Downfall

As is often the case, my wife Angie put on a movie about 10:30 and then proceeded to fall asleep somewhere in the middle, leaving me to watch until after 1:00 in the morning.

The movie was Downfall, a German movie (with English subtitles) about the final days of Hitler in his bunker. The main character is his secretary, and she would also seem to be the main source of information behind the movie. As the movie neared its end, I had a fair sense of who would survive and who would not, based on who the plot seems to be centered. Given my "hermeneutic of suspicion," this of course made me wonder whether in fact the, all things being equal, positive portrayal of these individuals might be a little skewed. But my impression is that the film is broadly accurate (i.e., I didn't get the impression I have of Oliver Stone films).

I found so many aspects of the film horrifying, and in fact I wasn't able to sleep for some time after the movie ended. Unlike so many films of the adventure sort, this one was non-fiction, and many of those we would want to survive did not. Perhaps the most horrifying scene was Frau Goebbels giving a sedative and then cyanide, I think, to her children. She didn't want her children growing up in a world without Nazi Socialism. One in particular sensed what was going on and didn't want to drink the sedative. As far as I know that part was fiction, but we can easily imagine it.

Children come home to find their parents just hung and shot by roaming death squads personally carrying out Hilter's wishes for all the German people to die for being too weak to bring in the Third Reich. At one point Hitler remarks that the strong have all died already, and only the weak continue to live.

Meanwhile, Hitler lives in a dream world, continuing to act as if mythical battalions will pinch the Russian army. His generals nod and sweat, knowing that all was lost. Many of them shoot themselves in the end. Others are trying to surrender or trying to get him out. Hitler goes ballistic and orders several of his generals to be shot (alas, mostly to no avail--they're well out of his reach by now) for these things. He has Eva Braun's brother-in-law shot within hours of defeat for his part with Himmler in working toward surrender.

I wondered if the movie was calculated to have an effect on the latent and sometimes not so latent neo-Nazism afoot in Germany these days. Hitler--did he have MS--is not portrayed weak in the movie to be sure. But his inability to reckon with reality and his hatred for the surviving, weak German people, does not inspire. He is not someone I think a winner watches and thinks, I want to be just like him. Maybe I'm wrong.

Of course he ends up committing suicide with Eva Braun, whom he has just married, and has his body torched so that it cannot be displayed as a trophy. Goebbels and his wife do something similar. Another doctor secretly blew up his family with two hand grenades over supper.

I was struck by the fact that many of the individuals in the movie have only died in the last five to ten years. Several of them spent time in a Russian prison and were released in the fifties, then to live out the rest of their lives. They lived alongside other Germans up until the present time. It is often noted how ordinary these people seemed, how even individuals who had done atrocious things--or done nothing to stop them--were just ordinary people.