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Comic Aspects of Hitler's Career
The Literary Digest; 8/26/33. p.13

IMAGE
(Abroad)

A military edition of Charles Chaplin, with his characteristic mustache and his bouncing way of walking. He never wore a hat, but always carried a riding-whip, with which he chopped off imaginary heads. This was Adolf Hitler in the old days, writes W.W.C. in the London New Statesman. "He was so funny, I inquired who he might be. Most of his neighbors took him to be one of these Russian emigres who abounded in Germany at that time, and they freely talked of his being probably a trifle mentally deranged."

While the myth of the great leader is growing by leaps and bounds in Germany, certain independent European dailies and weeklies are stressing the comic aspects of Germany's dictator. They picture Hitler as a comedian, all the more laughable because of his seriousness. His triumph, as these critics see it, is the fruit of an indefatigable sense of the theatre. Hitler, they would have us believe, is a sort of actor- manager, staging his big show with scraps of discarded ideas and unconsidered trifles. ............

........ Hitler won devoted adherents in the "Osteria Bavaria", as that Munich saloon was named:

"There is no doubt his chief admirers were the two waitresses, buxom Bavarian wenches, who listened open-mouthed to him and danced attendance on him in a way that formed the subject of many jokes among the habitues of the place. Hitler's relations with women indeed are a strange and obscure chapter. I saw a great deal of him at that time and I can certify that he was in these mattersas [sic] abstemious as in regard to food and drink. The only woman he seemed to care for at all was the lady in whose viall [sic] in the hills he fled after his inglorious collapse in November, 1923....."

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