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.

Film review: Sophie Scholl – The Final Days

SBS seem to be on something of a theme lately, screening a number of films about the lives of young women under fascism. I’ve already reviewed two such films in recent months (El Calentito and Las 13 Rosas), so it was with another review in mind that I watched Sophie Scholl – The Final Days on Wednesday night. In the lead role was Julia Jentsch, whose other politically-themed roles include The Edukators, where she played a member of a group of young anti-capitalist activists who break into the houses of rich people, but ‘educate’ them rather than steal from them. This film is based on a true story – that of the eponymous twenty-one year-old Bavarian, a member of an anti-Nazi non-violent resistance group called the White Rose who was executed for treason in 1943 after distributing subversive pamphlets at her university.

At the beginning of what would prove to be an otherwise macabre film, one couldn’t help but be enchanted by the use of old-school methods of political communication. Watching Sophie, her brother Hans, and their friends mimeograph pamphlets to be direct-mailed or dropped at their university in between lectures evoked a yearning for something that is missing from modern politics. Before the thirty-second soundbite and the twenty-four-hour news cycle, any organised group could get its message heard – even under the most infamous dictatorship in human history. It was here, however, that Sophie and Hans would be caught by the authorities, beginning a process which would lead to their deaths.

There were many parallels between Sophie’s experience and that of Verónica Sánchez’s Julia in Las 13 Rosas: the use of underground anti-fascist pamphlets, interrogation scenes with a young female being tormented by a uniformed fascist, the background noise of radio speeches made by the Führer or Caudillo, the camaraderie between women imprisoned for political crimes, the show trials in which they were let down by hapless defence lawyers, and the characters’ naïve hopes that foreign intervention would liberate their country from fascism before their eventual executions. In both films, the lead character’s virtue is imparted via their comparative lack of political engagement – Sophie dodges the detective’s questions by describing herself and her acquaintances as “apolitical”, and is propelled to political action not by ideology but by her faith (Lutheran, if you’re playing along at home); Julia owns about five pieces of socialist literature. This, as well as the fact that the White Rose’s membership probably didn’t run into double digits and its activities didn’t go beyond distributing literature, illustrated well the paranoia of totalitarian regimes, for whom any activity outside their control is seen as a threat.

Besides being a small-time amateur operation, the members of the White Rose were not originally drawn together by politics. This isn’t covered in the film (which, as the title indicates, focuses on the final days of Sophie’s life), but the group was brought together through a shared interest in cultural pursuits and a background in the so-called ‘German youth movement’, a cultural phenomenon similar to Scouting which the Nazis took over and exploited for their own ends. There is an even more intriguing angle, however – Jud Newborn, an author of a book about Sophie Scholl, believes that Hans Scholl was forced out of the official (Nazi-sanctioned) youth movement due to his homosexuality, and that this caused the two siblings to side with the victims of the Nazi state. If true, this reminds us of the obsession which reactionary political movements have of policing the bodies of women, LGBTs, and minorities. (It also provides a link with the storyline of El Calentito, where the transsexual bar owner and her friend don’t need a political science degree to know that franquismo is bad for their health.)

The centrepiece of the film was not the trial but the multiple interrogation scenes in which Sophie is quizzed by Gestapo officer Robert Mohr. Initially, Sophie denies any involvement in the pamphleteering, but confesses forty-five minutes into the film. In explaining her opposition to the Nazi regime, she initially hides behind her belief that the war is unwinnable, an idea formulated based on her brother’s and fiancé’s military experiences (both have seen action at Stalingrad). Then, she reveals her humanism and idealism. She has seen a Jewish schoolteacher beaten, disabled children taken away to be killed (with the assistance of nuns), and dreams of a unified, peaceful Europe. She speaks of her concern that the German people will be reviled throughout history for their actions during the war.

