Saturday, February 9, 2008

The Banality of Evil: Hitler’s Private Life



A short documentary film that examines Hitler's silent home movies taken at his Berghoff retreat and applies new ALR software technology developed by German speech recognition expert Dr. Frank Hubnet to "re-voice" the films. Based on a clip taken from a private conversation with the Finnish marshal Karl Mannheim in 1942 discussing the war in Russia – believed to be the only such recording in existence of Hitler speaking in private – the dubbed results (subtitled) provide a fascinating, if disturbingly banal, glimpse of the Nazi dictator’s private world.

“People often dismiss the trivia of history and they look on the major dates of battles and the major generals and this kind of thing, but history essentially I think is largely about trivia. Our lives are about triva… and if you understand the trivia, maybe it helps you to understand the bigger issues, the larger issues, and how they emerge from the trivia.” — Dr. David Lewis.