E-Mail This Article to a Friend THE GOEBBELS EXPERIMENT

GERMAN + ENGLISH | 107 MINUTES | COOLIDGE CORNER

Give him Kenneth Branagh to enact his words and even a monster can seem like a half decent guy. Maybe that’s the experiment Lutz Hachmeister and Michael Kloft refer to in this documentary. They back entries from Goebbels’s diary with archival Nazi footage, and at times you can’t help feeling for the little runt. Writing in the 1920s, the future Nazi propaganda minister describes himself as a tortured romantic seeking meaning in order to escape despair. This meaning he finds in Hitler, and for two decades his entries record not so much the banality of evil as the obsessions and schemes of an ambitious non-entity. The visuals underline this notion; he looks like a child in his father’s uniform. Otherwise, there’s little art or irony in the selection of material — why the Venice Biennale and not Auschwitz? The most horrific image is the charred corpse of Goebbels himself lined up with the bodies of his five children, whom he poisoned before he committed suicide.