Uncomfortable History

A REFLECTION ON THE FILM DOWNFALL (2004)

Michael DeNobile reviews the 2004 German film Downfall, and its historical significance. 

"For me, the terrifying thing is that he [Hitler] was human, not an elephant or a monster from Mars. If he had been a monster rather than a man, it would take the guilt away from other people--from his millions of followers. A monster is capable of anything, but everyone knows that one man could never have puled it off alone." 

~Bernd Eichinger, producer of Downfall

History can get dirty. It's painted in shades of ambiguous grey, not black and white. Sometimes the stories are difficult to tell. Oftentimes, is can be uncomfortable to share.

Michael DeNobile asks readers, how does one share one's own uncomfortable history, parcelling out the condemnation of what was wrong while salvaging pride in one's own culture and history? As an American, Michael DeNobile recognizes that telling stories of the Civil War, especially if you're someone from the South, becomes difficult. As Brad Paisley sang in "Accidental Racist," one can get "caught between Southern pride and Southern blame.

We can only imagine how a German would want to approach telling stories of World War II from the German perspective; and one could suppose that, like Paisley, they could get caught between German pride and German blame. Luckily for Michael DeNobile and readers, we don't have to imagine it: it's all on the silver screen.

A brief but detailed history of German cinema after WWII.

• Documentary film footage - these were historic film footage that detailed the true and real horrors of the war, including (and especially) the liberated concentration camps from the Holocaust
• Trümmerfilm (English: "rubble film") period - using the backdrop of bombed-out cityscapes to explore the impact of the war on civilian survivors; this style was used to help rebuild Eastern Europe, Italian, and German film industries after the war (it should be noted that Soviet forces heavily influenced East German film, and Western forces (especially British and American) heavily influenced West German film during the early years after the war
• Wirtschaftswunder ("the Miracle of the Rhine") period - the post-war reconstruction period focused on entertainment and not social-political satire; defined by Heimatfilm ("homeland film"), simple, cultural family stories in a rural setting, often in the Bavarian, Austrian, or Swiss mountains (similar to "The Sound of Music," but European directors)
• Bundeswehr ("Federal Defence") period - after the rearmament of the German armed forces, this period pumped out a series of war films depicting brave yet apolitical WWII German soldiers as "heroic victims" (as noted by Jewish historian Omer Bartov; Dr. Bartov has also challenged this view through his scholarship that the Wehrmacht (the unified Nazi armed forces) were not apolitical but indeed played a role in the war crimes of WWII); nonetheless, from the point of view of reconstruction, one may come to understand why German film during this time period would pump out pro-German army propaganda using wartime history (if we are honest with ourselves, American and England were doing the same type of films out of Hollywood and Liverpool, respectively)
• Widerstand ("resistance") period - the late 1950s saw the rise of anti-fascism war films, another reconstruction push to distance Germany's connection to Nazi ideology; Dr. Bartov notes that this was historical revisionism, rewriting the ordinary German soldier's commitment to Naziism 
• Crisis period - in the 1960s, rising incomes and access to television led to a collapse in the film industry; German film produced similar genre movies as Hollywood and Liverpool: spaghetti westerns, suspense and pulp fiction crime thrillers (known as Kriminafilm), horror, and softcore pornographic films
• New German Film period - in the Oberhausen Manifesto of 1962 where young German filmmakers declared, "Der alte Film ist tot. Wir glauben an den neuen" ("The old cinema is dead. We believe in the new cinema"), vowing to recreate the German film industry and establish new artistic and social standards as opposed to commercial viability; this had mixed results: while there was support from within the German film industry to change standards, some of those providing the capital did not understand the film market, wanting to sell the rights to films to be played on the expanding television market prior to theatrical releases (think a 1960s version of Netflix minus the monthly subscription fee). Good films flopped at the theatres because many already saw them for free on TV. However, an agreement between Film-Fernseh-Abkommen ("Film & Television Accord") and the Federal Film Board (created in 1968 to support the German film industry) fixed this problem, establishing film fund and a standard of personal home-viewing distribution no sooner than six months after theatrical release and television release two years after the theatrical release. Ideologically, New German Cinema sought to directly explore contemporary social issues using experimental film and progressive storytelling styles, everything from understanding Germany's Nazi past; the poor, working class, and migrant worker; and contemporary cultural issues and developments, including feminist cinema.
• The '80s period - the 1980s brought a wane in the German film industry. While Hollywood was pumping out box office hit-series from Star Wars to Indiana Jones to Back to the Future to Crocodile Dundee to Lethal Weapon to Rocky, New German Cinema fatigued, having individual recognition for such films as Das Boot (1981), The NeverEnding Story (1984) (one of the best films of the 80s, in my humble opinion--an upcoming review is in the works), and the Otto film series (1985, 1987, 1989, 1992, 2000) by comedian Otto Waalkes (who voiced the German dubbings beloved characters Mushu (Mulan), Sid (Ice Age) and the Grinch (2018)).
• Modern period - since the collapse of the Soviet Union, German cinema has expanded in leaps and bounds; with all of Germany having access to the popular Western market, viewership has exploded over the last thirty years. German cinema's exploration for the innovative and provocative from the New German Film period has been rediscovered, especially in the realm of social commentary.

Michael DeNobile believes that the nuance of German film has come of age in the Modern period, borrowing from the past while being able to apply the wisdom of the distance of over half a century to navigate the truth of the past in regards to World War II: films like Stalingrad (1993), After the Truth (1999), Sophie Scholl - The Final Days (2002), Forbidden Films (2014), 13 Minutes (2015), The Captain (2018), the German-Israeli co-produced movies An Unfinished Film (2010) and Made in Auschwitz: The Untold Story of Block 10 (2019), and Free State Midpoint (2019)--a very incomplete list, but German films Michael DeNobile hopes to explore in the future.

