Downfall

Haven't been going to the movies so much in recent years, and would like to turn that around, so I'm making it every Tuesday.

It’s started with a bang, a real heavy-weight. The German film Downfall certainly has plenty of ready-made drama about it, and threading so many stories through the last crumbling and exploding days of the Third Reich must have been something of a logistical nightmare, but the director Oliver Hirschbiegel has wisely chosen to leaven the general cruelty and stupidity of Hitler and his cronies with the odd hero (in particular a Doctor Ernst-Gűnter Schenck), and a handful of naïfs (such as Traudl Junge, Hitler’s young secretary, and Peter, a boy soldier) caught up in the insane fervour.

I always like to start with criticising the critics, and while they’ve been overwhelmingly favourable, you get the odd carper who writes something like ‘okay it’s accurate enough, but it offers no new insights’, or ‘yeah it’s fine on how things happened, but not so hot on why’. Also, it seems that some critics feel the film isn’t sufficiently hard on Hitler, or that it’s somehow not ‘momentous’ enough.

So why not use another critic against them. The generally reliable Roger Ebert responds:

I do not feel the film provides "a sufficient response to what Hitler actually did," because I feel no film can, and no response would be sufficient. All we can learn from a film like this is that millions of people can be led, and millions more killed, by madness leashed to racism and the barbaric instincts of tribalism.

And this brings me to another point. A couple of critics have pointed out that Germans have rarely portrayed Hitler on screen, implying that they haven’t been able to come to terms with their Nazi past. I suspect quite different reasons. To ‘portray’ Hitler is inevitably to fictionalise him to some extent. There is plenty of real footage of the man and the events, and the reality is what they’ve needed to confront. It’s notable that Hirschbiegel has insisted that every element of Downfall is based on fact. Clearly this is an important matter for the German director, and for a German audience, a point lost on some American critics. For example, Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly [EW probably shouldn’t be allowed to review such a movie] writes:

The moment of Hitler's greatest vulnerability — his double suicide with Eva Braun — occurs off camera. What did he say just before he pulled the trigger? Missing from Downfall is a vision of this ultimate murderer's relationship to death.

Of course Hitler’s last words are unknown, so Hirschbiegel would’ve had to invent them. Yeah, no probs, wanker.

But getting away from the critics - sorry I’ve read no German ones, not knowing the language – the film was as absorbingly ghastly as one might expect, and certainly the most chilling scene, the one that lingers longest in the mind, was the murder by Frau Goebbels of her picture-perfect kids, because she didn’t want them growing up in a non-Nazified world. It’s this readiness to sacrifice even one’s own children to an ideal (any ideal, let alone such a puerile and putrid one as Nazism) that scares and sickens most effectively.

The main perspective we’re given of these last claustrophobic days is that of Traudl Junge. She might be criticised for being ‘too naïve to be true’ (or to engage our sympathy), and irritatingly star-struck before Hitler, though we also see the scales starting to fall from her eyes as old Uncle Adolf (played unforgettably by Bruno Ganz) spits out his venom upon the Jews. Her naivety and passivity are, I think, meant to be symptomatic of a large proportion of the German population – and we find such types everywhere, though hopefully in lesser proportions as we’re increasingly educated to back our own judgments and to distrust authority – who were overly awed by those who spoke in certitudes, crystallised vague fears and hatreds, promised the earth, and promulgated that ever-enticing myth (now promulgated in Israel itself, as well as in the USA), of the Chosen People.

At times sprawling and untidy, because sacrificing neatness and tightness to the reality principle, the film has left me with some memorable characters above all – Traudl and Peter, the bizarrely untouched Eva Braun, the noble yet questionable Schenck, the career soldier Weidling, the fanatical Goebbels and his wife – but with all the ‘based on reality’ emphasis, I’m left wondering at how true they are. Hitler dominates and so his portrayal ends up being most questionable of all. In the end we’ll never know, and for my part I’m left with a kind of self-annoyance at how unfathomably fascinating and compelling such unworthies are. It’s a bit like staring into an abyss – get away from there, you’ll hurt yourself.