German Postwar Films: Life and Love in the Ruins (Studies in European Culture and History)
Language: English
Pages: 224
ISBN: 1349375047
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This volume offers a cultural, aesthetic, and critical reappraisal of German 'rubble films' produced in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and constructs their meaning in a historical context.
and thereby redeem him. At the end of the war, moral and political innocence goes with the victim status protected by Allied victory and German defeat. Brückner, the evil perpetrator, is beyond redemption even though he may yet escape human justice; it is left to the viewer to decide. In contrast to these inner Manichean separations, the visible outside world does not allow such distinctions. Like most of the surviving apartments, Susanne’s has no windows left; there is no clear distinction
beautiful, beloved city of his youth, is one of the most effective texts of the immediate postwar years because it interweaves mourning and hope, emotion and reason. There are the 10.1057/9780230616974 - German Postwar Films, Edited by Wilfried Wilms and William Rasch 54 / dagmar barnouw devastating images of irrevocable transformation and radical reduction and yet, at the moment of the visitor’s speechless despair, they are already retreating into the past. It will be a past that, though
the text of the speech see Ludin, Staudte, p. 32. 6. Quoted in Ludin, Staudte, 34. 7. Ibid., 36. 8. Werner Fiedler, “Der Weg durch die Trümmer,” Neue Zeit (October 17, 1946, reprint in Edition Filme 6. Staudte, pp.176–177). 9. “Der erste deutsche Film nach dem Kriege,” Der Tagesspiegel (October 16, 1946; reprint in Edition Filme 6. Staudte, pp.173–176). 10. See the large collection of documents in Jürgen Steinle. Nationales Selbstverständnis nach dem Nationalsozialismus. Die Kriegsschuld-Debatte
amerikanischer Pressefilm: ‘Call Northside 777’ lief in München,” FilmInformation (Wiesbaden) May 25, 1948. Kenwort 777 press clippings, Archive, Deutsches Filmmuseum. Frankfurt am Main, Germany (DF hereafter). Ibid. “Neue Sachlichkeit im Film,” Rheinische Post (Düsseldorf) December 10, 1950. Kenwort 777 press clippings, DF. Gustav Hartlaud, “Introduction to ‘New Objectivity’: German Painting Since Expressionism,” in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward
in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), pp.88–122; and Svenja Goltermann, “Im Wahn der Gewalt: Massentod, Opferdiskurs und Psychiatrie 1945–1956,” in Nachkrieg in Deutschland, ed. Klaus Naumann (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2001), pp.343–364. 23. Moeller, War Stories, pp. 123–170; and Johannes von Moltke, No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), pp.135–169. 24. Burgess, Life and