'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

2.2 Birth and Rape:
Two Scenes Emphasizing a Woman’s Gendered Experience of War
While standard historical accounts of the “Third Reich” and the Second World
War have tended to focus on important battles and concepts of victory and defeat,
Sanders-Brahms‟ film Deutschland, bleiche Mutter was one of the earliest West German
films to recount a woman‟s personal experience of these historical periods. 30 Sanders-
Brahms includes in her film several scenes depicting a woman‟s gendered experience of
war. Two scenes that are of central importance in representing this individual female
experience are the birth scene and the rape scene. In the first sequence, Lene gives birth
to her daughter, Anna, during an Allied bombing raid. In the second, Lene is raped by
two American service men in an abandoned building while her daughter looks on. A
close reading of these scenes will show how Sanders-Brahms uses such cinematic
techniques as female voice-over and the insertion of documentary footage into her
fictional narrative in order to juxtapose the generally accepted public collective memory
of the German war experience with a fictional re-creation of Sanders-Brahms‟ mother‟s
personal experiences of this period. Through intertwining the pivotal events of Lene‟s
gendered experience of war with the public documentary record of that era, Sanders-
Brahms underscores the intrusion of historical forces into Lene‟s life (McCormick,
Politics 191). This emphasis stresses the “false dichotomy” of the division between the
private and public realms. 31
30 Although Kluge‟s film Abschied von gestern features the experiences of a young East German refugee in
the West Germany of the 1960s, the film does not directly depict her experiences of the war or the
immediate post-war era, and only refers in passing to her Jewish heritage.
31 Judith Mayne has written, “Feminist theorists have always stressed that the division between the realms
of public and private is a false dichotomy. Traditionally and historically, women‟s sphere has been the
private, the realm of family, home, and personal relations. And men‟s sphere has been the public sphere of
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