Downfall

Thanks to Oh-san for the translation! Heh I tried Babel Fish, FreeTranslation, QuickLatin etc, and they all refused to translate it into English, just kept returning the Latin phrase. Though now I'm still bemused by it. In the context it doesn't make much sense to me even when translated. But ah well, Winterson's character wrote that it didn't mean much to her till much later either, so maybe I'll just sit tight on it first.

And thanks muchly to Ian for that fascinating article! =) Shall have a closer look later, when I'm not burning the midnight oil. As for Briony, I don't like her either...she starts off seeming self-indulgent and arrogant, and finishes off rather lamely with her hopeless petition for forgiveness. But Briony is hardly the point of the book I think. It's the fascinating way that McEwan constructed the character Briony, and then used Briony to construct an autobiography, which is revealed to be fake only at the end of the book. Raises lots of questions about reality that are conveniently also talked about in Gut Symmetries. If we can pretend convincingly enough, there's no telling what's real and what's not.

Gut Symmetries is losing me, I'm afraid. All these connotations and references to other languages, and the whole Jewish motif, are rather confusing. I have a feeling that there's more meaning than I'm seeing, and that the meaning I see right now is restricted by who I am. But self-reflexively, the book addresses that too...the subjectivity of meaning. So I'm thinking that in a warped and roundabout way, the book is confusing just to make that point about meaning, about how we are predisposed to find some kind of meaning in everything, regardless of whether that meaning is really there at all. Normally I'd think that's a decadent and fluffy philosophical cop-out, but the book lends itself so symmetrically to that interpretation that it can't be thrown out entirely.

* * * * *

Watched Downfall today, a film about the last days of the Third Reich, set in Hitler's bunker system. A haunting show, worth watching, but not if you want to stay happy for the rest of the day. It's disturbing, really, to see the normal life of a madman, because between sessions of mindless and fanatical rage, Hitler's portrayed rather sympathetically (not in the sense that he is a good man, but in the sense that you can understand why he does the things that he does). In fact, he's rather nice to his secretary and the other women in the bunker. Call it traditional chivalry, if you will. But the scary thing about the madman was that he had moments which were distinctly not mad. At times he's just an old worn-out man trying his best to deal with a whole civilisation falling to bits around him. Trying his best to deal with the people around him leaving him and betraying him. And you can see why he is so despairing, so furious. To some extent he is compelled to be a madman, crowded into a corner without any other way out.

The most disturbing bits have to do with the fanaticism of the people around him. The way Ernst Rohm goes home to his family for dinner after being denied authorisation to escape, and pulls the pins of two grenades under the table. Frau Goebbels's determination that her children must not be allowed to live in a world without National Socialism, and then drugging them to sleep and poisoning them to death in the middle of the night. Eva Braun's delusional dedication to Hitler, all the way to death. It's the killing of the children, all in the name of protecting them from a world without Nazism, that depth of conviction in an idea that outweight sheer familial love, that is so deeply disturbing.

And then there are the suicides. Hitler and Eva discussing the best ways to die, like Cleopatra in the last moments of A&C. The Hitler Youth shooting themselves rather than surrendering. Two generals blowing their brains out after Hitler's suicide. Goebbels shooting his wife and then himself in the ruins of the Chancellory's gardens. An injured officer blandly pulling out a gun and shoving it up his mouth, and the next thing you realise he's slumped over and there's a blood splatter on the wall. Not even enough time to flinch. When the SS officers shot themselves in the head, I positively flinched, averted my eyes. Every gunshot ringing out claimed a life, claimed the lives of people who believed so much in an idea that they couldn't live without it. To watch someone die for an idea is not a pretty thing, even if it is make-believe. Even if you know that dramatic irony is what's making it so horrific, the knowledge of someone calmly accepting and executing certain death. It's moments like these that make you cherish skepticism, and hope that people won't believe so deeply in anything ever again.

And the concept of the bunker itself...a closed-off reality hidden underground, the last stronghold of Nazism, the festering ground of the idea that, because it had lost its primacy above ground, warped the minds of everyone hidden underneath. It is unreal, to see them sitting down to meals with full set-up of utensils and wine and et cetera, just underneath the ruins of the capital of Germany, where civilians and soldiers are dying and not dying but suffering. To hear Hitler toy with death, determined to kill off the German people who had failed his ultimate test, and considering the best ways to kill himself, while everyone above ground was desperate not to die. To see the officers drunk and decadent in safety, while their subordinates struggled to carry out their impossible orders. Trudl the secretary eventually realises this surreality; she calls it a dream from which you want to wake up but can't. Perhaps, then, everyone in that bunker was a bit mad, detached from the real reality by an illusion so complete and all-encompassing that they could believe what they liked, that final victory was still possible, that their Fuhrer was still capable of leading. And for many of them, to leave the bunker was tantamount to death. To enter a world without Nazis was to enter a nightmare. It's all in the perspective, isn't it; what you regard as madness, other people have learned to accept as reality.

Quite a haunting movie, really, unabashed in its portrayal of brutality and insanity. And significantly made by a German. After you watch it, you're just stunned; as Kels said it is a tiring film to watch, almost cathartic, except that the horror stays with you after you leave the theatre. It's something that everyone should go through once, and once only, I think.

Do you think, though, that that reality is gone? That the WWII experience will haunt us forever? I'm not sure whether we can keep the memory of the horror alive much longer...in a few more years everyone from that generation that suffered so much will be dead. And what then? Does that mean that we're once again adrift on the seas of incomprehension? In our complacency that nothing like that will happen again, will we unconsciously take the same path again down to that kind of fanatical conviction, a lucidity and logic so tightly focused and clear that it drives people mad?

pondered by phoenican @ 15.6.05