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

566 Robert G. Moeller
with other sources, including, but by no means limited to contemporary film
review, films can illuminate larger social and political trends in the Federal
Republic a decade after the end of the Second World War.
The Text
First, the film. KMG was a film adaptation of a popular page-turner by
Herbert Reinecker who made a living churning out melodramas in a different
key under the Nazis. Without losing a beat he emerged in the 1950s, plying
his trade for the mass market in a democratic, not a fascist, Germany.
Reinecker, whose works in the early 1940s included Panzer nach vorn!, the
stirring story of the triumphant Wehrmacht heroes who rolled over Poland,
and Pimpfenwelt (World of [Nazi] Youth), 7 was ready by the early 1950s to
‘get rid of heroism’: Hau ab mit dem Heldentum was the title of the serialized
story first published in QUICK, a weekly illustrated magazine with a circulation
of 685,000; the story became a more prosaic KMG when it appeared as a
novel in 1953. 8 Reinecker was the screenwriter for the film version.
The film’s producer was Erich Pommer, known to film aficionados as the
organizational inspiration responsible for such films as The Cabinet of
Doctor Caligari and The Blue Angel and a driving force behind the German
‘art film’ of the 1920s. Pommer had chosen to sojourn for about a year in
Hollywood in 1926 and returned involuntarily to the United States in
1933 when it became undeniably clear that as a Jew he would find little work
with Ufa, the big German film production company to which he had contributed
so much in the previous decade. Pommer was in Germany once
more in 1946, this time as an American citizen in an army uniform, charged
with helping to rebuild the German film industry in the American zone of
occupation. A decade later—now as a civilian—he was still there, looking
for good stories that would draw big audiences and potentially attract foreign
distributors. Pommer was unwilling to work with former Ufa directors
who had served Goebbels, and for KMG he enlisted the Hungarian expatriate
Laslo Benedek, who had also established a name in Hollywood.
Benedek’s credits in America included a well-received film version of Arthur
Miller’s Death of a Salesman and The Wild One with Marlon Brando. The
Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel put Benedek in the elevated company of Vittorio
de Sica, Billy Wilder, and Max Ophuls, praising him as a director
7 Herbert Reinecker, Panzer nach vorn! Panzermänner erzählen vom Feldzug in Polen (Berlin, 1940);
Reinecker, Pimpfenwelt (Berlin, 1940).
8 Herbert Reinecker, Kinder, Mütter und ein General (Darmstadt, 1953). Circulation figures for
QUICK are from Alex Schildt, Moderne Zeiten: Freizeit, Massenmedien und ‘Zeitgeist’ in der Bundesrepublik
der 50er Jahre (Hamburg, 1995), p. 130. According to public opinion surveys, about
one-fifth of the West German population saw QUICK or Stern, a competitor with a circulation
of 328,000, on a weekly basis.