We haven't given you, our non-paying listeners, a bonus episode since Christmas, so have a summer present. It's our bonus episode - originally for Patreon backers only - on 2004's Downfall, the acclaimed German movie (good thing there are subtitles because... y'know) about the last days of Hitler and his assorted hangers-on in the bunker as the Red Army grind their way into Berlin. Spoiler: he shoots himself. It's a complex, flawed, fascinating movie, and both of your hosts have complicated feelings about it. Downfall (2004 film) - Wikipedia Become a backer of Daniel or Jack to get exclusive access to a new bonus episode. Becoming a patron also brings access to all other bonus episodes. At least one new Patreon exclusive bonus episode every month. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent. Patrons get exclusive access to one full extra episode a month. IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
By continuing to be in the meeting, you are consenting to being recorded.
All right, then.
Oh, apparently they've had some lawyers get involved in this whole thing, apparently.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Probably.
I mean, I would say it's never a good time when lawyers get involved, but we are talking about the tech industry.
It's kind of like a liver shrugged.
good anyways.
It's kind of like a liver shrugged.
It's like, well, I mean, the banks are terrible, but they are dealing with Facebook as And so it turns out the multinational banks are the good guys in this situation.
They are at least theoretically supposed to have some rules that they stick by, you know?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, or like, you know, when the Red Army is bombing Berlin in 1945, it's sort of, well, Yeah.
Is the Red Army a completely unimpeachable organization?
No, but... Well, I mean, Stalin was terrorist.
Stalin was one of history's greatest monsters, but Hitler, you know.
Hitler, yeah.
That's really, I mean, that's just an argument winning move, isn't it?
Well, I mean, that is the Godwin.
Right thing, isn't it?
But Hitler, you know?
Yeah.
Because it is the nuke.
It's the nuclear option.
It just wins the argument immediately.
But Hitler was on the other side of that.
So, you know, whatever.
Yeah.
I mean, if, you know, if if one side is Hitler, then pretty much by definition, the other side is is at least preferable.
You know, if you if you have to pick a side, you know, the side that isn't Hitler is.
Pretty much always the best option.
Yeah, non-Hitler is the one to go for, I would say, generally.
It's hard to find a counterexample to that, you know?
Yeah.
It's like Robert Evans talking about, you know, in one of the episodes of Behind the Bastards, he was talking about like, yeah, then one of Hitler tried to commit suicide and his friend talked him out of it.
And usually you think, talking to someone out of suicide, universal good.
Maybe if your friend is Hitler, go, yeah, no, that probably would have been fine.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, First World War, you know, 99 times out of 100, my exhortation to the German and British troops firing at each other would be lay down your arms and join forces against your mutual class enemy on both sides of the national divide.
But in the case where the British soldiers are firing at Hitler, keep firing.
Yeah.
Aim better.
Try just a little bit harder.
Hitler, not so good, controversially, he said.
Not such a great person.
Not such a nice guy.
Unless you were his secretary, apparently, and even then.
this is I don't speak German I'm Jack Graham he him and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper
also he him about what he learned from years of listening to today's Nazis white nationalists white supremacists and what they say to each other when they don't think we're listening Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
Content warnings always apply.
Okay, so this is IDSG special bonus so this is IDSG special bonus backer only episode five.
Five, yep.
It's number five.
So if you're listening to this, thank you for giving us money.
Yeah, we thank you very much.
It's very helpful.
I appreciate it.
You're a brick.
And yeah, so this episode This episode is about, as you might have gathered already, if in fact I leave all that in, it's about Downfall.
Original German title Der Untergang, released in 2004, directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel.
I believe that's the correct pronunciation.
It's well known that we don't speak German, so it's fine.
Well, I was trying to avoid that very obvious gag, but Daniel, Daniel just couldn't resist it, but never mind.
I can't speak German, but I am quite good at the accent, I'm told.
But never mind.
Yeah, for context, in case this is released in the future, we are recording this on the 23rd of May 2021.
But in the immediate term, this will be just for you, you money givers.
Yeah.
So yeah, Downfall.
What's the context for that?
We're talking about this.
It was originally our plan to make this episode 88, which is still looming as we record.
Yes.
We still have a plan for that.
I'm looking forward to that episode.
We're going to go off the deep end on that.
We're going to do something completely different for 88.
So it's going to be fun times.
And as it happens, recent events, I've been in great conversations with our guests for that episode.
It becomes more relevant with every passing day, but that's a bit of a spoiler, you know?
Yeah, it's rather upsetting when any of our relevant topics for this show become more relevant with every passing day.
That's just not good.
But we do have a great guest lined up and they will be magnificent.
So yeah, this was originally, well it wasn't.
88 was looming for a while and people were like, oh, episode 88, episode 88.
And we were like, yeah, we know.
But between us, in private, we were sort of, what are we going to do?
What are we going to do about 88?
because 88 88 88 and you know 88 so we had various ideas and one of them was uh we just completely ignore it and one of them was we do downfall for episode 88 and just do the entire episode talking about what a what a fucking dickhead hitler was Yeah.
And how he shot himself and how that was really good.
But that's not we got a better offer, shall we say.
So, yeah, we figured out, figured out, figured out another thing to do.
So.
So instead, you get this as a bonus episode.
So that's how it goes.
So Downfall was relegated to a bonus episode where it should be because it's a movie.
According to the new system, that's where we do the movie so as to not try the patience of the serious people that listen to this and tune in everything.
Oh, good.
It's about, oh, there's a new IDSG.
Oh, you know, they check their feed and it's about Fight Club or something.
Or Captain America.
I think that was the one that was the most, you know, like, yeah, let's do Captain America.
Although there's some good stuff in that episode.
I was pretty happy with that one.
But, you know, like.
Oh, all our episodes are, of course, fantastic.
Yeah, I know.
All I was saying was that some people are so self-consciously pompous and up their own arses, you know, that they don't realise how good our movie episodes are, that's all.
Whereas you, who are listening to this now, one of the chosen few who paid to listen to our backer-only episodes, you are one of the ones that gets it.
I think we've maybe waffled long enough.
I think it's time to move on.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Conversation.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Daniel, they're giving me directing notes.
That's fine, because you and I could waffle all the time.
Usually what we do is we waffle when we don't want to talk about the thing that we're doing.
But actually, I think I think you and I will have a lot to say.
I have a handful of notes.
I don't know what you've got, but I just really want to chat about this because I actually rewatched it just a couple hours ago.
So.
And I think we both rewatched The Bunker, didn't we?
Yeah, from 1981.
Now, I did not rewatch that one this week.
I watched it last week and I frankly don't have a lot of memories of it because I only watched it the one time and just kind of watched it idly.
But we can definitely talk about kind of a comparison between the two films to some degree.
But I don't have like kind of a set of like detailed notes about The Bunker and the way that I do about Downfall.
And I don't even have that many detailed notes about Downfall.
But I rewatched it more recently, so that's the that's the answer for me on that one.
But yeah, no, we could definitely kind of refer to the bunker as well.
The bunker is kind of there as a background frame of reference, I think.
To downfall, which, yeah, so downfall, downfall, downfall.
First thing to say, probably just to get it out of the way, is, you know, the thing that everybody says about downfall, which is Bruno Ganz very, very good as Hitler.
Yeah.
I wasn't even going to start there.
I was going to start with the meme because I think, you know, it lords over because so many more people have seen the meme than have seen the film, honestly, or even really know like people see the Hitler meme and don't even realize that it's a film.
I think it is one of the great internet memes.
If you don't know the meme, I've put some links to the history of the meme in the show notes, so we're not really going to talk about it, but at least we've referenced the meme.
I don't know, do you like the meme?
Because I really like the meme.
I find it routinely hilarious what people I don't actually entirely know what you mean by the meme.
Do you mean the thing on YouTube where people put inaccurate subtitles over the scene where?
Yeah, OK, right.
OK.
Yeah.
And the the sillier and more like the more it's built around, like some nonsense fandom thing that's going to be forgotten in three days, the funnier it is.
You know, like I've seen ones where it's like, I just wanted to sit in the theater with my Watchmen mask and now Zack Snyder has ruined this for me, you know, or, you know, like that sort of thing.
There was one that's like the Blu-ray players and the HD DVD back in the day, where HD DVD was a competitor for Blu-ray back in 2006 and 2007.
And then HD DVD just completely lost the plot, despite the fact that they were probably the technically superior medium.
And so it's all over again.
Yeah, it's been max all over again.
And I don't know, like maybe I was just more plugged into that kind of meme culture at that time.
But it does kind of pop back up every few years.
And I always find it like amusing that people rediscover it.
And I think there's real power to it.
And I think it is your feedback into what you're more seriously talking about.
It is Gonza's performance that sort of makes that it makes it so powerful.
And I think that the film itself and that scene survives.
Survives the meme.
Like, no matter how many times you've seen the meme, the scene works in context regardless of that.
And I think that's a real testament to the power of the film.
You know, so few things of this nature really kind of survive becoming this kind of like pop culture trope in the way that this does.
Yeah.
Well, of course, I'm a very serious minded sort of person, so I'm not really steeped in this sort of Internet meme YouTube silliness kind of stuff the way you obviously are.
Clearly.
Yeah.
So, you know, I appreciated the movie first and foremost as serious drama.
