Mögen andere von ihrer Schande sprechen, ich spreche von der meinen.
O Deutschland, bleiche Mutter! Wie sitzest du besudelt Unter den Völkertn. Unter den Befleckten Fällst du auf.
Von deinen Söhnen der ärmste Liegt erschlagen. Als sein Hunger groß war Haben deine anderen Söhne Die Hand gegen ihn erhoben. Das ist ruchbar geworden.
mit ihren so erhobenen Händen Erhoben gegn ihren Bruder Gehen sie jetzt frech vor dir herum Und lachen in dein Gesicht. Das weiß man.
In deinem Hause Wird laut gebrüllt, was Lüge ist. Aber die Wahrheit Muß schweigen. Ist es so?
Warum preisen dich ringsum die Unterdrücker, aber Die Unterdrückten beschuldigen dich? Die Ausgebeuteten Zeigen mit Fingern auf dich, aber Die Ausbeuter loben das System Das in deinem Hause ersonnen wurde!
Und dabei sehen dich alle Den Zipfe deines Rockes verbergen, der blutig ist Vom Blut deines Besten Sohnes.
Hörend die Reden, die aus deinem Hause dringen, lacht man. Aber wer dich sieht, der greift nach dem Messer Wie beim Anblick einer Räuberin.
O Deutschland, bleiche Mutter! Wie haben deine Söhne dich zugerichtet Daß du unter den Völkern sitzest Ein Gespött oder eine Furcht!
"O Germany, pale mother How you sit defiled Among the peoples! Among the besmirched You stand out" [ Deutschland, bleiche Mutter [Germany, Pale Mother]. (1979). Helma Sanders-Brahms. (130 minutes).].
From the opening line of Bertolt Brecht's 1933 poem reveals the motif and title of Helma Sanders-Brahms's film, Germany, Pale Mother, which reflects about Nazi Germany and the sensitive changes that post-war Germany has undergone; with a voice-over reading of the poem by Brecht's own daughter right before the opening scene of the film, the poem serves as an allegorical meditation on Germany as the pale mother under Hitler's dictatorship.
The Second World War brought not only defeat for the German nation, but also trauma. After the war, many Germans found it difficult to cope with their guilt for the actions of the Third Reich, and it was a torment for them to begin to rebuild their country as well as their self-identity. Set against this historical background, the film explores the relationships between men and women, mother and daughter, winner and loser; it transforms the story of depravity, shame, and retribution into the big screen, combining Sanders-Brahms's autobiographical experiences and memories with the collective history of Germany.
According to Leonie Naughton, Germany Pale Mother "is a film which accentuates the process of historical recovery, treating history not so much as an indisputable, fixed referent, but rather as a site of contestation between the sexes, between generations and communities and between victors and defeated" [ Leonie Naughton. (1992). "Germany Pale Mother: Screen Memories of Nazism". Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media and Culture, Vol 5, No 2 (1992).]. The film deals with the subjecst of childhood and motherhood, female identity and patriarchal oppression in this particular period of German history. By contrasting the family life before and after the war, it delineates how the war affected ordinary people's everyday life and implies how the post-war political patterns influenced the national identity of German people ever since.
This essay examines the way Germany struggled to heal itself, peculiarly the heads and minds of German people after the Second World War from the perspective of the filmmaker Sanders-Brahms, who metaphorically uses her identity as the media to construct a fictionalised biography of her mother. As a female director, Sanders-Brahms provides the film with feminine insight into this delicate transition period of German history. Her private story to some extent indicates the cross section of German people that appears as the victim of the war. How did the war destroy German people's self-identity and their relationship with people around them? How did they rebuild their national identity? How did they live with the ever-present anguish of national trauma? My essay lies its focus in discussing these questions along with the study of the film Germany Pale Mother.
Lene and Hans
In his book From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film, Anton Kaes points out that for those born in the early 1940s (Sanders-Brahms was born in 1940), the parent generation was the war generation, and to question their parents meant to interrogate the German past. Hence for many years during the 1950s and early 1960s, "no one had dared to ask their parents what they did during the war, how they lived under Hitler, and to what extent they collaborated with the regime, unwittingly or not". And therefore the psychological trauma rendered by National Socialism became a source of curiosity. In the mid-1970s, approaching their midlife point and having children of their own, the postwar generation looked back on their childhood and became introspective about the particular historical period of their country. They began to pay their attention to their parents, to fathers and mothers "who had lived through the Hitler period and were emtionally, if not physically scarred by it". They made an attempt to understand and even to pity them instead of simply accused their parents. [ Anton Kaes. (1989). "The Presence of the Past: Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun" and "Our Childhoods, Ourselves: Helma Sanders-Brahms's Germany, Pale Mother" in, his From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film. First Harvard University Press paperback edition, (1992). ]
As one of those retrospected the times of their parents in the 1970s, Sanders-Brahms uses a strong autobiographical tone to recall the story of her parents, Lene and Hans, during the Nazi era, the war and the immediate post-war period in Germany, Pale Mother. The opening scenes introduce how Lene and Hans met and fell in love and got married during the 1930s at the peak of Nazi reign. The film opens with a close-up of a reflection of a gigantic swastika in a river to locate and date the events. While the camera moves backwards we find a rowboat glides into the frame from the left and in vocie-over Anna/Sanders-Brahms comments: "I cannot remember anything of the time
before my life. I am not guilty for what happened before I was born. I was not around then. I began when my father saw my mother for the first time" (Deutschland, bleiche Mutte). In the intent gaze of Hans and his friend Ulrich in the rowboat, Lene emerges on the shore quietly, being followed and teased by a group of SA officers and their dog. She bravely defends herself without uttering a sound or calling out for help. We watch her struggle through the eyes of Hans and Ulrich. Both of them admire her fortitude; Ulrich even praises her as a true German woman. "The choice of this point to begin the film suggests that Lene is spoken more than speaking, enunciated more than enunciating. The construction of the scene reinforces this positioning by rendering Lene literally silent -- even emphasising the fact through Ulrich's valuing of it -- and by making her an object of the male gaze" [ Julia Knight. (1957). "Is There a Feminine Aesthetic" in her Women and the New German Cinema. Verso, London, (1992). ]. In the course of the story, the film sets the merited male gaze and male aggression as a symbol of patriarchal order at the start.