Which brings us back to Downfall, an in-depth, psychological analysis of the final days of the war, the downfall of the Third Reich, and the European Front's apex clash the Battle of Berlin. Bruno Ganz provides a haunting yet uncomfortable portrayal of the man that has become synonymous with evil--uncomfortable because at moments Ganz makes you almost--and the key word here is almost--sympathize with Hitler. But Michael DeNobile believes that's the point of the film--it answers one of the very painstaking questions that has haunted historians for decades: how could anyone follow a man who was clearly a hate-filled lunatic? How could anyone fall for that kind of brainwashing? Ganz provides the answer in his acting; Traudl Junge, his secretary, provides the answer in her words, that while she herself did not sympathize with the Nazi cause, she too gets mesmerized by Hitler's charm, and even vows to stay with him until the end at one point. In an interview with NBC, Downfall's director Oliver Hirschbiegel noted, "We know from all accounts that he was a very charming man – a man who managed to seduce a whole people into barbarism."

Michael DeNobile completely understands the controversy this film caused in German critics and audiences who were concerned about portraying the monster of Hitler as a human being just like the rest of us. How could anyone dare to do such a thing? History has spoken and we know the true nature of Hitler, fascism, and Nazi ideology. But the filmmakers of Downfall would not be alone in such controversy. German-born American political scientist Hannah Arendt explored Immanuel Kant's concepts of "radical evil" by, as noted by Todd Calder, studying "the individual culpability for evil through her analysis of the Nazi functionary Adolf Eichmann" and his role in the Holocaust. Arendt argued that "desk murderers" like Eichmann "were not motivated by demonic or monstrous motives" but "sheer thoughtlessness--something by no means identical with stupidity--that predisposed [Eichmann] to become one of the greatest criminals of that period." In other words, true evil is banal or "terrifyingly normal," in the words of Arendt.

Frau Junge puts the film's brilliance into full perspective when she says (from actual interview footage),

So in those first years [after the war], it never crossed my mind that I should come to terms with my past. Of course, as a result of the Nuremberg Trials, I found out about all these atrocities, the six million Jews, and people of other races, who died was a completely devastating, terrible fact: but I still didn't make the connection with my own past, I was still satisfied that I bore no personal responsibility--I knew nothing about it. I had no idea of anything on such a scale, but one day I went past the memorial plaque they put up to Sophie Scholl on the Franz-Joseph-Strasse, and I saw that she was born in the same year as me, and that the same year I went to work for Hitler, she was executed. At that moment, I actually felt that youth is no excuse, but that it might have been possible to find these things out.

We are uncomfortable with the portrayal of Hitler as so human because we have full knowledge before, during, and after the film of what Hitler and the Nazis were doing all along. The movie gets us lost in the human drama that would have been the reality of history if we were in the shoes of one like Frau Junge. In one scene, we see Hitler marveling over a replica of his vision of Berlin as a cultural center of Germania--and as a viewer, you flirt with the question, what could be so wrong with a leader wanting to preserve his culture? But then comes the downfall--we are reminded a few times in the film when Hitler makes lunatic rants about the Jewish people and is even willing to sacrifice German civilians in the face of losing the war, that this human being isn't just any human being, he is the tyrannical monster we've always known about. That grand, idealistic vision of Berlin will come hell or high water at the expense of other cultures and even his own people.

The filmmakers attempt (and in Michael DeNobile’s opinion succeed) in recreating that juxtaposition for the audience: how did so many people become blind followers--or maybe that's being too merciful--how did so many willingly turn themselves over to such an irrational ideology? And then once the filmmakers answer that question, they set it all at the feet of the German people stuck between German pride and German blame: now that we know what truly happened, what are we going to do about it? How do Germans, after decades of guilt, shame, and blame move forward, knowing as a people that it was possible to have found out about the downfall of Nazi ideology before such trauma had occurred? The filmmakers of Downfall teach all of us how to deal with uncomfortable, traumatic history like this: first, you learn and become aware; then you condemn what needs to be condemned; then you forgive yourself of your ignorance; then you act by becoming an agent of change, even if that act is in the simplicity of creating art--like a brilliant film--to teach others what you have learned. In dramatic irony, the lesson is not new: Plato taught that to us millennia ago in the Cave.

Roger Ebert said it best about Downfall:

Admiration [for Hitler and the Nazis] I did not feel. Sympathy I felt in the sense that I would feel it for a rabid dog, while accepting that it must be destroyed. I did not feel the film provides "a sufficient response to what Hitler actually did," because I feel no film can, and no response would be sufficient. All we can learn from a film like this is that millions of people can be led, and millions more killed, by madness leashed to racism and the barbaric instincts of tribalism.

Finally, just as Rupert Goold's Macbeth featuring Sir Patrick Stewart as Macbeth showed us that a British play set in Scotland can be portrayed within the historical context of the Bolshevik Revolution to teach us that the universal concept of corruptive power is timeless, Downfall teaches that reconciliation with our national past is not a uniquely German experience. Downfall is clearly an antifascist film condemning the past of Nazi Germany in order to do for the German people what the New German Film period attempted to do for film. To borrow from Brad Paisley's song one last time (which too faced similar controversy as the filmmakers of Downfall and Hannah Arendt): "Oh, Dixieland / I hope you understand what this is all about / I'm a son of the new South / And I just want to make things right / Where all that's left is Southern pride." 

We can't fix a traumatic past, but we can attempt to mend the present in order to build a better future. And unfortunately, that mending has to start with uncomfortable conversations.