A Difficult Perspective

Rating: 8/10 (1 September 2006)

Everyone knows how WWII turned out, unless they don't teach it in schools anymore. A man called Adolf Hitler stepped into the political vacuum left behind after WWI, united the German people behind him and tried to conquer the world. He was one of the most charismatic leaders of the 20th Century and within a decade he had most of western Europe under his control.
Unfortunately for Hitler, he chose to take on the might of the USSR and the USA so by 1945 (when the film is set) his "Thousand Year Empire" was shrinking down to the hundred or so square miles around Berlin, Germany's capital city.
"Der Untergang" (Downfall) dares to portray Hitler as a human being and has been criticised for doing so. I think that this is unfair because the film does not set out to give us a history lesson. The atrocities committed in Hitler's name are hardly mentioned, but why should they be? Why should every film about WWII have to tell us why it had to be fought?
"Der Untergang" was made by intelligent people and it asks us to be intelligent as we view it. Hitler never saw what his followers did at Belsen. Hitler never saw what his followers did to Russian civilians. Hitler never fought at Stalingrad, Salerno or the Ardennes. During WWII, he never waded in blood. He just gave orders and dreamed of a German empire. "Der Untergang" shows him as reality finally intrudes on his fantasies. It also shows some of his most loyal followers trying to deal with the fact that their leader has been revealed as psychologically damaged and physically broken.
Bruno Ganz is outstanding as the man who ordered counterattacks by armies that had already been wiped out. If "Der Untergang" is guilty of anything, it is guilty of showing us the suffering of the German people as their Fuhrer abandoned them to their fate.