Movies About or Around Europe: "Downfall" ("Der Untergang")

Ever since I was about 8 or 9 years old I've been reading about the Holocaust and Hitler's Germany. I don't know why. I started with your standard children's books on the topic - "The Hiding Place", maybe "The Diary of Anne Frank", but soon I was reading "Night" by Elie Wiesel and other, darker books documenting Nazi atrocities. I watched a lot of movies on the topic too. Some of the first foreign films I watched were things like "Europa, Europa" that dealt with Nazi Germany. I've always felt a bit uncomfortable with my fascination with the Holocaust and the Third Reich, because it is a sort of fascination, and to be fascinated by something seems to imply a lack of disgust, or a lack of reverence for those who suffered. It seems lurid to me, a species of people craning their necks to get a look at a car accident only worse. Yet it is part of me. I deplore the Holocaust, and I deplore fascism and any signs of fascism in the world around me (believe me, I see the potential more often than I would like in my own country). But I also can't look away. I'm not the kid in "Apt Pupil", certainly, but I think Stephen King was onto something. (Isn't he always...)

I watched "Downfall" ("Der Untergang") believing that it was a documentary about Hitler's secretary Traudl Junge. There was a documentary made about the movie's fly-on-the-wall character - "Blind Spot. Hitler's Secretary."  I'll probably watch that as well at some point. "Downfall", from what I can read on the net, however, appears to be a mainly historically accurate film about Hitler and his inner circle in their last days in the Berlin bunker. And though I have read a lot about the Third Reich before, it was mainly from a distance. From a distance this machine seemed somehow grandiose and terrible, unstoppable like the Party in "1984." It at least seemed to be run by competent, if evil, people. But as portrayed in "Der Untergang", the Third Reich is a cult that is falling apart, its members losing faith or spiraling into suicidal insanity.

Hitler's former secretary, Traudl Junge, as she appears in the beginning and end of the film. 

Hitler himself is portrayed as, by turns, delusional, cordial, paranoid, confident, self-pitying, and enraged. At times he resembles somebody's weird old crank of a grandpa who everyone has to listen to even if no one agrees with him. (This is the movie that brought you those "Hitler reacts to..." videos where Hitler's subtitles are changed and he appears to be enraged by everything from teachers desk-warming in Korea to Twitter not working.) http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/downfall-hitler-reacts Despite this unstable personality, he is obeyed nearly without question and executions are being carried out at his behest even as it becomes clear that no one's getting out of this alive or uncaptured anyway. In this movie, Hitler is repeatedly portrayed as saying that if the Third Reich won't survive, the people don't deserve to survive either.

Hitler's bunker, in the film, resembles nothing so much as a cult - a Heaven's Gate or Jim Jones situation. Indeed, many of the inner circle are portrayed committing suicide and taking their families with them - willingly or unwillingly. Even a dog is subjected to this ritual suicide. These are a people who have come so much to believe in their own myth-making, their own prejudice, their own skewed vision of the world - that they can't imagine a life worth living after the Third Reich - even people who must know they would not be found culpable of the Third Reich's crimes. Meanwhile Hitler and his commanders' refusal to surrender is shown to be needlessly wasting the lives of civilians in the world above the bunker. Children and teenagers fight fanatically and senselessly on Hitler's behalf, old men are shot for refusing to do the same, wounded and sick people are abandoned in hospitals. None of it matters to Hitler, who vacillates between looking at his architectural model for a new Berlin with Albert Speer and believing himself betrayed by each and every person under his command.

It is hard to believe, watching this movie, that Hitler was able to rise to power, to win so many followers and this type of devotion. Perhaps the unreason in him, the madness in him, called to a madness in many other people. Perhaps his delusions were delusions that many others wanted to believe. It's been a long time since I read it, but "Hitler's Willing Executioners", by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, made the case that the anti-Jewish sentiment was already there in the German people.  http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/09/bsp/hitler.html
That would make the power of a man who was so delusional much more comprehensible. That he did suffer from delusions does seem backed up by historical references, especially from Albert Speer's book "Inside the Third Reich." This movie does not seem to be attempting to fictionalize Hitler but to demystify him.

