childhood of Adolf Hitler
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WHAT a terrible childhood Adolf Hitler had - really. Oddly, ''Hitler's Childhood,'' by the Swedish poet Niklas Raadstrom, being presented by Northern Lights Productions at the Irish Arts Center, makes it seem utterly surreal.
The play is based on ''For Your Own Good,'' a 1983 book by the Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller, which argues that the dictator's personality was shaped by emotional and physical abuse in childhood; it adds that one reason he found a following in the 30's is that an abused upbringing was the common lot of German children in the late 19th century.
''Hitler's Childhood'' tracks little Adolf from birth for about 11 years while his father, Alois, beats and humiliates him daily. His mother, Klara, grieving for three older children who had died of diphtheria, cooperates in the subjugation of the child, and her hunchbacked sister, Johanna, terrifies him. The action unfolds in about 40 episodes that are vitually unvaried in emotional or dramatic intensity.
Here is the boy thanking his father for caning him, having nightmares after Johanna tells him that if he sucks his thumb the barber will cut it off, learning from his father to call everything bad Jewish, fantasizing in his loneliness that he has a grown-up Jewish friend whom he finally rejects in a violent outburst, pleading for attention from his mother as she says the rosary for her dead children, breaking under the ridicule his father heaps on his hopes of being an artist.