In “The Tin Drum” Nobel-prize winning novelist Gunter Grass satirizes his countrymen’s postwar emotional frigidity by having them engage in onion-cutting ceremonies in order to shed tears. These days Grass’s tongue-in-cheek prescription would be superfluous. For, judging by the immense box-office success of Oliver Hirschbiegel’s new film, “Downfall,” Germany’s capacity for self-pity has become big business. When it premiered in Berlin last September, “Downfall,” which melodramatically reenacts the Third Reich’s Gotterdammerung, attracted record crowds. Locally, it has been packing the house at the Film Forum, where it opened two weeks ago.

The movie is part of a larger trend: an outpouring of historical and fictional works that have, at long last, tried to come to grips with the institutionalized political madness that was Nazi Germany. One might date the wave’s onset from the 2002 publication of historian Jorg Friedrich’s controversial book “The Fire: Germany Under Bombardment 1940-45.” Mr. Friedrich portrays in unflinching detail the Allies’ massive aerial bombardment campaign during the war’s final months, culminating in the fire-bombing of Dresden, where an estimated 135,000 people lost their lives – a figure that exceeds the death toll at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

The Allied raids served no strategic purpose, since by this point it was clear the Nazi higher-ups were categorically unwilling to capitulate. They succeeded merely in terrorizing the civil population and devastating German cities for years to come. Moreover, to select Dresden as a target seemed particular heinous: a pristine medieval city, swollen with refugees fleeing the rapidly advancing Red Army that heretofore had escaped the depredations of war.

Until recently, German authors and filmmakers had been hesitant to deal with the Third Reich in general and the theme of German victim hood in particular. Instead, the most influential treatments had come from outside of Germany: the 1978 Hollywood mini-series “Holocaust,” Steven Spielberg’s magisterial “Schindler’s List.” Yet, in the aftermath of “Downfall’s” remarkable success, the floodgates have seemingly opened. The German version of the Nazi era – written by, for, and about Germans – has become a growth industry. Cinematic treatments of Goebbels’ diaries (“The Goebbels Experiment”), the life and times of Nazi architect Albert Speer (“The Devil’s Architect”), and the travails of a German priest who was interned at Dachau (“The Ninth Day”) are slated to appear soon. In sum, not only is the idea of portraying Germans-as-victims no longer taboo. It has become positively fashionable.

Is this a bad thing? Yes and no.

It is objectionable insofar as it presents a skewed, highly “theatrical” version of the historical events. Many of the books and films in question willfully distort the factual record for the sake of assuaging Germany’s badly bruised, collective psyche. One reason German popular culture avoided the Third Reich’s misdeeds and excesses is that, from a German standpoint, the events contained little of redeeming value – there were, it seemed, only negative lessons to be learned.

“Downfall” is different. In fact, the title itself is something of a misnomer, insofar as the film tells two stories at once: a story of collapse, combined with a positive tale of redemption and rebirth. Needless to say, it’s the latter theme that has caused Germans – not without a certain ambivalence – to pack the local cinemas in droves.

The narrative cliches that “Downfall” employs to seduce its audience are contrived and misleading. Amid the devastation and destruction of the Third Reich’s final days, German viewers are pointedly offered three characters with whom they can wholeheartedly identify: an altruistic SS medical doctor, who, unlike the diehard Nazis, cares more about the German people’s welfare than about “ideology” or following orders; a cherubic, 12-year-old anti-Soviet partisan, or Flakhelfer, who disposes of Russian tanks as if they were ducks in a barrel; and, finally, Hitler’s winsome Bavarian secretary, Traudl Junge.

Of the three, Junge is clearly the most important – a point cinematically reinforced by the film’s prologue, set in 1942, which recounts the story of her personal selection for the post by Hitler (“You’re hired!”). Junge really existed: She died in 2002 and was recently the subject of a disconcerting documentary, “Blind Spot.” The documentary was disturbing insofar as, despite the fact that Junge rubbed elbows with the Fuhrer on a daily basis for nearly three years, she categorically disclaims knowledge of German atrocities.

