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576 Robert G. Moeller l’Union de la Critique de Cinéma) and a Golden Globe Award from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association in 1956. 23 Yet the film made no money, and it did not attract huge audiences in West Germany. Production costs had escalated because of the distributor’s demand for two endings, and Pommer convinced no one that a dubbed English-language version would draw viewers in the United States. The film was a commercial flop. During the filming, Pommer pronounced that ‘if this [film] doesn’t make it, then I’ll give up. Then I’ll just make comedies.’ 24 Pommer was not entirely true to his word, but after KMG he made no more films in Germany, retreating to the United States where he spent the rest of his life. It is tempting to conclude—with Pommer’s son, John—that the film failed because of the distributor’s faint-heartedness and unwillingness to advertise it aggressively or place it in large numbers of cinemas, cautious responses to the shift in public opinion in favour of rearmament and West German entry into NATO. The same papers that carried reviews of the film also reported on the West German parliament’s final deliberations of the treaty with the western Allies that would put Germans in uniform and end the Allied statute of occupation, elevating West Germany to the status of a sovereign nation. The film’s tough anti-war message, Pommer the younger speculated, was not in tune with public opinion, and a spineless distributor was ready to take a loss on a potentially controversial film. 25 A highly critical review of KMG in the left-wing newspaper Unser Tag offered quite a different analysis, excoriating the film’s makers for producing a film that would have delighted the Nazi high command. The film’s depiction of the heroic working-class figure Mutter Bergmann notwithstanding, the paper’s reviewer concluded that ‘poor Goebbels would not have passed up this hymn of praise to the brave soldiers, true to their oath, who fought to the last ounce of blood.’ A winner for Hitler’s propaganda minister, the reviewer continued, the film would also find favour with Theodor Blank, the man who headed the office in Adenauer’s government charged with shaping the new West German army and completing the ‘rehabilitation of the German soldier’ and the chancellor’s choice as West Germany’s first Minister of Defence. Just one more example of the ‘invasion of films in uniform’, charged the critic, KMG joined a wave of war films that had accompanied the rearmament drive. By failing to equip its viewers ‘with a weapon against war’, the film ill-served the mothers to whom it was dedicated. Unsuited to educate or illuminate, the reviewer concluded, it was in ‘no 23 Ursula Hardt, From Caligari to California: Erich Pommer’s Life in the International Film Wars (Providence, 1996), p. 196; and Handbuch für evangelische Filmarbeit, Gruppe I=b=2, February 1955, copy in DFI. 24 ‘Erschütternder Passionsweg der Frauen’, Duisburger Generalanzeiger (30 Oct. 1954). 25 Hardt, From Caligari to California, pp. 195 6; also Sabine Hake, German National Cinema (London, 2002), p. 97.
What Did You Do in the War, Mutti ? 577 way suited to remove the blinders that many mothers still wear.’ 26 Accomplishing this goal required the kind of anti-fascist education on offer in the German Democratic Republic, not least in films produced by the staterun film company DEFA. 27 In this paper, I argue that neither Pommer’s biggest fan nor his most outspoken critic got it right. To his son, I would respond that even good box office cannot tell us much about audience response, and a producer’s and distributor’s commercial failure can be a historian’s goldmine. As for the left-wing critic, Bonn was not Weimar, as Fritz René Allemann declared in 1956, and it was certainly not the Third Reich, despite communist claims that there was little difference between Hitler’s Germany and Adenauer’s. 28 Hitler’s propaganda minister would never have approved a film that sent women to the front, even if it was their sons, not they, who bore arms, nor would he have endorsed a film that praised captains who disregarded the orders of superior officers. So where in between does the truth lie? Let me offer a response by focusing on the story that KMG tells—a story that already had attracted a broad readership in illustrated magazines and in novel form, a story that had won some modicum of official favour by obtaining government financial support and securing the use of West German border troops and British tanks when it was made into a film, and a story that received much positive press. It was a story, I maintain, that did much more to affirm than contest how most West Germans had come to understand the meanings of the end of the Second World War by the middle of the 1950s. Far from unequivocally challenging pressures for West Germany to rearm, it suggested ways in which the men who would put on uniforms in 1955 could draw on traditions and values that had allowed them to resist Nazi indoctrination and were amply displayed by those who unwillingly put on the Wehrmacht uniform in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The right sort of army would never initiate a war. KMG also indicated how West German memories of the war were shaped by the postwar development of the Federal Republic. The story the film told was as much a commentary on a reconstructed Federal Republic ten years after the war’s end as it was on a Germany nearing defeat in the spring of 1945. 26 ‘‘‘Kinder, Mütter und ein General’’: Einer aus der Invasion uniformierter Filme’, Unser Tag (27 July 1955). 27 See, for example, Christiane Mückenberger, ‘The Anti-Fascist Past in DEFA Films’, in Sean Allen and John Sandford (eds), DEFA: East German Cinema, 1946 1992 (New York, 1999), pp. 58 76; and Detlef Kannapin, Antifaschismus im Film der DDR: DEFA-Spielfilme 1945 1955=56 (Cologne, 1997). 28 Fritz René Allemann, Bonn ist nicht Weimar (Cologne, 1956).
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