E-Mail This Article to a Friend Bunker bunk Der Untergang rewrites German history BY GERALD PEARY

Apolitical World War II buffs who get off on guys strutting around in uniforms, consulting maps, and arguing military strategy are probably the target American audience for Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Der Untergang/Downfall, the Oscar Best Foreign Film nominee (it’s at the Kendall Square) that dramatizes the last days of Adolf Hitler. The spiffy production design is persuasive in both its interiors (the elaborate linking rooms that constituted Hitler’s bunker) and its exteriors (a smoldering, burned-to-the-ground Berlin). The familiar story, of the Nazis’ final battles against the invading Russians and the double suicide of Hitler and Eva Braun, is told efficiently; the 155 minutes pass quickly. The German actors who portray recognizable Nazi commandants — Goebbels, Himmler, Speer, etc. — all pass muster. Hitler’s okay too, if a bit aged, stooped and 60ish instead of straight-shouldered and 50ish: the fine Swiss-German actor Bruno Ganz (Alice in die Städten, Der amerikanische Freund).

How do you do the Führer? It’s in constructing its protagonist that the filmmakers of Der Untergang were met with philosophical challenges. He’s got to be more than a moustached, evil-spewing stereotype, and yet he can’t be too humanized either, this murderer of six million Jews! Der Untergang strives for proper imbalance: Ganz’s Hitler can be kind to his secretary, Traudl Junge (Alexandra Maria Lara), friendly to those fiercely loyal to him, such as Magda (Corinna Harfouch) and Joseph Goebbels (Ulrich Matthes), and courtly toward his girlfriend, Eva Braun (Juliane Köhler). But he’s also cranky, mean-tempered, and, most important, a fervent, up-front anti-Semite who praises himself for having "cleansed" Germany of Jews. How do his underlings react to his hatred? They say nothing at all, standing about politely, as if embarrassed by their boss’s racist improprieties. German soldiers come and go, even SS troopers, but nobody mentions Jews. In fact, the only anti-Semite in all Germany in this German-made movie is Adolf himself!

German revisionism about the War? You bet! As the movie marches on, it becomes clear that Der Untergang’s major problem with the Führer is not his heinous Nazi policies (in real life carried out by millions of "Heil Hitler" Germans) but the self-absorbed death trip he went on toward the end, contemptuous of the German people and indifferent to the fact that the country he led was being reduced to rubble. Who are the movie’s villains? A few true-believer storm troopers who would rather shoot themselves than live on in a non-Nazi world. And there’s the Goebbels family of seven, a Satanic version of the Trapps: blond, Aryan, crooning in unison patriotic Nazi tunes, dying in a mass suicide. Joseph Goebbels is Hitler’s echo: "I feel no sympathy. The German people deserve their fate."

And everyone else? Behind the well-oiled military melodrama is the film’s true, and repugnant, ideology. Only Adolf and a few nutty extreme loyalists are implicated in what Nazi Germany did to the world in the 1930s and 1940s. Many of the Third Reich military are regular GI Joes, and most who share Hitler’s bunker are nice people, civilians in the wrong place and the wrong time. Albert Speer (Heino Ferch) seems a decent man; Eva Braun is a likable party girl. Ordinary Germans? To a person, they are victims of the war, victims of Hitler’s madness. Innocents! The vilest scene takes place in a German hospital that’s been bombed by the Russians. There’s a shot of patients looking numb and comatose. The image is familiar: it’s the starved, half-alive in Hitler’s death camps awaiting liberation. Der Untergang has the audacity to replace Jews with Aryan Berliners, making the latter virtual Holocaust survivors. I say: heresy!

Here’s a neat way to fight Hitler today and help ensure the survival of the culture he tried to obliterate. The National Center for Jewish Film at Brandeis University is working to preserve the 1939 Yiddish movie Der Lebediker Yusem/The Living Orphan, an urban drama shot on the Lower East Side of New York featuring stars of the then flourishing Yiddish theater. The NEH has provided $15,000; an additional $49,000 will be required to restore the original nitrate negative and strike a new print. Your tax-deductible contribution of $100 will pay for the restoration of 100 feet of film. Call (781) 899-7044 and learn how you can assist the heroic National Center restore its 33rd Yiddish picture.