'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

exculpatory brand of Vergangenheitsbewältigung presented in the Kriegsfilme believable
and that she wanted to show ordinary Germans‟ behaviour under fascism as complex and
contradictory. She stated:
[S]everal films were made that were personal stories. But they were personal
stories that were more or less about people who had behaved well during fascism.
[…] You always show the well-behaved man who fights against Nazis. And then,
of course, there were men‟s stories, mostly men or boys‟ stories. Like for
example, Die Brücke [The Bridge] by Bernhard Wicki. And, to me, all these
films did not really convince me because I felt that things were much more
complex. I lived through them as a small child [… Deutschland, bleiche Mutter]
is not just telling a nice story about something in a brutal and horrible time, but
it‟s very complex. […] Lene is not a Nazi, but she is not a fighter against fascism
either. Her husband is not a Nazi, but he is also not a fighter against Nazism.
And, at special times, he also uses phrases of the Nazis for himself. (Reed 159)
Sanders-Brahms went on to reveal that she felt that it was this very complexity that
caused Deutschland, bleiche Mutter to receive critical acclaim internationally but also to
be attacked by critics in West Germany. She claimed that in West German society of the
late 1970s, “This complexity was seen as something that you shouldn‟t really do in a
film. So it irritated the critics terribly” (Reed 159-160). 23
While Deutschland, bleiche Mutter differs from the personal stories of war
presented in the Kriegsfilme of the 1950s and in its retelling of German war history from
a woman‟s perspective and in its depiction of the ambivalent behavior of ordinary
Germans during the “Third Reich,” it shows some stylistic similarities with other films of
the Nazi-Welle. Holocaust and Heimat employ classical realist codes of representation
and elements of melodrama. In classical realism, evidence of the constructedness of the
23 One reason why the film was so controversial is that it transgresses the cultural taboo of disclosing the
political past of one‟s own family members during the “Third Reich” to the public. Any critical look at the
past was promptly labeled as Nestbeschmutzung (Weinberger 73). This attitude towards the recent German
past certainly influenced the critical reception to Deutschland, bleiche Mutter. Olav Münzberg wrote a
sociopsychological analysis of the film in which he suggests that Deutschland, bleiche Mutter, by breaking
cultural taboos, awakens unresolved anxieties (Münzberg 34-37).
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