With the outbreak of the Second World War, Hans, not a Party member, is shipped off to the front to fight for the country shortly after his wedding. During those years of war, Lene and Hans can only see each other briefly on his short leaves. To have a substitute for Hans, Lene wants to have a child. Subsequently, their daughter Anna is born under an air-raid. However, their house is completely destoryed right after her birth. Although Lene loses almost all the family belongings and suddenly becomes homeless, she surprisingly experiences a sense of liberation, as Sanders-Brahms says in voice-over: "with the end of the living room you became merry" (Deutschland, bleiche Mutte). Lene toughens up and raises Anna and survives the war and the following post-war years all by herself. "The film implies that the physical destruction of the bourgeois-patriarchal household creates the freedom necessary for the mother to develop as an independent personality" (Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film, 154). As a mother, Lene is forced to grow into an independent and resourceful woman to take charge of everything that was supposed to share with Hans.
Sanders-Brahms also portays the effect that the war has on Hans. She comments in voice-over when her father is first sent off to the front : "so they sent you off to kill people, but you couldn't do it" (Deutschland, bleiche Mutte). There is a scene where Hans and a bunch of other soldiers are commanded to shoot a few Polish peasants. Hans spots a woman who resembles his wife and he could not pull the trigger and he gets confronted by other soldiers afterwards. His softness and conscience, however, gradually goes off as the war goes on. The film later on shows another scene in which Hans once again encounters a woman who looks like Lene but he kills her along with other victims numbly. Although he manages to survive on the battlefield, Hans has become an broken man by the end of the war. Thus he is seen as a victim of the war too.
Even though remain faithful to each other, the feelings of distance and suspicion grow between Lene and Hans while they are separated. When they finally reunites, they both are unable to make love to each other. The war has thoroughly changed them into different persons and undermined their marriage. The similar story also happens in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film, The Marriage of Maria Braun [ Die Ehe der Maria Braun [The Marriage of Maria Braun]. (1978). Rainer Werner Fassbinder. (120 minutes).], in which a woman, Maria, is married to a soldier, Hermann Braun, who is immediately sent to the front in the middle of the Second World War. With the absence of the husband, Maria learns how to survive the war and take care the rest of the family on her own. Just like Lene, Maria develops a strong sense of female identity that she is the core of the house. With the husbands' return, their predominance and strength have to be oppressed. At the same time, shattered and embittered by the war, either Hermann or Hans are no longer the same men they were. Although these couples are still convinced of their love for one another, they can never go back to the place of innocence and start over with a clean slate. They represent "a public burdened by Germany history" (Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film, 92).
After the war, the fathers, beared with the destruction of all the values and ideals for which they had supposedly fought, are left deeply insecure by the military defeat. Their self-confidence had collapsed and had to be produced anew at the expense of their families, and therefore, they compensated for their authority in their controlling over their wives and children, violently (Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film, 156). As one of those fathers, Hans also becomes irritable and short-tempered, and his return virtually sabotages the harmonious symbiosis between the mother and the daughter as the patriarchal domination restored abruptly. The more he realises that he is involuntarily redundant in the family, the more aggressive he treats the family. In voice-over, the daughter observes that "the stones we cleared away were used to build houses which were worse than before. That was the return of the living rooms. Then the war began inside, once there was peace outside" (Deutschland, bleiche Mutte), signifying the war at home begins.
To regain his authority in the domestic sphere, Hans becomes ruthless towards Anna and Lene. The climax of this section of the film is when Lene starts to suffer from her facial paralysis, the dentist misdiagnoses the illness and insists to extract all her teeth. Regardless of Lene's unwillingness and distress, Hans gives the dentist permission to operate on her. The camera shows this process with repulsive and bloody details of the operation to underscore the brutality of Hans. After this, utterly speechless and withdrawn, Lene wears a black veil to conceal the affected half of her face so that she is nearly invisible. She is again constrained in the house. In the final scene Lene locks herself in the bathroom and attempts suicide by gas; her daughter cries and hammers on the door to beg her to come out; and in the end although she finally does unlock the
door, the voice-over tells us that: "It was a long time before Lene opened the door, and sometimes I think she is still behind it, and I am still standing in front of it, and that she will never come out again, and I have to be grown up and alone. But she is still here. Lene is still here" (Deutschland, bleiche Mutte). The film winds up with a depressed mother who has "learned to be silent" (Deutschland, bleiche Mutte), and eventually, Hans, Lene and Anna "attempt unsuccessfully to re-constitute themselves as a family and re-integrate into post-war German society" [ Judith Keene. (1997). "Mothering Daughters: Subjectivity and History in the work of Helma Sanders-Brahms's Germany Pale Mother". Film Historia, Vol 7, No 1 (1997), pp. 3-12.]. The film begins and ends with the reticence of Lene.
The postwar section of the film illustrates the disruption to the relationship between the mother and the daughter by the returning father and the shift of the mother from authority and responsibility to powerless marginality. "By exploring how Lene experiences war as a period of liberation and pleasure, and peacetime as a period of violence which silenced her, the film suggests that the Second World War can also be understood as an event which disrupted the patriarchal order, while the return to peace brought about its violent reimposition. That is, it made women of Lene's generation aware of the patriarchal order and the way it oppresses women" (Knight, Women and the New German Cinema, 127). Feeling oppressed and depressed, Lene fails to coincide with the female identity she built during the war.
Germany, Pale Mother reveals how the inhumanity of the war distorted the relations between men and women. Lene and Hans are just an ordinary couple but their story stands for the collective tragedy of the war generation. As Sanders-Brahms says in the film, this is a love story, a marriage that is "happy. Perfectly normal. Only it happened at this time, in this country" (Deutschland, bleiche Mutte).
