Downfall

Der Untergang; war drama, Germany / Austria / Italy, 2004; D: Oliver Hirschbiegel, S: Bruno Ganz, Alexandra Maria Lara, Juliane Köhler, Thomas Kretschmann, Christian Redl

Berlin during the final days of World War II. The young girl Traudl Junge, the new secretary of dictator Adolf Hitler, observes the chaos. On 20 April '45 Hitler is celebrating his 56th birthday, but the party is crashed by the sounds of fighting with the Soviet Army only 12 kilometers away from the city. Heinrich Himmler and architect Albert Speer advise him to flee the city, but Hitler is determined to stay in his bunker, still thinking the Third Reich will win the war. He assumes that President of Reichstag Hermann Göring is a traitor who wants to take over the leadership. After the ammunition starts running out, Hitler and Eva Braun decide to marry and commit suicide. Their bodies are then burned. The Soviet Army releases Traudl who manages to escape after the war ends with a Nazi defeat.

The sequence of Bruno Ganz's performance as Adolf Hitler observing the map of Berlin and then having a nervous breakdown, followed by angry shouting at his generals for three minutes became such a famous viral video that it became tempting to see the whole film from which it originated from, Oliver Hirschbiegel's "Downfall". Made by German authors, who wanted to point out their detachment from that part of dark history of their ancestors, "Downfall" became controversial since some complained that the story showed a 'humanized' Hitler. The world is used to the fact that the dictator is always shown as one-dimensional evil, but here he was shown almost as a "normal" person in private, though wrong and misguided as a politician. Hirschbiegel daringly hints that even the monster had some normal moments of behavior. The opening act is quite uneasy: during the job interview, the main heroine Traudl Junge is tested for the job position of Hitler's secretary, and instead of the monster showing up, Hitler shows up uncomfortably charming and sympathetic to her (and the viewers), testing her typing speed, humorously adding to calm her: "Don't worry, you can't make more spelling mistakes than me". 

Hirschbiegel naturally also shows the dark side, the dread of war and destruction, yet he also depicts Hitler from the perspective of the people of the Third Reich, who were really believing he was the good guy: the scene where Traudl observes how Goebbels cries in front of her because Hitler won't listen to him anymore, is completely surreal. Due to such moments, the movie is a bit controversial, and the authors went on a very slippery road there because they wanted to show the psychological insight of the people of that time, but the approach remains dubious nonetheless. Towards the end, they even made an emotional-patriotic attachment for the dictator, which is a wrong decision. Maybe they needed to show more of a distance, or an analysis of his hate towards some nations, but Hirschbiegel instead decides to only depict Hitler's last few days before his death, as described in Traudl's memoirs. Still, it is a powerful, energetic film with enough of disturbing moments that reveal the reality behind the scenes (in a war torn Berlin street, a hanged man with a sign attached to his body says: "I collaborated with the Bolsheviks"; the unbearable suicide sequence of Goebbels, his wife and their children with cyanide pills), showing that the German officials knew they are trapped in a dead end by a madman, and that they could only hope for to lose as soon as possible to finally end all this, sending a scary message that people can often not be aware they are serving the wrong side until their collapse. Ganz's performance is great, and he should have been given more credit.

Grade:+++