Today, Hitler's bunker is under a parking lot, marked by a historical plaque, itself only recently erected. It is not somewhere I want to visit, but I have always been fascinated by this historical period. Part of it is maybe lurid, but in writing this entry, I begin to think that a bigger part of me just wants to understand how such unreason, racism, and lack of compassion - probably sociopathy - can come to be followed by so many people and can come to nearly dominate the world. It's important to remember that the world isn't inevitably good. I think a lot of people who grew up white and middle-class in the United States, like me, assume freedom, assume a world of progress. Maybe this is less true these days, post 9-11, post-Guantanamo. I don't know. But I think the assumption is faulty. Though Hitler meets his pitiful downfall in this film, I think Roger Ebert said it best in his review of the film: "It is useful to reflect that racism, xenophobia, grandiosity and fear are still with us, and the defeat of one of their manifestations does not inoculate us against others."

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/downfall-2005

Movies About or Around Europe: "Generation War"

I've been sick the last few days which means that I've spent a lot of time on my couch watching movies. One of the things I watched was the popular German mini-series from 2013, "Generation War", or in German,"Unsere Mütter, Unsere Väter" (Our Mothers, Our Fathers). http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1883092/  The show chronicles the journey of five friends through World War II, starting as two of them are about to go of to war, and ending after the surrender. Three of the friends are men - two brothers, Wilhelm, the golden boy and Friedhelm, more of a reader than a fighter; and Viktor, the Jewish son of a tailor. The women are Greta, who is in a romantic relationship with Viktor and wants to be singer; and Charly, who is setting off to be a nurse on the Eastern front and is in love with Wilhelm, but doesn't say anything.

Improbably celebrating the young men going off to fight Hitler's war.

I had read a fair amount of criticism of the show before watching, but even without that reading, my knowledge of history, especially Holocaust history made the show seem a bit fantastical at best and revisionist at worst. Mainly the show tries to simplify a friendship among five people that, if it existed at all, would surely have been more complicated. The idea that there would be no real discussion of what's happening to the Jewish people among these friends seems rather absurd, as the movie begins in 1941, well after Kristallnacht http://www.ushmm.org/information/exhibitions/online-features/special-focus/kristallnacht (the only allusion to Nazi atrocities given in the first part of the movie), and in the same year as the first deportations from Berlin. "The Eternal Jew" - the notorious propaganda film that compared Jewish people to rats, among other things - was released in 1940 alongside other films which had been laced with anti-Jewish messages. Hitler had already announced his intention for the annihilation of Jews in Europe. It seems like the five friends would have to be enormously naive and/or insensitive to talk as they do in the beginning of the film about hoping for Germany's early victory and serving a country which was so openly hostile and threatening to one of their friend's very existence. I kept thinking about the much more interesting, complex film that might have been made had it followed five friends from say 1933-1941 and seen the changes they must have inevitably undergone as the culture changed under Nazism. This film was not made to that end, however. A very interesting documentary which interviewed people from the time can be found on youtube  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zocAaqp4AG4and gives a more realistic account of the youth of that period.

As the mini-series develops, the main complaint I had was that the characters really don't have enough time to earn the changes they undergo. Certainly the motives of Charly (and Greta towards the beginning) are barely fleshed out, and you have to sort of fill them in yourself. Same goes for Friedhelm, who completely flips personality at some point in the mini-series, leaving me feeling as if I'd missed something. 

Friedhelm becomes a hard-ass soldier, but I must have blinked and missed the moment where they told us why.