It's even in a foreign language, for God's sake.
You know, it was nominated.
It was nominated for best foreign language picture.
Yeah.
Which is I always think that's weird when something's nominated as best foreign language, because every film's in a foreign language, if you think about it, isn't it?
Well, if you're an American, there is only one.
There is only one real language.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's only one foreign language if you're an American.
All the all the other ones.
All the other ones.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, the bar, bar, bar talk.
That's the that's right.
Yes.
You know, I think that the power of that to be slightly more serious about this, I think the power of that thing with the meme where people give they take the scene from downfall where Hitler is having his massive ranting and raving session, which I don't know, this is going to become a theme for this episode because I've got Kershaw's biography.
You know, the massive two-volume biography.
And I reread the last full chapter of that in preparation for this, which covers these events.
And according to Kershaw, that actually happened, that confrontation.
And in reality, apparently it lasted about half an hour just by itself, as opposed to the brisk minute or so that we see.
Because I mean, this wasn't exactly an unusual occurrence at the time.
You know, Hitler was given to these massive screaming fits that lasted for a very long time, tirades and tantrums.
But apparently this was big, even by the standards of, you know, people in the bunker were used to this.
But this was sort of remarkable, even by by the standards they were used to.
And yeah, it went on for about half an hour.
And so, yeah, this This scene that people have turned into a meme by putting subtitles on top where Hitler's ranting about, you know, whatever.
I think it derives some of its power from kind of the I mean, I think you have to see it in context of Gamergate, don't you?
Because so much of the stuff people give Hitler to say in the meme is kind of petulant fandom stuff, petulant fandom whinging, you know, entitled fandom whining.
And I think you have to say, I mean, this film was released in 2004, 2005, more broadly across the world.
And that's really at the point where this sort of thing is becoming, you know, a force culturally, isn't it?
This This burgeoning culture of online fan entitlement and fan tantruming and fan bullying, etc.
It's laying the groundwork for, as I say, Gamergate, which will be along in a few years' time from here.
And I'm not equating them!
There's a through line.
I mean, I was I was kind of into Internet nerd fan culture before it was cool because I was reading any cool news of like 1998.
You know, so like Trendsetter.
Yeah, Trendsetter.
I was by, you know, surfing the Internet.
When I was a teenager, that was the thing.
But, you know, you definitely get this.
it turned off as this kind of like weird little collection of internet people, internet film nerds, like talking about weird shit online on, you know, use that forums and other types of forums and websites with shitty graphics and stuff.
And then eventually it becomes something that was like encouraged by the studios.
And so you would get like suddenly this culture, this like, like slash film becomes a thing where like this culture of, you know, Oh, we're going to make Spider-Man the movie.
We're going to make the original Tony McGuire Spider-Man movie.
And then we're going to feed like onset visits to the same kind of like internet culture.
We're going to like professionalize it.
And then once it becomes professionalized, once it becomes part of like the official like feedback loop of how we advertise movies, suddenly what was this kind of like weird internet subculture to be fair, largely, largely made by and pushed by a complete largely made by and pushed by a complete sociopathic internet nerds like myself then becomes part of the capitalist superstructure.
And therefore it embeds itself into the terrible, terrible rock of the actual Hollywood system.
And I think also the The Hitler meme really becomes a thing at the beginning of the internet video streaming era because you can't do that meme until something like YouTube exists and so this is like one of the first big YouTube things and I think that's
There's an interesting kind of like the, there's a medium is the message kind of thing going on there where, as the internet culture gets more popular and as the technology gets better suddenly you're able to do this and the creative, the creativity of people.
In the subculture is able to influence the the way that the film itself is seen in a lot of ways.
So, yeah.
So I didn't want to spend this much time talking about the meme itself, but like you really can't get you really have to at least mention it, you know, with the film.
No, I'm I'm going to.
Yeah, let's move on from the meme.
I just you know, I'm going to completely ignore the baited mousetrap reference to the the base and superstructure model.
I'm going to completely ignore that.
And I'm just going to say, I'm just going to say what I was thinking of more was kind of Hitler.
Hitler is kind of the, I mean, as I think this film puts across and to anybody that knows about him, he's the epitome of this, you know, this narcissistic sense of entitlement.
And, you know, it's sort of inherently reactionary.
But of course, in Hitler, it's very, very explicitly and specifically reactionary.
So I think there's a way in which it chimes for me, the use of that particular individual in the process of having one of his epic tantrums to, you know, jokingly.
But I think I think that this is why the joke works, you know, because it hits, because what's being joked about is this sense of sort of narcissistic entitlement.
And so putting it into the mouth of Hitler, that works as a joke because it kind of skewers the inner logic of that kind of thinking.
Yeah, I mean, there have been like more serious versions of it.
And again, not to keep talking about the meme, like, you know, when Sarah Palin was selected as VP and, you know, when McCain lost or when, you know, the bank bailouts happened.
So there have been versions of it that touch on real bits of like important political history.
But those don't seem to hit in the same way.
It's the frivolity of the message of the thing combined with the seriousness of the performance and of the ultimate subject matter that seems to kind of like that frisson seems to be the thing that makes the meme work more than anything.
And I think you're right.
I think it does reflect a certain, you know, the sort of narcissistic childishness of a lot of those subcultural figures.
It does seem to, in a lot of ways, like the people who are making the memes are putting their own opinions in the mouth of Hitler, you know, and so there is also a bit of like a kind of a self-deflating to it in some ways, although that's certainly not universal.
I don't know, there's probably like a there's probably a PhD thesis in, you know, the Hitler name to find someone into in in this kind of a study to to look at that, but.
Yeah, no, that's interesting.
You know, I was going to say Sarah Palin, you know, that just feeds directly into my point, you know, childish, delusional, reactionary tantrums.
But yeah, it's interesting that a lot of people making the meme will have been people giving Hitler their own opinions.
Yeah, rather than sort of satirizing other people's opinions by giving them to Hitler.
Yeah, that is interesting, which kind of completely undermines what I was saying.
But never mind.
It's certainly not universal.
I mean, it's sort of a recognition of the of the culture itself, I think.
And I think there I think there is something there.
But I think there's a I don't know.
It's hard.
It's hard to tease out.
And we don't have examples in front of us.
IDC bonus six, the Hitler meme discussed in detail.
Yeah.
And then we'll just play the clips in German.
That's right.
Yeah.
Without the subtitles.
And then we'll talk about them.
That will be the way to do it.
That'll be great.
Yeah.
This next clip is about XYZ.
You play it and it's just exactly the same.
It's just the German.
Yeah.
Oh, audio medium.
That's how that's how it works.
Yeah.
There you go.
Yeah.
But yeah, moving on from that, you got anywhere particularly want to go?
I mean, do you want to talk about it as a film for a little bit to start with?
Yeah, I mean, I guess I guess I the thing that interested me kind of rewatching it because I had seen this once again, I think I saw the meme first and then kind of saw the film after that at some point.
And it was like kind of in that same 2006, 2007 period.
And I had wanted to see the film.
I had heard it was great, mostly on Any Cool News, probably, and then saw it at that point, and then never really revisited it until we had talked about doing it for the podcast, and then watched it twice in the last two or three weeks.
My own kind of immediate thought was just to kind of get this thing out of the way immediately.
And that is that, I mean, you referenced the Kershaw biography, and I actually have a link to Kershaw's review of the film in The Guardian from 2004.
So if you want to, Kershaw thought the film was very accurate and admired the film in a lot of ways.
And I do have a kind of part of his conclusion that we might read later if you're interested in that.
But anyway, it's in the show notes if we don't get around to it.
But my The thing that kind of strikes me as someone who like spends a lot of time thinking about Nazis is I spend almost no time thinking about Hitler like as a person, right?
And my own education, my own like I took One university-level history course, and that was in, like, ancient world history.
That was all I was required to take for my degree.
And high school history textbooks do not, like, you know, they cover World War II, fairly extensively, but it's mostly in terms of like kind of the broad sweep of, you know, the battles and the Axis and allies and, you know, kind of some of the, but like the internal politics of Nazi Germany are just way, way away from anything that's covered In, you know, mainstream U.S.
history courses.
I even checked the, I put a link to a 2019 AP History exam just to see if there was, there's no even mention of World War II or the Nazis anywhere in that exam.
Not to say that's like kind of a thing that is, you know, not to say that's like the most important thing that you could cover on one of those exams or that's like a kind of, but it does speak to Most Americans have no fucking clue of what's going on inside the actual political structures of Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945.
And I feel like that's maybe, I don't know, maybe you could speak to your own experience, like outside of your kind of studying it for your own knowledge.
Like, did you get more of that in your kind of Regular education?
Yeah.
When I was at school, which admittedly was a depressingly long time ago now, but I was in secondary school, which is roughly equivalent to what you guys call high school, in the 80s and early 90s.
And in 89, I suppose, 90, something like that.
I started doing history for GCSE, which is one of the main lower qualifications you get.
It's the qualification you get when you leave secondary school.
And in history GCSE, we did an entire module about the Nazis, about the rise of the Nazi party.
Um, you know, weeks concentrating on that, right?
So we did, I mean, not, you know, this is, this is school level stuff.
So it's not in depth, but we did like, uh, you know, the, the early days of the party, the storm troopers through to, uh, Getting into power, Kristallnacht, Hitler Youth, up to, I think, just before the war.
