We’re in the middle of awards season, a time for reflection on film and the greatest made. It’s also a time to remembering the losses of the industry, and the overlooked films or roles. It’s perhaps rather poignant then, that during all this, Swiss character actor Bruno Ganz has passed away.
Ganz, for those who can’t remember was the short, stern-voiced character actor who appeared in several high profile films; for academics it’s probably his turn as an angel in Wim Wenders Wings of Desire and it’s lesser sequel Faraway, So Close! For others it’s perhaps supporting turns in Liam Neeson thriller Unknown, or for his roles in other thrillers like The Boys From Brazil, the remake of The Manchurian Candidate, Lars von Trier’s The House that Jack Built, Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth Without Youth, Ridley Scott’s The Counsellor, or in post-war dramas Remember and Kate Winslet drama The Reader. Most recently he was seen having a blast in Sally Potter’s The Party.
World cinema fans might even know him for his turns in In Order of Disappearance (currently being remade as Cold Pursuit) or Der Baader-Meinhof Complex.
But most of all, to those tuned into cinema, his biggest and best role will still be in Olivier Hirschbiegel’s 2004 drama Der Untergang, or Downfall, where Ganz portrayed Adolf Hitler during the final week of his life. The film itself is based on two different accounts; Hirschbiegel’s film was the follow up to his social commentary drama Das Experiment, itself based on the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment.
Downfall does what many biographical films fail to do, not only does it take a scalpel to a period of history we think we know, and to project a film many of us would go in with expectations but it delivers a truly engaging but also uncomfortable watch. It is well known that Germany has very strict laws about what can and cannot be said about the Nazi regime, but the film skewers that for what might be the most difficult pitch in the world: what if Hitler was a human being?
For many years Adolf Hitler has been portrayed (and rather rightly so) as a genocidal maniac, a racist fascist with no humanity, but what can easily be forgotten, and what is so true of many of histories great monsters is that he was also a human being. This is not a sympathetic portrait of Hitler, as no one in their right mind would defend his actions, but the film instead looks to what drives a man, what goes on in the mind of someone sitting on the verge historical significance.
Ganz, for his part, takes the stern authority and layers him with nuance, yes there’s the famous and often parodied scene of him losing his temper in the bunker – the parodies have been met favourably by the director who says that mocking evil is the easiest way to defeat it. But Ganz, who conducted months of research and became convinced Hitler was suffering from the onset of Parkinson’s, turns the image in on itself.
What Ganz and the film does that films such as Darkest Hour or The Iron Lady fail to do is to actually look at what makes a historical figure tick, to an extent Lincoln also fails at this. We look at a turning point in a person’s life – the moment Germany began to crumble under the weight of Hitler’s ambition, when the war turned in the favour of the allies, and to say “what does this do to the person upon whom everyone is placing their hope”. Hitler was not a good person, though certain facts about him continue the juxtaposition that no one person has one dimension. Instead what Downfall leaves us with is one basic fact – Hitler was born a human, he died a human, and everything else is just books.
Ganz’ performance as Hitler is one for the ages, where he gets the obvious things – the moustache, the hair parting, the salute, but then looks beneath it, a man trapped by his own image, unable to show weakness to anyone, to confide doubt in anyone – Darkest Hour attempts and fails to do the same for Winston Churchill but in the end just makes him out to be a hero. Hitler is the villain of the World War II story, but in his own mind he’s more akin to Lear.
And this is where Downfall gets tricky and therefore brilliant. As the burgeoning empire comes crashing down around him, and Hitler begins to lash out at everyone near him we realise a very simple fact about him, he blames himself. Hitler is the figurehead, but Adolf is the man. We know how the story ends, it ends with a bullet in his skull, but that’s not what matters – it’s how he gets to that point. Ganz imbues Hitler with a humanity that is hard for people to stomach – critics were outraged that people would dare to show Hitler as a human being, as someone who felt emotions – Channel 4 aired an advert for the film with the slogan “it’s a happy ending, he dies”. But Hirschbiegel and Ganz are too intelligent for such flippant retorts.
Of the film, Hirschbiegel said “They just got it wrong. Bad people do not walk around with claws like vicious monsters, even though it might be comforting to think so. Everyone intelligent knows that evil comes along a with a smiling face.”
While Ganz stated “What people need is for Hitler to actually represent evil itself. But what is evil itself? That means nothing to me. I have to perform a living human being. We know how to judge Hitler, we don’t need another film that condemns him. We already know where to stand on this. I mean, there is certainly no sympathy for Hitler in the film.”
What lives on in Downfall, above all of Ganz’s other work, is how he turned into someone we fear (though we may pretend we don’t) and make us pity him. To take the fear from him and show what’s left, which is almost nothing but pity. The image of Hitler, slowly walking to his bunker, the war all but lost for him, the empire fallen, the doctrine of Mein Kampf turned to burnable trash is one that lingers in the memory. Like seeing Saddam Hussein filthy, underfed, long beard and unkempt hair in the hole, there’s nothing left to say about the person, because we took away their power, not just to control, but to function. Before he took his life, Hitler was already dead, and Ganz shows us this for two uncomfortable hours.
Sadly, Downfall did not receive any awards, though it was nominated for Best foreign language film at the Oscars, and Ganz went without a nomination for his performance. Yet, thanks to the work of the film, his legacy of other great character work, and yes, the YouTube generation’s parody skills, Bruno Ganz turn as Adolf Hitler will linger in our memory much longer than we’ll ever feel comfortable with.
Bruno Ganz
1941 – 2019
