Film review: Downfall

The 2004 German film Downfall (Der Untergang) is perhaps best known not for its content but for its status as the source of the twenty-first century’s quintessential viral meme, the ‘Downfall parody’ (my favourite: “Michael Jackson is dead?!”). As for the film, its production and release caused a sense of national unease in Germany, for no German cast and crew had ever portrayed Hitler as so human: complimenting his secretaries, loving his dog, walking with his left hand behind his back so as to conceal the onset of Parkinson’s Disease. That this was so controversial is unfortunate: depicting history’s villains as singularly amoral is not the means to ensure that their crimes aren’t repeated, and the horrors of Nazi Germany were carried out not by Adolf Hitler alone but by the entire rank-and-file of the state, party, and military.

Downfall concerns itself primarily with the events in Berlin in April 1945, when Soviet troops were advancing on the city. The Nazi high command is divided as to what to do: Hitler wants to stay and fight, but others (including a general who has already made contact with General Eisenhower) believe that the West will refuse to allow the Soviet capture of Berlin. The film captures brilliantly the contrast between the Führer’s belief in an eventual German victory and the despair of his inner circle, who worry about his mental state and accept the inevitable, but fail to confront him directly. The famous scene which is used in Downfall parodies is an illustration of this: Hitler accuses his generals of stupidity and of standing in the way of his dreams. He is told countless times by those closest to him that he ought to leave the city, but his stubborn refusal presages the final days in the bunker that the film depicts.

The Hitler portrayed in Downfall (by Swiss-German actor Bruno Ganz) navigates an inner conflict between German nationalism and contempt for the German people. While chatting with Albert Speer in the days prior to his death, he prides himself on his extermination of the Jews from Germany, yet in the next sentence describes Germans as failing to rise to his dreams for their country. He understands that some in the West still see his regime as a potential bulwark against communism, but as Soviet troops are advancing toward his bunker, he engages in a bit of noble-savagism, predicting that westerners will be beaten by “the disciplined people of the East”. Throughout his final days in Berlin, he speaks of defending a society whose values he clearly loathes. Looking over his plans for remaking the city, he tells Speer that his Reich would be worthless if it were just full of shopping malls; he dreams of art and culture, but also of a world ruled by a set of values that is militaristic and dismissive of the liberal, democratic, republican, and egalitarian heritage of western civilisation. In these scenes, the seemingly contradictory mentality of 1930s fascists is outlined perfectly: they combined the reactionary feeling of Romantic nationalism with the conceit of a parvenu class of technocrats who just knew that they were the rulers their subjects had been waiting for.

The film’s greatest contribution to our understanding of history is in its focus on the bunker. Hitler alternates between detailing his dreams of world domination, bemoaning the incompetence of his generals, and morbidly discussing the most effective suicide method (shotgun in a throat soaked in gin, he reckons). Downfall doesn’t explore Nazi ideology, preferring to detail the court politics which were still going on; even with the situation looking as bleak as it did, Hitler rearranges the Luftwaffe command to favour those loyal to him, and descends into rage when he finds that Hermann Göring has offered to take over his leadership, considering it a thinly-disguised coup d’etat attempt. In a Guardian review printed at the time of the film’s release, Britain historian Ian Kershaw, one of the world’s most formidable students of the Nazi era, praised the depiction of the bunker scenes for their historical accuracy – the film’s makers have clearly done their research.

Ultimately, Downfall is a film which asks to be judged not just on its historical accuracy or its cinematographic agility, but on how it has shaped popular understanding of Nazism, particularly in Germany. Downfall is most in tune with Hannah Arendt’s scholarship on the matter: the idea of Nazism as the cumulation of evil acts committed by ordinary people is familiar to anyone who has read her works on the trial of Adolf Eichmann. She would appreciate the way in which junior officers carry out their orders without thinking, and the film’s portrayal of a ‘human’ Hitler is very Arendtian. Prior to its release, the fear in Germany was that it would depict Hitler so sympathetically as to provoke a rise in neo-Nazism; most reviewers agree, however, that Ganz’s Hitler is so true to life as to allay those fears, as the Führer is exposed as a paranoid, self-pitying fantasist, and his inner circle are shown up for their deference to his logistically impossible and militarily foolish orders. The film still provoked historical hand-wringing, however: the follow-up criticism was that it assuaged Germans’ guilt over Nazi atrocities by showing civilians as being brutally victimised by SS thugs. It seems that when it comes to the historiography of the Third Reich, you can’t please everyone.

