Now the Germans have their say
A new movie about Hitler's last days is the latest from a generation of German film-makers determined to face up to their country's legacy of shame
Producer Bernd Eichinger's film Downfall, about Hitler's final days in the Berlin bunker, has been criticised by various commentators, particularly in Germany, for supposedly showing Hitler as 'too human'. Too right it does. It's all the more horrifying to recognise that Hitler's crimes were perpetrated by a fellow human being.
'For me, the terrifying thing is that he was human, not an elephant or a monster from Mars,' Eichinger says. 'If he had been a monster rather than a man, it would take the guilt away from other people - from his millions of followers. A monster is capable of anything, but everyone knows that one man could never have pulled it off alone.'
The subject of Hitler's final days has been dealt with in many other films, notably in Hitler: The Last 10 Days with Alec Guinness and The Bunker with Anthony Hopkins. There seems to be no limit to the public appetite for chronicles of the weird atmosphere of Hitler's last refuge, with the Russians only a few streets away and the terror of the Third Reich's lost control manifested in all sorts of ways, including drunkenness, fantasy and lechery. Some people have called this voyeuristic fascination almost a kind of pornography.
The great difference is that these previous films were made by the British and Americans - ie the victors. Downfall is made by Germans - or, as Eichinger puts it, 'the bad guys'. It is the latest manifestation of the extended soul-searching that has been going on in Germany since the war and the first feature film since 1956 to give Hitler a central dramatic role.
The fact that in Downfall Hitler is played by an actor - the great Swiss-born star Bruno Ganz - has broken a genuine taboo in German cinema. 'Something remarkable is happening in Germany,' editorialised one newspaper. 'Now at last we are beginning to come to terms with ourselves by having our history played out by actors we can identify with, in a German production worth seeing.'
In fact, Downfall is only the most high-profile and commercially successful of a new wave of German films which are taking a more direct, mainstream and emotional - some say almost Hollywood - approach to the country's Nazi past. In director Dennis Gansel's Napola, a working-class boy gets a sports scholarship to an elite but brutal public school, only to discover that this institution is where the Nazis train future leaders of the Reich.
Sophie Scholl - The Final Days, which won Silver Bears at the recent Berlin Film Festival for both its director, Marc Rothemund, and star, Julia Jentsch, dramatises the final six days of one of Nazi Germany's few genuine resistance heroes. Twenty-one-year-old Scholl was the only female member of the White Rose, a group of students - including her brother, Hans - who distributed anti-Nazi propaganda at the University of Munich. She was arrested on 18 February 1943 and executed with her brother a few days later. She met her death with astounding courage, shouting at the bench as she left the Nazi 'People's Court': 'You're hanging us today, but tomorrow it will be your heads that will roll.'
'I think it's a question of a new generation looking at this history from a new perspective,' says the film's screenwriter, Fred Breinersdorfer. 'The first postwar generation, who had lived through the Nazis, were either ashamed or saw those who resisted like Sophie Scholl as traitors. The second generation - my generation, actually - were more analytical and involved in educating themselves about what actually happened. The new generation sees the Nazi period in more personal terms: "What would I have done in that situation? Would I have had the courage to resist?"'
The film is to be shown everywhere, from the US and Canada to Mexico and Thailand - but not in Germany, where it has so far failed to find a distributor. For Von Glasow, who took 10 years to research and finance the film, this refusal to confront the story is evidence of what he still sees as the denial of past crimes.
'When something bad happens in your family you instinctively cover up for them,' he says. 'That's what's going on in Germany. We still cover up for the people in our families. It's happened in my family. My grandfather owned the Cologne daily paper and shared a bunker with the Gestapo, but even my father - who is Jewish - says he was completely innocent. That's why I think it's great that Downfall has been made. Because it tries to open up this denial.'
