'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

traditional gender roles and emphasizes her servitude. Kosta makes this clear when she
states that in this scene “Lene appears fragmented; the camera focuses on her hands,
metonymically signifying servitude as she carries a tray of coffee” (129). While Lene
reassumes such domestic duties, she does not accept the relegation to this subordinate
role in the unquestioning manner that she did before the war. Instead, Lene is oppressed
by this post-war re-marginalization to the domestic sphere because during the war she
discovered that she could survive independently and even thrive outside the home. When
the strength and skills, which Lene develops caring for herself and Anna during the years
of conflict, become irrelevant in the post-war era, Lene is disillusioned by the loss of her
newfound autonomy. Lene‟s spiritual paralysis is reflected in a sudden facial paralysis.
The film‟s mirror motif again appears as Lene examines the image of her face, disfigured
on one side, in the mirror of her new home after the war. Lene‟s palsied face manifests
the crippling effects of the restoration of the private sphere, including the repression of
the independence many German women gained through their experiences of wartime
survival (McCormick, Politics 191). This suppression renders Lene bitter, depressed, and
suicidal. Her facial paralysis is also a metaphor for her own personal silence as well as
the silencing of women‟s voices and experiences in post-war literature and film.
Lene‟s suffering in the private sphere in the final section of Deutschland, bleiche
Mutter mirrors the fairy tale in that the domestic realm becomes synonymous with
women‟s confined servitude. Like the elderly female figure of “Der Räuberbräutigam,”
who is confined by the robbers and forced to serve the murderous band, Lene is
oppressively limited to the domestic realm and expected to serve her husband. In effect,
during the years of the Economic Miracle, Lene becomes a representative figure of West
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