Downfall


Artykuł pochodzi z pisma "Guardian"

Downfall


Hang those that talk of fear, says Macbeth in his own final act. But the sinister nincompoop Hitler, in this account of the last days in the bunker, presides over a jabbering court who talk of nothing else. Macbeth incidentally adds that he will not play the Roman fool, and die on his own sword; big-cheese Nazis have different convictions. They preserve the polite fantasy, in the Führer's presence, of the Wehrmacht's upcoming glorious counterattack against the Russian troops encircling Berlin. But alone, the Sekt-quaffing officers and sieg-heiling party officials have just one burning topic of conversation: how best to commit suicide. They are Hitler's willing self-executioners.

Oliver Hirschbiegel's film has been criticised for "humanising" Hitler. It does precisely this - and makes him seem, in consequence, far more grotesque and sulphurous than any of the dozens of picturesque newsreel documentaries on TV. It restores to him evil's banality, in Hannah Arendt's phrase, and its silliness and cheapness. Any movie which removes the great dictator from the horrors of the camps and places him in a situation which he is history's biggest loser, risks conferring, if not tragedy exactly, then the pathos of a cut-price Götterdämmerung. But Hitler has never looked more noisome, a tatty charlatan. If anything, it is the SS on whom the film goes relatively easy, although they never appear anything other than chillingly pompous.
It has not been that long since we had the last "humanising" controversy about Hitler. Menno Meyjes's 2002 film Max showed the young Adolf, played by Noah Taylor, as a sensitive young painter in the 1920s, agonising over a choice between two equivalent vocations: art or politics. That was far more daringly ambiguous. And it is odd that, given our Nazi-obsessed media, Alexandr Sokurov's film Moloch has never been released in this country: a lugubrious, dream-like re-creation of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun's relationship.
Perhaps the most uncomfortable taboo that Downfall breaks is having Hitler played with gusto by a German-speaking actor (although Bruno Ganz is actually Swiss.) In the Anglophone world there seems to be a convention, perhaps born of fastidiousness and a victor's gallantry, that Hitler is best played by a classically trained Brit. In their various ways, Alec Guinness, Derek Jacobi, Anthony Hopkins and Alec McCowen have given brilliantly mannered impersonations of the Führer.
But the guttural authenticity of Ganz frankly blows them all away. He shows that shouting and raving was where Hitler's real identity lay, even in private. There was no fascinating "real" Hitler, no charming statesman or brilliant visionary or tactician. Brooding over his toytown model Germania with Albert Speer, he is just a spoilt child.
Hitler's authentic mode of communication was shouting - shouting, in this case, at the sweating generals (and, in absentia, the German people) who had let him down. It is parody-Nuremberg. Hitler goes into his time-honoured oratorical tricks, with his lank hair flopping about, but does it slumped at a desk, and faced not with an adoring crowd, but a dozen or so officials, stupefied with undisguised embarrassment and resentment.
Hirschbiegel, who directed Das Experiment, about the disquieting prison role-play experiment that went too far, transfers to this material his talent for the intimate horror of confinement. You can almost smell the bunker's sweat and fear. Screenwriter and veteran producer Bernd Eichinger devises some very queasy moments, particularly the Goebbels's six cute blonde children, so often used in the Nazis' PR, taking tea with "Uncle Hitler" and singing German folk-ditties down in the bunker to cheer everyone up. It is a Von Trapp nightmare which, of course, concludes with their parents poisoning all six, and somehow nothing is as pathetic and contemptible as this.
Perhaps most remarkable is the scene where senior Nazi officers troop grimly through the ravaged streets bearing a gigantic white standard, on their way to an impromptu summit with the Russians, where with monumental effrontery they sue for an advantageous peace, on the grounds that the Russians and the Germans are the countries "that have suffered most".
And all of this while naturally wearing their party badges: items which I can never see without remembering the scene in Volker Schlöndorff's version of Grass's Tin Drum: the Nazi swallowing his party badge while the Russians are almost upon him, and the open pin catching in his gullet. There is something of Günter Grass in the presence of Blondi, Hitler's Alsatian dog.
Insofar as there is a moral centre to the film, it resides in the person of Hitler's young personal secretary, Traudl Junge, on whose memoir, Until the Final Hour, it is partly based, and who was recently the subject of a riveting documentary, Blind Spot. Downfall actually concludes with interview footage of the real-life Junge confessing, as an old woman, that she finally came to admit that her extreme youth was no excuse for following Hitler. It is at any rate more candid than the notoriously slimy postwar equivocations of Albert Speer. The film imagines Junge escaping Berlin in the company of a young Hitler Youth boy, seen in famous footage being "decorated" by a decrepit tyrant in his last public appearance. In this manner, Hirschbiegel and Eichinger suggest the survival of something like decency. It is a questionable survival. What the audience takes away from this long and harrowing film is the utter destruction that Germany brought on itself: defeat without honour.


ambiguous- dwuznaczny, niejasny
contemptible- godny pogardy
daringly- odważnie, śmiało
effrontery- bezczelność
equivocation- dwuznaczność
fastidiousness- wybredność, drobiazgowść
flop about- opadać bezwładnie
gusto- zapał
harrowing- kłopotliwy, męczący
impromptu- zaimprowizowany, nieprzygotowany
jabber- paplać, trajkotać
lugubrious- ponury, posępny
newsreel- kronika filmowa
nincompoop- stuknięty
noisome- agresywny
pathetic - żałosny; patetyczny
quaff- szybko pić, łapczywie połykać
queasy- mdlący
rave- wrzeszczeć, pieklić się
riveting- pasjonujący
sinister- złowieszczy, złowrogi
slump- nagle opaść, ciężko usiąść
stupefied - oszołomiony
sulphurous- siarkawy
summit- szczyt
tatty- tandetny
undisguised- nieukrywany, niemaskowany

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