Unlike the rest of the Axis, Germany did not enjoy a post-war film renaissance. Japan had Kurosawa and Ozu; Italy had De Sica, Rossellini, and neo-realism. Germany had Willi Forst, Helmut Käutner, and the heimat movies — nostalgic, pastoral romances celebrating the countryside and traditional values that Hitler himself might have found wholesome. As can be seen in the Harvard Film Archive’s series "After the War/Before the Wall: German Film 1945-1960" (which is being presented in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut), achieving a cinematic miracle akin to the coming economic one was not high on the list of West Germany’s priorities.
Why such an unambitious post-war cinema? Like Japan and Italy, Germany had plenty of rubble to deal with, but also a lot more guilt. As W.G. Sebald points out in The Natural History of Destruction, his study of the German people’s response to the razing of their cities and the suffering of the civilian population, the devastation "seems to have left scarcely a trace of pain behind in the collective consciousness." He adds, "The darkest aspects of the final act of destruction . . . remained under a kind of taboo, like a shameful family secret."
Understandably so. Bad enough to lose hundreds of thousands to Allied bombers and vengeful Soviet troops — the guilt over having committed the greatest crime in history was too much. Movies provided an escape in the fields and flowers of the vanished past or in the materialistic dreams of the nascent wirtschaftswunder.
And if there was no one to watch movies that confronted the evils and sufferings of the past, there was also no one to shoot them. Most of the best German filmmakers — Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Robert Siodmak, Fred Zinnemann, Otto Preminger — had fled the Fatherland for Hollywood. One who came back was the actor Peter Lorre, to direct his first and only film, Der Verlorene/The Lost Man (1951; March 7 at 7 p.m.), an adaptation of his own novel. Turbid and inky in the expressionist mode of M, his 1930 collaboration with Fritz Lang (who also returned to Germany to shoot his last film, 1960’s Die tausend Augen des Dr. Mabuse, which is not part of the HFA program), Der Verlorene is the tale of a Nazi scientist (Lorre) who tries to escape justice for his crimes (which include not just working for the Reich but murdering his wife and another woman) by serving as a doctor in the post-war ruins. This moody return of the repressed appealed to such critics as Lotte Eisner but not to the public, and Lorre headed back defeated to Hollywood, dying five years later.
Other German filmmakers also tried to deal directly with past trauma and the present turmoil of a divided Germany. Helmut Käutner, who subsisted by making comedies during the Third Reich, shows a knack for melodrama in Himmel ohne Sterne/Sky Without Stars (1955; March 19 at 7 p.m.). Anna, a factory worker in the Communist East, sneaks across the border to retrieve her son from his selfish bourgeois grandparents. She’s aided by Carl, a West German border policeman, and the two begin a desperate, doomed romance, their trysts taking place in a bombed-out railroad-station waiting room in no man’s land.
Subplots and secondary characters deepen the film’s compelling love story. Anna’s grandmother, a survivor of the Dresden bombing, has lost her mind: she believes that the city still exists and that all those who perished in the firestorm still live, a chilling embodiment of the nation’s collective amnesia. And Mischa (Horst Buchholz), a young Soviet soldier with a crush on Anna, adds a note of sexual tension, paranoia, and pathos. Restrained, achingly detailed, and poignant, if subdued, in its social and political criticism, Himmel ohne Sterne ends on a note of heartbreaking irony.
The sky has plenty of stars in Kurt Hoffmann’s Ich denke oft an Piroschka/I Often Think of Piroschka (1955; March 14 at 9 p.m.), though they’re painted on a studio sky. A prime example of the heimat film, it travels 25 years into the past and to a different country to find the proper pastoral bliss. Despite its evasions, Piroschka evokes a bittersweet wistfulness in its tale of an uptight German student on holiday in a Hungarian backwater who falls for the girl of the title, the coltish 17-year-old daughter of the local stationmaster. As Piroschka, Swiss actress Liselotte Pulver conveys both a capricious innocence and a lurking sexuality; no wonder she became a favorite with German audiences in the years to come.
