The great dictator

Having examined the great escape and verboten as apposing poles of post-war Nazi
representation; one reducing fascism to simplistic villainy, the other overwhelming audiences
with traumatic realism, we now turn to how satire emerged as a third path. To analyse Nazi
depictions in cinema, it’s vital to turn to Charlie Chapins model; using humour not to trivialise
Nazism, but to dismantle its ideological seduction. Charlie chapin’s The Great Dictator (1940), a
groundbreaking satire ridicules Hitler through buffoonish parody while delivering a powerful
anti-fascist message, stands out as a seminal work that struck a delicate balance between satire
and seriousness. When The Great Dictator was released in October 1940, Nazi Germany stood at
the peak of its continental domination. In this climate of global terror, Chaplin's audacious satire
performed something unprecedented in cinema history, it made the world laugh at Adolf Hitler
while the Führer still commanded Europe's most formidable war machine.

The Anatomy of Subversion

Chaplin's genius lay in his understanding that fascism depends fundamentally on manufactured
dignity and performative power, what Walter Benjamin termed "the introduction of aesthetics
into political life" (1936, p. 19). His Adenoid Hynkel character systematically dismantles the
Hitler myth through three masterful techniques that enact what Theodor Adorno would later
argue the “repression of enlightenment to ideology which is graphically expressed in film”
(1944, p. xviii), using reason's tools to expose irrational authority. As David Robinson
documents (2013), Chaplin “screened all the newsreels of Hitler on which he could lay his
hands” (1985, p. 528), which enabled him to distill fascism's performative essence into what
Adorno would recognize as "the grave-yard stillness of dictatorship" (Adorno, 1944, p. 99)
lurking beneath democratic surfaces. The transformation of the Nazi salute into puppet-like
spasms and the jutting chin into a comic performs Adorno's observation that "film seeks strictly
to reproduce the world of everyday perception" (1944, p. 99), but here through carnivalesque
inversion. Adorno’s critique of fascism’s "jargon of authenticity" (1973, p.xiii) finds its perfect
cinematic rebuttal in Hynkel’s pseudo-German speeches (00:15:26–00:20:18). Chaplin’s
gibberish, "und ze sauerkraut!”, exposes a ritualized emptiness of authoritarian rhetoric, where
words substitute for meaning and gestures for thought, reducing the Reich’s "blood and soil"
sloganeering to culinary nonsense. Thus, showing that fascist language used to portray Nazis is
just recycled jargon, a flaw Chaplin magnifies until the jargon collapses under its own absurdity.
Also, the iconic globe ballet sequence distills Nazi expansionism into pure symbolic poetry. As
Hynkel pirouettes with a balloon globe before it spectacularly pops, Chaplin foreshadows the
Reich's inevitable collapse through sublime visual metaphor. Immortalising the collective
memory that America new even before the war ended that the Nazis would never succeed,
reducing them down to the depiction of incompetent caricatures preaching fascist jargon.
Chaplin’s Final Speech as Cinematic Epiphany

In the climactic moments of The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin performs one
of cinema’s most radical acts of rupture. The Jewish barber, Chaplin’s
everyman protagonist, hitherto trapped in the film’s dualistic farce, stands
before a crowd expecting the tyrant Hynkel. Instead, he sheds both roles
(barber and dictator) to become simply Chaplin, the artist, speaking directly
to the audience: "I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor..." This
shattering pivot dismantles the film’s comic scaffolding, replacing satire with
sermonic urgency. The moment is not merely narrative resolution but a
meta-cinematic awakening, forcing viewers to transition from amused
spectators of fascism’s parody to morally implicated witnesses of its real-
world stakes. Chaplin’s speech is a deliberate act of aesthetic violence
against the film’s own constructed reality. For 90 minutes, the audience has
been complicit in laughter, delighting in Hynkel’s buffoonery, a dynamic
Chaplin himself engineered to expose fascism’s absurdity. Yet the finale
rejects this complicity. By abandoning character, Chaplin echoes Bertolt
Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt which translates to “alienation” effect (1964,
pp. 76, 214), jarring viewers out of passive consumption. The barber’s
trembling voice and unvarnished plea ("Look up, Hannah!") collapse the
safety of satire, replacing it with what Walter Benjamin called "the tiny,
fragile human body" (White, 1936, p.1) confronting history’s storm. The
speech’s content transcends its 1940 context, anticipating postwar
discourses on human rights and collective responsibility. Chaplin’s call to
reject nationalism ("The way of life can be free and beautiful!") and embrace
solidarity ("We all want to help one another—human beings are like that!").
The speech is not just anti-fascist but anti-fascist in advance, a cinematic
bulwark against horrors the world had not yet fully witnessed. Thus engrainin
the memory that Nazis should not be tolerated into the minds of Amerians.
The speech implicates the viewer, "You have the love of humanity in your
hearts!", demanding active resistance over passive observation. In
additionas the film was created before the full revelation of Nazi atrocities,
The Great Dictator occupies a unique position in cultural memory as "pre-
traumatic" cinema. Chaplin later confessed he could never have made the
film had he known about the Holocaust's horrors. This very limitation makes
the film invaluable for understanding how societies recognize emerging
threats before they fully manifest. The movie captures that brief historical
moment when fascism could still be imagined as ultimately ridiculous rather
than systematically genocidal.

For American audiences in 1940, two years before the U.S. entered WWII,Chaplin's satire served
a vital function by allowing audiences to engage with a difficult subject at a time when American
public opinion gradually began shifting from “an isolstionist to an interventionist position”
(Maland, 1975, p.189). While The Great Dictator remains a landmark, its prewar context
inevitably limited its perspective. As it was made before the full horrors of the Holocaust were
known, it could not address genocide with the gravity of postwar films. Maland notes that the
great dictator, with its “satirical attack on fascism and its affirmation of an alternative set of
values”, had film makers exploring issues of central concern to americans at the time of its
release" (1989, p. 170), a distinction that would become crucial as Holocaust awareness grew.
Verboten learned from this and embraced its moral urgency but stumbled by pairing it with
unbearable trauma. The Great Escape also took inlufence via portraying nazis as broad-stroke
villainy. Together, these films illustrate the enduring challenge of representing fascism on screen
and how the great dictator set a standard on how to entertain without trivializing, and how to
educate without overwhelming.

However, this approach had limitations. By focusing on Hitler's ridiculousness rather than the
systemic violence of Nazism, the film unintentionally set a precedent for portraying fascists as
inherently incompetent, a trope that would later distort historical memory. As in immediate
postwar years, American cinema largely abandoned Chaplin's balance in favor of simpler Nazi
portrayals such as the great escape Hollywood, action one-dimensional villains trope. It wasn't
until the countercultural movements of the late 1960s and 70s that Chaplin's approach resurfaced,
this time with sharper political teeth, such as The Producers, using comedy to critique power
structures. Chaplin states that "more than ever now the world needs to laugh", "at a time like this,
laughter is a safety valve for our sanity". (Maland, 1989, p. 112). Overall, Chaplin's film didn't
just change how Americans saw Nazis—it changed how they saw themselves. By daring to mock
Hitler during his rise, The Great Dictator demonstrated that comedy could be a weapon against
authoritarianism. That lesson would echo through decades of satire. Yet the film also left an
unresolved tension: when does laughing at evil risk becoming laughing past it?