Mother and Daughter
"When they cut me from you, Lene," the daughter states in the voice-over, " I fell onto a battlefield. Yet so much that I couldn't even see was already destroyed"(Deutschland, bleiche Mutte). As an innocent child, Anna is another victim of the war who suffers from not only missing the unconditional father love but also witnessing the decadence and alienation of her own mother.
The central segment of the film starts with showing the inseparable bond between Lene and Anna. After Anna's birth, they go everywhere together and we see " the
blossoming of the mother-daughter dyad during the father's absence" [ Susan E Linville. (1998). "The Mother-Daughter Plot in History", in Feminism, Film, and Fascism: Women's Auto/Biographical Film in Post-war Germany. New German Critique, No. 55 (Winter, 1992), pp. 51-70.]. They always appear in frame together, usually in close physical contact, for instance, "Lene is often holding Anna in her arms or on her lap, or carrying her on her shoulders, or holding her hand" (Knight, Women and the New German Cinema, 124-125). Once when Hans visits them on leave at the deserted Berlin apartment of the wealthy relatives of Lene, he is viewed to be an outsider of the family. The camera observes him from the perspective of the mother and the child with tight medium shots and close-ups, so that the audience perceives his presence as disruptive (Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film, 155). In the eyes of Anna, Hans's very appearance is associated with the war, she indicates it in the voice-over: "You were as young as she, my father. But in my memory your face is always as old as it was when you came home from the war they sent you to" (Deutschland, bleiche Mutte). That makes Anna think of Hans rather as a stranger who tries to steal the maternal care of Lene from her than as a father. Anna asks herself in voice-over, "What am I to do with a father? I was jealous of him and he of me" (Deutschland, bleiche Mutte). As for Lene, her daughter is the reason why she hangs on to life and motivates herself to be strong and accountable. In the Berlin apartment, Lene is singing and dancing with Anna while telling Hans that, "The worse it gets, the more I sing. Not so much for the child as for me" (Deutschland, bleiche Mutte). In the scene when Lene and Hans want to make love, Anna screams to take over the attention from Lene, who gets up, brings the child on their bed and cuddles her. Lene even has to keep suckling Anna as she has nothing else to feed her. "For Anna, being with her mother has in fact become a prerequisite for life. It is as if they have never properly separated and are still joined by an invisible umbilical cord." (Knight, Women and the New German Cinema, 124-125).
Sanders-Brahms expresses her sentimental attachment to this particular phase of her and her mother in voice-over: "Things really went well for us...Hobos -- Lene and I. And Lene and I loved each other in the bath rub and flew like witches over the rooftops. Lene and I. Me and Lene. In the middle of war" (Deutschland, bleiche Mutte).They have their best time in the midst of the war when they are surrounded by bombing and raiding. "Despite the parasitic nature of the relationship - which Lene admits drains her strength - both mother and daughter find pleasure in their bondings" (Knight, Women and the New German Cinema, 125).
On the contrast, Hans's expressions and gestures align him with the military order and Nazi ideology. Feeling excluded and standing alone by an empty fireplace, Hans proclaims to Lene that the men will fight to the last drop of their blood, and he echoes the Nazi rhetoric that his party-member friend Ulrich uses earlier in the film: "Victory or destruction, that is worthy of the German people" (Deutschland, bleiche
Mutte). Replying to him offscreen, Lene states that she wants to live and that the rich relatives who own the apartment have fled Berlin because they already know that they have lost the war. Hans goes back to his troop, and the family reunion ends with Anna triumphantly repeating "Gone! Gone!" to Hans. (Linville, "The Mother-Daughter Plot in History", 58.)
As discussed above, the closeness of this bond is underlined by the almost constant visual connection between the mother and the daughter. The film even employed a scene where Anna watched her mother being raped by two drunken American soldiers and comforted her afterwards by kissing her on the forehead. From there we receive a strong sense of their undescriptive connection to each other. "In the rape scene the framing powerfully highlights the fact of their intimate sameness: both their faces are framed in matching shots, the one seen from the point of view of the other. At the same time, the use of cross-cutting (from a close-up of Lene's face to a parallel close-up of Anna's, watching the rape of her mother) reinforces the ominous sense that, though they are separate and even when they are separated, their fates, in the end, are inseparable. This lesson, that the lives of mother and daughter are conjoined, fated to be the same, is further underscored by the film's narrational structure: a daughter (the filmmaker) is telling the story of her mother (the film's protagonist); the mother is the 'you' whom the narrating 'I' is addressing. And finally, as if to show that the cycle perpetually continues, Lene's small daughter Anna is played by Sanders-Brahms' own daughter, Anna Sanders" [ Angelika Bammer. (1985). "Through a Daughter's Eyes: Helma Sanders-Brahms' Germany Pale Mother". New German Critique, No. 36, Special Issue on Heimat (Autumn, 1985), pp. 91-109.].
Unfortunately, the bond between Anna and Lene is broken by the returning of patriarchal order. At the end of the film, Lene is chained in the domestic sphere once again, rejecting Anna's love and even smacking her occasionally. The maximum of damage to their relationship is when Lene attempts to kill herself and leaves Anna begging outside the door for her to come out for a long time. Although Lene eventually chooses to stay alive for her daughter, the intimacy of the two of them has gone for good. Additionally, the finale of the film accounts that Lene has been silenced as the daughter's narrative voice emphasises that: "My mother, I learned to be silent, you said" (Deutschland, bleiche Mutte), implying Lene has withdrawn from the role as a strong and accountable mother as she used to be.
