Downfall

Downfall positions Hitler’s final days inside the bunker as alternately a labyrinth and a series of death traps slowly going off. Surrounding by his madness and the closest members of his Nazi party, the film focuses in on the grim specter of death that haunted Germany at the time coming back to its root. Numerous young characters can easily be seen as a generation preparing to comprehend tremendous guilt, and as innocents swept up in hysteria beyond their understanding.

By looking at only the last ten days of his reign of power, Downfall manages to remind us that evil does not exist or grow in a vacuum. Presenting Adolf Hitler as a man may sound like a squeamish prospect, how could one of the greatest monsters in all of history be presented as human? Because he was a human, in all of the mass contradictions present in that. He cracks a joke to calm his newly appointed secretary, he’s playful with a youth, and yet he rages hysterically about his impending defeat and where his rule went wrong. Yet his defeat wasn’t his fault, it was the people of Germany’s, they had turned traitor against their beloved Fuhrer in his eyes.

Is presenting Hitler as a mad man, but still as a man, an appropriate thing to do? I believe so, if only to remind us that this kind of thinking is not some mythological creation, it is born from a reality. And what Downfall excels at is exploring the various characters differing levels of mind-control. To view the film is to watch people swept up in the hysterics and mania of dangerous political ideology, and to witness how far down that hole some of them had fallen.

Perhaps none of them had fallen as hard as Joseph Goebbels and his wife, who with robotic indifference and steely reserve force their six children to swallow suicide pills before killing themselves. It’s a disturbing scene for several reasons, one of which is fever of which they believed in their cause, and fear of reprisal from the enemy that they would slaughter their own children with such quick and calculating efficiency. Goebbels, like Hitler, is seen as a twisted man, one still believing that their cause is not entirely lost until after Hitler’s committed suicide and the Allies are tramping down the dirt over their heads.

Downfall follows the ins and outs of life in the bunker, and it is scattershot as such. Some characters get sufficient development, while others are briefly glimpsed throughout, and they can be hard to keep track off. A roll-call of what happened to the various survivors of life in the bunker closes out their stories, but it’s hard to remember how big or important a role they had played previously. This does hamper the film a bit, but does not weaken it.

These people were under the spell of a mad man, who seethed with rage-filled fits, laid blame upon everyone else, and continued to fight the war despite no longer having an army or the resources to do so. Hitler was smart enough to align himself with great propagandists and military minds, but his racism, xenophobia, nationalism, and grand-standing are not original within him. Downfall presents a glimpse into the final days of Hitler’s life and the Third Reich, but it could just as easily be a mirror holding up and reflecting back the worst impulses within our society. After all, it’s not like any of those traits have vanished in the years since.