The road less travelled...

Dear Margarethe von Trotta,

Do you happen to remember that, many months ago (February of last year, to be precise) you lured me into the cinema in Berlin by using the topic of my thesis for your precious film that you had decided would be your representative of the Holocaust? You do? Excellent.

Yesterday, I went (far more willingly, I might add) to see another WWII-related film, Downfall (Der Untergang). This was the final few days of the Second World War as seen inside Hitler's bunker, based on the memoirs of, among others, Traudl (not Traudi, idiot Herald-Sun reviewer!) Junge.

Just so you know for future references, Ms von Trotta, THIS is the way war-time films should be done. Not your namby-pamby storyline about the sufferings of the twentieth century being compared (weakly) with those of 1943, but a full-scale blood-and-gore filled film that really does deserve the R rating it got in the US. (It is only M-rated in Australia.)

Sure, you could argue that the subject matter was completely different. I agree, it was. But perhaps the ideas evoked in Downfall should also have affected the viewer after Rosenstrasse. The most bizarre part of yesterday's experience was seeing the lights come up and realising that my world was still whole. I felt as if I should be walking amid massive piles of burning rubble and speaking German. (The film has subtitles, thankfully, as I doubt anyone else could imitate Hitler's accent like Bruno Ganz.) Having no sympathy for the characters in Rosenstrasse, Ms von Trotta, I couldn't have cared less if THEY were the ones stuck under the rubble. Does that tell you something? It should!

Downfall is the sort of film that will leave any number of images in your head on which you will dwell for a long time after seeing it. There are two truly frightening facts: one, that everything happened almost exactly as you see it. I know quite a lot about the historical facts of the last few days of the Third Reich and I couldn't fault the storyline. It did help that, unlike Hitler: The Rise of Evil, the actors looked as much as possible like the people they were portraying. Goebbels, particularly, is simply horrifying - if possible, worse than the real Josef Goebbels. His eyes are just - weird. And that's putting it nicely.

And the second frightening fact is that these are real people. The main argument against portraying Hitler in a film is that he mustn't be humanised. Having seen this film, I think it's time we did more 'humanising' of Hitler, because it is far more terrifying to realise that humans, just like you and me, can act in the way Hitler did, can become as obsessed as Josef Goebbels or Eva Braun, and can kill and die as coldly as Magda Goebbels (the scene in which she kills her children and then goes to play a game of patience (solitaire) is possibly the worst in the entire film for sheer horror).

If I have any problem with this film, it is that it is sometimes difficult to tell the lesser Nazis from each other. The main characters (Goering, Goebbels, Himmler and Speer, as well as Hitler), are, of course, very obvious, but the Generals are not always easy to distinguish from each other and Martin Bormann has several men who look very like him in size and shape. Not that I wanted them identified by labels on the screen, but addressing them by name once or twice would certainly have helped.

This is not a film that anyone other than Germans could have made for the simple reason of blame. This film allows the audience to make him their own minds about the lunatic running the Third Reich, where an American, British or particularly French film would have clobbered the viewer about the head with the 'these people are all insane' club. Somehow that makes it more confronting and dangerous than it would in any other circumstance. You can't passively sit through this film. You have to feel with the characters, trying, perhaps, to rationalise the worst of their behaviours towards themselves and each other. (It is interesting that, of the many comments on IMDB, the most negative come from Germans, Austrians and Hollanders.)

There is no hero or heroine in this film. Two people come close - Traudl Junge, Hitler's secretary, whose life is really the centre of the biopic, and Dr. Schenk. However Junge explains herself why she is no heroine in the usual sense of the word. She admits to having been a dupe of the Nazis, feeling that she was too young to be interested in politics, but gradually realises after the war that she can no longer use this as an excuse. Dr Schenk is shown in the movie as a 'save the patients at all costs' doctor, but this is not a 100% accurate portrayal. Still, it provides a chilling comparison with his older counterpart, Dr Haase, who instructs Hitler in the best way to ensure success in suicide.

Obviously, this is not a film for everyone, but for people who have an interest in Third Reich history, it is vital to see it, particularly in a cinema to get the full scale of the film. (Oh, and do NOT eat just before seeing it! Seriously!) This, Ms von Trotta, is the sort of comment I SHOULD have been able to make about Rosenstrasse. You have no one but yourself to blame for the fact that I cannot.

Yours insincerely,

KB