithic failure in all of human history, as a man who went from being the most powerful man in Europe and the most (in)famous man in the world to a lonely enfeebled cripple hiding in a bunker who has had his life routinely threatened by many of his former followers. While watching Dr. Goebbels take a dump, Bormann is slapped in the face by Fegelein, who immediately runs away like a delinquent toddler who is proud of being such a little asshole. After Bormann calls Fegelein a “German swine” as the fat belligerent bastard runs away, Göring comes up to him and Goebbels and lets them know that the rather rotund SS-Gruppenführer is a traitor because he has been screwing a prostitute. Needless to say, Göring, Bormann, and Goebbels gang up on Fegelein in a restroom, beat him up, and seemingly molest him, but he doesn’t seem to mind as he is a raving maniac who wallows in sadomasochistic cruelty of the sexually savage sort. Meanwhile, Eva Braun performs fellatio on Magda and Dr. Goebbels' underage son Kurt while the young lad draws a picture for his “Uncle Adolf.” Indeed, the Führerbunker is home to one fucked family affair. 

 While all the Nazis are singing “Silent Night” aka “Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht” while walking slowly in line like a bunch of highly devout monks in a somnambulist-like state, lovelorn lady lunatic Eva Braun gets jealous over Sister Morell due to her secret lurid love affair with Adolf, so she attacks her like a wounded rabid crazed cunt ex-girlfriend who won’t let go of her thoroughly disinterested boy toy. Meanwhile, sinisterly sleazy sex fiend Fegelein fingers a baby doll while repeatedly saying the word “fucking” as if he is possessed by the ghost of a depraved AIDS-ridden gay porn star.  In an assumed tongue-in-cheek reference by Schlingensief to himself and his own film, Bormann declares while sitting on the toilet, “I’m reading from the works of degenerate artists” and Göring responds by once again stating, “I want to be Reich Chancellor” while playfully manhandling his comrade. Meanwhile, Fegelein molests his sister-in-law Eva Braun while Nurse Morell does the same to Mrs. Goebbels. Fed up with Uncle Adolf's declining leadership abilities, Dr. Goebbels self-righteously declares, “We no longer need a Führer, just the German people.” For his last great artistic masterpiece before kicking the bucket, Hitler sits in a pile of liquid scheiß and then makes a print of his feces-covered fanny by pressing it against a piece of paper hanging on the bunker wall while Dr. Goebbels declares, “the people won’t be longing for a Führer, only the artist who has to learn not to resign, but to use the limits around him…Because, and I’m sure you will agree with me, Hitler, too was an artist!” in a most defiant fashion. Knowing that Hitler’s hours are numbered Göring conspires with Fegelein and Bormann, letting the former know he will be in charge of foreign politics and the latter will be in charge of domestic politics while he will act as both Reich Chancellor and Minister of Propaganda after purging Goebbels in what he hopes to be a 3,000 year Reich. 

 When Uncle Adolf finally puts a bullet in his brain, his estranged lover Eva Braun decides to become him by dressing in drag, even giving herself a Charlie Chaplin mustache with charcoal. As her first act as the new and hardly improved Führer, Eva Braun makes a phone call on a broken phone to some unknown person demanding that field marshal Erwin ‘the Desert Fox’ Rommel, who committed suicide in 1944 at Hitler’s request since he was connected to an assassination plot against the Führer, somehow be brought back to life. At her hubby’s command, Magda hands out poisonous chocolate to all of her children (notably, one is named after Margarethe von Trotta and another after Wim Wenders) who soon fall over and croak. Although she has killed all of her dozen or so progeny, Magda manages to give birth to another child—a primitive doll made out of yarn—during her lesbo wedding with Braun-turned-Hitler, though she dies during childbirth. Determined not to leave the baby a bastard, Braun hooks up with Fegelein and the two proceed to set Hitler’s dog Blondi on fire in what one might describe as a 'hound holocaust.' After escaping from the Führerbunker, Fegelein and Eva Braun put their Nazi bastard baby that they have symbolically named “Little Moses” inside a rusty old tub and send it down a river to an ostensible promised land in a scene juxtaposed with audio commentary of kraut conservative politician Franz Josef Strauss—a long-time minister-president of the state of Bavaria—stating, “Actually the Germans are romantic people, but then they start pondering. Others are logical, but in the practical sphere, they’re more realistic. Germans must finally learn…not everything in life ends in a mathematical parable, like 2 x 2 = 4. They should be less romantic, less enchanted, and most of all less ideological!,” in a biting scenario that seems to reflect Schlingensief’s belief that post-WWII Germany was sown in sin and perversion and is in denial about its National Socialist roots. 

