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16.06.05 |
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Downfall |
[movies] |
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OT: Der Untergang, Germany, 2004, 156 min |
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by Oliver Hirschbiegel |
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Much has been written and half the country went crazy about this movie. It even got nominated for an Oscar. So what's the deal? When the possibility occured to watch it for little money at the university cinema, I decided to get an impression on my own and what I got was almost exactly what I had expected: a technically well done movie with so much nationalist pathos I would have liked to puke my guts out.
For those who haven't heard about it, the movie reflects the last days of Berlin, Hitler and his whole nazipack before the glorious red army captured the reichshauptstadt in april '44. It tries to show Hitler from his „human“ side in order to make clear that after all his crimes and dirty deeds he was still a human being, a sick, old man who watches his dreams fall apart. We witness him being betrayed by his former comrades Göring, Himmler and Speer, we see him kissing Eva Braun and we see him cry. Well maybe it is a good idea to point out that all the horror of the third reich was commited by human beings, that even the head, the führer, was a human being and no kind of übermensch. Maybe this was the filmmakers' intention but I am sorry, they didn't reach their goal. Nothing in the movie managed to move me. Not even the brilliantly acting Alexandra Maria Lara in the role of Traudl Junge, Hitler's private secretary. Her charisma and the way she rolls her eyes make this movie bearable. It is significant that the moment tears came to my eyes was when in the credits this number 6000000 occured, 6000000 jews killed in the holocaust. This number stroke me more than every fucking tear of this bastard Adolf Hitler and his bunch of assholes, for nazis deserve to die, all of them!
The very end of the movie then is quite good, an interview passage with the real, now old Traudl Junge who says she always said to herself, she wasn't guilty as she didn't know all the horrible facts but then on a monument reminding on Sophie Scholl she found out, they were both born the same year and Sophie was executed the year she herself became Hitlers secretary. Maybe she could have known if she had tried to, she says and the screen turns black...
But this consiliatory final cannot cover the fact that every single woman in the movie is presented as naive. Everyone who has doubts about Hitler is male. Coincedence or sexism? The obsesive search for „good germans“ is just as ridiculous as enraging. Even worse indeed is the fact that Feldmarschall Keitel's adjutant is played by real life NPD-Member Karl Richter, a nazi playing a nazi. The ultimate metaphor for germany. [jan]
official website
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