Adolf Hitler is back, walking the streets of Dresden, Brandenburg, and Berlin, Germany, pumping gas for his car, buying coffee, waving to locals and acting as if World War II never happened.
Well, not really – this "Hitler" is actually lookalike German actor Oliver Masucci, drumming up interest for the upcoming film, "Look Who's Back." But to the average stunned German, the actor's trenchcoat-costumed appearance couldn't be more shocking if Masucci were the real deal,
NBC News reports.
Masucci-Hitler even appeared on a balcony in Brandenburg, railing at a bunch of real-life neo-Nazi NDP skinheads and calling them, "Schlappschwanze," which loosely translates into "wimps."
The film is a screen adaptation of the satirical book by the same name, a publishing phenomenon which the
Sydney Morning Herald notes has sold two million copies in Germany, been translated into 38 languages and marketed in 40 countries — but not in Israel.
Told in Hitler's voice, the book imagines Hitler awakening in a modern Berlin vacant lot in 2011 after 60 years, oddly un-aged, and saying, ''The last thing I recalled was sitting on a sofa, a divan, with Eva (Braun). When I awoke I was unable to recall any further details. Not least on account of the bad headache I was suffering."
Wandering out into the landscape of the new, media-obsessed Germany, he is seen as a Hitler impersonator who refuses to break character, and becomes a huge German television star.
Author Timur Vermes commented to the Morning Herald, ''We have the bad Hitler, the monster, the funny Hitler; that is our Hitler now. But no one knows how this man could be so fascinating. Most people wouldn't think it possible that if they would have lived back then they would have thought he was in some way attractive too.''
In the book, "Hitler" refers to today's German Chancellor Angela Merkel as, '"a chunky woman with all the confidence and charisma of a weeping willow'."
Verme said of the knowledge he gained about Hitler while working on his satirical novel, ''He was no politician, he was a gambler, and he was gambling with his country, which was possible because he believed you have to die one way or another so you can die as well for your country.''
He added, ''My Hitler resembles very much the Hitler I found in the texts: pragmatic, and if referring to the Holocaust, then fast, technocratic, slightly casual, because everyone around him knows what is getting done in the meantime somewhere else.''
The film is being produced by Munich's Constantin Films and directed by David Wnendt, the
Hollywood Reporter notes, and is expected to be released in October of next year, in Germany.
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