'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

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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.” 37
direct and personal confrontation with the issues of fascism and war. Her film can be understood as a cinematic manifestation of Generationenliteratur, in which a member of the post-war generation seeks to understand her mother‟s experience of and involvement in the “Third Reich.” Her work can also be understood as a part of the literary/cinematic movement of New Subjectivity of the late 1970s and early 1980s in that it merges the director‟s personal memories and subjective experience of the war and the Adenauer era with the historical discourse of coming to terms with the past. As will be seen in the following section, Deutschland, bleiche Mutter was influenced by a relatively recent movement in historiography which began in the early 1980s. This trend in historical understanding was characterized by a move away from a single authoritative record of the past to an embracing of the importance of adding personal stories in all their complexity to the grand narrative of history. 38
Page 1 and 2: Storytelling and Survival in the
Page 3 and 4: Supervisory Committee Dr. Helga Tho
Page 5 and 6: 3.1 Intergenerational Dialogue in D
Page 7 and 8: I would like to dedicate this thesi
Page 9 and 10: Sanders-Brahms describes a phenomen
Page 11 and 12: that Sanders-Brahms uses the fairy
Page 13 and 14: early 1980s by a wave of historical
Page 15 and 16: Deutschland, bleiche Mutter. Moreov
Page 17 and 18: audience. One of the most popular g
Page 19 and 20: 1.1 The Oberhausen Manifesto and Ne
Page 21 and 22: audiences. This film movement of th
Page 23 and 24: e beholden to him, for only through
Page 25 and 26: political events that took place in
Page 27 and 28: Verdrängten eigentlich gar nicht g
Page 29 and 30: (Deutschland im Herbst n. pag.). 14
Page 31 and 32: in drei Jahrzehnten Nachkriegsgesch
Page 33 and 34: impact West Germans in such a drama
Page 35 and 36: If German films are to make use of
Page 37 and 38: 1.4 Deutschland, bleiche Mutter as
Page 39 and 40: story must be hidden as much as pos
Page 41 and 42: Chapter 2: New Subjectivity and Wes
Page 43: Reich” opposes fascism, but who e
Page 47 and 48: context has only become part of the
Page 49 and 50: perpetrators are defined predominan
Page 51 and 52: Thus, Sanders-Brahms creates a coun
Page 53 and 54: In the birth sequence, Sanders-Brah
Page 55 and 56: ombs fall downward from the upper r
Page 57 and 58: narrator‟s sadness at the destruc
Page 59 and 60: essentialize men or women‟s exper
Page 61 and 62: image visually separates the runnin
Page 63 and 64: emotional connection between mother
Page 65 and 66: endurance and stoic acceptance of b
Page 67 and 68: texture which is both social and hi
Page 69 and 70: ombings terrorized civilian populat
Page 71 and 72: y war. A final interesting point of
Page 73 and 74: Maikäfer flieg. dein Vater ist im
Page 75 and 76: Why does Lene sing the Maikäferlie
Page 77 and 78: Beginning with the so-called recons
Page 79 and 80: elationship. Through its subjective
Page 81 and 82: a series of forty-one volumes publi
Page 83 and 84: 3.1 Intergenerational Dialogue in D
Page 85 and 86: geworden” (Brecht, Werke 253). 55
Page 87 and 88: Eure Unarmung kann ich mir nicht de
Page 89 and 90: 3.2 Retelling a Grimm Tale: Voice a
Page 91 and 92: and springs into the lap of the hid
Page 93 and 94: apes were collectively perceived as
Page 95 and 96:
3.4 “Der Räuberbräutigam,” Po
Page 97 and 98:
with its ironic “Arbeit macht fre
Page 99 and 100:
Further, the absence or presence at
Page 101 and 102:
can imagine the chimney blowing out
Page 103 and 104:
Chapter 4: Three Images of Woman in
Page 105 and 106:
Moreover she demonstrates insight a
Page 107 and 108:
victimization of another through he
Page 109 and 110:
in an effort to help, Lene quickly
Page 111 and 112:
Liebe, Ehe, ein Kind” (Sanders-Br
Page 113 and 114:
knowingly or unknowingly, to make p
Page 115 and 116:
passively complicit in the crimes o
Page 117 and 118:
Contrastingly, in the middle and la
Page 119 and 120:
traditional gender roles and emphas
Page 121 and 122:
The old woman‟s constructive fema
Page 123 and 124:
the severed finger at the tale‟s
Page 125 and 126:
and calm camera movements. In contr
Page 127 and 128:
The dentist and Hans completely ove
Page 129 and 130:
4.4 Summarizing Remarks Sanders-Bra
Page 131 and 132:
Chapter 5: Conclusion Mother’s Vo
Page 133 and 134:
forced back into the oppressive dep
Page 135 and 136:
daughter in what becomes an interge
Page 137 and 138:
authentic documentary footage of th
Page 139 and 140:
evocation of the Holocaust through
Page 141 and 142:
Brahms articulates represents an ac
Page 143 and 144:
H.S.-B.: Well, one answer to this q
Page 145 and 146:
H.S.-B.: There is a very small baby
Page 147 and 148:
only when you forget about scientif
Page 149 and 150:
R.R.: So an example of that would b
Page 151 and 152:
political context of the fictional
Page 153 and 154:
was a wonderful image, like the May
Page 155 and 156:
H.S.-B.: Yes, you‟re right, it‟
Page 157 and 158:
R.R.: Some critics say that she is
Page 159 and 160:
They just appeared during shooting.
Page 161 and 162:
film represent the woman who respon
Page 163 and 164:
R.R.: So, by telling your story, yo
Page 165 and 166:
H.S.-B.: This happened to my mother
Page 167 and 168:
irritated the critics terribly. It
Page 169 and 170:
opening up, but actually, the strug
Page 171 and 172:
---. Brecht on Theater. Ed. and Tra
Page 173 and 174:
Herbst, Philip. Wimmin, Wimps and W
Page 175 and 176:
---. “Gender, Film, and German Hi
Page 177:
Sander, Helke and Barbara Johr. Eds
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'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

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