You Love to See It: Downfall (Patreon)

“Show the man inside the monster” is, as Hitler-focused art and scholarship goes, about as prosaic as it gets. A little sentimental music can make you feel sympathy for a rock with a face on it, so conjuring up a few tears for little Adolf’s troubled boyhood or whatever doesn’t amount to much beyond basic narrative competence. Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall takes a similar path at first, giving us a deeply emotional view of the Führer’s last days, but it doesn’t let up once it finds Hitler’s humanity, his kindness, his love for his dog and his children — instead it plunges straight through them, forcing us face to face with the idea that these qualities in and of themselves possess no special power or significance. Unfailingly fatherly and patient with his secretary, the naive Traudl, delusional and frothing in his war room — it’s all the same man, and his personality matters far less than his ideology and the momentum of his path through life.

Bruno Ganz, who wore his Swiss passport over his heart whenever he was in costume “so Mr. Hitler couldn’t get me”, is such a towering element of the film’s success it’s easy to forget he’s only in it for about half its running time. His shaking hands, his deeply lined face and frequent bouts of gentle sentimentality — he’s vulnerable, deeply human in his doubts and bitter disappointment, in his quavering hesitation in the face of death, and it doesn’t matter at all. His pain is personal and small, an unremarkable point of emotion within a vast wasteland of pointless slaughter. His humanity makes his crimes more appalling, not less, as Ganz and Hirschbiegel prise Hitler out of his mythologized place as a structural component of Nazi Germany’s entire character and expose him for an unremarkable cancer cell no more or less interesting than the rest of his rapaciously propagated descendents. 

In one scene, Eva Braun reads out her final letter to her sister as Hirschbiegel’s camera moves through the bloody wreckage of Berlin, sweeping over amputated limbs, gutted homes, and butchered children as Hitler’s new wife lists her jewels and who’s to get them. The completely unremarkable humanity of these people lingers in your mouth like the taste of spoiled food as you watch their paranoia, their mania, their willful self-deception unfold into confused strings of individual choices hiding one inside the other like Russian nesting dolls, the complicity of tens of millions and the suffering of ten times as many encapsulated neatly in a single name and image. Hitler’s humanity is as meaningless as anyone else's, his repugnant dreams and beliefs a mere grain of sand on the limitless shore of venal nationalist hysteria he helped to stoke and permit. Pity him, understand him, see the real and earnest love in his heart — it’s irrelevant. It didn't matter at all.