War, Art, and Peace

David Crown
Nutting
GPS 315
5/17/13

Peace, War, and Art

In this assignment I watched the movie “Downfall” Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel. This movie follows Adolf Hitler, his Secretary Traudl Jung, and Joseph Goebbels during WWII as the war was ending. I took in this movie as a historical representation of what happened, and also took into account the dialogue the director emphasized in order to paint the picture he wanted to create. I find it important to point out that though the movie was told in the perspective of hitler and the German force, there was no agenda or bias in support of the nazi effort. In fact, the movie pointed out exactly what was wrong with the war effort and how the war convention really does work. Which leads me to my point, in this film I recognized many things that we discussed in the classroom, such as direct/indirect violence, the war convention, violence through a system and much more.
At the start of the movie Hitler’s actual secretary, Traudl Jung, who lived on through the war, spoke about exactly how she feels stating, “I've got the feeling that I should be angry with this child(herself), this young and oblivious girl. Or that I'm not allowed to forgive her for not seeing the nature of that monster.   I didn't realise that fate would lead me somewhere I didn't want to be. But still, I find it hard to forgive myself.” This being the very first line in the beginning of the movie sets a strong tone as to the direction of the film. Looking back at the bigger picture Jung realizes the wrong of what she was doing, being the accomplice to Adolf Hitler and that his goal was wrong. Upon being hired Jung had no idea that she would be working for a monster and just thought she was getting a secretarial job with the leader. In her perspective I can see how she is just the victim of a system, that she just happened to have a job that caused her total grief, trauma and suffering. This bringing me to my point about violence through a...