Sophie’s talk of freedom and human rights is scoffed at by Mohr. “Democracy only let me be a tailor,” he yells at her at one point, before rattling off the Weimar Republic’s ills (hyperinflation, political instability, etc.) as his reasons for supporting Nazism. The portrayal of Mohr reminded me of Hannah Arendt’s description of Adolf Eichmann in Eichmann in Jerusalem – someone not particularly demonic, but whose middling life prospects compelled them to seek acceptance in a cause greater than themselves, in which the bureaucratisation of twentieth-century life allowed them to hide behind rules and procedures whilst committing unspeakable evil. Just as the high school dropout and former vacuum cleaner salesman Eichmann could tell himself that he was simply carrying out his tasks as a functionary when he sent Jews to the gas chambers, the tailor-turned-detective Mohr has no qualms about having a twenty-one year-old woman executed because the law wills it. On multiple occasions, he brandishes his pocket copy of the Reich’s criminal code, including when he mocks Sophie’s belief that humans are answerable to a higher power than mere law.

The film ends on an ambiguous note. Sophie is graphically depicted being positioned horizontally in order to fit her neck into the guillotine which would execute her, with her last words being (apparently with some historical licence) “the sun still shines” – last words which reminded me of Galileo’s (“and yet it moves”). One of the pamphlets made by the White Rose is smuggled to Britain, where it is mass-produced and then dropped over German cities by the Royal Air Force. The foreign liberation that Sophie hoped for would come to late to save her, and would produce decades of geopolitical stalemate and the division of Germany. Just like Madrid’s republicans in 1939, the German Resistance’s lack of domestic support condemned it to plead for the help of the international community, which either doesn’t come (as in Spain) or comes at a hefty price (as in Soviet-occupied eastern Germany).

Explaining what happened in Germany between 1933 and 1945 is in many ways the ultimate challenge for the political scientist. My own interpretation meshes together the thesis of Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism with a broader understanding of European genocides against non-European peoples, notably illustrated in Sven Lindqvist’s Exterminate All the Brutes. Arendt focuses on the transition of statecraft from the ‘government of men’ to the ‘administration of things’, which she traces to the control of Western states by industrial capitalists and to the need of those states to control the societies of their colonies. (George Orwell detailed similar outlines of this phenomenon in his critiques of American Trotskyist-cum-neoconservative thinker James Burnham, who welcomed the New Deal, Stalinism, and Nazism and the managerial class those systems produced.) The mass genocides carried out by Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, per Arendt, were made possible by the ability of public functionaries to hide behind bureaucratic procedure and to not think about the human consequences of the orders they were carrying out. As mentioned above, the film’s portrayal of Robert Mohr and Arendt’s description of Adolf Eichmann exemplify this archetype.

Lindqvist’s book is a sketch of various atrocities committed by European states, corporations, and peoples against their colonial subjects during the late Victorian zenith of imperialism. When I read the book as an undergraduate, the most chilling passage was his description of the genocide of the Herero people of (present-day) Namibia by Wilhelmine Germany in 1897. The final sentence of the passage notes that Adolf Hitler was only eight years old at the time, as if to remind the reader that he didn’t invent the idea of exterminating en masse disfavoured ethnic groups. Everything the Nazis did was copied from someone else – concentration camps were first used by the British during the Boer War, many American states had extensive eugenics programs which inspired the Nazis’ own, and the Führer told his generals to govern occupied Poland as the British had governed India. When Mohr responds to Sophie’s tear-jerking description of the round-up of mentally disabled children to be killed by breathlessly saying “they deserved to die”, he was only expressing an all-too-common view among those in power at the time. (It would take the Holocaust to make eugenics unfashionable, but it still lives on in certain quarters, having arguably made its way into Malthusian rhetoric about ‘overpopulation’.)

In Nazi Germany, the twentieth-century disease of bureaucratic managerialism collided with a history of imperialism and genocide wrought by Europeans against subject peoples since Columbus’ landing in the Americas. Like El Calentito and Las 13 Rosas, Julia Jentsch’s portrayal of Sophie Scholl brilliantly depicts the street-level and human-scale consequences of the decisions taken by powerful men in Madrid and Berlin.

