Downfall
Almost the Same Old Story

Klaus Neumann

1. Wenders’ damning review of Hitler, eine Karriere was published in Die Zeit, 5 August 1977; an English translation appears in Wenders (trans. S. Whiteside & Michael Hofmann), Emotion Pictures: Reflections on the Cinema (London: Faber and Faber, 1989). Wenders’ damning review of Der Untergang appeared in Die Zeit, 21 October 2004. Fest and Herrendoerfer’s Hitler, eine Karriere was informed by Fest’s monumental Hitler biography (trans. R. & C. Winston), Hitler (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974); Downfall was informed by Fest (trans. M. Bettauer Dembo), Inside Hitler’s Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2004).

Does this sound familiar? It almost describes a situation in 2004, when the film Downfall (Der Untergang) was released in Germany. Almost but not quite: the Hitlerwelle engulfed (West) Germany in 1977. The Hitler film that upset Wim Wenders in 1977 was Joachim Fest and Christian Herrendoerfer’s Hitler: A Career (Hitler, eine Karriere). Wenders was as upset in 2004, and wrote an article about Downfall, which also appeared in Die Zeit. While the 1977 film was an overlong documentary, the 2004 film (starring Bruno Ganz as Hitler) is an overlong melodrama. Fest wrote the book that informed Downfall but, unlike in 1977, he did not write the script. (1)

In most Australian reviews of Downfall – from those by ABC television’s David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz to The Australian’s Evan Williams – were effusive in their praise. Audiences could be excused for assuming that the film marks an entirely new approach to the Nazi past in Germany. It does not. Like the 1977 documentary, Downfall is the product of Joachim Fest’s obsessive fascination with Hitler. It is not the first film about the final days in the bunker, it is not the first feature film focusing on Hitler, and it is not the first film about the Nazi past that has attracted large audiences in Germany.

2. Albert Speer (trans. R. & C. Winston), Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs (New York: Macmillan, 1970); Joachim C. Fest (trans. E. Osers & A. Dring), Speer: The Final Verdict (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001).

3. David Cesarani and Peter Longerich, ‘The Massaging of History’, The Guardian (7 April 2005). Ernst Günther Schenck wrote several books about the war; his favourable depiction in Downfall seems to have been partly based on his Das Notlazarett unter der Reichskanzlei (Neuried: Ars Una, 1995).

Like much of Fest’s earlier writings, his book about the last days in the bunker is informed by the self-serving memoirs of the convicted war criminal and efficient organiser of Germany’s war machine, Albert Speer. Speer has loomed large in Fest’s career as a historian. It was Fest who helped Speer write his memoirs (which were first published in 1969). It was Fest who wrote a supposedly definitive (and kind) biography of Speer. It was Fest who helped Speer to reinvent himself as Hitler’s former architect who repented and atoned for his sins, and to make his contemporaries forget that he was one of Hitler’s most prominent and most faithful henchmen. Not surprisingly, Downfall depicts Speer (Heino Ferch) in a favourable light. In the film, Speer tells the Führer that he has disobeyed the order to destroy Germany’s infrastructure ahead of the country’s occupation by Allied forces. As Speer’s is the only account of this conversation, most historians would probably have been reluctant to take his version at face value. Not so Fest and the makers of Downfall. The film even tries to make us believe that Speer disapproved of Hitler’s anti-Semitism. (2)

Speer is not the only prominent Nazi who cuts a fine figure in Downfall. The film is also remarkably kind in its depiction of some high-ranking Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS officers, most notably the SS doctor Ernst Günther Schenck (Christian Berkel). In a review in The Guardian, Holocaust historians David Cesarani and Peter Longerich pointed out that Schenck, Downfall’s honourable professor-cum-general, was not reinstated to his chair at Munich University ‘because he was implicated in the conduct of "frivolous" medical experiments on inmates in Mauthausen concentration camp’. But, like Speer, Schenck was a prolific author who after 1945 successfully rewrote his own role in Nazi Germany. (3)

Like numerous other German books and films (including, for example, Helmut Käutner’s 1954 movie The Devil’s General, in which Curt Jürgens plays the legendary World War I fighter pilot Ernst Udet), Downfall contrasts despicable Nazis with honourable Wehrmacht officers. Downfall reminded me of the history I learned in a West German high school more than thirty years ago: that the Wehrmacht was used by Hitler, and that Germany’s honour was saved on 20 July 1944, when Wehrmacht officers tried to assassinate him.

4. Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann (eds.), War of Extermination: The German Military in World War II, 1941–1944 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000).

Fest has been an influential public figure in Germany, both as the long-time editor of the conservative broadsheet Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and as a historian. In the so-called Historikerstreit (history wars) of the 1980s, he intervened on the side of the revisionists who called for the historicisation of the Nazi past. His book about Hitler’s last days in the bunker (and the film based on it) could be seen as another intervention: in the debate about the responsibility (and culpability) of the Wehrmacht, which was sparked by the so-called Wehrmachtsausstellung, an exhibition concerning the crimes committed by German soldiers in the course of the war against the Soviet Union, which toured thirty-three German and Austrian cities in the second half of the 1990s. (4)

At the end of Downfall two central characters, Hitler’s private secretary Traudl Junge (Alexandra Maria Lara) and the young Hitler youth Peter (Donevan Gunia) ride (on a bicycle) into the sunset. They are, the film suggests, innocent; with Germany and the Nazi regime in tatters, they are ready to build a new Germany. This, too, is not a novel view of history, but one that had much currency in both postwar Germanys, where the downfall of the Hitler regime was equated with a Stunde Null, a new and unencumbered beginning, and where it was assumed that the vast majority of Germans were at worst responsible for having been gullible and for having let themselves be seduced by ‘the Nazis’.

5. Hannah Arendt, ‘The Aftermath of Nazi Rule: Report from Germany’, Commentary, Vol. 10 No. 4 (1950), pp. 342–53.

6. Jörg Friedrich, Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940–1945 (Berlin: Propyläen, 2002); for the ensuing controversy see, for example, Lothar Kettenacker (ed.), Ein Volk von Opfern? Die neue Debatte um den Bombenkrieg 1940–45 (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2003).

7. Interview with Joachim Fest, circa 2004, www.der-untergang.de

In one respect, however, Downfall is indeed new. It emphasises German victimhood, and thereby follows a significant trend in the post-reunification Berlin Republic. Admittedly, Germans’ propensity to identify as victims is in itself not new: when visiting Germany in the late ‘40s, Hannah Arendt had already noted that Germans preferred to bemoan their own misery rather than empathise with their victims. (5) But, until the early ‘90s, the preoccupation with German victimhood was merely a strong undercurrent, lacking respectability. Germans had a first inkling that the memorialisation of German victims, and equations that accounted for German victims and victims of Nazi Germany on the same balance sheet, were becoming respectable, immediately after reunification. Then the Kohl government rededicated the Neue Wache memorial in East Berlin – formerly a memorial against fascism and war – to honour all those killed during and as a result of World War II, including Jews, Sinti and Roma, German civilians and soldiers, German expellees, and German postwar victims of Stalinism. Some ten years later, the historian Jörg Friedrich published a widely celebrated account of the bombing of German cities. The book’s reception proved that a patriotic focus on German victims had by now become socially acceptable. (6)

In an interview about Downfall, Fest claimed that ‘Hitler wanted to exterminate primarily two peoples: the Jews, and then in the end also the Germans’. (7) The film is informed by this ludicrous assumption, which refers to the systematic murder of six million Jews and to Hitler’s scorched earth policy at the end of the war as if they were compatible phenomena (and which, incidentally, does not mention the genocide of Roma and Sinti). Downfall subtly implies a symmetry between German victims and the victims of Nazi Germany.