Piroschka leaps conveniently from the idylls of 1925 to a present-day middle-aged nostalgia. Nothing is mentioned about what happened in the meantime, such as the likelihood that the picturesque Gypsies who serenade the lovelorn hero met their fate in death camps. Neither is there any mention of these matters in Hans H. König’s Rosen blühen auf dem Heidegrab/Roses Bloom on the Grave in the Meadow (1952; March 18 at 9 p.m.), though as the ponderous title suggests, its bucolic façade conceals a troubled soul. In the moors of Northern Germany, a young peasant woman falls for a young local boy made good — a budding architect and future designer of the new Germany. But a hulking local landowner has the hots for her, and his brutish lust and jealousy promise a messy resolution. Campy in its histrionics and narrative contrivances, the film nonetheless draws on the dread of past horrors — the Thirty Years War, not World War II — and the foreboding metaphor of an all-consuming, id-like swamp.
In general, women do not fare very well in German post-war/pre-wall pictures; they’re either virginal victims, as in Rosen, or trampy femme fatales. Willi Forst’s Die Sünderin/The Sinner (1950; March 12 at 7 p.m.) combines those two extremes in its tale of a call girl (a gorgeous Hildegard Knef) who redeems herself by supporting a down-and-out artist with a brain tumor. A kitschy hoot that plays like Douglas Sirk on a bender, Die Sünderin further suffers from Knef’s incessant voiceover narrative, which buries the film’s visuals beneath redundant verbiage. Some dank mystery and haunting beauty survives, however, notably in the flashbacks to the heroine’s initiation into her profession (blame not the war but her decadent stepbrother) and in the exquisite close-ups of Knef’s face.
A less idealistic prostitute is featured in Rolf Thiele’s Das Mädchen Rosemarie/A Call Girl Named Rosemarie (1959; March 12 at 9 p.m. and March 19 at 9 p.m.), which is based on the true story of Rosemarie Nitribitt ("sounds like an explosive," comments one character in this wittily scripted gem), a prostitute implicated in industrial-espionage scandals at the height of the economic miracle. Starting off her career as a 50-mark-a-night girl pimped by a pair of street buskers (their musical commentary is one of the film’s odd delights), Rosemarie catches on to the way things work under the tutelage of the slippery Prince Fribert. He has her bed down magnates and steal their secrets for later blackmail, a lucrative scam that backfires when she aspires to enter the privileged society she exploits and is exploited by. No doubt Fassbinder had this film in mind when he conceived of post-war German history as the career of a prostitute in Die Ehe der Maria Braun (1979).
A gold-digging hussy also stirs up trouble in Georg Tressler’s Die Halbstarken/The Hooligans (1956; March 15 at 7 p.m.), a gritty, more graphic knockoff of such Hollywood juvenile-delinquent pictures as The Wild One (1954) Blackboard Jungle (1955), and Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Sissy (Karin Baal) is the mercenary squeeze of teen thug and dreamer Freddy (would-be German James Dean Horst Buchholz). But she’s no pure-hearted Natalie Wood — instead she incites the leather-clad Freddy and his better-natured younger brother, Jan, to armed robbery and violent sibling rivalry. The true cause of the brothers’ discontent, however, lies at home, where their martinet father lashes out in bitterness about unearned debts and discredited traditions, leaving his sons a legacy of a blighted past and a dubious future.
The Oedipal origins of Germany’s downfall emerge more overtly in Bernhard Wicki’s Die Brücke/The Bridge (1959; March 9 at 9 p.m.). It’s just weeks before the end of the war in a small German town close to the front, and the local high-school kids seem more preoccupied with classroom romances and the sordid affairs of their parents — two of them have just discovered their dads are getting it on with someone they shouldn’t, to the kids’ primal horror — than with the prospect of defeat and sudden death. So when draft papers arrive for seven of our heroes, they’re overjoyed to participate in a new adventure. They’ve barely learned to salute when they’re posted to guard a bridge behind the lines — in their own home town, as it turns out. The idea is to keep them "out of the shit." But the front collapses more quickly than expected, and what starts out as a lark turns into one of the most brutally realistic war films ever made.
Although implausible (US Army vets might take exception to the spectacle of 16-year-olds knocking out American armor their first day in uniform) and with obvious debts to anti-war classics like All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Die Brücke still provides a disturbing glimpse at the thin line between innocence and chaos, family pathology and historical catastrophe. It was an eye opener for a country trying to forget its last war, and it should be the same for a country about to enter its next.
Film among the ruins