We didn't do the we didn't do the war, although I think, of course, it was it was varied.
So like other groups of the same year would have done maybe war history rather than pre-war, you know, stuff like that.
But yeah, I mean, we went into the Nazis quite in depth.
I don't know what they do now, but we certainly did.
And, you know, this country is obsessed with the fucking Second World War.
Absolutely.
I mean, I know America is as well, but I think America's inflection, you know, is very different.
I mean, of course, America's war was also, in fact, primarily the war in the Pacific, you know, against the Japanese empire, etc.
But yeah, I mean, we just get a lot of rah-rah, like we won sort of thing.
The Nazis were bad.
And, you know, with this kind of like cultural memory about, you know, the Holocaust or about Nazis or about like, less so, less so the kind of the Japanese and the other powers.
It's really like, you know, we beat Hitler.
Isn't that great?
Eisenhower good.
That's what the cultural remembrance of that is.
FDR good as well, although he was a goddamn socialist.
So, you know, like Truman really won that war.
Sorry, joking around there.
I mean, I'm, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm goofing off, but like, yeah, no, we, we don't like, there was a little like defining of terms.
Like, you know, you get the bolded word in the textbook, Kristallnacht.
And so you'd have to memorize what Kristallnacht was.
You'd have to write it down, but you wouldn't have to learn like the history of You know, what led to it or what was actually done or who was responsible or anything like that.
It's just sort of this, like, it's like you're checking boxes to a certain degree in terms of... My memory of my own education on these matters is that it was fairly good for what it was.
You know, of course, later on, when I'm doing my own reading, I I get an entirely different perspective on the rise of the Nazis because I come to see them as a as a counter-revolutionary movement and, you know, rooted in the fact that Germany from the end of the First World War through till 1923 was, you know, in a revolutionary process.
Which, you know, that's not something I was told at school.
One of the terms we had to define was hyperinflation, by the way.
That's kind of my one memory of Weimar in, you know, for my 10th grade, you know, world history course was, you know, Weimar.
That was it.
Yeah, absolutely.
But yeah, I mean, Hitler and the Nazis are an absolute obsession in this country.
But I don't know, even so, that many British people really know a great deal about Hitler as a person, or indeed the Nazi system, or even the contents of Nazi politics.
I think America and Britain both suffer from a similar problem, which is kind of just the problem of people defining Nazism as, you know, What I don't like.
That seems to be the operative definition of Nazism or fascism for a lot of people.
The people that disagree with me, the people whose politics I don't like, they're the Nazis.
We know that they're bad because they were collectivists.
That's the really awful thing that they did.
Well, yeah, I mean, this is free enterprise, like, like us, and they didn't, they didn't value freedom.
And you get some reference to, like, secret police or whatever, but there is this, like, confluence of, like, Nazis and Soviets in the, you know, in the kind of the popular imagination.
And even I think a lot of the, like, history channel documentaries you saw in, like, the 90s and 2000s don't do much better than that.
I mean, you know, it's just kind of a lot of, like, You know, ominous footage of, you know, of Hitler marching around and stuff, you know?
Like every BBC documentary about the rise of the Nazis, and they produce about, you know, 17 every year, begins with, you know, you get footage of Nazis marching in the streets, and then you get footage of communists marching in the streets, and the voiceover, the very somber voiceover says, Germany in the 1930s.
A society in crisis.
Communists marching for a worker's paradise.
Nazis marching for... Millions of Germans determined to abandon democracy.
That's basically the analysis you get.
Yeah, right.
And that makes it that makes it again to kind of talk about the film, because we have to think about the film in terms of, you know, what its intended audience was.
And this is, from what I understand, the very first film in the German language to depict Hitler.
As a character, since since World War Two.
Yeah, because it's a it's a taboo in I mean, it's actually legally problematic to depict.
Oh, yeah.
Hitler.
They have lots of laws.
In Germany, you know, displaying swastikas is illegal.
So German neo-Nazis display iron crosses and Confederate stars and pass because they know what it means.
And I think I think I'm going to mention this in the last episode for Glorious Bastards, but Eli Roth directed that like film within the film, the Frederick Zoller.
A murder movie, Nations Pride, and with all the swastikas all over the place.
And that was actually filmed in Germany.
And that was one of those things where apparently a lot of the crew were just kind of sitting around and going like, are we allowed to do like this?
You know, probably not.
I mean, yeah, no, seriously, probably not.
Apparently they got permission to do it, but it was a very, you know, kind of like because it's kind of the big American production, I guess they got like some kind of special dispensation.
You know, I guess Harvey Weinstein like twisted a few.
But yeah, even displaying displaying Hitler's image is illegal in Germany, displaying it in public.
So, I mean, this is one of the things when Kershaw's biography of Hitler was published, when it was marketed in Germany, it had to be marketed with pictures of Kershaw instead of pictures of Hitler, because it's literally illegal to put pictures of Hitler up on on the sides of buses.
Understandably, you know, although I think, you know, the the question of German attitudes to this It is quite interesting.
But yeah, sorry.
Maybe we'll get to that.
But yeah.
Yeah, no, no.
I mean, it was just because it's got to be made for a domestic audience, ultimately.
I mean, it's made for Germans, presumably, although obviously they're thinking about the international audience and they're thinking about Oscars.
I mean, this is clearly a movie that's made, you know, for For the Anglophone audience and for kind of a larger audience than just the people of Germany, but the decision to make the film, apparently it was like this deeply, you know, like everybody who made the film sat and talked about like how difficult it was to make the decision to do the thing and what a like kind of fine line they had to walk in terms of the portrayal of Hitler and how How human could you make him versus how, you know, how much did you have to lean into the Hitler is a monster?
And, you know, like people, people were really upset.
Even the idea, like there's a moment in the film in which he cries.
It's like, I think at like 12 frames of the film, he's crying after, I believe it's the, when, when he discovers that a spear has betrayed him.
And that was hugely controversial on this film's release.
And so, you know, Watching it as an American in 2021 in a VLC window is a very different experience than seeing this on a big screen in Germany in 2004.
And I think it's just worth highlighting that, that we are kind of coming at this, even as people with interest in the subject, we're coming at it as outsiders to a large degree.
And so, you know, it's just, I don't know, I felt like it was important to just kind of put a finger on that, because I think that is something that gets lost in some of the conversation around the film as well.
Well, that is the biggest single difference between this and The Bunker, for instance.
The Bunker is made for an American and English speaking audience.
Right.
And it's British actors for the most part, although there are some American actors in it.
With Anthony Hopkins as Hitler.
Man, that's an amazing performance.
This Hopkins guy, he's going places.
You and I, we like very, very long movies with Anthony Hopkins doing sometimes bizarre impressions of falling world leaders, don't we?
We've talked about this before.
But yeah, as I said, just on a basic aesthetic level, The Bunker is a movie made in the English language, starring English-speaking actors for English-speaking audiences.
Downfall, Der Untergang, is an all-German act.
Well, they're not all German.
Bruno Gans, for instance, is Swiss.
But German-speaking actors speaking German for a German audience.
And yeah, it is different.
It's a case of aesthetics.
Grounded in, you know, the material circumstances of the film's production.
It's being made in Germany by Germans for the German film market, primarily.
So, of course, it's mainly German actors speaking German, but it's the aesthetics of it.
I think they view how we watch it.
Like, for instance, when I watch Downfall, it just inherently feels more convincing to me than watching The Bunker, because everybody's speaking in German.
It's also exquisitely well made.
I mean, I think that's something that doesn't get highlighted well enough.
It is hugely convincing.
Like, I am fully on board with, oh yeah, I am watching scenes that were shot in Berlin in 1945 while the Red Army approaches.
Like, this feels Um, whereas, you know, the bunker, uh, for all of its, for all of its highlights does feel like something that was, yeah, this was shot on a, on a BBC lot or whatever, whatever, you know, this doesn't feel like, uh, no, that was actually shot in a, in the bunker.
Wasn't it?
That actually was shot in a bunker.
I don't know.
Okay.
Anyway, it's a very different aesthetic experience.
Yeah, it appeals to me the idea that the, you know, the film that was shot in actually in the bunker feels less convincing than the one that was shot in a set.
I like that because, you know, what I've said this before, what is convincing?
Convincing is an ideological proposition, you know, realistic.
These are convincing, realistic.
These are ideological propositions.
They're not about because I don't know what the bunker looked like, you know, but one feels realistic to me.
And one doesn't.
And why is that?
It's because in some way, one conforms to a certain set of ideas that are in my head, that aren't based on actual knowledge, you know, about how the bunker was lit, for example.
But, you know, in the bunker, everything, the movie The Bunker, Everything's flooded with light, and it feels over-saturated and over-lit and very studio-y.
Whereas in Downfall, the lighting is extraordinarily different.
It's low, diffuse lighting.
It just has this feel of authenticity to it, and that is based upon something other than Anything I know about how the bunker was lit or what it looked like, you know.
So there you go.
There's the aesthetics of cinema for you, including in this case, the fact that everybody's speaking in German.
And I think that ironically, that's probably a factor in the German filmmakers marketing of it abroad.
For once, it was actually probably a plus that this movie was was not in English to market it to an English speaking audience.
Yeah, you may be right.
I mean, you know, it certainly I think it does get it adds to its cultural cachet for it to be an actual German language production.
