Summary:
The final days of Adolf Hitler in his Berlin bunker as told from the perspective of Traudl Junge, his last secretary.
My Thoughts:
We are all heroes in our own stories, are we not?
This film begins and ends with a testimony from the real Traudl Junge, and while the rest of the movie is undoubtedly made with real class and knowledge of cinema, it’s the two interviews with Junge herself that hit me the most. I’ve decided to let you read both the first voiceover for this film before I continue with the review, because I believe Junge puts into words herself what the nation of Germany felt as a whole as they came to the end of the war, and she was there; she can speak far more eloquently about it than I ever could.
Unless you’re without a pulse, you’re probably aware that Germany lost WWII and Hitler is dead, so I don’t intend to mark any spoilers up throughout this review. I feel like most of what happens in this movie is common knowledge.
Frau Traudl Junge Opening Statement: I got the feeling that I should be angry with this child, this young and oblivious girl, or that I’m not allowed to forgive her for not seeing the nature of that monster […] I wasn’t a fanatic Nazi. I could have said in Berlin, “No, I’m not doing that. I don’t want to go to the Fuhrer’s headquarters.” But I didn’t do that. I was too curious. I didn’t realize that fate would lead me somewhere I didn’t want to be. But still, I find it hard to forgive myself.
This is a unique and powerful story told from the perspective of those who have done great wrong, or if they themselves hadn’t done anything terrible, they’re culpable in that they helped a great wrong to come to fruition by their indifference to those they were hurting, and are suddenly forced to face that ugly sin. This is a movie wracked with guilt and shame. It’s certainly not a fun watch, but it’s important. How often do we get to see things from the Nazi perspective? From the perspective of Hitler himself even?
I feel like with a lot of WWII movies and fiction, German’s have become heartless, faceless evil storm troopers that kill without mercy and enjoy doing it, but we have to remember that these were real people who really, wholeheartedly believed in the cause they were pursuing. They were tricked into following a madman; they simply ate up the rhetoric he was spewing without a second thought until it was too late to really do anything. (Take note, America; don’t follow the crazy man with bad hair who hates people that aren’t like him)
“You must be on stage when the curtain falls.”
Our film begins with the initial meeting of Hitler (Bruno Ganz, “The House That Jack Built”) and his new secretary, Traudl Junge (Alexandra Maria Lara, “The Reader”). We immediately flash forward to April 1945. Berlin is being shelled by artillery. Hitler and his loved ones are in a bunker below Berlin, just waiting for the end to come… With every day, Hitler grows more desperate, violently lashing out at his generals without need, growing irritable as he anticipates his own inevitable suicide. He watches as his dreams of A Thousand-Year Reich crumble before him.
This film is much a character study as it is a timeline of the events as they happened in the Bunker during Hitler’s last days. If you even have a modicum of interest in World War II I absolutely recommend this. Again, it’s told from a completely different perspective, one that does take a minute to get used to. As I said at the top of this review, we’re all heroes in our own minds. This movie humanizes a lot of the Nazi party, while it certainly doesn’t excuse them for what they did. This is a very violent film, but not in the way that most war movies are violent. Of actual fighting there is not a lot; most of the violence comes from the suicides and executions that seem to come frequently and senselessly (It’s like “Death of Stalin”, but far less funny).
The Nazi party in this movie behaves like a wounded beast. It’s confused and angry and unpredictable. Hitler himself knows he’s cornered, but he’s desperate to fight to the end, while others are prepared to surrender (many have families they want to go home to). Some are starting to rethink their involvement in the first place, while others still have never been surer that Nazism is the correct way to live. As a result, the party continues to hurt itself internally. Dozens of people are executed or commit suicide out of honor or out of guilt; parents poisoned their children so that they don’t have to face judgment at Nuremburg; even our protagonist, Traudl, accepts a cyanide capsule from Hitler.
If one can accept the idea that from our own perspective we are the good guys, then the downfall this film shows can be seen as a tragedy. Now, before someone goes jumping down my throat- (Lord knows you need clarification these days) I am not saying I sympathize with the Nazi cause. I am saying that I sympathize with some of the people behind the cause; the ones who got wrapped up in something wholly evil and didn’t realize it until it was too late: Traudl Junge, another prominently featured boy in the Youth Army. It was smart to depict this movie from Traudl’s perspective (and that of the youth army boy). When we meet Traudl, she’s only twenty-two; young, impressionable; she’s been fed propaganda ever since she can remember. Hitler, to her, is not a devil, but a celebrity. How could she not accept a job to be Hitler’s secretary? Anyone would’ve if they were in her shoes, wouldn’t they have?
Well, I’ll let Traudl’s final voice over speak for itself. (If you’d like to go in unspoiled skip the quotes bit)
Frau Traudl Junge Closing Statement: All these horrors I’ve heard of during the Nuremburg process; these six million Jews- thinking people of another race, who perished. That shocked me deeply. But I hadn’t made the connection with my past. I assured myself with the thought of not being personally guilty, and that I didn’t know anything of the enormous scale of it. But one day, I walked by a memorial plate of Sophie Scholl in Franz-Joseph-Strasse. I saw that she was my age and she was executed in the same year I came to Hitler. And at that moment, I actually realized that a young age isn’t an excuse, and that it might have been possible to get to know things.
Verdict:
This is a very powerful film, one that I honestly hadn’t expected to enjoy as much as I did. There are some great moments as far as acting, it’s a brutal depiction of Hitler’s last days (probably the best depiction I know of), and it raises some really compelling moral dilemmas. When you watch this, prepare yourself for a heavy watch. For a lot of these characters, it feels like they’ve come to the end of all things, and Hirschbiegel does an amazing job conveying that feeling that all is lost.
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