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

584 Robert G. Moeller
fantasies of scaling the Caucasus mountains in a Blitzkrieg, dies in action. As
she leaves Schwerin—part of the same ‘German East’ which is the setting for
KMG—in advance of the Red Army in the spring of 1945, she loses her only
child. Attempting to board a westbound train, she looks on in horror as
another train hits and kills her daughter. She hopes that in the postwar
period things will be better, because ‘we did enough penance in the war.’ These
hopes, however, are quickly dashed, and her struggle for survival becomes no
easier. She manages by working in a cannery where she crams fish into tins, but
she soon learns that she can smell of better things if she deploys her sexuality.
Serial relationships—with a married man and a black marketeer—teach her
that ‘no one needs us women ... they use us.’ Her war and postwar are thus
a ‘hell’ that match Beckmann’s hell at the front and in a Soviet prisoner-ofwar
camp. National Socialism has betrayed them both. The film opens with
Death and God gambling for control of these lost souls, but by the end of
the film, Gehrke has clothed, fed, and nurtured Beckmann, bringing him back
from the brink. In the process, by exercising these feminine powers, she has also
restored herself. Together, woman and man join in a project of salvation and
recovery, and God will help those who have helped themselves. Accepting their
responsibility for each other, they can face the future. 47
By the end of the 1940s, films that so relentlessly presented demolished
urban landscapes and broken lives and raised such difficult questions about
blame and guilt were ceasing to be big draws, leading reviewers to conclude
that audiences were sated with stories that focused only on the ‘hopelessness
of the first postwar years.’ As one reviewer of Liebe 47 put it, it was ‘time
for spiritual restoration. We have had enough of violent emotions.’ 48 There
was plenty of violence and no shortage of emotions in the war films of the
mid-1950s, but a decade after the war, violence and emotion were not linked
to complicated questions of accountability for war crimes, and the spectrum
of war memories—men’s and women’s—addressed in literature, political
discourse and films had narrowed decidedly. In KMG, Wicki is tortured
by whether to follow orders not because he fears responsibility for the
slaughter of innocent civilians by Germans, but because he does not want
47 See Massimo Perinelli, Liebe ‘47—Gesellschaft ‘49: Geschlechterverhältnisse in der deutschen
Nachkriegszeit (Hamburg, 1999); Ulrike Weckel, ‘Spielarten der Vergangenheitsbewältigung:
Wolfgang Borcherts Heimkehrer und sein langer Weg durch die Westdeutschen Medien’, Tel Aviver
Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte, 31 (2003), pp. 125 61; also Erica Carter, ‘Sweeping up the Past:
Gender and History in the Post-war German ‘‘Rubble Film"’, in Ulrike Sieglohr (ed.), Heroines without
Heroes: Reconstructing Female and National Identities in European Cinema 1945 51 (London,
2000), pp. 91 110; Kirsten Burghardt, ‘Moralische Wiederaufrüstung im frühen deutschen Nachkriegsfilm’,
in Michael Schaudig (ed.), Positionen deutscher Filmgeschichte: 100 Jahre Kinematographie
(Munich, 1996), pp. 246, 264. Gehrke embodies many of the symbolic meanings of ‘woman’
that defined West German national identity in what historian Elizabeth Heineman calls the ‘hour
of the woman’ in Heinemann, ‘The Hour of the Woman.’
48 ‘Überholte Filme’, Wirtschaftszeitung (16 July 1949). In general, see Helmut Peitsch, ‘Deutschlands
Gedächtnis an seine dunkelste Zeit’: Zur Funktion der Autobiographik in den Westzonen
Deutschlands und den Westsektoren von Berlin, 1945 bis 1949 (Berlin, 1990).