Downfall

by Shari L. Rosenblum

Hitler had a human face. Or so says Oliver Hirschbiegel in Downfall (Der Untergang). Working from a screenplay by producer/writer Bernd Eichinger, based on solid history ( Inside Hitler's Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich by Joachim Fest) and eye-witness accounts ( Until the Final Hour: Hitler's Last Secretary , by Traudl Junge and Melissa Müller), Hirschbiegel's contribution to the filmic history of World War II deviates from the broad-stroke iconography of Nazi evil that populates modern cinema. His film tells the story of the fall of the man.

He has put out a finely crafted piece of work. The film's setting contains within its four-wall claustrophobia the very essence of the Führer's last days. The bunker beneath the chancellery in Berlin, recreated and photographed among narrow corridors in harsh, but dimming, fluorescent light, becomes at once a microcosm of the shrunken empire—the Reich reduced to artifice and delusion—and an inescapable metaphor for the headquarters of Hell—labyrinthine underground populated with monstrous beings and presided over by the animus of evil. In the streets above, those who worshipped one or the other are abandoned by both and dying for their sins. Burnt-out buildings and broken bodies fill the landscape of what is left, the dreaded Russians at the gate. But in the concrete fortress below a melancholic madman clings to impossible victory, military leaders finger their guns and speak of honor and, cyanide at the ready, the followers dance—macabre specters with illusions of grace.

Despite these echoes of Bosch in the film's imaginary décor, there is a softness in Hirschbiegel's approach to his subject. Rather than the cold hard facts—the ghettos, the camps, the oven stench of flesh—he gives us the underworld through the eyes of Traudl Junge, Hitler's last personal secretary. The film opens with her voice, from interviews late in her life, and closes wi th her unapologetically handsome real-life image (from the documentary Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary, by André Heller and Othmar Schmiderer ) . It takes as historical fact her calmly captured recollections from the age of 25—as she evinces still at 81 an admiration—warmth—for the man who was Hitler.

Luminous and guileless (as played by Alexandra Maria Lara), Junge is our passage into the devil's lair. Some see her—like the child soldiers the film gives us in the ruined city above—as a symbol of the German people's claimed captivation, deluded innocents in thrall to charisma. But she is also a model (denials all accounted for) of their willing complicity: standing by, taking down his words with care, and all the while claiming blindness to the horrors he dictated. Despite the sweetness of her look, she betrays an almost icy lack of sensitivity to anything other than herself and her circle. Hirschbiegel's subjective soft focus notwithstanding, she gives no pause to the human pains, but only to the folly and fanaticism at the moment of collapse. She giggles in mock shock when Eva Braun (Juliane Koehler, playing hysterically in tow) confesses to kicking Hitler's beloved German Shepherd, Blondi (on whom he famously tests Himmler's poison), gazes dispassionately at a crumbling Joseph Goebbels ( Ulrich Matthes), and registers something like mild p.c. surprise when her boss utters harsh words against the Jews. Even i n the wake of Magda Goebbel's methodical murder of her six young children—fresh-faced, adorable, trusting—Junge shows neither anger nor disgust. Actress Corinna Harfouch's painstaking determinedness in the role is unshakably chilling, the definition of despicable, but the secretary does not look on her with anything more than pity that she should be brought to such deeds by the defeat of National Socialism and sorrow that something else could not be done. Remorse is not an issue. The film embraces the same ambivalence as she between expressed regret and self-forgiveness.

Bruno Ganz is her Hitler. Oft-cast as angel with his gentle visage and eyes of soft compassion, the Swiss-born actor plays the master Nazi with the remnants of magnetism overwhelmed by mania. The performance mesmerizes, with the necessary mimicry of biographical portrayal (the body progressively hunched, the hand trembling from illness or wound) and an extraordinarily nuanced range of emotional glimpses (the voice rises and falls, rings passionate and falls flat, goes tender and shrill). He grows more misshapen as the film unfolds—as if the grotesquerie were ultimately just a sliding into the madness of the Reich's defeat. That some express sympathy for him here is troubling, but not unexpected. The worst of what he did is not in play—his rantings against his followers and the German people framed as lapses in his flawed humanity. Perhaps the reality is so unfathomable that it cannot be contained in psychological portrait.

To what purpose the humanization, asks Stanley Kauffman in The New Republic—“ an attempt to balance the world's black view of Hitler?,” “to show at least that he was sincere and brave?,” just as German journalists wondered in print whether the film's resizing of the Nazi monster might give succor to neo-Nazi monsters in the making. David Denby in The New Yorker shouts out “We get the point . . . [but] is this observation a sufficient response to what Hitler actually did?” and Roger Ebert answers no, “[a]ll 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.” I don't think the point was to make Hitler look brave, and I doubt that anyone ever doubted his sincerity; I don't think he comes off strong enough to bolster neo-Nazis; I don't think the film was intended as response to anything (it offers none); and I don't think it teaches us anything about racism (which is not of the film's concern) or the barbaric instincts of tribalism (if for no other reason than that it takes them as a given). I think the point was to make Hitler credible—not to make us understand him, but to allow the German people to understand themselves (which explains not only the emphasis on Junge's naïveté and Goebbel's blind devotion, but also the factual revisions of characters like Hermann Fegelein and Professor Schenk). To give the German people a way to come to terms with their history—to excuse themselves. His downfall, after all, was theirs too.

This is not a film intended to convey the enormity of Hitler's deeds—such things would blur the message. The film's point, it seems, is to remind us of the natural way we sway to the tilt of humanity—familiar, recognizable, identifiable humanity, however perverted its form. The way we make excuses and exceptions and forgive the unforgivable if it has a human face. The self-indulgence in the memories of Traudl Junge is precisely what the filmmakers were going for, and to her the worst Hitler was was a “criminal”—the face she saw is the face they show. So in the end what we get is nostalgic disenchantment about a man gone wrong and an empire lost rather than a grasp of unspeakable acts and actors. And it's too bad, because excusing is worse than forgetting. If we are to remove the Nazi legacy from the realm of icon and metaphor and give reality back its force—we have to admit what the reality was. We take great pains to remember the human cost of such acts, and we should take equal pains to remember the human cause. It is humanity that gives evil its ultimate power. If we can see ourselves reflected in the moral abyss, we willingly believe we see a light. Hirshbiegel is right: that Hitler looked a lot like us we must never forget. But we must not excuse those who were content to look no further into his soul, lest we forget that we resemble far more closely those who perished by his hand.

©2005 Shari L. Rosenblum
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