'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

oles of three female characters in the fairy tale echo the fluid behaviours of the mother
figure in the film narrative. The expression used in the title “in the murderer‟s house” is
gleaned from “Der Räuberbräutigam” and it refers to the situation of the heroine who at
one point finds herself trapped in a house inhabited by her murderous future husband and
his band. Held captive in this den of ignominy, she witnesses the murder of another
young woman. Thus the heroine is at once a victim in the sense that she cannot escape
and a bystander in that she does nothing to stop the murder. I argue that Lene is also
ensnared in the “house of murderers” of Nazi Germany and that she possesses similar
complex and contradictory roles. Moreover, I contend that the actions and attitudes of all
three female characters in the tale emphasize the multidimensional and changing nature
of non-German Jewish women‟s roles in the “Third Reich” and post-war period. My
thesis also adds to existing critical studies on the film in that it includes a personal
interview with the director which took place in Berlin, Germany in March 2009. In this
interview, Sanders-Brahms and I discussed ideas which previously had not been
addressed in prior interviews, 5 such as her understanding of the parallels I draw between
the ambivalent roles of the mother figure and the three female fairy tale characters.
This thesis is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 summarizes West German
post-war cinema in its historical context in order to situate Deutschland, bleiche Mutter in
this cinematic framework. I trace the various stages of Vergangenheitsbewältigung in
post-war West German cinema in order to outline how the generally escapist and
exculpatory films of the post-war period were eventually superseded in the late 1970s and
5 See, for example, Sanders-Brahms‟ interviews with Renate Möhrmann (1980), Peggy Parnass (1980) and
Peter Brunette (1990).
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