'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

herself and teaches her daughter to speak as well” (151). It is at this point in the film that
Lene is depicted as most vocal and active. She uses her voice not only to secure shelter
and food but also to pass cultural information to her daughter in the form of a Grimms‟
fairy tale. However, with the end of the war and the return to the domestic sphere, Lene
is gradually rendered less and less vocal until her voice ultimately recedes into silence.
Her voice, representing her independence and agency, is slowly stripped away by
traditional family culture and by the patriarchal society of West Germany‟s post-war
culture. Lene‟s loss of voice, her disempowerment, is further exacerbated by her facial
paralysis and the extraction of all her teeth which can be seen as a further form of
mutilation and silencing by a patriarchal agent. Nearing the end of the film, Lene is
reduced to cries of despair and weeping. In the last scene of the film, she becomes
completely silent. After Anna convinces her not to commit suicide, Lene embraces her
daughter and speechlessly looks off screen.
The mother‟s silence in the film is juxtaposed to the filmmaker‟s speech in her
portrayal of the mother-daughter relationship. Sanders-Brahms, the filmmaker, reclaims
the enunciative role of woman as storyteller by articulating her mother‟s story in a film,
which she herself narrates. Through creating a fictionalized re-telling of the cultural,
historical, and personal forces that silenced her mother, and of the horrors and
disillusionments she experienced, Sanders-Brahms gives form to a part of German
wartime history that is often neglected in traditional historical accounts of the period, that
is, a woman‟s experience on the home front. Sanders-Brahms suggests that the tragedy
of her mother, and countless other non-Jewish German women like her, was that after the
war, their newfound independence and strength were no longer required. They were
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