Berlin, Divided Heaven: From the Ice Age to the Thaw
Touring Film Series

Rebuilding the Defeated, Occupied and Divided City

"Rebuilding the Defeated, Occupied and Divided City" explores post-war Berlin and the marks defeat and destruction left on the city and its citizens. Films highlighted represent three radically distinct aesthetic approaches to the city as film location: Story of a Young Couple, a shining example of how East German culture between 1946 and 1951 conformed to Stalinist politics and the glorification of "progress." With Somewhere in Berlin veteran director Gerhard Lamprecht reconnects German cinema temporarily to his own Weimar work (Emil and the Detectives) as well as the neo-realism of Rossellini's Germany Year Zero. His film portrays war-torn Berlin with documentary coolness and its inhabitants with psychological precision. Finally, The Murderers Are Among Us, the first feature made in Germany after World War II, recalled German expressionism to become a noir classic and ranked among the top ten German movies of all time.  

Story of a Young Couple (Roman einer jungen Ehe) 
Somewhere in Berlin (Irgendwo in Berlin)
The Murderers Are Among Us (Die Mörder sind unter uns)


Suggested further viewing:

Our Daily Bread (Unser täglich Brot)
1949, East Germany (DEFA), b/w, 99 min
Dir.:  Slatan Dudow
Script:  Slatan Dudow, Hans Joachim Beyer, Ludwig Turek
Camera:  Robert Baberske
Editing:  Margarete Steinborn
Music:  Hanns Eisler
Cast:  Paul Bildt, Viktoria von Ballasko, Inge Landgut, Harry Hindemith, Paul Edwin Roth, Siegmar Schneider

A story about a family after the Second World War.  The petty bourgeois cashier Karl Weber of Berlin observes from a distance how his son Ernst participates in the building of a new socialist society.  Karl does not understand Ernst’s visions, instead he confides in his other son Harry.  However, Harry becomes involved in illicit business and Karl quickly realizes that it would be best to join his son Ernst in the citizen-owned factory.

With this film, director Slatan Dudow (1903-1963) continued the traditions of proletarian German film from the Weimar Republic.  As with this first feature film Kuhle Wampe, from a screenplay by Bertolt Brecht, Dudow wanted an art that “cultivates the viewer’s psyche.”  His postwar films were intended to make the viewers realize the importance of supporting the “new order” in East Germany.  Our Daily Bread became known as a premiere film of its day under the rubric of “socialist realism.”   Slatan Dudow’s work was convincing mainly through his detailed descriptions of socialist everyday life.  Music by Hanns Eisler was the centerpiece of contemporary review.  After coming back from his exile in America, the composer created a score that “challenged, thrilled, and focused.  The usual illustrative film scores from hundreds of films were simply washed away.”  (Herbert Ihering)  

Germany Year Zero (Germania Anno Zero)
1947, Italy/West Germany, b/w, 74 min.
Dir.: Roberto Rossellini
Script:  Roberto Rossellini, Carlo Lizzani, Max Kolpet
Camera:  Robert Juillard
Music:  Renzo Rossellini
Cast:  Edmund Moeschke, Barbara Hintze, Franz Kruger, Ernest Pittschau  

With this film, the final part of his neo-realist war trilogy, director Rossellini shifted the focus of his attentions from Italy [subject of Rome, Open City (1945) and Paisa (1946)] to Germany. In the ruins of Berlin a boy, Edmund, tries to come to terms with the Nazis defeat; a situation his Hitler youth upbringing did not prepare him for. Edmund's father is seriously ill, a drain on scarce resources, while his sister is prostituting herself to obtain food, and a deserting German soldier is hiding out in their house.

Edmund constantly wanders through the ruins (allowing for characteristically neo-realist location shot scenes).  Wedged between the “selfish” drive to survive and to put his father out of his misery, he believes he has let him die.  This youngster cannot cope with his individual crime or the general societal disintegration, and so in the end kills himself.

A grim movie perhaps, but with its abandonment of the usual neo-realist view of children (compare Edmund to Bruno in De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948); or to the children of Rossellini's own Rome, Open City) Rossellini provides a fitting end to both the trilogy and his 'pure' neo-realist period.

Related reading:

Byg, Barton.  "Nazism as Femme Fatale:  Recuperations of Cinematic Masculinity in Post War Berlin."  Gender and Germanness: Cultural Productions of Nation.  Patricia Herminghouse and Magda Müller, eds.  Providence and London: Berghahn, 1997.  176-188.

Fehrenbach, Heide.  Cinema in Democratizing Germany:  Reconstructing National Identity after Hitler.  Chapel Hill:  North Carolina Press, 1995.  

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