What Did You Do in the War, Mutti? Courageous Women ... - iSites

572 Robert G. Moeller
Figure 3: The unmarried doctor (Ursula Herking) works side by side with her
Wehrmacht counterpart (Rudolf Fernau).
Courtesy of Schorcht-International Filmproduktion and the Deutsches Filminstitut.
and peace’ of death, and her celebration of the sanctity of life sends his war
weariness running (Figure 3). 18 The sister, ogled earlier by the hapless enlisted
man, immediately attracts the attention of the good-natured corporal charged
with feeding Dornberg’s troops. Left by the war with a gloved prosthetic device
where once there was flesh and bone, the ‘corporal with the wooden hand’
(Claus Biederstaedt) sees in her a hope for the future and the possibility that life
might one day consist of more than ‘eating, sleeping, and drinking’ (Figure 4).
Love is also in bloom in Captain Dornberg’s quarters, where Helene has
retreated for one final attempt to convince him to release the boys. She confesses
that she has already lost her husband to the war and pleads with Dornberg to
spare her son. Dornberg also has a tale of loss. He reveals to Helene that in
Russia, he had to abandon his best friend, left behind with other wounded
comrades and armed only with Dornberg’s service revolver. Unable to fulfill
his final request—to be shot by Dornberg, allowing his mother to know that
he did not meet his end at the hands of barbarous Russians—Dornberg is forced
18 There is an interesting parallel with Wolfgang Liebeneiner’s 1958 film, Taiga, another film based
on a page-turner by Herbert Reinecker. This time, the doctor is Ruth Leuwerik, one of the biggest
box office favourites of the decade. She has been dispatched to care for German soldiers languishing
in a Soviet POW camp somewhere ‘behind the Urals.’ See Moeller, War Stories, pp. 155 60.