“Steiner…Steiner konnte nicht genügend kräfte für einen angriff massieren…”
Eighty years ago saw the final formalized end of the largest and most destructive conflict in human history—one that saw the world order incalculably resculpted in ways that still echo to this day. Tyrannies were defeated, only in many places to be replaced by a different kind of tyranny. Superpowers were broken, others rose, and technology itself changed the very concept of war.
The sheer level of ruination across multiple continents has never been repeated. While there were certainly ethnic genocides before and since, the sheer, deliberate, industrial scale of those committed in those five years has also never been matched. In many ways, the sheer level of savagery committed here is something perhaps the modern mind, divorced now by the better part of the century, can’t truly grapple with—there simply is no real frame of direct reference for all but the very elderly now, besides the realm of cinema and pop culture, and even that barely scratches the surface.
With that in mind, here I’ll be looking at several varying cinematic pieces looking back to the Second World War—and there is certainly no shortage. The first one perhaps is the most pertinent, coming to us from Oliver Hirschbiegel—zeroing in on something that perhaps encapsulated the whole thing, and in more ways than it should things now. Namely, the toxic influence and delusions of one old man, his inability to accept responsibility to the very end, and how his cult of aforementioned self-delusion pulled down everyone and everything with him.
Downfall takes us to Berlin, 1945—following several characters, among them Alexandra Maria Lara as secretary Traudl Junge, reporting directly to Bruno Ganz, so expertly playing the disease-riddled mind-rotted old man in question. Ganz, like so many of such men in reality, gives us some who is capable of being affable and self-deprecating enough in private—but when put on the spot, when allowed even a modicum of chance to slip into unreality, goes back to ideas of pointless last stands and pontificating over grandiose models of an empire never to be.
It’s true he might seem pitiable. Anyone can seem sympathetic enough in isolation. Of course, not long after we get the consequences of his irresponsibility—children being forced to man artillery because everyone else has been tossed into the meat grinder, citizens being hanged by state thugs, of underlings forced to politic and ultimately abandon all the prattling of loyalty to try and save their own skin. We have the slimy like Ulrich Noethen as Himmler, and perhaps the marginally more relatable Rolf Haines as Hans Krebs, who in the midst of hedonistic debauchery among uniforms deciding there’s no point to anything is forced to grovel before uncaring Red Army commands to no avail. Worse of all is Ulrich Matthes as the detestable freak Goebbels, casting poorly armed citizens into the fray and openly unrepentant--their punishment, he reasons, for not making whim a reality.
And of course there’s the one scene where it all falls apart. You might have seen memes and videos, but it context it’s the half-senile attempt of someone who’s trying to comprehend that reality cares not for his fantasies, and that indeed the will cannot triumph over the stark grimness of defeat. After all the ranting and raving, after all the medals given to 12-year olds forced to hunt tanks, there’s no hiding from the truth.
The answer of course is to refuse to accept responsibility, blame everyone but himself, and refuse to confront this reality besides take the only definite means of escaping it. Everything leads up to this—the increasingly ruined city, the subordinates scrambling around, and all it came down to was the worst possible way of grasping that it all boiled down to a loudmouth fool with a syphilis-addled brain.
You can glimpse here how some followed that fool, and why it all came to naught (of course, it's not over there, as survivors quibble over matters of honor as hollow as the ruins they stand in, while others look merely to see one more day). If there’s any one theme here so starkly and uncompromisingly shown by Hirschbiegel, it’s the power of delusion—the same delusion that ensnared other fools, the same delusion that so easily consumes the lost, the confused, and the bitter that can be marshalled by someone who simply takes that state of mind to the next level. And ultimately, as also shown mercilessly, you can't have delusion without ruin.
Of course, all these decades on, surely we’ve learned. Surely, we’d never have pointless death and destruction wrought again by someone whose lies bleed into their own rotted psyche. Surely, we’d have people not stand idly by when once more divides and uncertainty are directed into mindless self-destruction.
As Traudl says here in tears—“it’s like a dream, where you can’t wake up.”
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