The Fairy Tale The core of the film is expressed in a nearly twenty-minute long sequence, in which Lene begins to tell her daughter the Grimms' fairy tale of the robber bridegroom as the
war comes to an end. This allegory is so crucial in the content and structure of the film that it is necessary to discuss some details of it. The story is about a young bride and the suitor to whom her father has betrothed her. The groom who lives in the depths of the forest insists the young girl to visit him. He scatters the path with ashes to ensure she can find her way to his place. However, the girl is so filled with irrational fear that she also sprinkles the path with peas and lentils on her way through the forest to the groom's house. When she spots the house and is about to enter in, the girl is warned by the talking birds three times to "turn back, turn back, young bride, you are in a murderer's house" (Deutschland, bleiche Mutte). Hesitating, but she still carries on to the house. Fortunately, an old woman confirms the warning by helping her hide and witness another young girl undergo the tragedy which could have happened to her. The brutal robber groom and his gang kill the poor victim with poisoned wines, cut her body up into pieces and eat her. They chop off her finger to take off a golden ring she was wearing, but the finger springs from the table into the bride's lap as she huddles behind the stove. With the aid of the old woman, she leaves the house but to find that the ashes have blown away. The lucky bride, however, manages to escape and return home guiding by the peas and the lentils that have sprouted. As the wedding feast takes place, the bride tells the story of her horrible journey but disguises it as a dream of hers, punctuating with the repeated phrase "My love, this was only a dream" (Deutschland, bleiche Mutte). But when she reaches the point of the golden ring and the extremely cruel dismemberment, she turns the dream into the reality by showing the the hacked off finger itself to the guests of the wedding. "The robber, who had gone chalk white during the story, jumped up and was about to escape, but the guests captured him and turned him over to the court. He and his whole band were sentenced for their evil deeds" (Deutschland, bleiche Mutte). This fairy tale of terror and retribution is well layered in its own narration and in the film's narration of it, indicating its analogy to the lives of Lene and Anna. "The parallels to Lene and Anna's situation are unmistakable, for during Lene's narration, mother and daughter stop in an abandoned factory suggesting a crematorium at the end of the war - one of several strong pieces of visual evidence that Germany itself is a house of death camps, a murderer's house" (Linville, "The Mother-Daughter Plot in History", 68). The film alludes that Germany under Nazism is literally the house of murderers and the smell of death permeates the fatherland. While Lene and Anna are wandering across the forest, they find a corpse on the snowfield. "This gruesome discovery is followed by a series of long, soundless aerial shots of Berlin's ghostly skeleton houses and documentary pictures of Hitler's burning bunker. These images, like the finger in the fairy tale, provide irrefutable evidence: if it were not for these documents, everyone would think that the story of Germany in the 'Thousand-Year Reich' was a bad dream" (Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film, 148). Additionally, the rape scene mentioned before is inserted in Lene's account of
the tale, referring to Germany as a national victim of the Second World War. Kaes also asserts the equation of Lene's rape by two American soldiers with the metaphorical "rape" of Germany by the victors of the war. "The allegorical logic of the film suggests that if the mother embodies Germany, then post-war Germany is the innocent victim of rape by America" (Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film, 148); and this logic is articulated when Lene says to her daughter after the two soldiers left: "That's the right of the victors, little girl. They take the things and the women" (Deutschland, bleiche Mutte). In a sense, Lene resigns herself to rapes almost without any complaint because the event was somehow submerged by a general feeling of being defiled [ Helke Sander, (1995). Remembering/Forgetting. October, Vol. 72, Berlin 1945: War and Rape "Liberators Take Liberties" (Spring, 1995), pp. 15-26.]. "For German women in 1945-certainly in Berlin and to its east-rape was experienced as a collective event in a situation of general crisis. While frightful and horrific, it seemed to provoke no guilt; if anything it confirmed their expectations and reinforced preexisting convictions of cultural superiority. Rape came as just one more (sometimes the worst, but sometimes not) in a series of horrible deprivations and humiliations of war and defeat: losing your home, becoming a refugee, having your menfolk killed, maimed, or taken prisoner, your children die or sicken of disease and malnutrition" [ Atina Grossmann, "A Question of Silence: The Rape of German Women by Occupation Soldiers". October, Vol. 72, Berlin 1945: War and Rape "Liberators Take Liberties" (Spring, 1995), pp. 42-63. ]. The deliberate treatment of this scene effectively dramatises the fact that Germany was a national victim of the war.
In the article "Germany Pale Mother: Screen Memories of Nazism", Naughton probes more about the allegorical referents of the fairy-tale sequencet, conceiving that: "The narrative elements include, for example, reference to a path scattered with ashes, redolent of the macabre reality of Nazism, which saw the construction of road ways from the ashes and bones of cremated concentration camp inmates. The reference is one which finds its reverberation through the locations in which the tale is narrated: at one point, Lene's recital of the tale is interrupted as she and her daughter pass a towering chimney stack, depicted in a lingering tilt shot. Elsewhere, when Lene and Anna enter the ruined shell of a building, in the background, ovens evocative of a crematorium are conspicuous. In another location where the narration is continued, concentration camp transports are brought to mind with the inclusion of an abandoned railway terminus, the railway tracks overgrown and disused. Denazification also manifests itself in the narrative closure of the tale, with the murderers captured and sentenced for their crimes. The tale of the robber bridegroom is one which also manages to integrate the biographical and familial components of the film, establishing parallels
between the narrative function of the bride within the tale and incidents in Lene's life. Lene duplicates the fictional role of the bride who is told she will marry death and live in the house of her murdering husband, an identity which Hans himself assumes as a soldier during the war. Other details link Lene and her fictional counterpart: in one scene which interrupts the narration of the tale, Lene is approached by Allied soldiers who offer her wine before they assault and rape her; when reunited with her sister, Lene (like the maiden in the tale) drinks three glasses of wine; while the brutality with which Hans, in one early scene of the film, rips the clothes off his wife finds its recurrence in the story. In the final scene, it is Lene who, in her psychic distress, accuses Hans of wanting to kill her" (Naughton, "Summary: The Robber Bridegroom", in "Germany Pale Mother: Screen Memories of Nazism").
Sanders-Brahms thoughtfully applied this fairy tale to unveil the film's theme which lays its emphasis on the national trauma and national identity of Germany as a whole. Germany, Pale Mother recounts how the Second World War traumatises Hans, Lene and Anna individually; and at the same time, destroys the felicity of an ordinary family, reflecting its impairment to the whole nation.
