On a visa run to Berlin last week I saw the movie that had all of Germany talking this fall. “Der Untergang,” or “The Downfall,” deals with Hitler’s last days in his bunker below Berlin. In two and a half hours, the film clinically depicts the suicidal rage that gripped the Nazi leadership as the Red Army closed in on them in the spring of 1945.
Hitler, played masterfully by Bruno Ganz, is portrayed as a man – not a monster – who shows avuncular concern for his young secretary. His madness only comes to light when he raves at his generals or goes on anti-Semitic tirades. His humanness reminds us of how banal evil can be.
World War II will not let us go. In Germany, Russia and the United States, the war has been the subject of countless books, films and memorials. As the 60th anniversary of the war’s end approaches next year, public attention will only grow.
The number of surviving participants in the war is dwindling fast, however, and the significance of the conflict will inevitably fade.
The growing distance from the war has allowed for reconciliation among former enemies and a more nuanced understanding of what happened. In recent years the French have recognized that not everyone fought in the Resistance; the Swiss have uncovered the shameful profit of neutrality; and Poles have confronted their country’s wartime anti-Semitism.
Germans, too, have recently broken a long-standing taboo by openly discussing the millions of German civilians who suffered during the war. Given the critical self-examination German society has subjected itself to, this development is not cause for concern. What is worrisome is that once next year’s commemorations are over, World War II will accelerate in its passage from living memory to textbook history.
Although I was born in 1970, I consider myself a member of the last generation shaped by World War II. All the older people I knew as a child had wartime memories. When I visited my Swiss grandparents in Zurich, I was always intrigued to peek into the bomb shelter in their basement. My grandfather spent most of the war on military duty, and a German aunt never met her father, who was killed in combat.
Today, Europe is prosperous, whole and at peace. But a movie like “The Downfall” is a powerful call for vigilance. The multiplex cinema where I saw the film is only a stone’s throw from the location of Hitler’s bunker. That area – once a wasteland abutting the Berlin Wall – is now all glass and steel and bright lights. It took more than half a century to complete the reconstruction of Berlin. It took only a few weeks to reduce it to rubble.
Lucian Kim is deputy business editor of The Moscow Times.
