With Germany taking stock of its collective memory on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the end of WWII, a spate of recent political demonstrations by left- and right-wing groups, high-profile commemorations, new monuments, historical inquiries, and regional elections in Germany, have coincided with the release of some mainstream German films that take part in this anniversarial reckoning. Sophie Scholl: The Last Days, Mark Rothemund’s drama about the arrest and execution of the leader of the anti-Nazi White Rose resistance movement, has yet to receive any U.S. distribution, though its rising-star lead, Julia Jentsch, took home the best actress award at this year’s Berlinale. And currently making the rounds in the States to uniformly enthusiastic notices is Downfall (Der Untergang) which probes the other side of the historical conflict. Downfall enjoyed a successful run in Germany last autumn, due in no small part to its controversial and “sympathetic” depiction of Hitler in tailspin. Predictably, German critics and filmgoers disagreed over the merits of showing Hitler as one capable of charming, patient, and affectionate behavior toward his elite faithful—smiling upon doomed children and complimenting his cook for whipping up a terrific pasta.

Downfall writer/producer Bernd Eichinger and director Oliver Hirschbiegel seem assured of their film’s novelty, using the opening scene to show Hitler (a studied performance by Bruno Ganz) wearing a cordial and patriarchal face as he hosts try-outs for a vacant secretarial position. When one of them falters at the typewriter, we expect a slobbery rant, or at best a stern dismissal. Instead, we get an understanding smile. Even though we know all along what the filmmakers are up to, this scene derives its tension by clashing boldly with the Hitlers of decades of Anglo-American feature films and television documentaries.

But…sympathetic? When we next catch up with Hitler, Berlin is under siege from the advancing Soviet Red Army, and he is screaming at one of his generals over the phone. Suddenly we’re back in more familiar territory. And from here on out—another two hours or so—we’re privy to a fairly predictable cycle of ups and downs in Hitler’s confidence, temperament, and grasp of reality. Pouring over maps, for instance, generally brings out the illusioned and combative dreamer within, while expressions of loyalty and complicity in suicidal schemes might win a smile, handshake, or possibly a passionate kiss from the ailing leader. Or so we are told. Novel or not, Ganz’s mercurial Hitler, the chaotic, bizarre underground bunker surroundings, and the looming collapse of it all make for a compelling mix. The mishmash of repulsive and naive characters weaving in and out the refuge, paralyzed by indecision or ideological fidelity, lends the Reich’s dying throes a Night of the Living Dead atmosphere, except that we wouldn’t be displeased if the approaching menace came punching through the wall.

The young applicant from the opening sequence is Traudl Junge (played by an appropriately wide-eyed Alexandra Maria Lara), who becomes Hitler’s secretary and the audience’s surrogate witness in the bunker. Her recurrent waves of nausea are pretty much in-step with the foreboding senses imposed on the viewer. Her astonishment, though muted, sometimes reflects our own. Yet she refuses to leave Hitler’s side. In so doing, she ingratiates herself with figures like Eva Braun, Joseph and Magda Goebbels, and a handful of suicidal or drunken Nazi generals and officers. Unlike that lot, however, Junge has the sense (and perhaps the innocence) to leave after Hitler dies.

It is that impulse to stay aboard a sinking ship that obviously fascinated writer/producer Eichinger. Like other filmmakers before, Eichinger relied partially on Junge’s memoirs, Until the Final Hours, for his details and narrative thread, as well as the work of popular historian Joachim Fest. As Eichinger said in an interview with epd Film (one of Germany’s leading film periodicals), it was Fest’s meditation on the 10 days between Hitler’s death and Germany’s official surrender that inspired the script. The reasons why the “the machine” did not come to a sudden halt after Hitler’s demise—the convictions, dependence, conformity of the people around him—are all over the faces of Eichinger’s characters until the final reel.

Ultimately Downfall demonstrates just how far behind mainstream cinema is from the ongoing scholarly efforts to demystify the Third Reich. Take the academic dialogue sparked in the mid-Nineties by Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executionerss and Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men, or even the work of Hannah Arendt in decades prior, specifically her Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report On the Banality of Evil. These are but a small sampling of the attempts to make sense of why and how Nazis of all ranks carried out their orders, accounts that probe a bit deeper than guilt or innocence and actually try to dissect the Reich to provide a more detailed composite sketch of what future generations might avoid. Perhaps asking a mainstream film to grasp the philosophical baton from Hannah Arendt and run with it is too much to ask. Stopping short of calling Downfall a milestone in the cinematic portrayal of the Nazi regime, I will say that the film’s mingling of “human” and “villain” gets us closer to addressing the more compelling questions about the nature of the Third Reich.

In some ways, a demythologization of history can be useful—as some of my German friends have pointed out, there is something oddly contemporary about much of the dialogue in the film. It’s as if the girl-talk in Hitler’s bunker is the same sort of German one might hear in a bar in Berlin’s Mitte on a Friday night; not the stilted, old-fashioned German that often distances viewers from the Nazis on film. Downfall, however, suffers from this laxity as well, especially in the sequences outside the bunker, which are more informed by war-movie clichés. And the nebulous threat of Russian forces, which at some points seems more immediate than at others. Perhaps we are meant, like those inside the bunker, to be slightly confused. Are the Russians miles or blocks away? Can we still pop out for a smoke? Whatever the case, it’s downright disorienting for those of us who prefer color-coded History Channel maps with little animated arrows.

Downfall presumes at least some previous historical knowledge of the operations of the Third Reich, and as such clearly pares down its historical scope. In all fairness, it probably had to. It is precisely this historical vacuum that sits uneasily with some viewers, German and otherwise. The Holocaust, for example, garners only a cursory mention. And as depicted in the film, the Nazi elite who jumped ship in the endgame (including Himmler, Goering, and Speer) seem nothing if not sensible. The film offers few historical reference points as to the extent of their crimes, and probably for many of us they may not be needed. But as one Berlin viewer admitted after being doorstepped by a Times (UK) reporter back in September, she was a bit worried to think about “who else might be in the audience.”