'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

mother who survived the war years profoundly affected her personal identity as a woman.
The filmmaker‟s speech is rooted in her positive memories of her mother as a figure of
independence, personal agency, and strength. In the preface of the film script, Sanders-
Brahms claims that daughters of the generation of German women who lived through the
war developed a sense of independence and self-sufficiency from the role models of their
strong mothers. She writes:
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Aber wir, Kinder der Generation, die noch im Kreig geboren wurden, haben [die
Kraft unserer Mütter] mitbekommen. Es ist kein Wunder, daß Frauen wie Gesine
Strempel, Helke Sander, Margarethe von Trotta, Alice Schwarzer, Grischa Huber
alles Trümmer Kinder sind, Kinder dieser Mütter. Frauen, die ohne Männer
leben, wie sie es in den ersten Lebensjahren von ihren Müttern gesehen haben.
Sie kriegen die Geschichte ihrer Mütter nicht mehr aus dem Kopf. Emanzipation
war die erste Erfahrung ihrer Kindheit, eine viel weitergehende Emanzipation als
die unsere […] Nie wieder habe ich meine Mutter singen gehört. Damals sang sie
viel. (Sanders-Brahms, Film-Erzählung 26) 94
As a female filmmaker working during the second wave of feminism in Germany,
Sanders-Brahms makes use of the positive models of strength her mother handed down to
her during the first years of her life to create a film of her mother‟s story. Sanders-
Brahms‟ portrayal of her memories of her mother as a resilient survivor of war,
homelessness, and sexual violence, and as an industrious Trümmerfrau gave her the
strength to realize female potential that was often rendered ineffectual during the post-
war years (Kaes 160). In Deutschland, bleiche Mutter, Lene‟s retelling of the
“Räuberbräutigam” is significant, because it is in her role as „storyteller‟ that Lene
possesses an influential voice and is able to transmit cultural and personal wisdom to her
94 “But we children of that generation, born during the war, realized [the strength of our mothers]. It was
not surprising that women like Gesine Strempel, Helke Sander, Margarethe von Trotta, Alice Schwarzer,
Grischa Huber are all children of the ruins, children of these mothers. Women who live without men,
something that they learned from their mothers in the first years of life. They cannot get their mother‟s
history out of their minds. Emancipation was their first childhood experience, a much more profound
emancipation than ours […] Never again have I heard my mother sing. At that time, she sang a lot”
(Sanders-Brahms, Film-Erzählung 26).