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selenakLast year, a film called "Max" caused a lot of debate, not so much because one of its two lead characters was fictional (the Max of the title, played by John Cusack) but because the other was Adolf Hitler, immediately post-WWI, shown as not yet a complete monster. I saw it in Britain when visiting and basically agreed with this review; it was well done and showed some of the gestation of both Hitler the person and the sociological climate in post-WWI Germany that would produce a lot of his support without prettifying or excusing either, just explaining some of it. Note the "some" - I don't think any fictional or factional treatment will ever provide a "satisfying" explanation of how anyone can give birth to something like the holocaust. Nor should it. But I also think that what is far more common in movies - the Nazis in general or Hitler in particular as eternally ranting stock types, in a row with other movie monsters from the 30s and 40s such as Frankenstein's Monster, the Wolf Man or Dracula, only far less dimensional than any of the three - creates the rather dangerous illusion that something like this could not possibly happen in our neighbourhood/state/era.
Honorh told me some months ago of how some students of hers, upon watching a TV version of Anne Frank's story, critisized her and her family for not "fighting back". Well, if you think of Nazis as stock villains out of the Indiana Jones movies who can easily be outwitted by Our Heroes, then you would. (Spielberg more than made up for that with Schindler's List, but that's not what kids remember, I guess.) In any case, the Third Reich remains an inexhaustible supply of movie plots and recognisable archetypes, sometimes in the Indiana Jones and sometimes in the Schindler's List tradition. On both sides of the Atlantic.
Here in Germany, the most recent attempt has just been released. "Der Untergang" pictures the last two weeks of the Third Reich, from Hitler's birthday on April 20th 1945 to Goebbel's suicide after which the complete capitulation finally took place. There have been cinematic versions of this last period before - notably one with Alec Guinness as Hitler - but this one got hotly debated in advance for the same reasons Max got debated - people were afraid that if Hitler weren't depicted as a complete monster (which seemed likely, since the film is based in parts on the recollections of his secretary, Traudl Junge, the documentary about whom awards at the Berlinale 2002), it could serve to "soften" the viewer's attitude towards him. One critic made another objection, also in advance, by pointing out that any film depicting a siege and people defending their city/country/whatever was bound to get the audience identifying with the defenders, no matter their past; she brought up The Two Towers and Return of the King which she said would have additionally prepared the potential audience to react in a certain way.
I've seen Der Untergang now, and aside from being definitely worth watching, it's interesting to ponder how the film avoids these predicted traps. (IMO as always.) While still doing the movie thing in giving us an emotionally engaging pov character and at least two others whom one also roots for to survive.
For starters, there is one big stylistic difference to recent war movies, no matter whether fantasy or historical. The camera never shows us more than a human being could see, never sweeps upwards for a total showing, say, Berlin in ruins, or the approaching Russian armies. (And it's not because Eichinger couldn't have afforded the GCI - this was one expensive production.) You see the destruction at eye-level. You hear the ongoing artillery as the characters do, and see it only when they do. Which is not only different from the above mentioned sagas but from that bizarre cinematic relic, the historical propaganda movie Kollberg Goebbels ordered to be made at a time when there were hardly any cinemas left in Germany to watch films in because of all the bombings.
Speaking of perspective, this is an ensemble piece, but we begin and end with a recording of the real Traudl Junge (who died last year), and she's mostly (but not exclusively) the character through which the audience is shown the events in the bunker; as for the fighting in the besieged Berlin, this is mostly shown through the eyes of one of the boys we see Hitler decorating early in the film in an scene that got restaged from basically the last news reel made. (A chilling one at that - you watch these children, and they're really children, and the old man who already killed millions handing out medals and thus signing their fate, too.) Which is a clever choice and a way to avoid the earlier mentioned emotional trap - we don't want that boy to learn how to shoot Russians, let alone to kill any, we want him to stop believing the lies he's been told and to get the hell out of there. The monsters aren't on the opposing side, they're walking around executing deserting soldiers. Or handing out medals.
As for Hitler. He's played by Bruno Ganz (if anyone saw Wings of Desire, you might remember him - one of our most famous actors; indeed many of the cast reads like a theatrical Who is Who), who does an eerie job in capturing both the ranting voice one remembers from radio recordings and the quiet voice with the slight Austrian accent which is in a few documentaries, and the mannerisms, and somehow both sells Hitler talking about how the German people deserve nothing but dying after failing him, Hitler accusing everybody and their dog of treason, Hitler spouting the (in)famous quotes about the weak deserving no pity or about at least having succeeded in "eradicating the Jewish infection from Europe" - and Hitler being unfailingly polite to his secretary, sometimes even kind and humorous. I don't think that even a hypothetical viewer who had no idea who the man on the screen was supposed to be would identify with him or feel pity for him, but said hypothetical viewer would understand why the personnel, including said young secretary, doesn't get out of Berlin as soon as they can.
