Ready for his closeup?
BERLIN -- Prior to the release of a new German movie emphasizing the human qualities of Adolf Hitler, Jewish groups in Germany -- as well as a number of British newspapers -- voiced fears that the film might lead masses of viewers to feel dangerous sympathy for the Fuhrer. Such worries were misplaced. Nearly half a million Germans flocked to see "Der Untergang" (The Downfall) when it opened last weekend, but aside from one incident in a Berlin theater there have been no cries of "Heil Hitler!" Instead, a lively discussion commenced as to whether there is anything new to learn from this meticulous, fly-on-the-wall dramatization of the Fuhrer's final days in the Bunker -- and, if so, what.
"The Downfall" breaks a major taboo. Swiss-born actor Bruno Ganz plays the Fuhrer as a doddering old man who not only spews anti-Semitic venom but sheds tears for his dead dog and looks tired and confused. The movie shows Hitler in moments of desperate indecision and occasional kindness to those who served him -- not to mention tenderly kissing Eva Braun.
The film also forgoes moralizing about those helpers. The story is structured around the memoirs of the Fuhrer's loyal secretary Traudl Junge, whose fealty to her boss outweighs all doubts, even as Berlin is being demolished by Soviet artillery.
Screenwriter-producer Bernd Eichinger stresses the film's scrupulous historical accuracy and claims to offer viewers a demythologized portrayal of Hitler, not as a demon but as a man. But "The Downfall," he told a film magazine here, is also a reappropriation of German history.
"I think it's high time that we tell our own story with the means at our disposal," Eichinger said. "We need to have the courage to play the main roles on screen ourselves." The implication is that Germans' view of Hitler has been in effect defined by his role in the Allies' heroic narrative of World War II -- the embodiment of evil vanquished by the good nations of Europe and the United States.
While reviews have been mixed, "The Downfall" has struck a chord with many Germans, including some very well-informed ones. "I know of no other film that brings history so urgently and painfully alive," Hermann Graml, professor of history at Augsburg University, told the news magazine Der Spiegel -- sentiments echoed by his eminent colleague Joachim Fest (upon whose work the film is partially based) and by British Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw.
Frank Schirrmacher of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung hailed the movie as a "masterpiece," comparing postwar Germans to characters unknowingly trapped in a doll house in a famous "Twilight Zone" episode. "It's as though we who were born afterward," Schirrmacher philosophized, "had been living in a toy replica world upon which an evil glare has been focused. Eichinger has broken through that."
Eichinger's critics see the obsession with biographical minutiae -- down to what Hitler ate for his last meal -- as the film's great weakness, arguing that what viewers get is not insight but voyeuristic spectacle. "The reduction of history to personal history is a completely inappropriate way to encourage understanding of major historical processes," objected historian Hans Mommsen in Der Spiegel. Meanwhile Georg Seesslen, a columnist for Die Zeit, dismissed the film as "Hitler for the children of CNN and `Big Brother."'
Watching "The Downfall," one can't help but feel Seesslen is right. Because the film focuses so narrowly on Hitler's demise, viewers don't learn anything more about the appeal of Nazism from this film than they do about everyday life from reality TV -- or about the reasons for war from embedded journalists. "The Downfall" may give German viewers a sense of Hitler's pathos -- perhaps allowing them to work through some national neuroses. But it doesn't shed much light on why some intimates stuck by his side in what they knew to be his suicidal final hour -- much less why Germany as a whole followed his vision of war and genocide.
Meanwhile, Germans have bigger things to worry about than this overblown biopic. The same weekend it was packing the cinemas, voters in economically depressed Eastern Germany returned two right-wing nationalist parties to local parliaments -- as if to remind people that the important thing was not how Hitler met his bombastic end, but how he got so far in the first place.
Jefferson Chase is a writer living in Berlin.
