'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

Ice Saints, 1979), which depicts an abusive mother who passes on her female self-hatred
to her daughter; and Elfriede Jelinek‟s Die Klavierspielerin (The Piano Teacher, 1983), 24
which explores a sadomasochistic mother-daughter relationship. These Mütterromane
are primarily written from the daughter‟s subjective perspective and explore the themes
of dependency, separation, emotional hardening on both sides of the mother-daughter
dyad, and female identity formation.
The search for personal identity through an examination of the mother‟s life and
mother-daughter relationships was not only a literary, but also a cinematic trend. In the
late 1970s and early 1980s, several female West-German directors began making full-
length feature films that examined their mother‟s lives and their own childhoods, often in
connection with a feminist questioning of traditional sex-roles. Revealing the past in the
present, Jeanine Meerapfel‟s Malou (1981) traces a woman‟s attempts to recreate her
mother‟s tragic life story and, in so doing, to come to terms with her own complex
identity of being Catholic, Jewish, and Argentinean in West German society. Jutta
Brückner‟s Hungerjahre (Years of Hunger, 1979) uses the story of a young girl growing
up during the 1950s to draw a connection between sexual repression and the culture of
the Economic Miracle (Hake 167). The daughter is forced to surrender to her mother‟s
anxieties about sexuality and to the imperatives her mother places on her body and thus a
negative female self-image is perpetuated between generations (Kosta 172).
In her film Deutschland, bleiche Mutter (1980) Helma Sanders-Brahms recounts
the story of her mother‟s personal experiences of Nazism, the Second World War, and its
aftermath along with her own childhood experiences of those eras and thus offers a very
24 While the official English title of Die Klavierspielerin is The Piano Teacher a more literal translation
would be “The Piano Player.”
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