Acting-wise, Ganz is in competition for most eerie and chilling impersonation with Ulrich Matthes and Corinna Harfouch, who play Joseph and Magda Goebbels. The script is very big on the show, not tell here; for example, if you've read biographies, you know that that they had a horrible marriage, but you don't have to know that. The fact they don't speak a word with each other throughout the entire film says it all. Most pointedly in the aftermath of one of the most gruesome and effective scenes, a scene that is without any bloodshed or violence at all - Magda Goebbels killing everyone of her six children via cyanide capsules, carefully kissing all of them and drawing the sheets over their faces. When she's done, he, in the only gesture of (attempted) affection we see Goebbels make throughout the entire film, tries to touch her shoulder and she draws away.
Much earlier in the film, after Hitler has admitted for the first time out loud that the war is lost, we see Goebbels excuse himself, go to the lavatory and stare into the mirror for a moment. Then he calls his wife and tells her to bring the children with her. And you realize that is the moment when he has decided they would die. Magda Goebbels goes through a variety of (documented) moodswings throughout the film, teary with Speer, desperate with Hitler and icy with everyone else except the children, but Goebbels more or less remains set, with the above mentioned exceptions. It's a convincing portrayal of an inhuman character without resorting to sledgehammers to signify the inhumanity.
I'm not sure how our hypothetical viewer without knowledge of history would react to Eva Braun and Albert Speer. Eva Braun is depicted as relentlessly upbeat, which fits with the testimony of the survivors about those final weeks (if not with the rest of her life as Hitler's mistress, which included at least one suicide attempt), which gives her an aura of having wandered in from another kind of film altogether, Frank Capra perhaps. Or something featuring Doris Day. Remaining in the point of view of Traudl Junge, we never seen Eva and Hitler alone together, and the film never pretends to understand how this relationship came to be, or indeed its nature. Probably the most successful attempt at characterisation is the cross-cutting between her and Magda Goebbels writing their respective final letters; Magda Goebbels to her adult oldest son (from her first marriage), explaining, coolly collected and sitting straight, writing with her hand, how life without Hitler is not worth living and that she hence will take the children with her, and Eva Braun, clumsily typing with two fingers, talking to her sister in a chatty, affectionate high school girl mood about what trinkets she leaves her, what bills should still be settled, how the coffee she sends is for Dad and would sis please remember nice Mr. X who was still owed this and that too?
And then we go to Dr. Schenck, the third pov character, stumbling across several dead bodies thrown over each other at a deserted hospital. Again, the point about the jarring juxtaposition of everywoman Eva and her relentless cheerful normalcy in tandem with the horror surrounding her is made. In a later scene, Traudl Junge very carefully probes a bit and says she can't understand how Hitler can be kind one minute and the next say "you know…", she stumbles, obviously not sure how to go there. It takes Eva Braun a second, but then the cheerful smile is back and she says brightly "You mean, when he's the Führer?" End of conversation. Neither of them is actually willing to go there.
Albert Speer, often and somewhat justifiably called the most interesting character of Hitler's inner circle, started out as Hitler's architect and later, during the war, became Minister for Armament. He got sentenced to 20 years of prison at the Nuremberg Trials, wrote memoirs and diaries during his time in prison that became bestsellers, and is the subject of an ongoing heated debate regarding the extent of his knowledge and responsibility. Naturally, the movie couldn't go into all that, especially since he's a minor character within the story it tells. I thought the choices the script makes work, but I'm not sure how much this opinion depends on me knowing more about Speer and said controversy than the film tells us. For example, the presentation of Speer's last visit in Berlin follows his own account, with one tiny but significant difference. In between saying just what he says in Speer's memoirs regarding the nation failing him and the world not understanding his genius etc., Hitler makes that statement I mentioned earlier, about having at least succeeded in "freeing Europe of the Jewish infection". As Speer in his written statements was always careful to accept general responsibility but to deny specific knowledge of the holocaust, that quote came from another account altogether. I thought interjecting it here was the script's comment on that, but the hypothetical unburdened viewer probably doesn't attach the same weight to it, especially since the emotional core of the scene is something else, i.e. Speer admitting to Hitler that he had not executed the later's scorched Earth orders, and Hitler's non-reaction to it.
