Paul Cooke Der Untergang (2004): Victims, Perpetrators and The

Paul Cooke Der Untergang (2004): Victims, Perpetrators and the Continuing Fascination of Fascism This chapter examines the controversy surrounding Hirschbiegel and Eichinger’s 2004 film about the last days of Hitler. It suggests that the image of the war and the National Socialist regime it presents is highly reminiscent of films from the immediate post-war period, a time when the representation of the Germans as ‘victims’ was commonplace. At the same time the film tries to accommodate the agenda of the New German Cinema, which looked to hold the nation accountable for its complicity with Hitler. Finally, I suggest that a key intention behind the film would seem not to be to engage with debates about whether Germans were ‘victims’ or ‘perpetrators’, but to present an image of the past that can capitalise the ‘authenticity’ offered by its German-speaking cast. Introduction In recent years German cinema has provoked a level of international interest it has rarely achieved in the post-war period. For example, if one takes the Oscars as a measure of international success, since unification German films have been nominated six times in the category of ‘Best Foreign Language Film’. This compares with nine nominations for German films in the previous forty years.1 Initially, the current success of German films abroad seemed to coincide with a shift in the interests of filmmakers. Key figures in the New German Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s – the last time that German film had made an impact on the international cinematic scene – including Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge and Wim Wenders, had attempted to provoke German society with their challenging works, intent upon forcing the older generation to face up to the legacy of National Socialism. For those filmmakers responsible for this new interest in German cinema, at first it appeared that the National Socialist period was losing its relevance, with films such as Tom Tykwer’s hugely successful Lola rennt (1998) owing more to MTV and computer game culture than any specifically German historical legacy.2 However, a brief glance at the list of Oscar nominations, from Michael Verhoeven’s Das Schreckliche Mädchen (1990) to Caroline Link’s winning entry Nirgendwo in Afrika (2001) as well as the most recent nomination, Marc Rothemund’s Sophie Scholl – Die letzten Tage (2005), makes it clear that an examination of the Nazi period 248 Paul Cooke _________________________________________________________ remains the best way for a German film to gain international recognition.3 Yet although such films continue Germany’s cinematic engagement with the legacy of National Socialism, the manner of this engagement has clearly shifted, both in terms of aesthetics and political point of view. As Eric Rentschler puts it, while the likes of Wenders and Fassbinder produced avant-garde film texts that ‘interrogated images of the past in the hope of refining memories and catalysing changes’, many recent mainstream films can best be described as a form of ‘cinema of consensus’ that lacks ‘oppositional energies and critical voices’, intent solely on achieving box-office success.4 As the present volume shows, this move towards a ‘cinema of consensus’ coincides with a time when we are witnessing a general cultural shift in the way Germany is exploring National Socialism and the legacy of the War. This has allowed for a, frequently highly controversial, engagement with the question of German wartime suffering, and the extent to which Germans might be seen as victims of, rather than accepting responsibility for, the events of history. As I shall discuss in this article, this has been particularly evident in recent German cinema, not least in the 2004 film Der Untergang, directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, co-written and produced by Bernd Eichinger – the head of Constantin Film, Germany’s biggest film company. In terms of box office, Der Untergang is to date the most successful of the new wave of internationally acclaimed films, grossing $92 million worldwide on its initial release and nominated for an Oscar in 2005.5 Based on Joachim Fest’s book of the same name, as well as on the memoirs of Traudl Junge, Hitler’s private secretary (made into a documentary film in 2002),6 Der Untergang gives a detailed account of the last days of Adolf Hitler, played by Bruno Ganz, a veteran of the New German Cinema. The film is told predominantly from the point of view of Junge (Alexandra Maria Lara), showing the spectator her experience of life in the Führerbunker as Berlin suffers the onslaught of, and finally capitulates to, the Red Army. Presenting the spectator with many of the stock images of Hitler’s final days, we see the growing hysteria of his inner circle as their leader refuses to accept the reality of the situation the nation is facing until his final suicide, which is then followed by a wave of deaths, perhaps the most disturbing (and well known) being those of Goebbels’s children, who are murdered by a mother that cannot imagine a world without .

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