Not all German reaction to the film has been so positive. While foreign critics in the US and elsewhere have described it as, among other things, 'one of the best war films ever made', Der Spiegel called Downfall 'ridiculous, superficial... and banal', while the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel said: 'The makers have involuntarily turned out the worst comedy of the year.' Katja Hofmann, a 33-year-old German journalist and screenwriter, welcomes the film as 'remarkable and very brave', but nevertheless admits to worries about the wisdom of its focus on Hitler.
'I was taught at school that history was not created by one man but by many and you won't get a better understanding of the atrocities that happened by focusing on one obviously very sick man,' she says. 'The film does capture the Third Reich when it is on its knees and the hollowness of its ridiculous propaganda and made-up belief system. But it also portrays the Germans caught up in the fighting in Berlin as Hitler's victims too, and I think it's very dangerous if you get into the territory of the Germans feeling sorry for themselves.'
The charge that Downfall shows ordinary Germans as victims of Hitler rather than as his enthusiastic collaborators is one which Eichinger flatly denies. 'I followed the evidence,' he says. 'This shows that they did indeed suffer, but as a result of what they had done in the past. They became victims of what they themselves had let happen. I do believe the film makes this clear.'
Eichinger is the German film industry's most - perhaps only - internationally successful producer, responsible for films such as Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot, Jean Jacques Annaud's The Name of the Rose and Bille August's The House of the Spirits. On the $16m Downfall, he was both producer and screenwriter and the film could fairly be said to represent his vision more than that of its director, Oliver Hirschbiegel. Fascinated by the Nazi era for almost 30 years, he could not work out how to turn it into a film until he read Inside Hitler's Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich by the German historian Joachim Fest. This book, as well as the memoirs of Hitler's secretary, Traudl Junge, who died in 2002, became the source material for the film.
'I was born in 1949, so I certainly don't feel responsible for what happened, but you are still in the shadow of these events and you have to live with them,' he says. His father, a doctor, served on the Russian front for four years and came back wanting to forget. 'For my generation, there was a silence with our parents,' Eichinger says. 'They wanted to live a quiet life with no politics whatsoever. It sometimes made me very angry.'
The scenes in Downfall which have caused most outrage - those which show Hitler being nice to his dog and his secretaries or complimenting the cook on a plate of vegetarian ravioli - are all straight from the historical record. In only a couple of places does Eichinger fictionalise the story and stray towards Hollywood convention. One is the famous moment when a feeble and broken Hitler emerges from the bunker for the last time on 20 April 1945 - his 56th birthday - to pin decorations on the boy conscripts he has entrusted with defending Berlin to the last. In the film, the boy whose cheek Hitler pinches in an almost fatherly way receives his honour for zapping Russians with a mortar, whereas the real boy recipient, Alfred Czech, as emerged only this week, won the Iron Cross (which he has now thrown away) for saving wounded German soldiers.
In a rather queasy approximation of a happy ending to the film, the same boy is later shown escaping on a bicycle with Hitler's secretary through a sunlit forest, whereas in fact Czech and Junge were separately captured and it has been suggested that Junge had to give sexual favours to her Russian captors in order to escape.
In Germany, the film has been what Eichinger calls a 'mega-hit', with 4.6 million admissions and audiences sitting in stunned silence as the credits roll. In the US, it was nominated for an Oscar as best foreign film. After three years in the red, Eichinger's company, Constantin Film, is making money again, thanks to the world's fascination with Hitler.
'But that's not why I did it,' he says. 'In fact, many people advised me not to. There was a big, big chance audiences might turn away or people might say, "How could you do a movie like this?" But these events only happened 60 years ago and we forget them at our peril. Look at the world today. Again it is divided down racial lines - Christian fundamentalists against Muslim ones. And if you read what happened in those Iraqi prisons, you see normal people within two or three weeks starting to torture other human beings. They are told someone is a bad guy and they do it, even though no one's going to shoot them if they don't. You can see how fast what happened under Hitler can happen. It's not so far away.'