Whereas if it was, you know, Tom Cruise as Hitler or something, you know.
Yeah, but they're very much going for the authentic experience, the convincing experience.
So if that is if that is if you like their They're aesthetic address to the audience and also inherently therefore also the way they're selling it.
Then if you're going to sell it abroad as this incredibly authentic and convincing experience, then yeah, you want it to be in German.
Yeah.
No, no, agreed.
And although, although it also like so much of this, and this is why I was kind of looking for, you know, like questions about like how true to life is all of this and how, how, you know, honest is this portrayal?
Because like, there's a lot of this that I sit and go like, did Hitler actually say this?
You know, like when he's literally sitting there and saying, like, the German people, all the all the superior ones have already died.
Everyone that's left is an inferior man.
And so they deserve to die anyway.
You know, like that's that's a straight up Bond movie villain shit.
Right.
You know, like, yeah.
And there are a lot of scenes like that in this movie.
You know, you definitely don't.
I mean, I don't you can feel sympathy for anyone who feels the need to shoot themselves in the head.
Maybe not, maybe not if it's Sittler, but like you can you can at least have like a certain human, there's a human moment to like where the end of the film and then all these people are just like, and now I'm going to bite down on cyanide.
You know, that's what we're going to do.
We spend the last 20 minutes of the movie just watching people kill themselves.
Not a fun, not a fun way to end a movie, you know, but even though they're Nazis.
But, you know, there is this there is this kind of Since that, even with all that, I mean, it really leans heavily on, like, what a complete fucking piece of shit Hitler is.
Just in terms of, like, the way he deals with the people around him, he's making all these, you know, kind of speeches about, like, you know, how it doesn't matter.
Like, the thing that he's crying about when Spear reveals his betrayal is, like, Well, no, I actually didn't destroy all of German infrastructure the way you told me to, to prevent the Red Army from invading, because it would have meant the death of the entire German countryside.
And Hitler's like, you fucking bastard.
How dare you do this?
How dare you do this to me?
All of those people could have died.
Germany would have risen from the ashes.
Um, and it's, it's such a like, it's like, again, like, there is a sense in which the Bond villains are like built on this kind of image of Hitler.
But there's also this thing of like, Did Hitler actually say that?
And like, from what I understand, yeah, I guess he kind of did.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, Speer is far from a completely reliable narrator.
I mean, Speer set about attempting to rehabilitate his reputation and denied that he knew about loads of stuff that we now know that he definitely, definitely knew about, you know.
We know as a matter of fact now that he knew about the death camps and stuff like that.
So Spears, he's a very self-serving memoirist, but he's clever enough to couch his Self-rehabilitation in lots of historical truth and accuracy.
And yeah, I mean, Hitler's orders to basically just, the scorched earth orders, you know, to destroy German infrastructure, which undoubtedly would have meant just millions upon millions of Germans just starving.
That's a matter of historical record and Speer, and you know, I don't want to say to his credit because the man was a Nazi who was up to his neck in the whole thing, but Speer actively did try to resist the scorched earth orders and he went around getting other bigwigs in the locales to ignore the orders as well.
So yeah, we know that was absolutely something Hitler wanted.
And it was completely in accordance with his stated worldview, endlessly over and over again stated worldview, which was that the social Darwinism, basically this particularly brutal, savage form of social Darwinism.
Yeah.
No, no.
Agreed.
I mean, again, it's just, it's just so on the nose that it did it.
You know, in the moment it kind of strikes me as breaking that verisimilitude.
Right.
You know, but at the same time, sometimes the stuff that's actually true is the stuff that, you know, like, like that's how terrible these people were.
Right.
And I think that's the thing.
It's like, you know, we are kind of talking about like Spears, like, you know, the not as bad.
And sometimes there is that drill tweet of, Sometimes you don't, you actually don't have to hand it to them.
So we're definitely not kind of going in that direction.
Spear is a monster and like, you know, let's maybe not kill all the German people when we're going to die.
We're all going to die in four extra days anyway.
Maybe that's not the moment in which you get to grow a conscience, right?
Maybe the line should have been well in advance of that.
But, you know, when you've spent years feeding prisoners of war into, you know, slave labor in your factories in order to up the productive capacity of your nation that's currently waging a war of aggression and occupation against the rest of the world, you know, maybe, you know, yeah, I think sort of at the very end saying, actually, let's not kill all our own people.
It's Not really all that impressive.
And maybe let's not kill all our own people.
Like, no, it was fine to kill all the Jewish people.
It was fine to kill.
You can kill all the Russians, you can kill all the Americans you want.
Maybe let's not kill all the German people.
Yeah, no, it's a it's also a running theme in the film.
There's just like fascinating moment where Hitler is standing in front of the and this is early in the film where he's standing in front of this like model, which I think of as like the the Robocop OCP.
Um, uh, model of like the, the risen, uh, I guess this is like Berlin after, after the war, like the plan for what we're going to do with Berlin.
It's got this giant dome and it's got, he's walking through, we've got this medieval architecture, like speaking to the old German ways, you've got this like classical stuff and it's going to be this city of You know, learning and erudition is going to be this art and cultural center that's going to last for thousands of years.
And actually, very, very crucially, it was going to be the biggest capital city in the world.
And the civic buildings are going to be the biggest in the world.
And the one at the middle, it was going to have the dome and it was going to be the biggest dome in the world, etc, etc.
I mean, it's an absolute, I mean, just the, even the model of it, it's just gigantic.
I mean, it's like eight feet across or something.
It's, it's huge.
And yeah, you see that scene and you see like Hitler believes in this and the people around him.
I mean, it's funny that like several of the kind of the upper officers and the ambassadors are kind of like, no, this isn't going to work guys.
We gotta, we gotta cut this.
but like, you know, a lot of the, a lot of other, I mean, evil brawn is certainly kind of on board, you know, full on.
And you know, there were people who still believed in him and who were willing to follow him believed in the kind of the myth of Hitler to the very end.
Again, another thing that feels, you know, almost like, almost like this like caricature of like kind of the, the, the obsessed cult around this person, you know, about this kind of belief in the Fuhrer can do no wrong And it's like kind of God Emperor stuff.
But again, seems pretty accurate to the actual record.
I mean, you know, again, yeah, you know, it puts so much like we've seen these tropes so often, I guess this is what I'm trying to ignorantly point out is that we've seen these tropes so often in Fictionalized portrayals, like we've seen Star Wars, you know, we've seen all these other, you know, kind of sci-fi portrayals that like draw on this kind of idea.
And we've seen the kind of like cheesy sci-fi version often enough, but then realizing like, no, they weren't making any of that shit up.
This was actually what was going on in Hitler's final days, you know.
And I feel like that's something that I run into a lot, just, you know, like when you do kind of like listen to these dipshits talk about stuff and it's like, yeah, no, they really just do come out and say like the stupidest, most insipid shit on a regular basis.
And yeah, no, again, it just, it struck me as someone who doesn't have like a firm grasp on like exactly how much this is and then doing like cursory Googling and going like, yeah, it seems like that's pretty accurate.
So yeah.
The problem in fictional portrayals of evil is very often that evil people seem to be conscious of the fact they're evil.
There's a basic misunderstanding of evil in popular fiction, which is that evil people are people who like evil and think evil is good, right?
The bad guy is the guy who says, yes, I am evil.
I like being evil.
Being evil is a great deal of fun.
Hitler thought he was the good guy.
He thought he was a hero defending Western civilization and all that was good and decent and honorable and true.
You know, he absolutely thought he was a good guy, and all these people that were around him thought he was a hero.
They thought their cause was just and noble, etc.
Absolutely.
I mean, that's slightly problematic, because then you have to admit that loads of them were also completely amoral, self-interested chancers and grifters at the same time.
But there isn't really a contradiction, because people managed to be both at once.
Well, I mean, Trump, Trump standing on January 6th of this year, you know, and doing that speech and, you know, calling on the mass of people to follow him into the Capitol.
And then he fucks off to his level and drops away while they go in and 400 of them have been prosecuted for, you know, Encouraging to the United States government.
And then he's literally like ripping them off by, you know, rebilling them for their campaign donations.
And people lost their life savings because they just forgot to click the, you know, do not renew button because he had it opt out instead of opt in.
And so, I mean, he's literally just grifting off of his own followers.
And that's certainly not the same thing as like literally doing like a General Sherman on your own people, but You know, it's got the same rhymes.
I mean, it's the same pattern of behavior continues, where the leader just doesn't give a... there's me, and I'm the person, I'm the leader, and I have the correct opinion about things, and I'm going to do exactly what the fuck I want to do for the greater good, which might just be for my bank account, and the rest of you can go fuck off.
Yeah, but it's my bank account, and I'm good because the things I believe in are good.
Ergo, if I fill my bank account by any means necessary, that must be a good thing too.
I think that's the logic.
But yeah, it is kind of bizarre when you study the Third Reich, the level of devotion that Hitler was able to instill in some of these people.
I mean, the film doesn't really put it across.
This, I think, gets to the heart of some of the problems with the film.
I do think some of the criticism of the film, and the film received a lot of criticism, I think some of it is kind of unfair.
Lots of people criticized it.
Wim Wenders criticized it.
And one of the things Wim Wenders said was, you know, Hitler isn't given a point of view.
