“I
was born in Munich in 1924. I was a German Jew and I lived right across the street from Hitler's private apartment
,” remembers Edgar Feuchtwanger at the opening of the gripping documentary directed by François Bordes and Bertil Scali.
This man who fled Nazism in February 1939 at the age of 14, joined by his parents three months later, became a historian across the Channel.
We follow him, in this film taken from the eponymous book by Bertil Scali published in 2012, during a trip to Munich.
Here he is in the apartment where he lived from his birth in 1924 until his exile.
The place has today become the headquarters of a company.
Through the window of the former office of his father, Ludwig Feuchtwanger, who was a renowned publisher, his only son shows us Prinzregentenplatz 16.
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Mythical figure of evil
It was there, in a building still standing today, that the leader of the National Socialist Party (NSDAP) settled from the end of 1929. He occupied there, on the second floor, a luxurious apartment of 300 m2 and nine pieces.
Hitler was still far from coming to power.
But he is already a very well-known, politically important personality.
And now he has the financial means to move into a beautiful, well-located home.
Gone for him is the maid's room that he once occupied in a working-class district of Munich.
Opposite the future dictator, therefore, the Feuchtwangers.
They belong to a family of notables who have lived in the Bavarian city for a century.
Among his uncles, Edgar counts Lion Feuchtwanger, famous writer and early anti-Nazi.
He is notably the author of the Jew Süss, in 1925, and of Erfolg, in 1930, a novel which directly attacks Hitler by ridiculing him.
“
Our name was of course known to Hitler,” emphasizes Edgar.
We weren't the type to give in.
My father was famous locally and my uncle even more so.
Lion was, without exaggeration, one of the most widely read writers of his time.
» This is how, despite everything, despite the redoubled anti-Semitism, despite the Nazi propaganda which is present even in the school that little Edgar attends, the Feuchtwangers continue to live not only in Germany, but in Munich, the city that their sinister neighbor considers to be the cradle of his movement.
Where, in 1923, he launched his failed putsch.
There, even though he became chancellor on January 30, 1933, he still resides.
After this date, Nazism asserted itself in its ferocity.
The public humiliation of lawyer Michael Siegel on March 10, 1933, ordered to parade in his underwear in the streets of Munich, with an anti-Semitic sign around his neck, marks a turning point in abjection.
The photo of this friend of the Feuchtwangers, banned in Germany, was published in the United States a week after the events and went around the world.
Tragic whirlwind
In this tragic whirlwind, Edgar, pensive, thinks back to the physical proximity he experienced with the devil.
“I
had the same dentist as Hitler…
,” he slips.
It seems crazy today, because this character has become almost unreal, like some kind of mythical figure of evil.
In my memory, in the street, he seemed almost human.
And in a sense he was a human being...
”
One thing is certain, Nazism is sinking deeper and deeper into terror.
Kristallnacht, Munich agreements with British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, coaxed by a honeyed Führer, who received him in his private apartment on Prinzregentenplatz, the better to screw him over.
The relentless spiral that will lead to war and the Shoah appears in this documentary in a particularly chilling way.