National Trauma and National Identity
Constructed through the eyes of women, Germany, Pale Mother offers significant insight into the social history of Nazi Germany and post-war western Germany by telling the story of Sanders-Brahms's own mother and of herself as a child born at the end of the Second World War. In 1945, 3.5 million men had been killed in Germany, hundreds of thousands crippled by the war, and about 12 million soldiers remained in prison camps; as a result, 65 percent of the population were women (Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film, 152). In Sanders-Brahms's film, these statistics are translated into the story of the family history of Hans, Lene and Anna. The mother, "Lene, appears as a victim, psychologically and physically, of the recent German past. Her psychosomatic facial paralysis at the end of the film externalizes the physical destruction brought about by German history" (Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film, 142). As for the father, Hans represents the resentful men of the war generation. "A kind and gentle young man when he is sent off to be a soldier by the young bride he has barely had time to know, Hans returns years later, aged and hardened and broken in spirit, to a marriage that had died while he was forced to live by killing" (Bammer, "Through a Daughter's Eyes: Helma Sanders-Brahms' Germany Pale Mother", 97). Inevitably, the destructive experiences of her parents inflict a trauma upon the daughter. As an innocent child, Anna, who is also the
narrator of the film, helplessly endures the depravity of both her father and mother. In real life, Sanders-Brahms never get married for the impact of her parent's miserable marriage on her personal life.
Based on personal experience, artistic creation, and historical context, Germany, Pale Mother blend autobiographical, fictional, and historical elements together. Although an essence of autobiographical work is its authenticity as well as subjectivity, "this did not prevent Sanders-Brahms from fictionally reshaping her life and that of her parents, condensing their lives and imparting to them a higher level of generality". (Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film, 145.) Narrating from the standpoint of women, however, "Germany, Pale Mother is not just a 'women's film' or a feminist film; it is also a German film, a product of current West German cultural and political history. This history, and its resultant cultural production, has been marked by the struggle of a new generation of German artists - writers, painters, poets and filmmakers - to find words and images with which to understand and articulate their experience as Germans, an experience passed on to them by the generation of their parents whom denial and shame had, for the most part, rendered silent" (Bammer, "Through a Daughter's Eyes: Helma Sanders-Brahms' Germany Pale Mother", 95). Through the film, Sanders-Brahms revives the way the Second World War has traumatised Germany nationally, exemplifying the process of German people rebuilding their national identity as a defeated nation in the post-war era. Borne with the ever-present anguish of the collectively given shame and pain, Germany can only find its place in this world again by, as what the film Germany, Pale Mother does, facing and contemplating the truth of the history of that particular period.
References
Bammer, Angelika. (1985). "Through a Daughter's Eyes: Helma Sanders-Brahms' Germany Pale Mother". New German Critique, No. 36, Special Issue on Heimat (Autumn, 1985), pp. 91-109.
Grossmann, Atina. "A Question of Silence: The Rape of German Women by Occupation Soldiers". October, Vol. 72, Berlin 1945: War and Rape "Liberators Take Liberties" (Spring, 1995), pp. 42-63.
Kaes, Anton. (1989). "The Presence of the Past: Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun" and "Our Childhoods, Ourselves: Helma Sanders-Brahms's Germany, Pale Mother" in, his From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film. First Harvard University Press paperback edition, (1992).
Keene, Judith. (1997). "Mothering Daughters: Subjectivity and History in the work of Helma Sanders-Brahms's Germany Pale Mother". Film Historia, Vol 7, No 1 (1997), pp. 3-12.
Knight, Julia. (1957). "Is There a Feminine Aesthetic" in her Women and the New German Cinema. Verso, London, (1992).
Linville, Susan E. (1998). "The Mother-Daughter Plot in History", in Feminism, Film, and Fascism: Women's Auto/Biographical Film in Post-war Germany. New German Critique, No. 55 (Winter, 1992), pp. 51-70.
Naughton, Leonie. (1992). "Germany Pale Mother: Screen Memories of Nazism". Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media and Culture, Vol 5, No 2 (1992).
Sander, Helke. (1995). Remembering/Forgetting. October, Vol. 72, Berlin 1945: War and Rape "Liberators Take Liberties" (Spring, 1995), pp. 15-26.
Filmography
Deutschland, bleiche Mutter [Germany, Pale Mother]. Produced and directed by Helma Sanders-Brahms. 1979; Color; 130 minutes. German with English subtitles. Distributor: West Glen Films.
Die Ehe der Maria Braun [The Marriage of Maria Braun]. Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. 1978; color; 120 minutes. Distributor: New Yorker Films. Video: RCA/Columbia Home Video.