Downfall is an epic film which doesn’t get too many things wrong. It may not give the viewer an account of the rise of Nazism or the lives of ordinary Germans under its rule, but it doesn’t pretend to: this is the story of Hitler’s final days in the bunker, and of the courtiers and subordinates who tried to reconcile their loyalty to him with saving themselves. If I had one criticism, it would be that the film doesn’t talk much about how the Nazi leadership tried to shape the post-war world, apart from one mention of a general trying to do a deal with Eisenhower. After Hitler’s suicide, everyone seems to either give up or recklessly resist the inevitable Russian capture of Berlin; but we know that senior SS officers were arranging sunny futures for themselves in South America while the Nazi movement dissipated so thoroughly that it produced only one guerrilla attack on Allied forces during the occupation and was never heard from again.

There are many ways in which post-war (West) Germany could have dealt with its Nazi past. The path it chose was to build its foreign and defence policy around the avoidance of any appearance of German exceptionalism. To this end, it has always acted multilaterally through the EU and NATO, accepting American leadership of the West and joint Franco-German pre-eminence in Europe while its economy rose to be the world’s third largest. Beginning with the Balkan conflicts of the early 1990s, however, the ghost of Nazism began to play a different role in German political debates. Previously, the country had avoided sending its military anywhere, but with every new dictator (Milosevic, Saddam, Gaddafi) portrayed as the second coming of Hitler, the advocates of ‘humanitarian intervention’ had no trouble convincing Germany to commit to their missions (except Iraq, where solidarity with France outweighed the Saddam-as-Hitler argument). The personality who most symbolises this shift is Green MEP Daniel Cohn-Bendit, whose formulation that “never again Auschwitz” trumped “never again war” could serve as a slogan for modern German foreign policy. While post-war Germany used its aversion to nationalism to develop some positive ideas, such as Jürgen Habermas’ writings about ‘constitutional patriotism’, these were drowned out by the jingoistic atmosphere of the post-unification period and by the liberal internationalism of the likes of Cohn-Bendit.

This, then, is the true legacy of Nazi Germany: a German state whose raison d’être has become the suppression of any deviation from the liberal-democratic status quo. It spies on its own citizens suspected of engaging in extremist politics (of both left and right); it throws its geopolitical weight behind the Wilsonian dreams of the left-liberal chattering classes; it serves as the bedrock of a system of European integration which has lost any pretence of respecting the democratic will of those Others (Greece, Italy, Ireland) whose economies fall foul of the ratings agencies; it acts as an unquestioning defender of Israel; and its anti-Nazi guns are too easily turned leftwards, morphing into McCarthyism. Two recent events have exposed the dark side of this culture: the condemnation of intellectual Günter Grass over his authorship of a poem criticising Israeli foreign policy, and the Israeli embassy’s snooping into the affairs of the Pirate Party, under the pretence of checking whether it contains any neo-Nazi activists (if any did join, the joke would be on them: the Pirates’ national leader is a Jewish woman). Just as membership in the Nazi ‘cause’ allowed drifters and malcontents like Adolf Eichmann to carry out acts of injustice without regard for their own agency, the German state evades responsibility by hiding behind impersonal forces such as the logic of neoliberalism and the Fukuyama-ist belief in the triumph of liberal democracy.

Downfall is the perfect counterpart to Sophie Scholl – The Final Days, and provides a glimpse into the lives of those who persecuted the likes of Scholl. (Indeed, there are a few actors who appear in both films, and Sophie Scholl is mentioned in the narration at the end of Downfall.) By depicting Hitler as something other than a sexual deviant or a monster whose evil deeds are beyond explication, it enlightens as well as entertains, and it manages to combine the manic bunker scenes with sympathetic portrayals of the civilians on the outside, caught between Soviet bombing and Nazi indifference to their suffering. Downfall is not just a classic film, but one which serves as a cultural signpost regarding attitudes in Germany about the country’s past, and whose status cannot be diminished by its trivialisation in online parody videos.