Der Untergang/The Downfall (2004)
DIRECTOR: Oliver Hirschbiegel
CAST:
Bruno Ganz, Alexandra Maria Lara, Juliane Köhler, Corinna Harfouch, Ulrich Matthes,
Thomas Kretschmann, Matthias Habich, Ulrich Noethen, Heino Ferch, Christian Berkel,
Michael Mendl, André Hennicke, Doneven Gunia, Thomas Thieme
REVIEW:
With the exception of the 1955 film Der Letzte Akt (The Last Act), starring Albin Skoda as Hitler, Adolf Hitler has appeared in German cinema only in cameos or from a distance or from behind, never a central character, never occupying a significant chunk of a film’s screentime. There have been numerous depictions of Hitler over the years by British and American films and actors, including such distinguished names as Sir Derek Jacobi, Sir Anthony Hopkins, and Alec Guinness, to name only a few. And yet even these acclaimed actors had trouble convincing us that they were der Führer. Filmmakers Oliver Hirschbiegel and Bernd Eichinger, working from a script based on Joachim Fest’s Inside Hitler’s Bunker and Traudl Junge’s own memoirs, set out to change this. The result is a compelling, engrossing, and sometimes genuinely affecting German war drama bolstered by an extraordinary lead performance by Swiss actor Bruno Ganz.
Downfall is bookended with brief snippets of interviews with Hitler’s secretary Traudl Junge conducted shortly before her death in 2002, and the film is primarily from Traudl’s viewpoint, starting with a prologue in November 1942 in which the young secretary (Alexandra Maria Lara) is appointed to the Führer’s headquarters. We next jump ahead two-and-a-half years, with Traudl and the rest of the entourage (an assortment of secretaries, cooks, aids, and top Generals) holed up with Hitler in his bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, which is now almost surrounded by the Russians who are already overrunning the city’s outskirts and pounding the rest into rubble. Many of the Führer’s underlings, including Heinrich Himmler (Ulrich Noethen) and Eva Braun’s brother-in-law Hermann Fegelein (Thomas Kretschmann) urge him to flee, but Hitler is determined to stay in the besieged capital, still holding out hope for a last-minute turn in the tide, and if that fails, resolving to kill himself in the bunker. Most of his subordinates have already fled, and many of those who remain, including Traudl, are anxious to get out before it’s too late, but a small circle of diehard loyalists join Hitler in the bunker, including Eva Braun (Juliane Köhler), the Führer’s vacuous mistress, and the Goebbels family, headed by Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels (Ulrich Matthes) and his wife Magda (Corinna Harfouch), both of whom are steadfast in their devotion to Hitler and willing to sacrifice their six children rather than allow them to grow up in a world without Nazism. Surrounded by this shrinking inner circle, Hitler himself retreats more and more into a dreamworld, lamenting his unrealized plans for the German people, even as he refuses to evacuate the civilian population from war-torn Berlin, and venting his rage on his cowed Generals when his plans- depending on nonexistent forces- do not materialize. Outside, last-ditch fighting continues, pitting old men and schoolboys armed with bazookas against Russian troops and tanks, among them ten-year-old Hitler Youth Peter Kranz (Doneven Gunia), who has proudly destroyed two Russian tanks and is awarded with an Iron Cross presented to him by Hitler himself. SS physician Ernst-Günther Schenck (Christian Berkel) resolves to stay in Berlin to do what he can to care for the wounded and the civilians. General Helmuth Weidling (Michael Mendl) is first sentenced to death by Hitler for allegedly moving his command post without permission, and then appointed to command the final defense of Berlin. When told of his abrupt change in fortune, Weidling remarks that he would have rather been shot. There is also the hard-nosed SS General Wilhelm Mohnke (André Hennicke), a tough, ruthless soldier willing to fight to the end but who firmly disapproves of schoolboys being sent into combat. This actor is quite good by the way; he keeps a stoic face but you see it all in his eyes. But the main story is inside the bunker, through the bewildered eyes of young Traudl Junge, as the atmosphere grows increasingly unrealistic and unhinged, until time finally runs out and the Third Reich dies in an orgy of suicide, murder, and devastation.
