The waxwork Hitler in Berlin is the latest proof of Germany’s determination to come to terms with a gruesome history, by turning the Führer from a one-dimensional national bogeyman into a three-dimensional failure.

For most of the postwar period, Hitler has been portrayed in popular culture as an aberration, a monster and a freak. In recent years, however, there has been an attempt to see Hitler in a more realistic light: no less evil but more believable, a human capable of inhumanity on an epic scale.

The 2004 film Downfall depicted Hitler’s last days in the bunker, but in contrast to previous films the Führer was depicted as ruined and contradictory, ranting one moment and petting his dog the next, baffled and weepy with self-pity. Der Speigel said that it gave “a real face to the absurd drama in the concrete ghetto”. Rendering Hitler as a lifelike dummy behind glass, rather than some iconic representation of wickedness, is the next stage in demystification.

The Germans have a complex word for the complex process of coming to terms with the past – Vergangenheitsbewältigung. A few years ago this was voted the most beautiful word in the German language.

Banning Nazi paraphernalia, prosecuting Holocaust deniers, holding up Hitler as a cartoon abomination may not be the best way to undermine neo-Nazism. Extremism thrives best when it can claim persecution. Far better to show Hitler as he really was in his last days, hunched over his desk, in front of a map showing the thousand-year Reich that would never be.

Covering the Eichmann trial, Hannah Arendt wrote of the “banality of evil”, the capacity of ordinary men to commit extraordinary crimes. And what could be more banal than a wax model of a doomed little man, contemplating the ruins of his terrible idea?

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