Since Hitler is shown exploding when getting the news about Goering, then Himmler trying to get in touch with the Allies, not to mention various unlucky generals being unable to deliver victories, the non-reaction is probably grasped as significant sans historical knowledge; what I find stunning, and again, chilling is something else the script/actor/director added at the very end, after Speer has taken his leave and turned around to go. Because you see, through the entire movie Hitler isn't presented as showing something like regrets, let alone grief (as opposed to anger) about anything, except about the death of his dog shortly before his own… and at the departing Speer, which the first and last time you see a tear on Bruno Ganz' face. From a historical pov, this fits with Speer having been called Hitler's "unrequited passion" by Joachim Fest, Gitta Serenyi et al. From a cinematic pov, it's at the same time a human and a horrendously inhuman thing. He's not able to pity any of his past (about 50 millions dead so far) or future (everyone else who dies before the capitulation takes place, which he refuses to consider) victims, but he feels sorrow here.
As mentioned earlier, the film ends with a glimpse at the real Traudl Junge, saying only a year or two ago, shortly before her death, that despite being horrified by what was revealed through the Nuremberg trials, she still did not connect this to her own existence until passing a memorial to Sophie Scholl in Munich. (Sophie Scholl, her brother and some friends formed the "White Rose", a resistance group. They ended up arrested and executed.) "I read the inscription and I saw we were exactly the same age, she and I. And that she had been executed in 1942, the year when I became Hitler's secretary. And that was when I realized that having been young is no excuse."
Honorh told me some months ago of how some students of hers, upon watching a TV version of Anne Frank's story, critisized her and her family for not "fighting back". Well, if you think of Nazis as stock villains out of the Indiana Jones movies who can easily be outwitted by Our Heroes, then you would. (Spielberg more than made up for that with Schindler's List, but that's not what kids remember, I guess.) In any case, the Third Reich remains an inexhaustible supply of movie plots and recognisable archetypes, sometimes in the Indiana Jones and sometimes in the Schindler's List tradition. On both sides of the Atlantic.
Here in Germany, the most recent attempt has just been released. "Der Untergang" pictures the last two weeks of the Third Reich, from Hitler's birthday on April 20th 1945 to Goebbel's suicide after which the complete capitulation finally took place. There have been cinematic versions of this last period before - notably one with Alec Guinness as Hitler - but this one got hotly debated in advance for the same reasons Max got debated - people were afraid that if Hitler weren't depicted as a complete monster (which seemed likely, since the film is based in parts on the recollections of his secretary, Traudl Junge, the documentary about whom awards at the Berlinale 2002), it could serve to "soften" the viewer's attitude towards him. One critic made another objection, also in advance, by pointing out that any film depicting a siege and people defending their city/country/whatever was bound to get the audience identifying with the defenders, no matter their past; she brought up The Two Towers and Return of the King which she said would have additionally prepared the potential audience to react in a certain way.
I've seen Der Untergang now, and aside from being definitely worth watching, it's interesting to ponder how the film avoids these predicted traps. (IMO as always.) While still doing the movie thing in giving us an emotionally engaging pov character and at least two others whom one also roots for to survive.
For starters, there is one big stylistic difference to recent war movies, no matter whether fantasy or historical. The camera never shows us more than a human being could see, never sweeps upwards for a total showing, say, Berlin in ruins, or the approaching Russian armies. (And it's not because Eichinger couldn't have afforded the GCI - this was one expensive production.) You see the destruction at eye-level. You hear the ongoing artillery as the characters do, and see it only when they do. Which is not only different from the above mentioned sagas but from that bizarre cinematic relic, the historical propaganda movie Kollberg Goebbels ordered to be made at a time when there were hardly any cinemas left in Germany to watch films in because of all the bombings.
Speaking of perspective, this is an ensemble piece, but we begin and end with a recording of the real Traudl Junge (who died last year), and she's mostly (but not exclusively) the character through which the audience is shown the events in the bunker; as for the fighting in the besieged Berlin, this is mostly shown through the eyes of one of the boys we see Hitler decorating early in the film in an scene that got restaged from basically the last news reel made. (A chilling one at that - you watch these children, and they're really children, and the old man who already killed millions handing out medals and thus signing their fate, too.) Which is a clever choice and a way to avoid the earlier mentioned emotional trap - we don't want that boy to learn how to shoot Russians, let alone to kill any, we want him to stop believing the lies he's been told and to get the hell out of there. The monsters aren't on the opposing side, they're walking around executing deserting soldiers. Or handing out medals.