The acting in Downfall is excellent. First off, Bruno Ganz is just brilliant as Hitler. From his first appearance, the richness and authenticity of his performance grows on you until you can hardly take your eyes off him. Ganz isn’t a dead-ringer but he looks the part better than anyone else I’ve seen, and seems to have both the voice and the body language down pat, but that’s only part of why he’s the most convincing movie Hitler. Ganz is able to demythologize Hitler, getting across that he was a person and not some supernatural beast without making him sympathetic. With his sagging, weary face and big, sad-looking eyes, Ganz is primarily known for gentle, soft-spoken characters, but his ability to throw a rage is awesome, erupting at his subordinates so powerfully that it seems like he's lost control of his own body and is just about to explode. These scenes, the sweaty, nervous Generals huddled together in the cramped conference room, the endless stream of bad news, Hitler shrugging it all off by saying this army or that army will come to the rescue when those forces no longer even exist, and flipping out when anyone dares to tell him, are some of the best scenes in the movie. Ganz was brave to take such a deeply controversial role, and plows ahead confidently, playing it with complete conviction, as though he is in fact not an actor playing a role, but Adolf Hitler himself, and this is the only portrayal of Hitler I’ve ever seen where I can believe it too.
Some viewers have criticized Downfall for its supposed “sympathetic” portrayal of Hitler. This is simply not true. Bruno Ganz doesn’t spend all of his screentime throwing frothy rages (although he does have a few of those), he makes only a brief- but hateful- reference to the Jews, and from the prologue to his final moments he is kind to Traudl Junge. When his architect Albert Speer (Heino Ferch), one of the most trusted members of his inner circle and viewed by wannabe artist Hitler as a kind of kindred spirit, confesses that he has been sabotaging his orders behind his back, Ganz has a tear in his eye. In addition to being quite possibly the only time Hitler has ever been portrayed on the verge of tears, this is also likely the only time he is shown kissing Eva Braun. Those who claim the film goes too easy on Hitler base their accusations on scenes like those. But one need only watch the film in its entirety to see that the overall depiction is not a flattering one. Hitler incessantly bemoans his own grand dreams come to nothing, but coldly dismisses the urging of his Generals to evacuate the civilian population. He grasps desperately at straws, depending on salvation from divisions which exist only on paper, and throws apocalyptic rages when anyone summons enough nerve to tell him so. He increasingly sees traitors everywhere, still speaks of the Third Reich in future tense when it should be obvious to anyone that defeat is imminent, calls compassion a “sin”, and when told that young German soldiers are dying in the thousands for a lost cause, he simply shrugs and replies that that’s what young men are for. In the end, Bruno Ganz makes a more three-dimensional Hitler than other actors, but he’s still a psychopath, and still a self-absorbed, venomous man who views his own life as some epic tragedy but cares nothing for his own citizens dying in the streets right over his head. They must all be sacrificed for his visions of glory, and as he says himself, “I will not shed one tear for them.” If he is capable of shedding tears at all, it is apparently only for himself.
Alexandra Maria Lara, a young, pretty, Romanian-born and German-raised actress, adds a needed dash of humanity and comparative normalcy as the impressionable Traudl Junge, who to some degree is under the Führer’s spell herself, but is not as far gone as others and witnesses the bizarre events around her with mounting horror. We get the sense that she wants to believe in the Führer, wants to believe in his dreams of a last-minute turn in the tide, but can’t shut out reality as easily as Eva Braun or the Goebbels. “It’s all so unreal,” she despairs at one point, “like a dream where you can’t ever wake up”, and the audience will inevitably gravitate towards her as one of the only sympathetic principal characters, but at the same time, is anyone here really completely innocent? Traudl comes across as a nice girl caught up in events that take her to a place she never wanted to be, but as the real Junge admits in the epilogue, she pretty much allowed herself to be caught up in them, and if she didn’t know anything about the Holocaust, it was because she didn’t want to. With the obvious exception of the Goebbels children, too young to comprehend the situation or the true nature of their beloved “Uncle Hitler”, are any of these characters, even those who behave more admirably than others, really innocent?
If it’s somewhat difficult to make a moral judgment about Traudl Junge, many of the other characters are easier to come to a conclusion about. Ulrich Matthes makes Josef Goebbels an icy fanatic who declares with what sounds like a kind of bloodthirsty satisfaction that “the people chose their own fate and now their little throats are going to be cut”, but he’s surpassed by Corinna Harfouch as Magda Goebbels, a woman who is thrown into hysterics by Hitler’s plans for suicide but can methodically murder her own six children with chilling self-control. Juliane Köhler makes Eva Braun a vacuous party girl, laughing and dancing as though nothing is happening, but we suspect that this is her way of blocking out the grim reality. Her adored Adolf’s insanity and venom should be obvious to anyone, let alone his longtime mistress, but Eva either cannot see it or- perhaps more accurately- simply refuses to.