笑独行按：柏林电影节最佳影片金熊奖提名，法国《电影手册》1982年度十佳电影。该影片片头为一首同名长诗。影片中女一号主人公在带着女儿洗澡时有侧裸镜。IMDb该影片评分为8.3分。
当个体无法左右群体的时候，必然会获得群体所带来的收益，与此同时，也要承担群体所付出的代价。这个世界上没有免费的午餐，当你获得的时候，自然需要付出成本，当你付出了成本之后，自然是可以有所收获。这个规律不同的阶段有着不同的解读，每一次解读都需要结合一定的历史背景，现实环境，如果脱离了这个背景环境去解读，自然不会有所收获。
今天给大家推荐的是一部战争电影，本片通过一个母亲的视角为我们解读了德国的普通人面临二战的时候，是一副怎样的面孔，其中好好坏坏，我们无法绝对怜悯，但同时也无法铁石心。《德国，苍白的母亲》所选取的视角是一个吉普赛女郎，她在嫁给了一个德国人之后，本应该迎来属于自己的美好的婚后生活，然而美好并没有持续太久，德国丈夫便奔赴战场，丈夫并不是纳粹党员，但在二战时期的德国，他不得不参军上战场，起初，德国丈夫面对着战场上的杀戮感觉到胆颤心惊，然而人是会习惯的。
战场外，作为德国的留守妇女，她每天过着提心吊胆的生活，与此同时，却又不得不面对周围人的各种挤压，战场上的消息是她最不愿听到的消息，战场外的生活也变得艰难起来。然而她的德国丈夫是幸运的，他在战场上生还，二战结束回国，也因为没有参加纳粹党而获得了一份不错的工作，但是妻子这个时候却生病了，回国后的丈夫无法排解战争给自己带来的创伤，开始变得暴戾无常。
关于这部电影，我们无法从正常的角度去理解影片中的设定以及人物人设，因为正常的角度自然是要带着一种非黑即白的立场去评判的，但是对于本片来说，对于这样展示一种生活方式的电影来说，非黑即白并不能完全的解读这个母亲所遇到的一切。因此，冷峻的讲述，就如同片中的冰雪一样的冷峻的讲述才是电影真正所以站立的角度。
你无法同情这个吉普赛女郎，即便是她并没有直接参与战争，即便是她仅仅是一个普通的不能再普通的德国母亲。因为二战是以一个国家发起的犯罪行为，如果具体的落实到每一个人身上，我们该如何面对战后的战败国。
1945年战争结束后，德国作为战败国除了被剥夺了一些权力之外，基本上就成为冷战时期东西方阵营各自争取的对象，如果这个时候要审判德国的普通民众，我们需要一套怎样的法典？战争结束，即便是没有参加纳粹党，丈夫依旧是一个德国士兵，丈夫要不要审判？妻子作为德国的普通民众，作为战败国的普通民众，妻子需要不需要审判？只因为丈夫没有参加纳粹党，所以还在战后获得了一份不错的工作，这对于遭受过德国的入侵的国家来说十一是一种耻辱？
以上，所有的问题，都无法让我们从一个普通人的角度去简单的看待影片中存在的母亲这个形象。似乎将一切归结于纳粹党是一个最好的办法，反正这一切跟我们普通人无关，我们只是受到了蛊惑，我们也被蒙蔽了，我们是爱好和平的，我们甚至与不敢杀人等等，这些都对吗？自然，从这个角度来看，无比正确，但也因为这些无比正确的话，当所有人都这样说的时候，他们在战后形成的新的叫德国的国家，跟原来的纳粹党有什么区别呢？
因为你是二战发起国，因为你的扩展对于周边国家造成了一种惨绝人寰的灾难，但是你却因为你的扩张而获得了安定的生活，起码德国国内在没有遭受到反击之前是宁静祥和的。因为你发动了战争，德国的普通民众们便可以享受到长久的和平，而那些在二战中遭受到了国家层面的灭顶之灾的人们并没有同等的待遇，他们别说生孩子，就连活下去都是一种奢侈。这个时候，谁来问问那些国家，那些人疼不疼？没有人。
因此，前文提到的，有人需要承受代价，就有人会享受收益，德国战败后，柏林被苏联军人以及盟军攻克，作为德国人的吉普赛女郎被战胜国的士兵所侮辱，看到这里很多人是义愤填膺的，但我们应该搞清楚一个问题，我们的愤怒在于没有约束的士兵违反道德，而不仅仅是对于一个遭受侵犯的女性的简单的同情。因为那些被德国侵略过的国家的人民们遭受的苦难远不止于此。
时至今日，我们依旧是需要怀着复杂的情感看待法西斯主义的，即便有的人再努力的为这些国家洗白，他们曾经犯下的罪恶也是不可饶恕的，因为他们曾经因为法西斯主义享受到了收益，但却因为战败而付出了代价，这并不是完全对等的，因为还有一些法西斯国家依旧是没有为自己曾经的恶行付出应有的代价，我们反对法西斯，至少应该时时刻刻记住它。
……
你好，再见
影片采取了大量的独白，从女儿的角度，讲述父母简单相识、结合，继而父亲应征入伍，最后回到一片废墟的德国重新开始生活。看似老实敦厚、自始至终都没有加入纳粹的父亲，经历了战争的磨难与洗礼，无论精神还是肉体都承受了巨大的压力，即使在军中，每次发放香烟和安全套时他都只领取香烟，用“我爱我的妻子”拒绝慰安妇，结果惹来同僚的嘲讽，用安全套拼成“Love”放在他的床上；他在波兰射杀无辜妇女后痛苦流涕，妻子和女儿的照片成为他在疯狂战争中唯一活下去的勇气，但这些看似正面的描述却无法把他升华成一个称职的丈夫与父亲。母亲始终无法得到她追求的爱情，无论是她拒绝和丈夫做爱、为女儿坚持活下去的勇气都无法得到丈夫的真正理解，她最渴望的爱从来都被忽视。
她被盟军强奸的那一幕令人印象深刻，Helma Sanders-Brahms舍弃哗众取宠的手法和视觉，天真无邪的女儿并不知道究竟发生了什么，她走下楼梯，给母亲一个亲吻，却比《不可撤销》中用镜头直面压抑的过程更残酷和真实，基本上整部影片中都没有过于刻意煽情的情景，既不是痛斥纳粹的残暴，也不是要为同样生灵涂炭的德国平反叫屈，它要表达的，即使祖国母亲的悲哀，也是普通母亲的悲哀，战争、生活的压抑，都比不上只会索取不会付出的配偶从心灵上最致命的摧残，影片的结尾，又是女儿稚嫩的叫唤声唤醒了面部半瘫母亲的绝望，她终究没有选择告别这个世界，而是打开浴室的门，在最艰难的时刻继续生存。
Mögen andere von ihrer Schande sprechen,
ich spreche von der meinen.
O Deutschland, bleiche Mutter!
Wie sitzest du besudelt
Unter den Völkertn.
Unter den Befleckten
Fällst du auf.
Von deinen Söhnen der ärmste
Liegt erschlagen.
Als sein Hunger groß war
Haben deine anderen Söhne
Die Hand gegen ihn erhoben.
Das ist ruchbar geworden.
mit ihren so erhobenen Händen
Erhoben gegn ihren Bruder
Gehen sie jetzt frech vor dir herum
Und lachen in dein Gesicht.
Das weiß man.
In deinem Hause
Wird laut gebrüllt, was Lüge ist.
Aber die Wahrheit
Muß schweigen.
Ist es so?
Warum preisen dich ringsum die Unterdrücker, aber
Die Unterdrückten beschuldigen dich?
