Mein Kampf

The show at the Teatro Argentina by and with Stefano Massini, based on Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, is a lucid and merciless investigation into the power of words and their devastating consequences.

In 1924, while locked in his cell in Landsberg prison, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, where he laid out his political thinking and outlined the Nazi Party's program. Only eighty years later, in 2016, did Germany decide to allow its dissemination, believing that only through knowledge can a recurrence of a catastrophe be avoided. Over the years, Massini has linked the first draft of that manifesto-book to Hitler's speeches and rallies, as well as to the vast material collected in the Dinner Conversations with Hitler from 1941 to 1944, by two trusted party officials, Heinrich Heim and Henry Picker, under the supervision of Chancellor Martin Bormann.

Massini thus stages a harsh but necessary performance, where Hitler's work emerges in all its disturbing scope. The Mein Kampf can indeed be interpreted as a 20th-century Word, disguised as the paranoid autobiography of a fanatic. From the primacy of the Aryan race to the apotheosis of the leader, from the lust for redemption to the fever of propaganda, Massini reconstructs the framework of National Socialism, unfiltered, through the obsessive and baroque style of the original text. A theatrical experience that explores Hitler's exasperated rhythms and tones, in an attempt at understanding that, according to Massini, is the only antidote to the repetition of that destructive and devastating mechanism.

Produced by Teatro Stabile di Bolzano, Piccolo Teatro di Milano – Teatro d’Europa in collaboration with the Fondazione Teatro della Toscana. 

Photo: Filippo Manzini