'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

that Sanders-Brahms uses the fairy tale to thematize the complex issue of non-Jewish
German women‟s roles in the Nazi state and their involvement in the Holocaust.
My thesis differs from earlier studies on Deutschland, bleiche Mutter in several
ways. First it offers a more in-depth analysis of various cinematic techniques Sanders-
Brahms employs to articulate her mother‟s and her own gendered experiences of war.
For example, scholars such as Kaes, Kosta, and Knight deal only tangentially with
Sanders-Brahms‟ use of documentary footage in the film. In contrast, in his work
Politics of the Self: Feminism and the Postmodern in West German Literature and Film
(1991), McCormick offers a more detailed examination of the director‟s intercutting of
authentic archival footage into three sequences of the film. McCormick concludes that
the documentary scenes historically contextualize the fiction occurring, and,
concomitantly, the enacted scenes offer a social context to the archival footage (Politics
191-193). Using McCormick‟s research as a point of origin, I complete a close reading
and analysis of all other scenes in which Sanders-Brahms incorporates documentary or
radio broadcasts. In this analysis, I argue that Sanders-Brahms blends moments of
individual and public memory in order to imbue memory in her film with a texture that is
at once social and historic. Also, I consider the narrative ends to which Sanders-Brahms
incorporates the “Maikäferlied,” a traditional German children‟s song, into her film.
With regard to memory studies, my thesis differs from preceding critical literature
in that it applies Marianne Hirsch‟s concept of “postmemory” or of mediated generational
memory to Sanders-Brahms‟ use of images emblematic of the Nazi regime and the
Holocaust. With specific regard to issues of Vergangenheitsbewältigung and to women‟s
complicity in the crimes of fascism, I examine how the ambivalent victim/perpetrator
4