So you just experience him as just a suffering human being.
I don't actually think that's true.
I think the film does.
The film gives him Several scenes where he spells out his worldview, you know, they go out of their way to make sure that he gets a chance to tell you exactly what he stands for.
He talks about the Jews.
He rants and raves about the Jews in the film.
So, yeah, I don't think that's a fair criticism.
But there are problems with the film.
And I think a lot of the problems with the film boil down to You know, accuracy in the face of a lack of context.
And I think there's a problem there that there's just a problem inherent in drama, I think, where if you're going to be making drama out of reality and you're doing it with the explicit aim and intention of making it, quote unquote, realistic, going back to what I was saying before about realistic itself being kind of an ideological proposition.
Of course, none of it's realistic because we know we're watching actors and we know we're watching a film, etc.
But.
If you're making if you're making a quote unquote realistic drama out of real history, particularly something like this, which is so freighted and charged emotionally and morally and politically.
And I do believe that the filmmakers went in with the best of intentions, you know, and attempting to do this in good taste, et cetera.
And I think that you can absolutely see their point where the best way to do it in unimpeachable taste is to just tell the bare truth.
And the film is, there are some departures from historical truth here and there.
But the film is, for the most part, very historically accurate.
But there is just this problem, because there is something about drama that It can't do what non-fiction can do.
Non-fiction can just, you know, somebody walks in and non-fiction can just stop and say, right, this guy, he did X, Y and Z. He was born in such and such a place.
And he's, you know, drama can't do that.
So what you have is a situation where you've got this room full of generals.
And if you know that that one there is supposed to be Keitel, and that one there is supposed to be Yodel, and that one there is supposed to be Krebs, etc., etc., then that's fine.
But if you don't, it's just a room full of generals.
And then going even deeper into it, the film can't tell you, just in the course of its very focused drama, that Keitel and Yodel, they were absolutely obsessed with Hitler.
These were obsessed fanatical, admiring lapdogs.
And this is where we do get into the problem, some of the problems with the film.
One of the characters who appears is Wilhelm Munch.
He's the general who is shown having a sort of argument with Goebbels about the Volkssturm, which is kind of like the German Home Guard, you know, like the old guys who are supposed to be defending Berlin.
And he's also in the bunker at one point, and he sort of says to Hitler, but what about the elderly and the injured and stuff like that?
And Hitler says, oh, fuck them.
You know, it's really weird because this guy was this guy was an SS butcher.
This guy butchered, captured British soldiers outside Dunkirk.
This was not a good guy.
And yet the film, you know, and I don't know, maybe Wilhelm Munch did at some point express concern about the injured and elderly and women and children of Berlin.
He may well have done.
But none of that context is in the film.
And infamously, the guy, Professor Schenk, Who's depicted almost as this heroic figure in the film, right?
He was our one returning cast member from Inglorious Bastards, by the way.
He was the he was the bartender in the in the basement bar in Inglorious Bastards.
Yeah, he's also one of the conspirators, the bomb plot conspirators in Valkyrie.
Oh, interesting.
So he's in all three of those films.
Yeah, that character he's portrayed.
And the film is partly based on his post-war memories.
It's, you know, But he's portrayed in the absence of context about him.
He's portrayed as almost this heroic character.
This guy did experiments on people in Mauthausen.
Nicely done.
Nicely done film.
Yeah, no, I guess I guess you take your you take your you take your relative heroes or you get them.
But yeah, no, it is.
There is a little bit of like It turns out he wasn't as bad as Hitler, and so, like, he's the person that we get to use as our, like, you know, you know, and these people are all portrayed as Nazis, you know, I mean, I don't think that there's a, I don't know, it does, it does get complicated.
I think, I think you're right.
I think it's, you know, if you're making, I mean, if you made this film and literally everyone, what, like, it really did kind of get into that context, because there would be ways of, you know, putting up some, like, a bit on screen or having like a narration or something where it's like, you know, and then Schenck said, did this thing.
And then you cut away to, you know, him experimenting on some of those same people or something, you know, like do some, some kind of like you, there are ways of kind of adding that context back into the film and making it, making it more, giving it more of that heft, more making it more, giving it more of that heft, more of that moral weight
at the same time, it kind of interferes with the thing that they're actually trying to do in the film, which is just to sort of like portray the, portray the events in some kind of like relatively straightforward way.
I mean, I guess there's no there's no right way to adapt it.
I think it's all about like how it works artistically and how it works historically.
And yeah, I mean, it is a problem.
It's definitely a problem because, you know, as we as I kind of started out with, like most people who see this film, at least in the Anglophone world, at least in the United States, are not going to have any fucking clue who Schenck is.
Like, I don't know who Schenck is.
I didn't first time I saw it.
Yeah.
I mean, you said these people are all portrayed as Nazis.
There is kind of an implied opposition in the film between, like, the Nazis and the army, isn't there?
I feel like the film implies that, like, that you've got Hitler and Goebbels on the one hand, and then you've got, like, these decent He has a great line, I would rather you just shot me.
the other, like the crusty old guy who eventually he gets, he's supposed to be shot and he gets promoted to take charge of the defense of Berlin.
He has a great line.
I would rather you just shot me.
That is a pretty good line.
I think that's, I think that's Weidling.
I think that's his name.
I don't have it in front of me.
He has a, he, the text of his speech that's relayed over the loudspeakers at the end, that's taken from, that's taken directly from history.
And he did make the remark about Hitler abandoning his people, which, you know, several people who were there at the time thought that they, there was a guy called, Referring to the Kershaw biography, what was his name?
Koller, I think his name was.
He thought, oh yeah, Blow your brains out.
Great.
How does that help?
You know, that's just abandoning the German people in the time of their greatest need.
You're just, you're basically just running away.
You know, you're not staying to fight or help or negotiate or anything like that.
Just blow your brains out.
Um, which I think is very true.
I mean, Hitler's just basically doing what, um, the, uh, uh, what's his name?
Fegelein does.
Um, his, yeah he's Himmler's well he's he's not Himmler's guy he's Hitler's guy but he's Himmler's SS Hitler's SS adjutant I think so he's the he's the sort of liaison between Hitler and Himmler and he he just buggers off he's also married to Eva Braun's sister and he just buggers off at one point and I'm you know I was watching it this time around and I was thinking Yeah, that's basically what Hitler's doing.
You know, they catch him and he's lying around drinking.
And, you know, he's deserted his his duty.
Well, what's Hitler doing?
He's just lying around doing nothing, getting ready to shoot himself.
That's just desertion, isn't it?
And all the people around him, like all of his all of his officers are sitting in, you know, getting drunk outside his office, you know.
Yeah.
You know, there's not like the film also really kind of highlights this this element of, you know, Hitler's having, you know, like these kind of like very fine meals on nice tablecloth and China, you know, in the bunker while, you know, the people we should definitely talk about the the invasion of the Red Army.
But like the city is being bombed, like people are dying, horrifying deaths the entire runtime of this film above ground.
And then Hitler is just kind of like sitting there.
And having, you know, having his little pity party for himself because he didn't murder all the generals the way Stalin did when he took power.
And even within that context, there's also the sense of like Hitler's got, you know, his wife is there.
Hitler's got his like pretty secretary and like a couple of other people around them.
Who are, you know, he's he's got, you know, he's kind of got his friends around him and he's got this kind of sense of like domestic tranquility and domestic comfort.
And Hitler as well has his family, his whole family sitting around one of the darkest scenes in the film.
You know, the way that ends.
But then you've got all these other generals who are, you know, they're not allowed to smoke.
You know, they don't.
That's possibly my favorite bit in the entire movie, where immediately after Hitler shot himself, all the generals get their cigarettes.
Yeah, no, it was so funny.
It's so funny.
No, no, I think, I think my, I think my favorite, my favorite little incongruous moment is the, there's a bit, I forget the exact context, but Shank walks into the like operating theater for the first time where they're just like hacking limbs off.
I mean, you know, it's, and he's just kind of like standing there.
He walks in and he kind of looks to his left And he sees this guy like just sawing into somebody and then like the leg just kind of pops off and lands in a little bucket.
And you just get this shot of Shank and he's like, OK, well, I mean, I don't know, for some reason that just struck me as it's a very like Romero moment for me.
And I think I was looking for that like slight that slight bit of surrealness.
You know, I don't know.
It struck me.
It struck me as, you know, well, that's that's intense.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, it's a very it's a very intense movie.
Yeah.
I just just going back to what I was saying about sort of the implied opposition between the army and the Nazis.
One of the invented scenes is the confrontation between Munker and Goebbels in the bunker that where Munker is like, you know, your Volksturm guys can't cope with what's happening.
And Goebbels is like, oh, fuck them, you know.
Some of the dialogue that Goebbels has given there is supposedly stuff he actually said, but he didn't say it then and there in that scene.
So that scene seems to have been put there just to sort of emphasize a division, a difference between the callous, fanatical Nazi leadership and the noble, responsible Army leadership, you know?
And I think that's very irresponsible.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, the army leadership was made up of hardened, fanatical Nazis.
As I say, Keitel, Yodel, these weren't just opportunist, careerist lickspits.
These were people who were absolutely convinced that Hitler was a genius and, you know, that they were totally signed on.
And one of the problems with this is that this is one of the This is one of the lines taken by conservative German historians.
