Mein Kampf

„Are you ever playing, joking? You must, my friends! It enters my soul, for this is what desperates must do.” George Tabori put these words by Hölderlin before his 1987 play, and indeed the profoundly dark humor of MEIN KAMPF (MY STRUGGLE) ascends from the grimmest chapters of the 20th century. Tabori was one of the first to rediscover Hitler as a comedic character – almost fifty years after Charlie Chaplin´s THE GREAT DICTATOR. A country kid from Braunau, still wet behind the ears and yet already driven by delusions of grandeur, young Adolf travels to Vienna, carrying some paintings which he hopes will get him into the Fine Arts Academy. He finds accomodation in a men’s dormitory, sharing a room with the Jewish bookseller Shlomo Herzl who provides a touching care for the young Führer-to-be, eventually even lending him the title of a book he has been starting to write: MEIN KAMPF.