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Big puke in need of love: Lars Eidinger as a reporter in "Faking Hitler"
Photo: Wolfgang Ennenbach / RTL
In the German film and television industry, the journalist profession is almost always presented as a biotope for idiots and unsympathetic people. In this respect, it is probably the biggest surprise of the series »Faking Hitler« that the actor Lars Eidinger embodies a reporter for the magazine »Stern« as a human touching, a bit desperate, in need of love. Eidinger plays Gerd Heidemann, the notorious star journalist who brought the forged Hitler diaries to the "Stern" in 1983.
The bosses and colleagues of the hero presented by Eidinger are all shown as career-horny and sexist, cynical and reader-despising, as one is used to from many German film and television productions.
Eidinger's Heidemann, on the other hand, is a nicely melancholy dreamer.
The notebooks allegedly handwritten by Hitler, which a Swabian provincial forger named Kujau passes to him, are his last chance, because he is on the hit list of his bosses, and so he sighs very seriously: "This will be the hit of my life."
A Jewish activist researches Nazi greats
The six-part series “Faking Hitler” is the stuff of the hit movie “Schtonk!” From 1992, except that Götz George alias Heidemann is now played by Eidinger and Uwe Ochsenknecht alias Konrad Kujau by Moritz Bleibtreu. The series maker Tommy Wosch has re-filmed the scandal surrounding the Hitler diaries, which were presented as a world sensation and quickly exposed as a fake, for a six-part series with a great cast. And he came up with some new characters and subplots. The most important female role in media satire now belongs to a young »Stern« editor (Sinje Irslinger) with a bad blond hairstyle and a brown family background. The actor Daniel Donskoy plays a smart Jewish activist who researches old Nazis and the fraudulent diaries.
"Faking Hitler" is not a crazy grotesque like "Schtonk!"
As you can see when you watch it again, Helmut Dietl's film has not aged particularly well, precisely because of its bad humor.
Wosch is now telling an almost conventional crime thriller with a lot of 80s-era flair.
In this, the two talented impostors, Kujau and Heidemann, head towards each other with a cheerful inevitability.
Bleibtreus Kujau is an almost honorable crook.
First he realizes with childish enthusiasm how easy it is to earn a lot of money with fake Führer records about digestive problems and Eva Braun's mood.
Then he panicked to stop his business partner Heidemann because the "Stern" bosses commissioned an expert report on the authenticity of the diaries.
Bertelsmann Group is coming to terms with the past
At its core, "Faking Hitler" is a friendly lesson.
It is about how alive the Nazi legacy was in the late Federal Republic - and about the changes in the media and communication.
A mobile phone that was not yet invented at the time, as one learns in this lovingly designed historical drama, would have prevented the big "star" blitz.
Because in a few crucial moments Kujau simply cannot reach the reporter Heidemann.
The "star" man is far away in New York.
There he has fun with his lover, a descendant of the war criminal Hermann Göring, who is played here by the actress Jeanette Hain as a clever, superior companion of a notorious seducer (and not as the garish Nazis who Christiane Hörbiger in the role model role in »Schtonk ! «Demonstrated).
The broadcaster RTL +, on which Wosch's six-part series runs from Tuesday, belongs to the Bertelsmann group like the »Stern«.
For the corporate group, the series can be seen as a project of coming to terms with the past, similar to a Hitler diary podcast by the »Stern« a few years ago.
The entertainment industry of the eighties is presented in "Faking Hitler" quite indignantly as a circus of male sexists, in which women are treated with contempt and stupid slogans.
“It's a Chauvi shack,” a law professor played by Ulrich Tukur once said.
This kind of resolute distancing should also convey a reassuring message to the series audience: This is definitely not something like this in the Bertelsmann empire these days.
"Faking Hitler", from November 30th. on RTL +.
