THE spring of 1973 has brought a worldwide revival of interest in a mustachioed, vegetarian nonsmoker. An artist and architect, he was a firm believer in astrology and, though a speed freak, surrounded himself with people who preferred cocaine and morphine. His appeal to youth was legendary: he could hold an auditorium spellbound for hours with a vocal solo. He died underground, committing suicide in protest against a social climate that he found oppressive.
All the same, Adolf Hitler's presence never vanishes. His career is still the fundamental trauma of the century, the wound through which our shared humanity leaks. Yet it is a disconcerting thought that grandparents are alive today who were not born when World War II broke out. Since it ended, Hitler's life has furnished material for a thousand historical theses. But of late it has moved into the twin fields of memoir and entertainment. Since Albert Speer's Inside the Third Reich was published in 1970, one might suppose that everyone who had anything to do with the Führer, from general to cook, had been signed up for paperback. Five new volumes of Hitleriana have recently come out in English, and a brace of feature-length films—with more to come —have been readied. Morbid curiosity again? Not quite. Each is instructive in its own way. The first to be released in the U.S.—it opened last week in New York—is Hitler: The Last Ten Days, a retelling of what must be the best-known suicide since Cleopatra's. Sir Alec Guinness is the star.
Guinness's performance is obviously based on a close reading of the sources. The habits are ticked off one by one, amid the slow disintegration of personality: the stiff, corseted movements, the crescendos of temper, the harsh, mesmeric voice grinding out its long postprandial diatribes against traitors, smokers and meat eaters. The words rebound from the elephant-colored walls of the bunker as once they had echoed down the parade grounds of the Third Reich. Hitler's pallid hand, shaking from Dr. Morell's amphetamine capsules, spoons dollops of Schlag onto a slab of chocolate cake. The movie is the world's most overdocumented Grand Guignol, the phantom of history's opera at bay in the foundations of the Fuhrer's falling theater.
And that is precisely the trouble with the film. Perhaps any dramatic version, no matter how well acted or researched, must end as an opera about an opera, Gödtterddmmerung at two removes. We know about the myth of Hitler. It has saturated our culture. Our stock image of murderous power is not Stalin quietly chewing a pipe, but Hitler noisily chewing a carpet. The details slip; not so many people nowadays know or care who Baldur von Schirach was or what the Roehm putsch signified. But the broad trajectory of Hitler's career, let alone its grisly climax in the bunker, is still as familiar and very nearly as mythic to Westerners as the deeds of Antichrist were to men in the Middle Ages.