Part I

thanks to /u/vinco_et_praevaleo for reminding me via Sunday Digest to write this answer

One of the realities of postwar German cultural history is that although the war exerts an outsized influence on German memory, cultural depictions of the war are often constrained by various taboos. This was doubly true for cinema as the prior regime’s open celebration of militarism created an unsavory connection with their postwar depictions of the war. German cinematic depictions of the war often had to navigate very loaded territory that struck a balance between maintaining the conventional tropes of a war film and contemporary politics. This was true in both Germanies, albeit the different state contexts resulted in two very different strains of war films.

As counter-intuitive as it might sound, the early postwar period in the FRG witnessed arguably the most conventional type of war film. German studios had a ready stable of actors and directors who had cut their teeth under Goebbels’s film machine. The war film was a popular one for FRG audiences, and the films were not that much different than the wartime films Goebbels’ ministry churned out during the period of German victories. Two of the more notable and successful war films of the 1950s, U 47 – Kapitänleutnant Prien and Der Stern von Afrika, had at their central protagonists two war heroes lionized during the war, Prien and the ace Hans-Joachim Marseille. Other films played more gingerly with thinly-fictionalized biopics of wartime figures such as 1955’s Des Teufels General which featured a fictional stand-in for Ernst Udet or Hunde, wollt ihr ewig leben in which fictional protagonists interact with historical figures like Paulus or Hoth.

In terms of raw comparisons, these 1950s FRG films were often quite identical in casting and editing to their American counterparts of the same period such as The Flying Leathernecks or Battleground. These films typically had handsome leads engaging in battles with surplus war equipment punctuated by set pieces with either miniatures or stock wartime footage. These films also featured a cutting back between a domestic life on the homefront in between battle scenes, giving a love story to the film. Der Stern von Afrika contains a sizable love story with Marseilles’s fiancé Brigette (Marianne Koch) and the only woman in Hunde is a Russian played by Sonja Ziemann who helps the protagonist escape the Red Army because he had helped her earlier when she was an émigré in Germany.

But although there were stark parallels between these American and German films, the differences were important and at times quite subtle. The trajectory of a typical American war film was triumph over adversity and the love story is a domestic reward as a return to normalcy. In contrast, domesticity tends to emerge as a Cassandra in the 1950s FRG war film. In Der Stern’s Brigette warns her man not to go to Africa and stay and start a family, yet his boyish enthusiasm for war overrides her common sense. In a similar vein, the films also feature religious opposition to the Third Reich, often in the form of a pastor or other figure bemoaning the abandonment of Christian living. The 1950s FRG film often inverts the common narrative of a war film; the films start with victories, but end in defeat. This narrative framing allowed FRG cinema to clearly delineate between heroic protagonists and their villains. The archetypical soldier protagonist is not a Nazi, but is often a victim of their policies. Not only did this involve eventual military defeat, but it besmirched their soldierly honor. U-47 has a notable scene in the film’s beginning in which the NSDAP liaisons with the Navy ignores the concerns of its officers over the nature of the war and the sinking of freighters with civilians. The net result is that the war films of this period often have a double-victimization, not only are the brave protagonists victims of Allied material superiority, but also the victims of a criminal regime. Prien and Marseilles thus become not just fallen heroes, but martyrs. Within this schema, soldierly honor and masculinity remain intact. Death or honorable surrender after enduring the pains of a criminally mismanaged war.

War, or more specifically, the soldiers who fought in the war thus became depoliticized in this context. This was in keeping with the Adenauer period’s general position that the responsibility for the war only fell on a few shoulders and Germans by and large had fought the war honorably. Resistance never goes into active fighting against other Germans, but rather forms of moral suasion like Prien’s pastor that fell on ears too young to take notice. Although these films enjoyed a degree of popularity, a number of critics did note the depoliticized jingoism (which is itself a type of nationalism) in these films and asked why did not German filmmakers concentrate on actual resistors or victims like Anne Frank or Bonhoeffer.

