Enlarge imageBy Janet Guttsman
TORONTO (Reuters) - A new film portrayal of Adolf Hitler shows both a ranting, twitching, delusional madman and a father figure who speaks kindly to his secretary and gazes fondly as blond Aryan children sing songs of praise.
But Downfall (Der Untergang), which had its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival on Tuesday, also breaches one of post-war Germany’s last taboos to show the Nazi leader as a human being rather than just a monster.
It has prompted the charge that director Oliver Hirschbiegel has gone too far.
"It’s one of the last remaining taboos in Germany and we broke that taboo," Hirschbiegel told a news conference to introduce the 2-1/2 hour movie, set in Hitler’s fortified Berlin bunker during the final 12 days of World War Two.
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"There still seems to be a great fear in Germany to openly and honestly face up to the events that made up that most terrible chapter of our history."
The movie opens across Germany on Thursday, and it has already prompted questions about whether German filmmakers have the right to delve deeper into the darkest days of their country’s history.
Some 50 million people died in the war, including 6 million Jews murdered in Nazi concentration camps. Cities in Germany and elsewhere were reduced to rubble, both in bombing raids and in the fierce fighting at the end of the war.
But Hirschbiegel said the movie was in no way designed to provoke sympathy for Hitler, who is shown ordering nonexistent armies into battle as the Soviet Red Army pounds his capital with bombs and artillery fire.
Hitler, played to chilling effect by Swiss actor Bruno Ganz, rants incoherently about his generals’ failure to implement his grandiose battle plans and displays callous disregard for Berlin’s increasingly beleaguered civilian population, where children fight on the front lines.
But at the same time he is kind to the women and children in the bunker, and steadfast in his resolution to die rather than surrender.
"The movie set out to put an end to the simplistic way of depicting Hitler up to now," Hirschbiegel said. "We only saw Hitler as a monster, as a mad psychopath -- a cartoon kind of character.
"What we are trying to do is give him a three-dimensional portrait, because we know from all accounts that he was a very charming man. He managed to seduce a whole people into barbarism -- a monster could never achieve that."
Ganz admitted he thought long and hard about whether to take the role, and said his character’s anti-Semitic rants and callous attitude to the Germans who had brought him to power were among the hardest things to take.
"It became a threshold I had to cross, and then I was there," he said.
