'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

H.S.-B.: Well, one answer to this question would be to tell you that at that period when I
started to think about this film, my generation of filmmakers were about to reflect
German history very much. That is to say, quite a number of films about German history
were made at that time, like, for example, Blechtrommel, The Tin Drum. And I felt that
there were so many films about the male vision of war and Nazism, that it would be
really something new and special to make a film about the female vision of these things
like war and fascism. Because I felt that war is mostly a thing of men, men fighting for
resources of all kinds, those could be fertile soil, or diamonds, they could be coal, or
steel, or iron, or gold. But women, normally, they are not related to that other than being
the victims of this, that means the women have to care for the wounded, for the children,
for the old, especially in the First and Second World Wars, it was the case where women
not only had to suffer, civilians had to suffer more than ever from these wars, but also
that they, after the war was over, and even during the war, were already replacing men in
all the professions. And, not only that, they had to rebuild the cities that men had
destroyed and especially this is shown also in the film, how the women were rebuilding
after the war, and saving the stones, and putting them in order again so that the towns
could be rebuilt and that people could live in these ruins. This was the idea and another
idea that I had was that the relationship of mother and child under these circumstances is
very special and had not yet really been exploited in cinema so far and not so very much
in literature either. That is to say, we had not really reflected, neither the Germans, nor
the English, what happened to children and to women, living under these circumstances.
One of the good things that this film, when it came out and when it was shown all over
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