It's been interesting to see how Downton Abbey has incorporated actual historical events into its five seasons’ worth of story lines—managing to thread in everything from the Titanic sinking and World War I to medical developments, political upheavals, musical innovations, and religious controversies. But as the Crawleys careen into 1925 during the drama’s final season, Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes has confirmed that there is one controversial figure of the era whom he absolutely avoids.
That man: Adolph Hitler. In fact, Fellowes’s aversion to writing about Hitler and Nazis is one of the reasons why the creator is ending the series before the year 1930, Fellowes explains in a new interview with The Wrap.
“I feel the ’30s have been very much explored dramatically, and I didn’t really want to get into the whole business of the Nazis, which I think has been explored exhaustively,” Fellowes explained. “And I don’t know that there is anything else to be said about the Nazis.”
Fellowes has given thought to covering the political party, but explains that it simply does not make for good drama.
“The difficulty of dramatizing the Nazis, to me, is that I like ambivalent dramas, where you don’t know whose side you’re on, or maybe you change sides,” he said. “You might initially think, Oh no, [Maggie Smith’s character] Violet is completely wrong in this, but as the argument goes on and as you hear more of her point of view, you understand where she’s coming from. That’s what I like.”
“But the Nazis don’t give you that. Nobody’s slightly on the side of the Nazis. It’s so absolute—there’s just bad guys and good guys. And there have been wonderful films about them, but I don’t think I’m the right guy to write them.”
Although Hitler did not take control of the German government until 1933, he did attempt a coup in Munich in 1923, and published the first volume of his manifesto Mein Kampf in 1925.
If Fellowes had his way, though, he would have actually ended the series after the fifth season, leaving even more space between his upstairs-downstairs drama and Hitler.
“We originally thought five would be it,” Fellowes said. “And it was only as we were getting started on [season] five that we realized that we didn’t really have enough time to wind everything up. And so that’s what we’ve done with six. But we were never tempted to do more.”
And sadly for us, our online pleas to keep Downton alive won't convince Fellowes to change his mind.
“We’ve had lots of letters saying, ’Please don’t,’ which is flattering,” he said. “And that is precisely why we’re ending it now, because we still get letters asking us not to.”
