Der Untergang (Germany, 2004)

“Do we still today have to feel guilty?” This is the question plastered over a picture of Auschwitz on the front cover of Stern magazine. To an outsider it may sound absurd—Americans continue to discuss the collective guilt of slavery 140 years after it was abolished. To a Jew it may sound frightening. But for Martin Walser the answer is no: “Germans have repented enough,” and, hence, a new artistic genre was born: victim flicks. The defining element of this genre is the absence of perpetrators. Watching a victim flick, one has the impression that World War II (and tangentially the Holocaust) was an unavoidable hurricane drummed up from humanity’s unconscious; and woe to the chap who stepped out of his flat and caught sight of that thunderhead floating over the horizon in 1933.

The film Der Untergang could be seen as an ode to that chap; let’s call him “Herr Schmidt.” It’s as if someone wants to say: “I’m sorry.” Because how could the good Herr Schmidt ever imagine his leader was a dog-loving misanthrope who suffered from palsy. All Herr Schmidt wanted was to keep his garden tidy, but he ended up witnessing the destruction of his world. Who destroyed it? The Allies. Whose fault was it? That fanatic in the bunker. Does this sound a bit simplistic? Well, in any case, it was the message projected onto screens across Germany this fall. And if this film garners blockbuster attendance, is it the fault of Herr Schmidt?

Herr Schmidt has a “cousin”: her name is Traudl Junge. Until recently she lived a quiet life in a suburb of Munich. In 2002, she passed away at the age of 81. Ms. Junge had a rich life, historically speaking; she was none other than Adolf Hitler’s secretary (who at the time of meeting the Führer was a 22-year-old virgin with the maiden name “Humps”). Moreover, she was in the bunker right to the bitter end. Certain readers may be wondering what this woman was doing in Munich in 2002, free as a bird to reminisce about the past. Worry not: after the war she was “de-Nazified” (agreed: this sounds like she was sprayed with aerosol followed by a scalp probing, but we must beg the reader’s indulgence: this is the history) and lived more or less happily ever after.

As one can imagine, Ms. Junge may have been harboring a degree of guilt having devoted years of her life to a cause that precipitated genocide. Once again, worry not: some filmmakers called upon her to fess up and get that weight off her chest. She did so, and a documentary was made to record her confession. It ran the art house circuit and even appeared in that charming spa along the Rhine called Wiesbaden.

What did Traudl confess? To start with, Hitler was not the man we thought him to be: he was a soft-spoken, paternal, vegetarian, lover of animals who didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, rarely mentioned Jews, and had an unusual tolerance to cold and damp environments—and, in case you didn’t know, his dog could sing like Sara Leander. The bunker was a rather benign place (“ein harmlose und friedliche Atmosphäre”) and seemed to be the only spot where nobody knew what was going on—in her words: a “toten Winkel” or “blind spot.”

At the end of the interview, Traudl declares that although it is tough to admit, she has come to realize that youth is no ground for exculpation. Don’t you feel better now? She did. Just before the credits roll, we see her words, left to echo like an epitaph: “I’m now beginning to forgive myself.” Othmar Schmiderer, the producer, was among the last people to speak to her. He quoted her as saying: “Now that I’ve let go of my story, I can let go of my life.” She passed away hours after the film was given its premier at the Berlin Film Festival.

Perhaps in respect of the good Herr Schmidt’s feelings, the filmmakers didn’t mention one important point about Traudl: she is a deplorable human being. To watch this woman reach into her amnestic soul and pull out ghosts dressed up in pink is to witness the trappings of a criminal mind. It’s akin to watching a serial killer describe his lonely childhood. The value of such a confession is not to be found in the narrative, but in the light it sheds upon our understanding of the narrator. And what does it tell us? Not much: we block out bad memories.

Der Untergang is the story of the end according to Traudl. In case you missed the documentary, excerpts are tacked onto the beginning and end of the film, firmly establishing from whose perspective this has been shown. The character of Fraulein Junge is shown as a starry-eyed girl who, in an inverted world, was in the right place at the right time. Not long after her engagement as Hitler’s closest employee, however, we see the pained expression on her face as she attempts to tread water amidst sharks. She is portrayed as the sane one in a loony bin, the clear-headed girl from Munich who got herself into a situation from which she couldn’t escape. Are we supposed to feel sympathy for her? The filmmakers seem to say yes.

The killing of civilians, including children, the suicides of fanatical Nazis, the wholesale destruction of Berlin by the Russians—bomb by bomb, bullet by bullet—and the verbal abuses of Hitler against his folk are constant. References to the Jews appear but twice: once when Hitler admits: “at least we got the Jews,” and a second time as an adjective thrown into a barrage of vitriol directed at Himmler for acting out of line. Analyzing the testimonies of Order Police assigned to shooting Jews in the forests near Lublin, Poland, Christopher Browning notes: “In terms of motivation and consciousness, the most glaring omission in the interrogations is any discussion of anti-Semitism.” Conversely, a phrase that echoes throughout the film is “nie Kapitulieren” or “never capitulate.” One is at pains to determine whether it is offered as an explanation for Germany’s tardiness to respond in the face of defeat or as a Wagnerian battle cry. In any case, one goes home with the idea that it was German stubbornness, rather than German racism, that brought on Germany’s defeat.

But the title says it all: Der Untergang, which could be translated as “The Fall” (as in the fall of the Roman empire) or “The Downfall” or “The Decline” or “The Decadence”—literally translated, however, the word means “Undergoing” or “Going Under” which conjures up the image of a great ship going down, a mythical Titanic that once inspired awe and envy. And yet was Germany sound before Hitler came on the scene? Ask Nietzsche (1888): “I have never met a German who might have been well disposed to Jews…we must not deceive ourselves about that. That Germany has more than enough Jews, that German stomachs, German blood have found it difficult (and will continue to find it difficult) to deal with even this amount of ‘Jew’ (which the Italian, the Frenchman, the English have dealt with, thanks to their stronger digestions).” The “sinking” of German culture did not happen in Berlin in 1945. And Hitler was not the one to pull the plug.

The suggestion implicit in this title is dangerously wrong. It must be emphasized: one cannot fully understand The Third Reich without understanding German anti-Semitism. Hitler would not disagree: “What we must fight for,” he wrote in Mein Kampf, “is to safeguard the existence and reproduction of our race and our people, the sustenance of our children and the purity of our blood…” This was no secret, and the question remains: Why, if not sharing the spirit of Nazism themselves, did these filmmakers choose to follow a Nazi’s version of the story? And why did they post the number 6,000,000 at the end of the film? Did they “forget” the other four million gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Slavs, and political opponents who died in German extermination camps?

Visually, when watching Der Untergang one cannot help but think of The Pianist, which leads one to the most difficult question of all: why was this film made? The sixtieth anniversary of Berlin’s destruction? If so, then they are one year early—not to mention that (unlike Hamburg and Dresden which were Medieval “wooden” cities) it took two years to destroy Berlin with its broad boulevards and stone architecture, and thus there is no anniversary. One is reluctantly drawn to the conclusion that someone in the artistic and political circles of Germany suffers from what could be called “victim envy,” and, after having seen The Pianist, felt the German side of the story needed to be told. If this is true, Germany has a long way to go before it has the right to relinquish its responsibility to repent.