‘Hitler’s Shadow Still Looms over Us’: G. W. Pabst’s The Last Ten Days as Film and Event

Abstract

The American news magazine Time hailed Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s dramatization of Hitler’s last days in the bunker, Der letzte Akt (The Last Ten Days, 1955), as ‘perhaps the best picture produced in Central Europe since the war’.¹ In Germany, however, the film was considered an artistic and financial failure. During its production, negative sentiments about the project were already being expressed, and by the time the film premiered in May 1955, general interest had dwindled to such an extent that the film soon vanished from the German screens. This striking lack of interest among the populace was noted with satisfaction in the German press as an expression of ‘healthy common sense’, while the news that the film had been sold abroad was perceived as ‘questionable, or even disturbing’.² By contrast, Peter Lorre’s film Der Verlorene (The Lost One, 1951), which had also initially been a box office failure, was later resurrected and given a respected place in the canon of German film history. The original negative response to The Last Ten Days in 1955 was, however, never revisited or revised. It is continually overlooked, even in the most extensive studies of German cinema. The few existing analyses of The Last Ten Days in the limited available literature are merely the result of particular interest in the work of two well-known contributors to the film: the director, G. W. Pabst, and the novelist, Erich Maria Remarque.³ In fact, the film appears to have made no mark on German cultural memory; it does not feature in television programs or film museums, nor was it ever released on video or DVD.