Der film nominee for the Oscars coming
Der Untergang (The Downfall) is a best foreign film nominee for the Oscars coming from the German cinemas.
This Oliver Hirschiegel film is a Non-fiction historical drama based on the book by Traudl Junge, the final secretary to the High Chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler. The movie opens up with a group of five girls sitting in a waiting room with concrete walls and simple furnishings. They are being briefed about how to properly speak and address their possible new boss as he interviews them. The movie has not yet given away who the employer is.The next person up for the interview is a young teenage Berliner, Traudl Junge (Alexandra Maria Lara). As she stands up and enters the office we see only the sliver of a person through the crack of the door identifiable immediately by his toothbrush mustache: Adolf Hitler (Bruno Ganz). The movie is set at the end of WWII the final days of the Third Reich in Hitler’s Bunker.
The movie continuously shows Hitler’s decline in health in a matter of days and his increased madness as he continuously proclaims to the German people he will win the war even though the Russians are but kilometers away from the capital.The odd thing of the movie is you find yourself crying not for the victims but for the people Hitler is able to drag to hell with him through manipulation. We meet Gobles (Harald Quant) who we have always seen as the Angel of Death for the SS of the Nazi Party, yet the movie is able to twist our thoughts into having sympathy for a man with a vision and a family. The saddest part of the movie is, for fear of the rape of his children by the Soviets the whole family sings one last song together as they have done every night before every bedtime and all together drink a poison and sleep together in one room in the dark bunker.His wife tucks them all in and tells them a story of how life would have been if the Furor had succeeded.
She describes the lush hills of Germany that would have been, it brings one’s emotions to their knees, yet confuses the viewer when one remembers that he was responsible for the genocide of millions. Traudle is the secretary of whom the story is written from the view point of. This young German girl who has a her whole life ahead of her shows really puts into perspective the basic German attitude at the time.She starts of with a respect for Hitler slowly sees the decline of the nation yet still respects him even until the end. The story end with what almost every surviving German faced from then and even to some extent today: the humiliation of what happened and just trying to pick up the pieces of her fallen nation.
This is one of the greatest movies I have ever seen, it shifts from the past recollection of Traudle herself and from various small side stories of the local Berliners preparing for the sacking of their city.From Hitler youth made up of 12 year olds committing suicide by a pistol to there head all the way to the elderly being left to die in the basements of the hospitals. This 2005 movie gives us the hindsight of WWII. It gives us a warning of how the Nazis were not some evil nightmare that a child has while sleeping but a cold hard fact. The theme of the story causes us to see that one day we see them as men with dreams, and yet at the same time they can be seen as the root of all evil. This is why trust not unto man for what is good or bad but to one’s conscience.
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