The German Treasure

DOWNFALL

Oliver Hirschbiegel

Germany

2004

There are a hundred and perhaps even a thousand of films about the Second World War, holocaust, and anything that has something to do with probably the world’s most notorious and hated human being ever—Adolf Hitler. This film however doesn’t have its focus on the Fuhrer’s tormenting quest for world domination. It concentrates itself with Germans alone and its featured enemy, the Russians, is conceived distantly and only visually present in few necessary scenes. The usual second world war films in international arena are about the French, Italian, Russian, Japanese, American British, and Germany’s interconnected military maneuvers and tactics or about the soldier’s harrowing experiences, pain, endurance, and importantly the essence that the real heroes and at the same time victims of wars are the soldiers. Never had I really watched a film about the principal culprit of perhaps the most shattering event to occur in the history of the world. Choosing to present the collapse of his mission until his suicide instead of his advent and all the promising auspices of his German supremacy is a groundbreaking statement. Opposed strongly to Leni Reifenstahl’s documentaries such as “Birth of a Nation” and “Olympia”, this is a film that deflates all of the success and greatness Hitler may had have at those films, though Hirschbiegel is prudent enough to give elements of respect for the man who drastically shaped history in this incredible and compelling film.

Aside form the actual downfall of the nation, looking at who Adolf Hitler really was, is the most reasonable aspect to look forward to. As a person who is not a German, who is born in the relatively peaceful times 43 years after Hitler’s death, who is interested enough in history, I think of him as definitely a visionary, but his indulgence to being a German while discriminating all the rest, and the time he was born in history when other countries are as politically operational are both reasons why he can never be the world conqueror he was dreaming of. In the film, he is portrayed as someone plagued with superiority complex, lacking with compassion, especially with the civilians, the common German people outside his direct command who he even mentioned as weak. He is desperate, and in the midst of the toughest and most dire situations he seems insane. While his generals make sense about the real danger of the enemies circling Berlin, he keeps on insisting impossible tactics and order. This is not to accuse he is insane at all, his madness is not impossible to expect in anxious times but in the film itself it, all of the lunacy targets his character like a dagger. His epileptic left hand is not simply cast in Bruno Ganz acting, it also a metaphor of his unsuitability of his grand ambition. The rattling hand is a cataclysmic doom of mankind, and that same hand is his own curse, his own inevitable quagmire.

The horrendous cost of his aspiration may be enough to despise Hitler but it is undeniable that for a time, in his nation, he is the most respected. Looking at Reifenstahl’s “Birth of a Nation” he is a half-God, half-man, and as a German and even any German (If I were a German) Hirschbiegel, can’t deny it. That for a time in Germany’s most significant history, there was someone they believed, adored, and trusted, and that should be enough to give due respects to Hitler even in the most sublime way. In the film, before Hitler dies, he asks that his enemies should never see him dead. Hitler and his wife enter the door with the poison capsule and the gun, the door is shut closed, gun shots are heard. His men enter the room. Camera shows his men carrying covered body of the Fuhrer and his wife. They bring the corpses outside the bunker and place them in a 6 feet deep burrow and burn them. The brutality of their death is never existent on the film at least visually. This is the respect that the director can mostly do particularly following historical accuracies.

The film is brilliant in many ways. The subject matter itself is enough to be riveting, and with its appropriate cinematography of black to gray to olive green, its decent editing, convincing sound and music, I just couldn’t ask for more about its technicalities. I appreciate the gloomy atmosphere the film tries to keep consistent in the bunker and even outside. The manipulation shows as if sun has never risen in the soon to fall city. The scenes where Hitler’s closest and most loyal people are deciding on how to commit suicide are so moving, and when they commit the suicide just like their Fuhrer are so striking. These people would rather die than to surrender their ideologies, and there’s one thing I have realized--there is nothing like being forced to accept your death in the circumstance of losing. The only thing I wish to have been changed in the film is its claim of the secretary’s point of view. It is not true at all, the POV is everywhere. I am not a fan of POV scattering around the place but in this film, I think the unrestricted POV works. This is because these multi-possessed POVs represent the many number of people involved in that downfall. It may be as many as the real number of war victims but this is enough to know that this is not just between Hitler and his ambition. The secretary’s POV is actually useless. Even though he has some scenes where he gets to know the Fuhrer and his surprising goodness, these scenes are hardly contributing to the film’s vastness to be captured into one. The opening and closing documentary footage of the grown-old secretary are by themselves spectacular but they are either not needed or too overrated. Thus, the secretary’s role has been stretched in the promotion of the film and at the mentioned beginning and closing when in fact they become irrelevant when you watch the whole film. I would have chosen to position the POV of this film in a more omnipresent status since an enormous subject matter justifies it.

I find the film haunting and I find myself loving it. Aside from few scenes in “Hiroshima Mon Amour”, this is the film which I have deeply felt the world in its most painful, frightening, and darkest time. The irony of the downfall of Berlin and the triumph of the rest of the world, of people’s desperate survival and their poignant suicides, and of Adolf Hitler’s death and the stolen lives of millions are so effectively translated in this sweeping and terrific film. “Downfall” is a German treasure.