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 Traudl Junge, secretary of 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 kilometres 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. 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.

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 again wanted to point out their detachment from that part of dark history of their ancestors, "Downfall" became quite 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 some 'bogeyman', 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 was a human being, whatever that says about human beings. 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, since Goebbels is worried for Hitler! 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 nontheless. Towards the end, they even made an emotional-patriotic attachment for the dictator, which was a wrong decision. Maybe they needed to show more of a distance, or an anylsis of his hate towards some nations, but Hirscbiegel instead decided 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 dark 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") and a scary message that people can often not be aware they are serving the wrong side until their collapse, whereas Ganz's performance is great, and he should have been given more credit.

Grade:+++