Downfall (Der Untergang) proved the perfect foil to the Europe of the Diversities conference, referred to earlier by Johnathan Pearce. This is a controversial film that has excited some who argue that representations of the Nazis which humanise their actions, and detail their suffering, downplay the consequences of the regime. There is weight to this argument, as the film focuses fully on the people within Hitler’s bunker, their loyalty, their duty and their concerns in those final days.
Deftly underscored by Stephan Zacharias’s string-laden soundscape and cinematographer Rainer Klausmann’s truly terrific skill in capturing of the grim reality of the horror that was 1945 Berlin, Hirschbiegel pushes many buttons: the collective guilt of a nation for atrocities committed by their state balanced against the horrific human price of no surrender; the astonishing loyalty of the women around the cold-hearted dictator and the SS who vow to fight on because “we cannot outlive the Fuhrer’s death”; the double standard of being superior but cleansing themselves of traitors and the imperfect until there’s no leadership left to carry the torch.
Although Friedrich Hayek argued that totalitarian regimes allowed thugs and psychopaths to enter positions of authority, this film shows that traditional values of honour and duty were perverted and strengthened by the Nazis. In the film, it is Prussian values which sustain the dying regime, bring the Hitler Youth onto the streets and motivate the soldiers.
One should watch Shoah prior to this, as an inoculation, since one must make a conscious effort to recollect the camps in order to avoid feeling any empathy with these monsters.
UPDATE: For those who thought my link to a revisionist website was too obscure a warning signal that these memes still exist, here is an interview with Lanzmann, the director of Shoah, explaining the reasons why his work must exist.
Karl, do you realize that the review of Shoah that you link to in this post is a revisionist historian’s review? The writer denies the existence of the gas chambers.
Is that what you intended to link to? Do you deny the Holocaust as well?
Indeed. And the “IHR” (cough, spit) is a Nazi organization. Get that filthy link off this site.
Yes, and ignoring the links, we know the kind of people they are…..
Der Untergang itself however, and for all the criticism it received here in Germany for giving Nazis a human face was, in its own way, brilliant for pointing out that very fact. Those atrocities were carried out by “normal” people with weaknesses and fears. And they believed that what they were doing was right……
Well I understood the context of the link just fine, Philip. Good post and might I suggest the author of the second comment might want to re-read your article, a bit more carefully this time.
Claude Lanzmann has said that if he came across an authentic photograph or film of a gas chamber in operation, he would destroy it without letting anyone else see it, since some mysteries are too sacred to be exposed to the light of common day or the perusal of factually based historiography. He has also said that any attempt to understand Hitler constitutes exoneration.*
Lanzmann is a mythomane. He is not alone.
*See ‘Explaining Hitler’ by Ron Rosenbaum, whose evocation of Lanzmann’s high-flown anti-intellectual obscurantism is merciless.
So what if Lanzmann is a wierdo? His strangeness is small beer compared to the preposterous flat-earther racists who deny that the Nazi state mass murdered anyone.
“since one must make a conscious effort to recollect the camps in order to avoid feeling any empathy with these monsters.”
Reflecting on my recent memory of this film I find it difficult to see how anyone could feel empathy for the characters. It was directed in such a way that there was very little character introduction or development, perhaps because audience familiarity with them from WW2 histories and biographies was assumed by the filmmakers. The film was shot more as a ‘view from an outside window’ onto the events unfolding in the bunker during Hitler’s last twelve days, which, with the lack of strong character focus, made the loyalty of Eva Braun, Goebbels etc seem all the more alien and disturbing to me – the thinking and twisted motives of these people are rather left to the viewer’s imagination. The thing that really struck me again and again was less the motivating Prussian values and more the sickening question as to whether and how far Hitler’s servants were knowingly lying to themselves in order to follow their oath of loyalty; how much evil (murdering their own children etc) they could knowingly swallow.
So for my twopenny worth, it was an impressive film – also apparently for the accuracy of historical details. Recommended.
