The Rottal-Inn district in Lower Bavaria treats its 120,000 residents to something that it is alone with in Germany - its own theater.

The Theater an der Rott has been in Eggenfelden since 1963.

It offers 385 seats, has an additional studio stage and a nine-person ensemble.

At the weekend it started the season with Hitler.

It always works, but does “Mein Kampf” also work as a musical?

Hannes Hintermeier

Feuilleton correspondent for Bavaria and Austria.

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Director and author Malte C. Lachmann, who is moving to Lübeck as acting director in 2022, and the Australian composer Dean Wilmington are making the book the subject of a talk show hosted by actor Norman Stehr.

The two volumes published in 1925/26 with a total of almost eight hundred pages become an eighty-minute mixture of reading, recital and history lesson.

Fortunately, it won't be a parody

The one-man piece demands quiet tones, roaring, dance interludes, singing, slapstick and gymnastics interludes from the very physically well-disposed Stehr. He fidgeted, fidgeted, fiddled with his reading glasses, lounged at his desk, spared the audience almost every layer of parody and uses the "German greeting" and the "Führer" gesture of the thumb pleasantly sparingly. Dean Wilmington, who acts as a sidekick on the electric piano, completes the picture with an expressionless expression. The spectators sit at tables on the stage, this creates intimacy, more closeness is not possible under Corona conditions.

"Hitler has a solution for everything, this old Dr.

Summer, but unfortunately nobody wants to hear it, ”is how host Stehr sums up the adolescence of the later dictator.

From a miserable student who lost both parents at an early age, he mutated, among other things, into a false academic painter.

Hitler wants to be everything, speaker, painter, abbot, architect, builder, worker, philosopher, sociologist, soldier, education officer.

All findings from "Mein Kampf", brought together to show who was the Ungeistes Child who later became the "Führer".

The goal: to make it understandable how this could happen.

Wilmington has also written songs that vary the motifs of Wagner, the Viennese waltz and the Comedian Harmonists (“A friend, a good friend”).

For a musical, however, it took a few real hit songs.

Hitler's unrestrained impostures

Stehr dissects Hitler's unrestrained impostures that would cost any politician's confidence today. The equation of Christian dogmas with the apodictic worldview of National Socialism, of course, intellectually tarnishes the claim to want to turn to the subject in a reasonably sober manner. Stehr's question as to whether you would go into the evening as a flawless democrat and come out again as a Nazi is rhetorical, but one number is irritating: "This book was liked by 79 percent of users," according to Google currently.

Lachmann and Wilmington are part of a tradition of “Mein Kampf” productions for the theater, first and foremost that by George Tabori, and readings - Helmut Qualtinger and, most recently, Erwin Steinhauer, will not be forgotten.

Your approach is deserving because it is suitable for schools.

Fade-in survey results show that there are still Germans who consider themselves a superior people and the influence of Jews to be (too) great.

The host abruptly ends the show with a question: Now that we've seen Hitler get his values, where do we get ours from?

Friendly applause.