International Vote Like A Pirate Day

After their breakthrough success in the 2009 European elections, where they won two seats in Sweden’s delegation to the Parliament in Strasbourg, the world was awakened to the existence of the Pirate Party movement. In 2011, Germany’s Pirates capitalised on disaffection among Green, Free Democrat, and Left Party voters to win fifteen seats in Berlin’s state legislature. The Pirates have proved that those results were not one-off flukes, and have in the last six weeks won seats in two more state legislatures: four in Saarland and six in Schleswig-Holstein. Tonight, the country’s largest state, North Rhine-Westphalia, goes to the polls, and the Pirates are consistently polling above the five-percent threshold needed to win seats there.

Germany’s political system is fairly easy to understand. There are two main parties: the centre-right Christian Democrats (including their Bavarian arm, the Christian Social Union) and the centre-left Social Democrats, and three smaller ones: the (classical liberal) Free Democrats, the Greens, and the Left Party (a merger of East Germany’s former ruling party with some leftist groups in the west). The position of the Pirate Party, both on the left-right spectrum and in relation to the existing parties, is not yet fully clear. Commentators have difficulty placing the party on the left-right axis because their basic raison d’être confounds peoples’ identification of the left with economic interventionism and of the right with free markets. A party which attacks monopolistic corporations would appear to be left-wing, yet the Pirates also defend free enterprise. But as we shall see, the Pirates are an echo of how the German left might otherwise have developed.

The Pirates’ voter base indicates their status as a party of the left. In Berlin last year, their voters were disproportionately young, unemployed or blue-collar, and switched to the Pirates from the SPD, the Greens, the Left Party, or from not voting in the previous election. Geographically, their support was highest in working-class suburbs in West Berlin (such as the SPD-voting Spandau) or in East Berlin (such as the Left Party-voting Marzahn-Hellersdorf), and in proletarian bohemian strongholds in the city centre (such as the Green/Left Party Kreuzberg). The classical liberal/centrist FDP, who suffered a huge drop in support, mostly leaked votes to the CDU and the Greens, not to the Pirates – their base (mostly middle-class Protestants: they’re referred to as ‘the party of doctors and dentists’) aren’t the sort of people who instinctively oppose the recording industry’s War On File-Sharing. In short, the Pirates’ support is found among young, anti-system Germans who believe that the SPD and the Greens sold out to the establishment long ago, and that the Left Party is too dominated by septuagenarian ex-Stasi types to provide a dynamic alternative to the Big Four parties.

The idea that being left-wing automatically means favouring large, soulless, impersonal bureaucracies over the dynamism of the free market is a) not true of everyone on the left and b) never was true prior to the early twentieth century. The German experience is instructive in this regard. In 1891, the Social Democratic Party published its Erfurt Program, summarising its policy goals. It was produced against the backdrop of the creation of a rudimentary welfare state by Bismarck’s conservative government, which the SPD labelled ‘state socialism’ (and they meant that term to be derogatory). Its demands included biennial parliaments, the right to keep and bear arms, and an elective judiciary, in addition to a few basic calls for economic regulation, such as a forty-hour week, the abolition of child labour, and free health care. These were too much, however, for Friedreich Engels, whose critique of the program asked whether the regulation of such things as “the bar…medical services…pharmaceutics, dentistry, midwifery, nursing, etc.” was “compatible with the rejection of all state socialism.”

What happened, then, to the left-libertarian spirit of the fin-de-siècle SPD? It died when the party jettisoned its anti-war and anti-imperialist stance in the face of the patriotic mobilisation which accompanied the First World War. It embraced the statist ideas of British Fabian intellectuals, and like so many left-wing parties around the world, came to view the wartime regulation of the economy as a model for building socialism in peacetime. When the Keynesian Consensus collapsed, it followed the rest of the global establishment left in diverting its authoritarian instincts towards the nanny state and green Malthusianism. The 5-10% of left-wing Germans who now reject the SPD-Green bloc are doing exactly the same thing that SPD voters did a century ago: supporting left-libertarianism against Bismarckian state socialism. It isn’t too difficult to make the case that if Marx and Engels were alive today, they would be among them.

So to the good folk of Nordrhein-Westfalen: vote Pirate!