- BERLIN (AFP) -- A big-budget
German film about the last days of Adolf Hitler has dared to shatter a
lingering taboo about history's greatest monster -- portraying him as human.
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- "Der Untergang" (The Downfall) starring Swiss
actor Bruno Ganz as the Nazi Fuehrer opens in Germany but it has already
sparked an emotional debate about the dangers of showing evil incarnate
with a human face.
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- "Are we permitted to portray someone as human who
is to blame for the deaths of 40 million people?" asked the publisher
of Berlin's Tagesspiegel, Hellmuth Karasek, in a full-page commentary amid
massive coverage in the German press.
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- Having made a picture that shows in astonishing detail
the end of the Third Reich with Hitler's suicide in his bunker on April
30, 1945, director Oliver Hirschbiegel said the time had come to take the
risk.
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- "The danger is not in portraying him as human but
in dismissing this man as a monster, or creating a myth so that he is reduced
to a comic book character," he told AFP at a Berlin hotel a stone's
throw away from the remnants of the Hitler bunker.
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- "It is an insult to the victims to claim that he
wasn't a human being, that means this was a demon that swept down over
the Germans or a maniac unable to take responsibility for his actions.
He knew exactly what he was doing every moment of his life."
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- Ganz's brilliant warts-and-all portrayal shows Hitler
in previously unimaginable scenes: charming his secretaries, sharing a
passionate kiss with Eva Braun, frothing at the mouth over the latest reports
of the encroaching Red Army, spilling sauce at dinner down his steel-gray
uniform.
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- The audience sees him with a persistent tremor, suffering
presumably from Parkinson's disease, deploying long-defeated armies against
the Russians and signing the death sentence of hundreds of thousands by
refusing to capitulate.
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- And there is even humor, albeit of the blackest kind,
when a justice of the peace who is brought down to the bunker to marry
Hitler and Eva Braun is embarrassed to ask the couple whether they are
of pure Aryan blood, a question required at the time.
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- Yet all the while, Hitler commands the undying loyalty
of his followers and the iron-grip on power that marked his 12 years as
Fuehrer.
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- Ganz, who the film's producers are hoping to bring home
a rare Academy Award for a non-English speaking actor, said that he had
aimed to probe this mystifying appeal.
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- "I cannot only hate this person, otherwise I would
not be able to play him," Ganz told ARD public television.
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- Previous Hitler portrayals by the likes of Alec Guinness
or Anthony Hopkins were widely panned for two-dimensional depictions of
a psychopath that failed to shed light on his magnetism for millions of
Germans.
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- Hirschbiegel said he was keenly aware of the dangers
of inspiring understanding or even moments of sympathy for Hitler.
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- "Provoking new questions in no ways means that by
showing Hitler as a person I make light of him or, as I read recently,
make him likeable," he said.
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- "That's complete nonsense. If you find him likeable,
you weren't listening."
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- Viewers are immersed in the horror of the last hours
-- seeing SS officers completing the Fuehrer's last orders by dousing his
dead body and that of his bride in gasoline and setting them alight, watching
the wife of propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels drug their six children and
place cyanide capsules in their tiny mouths.
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- But some critics have accused the filmmakers of lacking
the courage to venture an answer to one of history's most urgent questions
-- how were the crimes of the Third Reich possible?
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- "The fact that the film can pretend that daring
new ground is being broken does not reflect well on the efforts of the
Germans to look National Socialism in the eye," wrote the Frankfurter
Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung broadsheet.
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- "That even the mass murderer is a person, that he
can provoke sympathy in his final solitude, that there can be day-to-day
life in a dictatorship -- what was our image of Hitler Germany that we
can be sold such things as new discoveries?"
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- Karasek noted that watching a deeply flawed Hitler on
screen did not lionize him but cut him down to size, just as television
images of a disheveled Saddam Hussein fresh from his spider hole diminished
his mystique.
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- "Bruno Ganz shows that even the most inhuman things
emerged from a person. That does not make light of them," he said.
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- The 13.5-million-euro (16.5-million-dollar) film has
already been sold throughout Europe and in Japan. Producers are hoping
for distribution in North America and Britain after its screening Tuesday
at the Toronto Film Festival.
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- Copyright © 2004 Agence France Presse. All rights
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of Agence France Presse.
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