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574 Robert G. Moeller Figure 5: Helene Asmussen (Krahl), intent on saving her son, also rescues Captain Dornberg (Bernhard Wicki). Courtesy of Schorcht-International Film produktion and the Deutsches Filminstitut. outbursts appear on the margins. The focus is on the exchange of fond looks and terms of endearment—between the sister and the one-handed corporal, who urges her to seek refuge at his parents’ home in Westphalia, away from the Red Army and Allied bombs, and between Dornberg and Helene—as both couples steel themselves for the present by looking toward the future. The retreat is successful, but now Dornberg must face the military music. The general asks if ‘it’s the appearance of the women that has so confused’ Dornberg. They got to him too, he concedes. They both know ‘that this war is lost, it’s only a matter of weeks, horrible weeks and nothing can change the outcome.’ Yet ‘we cannot simply leave the law behind, not you, not I,’ the general adds, and the exigencies of military order demand that Dornberg face a court martial. The film added a coda to Reinecker’s novel. As Dornberg exits, a troop of news photographers enters, intent on presenting a different face of the ‘war to the finish’ (Endsieg). The Nazi propaganda machine wants to put the boys
What Did You Do in the War, Mutti ? 575 on the front page and in newsreels, the films of the 1940s that KMG now critically revisits. The general approaches the ‘men of Dornberg’s fighting group,’ but he stumbles over the formulaic paean to wartime heroism, unable to mouth words he no longer believes. The empty ritual is disrupted by explosions and gunfire, the camera cuts to Red Army tanks on the move, and the real war resumes. The general needs every man; Dornberg is saved from one sentence to serve another at the front, but glances exchanged with Helene as he heads out make clear that he has much to live for. Benedek and Reinecker told two different stories of how the film ended for the boys. In the original version, they too were mustered again, rushed off to the front. But the film’s distribution company worried that such an unhappy ending was too bleak and would keep audiences away. The weekly news magazine Der Spiegel, reporting on the making of the film, described the ‘hardheaded negotiations in which the director Benedek and the writer Reinecker threatened to remove their names’ from the film. Pommer, still under contract to the company for three more films, brokered the compromise. Although a ‘trial screening’ of both endings in front of ‘press and radio journalists, housewives, businessmen and politicians’ led to a vote for the ‘negative conclusion,’ another focus group of twenty, mustered by the distribution company, opted for letting the boys stay with their mothers. 19 Although the original version played when the film was shown outside Germany, producer, director, and writer agreed that at the end of the film in the Federal Republic, the boys were not to be sent off to face the Red Army. In West Germany, the ending was at least a little happy. A battle-weary enlisted man tells the boys to go with their mothers. The front that needed them was at home. Not all critics praised KMG, but even those who were disappointed by the substitution of ‘the formula of the illustrated magazine and the successful film production’ for scenes from ‘real life’ gave Benedek and Reinecker high marks for taking on a ‘theme that is provocative and valid for all times.’ 20 Others praised the film’s ability to represent the past with ‘decisive realism’, a stunning indication that ‘recently, German films have become much better’ 21 and called Benedek’s work the ‘most creative war film yet made in Germany’. 22 A Protestant watchdog group, the Evangelische Filmgilde, named the film the ‘film of the month’ in February 1955 when it premiered. Giehse won the National Film Prize, special recognition for her performance. And outside West Germany KMG drew critical acclaim, winning the Grand Prize of the Belgian Union of Cinema Critics (Grand Prix de 19 See Wolfgang Jacobsen, Erich Pommer: Ein Produzent macht Filmgeschichte (Berlin, 1989), pp. 158 61; also Walter Bittermann, ‘Der Krieg im Saale’, Rheinischer Merkur (29 April 1955); and ‘Der versöhnliche Ausklang’, Der Spiegel (9 March 1955). On the film’s distributor, Kurt Schorcht, see Manfred Barthel, So war es wirklich: Der deutsche Nachkriegsfilm (Munich, 1986), pp. 54 9, 261. 20 Friedrich A. Wagner, ‘Realismus und Routine’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (21 March 1955). 21 Georg Hensel, ‘Frauen in der Hauptkampflinie’, Darmstädter Echo (9 June 1955). 22 ‘Die Revolte der Mütter’, Stuttgarter Nachrichten (4 June 1955).
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