A history lesson masquerading as a book & film review

[bironic]

It's too big a subject for tonight, but here goes anyway.

Having got 300 pages into the excellent The Berlin Bunker by James O'Donnell -- through the Hitler double-suicide and just past the Goebbels debacle -- it was finally time to try "Downfall" ("Der Untergang," 2004), the recent German film version of the final days in Berlin. Overall it was very good. I'm glad I read as much of the book as I did before watching it, as it made the constant parade of officers and shifting alliances mostly comprehensible and gave me some understanding of things that weren't explained like Hitler's mood swings and Speer's odd, fond gaze at the Chancellery; on the other hand, like with any adaptation, it also meant there were points on which I disagreed. The movie was based on a different book from the one I'm reading as well as the memoirs of one of Hitler's personal secretaries (Gertrude "Traudl" Jung, who appeared in archive footage at the beginning and end of the film), and of course there are multiple accounts of events that have been floating around over the years, so I'm not sure which of the differences from O'Donnell's version were artistic license and which were faithful representations of what must have simply been other perspectives. I suspect O'Donnell's version is more accurate for a number of reasons. Take two examples:

- He debunked the myth that "a single shot" was heard when Hitler killed himself, since the door to his private quarters was soundproof -- to his surprise, O'Donnell found his sources saying the tension was terrible because there had been no sound, and he even got the men who'd claimed they heard the pistol go off to confess that they'd been lying -- but in the movie the shot rang out so clearly that people heard it as far away as the next floor.

- In the movie, Fegelein* (Eva Braun's brother-in-law and liaison between Hitler and the just-turned-traitor Himmler) was arrested drunk and high at an orgy and summarily executed for desertion, but in his careful reconstruction of events O'Donnell found that contrary to what most of the Bunker inhabitants thought, Fegelein had almost certainly been taken without arrest (the officers sent twice to fetch him didn't rank high enough to do it) in his apartment and eventually executed for leaking secrets to a woman the admittedly paranoid government suspected was a British informant, and that was only after he was passed among three groups of increasing rank and a court-martial was held that had to be aborted because Fegelein was too drunk for a fair defense. I think they cut an interrogation scene; in the DVD feature there was footage of Fegelein appropriately sloshed, scratching himself in a chair and throwing a cigarette in an officer's face.

*Played by our friend Thomas Kretschmann. And you thought I was kidding when I said one new interest leads to many more.

Factual quibbles aside, the acting was phenomenal, as was the casting. I don't know how they found people to portray these historical figures so well and look like them too, but Bruno Ganz was the spitting image of Hitler (from an angel to der Fuhrer, how hard they fall), and the men they got to play Goebbels and Himmler were eerily right as well. Doppelgangers, to borrow the Germans' own word for it. I loved the man they chose to play Albert Speer, too, who I think is the most enigmatic figure in the war: he (the actor) had a kind face, which was really a very good way to invite sympathy for the man when he was given so little screen time, and the tidbits in the film showcased his quiet, sweet disposition, intelligence, dedication to his art, and seemingly admirable moral grounding, which, as with the actual man, contrast with facts like how he ran thousands of slave laborers to their deaths so Germany could keep production up even in the face of certain defeat. I really want to read his memoirs now, they're just so thick...

There was something else I wanted to bring up specifically, but it's slipped my mind. There were interviews and an hour-long making-of feature on the DVD in which the actors and actresses discussed the difficulties of accepting their roles, getting into their "characters"' heads and portraying as human ("menschen") people who have been reduced to monsters or religious and political fanatics over the years, as well as their perceived responsibilities in making a film like this. Very interesting stuff.

Oh yes -- it was a line from the book. There are several passages here and there that stand out, sometimes because of a turn of phrase or a joke that reminds you that these were actual people with senses of humor and brains, but one especially in the beginning that I wanted to type here for you.

"...he stood up and kissed Eva Braun on the lips. 'It was the first and only time we ever saw him do that,' [one secretary] remembers. 'EB was radiant. Hitler's eyes were moist and weepy.' The silent valet, Corporal Schweibel, poured tea. Hitler passed the crumpets. There was no more talk of suicide."

Hitler passed the crumpets.

Just a man, having tea. It's so ... absurd. I don't know what else to say. It's far past time for bed.