Even the characters who appear briefly are well-depicted. Heinrich Himmler drops by early on, aptly played by Ulrich Noethen as a deluded twit who wonders with complete seriousness whether he should give General Eisenhower the Nazi salute or shake his hand. Equally fine is Heino Ferch as the dapper, inscrutable architect Albert Speer, who urges Hitler not to go through with his plans for total destruction but remains an enigmatic figure. He’s obviously the most level-headed, composed, and realistic of the high-ranking Nazis, but he never wears his emotions on his sleeve, and we’re never entirely sure what’s going on inside his head.
Ganz as Hitler is the centerpiece of the film, but the most disturbing and affecting scene Downfall has to offer does not even involve him. It is Magda Goebbels committing the most unthinkable act possible for a mother---the murder of her own six children. The scene is bloodless, non-violent; having already given the children a sleeping pill, she methodically goes from one to the other cracking cyanide pills inside their mouths. It’s a truly disturbing scene, and hard to watch even after knowing from the children’s first appearance that it’s coming. A fraction of a second in which Magda’s face of stone threatens to crack only makes her all the more horrific. What kind of woman could summon the willpower to do this? Furthermore, what woman would want to?
There are other striking moments along the way- Hitler’s first intimidating explosion at his General Staff, Josef Goebbels’ icy indifference to the fate of the children and old men he and Hitler are sending into battle, the final conversation between Hitler and Speer, and Hitler and Eva’s morbid discussion of the best way to commit suicide (he favors a gun, but Eva prefers poison and insists with typical emptyheadedness that “I want to look good when I’m dead”). Any argument that the film portrays Hitler sympathetically is eradicated by a dinner scene in which he lectures on the senselessness of compassion, dismissing it as “priests’ drivel”. The closest this cold-hearted, unhinged man seems capable of coming to a kind gesture is to present Traudl Junge with a cyanide capsule. The filmmakers set up an uncanny reenactment of the final newsreel footage to be taken of the Führer, in which he shamelessly awards Iron Crosses to ten and twelve-year-old “soldiers” fighting with bazookas against Russian tanks. Some viewers worried that the film would inspire pity for the mentally and physically broken dictator. My reaction after watching the film was that I felt that I had a better understanding of the way Hitler thought and acted and saw himself, but I did not feel sorry for him. There are scenes in this movie- those previously mentioned, and others- which can make one feel more like slamming his head into the wall than pitying him. Along with such films as The Pianist, Downfall, ironically filming in Russia with St. Petersburg standing in for 1945 Berlin, convincingly recreates a city devastated by war. I'm not exactly sure how they recreate such a war-ravaged landscape, but it all looks very authentic. Be warned that it also doesn't shy away from graphic violence; we see a long string of characters shooting themselves in the head toward the end, and doctors sawing off wounded soldiers' legs and feet and basically things you should expect to see in a war movie like this.
But how much interest will Der Untergang hold for the average moviegoer? A cold-blooded, selfish, psychotic group of people- with a couple of better ones stuck in between them- hole up in a bunker for ten days and then kill themselves. If the audience forms an emotional attachment to anyone, it is almost certain to be Traudl Junge, and many will feel pity for Peter Kranz and the Goebbels children, but most of the other principal characters are beyond comprehension, let alone sympathy. What it can say something about is the nature of fanaticism, the extraordinary hold that one charismatic, powerful figure can hold over dozens, hundreds, thousands, even millions of others which makes them willing and eager to sacrifice their own lives for him. The unquestioning loyalty- even stupidity- of Generals Jodl, Keitel, Krebs, and Burgdorf, complaining about Hitler’s insane orders and then in the next breath vehemently defending him against any questioning of his authority. What kind of hold does he have over such men, that they know he is insane and are still willing to follow his every command anyway? Magda Goebbels murdering her own six children to spare them the misery of having to live in a world without Adolf Hitler. Such displays of fanatical devotion are frightening, and they are by no means confined to Nazi Germany or the Third Reich. Dozens committed suicide with Jim Jones in Africa. Suicide bombers blow themselves up at the command of Osama bin Laden. Downfall gives a palpable sense of the kind of fanaticism it requires to do such things. That, and it is one of the finest WWII films ever made.
RATING: 
