Downfall falls down

by Junius

A few years ago I was in Germany and experienced a touch of authentic Nazism. It was a summer barbecue and two men in their late sixties (one of them of wide repute in his field) were getting thoroughly tipsy and eyeing me. The one with the reputation began it, saying (in German), “He’s got a Jewish nose,” and giggling. The other, who was actually wearing Lederhosen, joined in the giggling and said, “If there’s anything an Englishman hates it’s for people to think he has a Jewish nose.”

I was told they had been in the Hitler Youth together and always became loose-tongued in this way when they were drunk. They hated Germany’s losing the war. Among the elite of the youth movement, they had been promised privileges beyond belief and estates in the Ukraine. In their giggling remarks they were apparently trying to recapture the comradely feeling of those heady times.

The director of the film Downfall is not of that generation but he must have inherited something of the same spirit. He seems unable to tell the story of Hitler’s last days in the Berlin bunker without a glow of pride that Germany could produce such a leader and such loyal followers.

Stay away from this film. Neo-nazis will love it; others should boycott it. Do you want to see Frau Goebbels poison her six sleeping children one by one? She can’t stand the thought of their growing up in a Germany without National Socialism. An extreme form of devotion, but the film doesn’t allow you to see it as anything but noble. The same with Hitler’s suicide: noble. Of course, one knows better and can resist the film, but why put oneself through that experience? No point.

Instead, for scenes of contemporary Berlin and a modern approach to Nazism, go to Walk on Water. No, you don’t have to really, for it is a light-weight manipulation of themes. But it doesn’t hurt to see an Israeli assassin end up marrying the granddaughter of a Nazi war criminal. It doesn’t hurt to see a totally affable brother do his gay stuff and then, in all symbolic seriousness, turn off his grandfather’s oxygen machine. The feeling at the end of this film is that the old history can’t get to us anymore with its destructiveness, that we can have the life we want, and that the wants are not harmful.

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