If these self-contradictions are difficult to accept, they are also the contradictions that make it so difficult to comprehend seemingly banal evil or, in Daniel Goldhagen’s interpretation, the willingness of the many who served as Hitler’s executioners.
The most brutal scene in the film is not one of the plentiful tableaus of pre-adolescent Hitler Youth committing suicide as the city falls, nor of limbs being sawed off without anesthetic in makeshift, underground hospitals, but of a steel-faced Magda Goebbels poisoning each of her six cherubic blonde children shortly before her own suicide—giving them their “salvation,” as she writes in a letter, because it is “no longer worth it to live in a world after National Socialism.”
The camera spares us nothing. Having forcibly administered them a sleeping drug, Goebbels inserts a glass vial of cyanide into each unconscious child’s mouth, crunches each jaw shut, pulls a blanket over each face, exposing each set of small feet. She goes outside and collapses.
The film makes no further comment. It has not caricatured Magda, as it does, to a certain extent, caricature Joseph Goebbels. Between her six-victim murder and her suicide with her husband, we are given no further data to indicate how we should feel about an otherwise apparently loving mother capable of such brutality.
If the problem of forgetting is a theme of German history and historiography, this is not only the result of conscious repression. It comes also from the sheer unrepresentability of the extent of horror inflicted and suffered during the twelve years of the Third Reich.
The generation that came of age during the War often referred to a “zero” hour or year at its end, as Roberto Rossellini did in the title of his 1947 film, Germany Year Zero. At the simplest level, these nulls name a fact visible all over Germany—in Dresden, Frankfurt, Berlin, and the other cities leveled by Allied bombing, where the absence of pre-1945 buildings best testifies to what happened.
Philosophically, these lacunae point to a fundamental problem of witness itself. For, as Elie Wiesel once put it, “those who have not lived through the experience will never know; those who have will never tell; not really, not completely…The past belongs to the dead.”
Those who have fully witnessed the tragedies of history are not the spectators who can return from the scene to bear witness. The complete witness can never come back. As a result, the glance reconstituted by the witness can never come back. As a result, the glance reconstituted by the witness or represented by the artist can only be partial. If this inherent inadequacy of representations does not excuse the frolicking Roberto Benigni from critique, it does explain the indignation that almost every Holocaust film provokes among some portion of its viewers and critics.
Eichinger’s film does not explain why Hitler was the man he was. Nor can it justify Traudl’s attraction to him. It is wise enough not to attempt to—even if, by putting him on screen at all, it breaks a taboo rarely tested by German filmmakers.
Post-war German politicians and thinkers so often called for a Vergangenheisbewältigung—for a “coming to terms with the past,” or, to translate the word more literally, a mastery of it.
In a 1959 speech, Hannah Arendt speaks of the violence that is necessary for any such Vergangenheitsbewältigung. She argued that any such attempt to master the violence of history is inevitably another Bewältigung—that is, must involve another violence and another bid for mastery.
As an attempt somehow to mater an appalling history by representation, Downfall presents appalling events and figures. It draws us into an appalling world. Yet, at least for its duration, the film puts the viewer in the position of inhabiting such a world.
To relegate the horrors of the Holocaust and those responsible for them to the realm of pure anomaly, to make them singular and unrepresentable—this is a failure to confront the moral complexity and the danger that those evetns reveal.
What Hirschbieger and Eichinger have done may not satisfy everyone. And it is not to be recommended to everyone. However, it offers a valuable contribution to an ongoing process fo coming to terms with the past, which, if it is to operate honestly on the terms of that past, must always be difficult.