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19/08/2010 Downfall: Almost the Same Old Story 19/08/2010 Downfall: Almost the Same Old Story Downfall Almost the Same Old Story Klaus Neumann For a long time, Joachim C. Fest, a journalist and high-profile German historian of the Third Reich, has been fascinated by the historical figure of Adolf Hitler. One of his books on Hitler informs a two-and-a-half hour film. It attracts large audiences in Germany, but is controversial. The filmmaker Wim Wenders is one of its staunchest critics and publishes an article in the weekly Die Zeit, in which he says that he never before wrote about a film out of anger. The media’s and the German public’s obsession with Hitler in the wake of the film is referred to as Hitlerwelle, the ‘Hitler fad’. Does this sound familiar? It almost describes a situation in 2004, when the film Downfall (Der Untergang) was released in Germany. Almost but not quite: the Hitlerwelle engulfed (West) Germany in 1977. The Hitler film that upset Wim Wenders in 1977 was Joachim Fest and Christian Herrendoerfer’s Hitler: A Career (Hitler, eine 1. Wenders’ damning review of Hitler, Karriere eine Karriere was published in Die ). Wenders was as upset in 2004, and wrote an article about Zeit, 5 August 1977; an English Downfall, which also appeared in Die Zeit. While the 1977 film was translation appears in Wenders (trans. an overlong documentary, the 2004 film (starring Bruno Ganz as S. Whiteside & Michael Hofmann), Hitler) is an overlong melodrama. Fest wrote the book that informed Emotion Pictures: Reflections on the Cinema (London: Faber and Faber, Downfall but, unlike in 1977, he did not write the script. (1) 1989). Wenders’ damning review of Der Untergang appeared in Die Zeit, In most Australian reviews of Downfall – from those by ABC 21 October 2004. Fest and television’s David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz to The Herrendoerfer’s Hitler, eine Karriere was informed by Fest’s monumental Australian’s Evan Williams – were effusive in their praise. Hitler biography (trans. R. & C. Audiences could be excused for assuming that the film marks an Winston), Hitler (New York: Harcourt entirely new approach to the Nazi past in Germany. It does not. Brace Jovanovich, 1974); Downfall Downfall was informed by Fest (trans. M. Like the 1977 documentary, is the product of Joachim Bettauer Dembo), Inside Hitler’s Fest’s obsessive fascination with Hitler. It is not the first film Bunker: The Last Days of the Third about the final days in the bunker, it is not the first feature Reich (New York: Farrar, Strauss and film focusing on Hitler, and it is not the first film about the Giroux, 2004). Nazi past that has attracted large audiences in Germany. Like much of Fest’s earlier writings, his book about the last days in the bunker is informed by the self-serving memoirs of the convicted war criminal and efficient organiser of Germany’s war machine, Albert Speer. Speer has loomed large in Fest’s career as a historian. It was Fest who helped Speer write his memoirs (which were first published in 1969). It was Fest who wrote a supposedly definitive (and kind) biography of Speer. It was Fest who helped Speer to reinvent himself as Hitler’s former architect who repented and atoned for his sins, and to make his contemporaries forget that he was one of Hitler’s most prominent and most faithful henchmen. Not surprisingly, Downfall depicts Speer (Heino Ferch) in a favourable light. In the film, Speer tells the Führer that he has disobeyed the order to destroy Germany’s infrastructure ahead of the country’s occupation by Allied forces. As Speer’s is the only account of this conversation, most historians would probably have been reluctant to take his version at face value. Not so Fest and 2. Albert Speer (trans. R. & C. the makers of Downfall. The film even tries to make us believe that Winston), Inside the Third Reich: Speer disapproved of Hitler’s anti-Semitism. (2) Memoirs (New York: Macmillan, 1970); Joachim C. Fest (trans. E. Osers & A. Dring), Speer: The Final Speer is not the only prominent Nazi who cuts a fine figure in Verdict (London: Weidenfeld & Downfall. The film is also remarkably kind in its depiction of some Nicolson, 2001). high-ranking Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS officers, most notably the SS doctor Ernst Günther Schenck (Christian Berkel). In a review in The Guardian, Holocaust historians David Cesarani and Peter Longerich pointed out that Schenck, Downfall’s honourable professor-cum- general, was not reinstated to his chair at Munich University ‘because he was implicated in the conduct of "frivolous" medical 3. David Cesarani and Peter experiments on inmates in Mauthausen concentration camp’. But, like Longerich, ‘The Massaging of Speer, Schenck was a prolific author who after 1945 successfully History’ The Guardian (7 April 2005) www.rouge.com.au/6/downfall.html 1/4 19/08/2010 Downfall: Almost the Same Old Story History , The Guardian (7 April 2005). Ernst Günther Schenck wrote several rewrote his own role in Nazi Germany. (3) books about the war; his favourable depiction in Downfall seems to have Like numerous other German books and films (including, for example, been partly based on his Das Helmut Käutner’s 1954 movie The Devil’s General, in which Curt Notlazarett unter der Reichskanzlei (Neuried: Ars Una, 1995). Jürgens plays the legendary World War I fighter pilot Ernst Udet), Downfall contrasts despicable Nazis with honourable Wehrmacht officers. Downfall reminded me of the history I learned in a West German high school more than thirty years ago: that the Wehrmacht was used by Hitler, and that Germany’s honour was saved on 20 July 1944, when Wehrmacht officers tried to assassinate him. Fest has been an influential public figure in Germany, both as the long-time editor of the conservative broadsheet Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and as a historian. In the so-called Historikerstreit (history wars) of the 1980s, he intervened on the side of the revisionists who called for the historicisation of the Nazi past. His book about Hitler’s last days in the bunker (and the film based on it) could be seen as another intervention: in the debate about the responsibility (and culpability) of the Wehrmacht, which was sparked by the so-called Wehrmachtsausstellung, an exhibition concerning the crimes committed by German soldiers in the course of the war against the Soviet Union, which toured 4. Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann thirty-three German and Austrian cities in the second half of the (eds.), War of Extermination: The 1990s. (4) German Military in World War II, 1941–1944 (New York: Berghahn At the end of Downfall two central characters, Hitler’s private Books, 2000). secretary Traudl Junge (Alexandra Maria Lara) and the young Hitler youth Peter (Donevan Gunia) ride (on a bicycle) into the sunset. They are, the film suggests, innocent; with Germany and the Nazi regime in tatters, they are ready to build a new Germany. This, too, is not a novel view of history, but one that had much currency in both postwar Germanys, where the downfall of the Hitler regime was equated with a Stunde Null, a new and unencumbered beginning, and where it was assumed that the vast majority of Germans were at worst responsible for having been gullible and for having let themselves be seduced by ‘the Nazis’. In one respect, however, Downfall is indeed new. It emphasises German victimhood, and thereby follows a significant trend in the post-reunification Berlin Republic. Admittedly, Germans’ propensity to identify as victims is in itself not new: when visiting Germany in the late ‘40s, Hannah Arendt had already noted that Germans preferred to bemoan their own misery rather than empathise with their victims. (5) But, until the early ‘90s, the preoccupation 5. Hannah Arendt, ‘The Aftermath of Nazi Rule: Report from Germany’, with German victimhood was merely a strong undercurrent, lacking Commentary, Vol. 10 No. 4 (1950), respectability. Germans had a first inkling that the pp. 342–53. memorialisation of German victims, and equations that accounted for German victims and victims of Nazi Germany on the same balance sheet, were becoming respectable, immediately after reunification. Then the Kohl government rededicated the Neue Wache memorial in East Berlin – formerly a memorial against fascism and war – to honour all those killed during and as a result of World War II, including Jews, Sinti and Roma, German civilians and soldiers, German expellees, and German postwar victims of Stalinism. Some ten years later, the historian Jörg Friedrich published a widely 6. Jörg Friedrich, Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940– celebrated account of the bombing of German cities. The book’s 1945 (Berlin: Propyläen, 2002); for reception proved that a patriotic focus on German victims had by the ensuing controversy see, for now become socially acceptable. (6) example, Lothar Kettenacker (ed.), Ein Volk von Opfern? Die neue Debatte um den Bombenkrieg 1940– In an interview about Downfall, Fest claimed that ‘Hitler wanted to 45 (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2003). exterminate primarily two peoples: the Jews, and then in the end also the Germans’. (7) The film is informed by this ludicrous 7. Interview with Joachim Fest, circa assumption, which refers to the systematic murder of six million 2004, www.der-untergang.de Jews and to Hitler’s scorched earth policy at the end of the war as if they were compatible phenomena (and which, incidentally, does not mention the genocide of Roma and Sinti). Downfall subtly implies a symmetry between German victims and the victims of Nazi Germany. All this is not to say that Downfall is deficient because it does not thematise the Holocaust.
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