The major exception to these somewhat unreflective films was Bernard Wicki’s 1959 masterpiece Die Brücke. Based on a novel of the same name, the film features deep indictment of the waste and stupidity of war. But unlike films such as Der Teufels General, the victimizers are not some abstract Nazis, but their parents and guardians. The setup for the defense of the eponymous bridge shows a German society in which parental figures have abandoned children to their own devices. Spoiler Even their good-natured schoolteacher inadvertently sets up the children to be slaughtered by convincing an NCO to deploy the drafted children to defend a bridge to be demolished, but when a gendarme kills the NCO, the boys are left to their own devices, and only one survives defending a useless bridge. End spoilers. The uncompromising grittiness of Die Brücke’s last half set it apart from other war films not only in the FRG, but in the West as well and ensured it would become a classic of FRG cinema. But Wicki’s critique of adults and their society, many of whom would have been in the audiences makes it quite a different cinematic experience than depoliticized affairs like Der Stern.

The filmmakers of the GDR’s state-run DEFA film studios had a much more difficult time turning the war into an ideologically palatable cinema experience. Part of the problem was that the SED simply could not let the “friends,” aka the Red Army, be portrayed in a negative light. The glorification of war was also something not really possible in this environment. Unlike the FRG, the GDR film protagonists could not start off from a position of strength and high hopes. Thus the typical GDR war film often had a focus far more upon individuals who began out as disillusioned by Nazism and gradually became enlightened through their contact with socialism that allowed them to regain their humanity.

But while this topos of the redemption of Marxist-Leninism constrained GDR war films, it also allowed them to engage in Nazi crimes more directly. Konrad Wolf’s 1959 film Sterne was a case in point. This joint GDR-Bulgarian production dealt directly with the Holocaust as its protagonist NCO Walter (Jürgen Frohriep) is enjoying a quiet rear-line duty away from the war when he inadvertently meets Ruth (Sasha Krusharska) a Jewish inmate in a transit camp about to be deported to Auschwitz. Ruth tries to convince Walter to take a more active fight against evil and support the partisans, but he believes only in half-measures and enjoying things in the here and now. Spoilers Things come to a head when Ruth is deported, leaving only her Star of David for Walter, but rather than give up, he decides to actively fight against evil and help the partisans. End spoilers The overall message, and one Wolf in a pattern similar to other DEFA filmmakers had to shoehorn in, was that ordinary morality was not sufficient to fight something like Nazism, but rather it needed to have the discipline of an ideology behind it.

Yet the GDR war films dipped into victimization and their narratives created a clean Wehrmacht by default. Walter’s fellow soldiers are indifferent to Jewish suffering, but more apathetic than malevolent. The soldier protagonists in GDR films usually go over to the resistance or partisans, such as the main character of 1970’s Meine Stunde Null, who after being captured allows his experience with the Soviets to crystalize his doubts about fascism into concrete action and he agrees to cross the lines and kidnap a Wehrmacht officer. The 1978 joint Soviet-GDR production Ich will euch sehen likewise has a German soldier disillusioned by the war and joining the partisans. In both these films, the protagonists are reluctant at first to fight fascism’s war, but find that they are more than willing to fight in the name of socialism and humanity. The choice to fight in the latter is voluntary. Konrad Wolf would revisit the war in two more films, 1968’s Ich war neunzehn and 1977’s Mama, ich lebe also feature German protagonists working for the Soviets. To an extent, Wolf tries much harder to understand the ambivalences of German identity while wearing the uniform of a foreign power. In Ich war neunzehn, the film’s protagonist Gregor comes into more contact with Germany as he advances with the Red Army in April 1945, the more ashamed he is to be a German. At one point during a May Day celebration held by the Red Army for freed concentration camp survivors, Gregor’s Ukrainian friend asks one what he should tell his students about Germany, to which the survivor replies “Goethe and Auschwitz. Two German names. Two German names in every language.”