Mein Kampf

Not Hitler’s treatise, but Tabori’s farce: Why it is dangerous to love one’s enemies.

Vienna, early 20th century, on the coldest winter’s night in living memory: in Blutgasse in Vienna’s 1st district, there is a homeless shelter beneath a butcher’s shop. Here dwell the travelling bookseller Schlomo Herzl, specialising in Bibles and pornographic entertainment literature, and God in the guise of the unemployed kosher cook Lobkowitz. When Herzl isn’t roaming the city selling books or meeting up with Gretchen, the last virgin over the age of 14 in Vienna, he is writing his memoirs. The work isn’t really progressing, but at least there is already a promising title: Mein Kampf.

Then a poorly dressed stranger from the provinces enters, wishing to sit the entrance exam for a degree in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts. Hitler. A fervent anti-Semite even in his youth, uncouth, with a penchant for tediously long speeches and a dubious inclination towards still lifes and architectural studies. Herzl takes him in with motherly care and helps with the basics: he makes coffee, lends him his coat and trims the wild moustache down to a small goatee under his nose. And when Hitler, after being rejected due to hopeless artistic incompetence, claims that he does not want to be a painter at all, that he wants something else, namely the world, and indeed the whole of it, Herzl advises him to go into politics.

George Tabori’s play shows how Hitler becomes Hitler – at a time when he is a nobody, searching for his path, and has an encounter with a Jew that one might be tempted to call a friendship. With bitterly dark humour, this farce explores Herzl’s influence on Hitler’s development and, with it, the imperative to love one’s enemies. For Tabori, who himself had Jewish roots, this was a lifelong theme. Johan Simons directs Mein Kampf, the most famous play by the great theatre maker, author and director. It is no coincidence that it is being staged today.