WHEN NEW “ADULT entertainment” channel More4 launched in October 2005, one of the first movies it aired was Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall. The advert it ran presented an image of Swiss actor Bruno Ganz as Adolf Hitler, standing outside the concrete-slab entrance to the Berlin bunker where, ten days after his 56th birthday in April 1945, Hitler put a gun in his mouth and blew his brains out, while the city above was pummelled to rubble by Russian artillery. Ganz’s Hitler looked hunched and weary yet coldly defiant, his eyes shadowed by the peak of his eagle-festooned cap, with that horribly iconic brush moustache sitting above a sour, downturned mouth. And splashed in large letters across his chest was the channel’s own tag line: “It’s a happy ending. He dies.”
This was consciously glib and deliberately provocative, but speaks to one way Hirschbiegel’s Oscar-nominated film was received: as pure, uncut schadenfreude. After all, its dramatis personae are characters who, to varying degrees of commitment, are Nazis —and its narrative follows their descent into defeat, dissolution and death. There is undoubtedly some grim satisfaction in watching Ganz’s Führer flail ineffectively at his subordinates when reality intrudes on his arrogant-to-the-end self-belief, or shuffling sadly around the cramped, harshly lit passageways of his subterranean HQ holding a palsied hand behind his back.