Downfall

[poliphilo]

I watched part of the new German movie about the death of Hitler last night. It taught me that Hitler was a very bad man and more than a little bonkers in the nut. An hour and a half passed and he still hadn't chowed down on the cyanide capsule so I did some research and discovered there was another hour and a half to go. Good grief. I was feeling so tired it hurt (though this wasn't Hitler's fault) so I switched off and went to bed.

It's been said this film shows the Germans finally coming to terms with the Adolf Hitler experience. O, no it doesn't. What it does is load everything onto Hitler. He's this apelike loony, shambling around, twitching uncontrollably, throwing tantrums and tossing his sweaty locks, while all the other nazis- big or little- exchange embarrassed looks behind his back and react to events in ways that are variously courageous, noble, compassionate, sensible, stoical or- at worst- tragically misguided. Himmler is politically savvy, Goebbels is admirably loyal and as for Speer- well, Speer is a hero. So the moral of the story is we Germans are a thoroughly decent lot and the Third Reich was all down to one gibbering troll who somehow, unaccountably became our leader.

Please Miss, it wasn't me; it was him!

Comments

[ex-kharin447.livejournal.com]

Hmm. My understanding is that the film is somewhat misleading on this score:

http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,4120,1453984,00.html

"In fact they have reworked the evidence and omitted crucial information. Traudl Junge appears in the film's opening scene in 1942 as a fresh-faced and apolitical 22-year-old who is engaged by Hitler because she comes from his beloved Munich. The audience never learns that her background was saturated in Nazism.

Her father was a fanatical nationalist who fought in the rightwing Freikorps in the early 1920s. For participating in Hitler's abortive putsch in 1923 he earned the Nazi "Blood Order" medal. Although he was estranged from Traudl for many years, they were reunited in 1936, by which time he was security director in an armaments factory and held SS officer rank.

Traudl herself enrolled in the Nazi League of German Girls in 1935, and in 1938 joined the elite Faith and Beauty organisation. Its mission was "to bring young women up to pass on the National Socialist philosophy of life". She was an activist in other Nazi organisations too. Although she did not formally join the Nazi party until 1944, by the time she started working for Hitler she had impeccable ideological and political credentials.

Perhaps to maintain her image as a virginal witness, the film passes over her 1943 marriage to Hans Junge, who joined the SS-Leibstandarte, Hitler's personal guard, in 1933, and served as Hitler's orderly for three years. He was killed fighting with the Waffen-SS in Normandy in 1944. So when her eyes widen while Hitler rants about "international Jewry" it can hardly be out of surprise at his lethal rhetoric. Her reaction is as unlikely as the sight of Albert Speer, in another scene, shifting uncomfortably when Hitler congratulates himself on having cleansed Germany of the "Jewish poison". "

[sorenr.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm not claiming that Traudl Junge was as naive as the film portrayed her to be. I knew she had impeccable Nazional-Socialistischer credentials (my instinct tells me that most people had in the Führer bunker, but I might be mistaken. Merely guesswork on my part.) and that no doubt she was brought up with the rabid anti-semitism of the Third Reich, so I'm in no way claiming her as a saint, nor saying that the film is a subjective representation of her life during those days. What endears her to me is one sentence she once said in an interview, and whether honest, faked, repressed or whatever it was, it was a very real sort of representation of the German guilt. I've tried googling for it, but can't find it anywhere, I'm affraid. And I must say, googling her is not exactly bringing out anything else that might count in her favour as a lot of it seems to be centred around a personal (not even a national) claim to ignorance and innocense.