Germany breaks the Hitler taboo

The Daily Telegraph ^ | August 24, 2004 | Kate Connolly

[MadIvan]

A decades-long taboo was broken in Germany yesterday with the launch of a feature film in which Adolf Hitler appears for the first time in a central role, not as a ranting demagogue but as a soft-spoken dreamer.

The Downfall is a huge shift from the previous tendency in German cinema to show Hitler only as a background figure or a character who does not appear on camera at all.

Juliane Köhler as Eva Braun, Bruno Ganz as Hitler and Heino Ferch as Albert Speer

It tells the story of the last 12 days of Hitler's life in his 25ft-deep bunker in Berlin - including his suicide alongside his new wife Eva Braun on April 30, 1945 - while advancing Soviet troops pulverise the city with shellfire.

The production by Bernd Eichinger, a respected director, is likely to cause controversy when it opens in German cinemas next month. It depicts the Fuhrer as an avuncular character with a penchant for chocolate cake, who slides into madness when his lifelong dream of a 1,000-year reich slips from his grasp.

Hitler is convincingly played by Germany's star actor Bruno Ganz, who once acted the part of an angel in the award-winning German film Wings of Desire.

In one scene Ganz depicts him with his hair in his eyes, tears streaming down his cheeks, as he declares: "The war is over."

Hitler is shown stroking his alsatian Blondie and treating his secretary with tenderness and patience.

The Downfall offers a sympathetic portrayal of the Führer

Until he starts having hysterical fits, Ganz's Hitler talks in a soft, melodic Austrian accent, far different from the barking tone he adopted for his mass rallies. The director said the voice was copied from the single recording which exists of Hitler talking in normal tones.

Mr Eichinger, who also wrote the screenplay, reconstructs the last days of the Third Reich as seen from the claustrophobic and dimly-lit bunker with the help of diary extracts and eye-witness accounts by Hitler's secretary, Traudl Junge, who died in 2002, as well as his telephonist, and an officer, Major Freytag, who are the last two living survivors.

As well as recalling the unbearable stench of urine, sweat and diesel which dominated the bunker, Freytag described Hitler as a "physical wreck", with a limp, who hid his shaking left hand behind his back, leading to suggestions that he was suffering from Parkinson's disease.

Shot in Berlin, Munich and St Petersburg at a cost of £9 million, making it one of the most expensive German films of all time, The Downfall has been welcomed by critics for demythologising Hitler - even before they have had the chance to see it.

Bruno Ganz as an avuncular Hitler hiding his shaking hand

Writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the critic Frank Schirrmacher praised The Downfall for bringing Germany's evaluation of its history into "a new phase".

Until now Germans had been afraid to portray on screen "the man who still dominates the German imagination more than any other figure in history", he wrote.

But the tabloid Bild yesterday posed the question that an increasing number of critics will no doubt ask: "Should a monster be portrayed as a human being?" Eichinger, the 55-year-old son of a Wehrmacht soldier who fought on the eastern front, said he believed the film would offer an "emotional release" for many Germans still traumatised by the Second World War, even though only one in five living Germans experienced it.

Its release comes at a time when Germans are involved in an intense debate about their suffering in the war.

There have been several popular books and historical analyses of German suffering during Allied bombing of Dresden and other cities, most famously Gunter Grass's Crabwalk of 2002. The subject went virtually undiscussed for half a century after the war ended.

Critics say the debate is in danger of playing into the hands of revisionists - those who play down the crime of the Holocaust.

[Conservative til I die]

Sorry, my friend, as a half-German myself, there is something inherently psychotic in the German psyche. They are a militant, rigid, hard people.

[Einigkeit_Recht_Freiheit]

You wrote: "Sorry, my friend, as a half-German myself, there is something inherently psychotic in the German psyche. They are a militant, rigid, hard people."


This is a pretty strong statement to be made without providing any further analysis.

Moreover, I must ask whether or not you hold dual citizenship or were brought up in Germany? Otherwise about 30% of the American population can claim to be at least some part German. So obviously it is not a genetic thing.

You point out that there is a cultural propensity toward militarism. I agree. The Prussian culture was formed by teh constant need to fight the hordes of the East. The Teutonic knights fought back the Mongols and their Austro-Hungarian counterparts the Turks - just to name a few. If it were not for that culture neither you nor I would be here.

That much said, the actions of Germany and the German people during WWII are never to be forgotten or belittled. However the lesson you should learn is not that "Germans are inherently psychotic" but rather even cultures that appear to be completely civilized and at the pinnacle of civilization are capable of total barbarism.

America is not immune. It takes people like many here at FR to constantly make sure that individuals never get into power in United States that would use its unprecented power to evil rather than good.

[Conservative til I die]

You're right, I don't hold citizenship. But I am a first generation American, and have migrant relatives that live here. Some wax nostalgic about what Hitler did to restore German pride and power, almost how we wax nostalgic about Reagan here. Sure, they give lip service to how the Holocaust was evil, but they seem detached from it, as it was something that happened a million years ago in another universe.

And yes, I agree it could happen here. Put the wrong person in power and we've got a problem. But there's something about Germans and Europe in general, in that they never seem to learn their lesson, and with the state of affairs in France and Germany, with high unemployment, a trash economy, lots of immigration and rising resentment vs. them while not blaming their own government's socialist policies, crime, and economies about to collapse under the weight of their own cradle-to-grave welfare policies, along with the rise of people like Le Pen and the National Front in France, Germany trying to lead a European superstate in direct competition to the US, and I see history repeating itself all over again.