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Heal Hitler!
(Heilt Hitler!)

Screening on Film
Directed by Herbert Achternbusch.
With Gunter Freyse, Herbert Achternbusch, Gabi Geist.
West Germany, 1986, 16mm, color, 146 min.
German with English subtitles.

Stalingrad, 1942: just as he is complaining about the "blockheads" who are in control, a German named Herbert (Achternbusch) gets hit. Fast forward forty years after the war to Munich’s Hofgarten, where in front of the patched-up ruins of the Army Museum Herbert reappears, mistakenly believing he is still in Stalingrad, which the victorious Germans have destroyed and rebuilt in the image of Munich. While Achternbusch deploys such supernatural time shifting for comic ends, Heal Hitler! nonetheless casts a critical focus on the incurability of the sympathizers, as well as on those who dismiss National Socialism as a mere hiccup in German history and who Achternbusch ardently hopes "may lose the use of their eyes and ears."

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