I don’t know what you mean by ‘appropriate’, but there are no scenes depicting atrocities during the Holocaust, if that’s what you mean. Nor does the film glorify the Nazis.

However, it is set during the Battle of Berlin and is therefore very harrowing. It’s not a film to watch for entertainment.

On the contrary Democracies produce even more true believers than totalitarianism has. The Democrats and the protection of free speech, allows the creation of ideologies, manifold in number, that holds many people in their thrall.

It just happens that the most powerful of ideologies acquire the most followers in a democracy.

Democracies focus on allowing people to believe what they want. Totalitarianism focuses on making people obey.

So it is quite untrue that Democracies have zilch use for true believers.

To those who have seen the film: family members of the person with whom I normally watch movies were killed in the Holocaust. That person didn’t know them, but does carry the weight of family history. How appropriate do you think the film would be?

It is my guess is that Hitler’s true believers never numbered over ten percent. Every totalitarian movement has its cynics who seek only power. The former, however, are the ones who will take care of the violence. They are less squeamish about torturing and murdering others. A Stalin, Mao, or Osama bin Ladin is powerless without the true believer segment of their respective organizations.

Democracies have zilch use for the true believer mentality. These political entities are all about improving life in the here and now. True believers gravitate solely toward movements that are highly nihilistic.

The true believer is “a guilt-ridden hitchhiker who thumbs a ride on every cause from Christianity to Communism. He’s a fanatic, needing a Stalin (or a Christ) to worship and die for.”

—Eric Hoffer

The True Believer

“Corinna Harfouch’s performance as Magda Goebbels in the movie Downfall (2004, now on DVD) is one of the most compelling I’ve ever seen”

I agree. It’s a superb movie.

Corinna Harfouch’s performance as Magda Goebbels in the movie Downfall (2004, now on DVD) is one of the most compelling I’ve ever seen. It’s a subtitled film, but I recommend it without hestitation.

Surely it wasn’t the philosophy. Even at its height, the Soviet Union’s ruling Communists were but a tiny minority of its citizens.

neo: I went through a phase where I read about WWII all the time. Magda was, and is, a minor character in the drama. But she was very important to Goebbels. Imagine the result had she realized - truly grasped - what a horror Nazism was and took the children and fled the country.

Interestingly, Lord Haw Haw’s daughter went in exactly the opposite direction . . . .

When I wrote, “In telling such a story, I’m trying (often vainly) to somehow make sense of the puzzle that particular life presents,” I meant to convey the idea that the effort to understand is pretty much doomed to be unsuccessful. All we can really hope to accomplish is a partial understanding–through a glass, darkly. I think it’s worthwhile to try. But there is always a huge mystery at the core.

Fascinating story, and very well written.

Being in the same line of work as you, though, I have come (I think) to a slightly different take on our ability to understand, retrospectively, figures like Magda, because even in the much more ordinary cases I work with on a daily basis, I find an irreducible core, as it were, of mystery. The biographical facts never seem to me to provide enough material — and it may be that no source could conceivably provide enough material — to leave me feeling satisfied that I truly understand the person in question. That doesn’t mean I think the exercise is without value; far from it. Just learning the details of this life that you provide us is extraordinarily interesting. So I am eager to see Part II!

Jamaie Irons

The new mutation has left our hard power alone, thereby freeing it to be much more effective than it otherwise would be.