COLOGNE, Germany — Adolf Hitler flickers on old newsreels, a grainy ghost of spastic gesture and rousing speech. Arm slanted skyward, face drenched in sweat, he seems one-dimensional yet beyond comprehension.
Those sinister images will never fade, but today a new Hitler lurks.
He is in color. He speaks in a mannered voice. He attends parties lighted by chandelier. He pinches the cheeks of little boys, walks with friends through snowy forests. He jokes. And for a fleeting moment, when his scowling and ranting calm, he seems fragile as he conceals a hand shaking from what is believed to have been Parkinson's disease.
Two German directors are for the first time giving this nation a more human cinematic portrait of the Fuehrer. Once relegated to cameo appearances or skulking in the wings, the Hitler of German film is stepping center stage.
Considered by some critics risky artistic explorations of evil that could instigate right-wing fascination, the movies are attempts to pierce the unfathomable. Imbuing the author of "Mein Kampf" with the tics and foibles of humanity, the directors say, makes him more frightening, his acts more despicable.
"Hitler was a genius seducer, so you have to show that he was charming. You have to show him as a human being," said Heinrich Breloer, director of "The Devil's Architect," one of the films. "But he is also ruthless, a killer with the eyes of a shark. You have to depict all his nuances. We have to look at the man behind the newsreel images."
The new movies coincide with the recent trend of reexamining the Holocaust and a widening revisionist scholarship that is enabling Germans to portray themselves as victims of a madman who were forced to endure the destruction wrought by Allied bombing.
Hitler has been the insect on the pin of German imagination since World War II. Nearly every night, German television airs footage of the period from the days of Hitler's ascension to the ruins of Hamburg and Dresden -- reminders meant to help prevent a repeat of the atrocities. Today, Germany is the world's third-largest economy and a prominent voice for democracy and human rights. The age of penance and absolution is over, according to young Germans who are more preoccupied with globalization than the horrors of the past.