As for Hitler. He's played by Bruno Ganz (if anyone saw Wings of Desire, you might remember him - one of our most famous actors; indeed many of the cast reads like a theatrical Who is Who), who does an eerie job in capturing both the ranting voice one remembers from radio recordings and the quiet voice with the slight Austrian accent which is in a few documentaries, and the mannerisms, and somehow both sells Hitler talking about how the German people deserve nothing but dying after failing him, Hitler accusing everybody and their dog of treason, Hitler spouting the (in)famous quotes about the weak deserving no pity or about at least having succeeded in "eradicating the Jewish infection from Europe" - and Hitler being unfailingly polite to his secretary, sometimes even kind and humorous. I don't think that even a hypothetical viewer who had no idea who the man on the screen was supposed to be would identify with him or feel pity for him, but said hypothetical viewer would understand why the personnel, including said young secretary, doesn't get out of Berlin as soon as they can.
Acting-wise, Ganz is in competition for most eerie and chilling impersonation with Ulrich Matthes and Corinna Harfouch, who play Joseph and Magda Goebbels. The script is very big on the show, not tell here; for example, if you've read biographies, you know that that they had a horrible marriage, but you don't have to know that. The fact they don't speak a word with each other throughout the entire film says it all. Most pointedly in the aftermath of one of the most gruesome and effective scenes, a scene that is without any bloodshed or violence at all - Magda Goebbels killing everyone of her six children via cyanide capsules, carefully kissing all of them and drawing the sheets over their faces. When she's done, he, in the only gesture of (attempted) affection we see Goebbels make throughout the entire film, tries to touch her shoulder and she draws away.
Much earlier in the film, after Hitler has admitted for the first time out loud that the war is lost, we see Goebbels excuse himself, go to the lavatory and stare into the mirror for a moment. Then he calls his wife and tells her to bring the children with her. And you realize that is the moment when he has decided they would die. Magda Goebbels goes through a variety of (documented) moodswings throughout the film, teary with Speer, desperate with Hitler and icy with everyone else except the children, but Goebbels more or less remains set, with the above mentioned exceptions. It's a convincing portrayal of an inhuman character without resorting to sledgehammers to signify the inhumanity.
I'm not sure how our hypothetical viewer without knowledge of history would react to Eva Braun and Albert Speer. Eva Braun is depicted as relentlessly upbeat, which fits with the testimony of the survivors about those final weeks (if not with the rest of her life as Hitler's mistress, which included at least one suicide attempt), which gives her an aura of having wandered in from another kind of film altogether, Frank Capra perhaps. Or something featuring Doris Day. Remaining in the point of view of Traudl Junge, we never seen Eva and Hitler alone together, and the film never pretends to understand how this relationship came to be, or indeed its nature. Probably the most successful attempt at characterisation is the cross-cutting between her and Magda Goebbels writing their respective final letters; Magda Goebbels to her adult oldest son (from her first marriage), explaining, coolly collected and sitting straight, writing with her hand, how life without Hitler is not worth living and that she hence will take the children with her, and Eva Braun, clumsily typing with two fingers, talking to her sister in a chatty, affectionate high school girl mood about what trinkets she leaves her, what bills should still be settled, how the coffee she sends is for Dad and would sis please remember nice Mr. X who was still owed this and that too?
And then we go to Dr. Schenck, the third pov character, stumbling across several dead bodies thrown over each other at a deserted hospital. Again, the point about the jarring juxtaposition of everywoman Eva and her relentless cheerful normalcy in tandem with the horror surrounding her is made. In a later scene, Traudl Junge very carefully probes a bit and says she can't understand how Hitler can be kind one minute and the next say "you know…", she stumbles, obviously not sure how to go there. It takes Eva Braun a second, but then the cheerful smile is back and she says brightly "You mean, when he's the Führer?" End of conversation. Neither of them is actually willing to go there.