There's a really good article somebody shared with me.
It's a response to the film by the historian, I believe deceased now, sadly, David Cesarini and Peter Longarich.
And I'll put it in the show notes where they respond to the movie.
And they say, I've got it up on my phone, actually.
They point out That the film is influenced by.
And I think maybe they overstate their case a little bit.
I mean, firstly, they talk about Munker and Schenck, some of the stuff I was saying earlier.
But I think some of their criticisms are slightly overstated.
But I think there's a lot of truth in the idea.
That the yeah, here it is.
The film's agenda, I'm quoting now, the film's agenda echoes the historic strike controversy in the late 1980s over the interpretations of the Third Reich and parallels the efforts of former Chancellor Cole to allow Germans to feel comfortable with their past.
Although Cole has gone, his legacy informs the film.
This is one of the things that these conservative revisionist historians in the 80s, people like Ernst Nolte, they emphasised stuff like, you know, they made arguments like you had the supposed nobility and ethicalness of the German army as opposed to the SS, which is Largely mythical.
Loads of people in the army were completely convinced of the Nazi cause, and the Nazi was up to its neck in brutality in war crimes, etc.
And the army was up to its neck in brutality in war crimes.
And they argued that you could empathize with German soldiers fighting against the Red Army, because the Red Army was such a bunch of barbarians, and undoubtedly the Red Army did dreadful things, don't get me wrong, but You know, that completely elides loads of context about what's actually happening.
And the wider argument is like something you referred to earlier, sort of the idea that Nazism and Soviet Communism were kind of just very, very Like almost exactly the same thing, just in different iterations.
And in fact, Nolte and some of the other conservative historians, they argue that you have to understand Nazism and all the way up to Auschwitz, this kind of like a reaction to the to the barbarity of the Soviet Union and the Gulag and stuff like that.
And that's certainly a take.
This caused a huge argument in the in the 1980s.
That's what is referred to in that article as the the historiker strike, this huge squabble among historians.
You know, and it's all part of this attempt to sort of, not because they're all, they all claim to be anti-Nazi and to condemn Hitler etc, but they emphasize things like The uniqueness of the Holocaust is a huge topic.
I, as we've talked about before, I fall down on the side of saying that I think it is completely justifiable to call it unique in many respects.
But, you know, these conservatives, I think you have to be careful with that, but I think it's absolutely true.
But these sorts of conservative historians, they emphasized You know, there was the Armenian genocide and then there was war crimes of the Allies against the Germans.
And it's all this great big attempt to You know, in the guise of giving extra context, what they're actually doing is decontextualizing.
They're actually muddying the waters.
And I think this film, certainly Cesarini and Langerich, they say this, and I think maybe, as I say, I think they slightly overstate, but I think there's something to this.
It is playing into this idea of kind of like the German people as being just straightforwardly the victims.
of the Nazis, you know, just this tyranny that just sort of did this to them.
And the army was noble and fought its corner and behaved as it should to defend them.
But it was run by these terrible people.
And I think there again, I don't think the film is actually quite saying these things as such.
But I think it's kind of Yeah.
And it's through this lack of context, isn't it?
Right.
So I'm going to... I know I've been talking for a long time, but this was something I wanted to... Oh, no, no, no, no, absolutely.
I agree with you.
And I want to kind of come at this a slightly different way.
That is, a whole lot of people who were pretty high up people in the Nazi regime, or at least the Wehrmacht, ended up being high up officials in West Germany after the war, you know.
Yeah, Adenauer was very much sort of a figurehead, you know, loads of the other people running the, not just the political, but the business establishment in West Germany were Nazis.
Right.
Ex-Nazis, I suppose we have to say, yeah.
Right.
So it doesn't surprise me that, you know, kind of like saying like, Even this kind of implication, you know, in order to get the damn thing made, if you're going to make a movie about this era, kind of leaning against the, like, well, every person in this, every German person in this film is a monster who was on board with the Nazi regime, you know, seems to me maybe that's something that the financiers in the studio behind it were sort of, you know, like, that's a way you get it made.
Almost the same way that military apparatus has to be portrayed as kind of like ultimately good, maybe infected by a few bad apples within American productions, almost.
There seems to be kind of a parallel there.
The other thing that I would point out is, You know, what you were talking about, about the way the German people are seen as just kind of fundamentally victims of the Nazis.
I mean, they're portrayed as like victims of this situation, ultimately.
I mean, one of the things that struck me upon this rewatch was, you know, I had forgotten just how much footage there was.
Of the Red Army being the most terrifying fucking thing on the planet.
I've seen full-on disaster movies that do not have as much of a force of nature behind the tornado or whatever as the Red Army is in this film.
They are an implacable and irresistible force.
And you don't, you never even see the Red Army until the very end.
You have a handful of scenes in which you see actual faces, but you don't even see them as people.
It's just like this, this thing kind of coming and destroying Berlin.
And you definitely get the sense, at least I got the sense watching the film that, you know, the German people are stuck between this, Unbeatable force of the Red Army and the completely unresisting or completely kind of ramrod, unable to compromise and able to surrender Nazi party leadership led by Hitler.
And so there is the sense in which the, the, just kind of the German civilians are seen as blameless in this whole thing.
And, you know, far be it for me to blame civilians for being, you know, who are being, you know, elderly civilians who are being murdered by, you know, artillery shells and like, you know, saying, well, you deserved it.
That's not what I'm saying.
But there's a lot of complicity among the German people with, you know, what was going on in the Nazi era.
Like, and, you know, the film doesn't deal with that at all.
There's no, I mean, they are seen as, you know, as ultimately, if not angelic, at least, you know, highly humanized, you know, and in a way that strikes me as a very, you know, kind of political, both sides-y kind of opinion.
Yeah, it really does sort of weight the dice by concentrating on this band of kids as well, doesn't it?
Right.
And I think that's absolutely a story that needs to be told.
You know, the fact that children were caught up in this and children were indoctrinated and children were told that they had to go fight.
And you get the scene where Hitler goes down the line of these young boys and sort of taps them on the shoulder and squeezes their cheeks and stuff like that.
And You know, it's actually that actual kid was fictional, but there was a there that was a real moment in history.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Alfred Zeck was that kid's name in real life.
And he ends up being in the army until 1947.
He drops out when he's 14 and then walks back home for 100 miles and to the bombed out shack that he grew up in or whatever.
It's you know, it's a pretty horrifying story.
I just read his Wikipedia.
I linked to it in the show notes.
But but yeah.
Yeah, but the actual sequences involving those kids are all fictionalized as far as I can tell.
There's no truth behind.
And then there's the young girl soldier who gets shot because she can't bear to surrender to the Red Army or whatever.
None of that stuff seems to be real.
It's just a dramatization of the sorts of things that were happening at the end of the war.
Yeah, and you do have to be careful with that.
Like, it reminds me of the bit in Apocalypse Now where Colonel Kurtz is talking about these dreadful Viet Cong.
You know, we, meaning the Americans, went in and we inoculated all these Vietnamese kids.
And then the Viet Cong came in and we came back and we found all the inoculated arms had been hacked off and piled in.
You know, and that's just straight from John Milius's diseased imagination.
You know, that did not fucking happen.
Oh, it's okay.
You know who was slopping off hands?
King Leopold in Belgium.
Another story.
It's fine.
Making it very sympathetic kids.
Undoubtedly, kids were caught up in it.
Suffered horribly.
But it does again, it's just showing you that and kind of this, this this noble family man, father, etc.
And what he suffers at the hands of, like these this roving gang of Nazi fanatics who are, who are hanging anybody that is now fighting the Red Army.
It just leaves so much out, doesn't it?
And I don't know, it's worrying to me.
It's funny, I liked the film a lot more before I sat down and started recording this.
I'm much more critical of it having this conversation because I was kind of like, yeah, it's got its problems, but you know, it does a lot of things right.
And I still agree with that.
But like the problems are much more like they're much more salient to talk about.
It's it's much, you know, once you start to really kind of realize how much context is lost here and how much The film is leaning on a certain view, a subtle twisted view of these events, then it does become a little bit less defensible, I think.
Yeah, and I'm not I'm not saying that Germans, you know, Germans who were there, for instance, don't have some reason to feel that they were in some sense victimized.
You know, a lot of Germans were victimized by the Nazis.
A lot of Germans who didn't want the Nazis in power were subjected to Nazi power and dragged into a war that they didn't want.
The majority of the Germans at the start of the war didn't want a war, et cetera, et cetera.
And yeah, the Red Army behaved atrociously, the Allies bombed in a terroristic fashion.
All of this is true.
And I just think you can't tell the story of the German victims of Nazism in quite this way, in quite this sort of decontextualized way.
in the context of the history that we have, which, if we're honest, is the history of a Germany that's never really gotten to grips with this.
Right.
I mean, for all of the for all the work that I think Germany has done, you know, which is not, which is not insignificant, like they've never, you know, the whole world has never really gotten to really get at the... Well, no, I mean, look, when I when I say that, I'm acutely aware of the fact that my country just has a completely delusional, if not, in fact, psychotic case of just complete self delusion when it comes to our history as an empire, you know.
Right.
Well, I started reading the Jakarta Method this week, so you can understand how I feel about my government right now.
But, you know, yeah, no, I wasn't trying to be critical of you or anything.
