"My Struggle"

In a Viennese homeless shelter, the Jewish bookseller Schlomo Herzl finds himself taking in a rude young man who has traveled from Braunau am Inn and is named Hitler. Herzl devotes himself to the newcomer, lending him his only winter coat, giving him a distinctive beard trim, and not holding back on practical life advice. While Herzl wants to write a book to drive the evil from his heart – it is to be titled "Mein Kampf" – Hitler, after a failed application to the Academy of Fine Arts, sets his sights on a political career. By Herzl's side, a demagogue is maturing, one who knows how to instrumentalize others, allies himself with Death herself, and responds to Schlomo Herzl's love with a pogrom. The director and author George Tabori (1914-2007) was convinced that the content of every joke is a catastrophe and that laughter is as existentially liberating as crying. In his grand farce, he takes historical facts and counters them in a subversively comedic way. Thus, in his play, premiered in Vienna in 1987, he connects profound pain with philosophical wisdom and unshakeable Jewish humor against the backdrop of the Shoah.