Downfall
History is usually written by the winners, and as it's told and retold, it becomes known as the truth. Downfall - a film about Hitler's last days in the Berlin bunker - is especially engaging because it is made by the losers. It's the first time the Führer has played a starring role in a German film.
The story we usually tell is of Hitler, the icon of evil. But, lest we forget, he was also human, and in Downfall he's played frighteningly well by Bruno Ganz, whose degenerating and amoral leader is nevertheless courteous to his female staff and affectionate to his pet dog.
As such, the film is a helpful, if awkward, reminder that history is not created by cartoon monsters and heroes but by people, like you and me - even if it reflects a more painful truth about the darker side of our own nature.
Ultimately, however, there's little room for sympathy with Downfall's devil, despite us seeing his softer, vegetarian underbelly; Hirschbiegel instead generates moments of empathy with those who lived and worked with Hitler - and this makes the film all the more unsettling.
You feel the terrible pain of the misguided Magda Goebbels, for instance, who kills her six children, one by one, with cyanide in a truly terrifying scene within the bunker. And you feel the fear and confusion of Eva Braun, who knows her husband well enough to know that no one really knows him at all.
The film focuses, especially, on Traudl Junge, Hitler's secretary from 1942. She is an attractive, loyal girl, whose escape to freedom - having stayed by the Führer's side at great personal risk until his suicide - provides a happy ending to an unhappy film.
A heart-warming denouement such as this threatens to dilute Junge's culpability - and with it, that of the countless ordinary people like her who were party, one way or another, to Hitler's extraordinary plans.
Yet the hope, surely, is that as we watch today, we might think harder about our own complicity within contemporary structures of evil - which, like the Nazi movement, don't always seem so obviously wrong without the benefit of hindsight.
Hitler, we may not be. But each of us, like Junge, has a part to play in history. And whichever way we try to retell it, God knows, ultimately, how we have chosen to act.
Brian Draper
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