'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

audiences. This film movement of the 1960s is known as the New German Cinema, 10
because it rebelled against the older generation of filmmakers, who produced the so-
called “Papas Kino.” New German Cinema produced an abundance of filmic adaptations
of literary works, a few of which took a more serious look at the recent German past.
Three examples of this are Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet‟s minimalist film
Nicht versöhnt (Not Reconciled, 1965) adapted from Heinrich Böll‟s novel Billard um
halb zehn (Billiards at Half Past Nine), Alexander Kluge‟s, Abschied von gestern
(Yesterday Girl, 1966) based on his own short story “Anita G.” from the collection
Lebensläufe, and Volker Schlöndorff‟s Der junge Törless (Young Törless, 1966), a
cinematic adaptation of Robert Musil‟s 1906 novel, Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings
Törless (The Confusions of Young Törless). Abschied von gestern has the most relevance
to my contextualization of Deutschland, bleiche Mutter as Kluge‟s film depicts a
woman‟s gendered experiences in West German society of the 1960s. Therefore, only
Abschied von gestern will be discussed in this thesis.
Abschied von gestern demonstrates the inescapable connection between the past
and the present. The film focuses on the troubled toils of Anita G, a young East German
woman of Jewish descent who tries but fails to find success in West Germany. In a
disjointed sequence of episodes, the viewer sees Anita stumbling through various
ephemeral jobs and short-lived relationships, to end up an unmarried mother in prison.
Like so many refugees from the East, Anita arrives in the Federal Republic expecting to
10 The term “Young German Film” is sometimes used to designate the the avant-garde cinema produced by
a young generation of West German filmmakers beginning in 1962 with the signing of the Oberhausen
Manifesto (Knight, New German Cinema 13). In the 1970s, the movement was renamed “New German
Cinema” by New York film critics (Flinn 6). Throughout this thesis I will refer to the trend in West
German cinema spanning from approximately the late 1960s to the mid-1980s in which a generation of
filmmakers born circa the period of the Second World War directed a slew of critically acclaimed films as
“New German Cinema.”
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