Downfall

Oliver Hirschbiegel sets the film in the Führerbunker as Berlin falls, seen from Hitler’s private secretary Traudl Junge. Bruno Ganz prepared for four months and built the voice from the Mannerheim tape, recorded without permission at Imatra, Finland, on 4 June 1942 by Yle engineer Thor Damen: the only known recording of Hitler speaking in an unofficial setting. Ganz concluded from newsreels that Hitler had Parkinson’s disease and watched hospital patients, so the shaking hand on screen is the actor’s decision, not the script’s. Hirschbiegel says the computer work comes down to one shot, the ruined Reich Chancellery; the rest was built on Munich stages and shot in Berlin and Saint Petersburg. The German, Austrian and Italian co-production was nominated for the Foreign Language Film Oscar, losing to Spain’s The Sea Inside. The speaker at the opening and the close is the real Junge, in footage from the documentary Im toten Winkel, leaving the verdict to a witness rather than a screenwriter. Answering the charge that he humanised Hitler, Hirschbiegel said bad people do not walk around with monsters’ claws. A good fit if you want the bunker framed by the real secretary’s testimony. Not for anyone who cannot sit through the section given to Magda Goebbels and her children; the film shows it to the end.