Comments

[catilinarian.livejournal.com]

It's a little strange commenting on this from Konstanz University in Germany, or perhaps it only seems strange because the "z" and the "y" are in different places on the keyboard and the LJ page is asking if I want to "einloggen", and not for any deeper metaphysical reason. :)

I thought "Downfall" was fantastic as well when I saw it with the European Society (except, of course, for the fact that the projector kept overheating and shutting down partway through). It's so difficult for a film with THAT MUCH death - and deaths that so lend themselves to being poeticised, like the Hitler youth soldiers shooting each other rather than letting themselves be captured by the Russians - to keep from overdoing either the emotion or the darkness to the point where it doesn't penetrate anymore, and yet it managed to stay affecting until the end. The last letters written by the various inhabitants of the bunker, including Eva's strangely cheerful letter to her sister, particularly got to me.

I did recognise the discrepency with the gunshot from a documentary I was watching some time ago, but I didn't know that about Fegelein's arrest - interesting! And, on a related note... so THAT'S Thomas Kretschmann. Mmmmmmmm!

I'm with you on that quote about the tea. "Hitler passed the crumpets," sounds like it should be a line from some absurdist alternative rock song, not an actual event.

[bironic.livejournal.com]

So you saw it! *sheepishly* I thought this post would bore everybody.

It's so difficult for a film with THAT MUCH death - and deaths that so lend themselves to being poeticised ... - to keep from overdoing either the emotion or the darkness to the point where it doesn't penetrate anymore

Yes, it is. But Germany is struggling so hard to come to terms with what they did, and what was done to them, and what they let happen, that the weight of responsibility and the proximity of the subject material in making a film about the war must make it very difficult to romanticize anything. The actor who played Prof./Dr. Schenck, as just one example, said that like Schenck his father had been a doctor imprisoned by the Soviets, and almost all of his mother's family had been killed in the camps.

And speaking of "THAT MUCH death," it was actually kind of strange, because people were committing suicide and being executed left and right, yet I thought the film didn't manage to capture exactly the spiralling madness, detachment from reality, paranoia, sexual frenzy, skewed logic and psychological casebooks' worth of reactions to stress and certain death that I have gotten from the book, which I might add takes a matter-of-fact tone and backs everything up with quotes (even and especially noting contradictory ones). Maybe it's difficult to convey something like that in film without crossing the line into melodrama?

I did recognise the discrepency with the gunshot from a documentary I was watching some time ago, but I didn't know that about Fegelein's arrest - interesting!

O'Donnell devoted an entire chapter to 'das Leck,' the months-long security leak that allowed Bunker secrets to air on international radio to the point that Hitler apparently once joked whether they could get orders to their troops before they heard about it on the BBC. It seems O'Donnell was the first to come up with the Fegelein-as-suspect theory instead of (or rather compounded with) the Fegelein-as-defector theory, pieced together from accounts of who in the Bunker saw Fegelein where and when and escorted by whom. He showed his completed chapter to Speer (whom he interviewed 17 times), who said it was the most plausible theory he'd yet seen and that people's conflicting accounts now made sense.

And, on a related note... so THAT'S Thomas Kretschmann. Mmmmmmmm!

LOL, yes. He's quite cornered the market on Nazis ("The Pianist," "Stalingrad," "Head in the Clouds" [watched Friday night and didn't post about it: see, I do have some restraint], "U-571," "Downfall") and has said both that he's tired of playing them and that he understands the necessity of doing so as a German confronting Germany's past. In the DVD interview he said Fegelein was an asshole, but a charming asshole, and then murmured, "type-casting" in English. *snicker* He was sort of yummy in this one, wasn't he? with both the slicked-back officer look and the disheveled one that was more like "Immortal." I think this was the last of his films that I wanted to see now.

It is strange that you & Margaret are both traipsing about Germany while I'm in the midst of all this; and a friend of mine from middle school also recently spent a few weeks there (he was studying there for a year while we were in London). Will you be visiting Berlin?

[catilinarian.livejournal.com]

An afterthought, dearest B.:

While I was watching a swing-dancing exhibition tonight, I remembered that during one of the last, desperately madcap parties in the bunker in "Downfall", Eva asks for a swing record to be put on and starts dancing on the table. Granted, I get a lot of my history on this from "Swing Kids", but I remember swing being very, very verboten in Nazi Germany. I was wondering, does it happen the same way in the book, and do they offer any commentary on her choice of music? Or am I over-thinking this, considering that everyone at the party was probably a) soused and b) certain they were going to die?

[bironic.livejournal.com]

As a matter of fact, one of the witnesses in the Bunker book explicitly mentioned that, contrary to popular opinion, swing was never expressly forbidden in Berlin during the reign of the Third Reich. He says this while relating an anecdote not about Eva Braun but about how "they" put on a swing record -- no, it was a radio station broadcasting swing music, I think -- in the final days down there. I remembered "Swing Kids" then, too.