Der Untergang - Review

Director: Oliver Hirschbiegel
Writer: Bernd Eichinger
Starring: Bruno Ganz
Runtime: 2 hours, 28 minutes

It took me a while to get around to this movie. I've been studying Nazi Germany and World War II since high school because I find it one of the most fascinating periods in world history. Trouble is, you can only take so much of it. A few books here, a couple of films there, and then a lot of time off to decompress.

If you immerse yourself in Hitler's Willing Executioners one week, Stalingrad the next, and a Hitler biography the week after, you're asking for depression. Over the years I've read dozens of books, articles, and diaries on the subject, but I always pace myself. Never too much at one time.

I think I wrote about this a while back, but when I was in university I dated a Jewish girl and nothing churned my stomach as much as reading the vile, bizarre history of Nazi Germany, then going over to her place and looking into her beautiful brown eyes. You have to shelve madness away when you see beautiful things lest the madness makes you morose.

Why did I just write all of that?

Good question. I think it's because every time I buy a book with a swastika on it, I'm afraid that the bookshop girl will think I'm some neo-Nazi loon, so I wrote the above stuff to let you know I'm not. Funny.

I remember once I was carrying a copy of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (still the best book on the subject) and an Israeli friend was walking by. He said, "Can I see that?" I had forgotten to turn the cover towards my hip, to hide the swastika. So I gave him the book and he looked it over, and he looked at me, and I could tell there were all sorts of questions running through his mind. In the end, he decided not to ask them, and just said it was good to see that I liked history.

Swastikas do that. They're packed with potent meaning, and they make people take notice. It was Hitler and the Nazi Party that gave those bent lines such incredible force, a force that lasts to this day. That's why I've never held any truck with the people that say Bush is like Hitler, or any other politician is like Hitler. No one but Hitler has given a symbol such stopping power. Some anti-religion types might disagree and say Christ and the cross have such potency, but I don't think too many of them walk past a church, see a cross, and call the police. Only the swastika does that.

In the past hundred years, nobody has been like Hitler except Stalin, but no one compares anybody to Stalin because Stalin always gets a pass, mainly for being a communist. You can hand me Pol Pot, Milosovic and other dictators, but on the whole these were entirely regional figures and did not shape world events as Hitler and Stalin did.

While the swastika stops people in their tracks, the letters CCCP on a t-shirt hardly make people blink, and the hammer and sickle seem somewhat quaint though more people in the 20th century were killed under that symbol than any other, including the swastika. In any event, it's interesting that Stalin and Lenin photographs are tourist items in St. Petersburg while you will never find a Hitler portrait for sale in a Munich tourist trap.

What does this have to do with the film Der Untergang? I think it's the feeling that the film gives you. It makes you do a lot of thinking, some of it not so good.

The movie details the last week of Hitler's life. He spent these days in the bottom of his Berlin bunker, surrounded by the usual sycophants, until one by one they all left him (with the exception of Joseph and Magda Goebbels; after Hitler committed suicide, the Goebbels also took their own lives, but not before executing their six children).

The movie is historically accurate, but it may have one drawback: it expects you to know your stuff. Goebbels' name is hardly spoken in the film, but the actor Ullrich Mathes looks so much like him that the director expects you to clue in and stay with it. The same goes for fatso Hermann Goering, slick Albert Speer, and SS leader Heinrich Himmler. Even the bit part thugs are very well cast as far as appearance goes.

The film is subtitled, so if you're not into that, you may not like it. I think the film is the better for it. My German is rusty as hell so I needed the subtitles, but there is something about the guttural cadence of German that brings the words you're reading to life. Bruno Ganz plays Hitler, and he is superb in the role. The German language only adds to the effect and makes him more believeable than Anthony Hopkins was in 1980's The Bunker (Hopkins was fine in that movie, but he was still an Englishman; it makes a difference).

I would be curious to hear from someone that has never heard of the last days of Hitler, and what they thought of the film. I wouldn't be surprised if they found it somewhat tedious. During the last week of his life, Hitler degenerated into mad delusions of victory one minute, and deep despair the next.

Last known photo, outside the bunker
Every few hours Hitler would be moving large armies around a map, until one of his braver generals told him that that army no longer existed. Hitler would blame this on a general's betrayal and on cowards in the military. The next day he would be talking about the 1000 jet fighters he had in reserve to crush his opponents. Then back into depression as he learned the Russians were only kilometers away, then euphoria as he declared that the 9th Army would come to the rescue, until being told that the 9th Army could no longer fight, then back into depression, and so on. For a movie, this can get old in a hurry. Since you're stuck in a bunker with the guy, the mood swings can lose their power. You could end up halfway through the film saying, "Ah, here he goes again," and tune out.

But the filmakers stuck with it, and I admire them for that. They played it more or less the way it's agreed upon in the history books and, knowing that, it makes for a more fascinating film. After all, there were a lot of people in the bunker with Hitler. If we as an audience find his tedious ravings insane, how could the people in the bunker not do the same?

That's the million dollar question, the one that gets argued about all the time. How could this man command such obedience? You can argue that one until the cows come home and you still won't be any closer to an answer. And that's another reason the film makes you think some dark thoughts, both about the past and the future.

I read some reviews about this film a while back. They were mainly good, but several were disturbed that the film showed some sympathy to the people in the bunker. I don't agree, or in any case don't think it's worth worrying about. It all depends on how you look at sympathy versus empathy. Empathy is no big deal. Can I feel empathy for people stuck in a hole, waiting to be captured by a vengeful, evil Russian regime, while watching their surroundings turn into a death cult of suicide and execution? Yes I can. I can understand their terror and hopelessness. I am empathetic to those feelings. Do I have any sympathy for them? None whatsoever.

The writer and director of this movie are empathetic to their characters, but they are not sympathetic to them. To direct the movie otherwise would have been phony. Much as we would like to believe that monsters do not cry, sometimes they show us tears. Filming those tears does not demand that the audience should reach out and hug the monsters. (Magda Goebbels is an entirely different story in the tears department; it was she that fed sleeping potions to her six children, then came back later and crushed poison capsules between their jaws; her reasoning was simple: living without National Socialism would have been too much for her children to bear. So she killed them. And people wonder why I distrust political hero-worship).

One other note: I saw a preview for the new Tom Cruise film Valkyrie. It's about the attempted assassination of Adolph Hitler in 1944. From about 1939 on there were several plotters in the army that entertained doing Hitler in, but the plans never came to fruition for all kinds of reasons, mostly to do with spinelessness. In 1943 one attempt was made to blow up Hitler's plane (the bomb didn't go off), and another attempt to kill him a few days later also flunked. Then in 1944, a bomb exploded that injured Hitler but didn't kill him. This is the bombing that Valkyrie is about. During the preview of the movie I heard these words spoken by a character: "We have to show the world that we are all not like him."

This is extremely dubious. If the film is being built around that, you should be wary of the film's central theme. An assassination of Hitler could have been made many times before 1944, but most army officers involved in any "resistance" were chicken to try it. And why bother? In the early days of the war, Germany had conquered France and taken a big bite out of Russia. Then things changed. It wasn't until the war turned in the Allies' favor that the plotters went into gear. They were especially eager to kill Hitler in 1944 when all seemed lost, because they wanted to make peace with a Western army, as opposed to the Russians, from whom they would receive no mercy. Any moral "not like him" stuff in the film should be looked upon with deep skepticism.