'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

2.3 The Role of Documentary Footage and Radio in Deutschland, bleiche Mutter
While the previous section discusses Sanders-Brahms‟ use of documentary
footage in the birth and rape scenes, this section deals with her use of archival footage in
other scenes of Deutschland, bleiche Mutter. In several scenes of the film Sanders-
Brahms fuses fictional re-enacted moments inspired by her mother‟s and her own
personal recollections of war with iconographic images and sounds that have come to
represent official discourses on the past (including archival footage of bombed-out
cityscapes, recordings of Hitler‟s political speeches, and newsreel shots of the famed
Trümmerfrauen or “women of the rubble” starting to rebuild the devastated German
cities). By merging fictional (auto)biographical narrative with documentary footage,
Sanders-Brahms places „private‟ experience and broader socio-political „events‟ in
dialectic relation. This intermingling of re-enacted scenes and archival footage
contextualizes both the personal and collective memories. The newsreel images
depicting events of national history such as aerial bombing raids and Germany‟s
capitulation in 1945 situate the fictional scenes in a historical context. Conversely, the
enacted scenes locate the historical/political events in a social context by illustrating how
Lene, Anna and other German women and children were affected by and reacted to
events such as the bombings. Through blending moments of individual and public
memory, Sanders-Brahms emphasizes the interdependence of the public and private
realms of experience. As Leonie Naughton explains:
Germany Pale Mother's mobilisation of a range of discursive modes serves to
elucidate the nexus of the public and the private, of individual recollection and
officially instituted histories. […] Moving from the monumental events of
national history to the quotidian, the film succeeds in imbuing memory with a
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