'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

film and contains a transcription of the film‟s dialogue, Sander states that prior to her
film, there had been virtually no research on the subject. She also claims that each
document brought to light during the course of the research done by herself and her
collaborator, Barbara Johr, was often the result of months of searching (Sander and Johr
11).
Sander‟s difficulty finding research and historical documentation on rapes of
German women by Allied soldiers at the end of the war suggests that the rapes had been a
taboo subject in Germany for several decades after the conflict. Atina Grossman also
emphasizes the silence surrounding the rapes, stating:
…the topic [of the mass rapes] was suppressed, not as too shameful for women to
discuss, but as too humiliating for German men and too risky for women who
feared (with much justification, given the reports of estrangement and even
murder) the reactions of their menfolk. (61)
I maintain that in her film, Deutschland, bleiche Mutter, Sanders-Brahms uses
Lene‟s stoic reaction to being raped as a critique of the silence and historical
marginalization in post-war German culture of German women‟s rapes by Allied soldiers
at the end of the Second World War. 42 In my opinion, the filmmaker intended Lene‟s
reiteration to her daughter of the saying, “To the victor the spoils” and her subsequent
shaking off of the incident to function as an ironic commentary on the way post-war
German society expected German women to suppress the trauma of rape, to shrug it off,
and to simply carry on as if nothing of great importance had happened to them. This
view is contrary to that of some feminist scholars who are outraged at Lene‟s passive
Hulmut Kossodo, 1959). It had been published first in English in 1954 under the title A Woman in Berlin,
trans. James Stern (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1954).
42 Sanders-Brahms critiques this silence in post-war West German culture surrounding the rapes of German
women in light of the German atrocities that took place during the war. As will be shown, she depicts Lene
as a bystander of the crimes of the Nazi regime against Jewish Germans.
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