'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

1.2 The German Autumn and the “Return of History as Film”
The historic myopia of the cinema of the 1950s and 1960s was rectified in the
1970s during a resurgent interest in the fascist past that became known as the Nazi-Welle
or “Nazi wave.” As the artist Christo suggested in an interview, “The Germans suddenly
began to reinvent National Socialism. The Hitler period became an extraordinary
creative source for a whole generation of filmmakers” (quoted in Lotringer 20). In the
late 1970s and early 1980s, young West German directors produced a slew of historical
films that directly dealt with Germany‟s fascist past. Between 1975 and 1985 alone,
more than fifty new feature films dealing with National Socialism were made in West
Germany, nearly as many as in the thirty years before (Reimer and Reimer 82). Two of
the first films of the Nazi-Welle, Joachim Fest‟s Hitler – Eine Karriere (Hitler – A
Career, 1977) and Hans Jürgen Syberberg‟s Hitler, Ein Film aus Deutschland (Hitler, A
Film From Germany, 1977) directly thematized Adolf Hitler‟s years in power. Shortly
thereafter followed a number of historical films which accelerated the velocity of the
Nazi-Welle, including Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn, 1977) by a collective
of West German filmmakers, Rainer Werner Fassbinder‟s Die Ehe der Maria Braun (The
Marriage of Maria Braun, 1978/1979), Helma Sanders-Brahms‟ Deutschland, bleiche
Mutter (1979), and Volker Schlöndorff‟s Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum, 1979).
What caused West German filmmakers in the late 1970s to dramatically break the
silence about the National Socialist past? While the liberal policy of film funding
instituted in 1974 provided the funds for historically-oriented films, West German
directors‟ renewed interest in the “Third Reich” can also be viewed as a reaction to
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