'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

of memory, she opens up an intergenerational dialogue through three specific cinematic
techniques: a dramatic reading of a Brecht poem by the poet‟s daughter, using voice-over
narration to carry on a dialogue with her mother‟s life, and having her own daughter play
a role in the film. I also consider how the mother‟s retelling of the Grimms‟ fairy tale,
“Der Räuberbräutigam,” (“The Robber Bridegroom”) becomes a story which is layered
within the story of the filmic narrative. This is followed by a brief summary of the fairy
tale and a discussion of Sanders-Brahms‟ use of the tale as a narrative locus in which she
allegorically remembers the horrors of the Holocaust.
Chapter 4 explores how the roles of each of the three female characters in the
Grimms‟ fairy tale “Der Räuberbräutigam” reflect different aspects of the mother figure‟s
attitudes and actions at different points in the film, with particular emphasis on her
involvement in the crimes of the “Third Reich.” I examine how the behaviour of the
miller‟s daughter, the old woman, and the murdered maiden in the Grimms‟ tale
underscores and thus emphasizes how the mother figure reacts to hardship and the
deportation of the Jews during the Nazi era, and to men‟s oppression of women during
the Economic Miracle. Moreover, I theorize that the wider implications of this
paralleling technique are that non-Jewish German women‟s roles in German fascism
were not clearly-defined and static but were instead complex and dynamic as women
adapted to their constantly changing situations. In this section, I also consider the issue
of women‟s survival in patriarchal societies and how finding one‟s voice through telling
one‟s tale can sometime ensure female survival.
In the conclusion to this thesis, I contrast the mother‟s voicelessness in the film
narrative with the coming to speech of Sanders-Brahms through the creation of
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