Last night WotN and I went to see Downfall. It's a very powerful movie, with an outstanding central performance by Bruno Ganz as Hitler. The counterpoint between the increasingly bizarre inner world of the bunker and the destruction overhead keeps the film intensely interesting throughout some two and a half hours, and the contrast between the fluctuating state of mind of the main protagonist and what is happening around (and above) him, including the responses of his generals, his advisers, his intimates, provides a remarkable portrait of personal power in a state of dissolution.
Last September I wrote this post - about whether it would be wrong for a movie like Downfall to 'humanize' Hitler. I argued that there is an appropriate and indeed necessary way of humanizing him, since human is what he was, and that this only risks going wrong if humanizing him should cross over into apologia. Having watched the film, I cannot understand how anyone not already blinded by some sort of Hitler-worship could see the movie as an apologia for the man. It is the very opposite. Downfall shows Hitler as a human being, to be sure, but as repugnant and monstrous, for all that he loved his dog and could sometimes be considerate and affectionate.
I would also go along with the favourable judgements of Ian Kershaw and William Boyd, as against those of Stephen Moss, David Cesarani and Peter Longerich, on the wider issue of whether Downfall is too kind in its portrayal of some of the figures around Hitler and, more generally, of the German people. Cesarani and Longerich argue that the movie has omitted certain key facts: for example, presenting Hitler's young secretary, Traudl Junge, as an innocent when she had a 'background... saturated in Nazism'. They themselves, however, neglect to point out that there is an epilogue - involving the real Traudl Junge - the political meaning of which, for those listening and/or reading carefully, is the very opposite of apologia.
It isn't possible, finally, to present any 'inner world' of lived relations - whether Hitler's bunker, or Berlin in a state of military and social collapse - without some of the human facts and relations there appearing as... human facts and relations, and therefore with aspects capable of engaging some human sympathies. To do it any other way wouldn't be credible and it wouldn't be true. But this is not the same thing as letting those who are guilty off the hook. It all depends on the balance. I cannot myself see how the makers of this movie can be fairly convicted of having tilted the balance in the direction of offering excuses. On the contrary, they have shown what kind of a man it was (with what kind of beliefs) that a nation more or less consented to follow, and the attitudes towards his person both of the circle around him and of millions of Germans.