Downfall

I don’t exactly know why we wanted to watch this film (Downfall), maybe because we’re fans of Bruno Ganz. It’s a bit long, so we needed to find the time, and finally it worked last Saturday evening.

Ganz plays Hitler in his final days. The film is extremely well done. It’s easy to understand how people dig themselves in behind their fanaticism; at some point, a person has given too much of their soul to a system and can’t backtrack. It’s not about losing face, but more about losing any sense of who they are. We see how Madame Goebbels has given her soul to “national socialism” to the point that she can’t imagine living when the regime fails. It makes sense, in the parameters set by the film, when she kills her children before she and her husband commit suicide. The film takes us through each step of their deaths and I understood, in that context, why she would do something so atrocious.

That’s the thing with nutty behaviour. No one, and I mean no one, thinks “I’m crazy and I want to do something entirely nonsensical”. Every wacky act made total sense to the person at the time, within the parameters of their insanity. That’s important to remember, and to respect.

It would be worth it to use this to find a way to talk to people who we don’t understand at all, asking, like, “So what lead you to believe that (Trump is your personal savior, or whatever)”. Even better to do the “I like soup. Do you like soup?” way of questioning. Like “I’ve read a lot about climate change. The science behind it is quite solid (mention something that seems good, like the ice core samples taken in Antarctica). What makes you believe that climate change doesn’t exist?” You’ve positioned yourself, given yourself some support of your ideas, then ask someone to support theirs. That could lead to a discussion, instead of an argument.

The other really interesting thing was to learn that Hitler was an ethical vegetarian. He didn’t want to hurt animals. Probably inside the insanity that was the Third Reich, that made sense. There must have been three categories: Aryans, animals, and less-than-animals (the ones who were supposedly ruining the pure blood of the Aryans), and only the first two deserved respect or care. Again, so very strange from the outside, but must have appeared logical to those inside of the system.

Foro is just shaking his head over the folly of humans. He’s not exactly into hurting animals, either. We do awful things to cows, and pigs, and chickens. Foro is just a stuffed cow, but he’s a reminder of how we can all be a bit gentler, kinder, and more understanding.