'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

2.4 Summarizing Remarks
In this chapter I have discussed how on the West German cultural scene a
Tendenzwende or change of direction took place from the 1960s to the 1970s. While
many authors and filmmakers of the 1960s attempted to objectively document political
and social realities, writers and directors of the 1970s tended to value authorial
subjectivity and created works based on personal experience. In the late 1970s many
artists of the post-war generation began to turn their attention towards history, while
maintaining a concern for the self and its psychological development. This contributed to
a wave of Generationenliteratur. Written by authors born in the 1930s and 1940s, these
books dealt with the authors‟ relationships with their parents and their parents‟
involvement in National Socialism. While these works often focused on the authors‟
relationship with their fathers, some works written by women in the late 1970s and early
1980s began to examine the mother-daughter relationship. At this time, female West
German filmmakers began making films that combined autobiography and feminist
perspectives in the larger examination of historical issues. Specifically, they explored
their identities as women by telling the stories of their mothers‟ experiences during
National Socialism and the post-war period.
Deutschland, bleiche Mutter is an important project as it emphasizes an aspect of
German history that was often neglected: a non-Jewish German woman‟s experience of
the “Third Reich” and post-war period. In this film, Sanders-Brahms fuses historical and
political investigation with an intensely personal exploration of the mother-daughter
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