'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

emotional connection between mother and daughter. Next, a low-angle close-up on
Anna‟s feet shows her walking down three stairs. The camera then pans over the ground
and focuses in on another close-up shot of Lene‟s face. Lene looks off-screen in Anna‟s
direction and calmly tells her daughter, “Das ist das Recht des Siegers, kleines Mädchen.
Man nimmt die Sachen, und die Frauen” (Sanders-Brahms, Film-Erzählung 79). 40 Anna
then bends down and kisses her mother and Lene smiles very warmly at her daughter.
Thus, in the rape sequence, mother and daughter are only visually and physically
separated for the duration of the incident. After this scene, the narrative moves on in a
rather abrupt transition, showing Lene and Anna riding a train. The muted sounds of the
rape sequence are juxtaposed to the loud noises of the subsequent train ride (and to those
of the earlier birth scene).
Thematically, the rape sequence also serves as a critique of the widespread silence
in post-war German culture surrounding women‟s rapes by Allied soldiers during and
after WWII. In her controversial 1992 film BeFreier und Befreite: Krieg,
Vergewaltigungen, Kinder (Liberators Take Liberties: War, Rape, Children) German
filmmaker Helke Sander asserts that although rapes of German women by Allied soldiers
(in this case predominantly Soviet troops) in Berlin and other parts of Germany at the end
of the war took place on a massive scale, there was never much public discussion of them
in either German state (Sander and Johr 11). Although historical and bibliographical
accounts briefly referred to the rapes, they were almost never a topic of extensive
discussion. 41 In the book accompanying the film, which documents the research for the
40
“That‟s the right of the victor, little girl. One takes possessions and women” (Sanders-Brahms, Film-
Erzählung 79).
41
One exception to this historical phenomenon was an anonymously published diary entitled Eine Frau in
Berlin that appeared in Germany in 1959. Anon., Eine Frau in Berlin. Tagebuchaufzeichnungen (Geneva:
56