Götterdämmerung in a hole in the ground

A great deal of controversy attended the release of Oliver Hirschbiegel and Bernd Eichinger's film The Downfall ( Der Untergang ) last year, in France as well as in Germany: Claude Lanzmann, the historian and director of the monumental 9 hour long documentary film Shoah (1982), felt that the crimes committed by Adolf Hitler overwhelmed any reason that could be given for making a film about him. Other people took the view that the film ‘humanised’ Hitler, as if it were scandalous that he should be represented as a man rather than an alien, or even that it made him seem ‘affable’, as if the almost unctuous Viennese courtesy towards his secretarial staff and his maudlin dog-love were traits somehow not in keeping with the man who sent millions of people to their deaths. Kitsch and cruelty get along famously, as WH Auden knew when he wrote his poem Epitaph on a Tyrant : ‘And when he cried the little children died in the street.’ The Downfall , in fact, is a masterly study in claustrophobia, a Gotterdammerung in a hole in the ground. It …