German Films Explore Postwar History

Shots of a train snaking through the German countryside and gray smoke billowing out of a smokestack bookend the post-World War II film The Lost Man.

In contemporary films, trains and smokestacks in the German countryside normally evoke painful historical memories: the journey of many Holocaust victims to the extermination camps and their brutal deaths.

But neither concentration camps nor their Jewish victims appear in the series “After the War/Before the Wall: German Film 1945-1960,” which screens through the end of March at the Harvard Film Archive (HFA). Instead, the series shows an eclectic mix of films that range from escapist comedies to suspenseful thrillers.

They expose a post-war Germany struggling to create a new national identity from under the shadow of the Nazi regime and the rubble of the war. They also reveal, in their escapism as well as in their portrayal of persistent memory, a nation haunted by but not yet ready to deal with the Holocaust.

“After the War/Before the Wall” hit the screens of the Harvard Film Archive last Friday with a double feature of seldom seen post-war films, including Peter Lorre’s The Lost Man and Film Without A Title.  The series, which debuted at Lincoln Center in New York City last April, was organized by Germanic languages and literature department chair Eric Rentschler and two colleagues, Klaus Eder and Hans Kohl.

The films in the series are linked by their time period, not by a shared genre. Lorre’s The Lost Man, his only directorial endeavor, is based on the true story of a Nazi scientist-turned-serial-killer. The film’s anti-hero, Dr. Rothe, is stalked by shadows and plagued by his past in a film that aligns itself with the expressionist oeuvres of Fritz Lang.

Film Without A Title, also shown on last Friday, is a self-conscious film about filmmaking in the years after the defeat of the Nazis. Other films in the series include the German valentine to American jazz, Fanfares of Love, which Billy Wilder recast as Some Like It Hot a few years later, and The Hooligans, about youth rebelling against their Nazi-generation parents, a movie which resembles Rebel Without A Cause.While some of these films seem similar to Hollywood products of the Cold War era, many manifest a uniquely German struggle to create a new post-war national identity. Heimatfilms, which celebrate the German landscape as a lush geographical, cultural and even spiritual homeland, existed before, during and after the Nazi era.

But, says Rentschler, Heimatfilms of the 1930s “became a vehicle for privileging native soil, seeing native space as having to be protected from outsiders”—but by the 1950s, “the homeland was no longer about the same militant national identity, but about a psychological need to deal with upheaval” and create a new identity.

This subtle difference between Nazi and post-Nazi Heimatfilms seemed insignificant to critics of the German films of the 1950s. These critics, young German filmmakers of the 1960s, rebelled against a film industry that had been used to promote Hitler.

Rentschler says he believes their rejection of Heimatfilms was valid.

“The films of the 30s and 50s are clearly linked, with the same people and the same scripts,” he says.

Rejecting the techniques and politics of their forebearers, German filmmakers of the 1960s looked admiringly to experimental New Wave films emanating from France.

Four decades later, the arrival of “After the War/Before The Wall” at the Lincoln Center and the Harvard Film Archive reveal critics’ and scholars’ willingness to reconsider the once-maligned period.

Rentschler calls the films in the series “remarkably compelling social documents,” and says that such “exercises in diversion and distraction…can’t erase the past.”

According to Rentschler, co-curator Eder believes that these films ought to be “redeemed,” recognized for the important ways they diverge from Nazi era films, for their historical significance and for their aesthetic value.

Yet Rentschler is careful not to glorify the films from this period, saying that he is “skeptical.”

“I believe these films are interesting in the view of the project of trying to reinvent Germany in the modern world,” he says. “[But] these films are not saying things that ought to be said. There is a blockage at work.”

It is telling that while bombed-out German cities serve as the backdrop to many of the films, the Third Reich is seldom their subject. It is disturbing—if not offensive—that while the Nazis and war are occasionally referenced, the persecution of Jews is never addressed.

Instead of documenting or reflecting upon Nazi atrocities, these films choose to focus on more abstract themes of irrepressible memory and inescapable history.

In The Lost Man, Lorre’s character is a serial murderer and a Nazi, but he does not kill on behalf of the Party, and his victims are not Jewish. The film engages a guilty history, but it is the guilt of a lone psychopath rather than the guilt of an entire nation. Lorre suggests that Dr. Rothe’s transformation from an upstanding doctor to a murderer is linked to the political climate of the time, but the politics in the film are driven by wartime espionage, not by anti-Semitism.

The resulting message—as is the case in many of the films in the series—is that the German people were the victims of the Nazi regime, not victimizers on its behalf. Still, Dr. Rothe is a man tormented by his murderous past, and even the film’s harshest critics would be hard-pressed to ignore Rothe’s metaphorical significance.

As Rentschler concludes in an essay written for the series, post-war German film is “a contested and controversial cinema.”

“No matter what conclusions we might reach, if we want to comprehend the shape and substance of German dreams during the early post-war years, we can find no better resource,” he writes.

—“After the War/Before the Wall: German Cinema 1945-60” runs at the Harvard Film Archive until March 19.