Downfall was absolutely brilliant. The human aspects to the characters are played very well, and show the contrast between the private and public behaviour of the figures. It doesn’t do any good for the future to mindlessly demonise figures in an unrealistic manner. The film is incredibly, and justifiably, hard on the Nazis and no-one in their right mind would come away from it thinking that Nazism was a good thing. A very powerful piece of cinema.
The evil of the Nazis is not somehow enhanced by denying that they were human, and in person could not possibly have been entirely malign all of the time. Hitler was, after all, a politician. Also, it would be foolish and misleading to think that committed Nazis did not have certain virtues, which they placed in the service of an evil cause — courage and toughness and loyalty to their cause, for example.
I had a post on this film, which provoked a lengthy and interesting exchange in the comments. It may be of interest.
Courage? Toughness? ha bloody ha. My father once recounted a story of a squad of Waffen SS troops begging for their lives on their knees and pissing themselves after opening fire on troops under a flag of surrender – not surprisingly there weren’t many tears shed for them after their summary execution. Save your concept of “virtues” for the millions massacred by those scum, not for their deranged leader and his subordinates.
oldjacktar: “So what if Lanzmann is a wierdo? His strangeness is small beer compared to the preposterous flat-earther racists who deny that the Nazi state mass murdered anyone.”
Only Lanzmann exists, and your straw men do not.
Julian, have a cool drink, please. Do you really think that a cowardly army could have done as much damage as it did? Overran Europe? Fought tooth and nail for so long? We don’t have to like these people to recognize what they did. We will not learn anything from history if we omit facts.
I don’t think you are breaking any new ground in expressing vehement moral disapproval of the Nazis. A show of hands would show near universal concurrence.
The more interesting question is: How in blazes did this happen?
Saying that the German army did not have many brave and skillful people in it is like saying the 9/11 hijackers were “cowardly terrorists”. Dangerously wrong, because if we do not understand our enemies as they actually were and actually are, we are not capable of fighting effectively against our current and future enemies. Our enemies were and are serious and dangerous because they, all too often, are not cowards or fools, however evil their motives and methods and aims.
As to people pissing their pants when fired on, that is a physiological reaction which has nothing to do with courage or lack of it. See, e.g. On Combat by Dave Grossman. His finding is that about half of people exposed to intense combat piss their pants. It is a deeply wired response, to lighten the load for fight or flight. I’ve never been fired on, have you? If so, did you lose bladder control?
Effra: is David Irving a figment of Old Jack Tar’s imagination? There are a multitude of holocaust denial sites on the net which demonstrate the reality.
It has been brought to my attention that ‘Effra’ has been previously banned from here (he just changed his name) as he is an obsessive racist ideologue who wore out his welcome previously by turning every discussion onto endless rants about ‘racial intelligence’.
The proplem with fearing the “humanization” of the Nazis is that they were, in fact, human. They did not drop down from a UFO into our midst. What I found horribly human in the film was the ability of the Nazis to to doublethink. They knew pefectly well that they were doomed, yet they went right up to the end acting as if there was some way out. There are scenes where generals accuse each other of trying to further their career, while the Russians are literally in the next street.
If there is a lesson we should take from WWII it isn’t that there are huge monsters waiting to tear us apart. The lesson is that a lot of very ordinary people tore themselves apart. Hitler never laid a hand on anybody. He convinced the Germans to do it for him; without their help he would have remained a pathetic tramp.
The competence and bravery of the Wehrmacht is not really in question, nor is their motivation. The officers especially generally despised the Nazis and the whole party, if only out of class snobbery. They fought for reasons of national pride – too bad about the skank government running the nation, but an oath was an oath and they were men of honor, the kind that honors oaths. It was a constitutional weakness that their oath was to the actual person of Hitler as the head of state.
Lumping them in with the true believers based on their objective support of the regime does the opposite of advancing any understanding of the mechanics of the situation. the mechanics of the situation are that huge numbers of formerly decent people either committed hideous things, passively abetted hideous crimes or were manipulated into supporting hideous crimes by thiier own otherwise decent actions. Since understanding dictatorships with a view to destroying them is an ongoing task, analyzing the machanics of dictatorships seems a more useful questions than the relative moral purity of the participants. There will be time for all that some day if we succeed.