It is the fate of actors sometimes to complete a lifetime of distinguished theatre and film work and then be remembered by a vast number of people chiefly for their role in some silly TV hit or lowbrow franchise. Something of the sort happened to the great Swiss actor Bruno Ganz who – to his own huge interest and amusement – became iconic to a younger generation for the endless viral YouTube memes based on his terrifying bunker rant as Hitler in the 2004 movie Downfall. The Fuhrer erupts with rage at Frank Lampard signing for Inter Milan, about the fact there is no camera in the iPod Touch, or about Oasis splitting. “It’s amazing, the creativity from these kids! How they come up with these ideas!” Ganz exclaimed in an interview.
But the point is that the Downfall scene became meme-able because of the potency and brilliance of Bruno Ganz’s performance in this film about Hitler’s last days, written by Bernd Eichinger and directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel.
As late as 2004, it was vanishingly rare for a German-speaking actor to play Hitler (through a paradoxical cultural quirk, it was and is more common for classy Brit actors to play Hitler and Nazis generally) and even rarer to show Hitler in his final moment of failure: in his bunker as Berlin burned and the Soviets closed in. It was ordinarily the custom of movies and TV to dramatise and fetishise Hitler’s menace in the 1930s, in his period of sinister success: the ranting on stage, the Sieg-Heil-ing followers. The daring, the almost bizarre kind of blasphemy of Downfall as a serious drama (as opposed to, say, a comedy like The Producers) was to show Hitler as an eventual loser - ranting at people who had disobeyed his orders and who were increasingly open about being irritated by him. The irony of that impotence is what made it irresistible to online satirists. And Ganz’s portrayal – with his Parkinson’s tremor and thin-lipped resentment, somewhere between a grumpy grandpa and a spurned lover – was inspired.
Before this, Ganz was equally legendary for another Berlin-based role - his portrayal of Damiel, the angel in Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire (1987) who watches with fathomless sympathy and knowledge as human beings struggle with the terrible cruelties and indignities of everyday life. Damiel falls in love with a circus trapeze artist and feels a remarkable new desire taking wing within him: to renounce his immortality and partake of the ordinary pleasures and feelings of earthbound humans. Ganz’s face is delicate and boyish, with an ascetic sensitivity. The poetical presence of his beautifully modulated speaking voice is also what makes the role so memorable.
Before that, Ganz had been Jonathan in Wenders’s The American Friend (1977), an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game, the desperately ill man coerced by Ripley into being a killer. For Werner Herzog, he had been the high-minded romantic innocent Jonathan Harker in Nosferatu The Vampyre (1979). In Volker Schlöndorff’s Circle of Deceit (1981) he was the journalist covering the Lebanese war, horrified and bewildered by the spectacle of violence and drawn into violence himself. In all these roles, Ganz was excellent as the morally literate, cultured man gazing into an abyss of evil or sadness.
Ganz kept working until the very end and my last glimpse of him was in Lars Von Trier’s deeply trying serial-killer provocation The House That Jack Built (2018) as Virgil to the villain’s hell-bound anti-hero. As a movie, it left a good deal to be desired but Von Trier undoubtedly knew what he was doing in casting Ganz – who was very good, and who had after all played Faust on stage and screen (in a TV play about Goethe). He had that aura of a man possessed of timeless wisdom, and hardwon connoisseurship of good and evil. Ganz played characters who knew all about hope, despair and desire. The intelligence and fineness of his acting will be much missed.
