The mass mania and despair of the moment portrayed

Rating: Null/10 (15 March 2006)

DOWNFALL is an excellent film. There have probably been thousands of films that focus on the Second World War, but almost always the focus on Adolph Hitler is one of demonization of one personality, as opposed to examination of the sickness within mass politics that supported him to begin with. Aside from THE TIN DRUM, I can't think of any other work in recent years that so captures the group mania that hatched the Nazi juggernaut.
But in DOWNFALL, we see the last days of the Third Reich as surely they must have been. We see first the frustrations of a medical bureaucrat (Dr. Schenck/Christian Berkel) who is trying to salvage what remains of civil structure in the midst of chaos, a man who is only in the late days of the war, along with his colleagues, realizing his own duplicity in the nuttiness that surrounds him. I'm not sure if this is a historically accurate depiction of Schenck, or if he is a fictional composite, but I believe it is right to put forward the idea that there were those few rare people even among the ranks of the Nazis who understood that if Germany had a chance to reshape itself, it would depend on such energies. Not far behind this are scenes in which we see Himmler (Ulrich Noetlen) discussing with a colleague how power will be divided once Hitler implodes. Heino Ferch is solid as Albert Speer, one of the survivors who is destined to tell the story of the Third Reich from the inside. Bruno Ganz portrayal of Hitler is one in which we see the charismatic descend into lunacy as the appointment with retribution draws near.
Effective also in their portrayals are Corrinna Harfouch as Magda Goebbels, Ulrich Matthes as the war propagandist Joseph Goebbels, and Julianne Kohler as Eva Braun. Each of these actors represent the despairing mania that prompted the fascist machine among the down and out professional classes to begin with. Their inability to move outside of the extravagance of upper middle class culture is portrayed here in tight style and good form.
But most telling of all are the flashback scenes related by the central character of the story, Hitler's secretary Traudl Junge, here portrayed by Alexandra Maria Lara. The movie begins with her job interview in Hitler's office. Hitler is seen through her eyes as the "loving uncle" idealist, who indulges her errors, who has hired her for the position because her background is one he connects with out of his romance for his own student days in Munich. Ganz's Hitler isn't the pop-eyed monster from propaganda films, but resembles more closely the guy who brings milk and cheese to your doorstep. Both characterizations reek of what Hannah Arendt called the "banality of evil". It is not necessary to sympathize- but I believe the creators of this project are trying to get their audience to understand how easy it could be for an "advanced" civilization to crumble into this kind of homicidal delirium. It is a huge undertaking, and while DOWNFALL is far from as comprehensive a movie as one which attempts such a task needs to be, it is an important effort at this moment. Our own time is one in which the professional classes of the western world teeter between a re-awakening of the democratic impulse, and the authoritarian ambitions and imperial designs of late capital.
It may seem ludicrous to some to suggest that the west could actually repeat the experience of fascism, but the prime components for such a movement- lower middle class despair, professional class vanity, national myths, infrastructural decay, are in full throttle in the United States, a country which has always been notoriously inattentive to its own political culture. Sad to say, anything could happen in this world of "tea parties" and Obamian new age political cults.
Fascism as a movement emerged out of the violent antipathies of the professional classes of Germany, the despair of the German workforce shattered by world war and economic depression, capitalist culture driven by late junker speculation, and religious and cultural mysticism. DOWNFALL works as a film because it shows us these twisted political fervors and what they do to people. Its focus as a work is less on Hitler's personality then it is on the mass pathology- to use Erich Fromm's phrase- that made such a violent dervish possible. That's why the work is devastating.
The images of Hitler youth, or early teens out fighting Stalin's armies- which, in one of Stalin's rare moments of being on the correct side of history- were administring the death blows to the Nazi mayhem,
the images of Frau Goebbels poisoning her children, these are the essence of fascism, far more so then Hitler's personality. The film focuses on what certain political cultures do to people without becoming a work that is tendentious or "preachy". It shows us how it must have been in those last days of the German holocaust. Director Oliver Hirschbiegel has given us a powerful gift. It's not one that's easy to open, but it's a lesson from history that has to be confronted earnestly. DOWNFALL provides us with just such a tool.