Unforgettable

Rating: 8/10 (28 March 2006)

I tuned in late to this film, not expected very much, because we have all I suppose seen so many documentaries of Hitler's last days in the bunker, and a reconstruction with Alec Guiness thrown in for good measure. Many of these presentations depend on interviews with Trudl Junge, Hitler's secretary at the time. Her descriptions of the goings on during the final days are cool, precise, and dispassionate. First Hitler said this, then Eva Braun said that, and then they went up into the garden. A human surveillance camera who seems to have no personal mechanism for judgments.
She was, however, quite human after all. The last shot of the film is from an interview with her before her death in 2002. She explains to us that, young as she was, she had always put aside any feeling of guilt for her involvement in the Third Reich, negligible as it was. But then, one day, she passed a monument to Sophie Scholl who sacrificed herself in the course of resisting Naziism, and Frau Junge tells the camera -- and the rest of the world -- that she realized at that moment that youth and naiveté could no longer serve as her excuse.
I missed the first half hour or so, but I stayed for the rest. This is an extremely powerful movie. The events in the bunker are keenly observed. There is virtually nothing in the way of sentiment or dramatic displays. If the director, Hirschbiegel, wants two officers to commit suicide he may have them walk into a room and close the door behind them, then allow us to hear two shots a bit later.
No one talks about despair. Instead, the officers and some of the ladies sit around a table in one of the bunker's rooms and get drunk as skunks.
This is a tragic ending to an insane war, and it is all enacted by human beings, not demons. Goebbels and his wife have 5 beautiful young children, a boy and four girls. They deliberately give them knockout drops, then Frau Goebbels puts a capsule of fast-acting poison in each of their mouths, one after another, and crunches the capsule by pressing each child's teeth together. Then, wordlessly, Goebbels and his wife walk up into the open where, still wordlessly, he shoots her and then himself -- off camera. The soldiers who have been waiting impatiently for this ritual to end, then scurry forward with cans of gasoline to dispose of the bodies.
The episode is impossible to watch without being moved. What have Goebbels and his wife died for? What did their children, who knew nothing of war or racism, die for? And, implicitly, the film asks, what did some 50 million people die for between 1939 and 1945? I am grateful to the director and the actors for keeping things so matter of fact. Preparations for a predictable death are pretty gruesome even with the most tasteful intentions, and too often executions and suicides seem to have the filmmakers' attention lavished on them for not much reason other than to pander to a morbid interest in watching someone else die, a kind of arousal jag.
How easy it would have been for a trashy sensibility to give us the death of Hitler's German shepherd, Blondi, in all its horror. A DOG yet! Those of us who might have cheered at Hitler's death would now have a chance to weep over Blondi's. Instead, except for a few instructive inserts, Blondi's poisoning is only glimpsed in a clumsy shot through an open doorway.
Congratulations to everyone involved in this production. They've given us a well-executed film, made for adults. They come along so rarely.