A new movie about Hitler's last days is the latest from a generation of German film-makers determined to face up to their country's legacy of shame
Producer Bernd Eichinger's film Downfall, about Hitler's final days in the Berlin bunker, has been criticised by various commentators, particularly in Germany, for supposedly showing Hitler as 'too human'. Too right it does. It's all the more horrifying to recognise that Hitler's crimes were perpetrated by a fellow human being.
'For me, the terrifying thing is that he was human, not an elephant or a monster from Mars,' Eichinger says. 'If he had been a monster rather than a man, it would take the guilt away from other people - from his millions of followers. A monster is capable of anything, but everyone knows that one man could never have pulled it off alone.'
The subject of Hitler's final days has been dealt with in many other films, notably in Hitler: The Last 10 Days with Alec Guinness and The Bunker with Anthony Hopkins. There seems to be no limit to the public appetite for chronicles of the weird atmosphere of Hitler's last refuge, with the Russians only a few streets away and the terror of the Third Reich's lost control manifested in all sorts of ways, including drunkenness, fantasy and lechery. Some people have called this voyeuristic fascination almost a kind of pornography.
The great difference is that these previous films were made by the British and Americans - ie the victors. Downfall is made by Germans - or, as Eichinger puts it, 'the bad guys'. It is the latest manifestation of the extended soul-searching that has been going on in Germany since the war and the first feature film since 1956 to give Hitler a central dramatic role.
The fact that in Downfall Hitler is played by an actor - the great Swiss-born star Bruno Ganz - has broken a genuine taboo in German cinema. 'Something remarkable is happening in Germany,' editorialised one newspaper. 'Now at last we are beginning to come to terms with ourselves by having our history played out by actors we can identify with, in a German production worth seeing.'
In fact, Downfall is only the most high-profile and commercially successful of a new wave of German films which are taking a more direct, mainstream and emotional - some say almost Hollywood - approach to the country's Nazi past. In director Dennis Gansel's Napola, a working-class boy gets a sports scholarship to an elite but brutal public school, only to discover that this institution is where the Nazis train future leaders of the Reich.
Sophie Scholl - The Final Days, which won Silver Bears at the recent Berlin Film Festival for both its director, Marc Rothemund, and star, Julia Jentsch, dramatises the final six days of one of Nazi Germany's few genuine resistance heroes. Twenty-one-year-old Scholl was the only female member of the White Rose, a group of students - including her brother, Hans - who distributed anti-Nazi propaganda at the University of Munich. She was arrested on 18 February 1943 and executed with her brother a few days later. She met her death with astounding courage, shouting at the bench as she left the Nazi 'People's Court': 'You're hanging us today, but tomorrow it will be your heads that will roll.'
'I think it's a question of a new generation looking at this history from a new perspective,' says the film's screenwriter, Fred Breinersdorfer. 'The first postwar generation, who had lived through the Nazis, were either ashamed or saw those who resisted like Sophie Scholl as traitors. The second generation - my generation, actually - were more analytical and involved in educating themselves about what actually happened. The new generation sees the Nazi period in more personal terms: "What would I have done in that situation? Would I have had the courage to resist?"'
The film is to be shown everywhere, from the US and Canada to Mexico and Thailand - but not in Germany, where it has so far failed to find a distributor. For Von Glasow, who took 10 years to research and finance the film, this refusal to confront the story is evidence of what he still sees as the denial of past crimes.
'When something bad happens in your family you instinctively cover up for them,' he says. 'That's what's going on in Germany. We still cover up for the people in our families. It's happened in my family. My grandfather owned the Cologne daily paper and shared a bunker with the Gestapo, but even my father - who is Jewish - says he was completely innocent. That's why I think it's great that Downfall has been made. Because it tries to open up this denial.'
