Mussolini and Hitler caught talking about women. It seems like the start of a joke, or the headline of a digital page looking for clicks. But not. It is the result of a documentary released on La 2’s Documaster that has been dedicated to transcribing some of the Führer’s so far silent conversations. In one of them we see the two protagonists of the darkest period in the history of Europe on a balcony about to give a speech. It was 1934 and Hitler was visiting Italy. At one point, Mussolini points down and tells his colleague: “Look at that one, she is very pretty, she is not bad at all.” Who was going to tell the Duce that almost a century later some documentary filmmakers, with the help of artificial intelligence, were going to dedicate themselves to reading his lips. Given the Italian’s macho comment, the German doesn’t follow along.
This is the most frivolous passage in the documentary. In other scenes, the authors of the series transcribe conversations with greater political relevance. For example, those that show how Hitler wanted to appear nicer than he was, to attract more followers to his cause: “We do not want war, but to find a ground of constructive and interesting understanding for both peoples. “German culture prioritizes friendship and understanding with the British.” Or how, when he still did not have a majority to govern, he ended up making a pact with the traditional German right. Thanks to these pacts, Hitler became chancellor and, once inside, carried out barbarism.
How a society becomes accustomed to horror as it assumes acceptable behaviors that are not. How acts that until a few years ago were reprehensible are becoming normalized, trivializing evil.
In another film already released on platforms, the ability of human beings to adapt to behaviors lacking any type of humanity, compassion, empathy, putting yourself in the other’s place is precisely observed. The area of interest, which bases its title on the restricted area of the Nazi concentration camps to avoid witnesses to the massacre, is full of silences, always accompanied by disturbing background noise. Shots of great aesthetic beauty, converted into horror poetry, and the portrait of a family that lives its daily life right next to a concentration camp run by the father. The scene in which a kind of Holocaust commercial passionately sells him a perfected system to make the extermination of Jews even more effective is devastating.
Twenty years before all that horror happened, no one would have believed it. Ninety years later we live in a moment that is also difficult to believe. We find ourselves in a Europe where the discourses of the extreme right are accepted and supported by many citizens, rabid by the rise of feminism, who believe in the pure identity of their people, who are not racist but… When their leaders get hot They praise a fascist past that they long for.
These leaders, until very recently, caused fear. Now they are accepted as part of the new landscape. In the European Union we have become accustomed to the Le Pens, the Melonis and the Abascals, in the East, to the Putins, in the United States, to the Trumps, and in Latin America, to characters as grotesque and harmful as Milei. Don’t get lost with his show, with his eyes out of orbit, with his hairstyle, his insults. Behind all this staging there is a plot that longs for totalitarianism, that sympathizes with tyranny. Those who do not fight them now, laugh at them or make agreements with them will be accomplices of the new areas of interest.