Albert Speer, often and somewhat justifiably called the most interesting character of Hitler's inner circle, started out as Hitler's architect and later, during the war, became Minister for Armament. He got sentenced to 20 years of prison at the Nuremberg Trials, wrote memoirs and diaries during his time in prison that became bestsellers, and is the subject of an ongoing heated debate regarding the extent of his knowledge and responsibility. Naturally, the movie couldn't go into all that, especially since he's a minor character within the story it tells. I thought the choices the script makes work, but I'm not sure how much this opinion depends on me knowing more about Speer and said controversy than the film tells us. For example, the presentation of Speer's last visit in Berlin follows his own account, with one tiny but significant difference. In between saying just what he says in Speer's memoirs regarding the nation failing him and the world not understanding his genius etc., Hitler makes that statement I mentioned earlier, about having at least succeeded in "freeing Europe of the Jewish infection". As Speer in his written statements was always careful to accept general responsibility but to deny specific knowledge of the holocaust, that quote came from another account altogether. I thought interjecting it here was the script's comment on that, but the hypothetical unburdened viewer probably doesn't attach the same weight to it, especially since the emotional core of the scene is something else, i.e. Speer admitting to Hitler that he had not executed the later's scorched Earth orders, and Hitler's non-reaction to it.
Since Hitler is shown exploding when getting the news about Goering, then Himmler trying to get in touch with the Allies, not to mention various unlucky generals being unable to deliver victories, the non-reaction is probably grasped as significant sans historical knowledge; what I find stunning, and again, chilling is something else the script/actor/director added at the very end, after Speer has taken his leave and turned around to go. Because you see, through the entire movie Hitler isn't presented as showing something like regrets, let alone grief (as opposed to anger) about anything, except about the death of his dog shortly before his own… and at the departing Speer, which the first and last time you see a tear on Bruno Ganz' face. From a historical pov, this fits with Speer having been called Hitler's "unrequited passion" by Joachim Fest, Gitta Serenyi et al. From a cinematic pov, it's at the same time a human and a horrendously inhuman thing. He's not able to pity any of his past (about 50 millions dead so far) or future (everyone else who dies before the capitulation takes place, which he refuses to consider) victims, but he feels sorrow here.
As mentioned earlier, the film ends with a glimpse at the real Traudl Junge, saying only a year or two ago, shortly before her death, that despite being horrified by what was revealed through the Nuremberg trials, she still did not connect this to her own existence until passing a memorial to Sophie Scholl in Munich. (Sophie Scholl, her brother and some friends formed the "White Rose", a resistance group. They ended up arrested and executed.) "I read the inscription and I saw we were exactly the same age, she and I. And that she had been executed in 1942, the year when I became Hitler's secretary. And that was when I realized that having been young is no excuse."
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no subject
Date: 2004-09-18 10:43 am (UTC)*nods* The most chilling work of "fiction" concerning the Third Reich I've ever seen was a re-staged version of the "Wannsee Konferenz". Mostly because the ministers and all the others were portrayed as people. It is far more shocking to realize that those people worried about normal things like their dogs. Monsters are all very well to project some primordial fears. But the really scary thing are humans.
And thanks for the informative review as it's unlikely that I will see the movie in cinema for various reasons.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-18 12:20 pm (UTC)And you're welcome.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-18 12:12 pm (UTC)I think, if done right, it is the film (or whatever medium is used) that shows the inhumanity of man that is far more chilling and powerful that one that uses the monster archetype.
We can look at monster and say "never". Looking at a man or woman who is at moments "just like us" and at others something we believe we could never be is much more frightening. And an important warning.
We like to believe such things could never happen again (and I certainly hope and pray they won't), but if we don't learn and remember the chances are so much higher.
Thanks!
Date: 2004-09-18 12:25 pm (UTC)Yes, exactly. We don't get to be "the good guys" by default and natural immunity; we have to keep looking both at the world around us and ourselves and continue to question.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-18 02:12 pm (UTC)Reminds me of one of the most horrible things I've ever seen in US political blogging, when a well-known American right-wing blogger, who had no actual military or combat experience, told a well-known Iraqi blogger, in the most profane and abusive terms, that he (the Iraqi) had no right to criticise Bush because he and the other Iraqis hadn't taken up the gun and overthrown Saddam themselves. This guy is still regarded as a serious commentator.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-18 10:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-19 03:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-19 02:53 am (UTC)I think we only learn from the past if we see that it can easily REPEAT itself. Take your enemy and make them in-human, which means they lose their Human Rights and any rights in your eyes. Find some good reasons (they are traitors; they solute your blood; they endanger the security of your country; they are terrorits), and you end up having Gulags and Concentration camps (which were no German invention, but AFAIR first set up by England in some African conflict). Create a general atmosphere where criticizing the state means you're a traitor yourself - "you can either be with us or against us!". Streamline the media; use lies and deceive the people; be populistic and give something to every "good" group of your nation.
