'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

considering the parallel circumstances of the small beetle. The indirect nature of this
reflection would serve to minimize the child‟s fear of the vulnerable situation in which
she and her mother find themselves.
Following the Maikäferlied sequence, the final scene of the film containing
documentary footage takes place after the end of the war. A twenty-second early colour
documentary panning shot depicts Trümmerfrauen standing amidst the ruins of a city
block in several human chains, collecting usable bricks and passing them down the chains
in buckets. The camera then cuts to a close-up documentary shot of a middle-aged
woman standing in front of a pile of stacked bricks. The woman takes hold of a bucket
with a brick passed to her from the right of the screen and passes it left off screen down
the line. Next, she receives an empty bucket from the left hand side of the screen and
passes it off screen to the right up the line. This crisscross motion flows into an enacted
scene showing a human chain of women passing buckets. The chain culminates with a
shot of Lene and her sister, Hanne, who are shown stacking usable bricks in a large pile.
Lene and Hanne are smiling and joking playfully with one another, actions that suggest
they enjoy taking part in the reconstruction effort. The documentary shots are
accompanied with a cheerful piano melody.
The archival footage of the Trümmerfrauen in this scene depicts perhaps the most
famous collective memory of German women in the immediate post-war period. These
hopeful and inspiring images depict German women as cooperative, diligent, and full of
agency, determined to rebuild their cities from the devastation of war. As Markovits and
Reich suggest, in post-war Germany Trümmerfrauen came to symbolize the resilient,
industrious, and frugal nature of the German people. They write:
69