Hitler in the bunker

After a week of Christmas celebrations with my family, the story of Adolf Hitler in his bunker has a familiar resonance. Admittedly, my nephew doesn't have a silly mustache and the stakes aren't quite as high, but the temper tantrums, the looming sense of guilt for past behaviour and the claustrophobia are as visceral as in that scene from Downfall when Bruno Ganz kicks off about the officer classes.

I've always been less ambivalent about making stupid claims like this than I have been about Downfall: much as Ganz deserved praise for his performance and I've enjoyed the various YouTube remixes, I remain concerned that Hirschbiegel's film failed to uncover anything original in its representation of the monorchic maniac. Ganz stomps about shouting and cursing, and the historical detail is sufficiently accurate: but the portrayal of Hitler is determinedly monstrous. His late wedding to long-time partner Eva Braun, or his fraught friendships with the rest of his ghastly gang, aren't portrayed as humanising but just more madness. The lack of emotional control, the general inability to accept responsibility: it's Hitler as madman, as evil, as the source of all terror.

By the time of Ganz's rant, Hitler is less an individual than a symbol of a nation gone mad. It's pretty easy to understand why the Holocaust happened and why Germany ended up getting soundly defeated if someone like Ganz's Adolf was running the show. He becomes the scapegoat for the Nazi years, a convenient hanger for every manner of insanity and cruelty that happened in Europe between about 1933 and 1945.

And this is strangely old fashioned, an emphasis on history as the story of 'great men' rather than a collection of diverse narratives. The economics of the Weimar Republic, the willingness of ordinary people to grass up their neighbours, systemic social antisemitism, the cowardice of British politicians in the face of Nazism's rise: none of these are accountable when it's easier to blame one crazy Charlie Chaplin lookalike.

Whether Downfall is historically accurate, or whether it deserved its success, are irrelevant to my worries. The way it presents Hitler - and interestingly, when I wandered onto a neo-fascist discussion forum, the posters were pretty keen on Ganz's version - allows him to become an excuse, a way of explaining away one of the most disturbing episodes in human history. Effectively, the responsibility falls onto one man - like some kind of inverted Christ, Hitler dies for the sins of the world.

It makes me sick to write that sentence.

Here's the thing: as a representation of a particular moment in history, Downfall is acceptably accurate for my tastes. The script, the cinematography, the performances are all superb. But in its emphasis on Hitler as the source of all evil, and quite possibly insane, I find it morally reprehensible. The Nazis did terrible things, and a serious attempt to assess their meaning fails if it limits responsibility to one man, or even a cabal of idiots.

Meanwhile, here's a spectacular website about Antichrists.