8. Klaus Neumann, ‘The Children of Bullenhuser Damm’, Meanjin, Vol. 59 No. 1 (2000), pp. 74–93.

9. Quoted in Karin Springer and Bernhard Springer, Der Untergang: Materialien für den Unterricht (Munich: Kulturfiliale Gillner und Conrad, 2004)), p. 2.

All this is not to say that Downfall is deficient because it does not thematise the Holocaust. A film that aims to explore the dynamics in Hitler’s bunker during the Nazi regime’s final days perhaps does not need to include shots of German concentration camps. It is worth remembering, however, that some of those camps still functioned in late April 1945. On 20 April 1945, Hitler’s birthday and the first day of the twelve-day period featured in Downfall, for example, SS men executed twenty Jewish children in a primary school in Hamburg, which had served as a satellite camp for the Neuengamme concentration camp. (8)

Downfall’s main deficiency is its failure to engage with German (and Germans’) responsibility. Rather than trying to convey on screen why Hitler was a fascinating person, the film should have tried to understand why Germans willingly let themselves be fascinated by him. Downfall is testament to Fest’s fascination, but it does not help us to understand why Hitler was elected in 1933, and thereafter supported by an overwhelming majority of Germans. It does not help us to understand why and how ordinary Germans became implicated in Auschwitz. Bernd Eichinger, the film’s producer, has remarked: ‘I think it’s about time that we tell our history with our own means, and that we have the courage to put the main protagonists onto the screen’. (9) Obviously, for Eichinger and Fest (and numerous other German writers and filmmakers, particularly of the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s), ordinary Germans did not play a significant role in Nazi Germany, and do not deserve to be anything other than extras.

10. Junge’s recollections are the basis of a ghosted memoir which, according to Downfall’s publicists, served as one of the film’s sources: Traudl Junge with Melissa Müller, Bis zur letzten Stunde: Hitlers Sekretärin erzählt ihr Leben (Munich: Claassen, 2002).

Eichinger and his director did, however, allow two ordinary Germans to feature prominently in their film: the Hitler youth Peter and Traudl Junge. They do not play important roles in the events unfolding in the bunker and are not particularly well developed as characters, but they are crucial for the film because viewers can identify with them. Junge worked as Hitler’s private secretary from December 1942 until his death. The film opens with a scene that shows Hitler selecting Junge to work for him. But rather than depicting her as an innocent and, literally, wide-eyed German, the film could have made much more of the life of the historical Junge. It could have explored why she chose to work for Hitler and what she thought when she became privy to his thoughts and deeds.

The real Traudl Junge actually appears at the very beginning and end of Downfall in short excerpts from André Heller and Othmar Schmiderer’s 2002 documentary Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary (Im toten Winkel. Hitler’s Sekretärin). In the last clip, Junge reflects on initially not being able to draw a connection between the Nazi crimes that were publicised during the Nuremberg trials and her own life history: ‘I was satisfied with not having been personally responsible and with not having known about it, not having known of the extent. But one day I walked past the memorial plaque for Sophie Scholl in Franz Joseph Street, and then I realised that she had been the same age as I, and that she was executed in the year I joined Hitler. And at that moment I noticed that having been young is no excuse, and that it would have perhaps been possible to find out about things.’ Junge’s reflections on her own involvement are infinitely more interesting than anything Downfall’s recreation of the last days in the bunker has to offer. (10)

Far from being an innovative engagement with the Nazi past, Downfall is, for a German audience at least, a return to the clichés of the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s, according to which an evil but fascinating man, Hitler, together with his henchmen, seduced the German people. The film itself, and the admiration it has attracted in Australia, ignore the many worthy and complex previous attempts by German and Austrian filmmakers to grapple with an unbearable past. They include that of Edgar Reitz, the maker of the Heimat trilogy, which in my view is one of the most interesting and successful projects designed to make Germans think about responsibility. (The third part of this trilogy was shown as part of the 2005 German Film Festival in Australia. The screening was not given nearly the same amount of free publicity as Downfall, and attracted a comparatively small audience. SBS Television, which screened the first two parts of the trilogy, has decided not to buy the rights for Heimat 3.)