A new German movie about Adolf Hitler opened this week. It's the first mainstream German film to make fun of the Nazi leader. And while laughing at Hitler has been a successful form of comedy in the U.S. and Britain, it's been unusual — if not taboo — in Germany.

All of this is now being debated in Germany. Attitudes have changed, according to Rudolph Herzog, who wrote a study called Dead Funny: Humour in Hitler’s Germany. “The first reaction after the war was to say he was a demon. That is saying that he was like a hypnotist who hypnotised everyone so we're not really responsible. The hypnotist is responsible. Horowitz [a code name for Adolf Hitler in Yiddish jokes about persecution of the Jews during the Third Reich] (7) comes to the Other World. Sees Jesus in Paradise. “Hey, what’s a Jew doing without an arm band?” “Let him be”, answers Saint Peter. “He’s the boss’s son.” (8) Chaplin was warned in 1939 that the film might be refused release in England and face censorship in the United States. Political factions in both nations were anxious to placate the unpredictable, angry Hitler, and “The Great Dictator” could be calculated to enrage the Nazis, who reviled Chaplin as a “Jewish acrobat.”

The book’s scenario is absurd – farcical – but author, Timur Vermes, said that he had painted Hitler as a human figure precisely to make today’s Germans have to think hard about him. The plot is far-fetched but the character is human and complex, not the usual portrayal of Hitler as monster or clown.

See the review by Glen Abel on the DVD release in 2003 of The Great Dictator available at http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/search/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1930421. See also the review by Bosley Crowther published in The New York Times, 11 October 1940, available at http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9D0CE5DA103BE433A25755C1A9669D946193D6CF.

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Of course the question has never been answered, nor can it be, whether any of the material in the films would have been funny had the true context, the mass murders of Jews on the way to and in the concentration camps, been known. But this is difficult territory. Hitler as buffoon is a joke as old as Charlie Chaplin. But Hitler as human being also makes many uneasy. The reviewer, Cornelia Fiedler, of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, attributed the book’s success not to its literary quality but to an unsettling obsession with Hitler. “A very strange fixation on Hitler has developed in Germany and it has something of the manic about it. The focus on Hitler – be it as a comic figure or as the embodiment of evil – risks washing away the historical reality”. Inanimate objects that look like Hitler – such as this house in Swansea – are popular online. Photograph: Rex Current restrictions in implementation requires that you group all the descriptions and links contiguous (i.e. nothing else in between them from start to finish)