'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

(McCormick, Politics 203), Lene appears to passively accept her victimization in that she
fails to make any attempt to publicly protest it. Instead she remains silent about the
suffering she has endured and does nothing to ameliorate her situation. She does not
even tell her husband Hans about the rape. However, upon viewing Sander‟s film
BeFreier und Befreite I understood it was very uncommon for German victims of
wartime rapes to attempt to receive any kind of legal recognition or compensation for the
trauma they endured. As stated in Chapter 3, in her research for BeFreier und Befreite
Sander discovered only one case where a rape survivor filed a claim to be official
recognized as a war victim (Sander and Johr 168). Thus, one could argue that even if
Lene had brought her rape to the attention of the authorities, it would have been virtually
impossible to bring her aggressors to justice and very difficult for her to receive any sort
of financial compensation.
A fourth example of Lene‟s passive reaction to male aggression can be found in
the scene where Hans takes Lene to the dentist‟s office to seek a cure for his wife‟s
partial facial paralysis. The dentist advises the extraction of all of Lene‟s teeth in order to
stop the paralysis from spreading. When Lene objects to the procedure saying “Ich will
nicht”, the dentist addresses Hans, refusing responsibility for the spreading paralysis and
Lene‟s possible death if he is not given permission to pull her teeth (Sanders-Brahms,
Film-Erzählung 86). 88 Hans avoids responsibility for the decision by delegating it back
to the dentist. Hence this scene illuminates not only women‟s subordination to male
hierarchies but also the power dynamics that rule male discourse. Hans‟ automatic
acceptance of the dentist‟s drastic solution indicates a power hierarchy: the doctor‟s
status and opinion are weightier than Hans‟ and Lene and her wants rank at the bottom.
88 “I don‟t want that” (Sanders-Brahms, Film-Erzählung 86).
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