 Notably, in the documentary Christoph Schlingensief und seine Filme (2005) aka Christoph Schlingensief and His Films, auteur Schlingensief states that he once told a friend that he felt he would make an, “excellent guard in a concentration camp,” adding regarding his interaction with his confused comrade, “He was like “Now what’s that supposed to mean?” but no, I’m telling you […] I have this fear, I probably have those molecules […] I’m a few steps removed from Goebbels, my grandmother’s maiden name is Goebbels, it was the cousin of a cousin or something like that, maybe there are molecules in me, […] hopefully, they won’t come into effect, so I’ve got to use it up from the outset, before it maybe puffs itself up later.” Personally, I think Schlingensief would have probably been interned in a concentration camp or even secretly euthanatized like certain ‘Entartete Kunst’ artists like Elfriede Lohse Wächtle had he lived during the Third Reich, as he was such an innately intemperate, iconoclastic, and incendiary artist and pernicious prankster that there is no way he would have ever been able to follow orders from humorless Hitlerites, let alone guard thousands of prisoners, but I respect his message with 100 Years of Adolf Hitler in regard to contemporary Germans being afraid of their roots and denying the past by pretending to be bleeding heart pansy humanist eunuchs, philo-Semitic shabbos goy artistic serfs, Father(land)-hating feminists, and other untermenschen rabble. Indeed, while von Trotta symbolically renounced her ancestral heritage by directing absurdly banal feminist biopics about anti-kraut commie Jewesses like Rosa Luxemburg, Wenders attempted to become an American filmmaker and went out of his way to work with Jewish American filmmakers like Sam Fuller, as if these glaringly and repulsively compensatory ethno-masochistic actions would somehow rid them of the ostensibly nasty Nazi taint. As a man who staged an adaptation of Hamlet starring real neo-Nazis and created a Big Brother-esque TV show set in Vienna called Foreigners out! Schlingensiefs Container where swarthy turd-skinned foreigners living inside a concentration camp-like container were voted off the show to be deported, Schlingensief demonstrated an obsession with Germany’s taboo past that seemed to transcend Uncle Adolf’s own obsession with heebs and bolsheviks, thus reflecting his truly Teutonic spirit. In its depiction of Hitler creating a painting with poop, 100 Years of Adolf Hitler also reveals the biting irony of how Uncle Adolf unwittingly gave birth to the alpha-degenerate Viennese Aktionism movement, whose members were heavily influenced by their nation’s Nazi past, especially Otto Mühl, who served in the German Wehrmacht and was even a war hero of sorts. Apparently, Schlingensief was so obsessed with his genetic inheritance and the supposed atavistic ‘taint’ in Aryan blood and kultur that he believed he contracted the cancer that ultimately killed him as a result of his involvement in adapting Richard Wagner’s Parsifal in the summer of 2004 at the prestigious Bayreuth Festival because, as his friend Alexander Kluge noted in the foreword to the book Christoph Schlingensief - Art Without Borders (2010), “Wagner, he claims, disseminates a deadly poison via his suggestive music.” Indeed, considering Wagner’s crucial influence on Hitler and the National Socialist weltanschauung, Schlingensief might have been on to something. 

-Ty E