Goebbels und Geduldig

Goebbels und Geduldig is a 2002 German war comedy telefilm about Joseph Goebbels and Nazi Germany, directed by Kai Wessel, written by Peter Steinbach, and starring Ulrich Mühe in the two titular roles.

The premise is that of Harry Geduldig, a Jewish lookalike of Goebbels who has been held captive and a secret by Heinrich Himmler ever since the Nazi rise to power in 1933. In 1944, Goebbels finds out about this and intends to liquidate his double, but when the two meet, Geduldig manages to escape and is from now on considered the real Goebbels by his entourage, who in turn is now held captive by Geduldig's prison wards and thought to be his own Jewish double.

Background

Due to its controversial nature as a Nazi satire, the film was in development for seven years, throughout which the script went through a number of substantial changes (18 different scripts were written). Even though the film was in fact finished in 2000, it was widely tested on international film festivals for two years to see how foreign and especially Jewish audiences would react to it, before it was eventually broadcast on ARD in 2002 after the broadcast had been announced and re-scheduled several times.

German reviewers praised especially the performance of Mühe in his double role. The German Lexikon des internationalen Films praised the cleverly written satire script and its "enlightening wit".

In 2015, the film was released on DVD. The DVD imprint asks people to visit the website www.catch-him.de, but as of late November 2015, the site still appears to be in development, so it is unclear whether this is an indication that Catch Him is the film's international title.

Cast

• Ulrich Mühe: Joseph Goebbels / Harry Geduldig
• Eva Mattes: Magda Goebbels
• Götz Otto: Brenneisen
• Dieter Pfaff: Eugen Haase
• Katja Riemann: Eva Braun
• Jürgen Schornagel: Adolf Hitler
• Tobias Schenke

External links

• Goebbels und Geduldig at the Internet Movie Database