Ian Balmforth's review1 captured the mood of Downfall/Der Untergang neatly, especially the coarsening of the German language used by the self-appointed cultured master race, and the banality of the cake-gobbling human wreck whose greatest regret was that he had been too conciliatory, compromising and kind. Safe in our democracy and living through less interesting times, we can see this film as a warning from history. I find working with a few individuals or enmeshed families seemingly trapped in a self-destructive fate hard enough, and facing it on a societal scale is barely thinkable.
The German view may be different. Downfall is a moral tale of redemption in its different forms, as much docudrama of the battle between rigidity and flexibility as that between good and evil. So many armoured characters collapse that the film could be re-titled 100 Suicides and a Lucky Escape, yet flexibility triumphs in an ending that is optimistic. Albert Speer, the literal architect of the Third Reich, speaks truth to power, telling his beloved leader how he had disobeyed orders to destroy the infrastructure of social life and catapult Germany into the stone age. This courage is rewarded with grudging admiration, when lesser traitors are shot. The doctor so deep in the Nazi fantasy that he wears SS flash on his collar has no wish for the people to go down with their master, and saves as many as he can. Hitler's secretary Traudl Junge, who begins the film as a dizzy 20-something, ends it as an old woman describing her epiphany, not in the Russian shelling of the Führerbunker but in a Munich street years later. A plaque to the medical student Sophie Scholl, executed for anti-Nazi activities just at the time when Junge herself was recruited to work for Hitler, revealed to her the truism that ‘there are always alternatives’.
So there are, as well as reserves of empathy and the ability to speak truth to power. We need them in small, but reliable, quantities all the time as we encounter the rigidities of politicians with grandiose designs, over-obedient and unthinking health service managements, our own escapist desires when trapped in humdrum routines, or the stiff, unyielding logic of somatising patients. Even if the only mortal threat we face is a double espresso, Downfall is more than a history lesson.
- © British Journal of General Practice, 2005.
