On April 17, 1945, with the Third Reich on the edge of annihilation, Joseph Goebbels girded the loins of the inner circle with a bizarre call to arms. “Gentlemen,” he said, “in a hundred years from now, they will make a wonderful colour film about the terrible days we are living through. Wouldn’t you like to have a part in this film?”
As ever, the Nazi party’s propaganda maestro was right about the supreme impact of cinema. He was wrong about the date, though. The “thousand-year Reich” was fond of big, round numbers, but it has taken only 60 years for the predicted film to materialise. Der Untergang, released here as Downfall, opened in Germany in the autumn. Set in and around the moral vacuum of the bunker, it is the first home-made drama to place the person of Hitler at its heart, and it duly sparked a festival of navel-gazing. One question rang out above all: although dramatically rational, is it ethically feasible to portray a genocidal monster as a human being?
An answer of sorts comes in the film’s opening sequence. We are in an anteroom in the Wolfsschanze, Hitler’s so-called lair in East Prussia, in 1942. Five aspiring young secretaries — one of them Traudl Junge, to whom Hitler dictated his last will and testament, and on whose 2003 memoir the film is partly based — have been summoned for an audience with the Führer. Arrayed along a bench, they eagerly anticipate his appearance in their midst. So, for better or worse, do we: their peering round the door is also ours. “That’s what I wanted,” says Bruno Ganz, the actor whose face appears in the guise of Hitler. “I was very, very happy when I saw that sequence for the first time. Because it worked.”
Widely considered to be the greatest German-speaking actor alive, the man invited to take the lead role in Goebbels’s “wonderful colour film” is best known abroad from Wim Wenders’s 1987 film Wings of Desire. In that, he played an angel. But it would be glib to say that he now plays a devil. “I accept that from Jewish survivors. I don’t want to start to argue. But it was not the evil Hitler who got in such a high position.
It was the German people who supported this man. He is a human being. What else would he be?” Or, as a baffled Junge puts it in the film: “He can be such a caring person, then he can say such brutal things.”
So, Ganz’s Hitler is daringly shaded in. Buffeted by illness, military defeat and the betrayal of his oldest comrades, the screeching demagogue has to budge up and make room for the literally quivering husk of a man whose thoughts, as the Red Army approaches, turn from genocide to suicide. The towering portrayal has earned the highest compliment from Germany’s most eminent Nazi historian. “That really is Hitler,” said Joachim Fest, on whose essay about the last days, the script (by the producer Bernd “Das Boot” Eichinger) is also based. But the actor’s favourite commendation came from a retired doctor who read of his casting in the press. “He wrote me a letter saying, ‘Don’t fall into the trap of chewing the carpet. I got close to that man, and that’s not him.’ He saw the movie and he wrote me a second letter, saying I came very close to the real person.”
If nothing else, the impact of Downfall will be to stem for good the flow of British actors queuing up to take on the role: most recently Roger Allam, in David Edgar’s play Speer; Robert Carlyle, in the American mini-series Hitler: The Rise of Evil; and Ken Stott, in ITV’s Uncle Adolf. Ganz, who has not seen a single one of Hitler’s many British simulacra, has two incalculable advantages over all of them. For one, his Hitler castigates his quivering generals and fusses over his dog, Blondi, in German. But there is also the question of appearance. Even without the iconic regalia of side-parted wig and toothbrush, the slightly hunched actor who walks into a room in a hotel on Potsdamer Platz, Berlin, is already halfway to being a dead ringer.
Ganz, who will turn 64 on Tuesday, initially discovered a resemblance 30 years ago when, in a play about a group of revolu- tionary Russian sailors, he glued on a short moustache to distinguish himself from the other cast members. “That was the first time I said, ‘Jesus Christ, you look like Hitler.’ So I was not completely surprised. But I was surprised, with the addition of the wig, how far it went. I was scared, just for two or three seconds. Then I was actor enough to say, that’s okay, that will help. Even if you are bad as Hitler, still you’ll look like him.”
It took Ganz a month to say yes to Eichinger. Although he recently popped up in a supporting role in The Manchurian Candidate, one of the things that emboldened him was the mischievous instinct to be seen by international audiences in a lead role at the other end of the moral spectrum. “In Wings of Desire, I was an angel, with soulful eyes and poetic manners and a voice that people love, that the Americans say is carrying the weight of Europe’s refined culture. I know that as an actor, I can be violent, and that’s something that, in films, nobody has seen until now.”
Never having played a historical figure before — he once pulled out of impersonating Einstein — he spent four months in preparation. Hitler was never diagnosed, but a film of him pinning medals on boys outside the bunker proved to Ganz that “he really had Parkinson’s. You can see his left hand hidden behind his back, and if you had not known, you would not have been aware of it”. So, Ganz sat in the waiting room of a neurology ward and observed the outpatients. After a while, he voluntarily started to shake too, “because I felt somehow ashamed. I know how it feels to be watched all the time”.
His most useful research tool, however, was a seven-minute tape, secretly recorded in 1942, in which a dismayed Hitler explains to a Finnish diplomat that the Wehrmacht is a summer army rather than a winter army. “I liked it because the voice was deeper, lower, than his screaming voice. It was completely relaxed. I can hear very clearly that he came from Austria. That he is not German. He had what you can still see in Vienna. In French, you would call it ‘courtiser les femmes’: soft manners and kissing hands. His behaviour towards women was not bad. They were very pleased in Germany, because their own men were not able to do this.”
Of course, neither is Ganz a German. He lived in Berlin for 20 years, becoming a leading actor at Peter Stein’s Schaubühne theatre, but he is actually Swiss. He was born in 1941, three months before the German invasion of the Soviet Union. His birthright has consigned him to a lifetime of peace. Apart from a fragment of an American bomber landing in the garden in Zurich, his main memory of the war is his mother complaining about an absence of oranges and bananas. “Just ridiculous things. I don’t know what war is, not really.”
An important aspect of Ganz’s preparation was to learn to keep his distance from the character. Being Swiss helped, as did his not being a method actor. “You have to construct a wall or an iron curtain, so when it’s a wrap, it’s gone. I didn’t want to spend my evenings at the hotel with Mr Hitler at my side. I do not have the kind of problems that a lot of my German friends have, questioning their parents or grandparents about what they did in that time. I could put my passport between Hitler and me.”
The site of the original bunker is a short walk north from Potsdamer Platz, as is the new Holocaust memorial. Ganz spent two months in the film-set bunker in Munich. What, finally, did he learn as he gave the definitive account of the political leader who has caused more blood and ink to be expended than anyone in history? “I thought I might discover that Hitler was not really a big man. Sometimes, I thought, ‘You are such a stupid guy. You should now realise that you did the wrong thing. You wanted to rule the world with your race and you destroyed your own people. And you did one crime that Germany will never, never, never, never get rid of.’
“I never found out what was really the point of departure for his hatred of the Jews. Sometimes I felt he would have been the founder of a new religion. His power came from ... today, we would use a term like spiritual sources. You have to be careful with that, but somehow it got close. I think he could imagine being something to the extent of becoming it. As we would say, autosuggestion. His imagination was very strong. He could move himself to be something. And this is close to being an actor, yes.”
Downfall is released on April 1
