'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

4.1 Lene and the Miller’s Daughter
Several parallels link Lene‟s story to that of the miller‟s daughter. For example,
both women take journeys deep into a forest, the miller‟s daughter while visiting her
future husband‟s house, and Lene while crossing through the forests of Eastern Germany
with her daughter Anna. Moreover, Lene‟s situation replicates that of the fairy tale bride
who is told she will marry death and live in the house of a murdering husband. This
macabre prediction in the fairy tale becomes a reality for Lene in the film narrative.
During the war, her husband Hans assumes, as a soldier, the identity of a “murdering
husband” albeit a politically sanctioned one, killing Polish peasants and members of the
French resistance. 71 However, unlike the robber bridegroom, Hans is not a willing
murderer. While Hans is sympathetically portrayed for most of the film, he becomes,
against his will but without his resistance, part of a war machine that consumes people
(McCormick, “Confronting German History” 202).
Lene and the miller‟s daughter are also similar in how they react to adversity.
Both the bride-to-be in the fairy tale and Lene during the war years respond to
contingency with courage, intuition, and purposeful rational thought. Such character
traits are more often associated with male heroes than with female heroines in fairy tales
(Morewedge 232). The miller‟s daughter exhibits courage when she makes her way
through the forest to visit her husband to be, in spite of her inner aversion to him.
71 Sanders-Brahms casts Eva Mattes, the actress who plays Lene, in the role of a Polish peasant and a
French partisan, both of whom Hans helps execute, in spite of his recognition that both look just like his
wife. The triple casting is disorienting and unsettling for the viewer, because up until this point in the film,
Mattes has been identified with Lene, in accordance to the naturalistic acting one expects in conventional
films. Through this distantiation technique Sanders-Brahms makes an indictment of war: as a soldier Hans
is forced to kill women who are „just like‟ his wife but who happen to be on the other side of the conflict.
Visually then it appears as though he is murdering his own wife and thus symbolically he becomes an
uxoricidal husband (McCormick, Politics 199).
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