'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

Introduction
In February of 1980, Helma Sanders-Brahms‟ film Deutschland, bleiche Mutter
(Germany, Pale Mother) premiered at the 30 th Berlin International Film Festival. In this
(auto)biographical film, Sanders-Brahms recounts the story of her mother‟s gendered
experiences of the “Third Reich,” 1 the Second World War, and the post-war years of
reconstruction, while at the same time depicting her own early childhood memories of
those years. While exploring her own subjectivity, Sanders-Brahms traces the
intersection of her mother‟s private dreams and the politics of the “Third Reich.” In an
interview with the director, I asked her which personal, political, or artistic factors
inspired her to make a film about her mother‟s life during the Hitler and Adenauer eras.
She replied that when she was pregnant with her daughter in 1977, she felt emotionally
closer to her mother and began to reflect on “how she might have lived [through] this
experience, having a child, in the middle of the war” (Reed 135). Sanders-Brahms also
revealed that she wanted to create a film that thematized an aspect of Second World War
history that had often been ignored in traditional historical narratives: a woman‟s
experience. She states:
I felt that there were so many films about the male vision of war and Nazism, that
it would be really something new and special to make a film about the female
vision of these things like war and fascism…another idea that I had was [to
explore] the relationship of mother and child under these circumstances, [which]
is very special and had not yet really been exploited in cinema so far. (Reed 136)
1 Throughout this thesis I place quotation marks around the problematic term “Third Reich” to distance
myself from the political and ideological overtones and associations of this expression that I recognize but
do not share.