Word: hitleritis
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...allegations are not without basis. Bruno Ganz is not the toga-clad, Wagner-spouting Führer of Hans Jurgen Syberberg’s 1977 epic. He is not always clearly monstrous. Shortly before her death, Eichinger’s Eva Braun speaks with Traudl of the difference between Hitler when he’s husband and employer and Hitler “when he’s the Führer.” Which is to make the dangerous suggestion that there is a human Hitler after...
...some may find this troubling. But, for the most part, by keeping Hitler in the third person of Traudl’s account, Eichinger has resisted “psychologizing” him in the damning sense that most critics would use that term. By confining himself and his script almost exclusively to the last days of the war and avoiding explanatory digressions into the disappointments of Hitler’s youth and his experiences in World War I, Eichinger escapes any impulse toward explanation qua explanation...
...appearance of doe-eyed shock at some of the more vitriolic statements Hitler makes in his last days is perhaps one of the least plausible elements of the film (he has, after all, been dictating notes and speeches to her for more than two years). However, it is also part of what makes the ethical problems interesting...
...most brutal scene in the film is not one of the plentiful tableaus of pre-adolescent Hitler Youth committing suicide as the city falls, nor of limbs being sawed off without anesthetic in makeshift, underground hospitals, but of a steel-faced Magda Goebbels poisoning each of her six cherubic blonde children shortly before her own suicide—giving them their “salvation,” as she writes in a letter, because it is “no longer worth it to live in a world after National Socialism...
Eichinger’s film does not explain why Hitler was the man he was. Nor can it justify Traudl’s attraction to him. It is wise enough not to attempt to—even if, by putting him on screen at all, it breaks a taboo rarely tested by German filmmakers...