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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
An acclaimed new film dares to present the Fuhrer as more than a cardboard monster. The last man in the bunker, Rochus Misch, talks about the Hitler he knew.
Feb 21, 2005 | Germany's peculiar post-World War II identity, stretched uncomfortably between self-awareness and denial, is well-illustrated by Rochus Misch and his relationship to the German media.
Among the last living relics of the Nazi era, the 87-year-old Misch served as bodyguard, courier and telephone operator in the direct service of Adolf Hitler from 1940 to 1945. And recently he's been rediscovered -- the character of Misch is portrayed in Oliver Hirschbiegel and Bernd Eichinger's movie "Downfall," nominee for a best foreign-language Oscar and the most talked-about German film of the decade. The film's impact, both positive and negative, cannot be understated: It's the first time German cinema has dared to portray Hitler as a complex character rather than a cardboard monster and allowed the fall of the Third Reich to be the stuff of conventional melodrama.
In the film, Misch is depicted only briefly; his status in the bunker was low. But with the death of the few other remaining members of Hitler's entourage over the past 10 years, he has gained a new significance: He's now the last living man from the Führerbunker. Still, "The last man from the Führerbunker" has not received quite the level of media attention one would expect in the wake of the hugely successful film. If he is quoted, it is in short sound bites, or he is passed over entirely.
At first, this puzzled me. Given, for example, the recent widespread interest in Hitler's young secretary Traudl Junge, who died in 2002, it seemed strange the German press wasn't pouncing on Misch as wholeheartedly. Just before she died, Junge was the subject of the popular and critically acclaimed documentary "Blindspot," in which she describes her life as Hitler's secretary and grapples with intense self-recrimination. Misch, by comparison, has been ignored. But after reading the scanty profiles of Misch in German publications, I began to sense what the problem was, ultimately confirmed when I got to know Misch myself. Unlike Junge, Misch does no grappling. Instead, occasionally, in one of these dry profiles he makes a little comment. Once he mentions, elliptically, his dislike of the 2000 switch to the euro.
A dislike of the euro speaks volumes to those listening: It's a subtle hint of nationalism. It is an oblique nod to other political views preferred to be kept out of the press entirely. The public push to criminalize the neo-Nazi Nationalist German Party, in the wake of its demonstration at the 60th anniversary of the Allied bombing of Dresden, illustrates the double bind even better. As the interest in Nazism escalates, the media teeters along a fine line: feeding into it lavishly with the right kind of comfortingly outraged anti-Nazi stories, even as the self-censorship of the culture at large becomes more frantically repressive. (The only thing like it in America remotely comparable may be our simultaneous celebration of multiculturalism and the frequent taboo on open discussions about race.)
After the war, Misch was taken into custody by the Red Army; he spent nine years enduring torture in a Soviet prison camp and returned to Germany in 1954 (to the East) to find it a divided country with citizens confusingly "reeducated," as he puts it, this being his code word for no longer worshipping der Führer. Since then he has lived an anonymous existence in the Berlin suburb of Rudow. Previously he and his wife ran a small home-decorating shop and together raised their daughter, Birgitta. Since his wife died in 1998 he has lived alone. His daughter put her children in a Jewish school in Frankfurt. She chooses not to see him anymore.
Before "Downfall" was released, Misch's public persona was limited to solo visits to the site of Hitler's bunker -- and this is how I found him. I give walking tours of Berlin, which frequently take me to this windswept, out-of-the-way corner, frequented almost exclusively by English-language tour groups. (It's a little too macabre for the Germans.) One day an old man was hanging around, and my lecture on the last days of Hitler was interrupted by the cry, "Hello! Hello! Don't you know me? I'm Misch! I was there!"
