Oliver Hirschbiegel’s film has been criticised for ”humanising” Hitler. Downfall does precisely this — and makes him seem far more grotesque and sulphurous than any picturesque newsreel documentaries. It restores to him evil’s banality, in Hannah Arendt’s phrase, and its silliness and cheapness. Hitler has never looked more noisome, a tatty charlatan. If anything, it is the SS on whom the film goes relatively easy, although they never appear anything other than chillingly pompous.
Perhaps the most uncomfortable taboo Downfall breaks is having Hitler played with gusto by a German-speaking actor (although Bruno Ganz is actually Swiss). In the Anglophone world there seems to be a convention, perhaps born of fastidiousness and a victor’s gallantry, that Hitler is best played by a classically trained Brit.
The guttural authenticity of Ganz shows that shouting and raving was where Hitler’s real identity lay, even in private. His authentic mode of communication was shouting — shouting, in this case, at the sweating generals (and, in absentia, the German people) who had let him down. It is parody-Nuremberg. Hitler goes into his time-honoured oratorical tricks with his lank hair flopping about, but does it slumped at a desk facing a dozen or so officials, stupefied with undisguised embarrassment and resentment.
Hirschbiegel transfers to this material his talent for the intimate horror of confinement. You can almost smell the bunker’s sweat and fear. Screenwriter and veteran producer Bernd Eichinger devises some very queasy moments, particularly the Goebbels’ six cute blonde children, so often used in the Nazis’ PR, taking tea with ”Uncle Hitler” and singing German folk-ditties down in the bunker to cheer everyone up. It is a Von Trapp nightmare which, of course, concludes with their parents poisoning all six, and somehow nothing is as pathetic and contemptible as this. Perhaps most remarkable is the scene where senior Nazi officers troop grimly through the ravaged streets on their way to an impromptu summit with the Russians, where they sue for an advantageous peace on the grounds that the Russians and the Germans are the countries ”that have suffered most”. And all of this while, naturally, wearing their party badges.
Insofar as there is a moral centre to the film, it resides in the person of Hitler’s young personal secretary, Traudl Junge, on whose memoir, Until the Final Hour, it is partly based, and who was recently the subject of the riveting documentary Blind Spot. Downfall actually concludes with interview footage of the real-life Junge confessing, as an old woman, that she finally came to admit that her extreme youth was no excuse for following Hitler.
In this manner, Hirschbiegel and Eichinger suggest the survival of something such as decency. It is a questionable survival. What the audience takes away from this long and harrowing film is the utter destruction that Germany brought on itself: defeat without honour. — Â