Sympathy for the Devil

For 50 years, Germany has shied away from presenting Adolf Hitler as the main character in a movie. Since Hitler is a monstrous presence in the national memory, realistic portrayals on the big screen were considered bad taste — and sympathetic portrayals were unthinkable. Other countries made big-budget World War II epics with Hollywood stars such as Alec Guinness and Anthony Hopkins playing Hitler, but the last German-language film about Hitler and his subordinates, The Last Act, was produced in 1955 — and its Hitler was a raving lunatic. Now a new German film about Hitler's final days in the bunker, The Downfall, is stirring prodigious controversy, because its Hitler is not only a monster but also a human being.

The Downfall, which opened in Germany last week, was directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, who has mainly worked in German TV, and stars Swiss actor Bruno Ganz as Hitler. If Ganz's resemblance to the Führer is eerie, it is the sensitivity of his performance — at times introspective and at others explosive — that is truly unsettling. The intimacy springs both from Ganz's talent and the film's source material: it is based on two books, Inside Hitler's Bunker, by German historian Joachim Fest, and the autobiography of Traudl Junge, who was Hitler's secretary for the last three years of his life. And so the film presents a Hitler who is indifferent to the news that 50,000 soldiers have died in defense of Berlin, but also one who bounces children on his knee, strokes his dog Blondie and fumbles for his eyeglasses. The film doesn't address the murder of 6 million Jews except in a written postscript in the closing credits.

"Is it permitted to show Adolf Hitler as a human being, is it permitted to empathize with him, even to feel pity?" asked the daily Die Welt. So far, the response in Germany seems to be yes. A Stern magazine poll taken before the film's release found that 69% of those surveyed felt it was acceptable to show Hitler's human side, while 26% said it wasn't.

"The taboo has been broken," says Rolf Giesen, the curator of the Film Museum in Berlin, who is troubled by the film. "To show Hitler as a benevolent old man and not mention the Holocaust or the millions of people who became victims of the war — this is a real danger."

Downfall producer Bernd Eichinger, who also wrote the screenplay, argues that a bigger danger was Germany's habit of seeing Hitler as a one-dimensional madman — because it lets other Germans off the hook. "He turned almost the whole population of the country into his followers," says Eichinger. "I believe that in every one of us there is something very, very dangerous. Every human being has a side that is bestiality. It was very important to put this in the movie." So the film shows young boys fighting the Russians to the bitter end and civilian vigilantes roaming the city and killing people who they felt had given up on the cause. Eichinger says the Holocaust didn't feature in his screenplay because the documentary record indicated it wasn't discussed in the bunker. But at the end of the movie, he includes a clip from a documentary about Hitler's secretary Junge, in which she expresses remorse for the fact that she never knew about the regime's crimes despite working with Hitler up to 20 hours a day. Eichinger doesn't think Hitler was crazy or psychopathic. "A psychopath could never create what he created," he says. "I don't believe he was crazy at all, maybe sick in a certain way. But he was much more dangerous than that."

Eichinger, who has produced English-language films The Name of the Rose and The Never Ending Story, says the film isn't intended to make the Hitler generation feel guilty about the war, but to help younger Germans come to terms with the reality of their past — a reality in which one human being led a nation of other human beings to commit incomprehensible atrocities. "This film is made for my generation, for future generations," he says, "to help find answers."