'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

1.4 Deutschland, bleiche Mutter as Counter-Fiction and Brechtian Melodrama
It should be noted that Deutschland, bleiche Mutter was made in 1979, the same
year that Holocaust was broadcast on West German television and that the mini-series
played a major role in precipitating the country‟s “remembering” process. Deutschland,
bleiche Mutter premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in February 1980 and therefore,
chronologically, it was released several years before the airing of Reitz‟s Heimat in 1984.
Hence Deutschland, bleiche Mutter must be seen as a very early example of a West
German film that confronted the fascist past from the perspective of individual
experience. In my research I found only one critic who directly acknowledges this fact.
Everett claims Deutschland, bleiche Mutter “is one of the earliest female [cinematic]
autobiographies, and – arguably – the first post-war German film to face up to Germany‟s
troubled past” (132).
In some aspects, Deutschland, bleiche Mutter can be seen as a reaction to certain
trends in post-war West German cinema. Deutschland, bleiche Mutter is different from
the personal stories of war presented in the Kriegsfilm of the 1950s in that it envisions
German war history from the perspective of a female civilian rather than that of a male
soldier. Moreover, it does not present a revisionist recreation of history typical of the
post-war Kriegsfilme in which Germans are portrayed as noble anti-Nazis who have no
complicity with the crimes of the Hitler regime. As will be explored in greater detail in
Chapter 4, Sanders-Brahms depicts not only Lene‟s victimization, but also her role as
bystander in the face of National Socialist policies with regard to the Jews. During my
interview with the director, Sanders-Brahms explained that she did not find the
30