ZGram - 9/10/2004 - "Germany breaks the Hitler taboo"

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever!

September 10, 2004

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Today and tomorrow I am going to run news items pertaining to what 
some consider significant changes in the mentality of post-war, 
vassal Germany.  The first speaks a cultural change, examplified in 
the title and content of the British-flavored article below:

[START]

Germany breaks the Hitler taboo
By Kate Connolly in Berlin / The Telegraph
(Filed: 24/08/2004)

A decades-long taboo was broken in Germany yesterday with the launch of a
feature film in which Adolf Hitler appears for the first time in a central
role, not as a ranting demagogue but as a soft-spoken dreamer.

The Downfall is a huge shift from the previous tendency in German cinema to
show Hitler only as a background figure or a character who does not appear
on camera at all.

Juliane Köhler as Eva Braun, Bruno Ganz as Hitler and Heino Ferch as Albert
Speer

It tells the story of the last 12 days of Hitler's life in his 25ft-deep
bunker in Berlin - including his suicide alongside his new wife Eva Braun on
April 30, 1945 - while advancing Soviet troops pulverise the city with
shellfire.

The production by Bernd Eichinger, a respected director, is likely to cause
controversy when it opens in German cinemas next month. It depicts the
Fuhrer as an avuncular character with a penchant for chocolate cake, who
slides into madness when his lifelong dream of a 1,000-year reich slips from
his grasp.

Hitler is convincingly played by Germany's star actor Bruno Ganz, who once
acted the part of an angel in the award-winning German film Wings of Desire.

In one scene Ganz depicts him with his hair in his eyes, tears streaming
down his cheeks, as he declares: "The war is over."

Hitler is shown stroking his alsatian Blondie and treating his secretary
with tenderness and patience.

The Downfall offers a sympathetic portrayal of the Führer

Until he starts having hysterical fits, Ganz's Hitler talks in a soft,
melodic Austrian accent, far different from the barking tone he adopted for
his mass rallies. The director said the voice was copied from the single
recording which exists of Hitler talking in normal tones.

Mr Eichinger, who also wrote the screenplay, reconstructs the last days of
the Third Reich as seen from the claustrophobic and dimly-lit bunker with
the help of diary extracts and eye-witness accounts by Hitler's secretary,
Traudl Junge, who died in 2002, as well as his telephonist, and an officer,
Major Freytag, who are the last two living survivors.

As well as recalling the unbearable stench of urine, sweat and diesel which
dominated the bunker, Freytag described Hitler as a "physical wreck", with a
limp, who hid his shaking left hand behind his back, leading to suggestions
that he was suffering from Parkinson's disease.

Shot in Berlin, Munich and St Petersburg at a cost of £9 million, making it
one of the most expensive German films of all time, The Downfall has been
welcomed by critics for demythologising Hitler - even before they have had
the chance to see it.

Bruno Ganz as an avuncular Hitler hiding his shaking hand

Writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the critic Frank Schirrmacher
praised The Downfall for bringing Germany's evaluation of its history into
"a new phase".

Until now Germans had been afraid to portray on screen "the man who still
dominates the German imagination more than any other figure in history", he
wrote.

But the tabloid Bild yesterday posed the question that an increasing number
of critics will no doubt ask: "Should a monster be portrayed as a human
being?"

Eichinger, the 55-year-old son of a Wehrmacht soldier who fought on the
eastern front, said he believed the film would offer an "emotional release"
for many Germans still traumatised by the Second World War, even though only
one in five living Germans experienced it.

Its release comes at a time when Germans are involved in an intense debate
about their suffering in the war.

There have been several popular books and historical analyses of German
suffering during Allied bombing of Dresden and other cities, most famously
Gunter Grass's Crabwalk of 2002. The subject went virtually undiscussed for
half a century after the war ended.

Critics say the debate is in danger of playing into the hands of
revisionists - those who play down the crime of the Holocaust.

http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/08/24/wadolf24.xm

[END]