Der Fuhrer's Facelift....

A good friend of mine once said "every generation gets the Hitler they deserve"...
Now by that he did not refer to real-life genocidal dictators, rather he was mocking the ongoing passion for dramatically evoking Hitler in television and the movies.
Now CBS has "Fully Monty" star Robert Carlyle as a Führer on the make in "Hitler: the Rise of Evil".
The top Nazi of all time has always been big box office though. As far back in 1940 Morris Horowitz (aka Moe Howard) depicted one "Hailstone the Dictator" as a loud violent parvenue surrounded by homicidal morons.
Charlie Chaplin's "The Great Dictator" went the subtle route and saw the Führer as a needy fussbudget with a yen for conquest.
Anyone out there remember a short American character actor named Bob Watson? For five glorious years he was Hollywood's in house all purpose Hitler impersonator, he made a few low budget comedies and did specialized cameos as Adolf in top line features.
That is him playing Hitler in Preston Sturges' "The Miracle of Morgan's Creek".
Damn there was good money in playing Hitler back in the day!
Well...the world spun around a few times and when allied tanks rolled into the death camps suddenly Hitler wasn't so funny anymore.
Not that any of this stopped the global cinematropolis...everyone just switched over to serious type Hitler portrayals and soon we got brooding Richard Basehart as Adolf ("Hitler" 1962) and in due course the tallest dramatic Hitler on record Sir Alec Guinness ("Hitler: The Last Ten Days" 1973).
And in truth we've gotten comfortable with a film reinforced notion of Adolf Hitler as a kind of extra-historical slightly cartoonish supervillain, unique, monstrous and never to be seen again.
Well I don't know....identifying Hitler as the Apex Predator in the historic evil foodchain tends to obscure his prosaic origins as an extremist and a ruthless opportunist.
This is not to obscure he demonic skills as a orator and organizer....but his political milieu has it's importance in the story.
We should recall that Weimar Germany was a dying democracy in 1932. The decline in effective opposition political parties plays a role in Hitler's seizure of power. The Social Democrats, the unions, and all other liberty loving liberals were impotent after a ten year long beat down in the street and halls of Government through out Germany.
Muller, the last Social Democrat Chancellor was forced to resign in March of 1930 after failing to secure a funding compromise for unemployment insurance. Thereafter an increasingly inane collection of reactionary circle jerks would run the government.
Inept Mainstream conservatives like Otto Bruning and Franz von Papen pursued a ruinous deflationary economic policy whilst millions were jobless and without benefits in Germany.
AND THEN the damn fools actually called a parliamentary election, well the result was the extremist parties increased their representation in the Reichstag, with the Nazis now the second largest legislative faction.
Thereafter, all of Hitler's dealings in the lead up to his seizure of power were with hapless conservative hacks with a perfect record of economic catastrophe.
It's trendy today to blame the Nazis apotheosis on chronic liberal impotence, Leo Strauss is greatly hung up on this formulation. However this overlooks the German respectable right's victorious ideological warfare against the mainstream left that only made Germany easy prey for Hitler and fascism.
Hitler came to power in part because raw reaction had won a great triumph over social democracy in 1931, and then something worse came along to replace old fashioned conservatism.
George Washington Plunkett once said words to the effect that without political parties there would be hell to play in any large scale democracy.
It's the willful destruction of political parties and movements in Germany that gave Hitler the room he needed to maneuver himself into supreme power.
Remember that...