I was just trying to, you know.
Yeah, I agree.
I do want to highlight, not to not to take you off of what you're doing.
I did want to highlight a couple of other elements of the film because we are kind of getting to our wrap up period.
And one of the things is Trottel Jung.
Yeah.
Arguably the viewpoint character of the film.
I mean, her memoir is one of the things that the script is based on.
She's the secretary, who is 22 years old, and her real footage of her bookends the film at the beginning and end.
And in her recollections, I mean, the thing that she says is, you know, Hitler was a kindly father figure to me.
Like, he was He was always kind.
I mean, he's shown as being very kind to her and like the very first scene, you know, you've got like the monster Hitler and he's kind of like, don't worry.
I make a lot of mistakes in dictation.
He won't make as many as I do.
And then she kind of fucks up and then he just kind of goes, OK, let's start again.
And then she gets the job.
And it's like, oh, look, what a nice what a nice fellow this Hitler guy is.
Gold star Hitler.
He certainly did make plenty of mistakes dictating.
Right.
You know, I have no doubt of that.
But he wasn't a very good dictator.
Yeah, no, I find, I do, I do really like the actress who plays Trottle.
And I do think that she, she is a, she portrays this kind of sense of like this kind of gradually this, this understanding that like, we are, I am here, I'm going to die here, but I have to in order to support this, Our leader and this man that has been good to me and that who someone I that I respect.
And then at the end, just kind of has to go.
Yeah, no, that was kind of fucked up.
I've got to get out of here before, you know, I'm going to die.
And apparently she spent like decades without really talking about this stuff, as a whole lot of people did.
And, you know, I mean, that becomes a thing that, you know, a lot of the Nazis today kind of talk about, like, well, why did they wait 40 years?
And then they kind of come out there and they write a book and it's like, yeah, well, That's not uncommon, even when, you know, you didn't end up working directly for the greatest mass murderer in human history.
So, you know, it happens.
But yeah, no, I just, I wanted to, just in terms of your thoughts about Nyunga, or Trottle, and also Eva Braun, who I think is another kind of fascinating character in the film.
The film does make time for the women in a way that you wouldn't necessarily expect it to.
And I don't know, did you have any kind of thoughts about those characters, the way that those elements were portrayed?
Well, I think it's kind of the same thing again.
I think it's sort of misleading by telling the truth, but kind of only being able to tell part of it by the limitations of the of the aesthetic form of drama, like that article by Cesarini and Lungarich.
I'll quote from that again.
Where's the bit about Traudljonger?
Yeah.
Troll Younger appears in the film's opening scene, fresh-faced apolitical 22-year-old who's engaged by Hitler because she comes from his beloved Munich.
The audience never learns that her background was saturated in Nazism.
Her father was a fanatical nationalist who fought in the right-wing Freikorps in the early 20s.
Participating in Hitler's abortive putsch in 1923, he earned the Nazi blood order medal.
Although he was estranged from Traudl for many years, they were reunited in 1936, by which time he was security director of an armaments factory and held the SS officer rank.
Traudl herself enrolled in the Nazi League of German Girls in 1935, and in 1938 joined the elite Faith and Beauty organization.
Its mission was to bring young women up to pass on the National Socialist philosophy of life.
She was an activist in other Nazi organizations, too, although she did not formally join the Nazi Party in 1944.
By the time she started working for Hitler, she had impeccable ideological and political credentials.
So the film Even if every single second of how it portrays her reactions and her facial expressions in the film is accurate, it's still misleading you through leaving out all that context.
Oh, God, I didn't even realize that is... God, what a fucking... Oh, man, that's...
Because it's like the film has a story to tell, which is like the impressionable, innocent, young German girl who doesn't know any better falls under the spell of this apparently wonderful, kind, fascinating, powerful, great leader.
And it leads her to consent to things that she never imagined she'd go.
You know, it's the same thing again.
It's the German people victimized by this mesmeric, you know, Jekyll and Hyde character, isn't it?
And you can only tell that story if you leave out all this context.
Well, and like, how did you get that interview in the middle of the night, you know, with four other secretaries who apparently aren't even interviewed and they just get to go fuck off now, apparently?
Oh, you're a Munich girl, please.
Oh, I got the job.
They're very happy for her.
Now they get to go and not get the job.
Kind of a shitty thing to do, Hitler.
You know, shittiest thing he does in the movie.
Yeah, that's his worst thing in the movie.
But yeah, no, it definitely, you know, you know, how did you get that interview?
How did you get that interview, Trottle?
Oh yeah, my, my dad is a high up Nazi guy who, you know, participated in the Beer Hall Push.
Knows Hitler personally.
You know, it's like, oh, that, that, that actually adds a lot of context that makes things much more clear what's actually happening in that scene.
Yes.
And you could have given us that again with, like, a couple of lines of dialogue.
You could have explained that.
You know, Hitler could have said, oh, you're so-and-so's daughter, right?
And yes, it would have been by implication, but it certainly would have given us the hint that the filmmakers are at least aware of this issue, which, you know, so much of it is not even, it's completely elided, right?
You know?
So, yeah.
Yeah.
There's another bit in the film that I think is kind of emblematic of the entire film for me, which is when the dog is poisoned.
That's, again, based on a real event.
And what happens in the film is that they feed the capsule to the dog with Hitler present.
And Hitler is emotionally affected by the death of the dog, right?
He does this thing where he sort of looks to one side.
You don't quite see him cry, but it's obviously, it's implied that, oh, you know, Blondie, my beloved dog.
At least according to Kershaw, that didn't happen.
I'm going to read the bit in Kershaw's book.
This is the one where Jack does all the actual research.
So, you know, saves me from the effort.
Professor Werner Haas, summoned from his duties in the nearby public air raid shelter.
He's the guy hacking off the limbs in that bit you were just talking about.
Shortly before the afternoon briefing, aided by Hitler's dog attendant, Sergeant Fritz Turnau, he forced open the dog's jaws and crushed the prussic acid capsule with a pair of pliers.
The dog slumped in an instant, motionless to the ground.
Hitler was not present.
However, he entered the room immediately afterwards.
He glanced for a few seconds at the dead dog.
Then his face like a mask, he left without saying anything and shut himself in his room.
So that's very different to what we see on screen.
Yeah.
Witnesses it.
And yeah, no, he comes in the moment after.
I mean, you could see how without like paying attention to the details, it sort of feels similar.
But the elements that are changed are exactly those that make us more sympathetic to Hitler.
It's portrayed exactly the way it's described there in Kershaw.
It's portrayed exactly that way in the bunker.
Yes, it is.
Downfall goes out of its way to change it.
Now, I think what's going on there is that Downfall has a story to tell you.
Downfall wants to say Hitler is a human being, which is, of course, true, banal, unexceptionable.
He was capable of emotions.
Banal, true, unexceptionable.
Oh, weird paradox.
How do we make sense of this?
A man who could start this war, do these terrible things, condemn the German people to destruction, and yet, look, he loves his dog.
Now, I don't think the film is saying Hitler loved his dog, ergo he was actually a great guy, or ergo he was actually, in some sense, redeemable.
I genuinely do not think that's what the film is saying.
I think the film is trying to say, Something profound about, you know, he could be both at once.
He could be this man who was sentimental about his beloved pet dog and also completely callous and monstrous about human beings that he didn't care about.
So he's a man who has these self-involved emotions for creatures that make no demands upon him.
But when it comes to other human beings, he doesn't care, etc.
And I think as far as it goes, there's probably something to that.
But it wants to tell you that story, which is which is, you know, it might it might have something to say.
There might be some insight there.
But in order to say it, it has to tell you a lie, despite the fact that its whole thing, the way it's shot, the way that it's framed, the way it's lit, everything is screaming at you, the way it's marketed, screaming at you, authentic, realistic, convincing, based on facts.
That's its ideology.
That's the ideology of this piece.
So despite all that, it makes that bid up to make its point.
And the effect of it is to humanise Hitler.
Fine.
That's an interesting thing to do.
This person who's sort of a caricature and a monster.
We can re-humanise, re-understand him as a human being, the better to understand him.
I'm fine with all that.
But the trouble is, it humanises him in a way that he simply, on the facts, did not deserve.
He didn't actually care about his dog.
Right.
Well, he didn't even care about his dog.
Yeah.
There's also the I mean, just in terms of the way he interacts with the people around him and kind of coming back to the to the to the women in the film.
He is routinely portrayed as being very kind and caring with low level people.
He meets with the boys, the boys that he gives the iron crosses to his secretaries, with the kind of the nobodies around him.
People who are completely under his control.
People completely under his control and people who have no, who are not in a power grappling relationship with him.
And yet with everyone, the higher up in the command that they are, and if they are not completely kowtowing to him at all times, he has immense, you know, hatred for them and abuses them, you know, verbally at some length.
And in some ways, you know, physically or, you know, sentences them to death, et cetera, et cetera.
And so, again, that kind of plays with this whole idea that the film is really, I mean, this is the point of the film, right?
Is that, you know, Hitler, Hitler had his human moments.
You know, he doesn't go and kick the dog, except he did actually kick the dog, you know, like, you know, you know, You know, Hitler's great Jewish friend, you know, or whatever.
Like, there is this element that the film is trying to get that across.
And I understand that.
