Following the Führer (Die Mitläufer)

Erwin Leiser has explored, perhaps more than any other filmmaker, the role of the cinema in Nazi Germany in such landmark documentaries as Mein Kampf (1960) and Wake Up Germany (PFA, 1976). But the question which guides all of his work goes beyond that of the cinema to the riddle of how ordinary, presumably nice people could, indeed, “follow the Führer” into an immoral national consciousness and a criminal state. In Die Mitläufer, Leiser approaches the issue with a combination of rare documentary footage and eleven dramatic sequences, directed by Eberhard Itzenplitz and extrapolated from true-to-life anecdotes, to convey a picture of the Nazi regime as seen through the eyes of the common man and woman. It is a workaday world where a man becomes a brown shirt in hopes of just rewards, and a naive wife’s husband confronts her with her first knowledge of the holocaust; where intimidation at the workplace and threats by landlords are the order of the day, as commonplace as sauerbraten and sausages. Documented scenes such as a railway workers’ Christmas party in honor of the Führer ring even more absurd than the fictionalized ones, and the result is a devastating portrait of the banality of evil.