'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

4.4 Summarizing Remarks
Sanders-Brahms employs a self-reflective and historically-inflected retelling of
“Der Räuberbräutigam” to underscore how her mother reacted to the historical, political,
and personal circumstances that she experienced during the war and post-war era. The
various roles of the miller‟s daughter, the old woman, and the murdered maiden in the
fairy tale emphasize the multidimensional and changing nature of Lene‟s attitudes and
behaviour at different points in the filmic narrative. With specific respect to Lene‟s
involvement in the crimes of the “Third Reich,” the ambiguous functions of the miller‟s
daughter and the old woman highlight Lene‟s status as both a victim and a bystander of
the Nazi regime. The wider implications of this paralleling technique are that non-Jewish
German women‟s roles in the “Third Reich” were not clearly-defined and static but were
instead multidimensional and dynamic. During the Hitler regime, ordinary women and
men became complex combinations of both victims and perpetrators. However, women‟s
complicity with the crimes of the Nazi regime probably exhibited gender-specific
features as the social expectations for women under the National Socialists were different
from those of men (von Saldern 157). For example, while men could hold powerful
positions in the Nazi hierarchy women were usually confined to minor political offices.
Moreover, after the war began in 1939, men tended to be drafted into military service
whereas women more often remained at home in the less overtly Nazified domestic
sphere or took on occupations which had been vacated by men such as factory work,
agricultural labour, and so on. As von Saldern explains, “This meant that women were
commonly co-observers, co-listeners, and co-possessors of guilty knowledge rather than
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