FRANKFURT, Germany - The release of a major movie about Hitler is, by definition, a remarkable event in Germany, especially if it portrays one of history's great monsters as a human being, given to moments of tenderness as well as the more familiar paroxysms of hatred.

No longer a taboo subject, Hitler is now fair game for cinematic use as a bad guy, part of an international rogue's gallery, one commentator here said, that includes the likes of Nero and Jack the Ripper.

But the most remarkable thing about "Der Untergang" ("The Downfall"), a new film that explores Hitler's last 12 days in a bunker beneath the bombed-out chancellery in Berlin, is how unremarkable it is: a straightforward, rather conventional drama about the death throes of the Third Reich.

This is no small thing in a country that has struggled, in art no less than in life, to make sense of where the Nazis came from.

That Hitler has become acceptable grist for a piece of mainstream entertainment, rather than a sober documentary or a biting satire - as it has been the more customary treatment of the Fuehrer in postwar Germany - attests to how far the Germans have come in laying to rest their ghosts.

"For today's German public, the image of the old man with the brush mustache no longer poses a seductive danger," wrote Harald Martenstein in Der Tagesspiegel. "No greater danger than it does for the French or Irish, regardless of what the man on the screen says or does."

It is not that simple, of course, in a country where even today political analysts are nervously watching state elections in Saxony and Brandenburg this Sunday because far-right parties may make substantial gains in the provincial legislatures.

Germany still bans the Nazi Party, the wearing of swastikas, the publication of Hitler's "Mein Kampf" and other relics of National Socialism. In testing the boundaries of what is acceptable in dramatizing those days, German filmmakers must tread carefully.

"Der Untergang" opens here Thursday.

After decades in which Hitler was portrayed, if at all, as a demonic madman, Ganz offers a flesh-and-blood portrait - a sort of backstairs at the bunker, in which the Fuehrer chews out his hapless generals, dotes on his loyal-to-the-end secretaries and smiles at the doomed children of Josef Goebbels as they serenade him with folk songs.

A few critics have expressed qualms about the wisdom of depicting Hitler in such sympathetic terms. Some note that the Hitler of the film is almost a heroic figure who refuses to flee or capitulate in the face of the advancing Soviet army, even as he is betrayed by one former acolyte after another.

"This whole debate over whether we are allowed to show Hitler as a human being is wrong," said Bernd Eichinger, the film's writer and producer. "Of course he was a human being. You have to make clear to people that he was a human being, and that's the dangerous thing."