'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

its aftermath. German women‟s personal stories relating their gendered experiences of
the Second World War and its aftermath have helped change the prevailing forms of
representation of the recent German past. This thesis will argue that in her film,
Deutschland, bleiche Mutter, Helma Sanders-Brahms uses a variety of narrative and
cinematic techniques to give voice to the frequently neglected history of non-Jewish
German women‟s war and post-war experiences.
My study contributes to the scholarship on German women‟s film in general and
Deutschland, bleiche Mutter in particular as it explores Sanders-Brahms‟ film from a
perspective that connects gender issues and memory studies with an examination of
formalistic cinematic and narrative techniques. With regard to film and gender studies, I
will maintain that Sanders-Brahms employs techniques such as the use of an authorial
female voice-over, the insertion of authentic footage, and codes of fantasy and fairy tale
to depict a mother and daughter‟s gendered experiences of war. 3 In terms of memory
studies, I will argue that Sanders-Brahms juxtaposes re-enacted scenes inspired by her
mother‟s experiences of war with documentary footage 4 and radio broadcasts to
demonstrate how historical events affected the lives of German women and children on
the home front. Moreover, I will contend that Sanders-Brahms uses a retelling of the
Grimms‟ fairy tale “Der Räuberbräutigam” (“The Robber Bridegroom”) as a narrative
locus in which to allegorically remember the crimes of the Holocaust. I will also argue
3 Deutschland, bleiche Mutter is an (auto)biographical film in which the director Sanders-Brahms recreates
her mother‟s experience of the Second World War and the post-war years of reconstruction while tracing
her own personal experiences of the period (Sanders-Brahms, Film-Erzählung 10). The (auto)biographical
nature of the film is underscored by credits at the end of the film which reveal that the character Lene is the
fictional representation of Sanders-Brahms‟ mother Helene Sanders (born Brahms) and the character of
Anna is the fictional representation of the filmmaker as a child.
4 In this thesis I will use the terms “documentary footage,” “archival footage,” and “newsreel footage”
interchangeably.
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