It's so very hard to stand up against organized, surpressing groups. I'm not sure what I would do, if I had the courage.
But for all reasoning, a small part of me will never understand how humans are able to do it, no matter how many interviews I see on TV, how many reports about Nazideutschland or Milosevich's Slovenia or Guantanamo I hear. A small part of me always cries out that this just can't happen, shouldn't happen. But the mechanisms are the same, and you can still see them working all over the world and most incredibly in the oh-so-democratic USA. This is the worst - to see such developments and be unable to do anything.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-19 08:31 am (UTC)This is the worst - to see such developments and be unable to do anything.
I know what you mean, but I don't think we're unable to do anything as such.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-19 04:02 am (UTC)"Fighting back" is a lot harder in person than in the movies. Most people won't. Most people won't even blow the whistle when what's at stake is far less than their lives. I work with activists, people who supposedly work in politics because they are the ones who fight back. But when one of our volunteers is sexually harassing young men while representing us, no one is willing to go out on a limb about it for more than two years! When the "consequence" is possibly being thought flaky or being told that one is being silly. Not a danger to life and limb.
I would posit that one reason why some people do "fight back" and become Sophie Scholl instead is because they do believe that they are the hero. Like Julian Bashir, their fantasies allow them to imagine acting in ways that just aren't "normal."
Eva Braun, clumsily typing with two fingers, talking to her sister in a chatty, affectionate high school girl mood about what trinkets she leaves her, what bills should still be settled, how the coffee she sends is for Dad and would sis please remember nice Mr. X who was still owed this and that too?
Eva is certainly a historical problem. Perhaps I'll get flamed for the comparison, but she reminds me of Princess Diana. Only in a different context.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-19 08:42 am (UTC)Yes. Hence the reports about people murdered in their neighbourhoods, screaming the house down, only nobody came. On a much smaller scale, I renember being in a big bookstore when suddenly a guy started to tear up books. Nobody stopped him for quite a while because of disbelief, apathy, whatever. I finally went to the bookstore employees and pointed out what he was doing, but to this day I'm not sure why I didn't just go to the man himself and asked him what the hell he thought he was doing.
I would posit that one reason why some people do "fight back" and become Sophie Scholl instead is because they do believe that they are the hero. Like Julian Bashir, their fantasies allow them to imagine acting in ways that just aren't "normal."
Could be. She and her brother both were avid readers and started out believing in the ideals the Hitler Youth and the Bund Deutscher Mädchen preached, until they got disillusioned by comparing this with what was going on, and what the true implications were.
Eva is certainly a historical problem. Perhaps I'll get flamed for the comparison, but she reminds me of Princess Diana. Only in a different context.
No, it's a valid comparison. Albert Speer, who liked her a lot, said she was bound to be a disappointment to historians because she was in no way a Madame Pompadour. She had zero interest in politics, was neither very bright nor very stupid, loved American movies (she was one of the very few people allowed to see Gone with the Wind which promptly became her favourite film), Swing movies, and secretely smoked. And she liked making idyllic home movies with the newly invented colour Super 8 camera. What made all of this slightly perverse instead of everyday was the identity of her lover.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-19 06:13 pm (UTC)I wonder what he did think....
What made all of this slightly perverse instead of everyday was the identity of her lover.
If she had been someone different, perhaps a lot of things would have been different.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-19 11:20 pm (UTC)This would be assuming that Hitler would have started a relationship with a strong-willed woman to begin with. I mean, Eva was completly kept out of the public eye and her very existence was only acknowledged in those final weeks (one reason why she was so upbeat during the time, I guess). And this went on for a decade. Which is possible if the power balance is extremely uneven. Now Hitler, hard as this is for us to understand, was surrounded by a couple of attractive women (Winifred Wagner, Unity Mitford, and Magda Goebbels who really married G. in order to get close to her beloved Führer), some of which were even groundbreakers in their profession, like Leni Riefenstahl. And I don't think it's a coincidence he picked a photographer's assistant from Munich instead who was utterly dependent on him.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-20 04:29 pm (UTC)Yes. Exactly.
What is frightening is not that monsters can do such things. What is frightening is that human beings can do such things.
Thank you for writing this review. I will go see the film when it opens in NYC.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-21 06:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-22 11:01 am (UTC)