"Downfall"

We can all make polite noises about how the Nazi disaster could have happened in some other country, but it isn't exactly true -- we know it and the Germans know it. Other nations and other people are certainly vulnerable to the allure of creeping totalitarianism (cough, cough), but the rise of Hitler and the Nazis was a distinctively German business, born out of the darker corners of that nation's historical and intellectual traditions. It probably takes Germans to confront it with both honesty and understanding, and one of the things that's most striking about "Downfall" is that you are convinced by it, so immediately and so totally.

In scene after scene, Ganz's Hitler rages at a map of the encircled Berlin: Where is the Ninth Army? The 12th Army? His generals are cowards! The German people have proven themselves unworthy! They deserve no compassion! He has been betrayed again! By Goering! By Himmler! By all of them! They must be shot! The generals around him stand paralyzed; they know the Ninth and 12th armies no longer exist, and Hitler probably knows it too, but any deviation from the fantasy script is unacceptable. Josef Goebbels (played by the truly unnerving Ulrich Matthes) stares at his master with religious devotion; his terrifying wife (Corinna Harfouch) prepares to murder their six children, rather than lose them to "a world without National Socialism."

Outside the door of the Führer's war room, things are a little different. Younger officers stand around, jumpy and anxious; shouldn't someone talk to Hitler about the obvious need to open surrender negotiations? Doesn't he want to spare Berliners from this awful destruction? (No; in fact, he welcomes it.) Others sit at a long table, drinking themselves insensible and discussing the best methods for committing suicide. Hitler himself would poison his beloved German shepherd, Blondi, before he killed himself. Did he hate to think of her becoming a Russian general's dog?

Eva Braun (Juliane Köhler) passes through the outer chambers like a hurricane of false hilarity, insisting on parties, jazz, cigarettes, schnapps. (Naturally, no one may refuse these good times.) Traudl Junge (Alexandra Maria Lara) sits smoking with another girl while Soviet shells burst overhead and the electric lights flicker on and off. Surely the Führer hasn't lied to them! Surely everything will still be all right! As Junge herself observed in the 2002 documentary "Hitler's Secretary" (a snippet of which appears at the end of this film) she didn't know about the Holocaust or the other brutalities of Hitler's regime at the time -- but she didn't know because she didn't want to know.

I suspect people, especially people in Germany, will still be watching "Downfall" in 40 or 50 years, looking for that fusion of art and history that makes sense out of senselessness. Hirschbiegel and Eichinger, along with their large, brave and talented cast, have done something extraordinary for their generation of Germans, and for the world. They have willfully entered their grandparents' dirtiest, clammiest chamber of secrets, that cellar where Adolf Hitler and his great German dream -- a dream that inspired millions, as hard as that is to imagine -- curled up to die. They have come back to tell us that, yes, this really happened; we know these people even if we don't want to; here's what it was like.

• View blog reactions