Meeting Evil

Bruno Ganz plays Hitler in Downfall. Courtesy Odeon Films.

Hitler, in the German film Downfall, is a small man, reeking of illness, with a quivering, palsied claw that he keeps tucked behind his back. He is played, intensely and carefully, by Swiss-German actor Bruno Ganz, who is eight years older than Hitler was when he died in 1945 at 56. The added years make the führer look at once more foreboding than his image in archival footage and history books, and slightly sadder.

And what of that sadness, exacerbated by a fringe of long hair that falls over his eyes like a sheepdog? Can we – should we – see Hitler as a person, both a man of evil and a man who was good to his secretary and loved his German shepherd, Blondi (so much so that he clamps a capsule of cyanide between her jaws as the allies close in, just as Magda Goebbels murders her six children to save them from “a world without National Socialism”)?

The question of whether to humanize a demon of history has plagued Downfall – an Academy Award nominee for best foreign film – since its release in Germany last year. The script, about the final days in Hitler’s bunker, is based on two lauded non-fiction books, Inside Hitler’s Bunker, by Joachim Fest and Until the Final Hour, by Traudl Junge and Melissa Müller; Junge was Hitler’s private secretary. Until now, German filmmakers have largely left Hitler to the documentarians. Director Oliver Hirschbiegel (The Experiment) wants to inflate the well-known facts with speculated emotion. Clearly, Downfall is designed for modern Germans, a film that moves along a suspicious trajectory towards the most American of projects: healing. As such, it is somewhat confusing: on one hand, Downfall plays upon our deepest, possibly prurient desires to understand this unfathomable madness and the people who executed it; on the other, it comes dangerously close to letting many of those people off the hook.

Perhaps the historical debate prompted by the film has been so heated because that conversation is bound to be more interesting than one about Downfall as a film. It’s really a mediocre movie, spiked by wonderful performances and fascinating scenes. (Really, how could it not be fascinating? That it’s only occasionally fascinating is the strange part.) Downfall is rote; a conventional, overly long Second World War movie set almost entirely in the ant-tunnels of Hitler’s bunker below the German Chancellery. As the Soviets move towards Berlin, those who have not already fled Hitler’s inner circle must decide between their options: surrender or suicide.

The gang is all here: Himmler, Goebbels, Speer. Hitler and his architect gaze mournfully upon models of a new Berlin that will never be built, mooning like boys over toys they can’t play with (if defeated, “leave only scorched earth,” Hitler says). Minister of Propaganda Goebbels and his wife, Magda, swear their undying devotion to their führer; she swoons in his presence like a devoted fan, lacking only a “Hitler’s #1!” foam finger.

The eyes through which we’re invited to view the contradictions contained in this stifling, windowless space – the drinking and dancing; the defeat and disappointment – are those of Traudl Junge (Alexandra Maria Lara), hired at 22 years old to be one of Hitler’s private secretaries. Downfall is book-ended by short samples of footage from the marvelous documentary Blind Spot, showing the real Junge (who died in 2002) in her 80s as an attractive older woman still bewildered by her complicity.

In Downfall, she is simply bewildered, a war film ingenue in the eye of the storm. Junge took the job not because she was a stalwart SS supporter, but “out of curiosity,” she says. Her curiosity is limited to the goings-on in the tunnels; she is oblivious to the horrors outside of them. Junge’s constant refrain, in both Downfall and Blind Spot, is: “I don’t know why.” Of course not. When the economic, military and racial motivations are stripped away, one is still left asking: why there, why not here? And for Germans, the opposite. In Blind Spot, Junge herself is fettered by contradiction, sometimes talking of Hitler and his henchmen through a girlish giggle, looking back at her life below Berlin with nostalgia. Then, she checks herself; shame breaks into her reminiscences.

A scene from Downfall. Courtesy Odeon Films.

To the film’s detriment, Downfall, unlike Blind Spot, treads close to offering a singular answer – a “why” – and it is Hitler. Ganz’s task is to make Hitler, if not likeable, then conceivable. He does. With Junge, he is gentle and paternal, and she is smitten. Hitler’s charisma has been noted often; surely something besides politics, something personal about this awkward, bitter little vegetarian, captured the imagination of millions. But what? Eva Braun, played by Juliane Kohler (Nowhere in Africa) as a party girl content to dance while the bombs are dropping, confesses that even she, who becomes his wife in the hours before they commit suicide, finds Hitler essentially unknowable.

He was volatile, and as his plans crumble, Ganz’s Hitler flies into rages so terrifying as to seem almost comical: No one loves me! There’s no such thing as loyalty anymore! That anger was the gasoline on the fires of anti-Semitism and imperialism, and it must have tapped into something latent in the German population.

Downfall doesn’t go above ground too often, though when it does, the burnt-out streets above the bunker are not filled with heroic allies, but terrified German civilians. Up here, Hitler’s ideas remain abstractions: no concentration camps, no ideology. This is war in its basest form. Death squads murder those they consider traitors. Hitler Youth with artillery act out military fantasies. One pair of teenagers looks utterly crazed, screaming “Heil Hitler!” as they shoot one another, realizing that they cannot penetrate the walls of Russians closing in.

Kids love a uniform and they do follow blindly, susceptible to dogma and capable of hate without reason. But children were hardly the worst perpetrators in the Second World War; it almost feels like Hirschbiegel is copping out by using kids effectively as stand-ins for the German public, skirting adult treason. For all it does well – the acting, the lavish production values – it’s still unclear exactly what bargain Downfall is attempting to strike with the audience. Does it want to implicate? Does it want to unburden? It ends up doing neither; for a film about evil, Downfall is strangely toothless, certain only that Hitler was a rock star, a man so charismatic that he duped Germany, and nearly the world. Perhaps inadvertently, swept up by the force of Ganz’s performance, Hirschbiegel almost offers a “there, there” to his countrymen, which may be healing, but is certainly unjust.

The music swells; the falling military takes a final stand and the refusal to surrender is played as noble. But honour feels wildly inappropriate; in the end, these cinematic tricks are not useful up against the biggest questions of our time. Honour is the stuff of movies, but it does not illuminate history.

Downfall opens in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver on March 18.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.