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

568 Robert G. Moeller
was Bernhard Wicki, the commander at the front. Wicki—a well-known
actor and later director of Die Brücke, one of the best known West German
war films—had also starred in Helmut Käutner’s Die letzte Brücke, a war
film that came out of a German Yugoslavian collaboration a year before
KMG opened. In 1955, he would also appear as Count von Stauffenberg
in Es geschah am 20. Juli, playing the leader of the unsuccessful military conspiracy
to assassinate Hitler. 14 Beyond the principals, the cast also featured
such talent as Maximilian Schell, who won an academy award six years later
for defending Burt Lancaster on trial as a Nazi judge in Judgment at Nuremberg,
and Klaus Kinski, who had appeared in Morituri (1948), one of the few
postwar German films to take the concentration camp victim as its central
focus, and Decision Before Dawn, an American film about Germans who
are recruited as anti-fascist spies late in the war, in which Kinski had a small
role as the ‘whining soldier.’ 15 No other West German war film could boast
such a formidable group, even if the lines they spoke often came in unadulterated
form out of Reinecker’s pulp fiction.
Reinecker’s tale begins in March 1945. The film opens with scenes of an
idyllic rural landscape—dotted with storm clouds. Military music and the
sounds of gunfire in the background give way to French horns and the music
of the Heimat. The battle front and the home front are not all that far apart.
Arriving at a train station ‘east of Stettin’, Frau Helene Asmussen, a
radiantly blonde, somberly dressed Hilde Krahl, emerges into the midst of
chaos as refugees fleeing the approaching Red Army push their way on to
the train from which she exits. She has only one thing in mind—locating
her son, a schoolboy who has been moved here from Stettin because of
the bombs falling on that city. Immobilized by clueless personnel in the train
station, Helene is rescued by a force of nature, Giehse’s Mutter Bergmann,
the working-class wife of a mechanic, who is also in search of loved ones—
two sons who have been removed to the same boarding school. Mutter
Bergmann takes no flak and states her case forcefully: ‘We want to get
our sons, that’s all.’ When she and Helene finally locate the school, they discover
that it has been transformed into a barracks, a foreshadowing of what
has become of their boys. Helene and Mutter Bergmann quickly learn that
together with others from the school, their loved ones have left that morning,
not in beanies and blazers but in Wehrmacht uniforms, off to the front
and the defence of the Vaterland. Echoing the original title of Reinecker’s
14 See Klaus Kreimeier, ‘Die Ökonomie der Gefühle: Aspekte des westdeutschen Nachkriegsfilms’,
in Hilmar Hoffmann and Walter Schobert (eds), Zwischen Gestern und Morgen: Westdeutscher
Nachkriegsfilm, 1946 1962 (Frankfurt=Main, 1989), pp. 24 27; also Wilhelm Roth, ‘Ein Darsteller
mit Gestaltungskraft: Gedanken zu Filmen des Schauspielers Berhard Wicki’, in Robert Fischer
(ed.), Sanftmut und Gewalt: Der Regisseur und Schauspieler Berhard Wicki (Cologne, 1991),
pp. 53 8.
15 On Kinski, see http:==www.klaus-kinski.de=default.htm. And on Morituri, see Peter Pleyer,
Deutscher Nachkriegsfilm, 1946 1948 (Münster, 1965).