“Downfall,” however, is more interested in her symbolic value, on which the film’s message of redemption ultimately hinges. Thus, remarkably, after wallowing operatically in death and devastation for two hours and thirty minutes, “Downfall” ends on a triumphant note. Junge and the cherubic 12-year-old Flakhelfer brave a gauntlet of predatory Russian troops and ride off into the sunset together on a discarded bicycle. Germany, one can rest assured, will be reborn.

When we first meet Junge, she is youthful naivete incarnate. She applies for the secretarial position out of little more than girlish curiosity. Soon, however, she is hoodwinked and seduced by Hitler’s legendary charisma. Traudl only perceives the Fuhrer’s warm and fuzzy side: the Hitler who adored dogs and children as opposed to the one who, with the stroke of a pen, could consign entire races to slavery or extermination. In Mr. Hirschbiegel’s lavish epic, Junge becomes a paragon of the way in which an entire generation of Germans had their innocence destroyed by the Nazis’ megalomaniacal plans for world mastery.

This part of the film’s “message” is woefully simplistic and flawed. For it was hardly the case that, as Mr. Hirschbiegel would have us believe, German youth was deceived and misled by the Fuhrer’s fulsome promises. In point of fact, many Germans, young and old, were positively attracted to the idea of German world dominance, from which they, as German nationals, stood to benefit immensely.

Mr. Hirschbiegel’s film presents viewers with a misleading and historically inaccurate contrast between demented Nazi ideologues, holed up in the Fuhrerbunker and spouting drivel as the world around them goes up in flames, and supposedly “decent,” average Germans like Traudl Junge, who are guilty of nothing more than excessive credulity. Thereby, Mr. Hirschbiegel insinuates that figures like Junge were Hitler’s victims, too.

By focusing exclusively on German suffering, Mr. Hirschbiegel, by definition, distracts our attention from the suffering of others: the 3 million Soviet prisoners of war who died in Nazi captivity; the gratuitous murder of 6 million Jews; the senseless deaths of millions of purportedly “subhuman” Poles and Slavs. The list goes on and on. The same problem vitiates Jorg Friedrich’s depiction of the injustices Germany endured at the hands of the Allied bombing campaign in “The Fire.”

For by sticking with Hitler until the bitter end, the Germans in many respects brought their fate upon themselves. “Downfall” presents us with a panoply of average Germans who belatedly take exception to Hitler’s self-serving and malicious refusal to accede to the Allies’ request for unconditional surrender – a refusal that compounded German misery exponentially and showed how little he really cared about the welfare of the German “Volk.” But where, one might ask, were these “average Germans” in 1939, when their leaders launched an unprovoked, imperial war of conquest that resulted in the deaths of some 50,000,000 people? Nowhere to be found.

Mr. Hirschbiegel tries to remedy some of these deficiencies after the fact via an ill-conceived coda in which he provides a rapid-fire, statistical gallery of Nazi atrocities. But by placing this information in a frame that is extraneous to the film itself, he merely reinforces the point that these horrific events are irrelevant vis-a-vis his central narrative intentions: the tragedy of German suffering at the hands of Nazi madmen.

In the same coda, Mr. Hirschbiegel provides a brief yet poignant clip from “Blind Spot.” In it, Traudl Junge begins by once again implausibly denying any knowledge of Nazi crimes. Later in life, while passing a memorial for Sophie Scholl, a German girl who was brutally executed by the Nazis for resisting the regime, she experiences an epiphany. (Coincidentally, both women happened to be born in 1921.) The confrontation with Sophie Scholl’s “ghost” makes Junge realize that when massive criminality is at issue, girlish innocence is no excuse. Here, too, she becomes symbolic of the average German’s belated recognition of his or her complicity in Nazi brutality.

It is doubtful whether a film like “Downfall” could have been made or distributed at an earlier point in the Federal Republic of Germany’s history, when doubts persisted about the fabric of German democracy. Today, however, one can safely say that Germany possesses one of the world’s most robust democracies. Moreover, unlike Japan or Austria, on the whole the Germans have done an admirable job of confronting the sins and misdeeds of the Nazi past. It says quite a bit about this accomplishment that a film like “Downfall,” despite its flaws, poses few larger risks.

Mr. Wolin is professor of history, comparative literature, and political science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.