Die Ausgebeuteten
Zeigen mit Fingern auf dich, aber
Die Ausbeuter loben das System
Das in deinem Hause ersonnen wurde!
Und dabei sehen dich alle
Den Zipfe deines Rockes verbergen, der blutig ist
Vom Blut deines
Besten Sohnes.
Hörend die Reden, die aus deinem Hause dringen, lacht man.
Aber wer dich sieht, der greift nach dem Messer
Wie beim Anblick einer Räuberin.
O Deutschland, bleiche Mutter!
Wie haben deine Söhne dich zugerichtet
Daß du unter den Völkern sitzest
Ein Gespött oder eine Furcht!
How you sit defiled
Among the peoples!
Among the besmirched
You stand out" [ Deutschland, bleiche Mutter [Germany, Pale Mother]. (1979). Helma Sanders-Brahms. (130 minutes).].
From the opening line of Bertolt Brecht's 1933 poem reveals the motif and title of Helma Sanders-Brahms's film, Germany, Pale Mother, which reflects about Nazi Germany and the sensitive changes that post-war Germany has undergone; with a voice-over reading of the poem by Brecht's own daughter right before the opening scene of the film, the poem serves as an allegorical meditation on Germany as the pale mother under Hitler's dictatorship.
The Second World War brought not only defeat for the German nation, but also trauma. After the war, many Germans found it difficult to cope with their guilt for the actions of the Third Reich, and it was a torment for them to begin to rebuild their country as well as their self-identity. Set against this historical background, the film explores the relationships between men and women, mother and daughter, winner and loser; it transforms the story of depravity, shame, and retribution into the big screen, combining Sanders-Brahms's autobiographical experiences and memories with the collective history of Germany.
According to Leonie Naughton, Germany Pale Mother "is a film which accentuates the process of historical recovery, treating history not so much as an indisputable, fixed referent, but rather as a site of contestation between the sexes, between generations and communities and between victors and defeated" [ Leonie Naughton. (1992). "Germany Pale Mother: Screen Memories of Nazism". Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media and Culture, Vol 5, No 2 (1992).]. The film deals with the subjecst of childhood and motherhood, female identity and patriarchal oppression in this particular period of German history. By contrasting the family life before and after the war, it delineates how the war affected ordinary people's everyday life and implies how the post-war political patterns influenced the national identity of German people ever since.
This essay examines the way Germany struggled to heal itself, peculiarly the heads and minds of German people after the Second World War from the perspective of the filmmaker Sanders-Brahms, who metaphorically uses her identity as the media to construct a fictionalised biography of her mother. As a female director, Sanders-Brahms provides the film with feminine insight into this delicate transition period of German history. Her private story to some extent indicates the cross section of German people that appears as the victim of the war. How did the war destroy German people's self-identity and their relationship with people around them? How did they rebuild their national identity? How did they live with the ever-present anguish of national trauma? My essay lies its focus in discussing these questions along with the study of the film Germany Pale Mother.
Lene and Hans
In his book From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film, Anton Kaes points out that for those born in the early 1940s (Sanders-Brahms was born in 1940), the parent generation was the war generation, and to question their parents meant to interrogate the German past. Hence for many years during the 1950s and early 1960s, "no one had dared to ask their parents what they did during the war, how they lived under Hitler, and to what extent they collaborated with the regime, unwittingly or not". And therefore the psychological trauma rendered by National Socialism became a source of curiosity. In the mid-1970s, approaching their midlife point and having children of their own, the postwar generation looked back on their childhood and became introspective about the particular historical period of their country. They began to pay their attention to their parents, to fathers and mothers "who had lived through the Hitler period and were emtionally, if not physically scarred by it". They made an attempt to understand and even to pity them instead of simply accused their parents. [ Anton Kaes. (1989). "The Presence of the Past: Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun" and "Our Childhoods, Ourselves: Helma Sanders-Brahms's Germany, Pale Mother" in, his From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film. First Harvard University Press paperback edition, (1992).
]
As one of those retrospected the times of their parents in the 1970s, Sanders-Brahms uses a strong autobiographical tone to recall the story of her parents, Lene and Hans, during the Nazi era, the war and the immediate post-war period in Germany, Pale Mother. The opening scenes introduce how Lene and Hans met and fell in love and got married during the 1930s at the peak of Nazi reign. The film opens with a close-up of a reflection of a gigantic swastika in a river to locate and date the events. While the camera moves backwards we find a rowboat glides into the frame from the left and in vocie-over Anna/Sanders-Brahms comments: "I cannot remember anything of the time
before my life. I am not guilty for what happened before I was born. I was not around then. I began when my father saw my mother for the first time" (Deutschland, bleiche Mutte). In the intent gaze of Hans and his friend Ulrich in the rowboat, Lene emerges on the shore quietly, being followed and teased by a group of SA officers and their dog. She bravely defends herself without uttering a sound or calling out for help. We watch her struggle through the eyes of Hans and Ulrich. Both of them admire her fortitude; Ulrich even praises her as a true German woman. "The choice of this point to begin the film suggests that Lene is spoken more than speaking, enunciated more than enunciating. The construction of the scene reinforces this positioning by rendering Lene literally silent -- even emphasising the fact through Ulrich's valuing of it -- and by making her an object of the male gaze" [ Julia Knight. (1957). "Is There a Feminine Aesthetic" in her Women and the New German Cinema. Verso, London, (1992). ]. In the course of the story, the film sets the merited male gaze and male aggression as a symbol of patriarchal order at the start.
With the outbreak of the Second World War, Hans, not a Party member, is shipped off to the front to fight for the country shortly after his wedding. During those years of war, Lene and Hans can only see each other briefly on his short leaves. To have a substitute for Hans, Lene wants to have a child. Subsequently, their daughter Anna is born under an air-raid. However, their house is completely destoryed right after her birth. Although Lene loses almost all the family belongings and suddenly becomes homeless, she surprisingly experiences a sense of liberation, as Sanders-Brahms says in voice-over: "with the end of the living room you became merry" (Deutschland, bleiche Mutte). Lene toughens up and raises Anna and survives the war and the following post-war years all by herself. "The film implies that the physical destruction of the bourgeois-patriarchal household creates the freedom necessary for the mother to develop as an independent personality" (Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film, 154). As a mother, Lene is forced to grow into an independent and resourceful woman to take charge of everything that was supposed to share with Hans.