 There are exciting battle scenes, which I'm sure does it for some people, but it was hard to care about characters who seemed like little more than archetypes. Viktor was really the only character who seemed fully fleshed out, but even in his case I had to do some filling in from what I knew about the Holocaust, since some of the greatest horrors he must have undergone are never shown. This is a man who had probably seen a fair amount of people die, (as it's mentioned that he's traveling from one camp to another), but the daily horrors of a concentration camp (not just gas chambers but starvation, sickness, punishments and shootings) are never shown. Instead we see Viktor hanging out with the Polish resistance fighters, but undercover, since the Polish resistance are themselves portrayed as anti-Semitic. The Polish government was angered by this portrayal, although in that much I can't necessarily fault the filmmakers, as there is evidence to show that many partisan groups would not accept Jewish people in their ranks. That said, it creates quite an imbalance in the film when the sympathetic leads' own anti-semitic tendencies, or if not tendencies, then at least their participation in an anti-semitic war, are rarely if ever taken to task

 

The portrayal of the Polish resistance fighters as anti-semitic and complex is a realistic element inserted into the film. The more favorable portrayal of the German main characters would seem to justify the Polish criticism of the mini-series.

SPOILER- In fact Charly at one point betrays a Jewish person to the Nazis. In terms of the rest of the story, however, she faces no real consequence for this. She looks a bit upset about it for a moment and then goes back to the more important business of pining for her unrequited love. Then, she finds out that the person she betrayed, who, let's face it, would probably have been taken out back and shot in real life, is still alive and somehow improbably in a commanding position in the Russian army. So, no harm done, after all. What a relief. This seemed like an enormous cop-out to me, denying the character any real, sustained damage from the war, allowing her Nazi moment to be just a little "oops", a blip in her life. -SPOILER-

At any event, the story suffers from oversimplification, weak characterization, and a tendency to elide the worst of the atrocities - oftentimes there is a moment where we're almost going to see something horrible happen, but then it either happens off-screen or it is miraculously prevented from happening at the last moment. In World War II there wasn't a lot of deus-ex-machina to go around to keep up such a pleasant facade.The moment that struck me most deeply, in fact, was a single shot of Greta watching Jewish people being evicted from their house after she's realized that she's neglected to save Viktor's parents. In her look you can tell she suspects or knows the worst that's in store for them. Then as she averts her gaze and asks to be taken home, you understand the fear and paralysis that's prevented her from acting and is in the process of hardening her heart. Though Greta shows considerably more understanding for the fate befalling her country and especially the Jewish population, she is treated in the narrative as aloof from the war, as almost comically clueless compared to Charly, as someone afraid to get her hands dirty, as perhaps vain and selfish.

Greta, averting her eyes from atrocities, seems like one of the more realistic moments in the mini-series.

Is this to say I didn't enjoy the film? No, it was interesting enough. It is an antidote, perhaps, to the other idea in Western popular culture that all Germans were evil caricatures, a la "Inglourious Basterds." However, viewed by the wrong eyes, the eyes of someone who hasn't fully confronted the horrors of the Holocaust or come to terms with the way anti-semitism and fascism had infected the population so thoroughly, this film could be a dangerous revisionist history in which the Nazi war was fought primarily by some hapless kids who didn't really mean any harm and just wanted to get back to Berlin to hang out with their Jewish best friends. I think that that proposition is as false as the "Basterds" premise, however. The truth lies in the middle somewhere. Reading books such as "Hitler's Willing Executioners", watching documentaries such as that linked above, reveals that the German population was not so naive, that Hitler was not simply a dictator who inspired fear but a loved figure who made no secret of his hatred for the Jews. I hope that the popularity of this film does not indicate a new desire to gloss over their history on the part of the Germans, who, heretofore, have seemed more than willing to accept responsibility for their past.

At any rate, this is not a terrible film, but it's a film that should be taken with several grains of salt, and I would recommend that people read up on their history and watch some documentaries before digesting any of it at all.

That said, it was a great way to practice my German listening skills. I'm still a beginner at German, (Ich bin eine Anfänger), so I didn't pick up much. However, it's good to immerse yourself in the second language when you can. I figured that catching up on what's popular on German TV at the same time would be a good two-for-one language and cultural lesson.