Powerful, and yet strangely inadequate

Rating: Null/10 (31 October 2005)

US Air Force General Curtis E Lemay, who supervised the atomic bombings of undefended Hiroshima and Nagasaki, infamously talked of "bombing them back to the stone age", and grimly joked: "If we got to start over again, I want Adam and Eve to be Americans". That's what happened to Berlin. A great left-wing city, the city of Christopher Isherwood and Cabaret, turned into a vast burned-out shell, with sister cities Hamburg and Dresden flattened by allied bombing. Seven million Germans are said to have been wandering homeless in April 1945, bombed out of their homes by Churchill's murderous war on civilians. The massive armoured columns that had fanned out over Eastern Europe as far as the gates of Moscow, nearly taking the oilfields of Baku thousands of miles away, had been wiped out by the Soviet hordes, and now the yellow menace was invading the Kuhrfurstendamm, drunken, raping and pillaging. In a bunker we witness the madman Adolf Schickelgruber, alias Hitler, cursing his nation and condemning them to death with him. Everyone is a traitor, and even now as the house collapses on his head, he is willing to order people summarily shot. How to capture the scale, the scope of this overwhelming disaster? From ruling a continent to controlling a city block, all in a couple of years! Truly, it's beyond the power of one feature film, but this German team has tried, and produced a drama that is compelling and yet lingeringly inadequate. How can you possibly show a whole city being raped? How to depict more than 150,000 individual women being multiply violated in the greatest unpunished sex crime of the modern era? Most of all, how do you explain and convey the magnetism of Schickelgruber, the angry little corporal determined to get his own back on behalf of a whole people? Stripped of his state trappings, Bruno Ganz's fuhrer is little more than a nobody with a mammoth chip on his shoulder who believes the Prussian elite has turned against him. It is ultimately inexplicable how he hypnotised the German nation and actually managed to get elected and formally appointed Chancellor, unless you blame it on the threat from the vast Communist empire next door. Germans must be somewhat bewildered to glimpse Berliners carving meat off dead horses in the ruined streets, considering their standard of living is twice that of any other European country today. They don't know the half of it, and this film, for all its merits, won't tell them.