'Downfall': almost the same old story

For a long time, Joachim C. Fest, a journalist and high-profile German historian of the Third Reich, has been fascinated by the historical figure of Adolf Hitler. One of his books on Hitler informs a two-and-a-half hour film. It attracts large audiences in Germany, but is controversial. The filmmaker Wim Wenders is one of its staunchest critics and publishes an article in the weekly Die Zeit, in which he says that he never before wrote about a film out of anger. The media’s and the German public’s obsession with Hitler in the wake of the film is referred to as Hitlerwelle, the ‘Hitler fad’. [Introduction]