Review: Downfall (Der Untergang) (2004)

“Is this prestigious murder and suicide our only option?”

  WHAT A RISE, WHAT A FALL. The movie, which has criticized as “too sympathetic,” is not around Hitler, it is about Hitler. This piece of history directly comes out of the Führer bunker. “Downfall” covers the last ten days of Adolf Hitler and his inner circle, and since it has based on the first-hand experience of Traudl Junge, the last personal secretary of him, the movie becomes more spine-chilling. It has based on her memoir, “Until the Final Hour.” Here she has covered and which has spotlessly depicted in the film that how Hitler became delusional and disheartened. The movie has shown the courage to represent the closest version of Führer, as it feels like ‘Hitler would be just like this.’

The movie begins with an interview of an old Traudl Junge in her last days who wishes to stop to her younger self of 1942 who is not ready to listen to anyone and chooses to become secretory of among the most dominant persons on earth. Not just with painstaking historical accuracy, but the movie also impresses us with the depiction of devastated Berlin by constant bombing and helpless civilians getting crushed between unattained government and Soviet invaders. 

Before, all I knew that people wanted to kill him; I was astounded to see blind devotion toward him by people. Under some charismatic personality spell, they wanted to die with him and were following his orders even after his death. In the most miserable scene, Frau Goebbels, who did not want her six children to live in a world without “National Socialism,” she and her husband joseph first dosed them some potion to drink, to make them unconscious. When a daughter refused to take it, they forced her to drink. Then the mother herself crushing cyanide capsule between their teeth, killed them one by one. This bloodless scene can chill bones. After that, Joseph shot Frau and then himself. Such mindless devotion has stupefied me during the whole movie.

 This movie can fall into the category of character study, thanks to Bruno Ganz, who gave powerful performance about an equally powerful person. My easily favorite Hitler on the screen so far. With tyrant’s rants and raves, reckless commands, imaginary armies, love for dogs and children, but no sympathy for helpless civilians, the movie has portrayed the comprehensive image of him, sometimes as human other times as Satan. Sometimes he is like a grandfather and supports people around him and sometimes let them die just because he doesn’t think they deserve to live. 

The 20th century’s most vindictive and significant person, who had the whole world almost in his hand but lost control over the country and his conscious, and died like a rat in the small bunker, reminds me a line...

“अब तो उतनी भी मयस्सर नहीं मयख़ाने में,

जितनी हम छोड़ दिया करते थे पैमाने में.”

What happens when the center falls apart? Ask the people of Berlin, Rome, and Troy.