Not all German reaction to the film has been so positive. While foreign critics in the US and elsewhere have described it as, among other things, 'one of the best war films ever made', Der Spiegel called Downfall 'ridiculous, superficial... and banal', while the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel said: 'The makers have involuntarily turned out the worst comedy of the year.' Katja Hofmann, a 33-year-old German journalist and screenwriter, welcomes the film as 'remarkable and very brave', but nevertheless admits to worries about the wisdom of its focus on Hitler.
'I was taught at school that history was not created by one man but by many and you won't get a better understanding of the atrocities that happened by focusing on one obviously very sick man,' she says. 'The film does capture the Third Reich when it is on its knees and the hollowness of its ridiculous propaganda and made-up belief system. But it also portrays the Germans caught up in the fighting in Berlin as Hitler's victims too, and I think it's very dangerous if you get into the territory of the Germans feeling sorry for themselves.'
The charge that Downfall shows ordinary Germans as victims of Hitler rather than as his enthusiastic collaborators is one which Eichinger flatly denies. 'I followed the evidence,' he says. 'This shows that they did indeed suffer, but as a result of what they had done in the past. They became victims of what they themselves had let happen. I do believe the film makes this clear.'
Eichinger is the German film industry's most - perhaps only - internationally successful producer, responsible for films such as Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot, Jean Jacques Annaud's The Name of the Rose and Bille August's The House of the Spirits. On the $16m Downfall, he was both producer and screenwriter and the film could fairly be said to represent his vision more than that of its director, Oliver Hirschbiegel. Fascinated by the Nazi era for almost 30 years, he could not work out how to turn it into a film until he read Inside Hitler's Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich by the German historian Joachim Fest. This book, as well as the memoirs of Hitler's secretary, Traudl Junge, who died in 2002, became the source material for the film.
'I was born in 1949, so I certainly don't feel responsible for what happened, but you are still in the shadow of these events and you have to live with them,' he says. His father, a doctor, served on the Russian front for four years and came back wanting to forget. 'For my generation, there was a silence with our parents,' Eichinger says. 'They wanted to live a quiet life with no politics whatsoever. It sometimes made me very angry.'
The scenes in Downfall which have caused most outrage - those which show Hitler being nice to his dog and his secretaries or complimenting the cook on a plate of vegetarian ravioli - are all straight from the historical record. In only a couple of places does Eichinger fictionalise the story and stray towards Hollywood convention. One is the famous moment when a feeble and broken Hitler emerges from the bunker for the last time on 20 April 1945 - his 56th birthday - to pin decorations on the boy conscripts he has entrusted with defending Berlin to the last. In the film, the boy whose cheek Hitler pinches in an almost fatherly way receives his honour for zapping Russians with a mortar, whereas the real boy recipient, Alfred Czech, as emerged only this week, won the Iron Cross (which he has now thrown away) for saving wounded German soldiers.
In a rather queasy approximation of a happy ending to the film, the same boy is later shown escaping on a bicycle with Hitler's secretary through a sunlit forest, whereas in fact Czech and Junge were separately captured and it has been suggested that Junge had to give sexual favours to her Russian captors in order to escape.
In Germany, the film has been what Eichinger calls a 'mega-hit', with 4.6 million admissions and audiences sitting in stunned silence as the credits roll. In the US, it was nominated for an Oscar as best foreign film. After three years in the red, Eichinger's company, Constantin Film, is making money again, thanks to the world's fascination with Hitler.
'But that's not why I did it,' he says. 'In fact, many people advised me not to. There was a big, big chance audiences might turn away or people might say, "How could you do a movie like this?" But these events only happened 60 years ago and we forget them at our peril. Look at the world today. Again it is divided down racial lines - Christian fundamentalists against Muslim ones. And if you read what happened in those Iraqi prisons, you see normal people within two or three weeks starting to torture other human beings. They are told someone is a bad guy and they do it, even though no one's going to shoot them if they don't. You can see how fast what happened under Hitler can happen. It's not so far away.'
