- A decades-long taboo was broken in Germany yesterday
with the launch of a feature film in which Adolf Hitler appears for the
first time in a central role, not as a ranting demagogue but as a soft-spoken
dreamer.
-
- The Downfall is a huge shift from the previous tendency
in German cinema to show Hitler only as a background figure or a character
who does not appear on camera at all.
-
- It tells the story of the last 12 days of Hitler's life
in his 25ft-deep bunker in Berlin - including his suicide alongside his
new wife Eva Braun on April 30, 1945 - while advancing Soviet troops pulverise
the city with shellfire.
-
- The production by Bernd Eichinger, a respected director,
is likely to cause controversy when it opens in German cinemas next month.
It depicts the Fuhrer as an avuncular character with a penchant for chocolate
cake, who slides into madness when his lifelong dream of a 1,000-year reich
slips from his grasp.
-
- Hitler is convincingly played by Germany's star actor
Bruno Ganz, who once acted the part of an angel in the award-winning German
film Wings of Desire.
-
- In one scene Ganz depicts him with his hair in his eyes,
tears streaming down his cheeks, as he declares: "The war is over."
-
- Hitler is shown stroking his alsatian Blondie and treating
his secretary with tenderness and patience.
-
- Until he starts having hysterical fits, Ganz's Hitler
talks in a soft, melodic Austrian accent, far different from the barking
tone he adopted for his mass rallies. The director said the voice was copied
from the single recording which exists of Hitler talking in normal tones.
-
- Mr Eichinger, who also wrote the screenplay, reconstructs
the last days of the Third Reich as seen from the claustrophobic and dimly-lit
bunker with the help of diary extracts and eye-witness accounts by Hitler's
secretary, Traudl Junge, who died in 2002, as well as his telephonist,
and an officer, Major Freytag, who are the last two living survivors.
-
- As well as recalling the unbearable stench of urine,
sweat and diesel which dominated the bunker, Freytag described Hitler as
a "physical wreck", with a limp, who hid his shaking left hand
behind his back, leading to suggestions that he was suffering from Parkinson's
disease.
-
- Shot in Berlin, Munich and St Petersburg at a cost of
£9 million, making it one of the most expensive German films of all
time, The Downfall has been welcomed by critics for demythologising Hitler
- even before they have had the chance to see it.
-
- Writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the critic
Frank Schirrmacher praised The Downfall for bringing Germany's evaluation
of its history into "a new phase".
-
- Until now Germans had been afraid to portray on screen
"the man who still dominates the German imagination more than any
other figure in history", he wrote.
-
- But the tabloid Bild yesterday posed the question that
an increasing number of critics will no doubt ask: "Should a monster
be portrayed as a human being?" Eichinger, the 55-year-old son of
a Wehrmacht soldier who fought on the eastern front, said he believed the
film would offer an "emotional release" for many Germans still
traumatised by the Second World War, even though only one in five living
Germans experienced it.
-
- Its release comes at a time when Germans are involved
in an intense debate about their suffering in the war.
-
- There have been several popular books and historical
analyses of German suffering during Allied bombing of Dresden and other
cities, most famously Gunter Grass's Crabwalk of 2002. The subject went
virtually undiscussed for half a century after the war ended.
-
- Critics say the debate is in danger of playing into the
hands of revisionists - those who play down the crime of the Holocaust.
-
- © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2004.
-
- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004
/08/24/wadolf24.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/08/24/ixworld.html
|