Posted on 09/14/2004 7:55:51 PM PDT by Nachum
TORONTO (Reuters) - A new film portrayal of Adolf Hitler shows both a ranting, twitching, delusional madman and a father figure who speaks kindly to his secretary and gazes fondly as blond Aryan children sing songs of praise.
But Downfall (Der Untergang), which has its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival on Tuesday, also breaches one of post-war Germany's last taboos to show the Nazi leader as a human being rather than just a monster.
It has prompted the charge that director Oliver Hirschbiegel has gone too far.
"It's one of the last remaining taboos in Germany and we broke that taboo," Hirschbiegel told a news conference to introduce the 2-1/2 hour movie, set in Hitler's fortified Berlin bunker during the final 12 days of World War II.
"There still seems to be a great fear in Germany to openly and honestly face up to the events that made up that most terrible chapter of our history."
The movie opens across Germany on Thursday, and it has already prompted questions about whether German filmmakers have the right to delve deeper into the darkest days of their country's history.
Some 50 million people died in the war, including 6 million Jews murdered in Nazi concentration camps. Cities in Germany and elsewhere were reduced to rubble, both in bombing raids and in the fierce fighting at the end of the war.
But Hirschbiegel said the movie was in no way designed to provoke sympathy for Hitler, who is shown ordering nonexistent armies into battle as the Soviet Red Army pounds his capital with bombs and artillery fire.
Hitler, played to chilling effect by Swiss actor Bruno Ganz, rants incoherently about his generals' failure to implement his grandiose battle plans and displays callous disregard for Berlin's increasingly beleaguered civilian population, where children fight on the front lines.
But at the same time he is kind to the women and children in the bunker, and steadfast in his resolution to die rather than surrender.
"The movie set out to put an end to the simplistic way of depicting Hitler up to now," Hirschbiegel said. "We only saw Hitler as a monster, as a mad psychopath -- a cartoon kind of character.
"What we are trying to do is give him a three-dimensional portrait, because we know from all accounts that he was a very charming man. He managed to seduce a whole people into barbarism -- a monster could never achieve that."
Ganz admitted he thought long and hard about whether to take the role, and said his character's anti-Semitic rants and callous attitude to the Germans who had brought him to power were among the hardest things to take.
"It became a threshold I had to cross, and then I was there," he said.
Putin is taking steps to suspend the government and restore the Soviet Union.
And France is holding hands with both of them.
Amin Al Husseini seen inspecting his Hanzar Division made up exclusively of Muslims, mostly from the Crotia/Bosnia/Serbia region. They actively lead the genocide against Serbs, Serbian Jews and Gypsies.
Amin Al Husseini meets with Adolf Hitler in November 1942, weeks before the decision to implement the Final Solution which sent Europe's Jews to the gas chamber. The Third Reich provided Amin Al Husseini with a salary and appointed him Head of the Hanzar SS Division. The Hanzar Division was made of Nazi Muslims and implemented the genocide of 250,000 Serbs, Gypsies and Jews during WWII.
Amin Al Husseini shown here on a Nazi poster recruiting fellow Muslims to join Hitler in the fight against the West and the Jews. His disciples today include Yasser Arafat, Saddam Hussein and the leaders of Hamas, Al Qeida and Islamic Jihad.
Amin Al Husseini, future President of the World Islamic Congress (1961) and founding father of the Arab League (1944) inspects his Muslim Nazi troops, the Hanzar Division. Amin Al Husseini making the traditional nazi salute.
Yasser Arafat became a disciple of Amin Al Husseini since the age of 17. Here: recent picture of Palestinian soldiers under the leadership of Arafat making the traditional Nazi salute.
Is Oliver German for Michael ? ....as in Moore ?
No wonder France, Germany and Russia tried everything they could to prevent us from taking out Saddam.
Adolf Hitler was a very complex and inconsistent man. I know a lot about the Nazis.
bump for later.
Next we'll be hearing how most of the Nazis were moderates and peaceful types --- only a mere handful were actually involved in acts of terrorism.
If you want to watch a liberal squirm, refer to the nazi's as the "nationalist socialist workers party" and talk about Hitlers economic beliefs.
It leaves'em kind of unhinged and confused.
Is the movie going to show his male prostitute days in Vienna, the fact that he surrounded himself with homosexuals for years, never lived with his so-called mistress Eva Braun, and so on?
People interested in Hitler should read "The Pink Swastika" and "The Hidden Hitler". Both well researched.
I sort of preferred the Hitler on broadway in "The Producers".
"Don't be stupid be a smahty. Come and join the Nazi pahty!"
As Jonah Goldberg put to one of his liberal freinds: "Gee, Socialized Medicine, environmental laws, full employment...Aside from mass murder, what do you disagree with the Nazis on"
To kid with them some more, point out that Hitler and Mussolini were both vegetarians, then give them Mussolini's (the guy pretty much invented the word facist, or at least helped define it) background, i.e. former editor for 2 different socialist newspapers, and made his name as a union leader.
I don't look at it that way. WHat's wrong in stating the obvious, that Hitler was a man with all the complexities it implies ? Making Hitler some kind of semi-mythical monster is tempting, but counter-productive. It more or less implies that, as in a good sci-fi movie, the beast can de defeated once and for good, and after that we'll be happy foreever.
But that's not so simple : yes, he was just a man. That's the worst of it : he was one of us, and that means that there are other Hitlers in the making, in fact there already were some : Stalin, Pol Pot, Khomeiny, Saddam, Karadzic...
Hitler was not the monster from another dimension, the creature from outer space. He rose from our ranks - and his cronies and goons rose from our ranks too, there was nothing magical about it, and unless we stay alert, we could very well witness the rise of another one.
I think it is worth studying the true view of all this --- Hitler wasn't just a monster who the German people suddenly rushed to support. Things don't work that way.
He had a kind of charisma that allowed him to captivate and convince his audiences and he had to have been clever to move up the way he did into a position of such power. He wasn't a ranting Charlie Manson type of lunatic or he would have been locked up early.
I think there is a lot of correlation between the Nazis and the Muslims -- people can point to some Muslim neighbor they have and see a family that appears to love their children but I'm sure most Nazi families were the same.
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