THE SHICKLGRUBER CODE

Hitler's World Cup drama an own goal, say theatregoers (Kate Connolly, The Telegraph, May 24th, 2006)

Theatre audiences in Hamburg have been outraged by a new play in which Adolf Hitler dreams of holding a World Cup to rekindle Germany's glory on the world stage.

My Ball - A German Dream, complete with a pop-song accompaniment, satirises the last days of the Nazi regime.

As Hitler's demoralised followers wait for him to commit suicide, he comes up with the idea of a football tournament, in which he is determined to engineer a Germany victory. The megalomaniac believes that it will save his Reich from final destruction.

Erik Gedeon, the Swiss-Swedish director, said the play was a dig at the nation's current attempts to project its hopes for an economic revival on the World Cup, which it is hosting in just under three weeks.

But critics have condemned the play, which opened this week at Hamburg's Schauspielhaus, as being in bad taste and appallingly timed.

The climax comes when the USAF foils the plot by parachuting tens of thousands of cases of Budweiser into Germany, thus completely destroying morale and checking the militarist revival.