And some of what we do on this podcast, or some of what I do on this podcast, is to try to also humanize the figures that I'm covering.
And that I'm trying to help explain and to say, like, there are times in which, you know, these people are human and that they do have, you know, human problems and human scale problems.
And you know what?
That just kind of makes them more monstrous.
Because if Hitler did love his dog and Hitler did feel bad about having to put his dog down, how did he feel that?
What about the 6 million Jews?
You know, like, What does that say about his feelings about the Jewish people in Germany and the rest of Europe?
If they got to go to a death camp and the dog, well, you know, he felt bad, you know, that he had to kill the dog, like, you know, that just makes him worse.
But the film isn't like portraying it that way.
The film is portraying it as this kind of humanizing moment in which we get to You know, empathize with Hitler.
Well, as I say, I think the film is going for critique with that scene.
My problem is that by it's just doing it in a in a narrativized way that actually misrepresents the facts, you know, and it's a very minor fact.
But even so, the film has staked its case upon, you know, for itself, upon the idea that it's this ruthlessly truthful account of the facts.
Well, it's no.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I have complicated.
I mean, again, I was much more inclined to come into this and basically praise the film.
And now I feel like we've been very harsh to the film, but I feel like it deserves it.
It deserves this criticism, honestly.
Yeah, it's a very good film.
You know, I do legitimately think it's great.
I think the acting is uniformly brilliant.
I think the way it's directed is fantastic.
There are some questionable decisions here and there.
But yeah, it's extremely well made.
And I think the intentions behind it are fundamentally pretty good.
And I don't I don't think you could come away from it actually thinking this is a pro Hitler film or a sympathetic.
Oh, no, no, I'm not.
I'm not.
I'm not arguing that.
I'm not arguing that.
No, neither am I. But even so, it's just this this topic is so freighted.
And the film is it's trumpeting its authenticity in a way that I think just both of those things combined kind of.
They just make it kind of essential.
To really interrogate it.
Yeah, I'd agree.
I don't know.
Do you have anything else?
We've gone through my notes.
I don't really have any other anything else kind of jumping out at me as something that's kind of begging to be discussed.
Unless you want to talk about unless you want to talk about a Magda Himmler murdering her children.
Magda Goebbels.
Goebbels, excuse me, my mistake.
I know the difference.
It was something that's on there.
No, not really.
I mean, again, Kershaw says that somebody else Did the actual poisoning?
Kershaw says it was Dr. Stumpfeger that that crushed the capsules inside the kids mouths.
Apparently there are other accounts that say she did it or they both did it.
Both of the movies, The Bunker and Downfall, both have her doing it on their own, which is much more dramatic.
It's much more dramatic.
Yeah.
Yeah, again, they both can't resist giving her that Medea moment.
But yeah.
God, she was a nasty piece of work.
Well, again, one of those things of, you know, did Gerpels actually look like that?
You know, it's like blood, red, sunken in eyes.
It's like a skull.
And then you go Google a photo and like, no, he did.
He did kind of look like that.
It was a bit more Weasley, I think, than the guy they cast in the movie.
He's, you know, the only thing that can make him look worse is if he was just tended a little bit more in that Stephen Miller direction.
Yeah, slightly dodgy.
I've always thought the perfect person to play Goebbels would have been Milton Johns.
I don't know.
You probably don't know the actor.
I mean, but if you if you saw him, you would recognize him and you would.
He's in Doctor Who, right?
He's in Doctor Who several times.
Yeah.
He's one of my favorite British actors from that era.
I think he would have been great.
Yeah, I've got a photo.
Yeah, I could.
I'd have to.
I'd have to find one from that period.
But yeah, no.
Yeah, I could go on board with that.
Oh, he's in The Empire Strikes Back.
That's fun.
Yeah.
As is Michael Sheard, who, of course, is also in Doctor Who and who plays Himmler in The Bunker.
Oh, he played Eichmann in the 88 series, Warm Remembrance, apparently.
So, you know, how many British actors of that era have never played a Nazi is the question.
Whereas, yeah, there's probably loads of them.
Whereas some British actors have just spent pretty much their entire careers playing Nazis.
I mean, I was expecting a more of a crossover between between the Glorious Bastards and Downfall.
The fact that it's like one actor and it's that guy was was definitely kind of the surprise for me because I was really expecting like, oh, no, the guy who played Gerbles in one played, you know, Whatever.
But no, I mean, I feel like we've kind of covered the film.
I don't feel like we left a lot on the table here.
I mean, even though the film was very rich, there's a lot to talk about.
I don't feel like I mean, I feel like it's just kind of the same thing over and over again.
It's exquisitely well made.
All the acting is brilliant.
The memes are funny.
And, you know, the film has definite problems the way it portrays certain elements.
And those are maybe just kind of built into the material way that the film had to get made.
Like, maybe the film doesn't exist without those problems, but still problematic and disappointing in some ways.
Yeah.
I have complicated feelings about it now.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
I have complicated feelings about it, too, which we could have saved you an hour and a half, really, if we just said that at the start.
Yeah.
What Daniel's just said.
Plus, we both have complicated feelings about it.
There we go.
We could have been over and through this in five minutes.
Yeah.
And then we could have just talked about something else for an hour.
It would have been fine.
All right.
Okay.
Wrapping up.
I think for the next bonus episode, we're going to do something a little bit different.
I did want to announce it because it's a book.
We're going to do a book.
I think this was, I don't know.
I don't think we officially made this announcement or had this conversation, but I think we're both down for it.
Well, it's your choice, so you get to decide.
We're going to do a book and it's going to be the very first Red Dwarf novel, Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers.
Bit of a change of pace.
Bit of a change of pace, but something that I think, you know, you know, the thing is that, like, I'm just imagining that, like, so much of our audience, A, has no fucking idea what Red Dwarf is.
And even if they do, they have no idea that there was a book.
And yet, Jack and I both kind of had this, this is like a formative book in our young adulthoods, and we both kind of deeply love the series, at least most of the series, and this book, and it has definite on-point themes for this podcast series.
And we kind of joked about it, and then it's like, now let's just do this.
Let's just do Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers.
I'm probably going to include a link to the there is a PDF version of this so you can read this book if you choose to.
I'll include it in the show notes so you have time to read the book if you're so inclined, because it's it's it's it's a great it's a great thing to read.
And check out the TV series as well, at least the first season or two if you choose to.
But I'm just announcing that now, even though we won't really record that for a month, just to kind of give people a chance to kind of get up to speed if they if they choose to do so.
So yeah, that's going to be our next bonus episode for June.
Great.
OK, well, that was bonus episode five and it is now finished.
So you can you can fuck off now.
No, I thought, you know, like, oh, yeah, this would be an easy one.
And then, you know, I thought, oh, yeah, we'll just joke around and talk about the movie, how bad Hitler is.
And then we get it got a lot more serious.
This is what happens to us.
Well, yeah, this is one about which I have thoughts, as you might have noticed.
Oh, yeah, no, no, no.
And, you know, my thing was, you know, like, I just don't you know, I don't have a big knowledge of the actual history.
And so it's always a problem for me to kind of talk about these things, because I'm always like, well, I did some cursory googling, and it seems accurate to me.
And then Jack's like, I have the two volume cursory biography in front of me, and I read several chapters of it in preparation for this.
And I'm like, yeah, Jack did the research.
It's fine.
Yeah.
Although, yeah, I mean, I was slightly alarmed.
Trowdell Younger, right, her husband, Mr. Younger.
He was killed in 1945.
He was like an airman or something.
He was killed in the war.
No mention of that at all.
And I was a bit alarmed rereading Kershaw because he keeps on referring to her as Frowline Younger.
That's pretty basic, Ian.
That unnerves me that you got that wrong.
Yeah, her main name is Humps, and I think she's actually introduced as Humps at the beginning of the film.
That's right.
And then later, and then like, you know, after the initial scene, it's just two and a half years later, she's suddenly Yunga, but there's no explanation for that at all.
So, yeah.
The youngest of his private secretaries.
She felt great guilt for liking the greatest criminal to have ever lived.
I believe she genuinely did as well.
I mean, I yeah, there's no reason to doubt that.
I mean, you know.
But she was with Hitler's encouragement in June 1944.
She married Waffen SS officer Hans Berman Young.
That's right.
Yeah, he was in the SS Air Corps.
Yeah.
Who had been a valet and orderly to Hitler.
Jesus.
Yeah, he was in the fucking SS Liebstandarte.
That's right.
I'd forgotten that.
I mean, I'm just imagining, like, an upstairs-downstairs type sitcom with, like, Hitler and the Jungas now.
Hi, old honey, I'm home.
With, like, the Jungas are like, you know, oh, yeah, I had to fold his underpants today, sweetie.
And then she's like, oh, yeah.
Also, the thing with Trudeau is, like, The thing with Dreidel is like, oh, no, I had no idea how what monstrous things were being being done by the Nazi regime.
Now, allow me to take dictation from Adolf Hitler for two and a half years.
Like, yeah, I kind of have a feeling you might have like there might have been some signs, some hints.
And so that dictation that the film doesn't quote it in full, but the testament he dictates to her before he kills himself, there's He doesn't quite mention the Holocaust, but he sort of almost mentions the Holocaust.
Yeah, well, there's a lot of that going around, right?
Oh, yeah.
That was I Don't Speak German.
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