Last night to distract myself from insomnia (I was attempting to finish reading Seamus Heaney's "District & Circle"), I decided to watch the DVD of "Downfall" ("Der Untergang" in German) that I had checked out last weekend from the library.

It was as powerful a movie as the reviews I had read indicated it was. And Bruno Ganz is extremely compelling to watch as Adolf Hitler as he spirals into madness in the death thores of the Third Reich, while the Battle of Berlin rages outside the Führerbunker. The most compelling, and thus the chilling, scence of the movie for me, was the one in which Madga Goebbels, basically, murders her children with cyanide after drugging them with morphine.

It was only a few months ago that I had read Antony Beevor's masterful account "The Fall of Berlin 1945" (his "Stalingrad" is excellent too), and I had then wondered about the macabreness Beevor had written about in the Reich's final moments. And "Downfall" recreates, compellingly, how it would have been down there, in that bunker. I recommend that you watch it too, kind readers, for this movie may keep you up nearly all night.