'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

Sanders-Brahms describes a phenomenon in (West) German cinema since 1945 in which
the majority of films set during the years of conflict and the post-war period privilege
male accounts of war and reconstruction in that they focus on men‟s stories, which are
told from a male point of view. This tendency to „overlook‟ female voices in (West)
German films set during the Hitler and Adenauer eras can also be extended to the
historical research focusing on this time period. In 1995 film scholar Renate Möhrmann
wrote: “[It] never ceases to amaze me [that] the experiences of mothers from this period
are almost never documented; they are virtually absent as the subject of serious cultural
debate. History was always written from the perspective of men” (“Mother Figures,” 68-
69). While thousands of historical books and academic papers have been published on
the “Third Reich,” the Holocaust, and the Economic Miracle since 1945, there has been
relatively little research until recently that treats issues of gender or issues particular to
women (Reading 34, von Saldern 142). Since the late 1970s, there has been a small but
growing body of gendered historical accounts of the war, the Holocaust, and the post-war
era. 2
Deutschland, bleiche Mutter is an important contribution to (West) German film
and to the discourse of Vergangenheitsbewältigung or “the struggle to come to terms with
the Nazi past” in that it was, in my opinion, the first film of New German Cinema to take
as its central plot a German woman‟s gendered experiences of the Second World War and
2 One of the earliest studies addressing gender issues was Marion Kaplan‟s The Jewish Feminist Movement
in Germany: The Campaigns of the Jüdischer Frauenbund, 1904-1938 (1979). Soon after this was followed
by Vera Laska‟s Women in the Resistance and the Holocaust; The Voices of Eyewitnesses (1983) and
Bridenthal et al.‟s When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (1984). A key
work on German women‟s roles in the “Third Reich” which also includes a chapter on Jewish women as
victims and survivors is Claudia Koonz‟s Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics
(1987). There was also Carol Rittner and John K. Roth‟s Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust
(1993). More recent gendered historical studies include Dalia Ofer and Lenore Weitzman‟s Women in the
Holocaust (1998), Judith Baumels‟ Double Jeopardy: Gender and the Holocaust (1998), and Anna
Reading‟s The Social Inheritance of the Holocaust: Gender, Culture, and Memory (2002).
2