Munich, 1918. The rich Jewish art dealer Max Rothman (Cusack) returns from the First World War to his wife and children, his lover, his fashionable friends and his modern furnished house. He meets a disillusioned soldier, Adolf Hitler (Taylor), who wants to learn to paint. Even though he loathes the antiSemitic opinions of his pupil, Rothman hopes to keep him away from politics with the help of art. He encourages him to proceed further than modest landscapes and to transfer all his conviction and passion to canvas. He is very enthusiastic when Hitler makes sketches of insignia and buildings. Rothman sees the designs as the start of a grand art project with a vision of the future…The character Max Rothman who never existed but is a compilation of several real people serves as a starting point for an intriguing treatise about the relationship between art, power, politics and class. The film confronts the cosmopolitan side of German Jewry with the fury and frustrations of the German working class, both in a social and art historical respect. In a key scene, we see Hitler speaking to a room full of antiSemites for the first time and, after a hesitant start, he starts to discover his talent for flaming speeches.
