'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

Chapter 1: A (De)Politicized West German Cinema:
The Heimatfilm and the Kriegsfilm
After the end of the Second World War there was a desire to forget the Nazi past
and during the 1950s it tended not to be a topic for public discussion. As (West) German
filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta observed in 1984, “We felt that there was a past of
which we were guilty as a nation but we weren‟t told about in school. If you asked
questions, you didn‟t get answers” (quoted in Bergmann 47). In the late 1940s and the
1950s West Germany focused on rebuilding its economy. With help from the Marshall
Plan and the currency reform of 1948, the West German economy soon flourished. Many
West Germans blinded themselves to the continuities with the “Third Reich” and thought
that the past of their country could now be forgotten.
During the Adenauer and Erhard era, a remarkable change of mood took place in
West German cinema. The first films made after 1945 were the so-called Trümmerfilme
(rubble films) 6 that thematized the country‟s wartime devastation and political defeat
through their remarkable stories, characters, and locations (Hake 91). However, the
realism of the Trümmerfilme soon became less popular as German audiences started to
demand films that corresponded more to their fantasies than to mundane social realities.
The Trümmerfilme disappeared from the screen after 1948 (Fehrenbach 149).
Throughout the 1950s, West German cinema focused less on taking a critical look at the
recent German past and more on making pleasing entertainment films for a domestic
6 Examples of Trümmerfilme include Wolfgang Staudte‟s Die Mörder sind unter uns (The Murderers Are
among Us, 1946), Harald Braun‟s Zwischen gestern und morgen (Between Yesterday and Tomorrow,
1947), Josef von Báky‟s Und über uns der Himmel (And above Us the Sky, 1947), Helmut Käutner‟s films
In jenen Tagen (In Those Days, 1947) and Der Apfel ist ab (The Apple Fell, 1948) and Robert A.
Stemmle‟s Berliner Ballade (Berliner Ballad, 1948). In this thesis, all the primary works that I list but do
not discuss in detail are not included in the “Works Cited.” In contrast, all the secondary works that I list
are included in the “Works Cited.”
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