Sanders-Brahms also portays the effect that the war has on Hans. She comments in voice-over when her father is first sent off to the front : "so they sent you off to kill people, but you couldn't do it" (Deutschland, bleiche Mutte). There is a scene where Hans and a bunch of other soldiers are commanded to shoot a few Polish peasants. Hans spots a woman who resembles his wife and he could not pull the trigger and he gets confronted by other soldiers afterwards. His softness and conscience, however, gradually goes off as the war goes on. The film later on shows another scene in which Hans once again encounters a woman who looks like Lene but he kills her along with other victims numbly. Although he manages to survive on the battlefield, Hans has become an broken man by the end of the war. Thus he is seen as a victim of the war too.
Even though remain faithful to each other, the feelings of distance and suspicion grow
between Lene and Hans while they are separated. When they finally reunites, they both are unable to make love to each other. The war has thoroughly changed them into different persons and undermined their marriage. The similar story also happens in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film, The Marriage of Maria Braun [ Die Ehe der Maria Braun [The Marriage of Maria Braun]. (1978). Rainer Werner Fassbinder. (120 minutes).], in which a woman, Maria, is married to a soldier, Hermann Braun, who is immediately sent to the front in the middle of the Second World War. With the absence of the husband, Maria learns how to survive the war and take care the rest of the family on her own. Just like Lene, Maria develops a strong sense of female identity that she is the core of the house. With the husbands' return, their predominance and strength have to be oppressed. At the same time, shattered and embittered by the war, either Hermann or Hans are no longer the same men they were. Although these couples are still convinced of their love for one another, they can never go back to the place of innocence and start over with a clean slate. They represent "a public burdened by Germany history" (Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film, 92).
After the war, the fathers, beared with the destruction of all the values and ideals for which they had supposedly fought, are left deeply insecure by the military defeat. Their self-confidence had collapsed and had to be produced anew at the expense of their families, and therefore, they compensated for their authority in their controlling over their wives and children, violently (Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film, 156). As one of those fathers, Hans also becomes irritable and short-tempered, and his return virtually sabotages the harmonious symbiosis between the mother and the daughter as the patriarchal domination restored abruptly. The more he realises that he is involuntarily redundant in the family, the more aggressive he treats the family. In voice-over, the daughter observes that "the stones we cleared away were used to build houses which were worse than before. That was the return of the living rooms. Then the war began inside, once there was peace outside" (Deutschland, bleiche Mutte), signifying the war at home begins.
To regain his authority in the domestic sphere, Hans becomes ruthless towards Anna and Lene. The climax of this section of the film is when Lene starts to suffer from her facial paralysis, the dentist misdiagnoses the illness and insists to extract all her teeth. Regardless of Lene's unwillingness and distress, Hans gives the dentist permission to operate on her. The camera shows this process with repulsive and bloody details of the operation to underscore the brutality of Hans. After this, utterly speechless and withdrawn, Lene wears a black veil to conceal the affected half of her face so that she is nearly invisible. She is again constrained in the house. In the final scene Lene locks herself in the bathroom and attempts suicide by gas; her daughter cries and hammers on the door to beg her to come out; and in the end although she finally does unlock the
door, the voice-over tells us that: "It was a long time before Lene opened the door, and sometimes I think she is still behind it, and I am still standing in front of it, and that she will never come out again, and I have to be grown up and alone. But she is still here. Lene is still here" (Deutschland, bleiche Mutte). The film winds up with a depressed mother who has "learned to be silent" (Deutschland, bleiche Mutte), and eventually, Hans, Lene and Anna "attempt unsuccessfully to re-constitute themselves as a family and re-integrate into post-war German society" [ Judith Keene. (1997). "Mothering Daughters: Subjectivity and History in the work of Helma Sanders-Brahms's Germany Pale Mother". Film Historia, Vol 7, No 1 (1997), pp. 3-12.]. The film begins and ends with the reticence of Lene.
The postwar section of the film illustrates the disruption to the relationship between the mother and the daughter by the returning father and the shift of the mother from authority and responsibility to powerless marginality. "By exploring how Lene experiences war as a period of liberation and pleasure, and peacetime as a period of violence which silenced her, the film suggests that the Second World War can also be understood as an event which disrupted the patriarchal order, while the return to peace brought about its violent reimposition. That is, it made women of Lene's generation aware of the patriarchal order and the way it oppresses women" (Knight, Women and the New German Cinema, 127). Feeling oppressed and depressed, Lene fails to coincide with the female identity she built during the war.
Germany, Pale Mother reveals how the inhumanity of the war distorted the relations between men and women. Lene and Hans are just an ordinary couple but their story stands for the collective tragedy of the war generation. As Sanders-Brahms says in the film, this is a love story, a marriage that is "happy. Perfectly normal. Only it happened at this time, in this country" (Deutschland, bleiche Mutte).
Mother and Daughter
"When they cut me from you, Lene," the daughter states in the voice-over, " I fell onto a battlefield. Yet so much that I couldn't even see was already destroyed"(Deutschland, bleiche Mutte). As an innocent child, Anna is another victim of the war who suffers from not only missing the unconditional father love but also witnessing the decadence and alienation of her own mother.
The central segment of the film starts with showing the inseparable bond between Lene and Anna. After Anna's birth, they go everywhere together and we see " the
blossoming of the mother-daughter dyad during the father's absence" [
Susan E Linville. (1998). "The Mother-Daughter Plot in History", in Feminism, Film, and Fascism: Women's Auto/Biographical Film in Post-war Germany. New German Critique, No. 55 (Winter, 1992), pp. 51-70.]. They always appear in frame together, usually in close physical contact, for instance, "Lene is often holding Anna in her arms or on her lap, or carrying her on her shoulders, or holding her hand" (Knight, Women and the New German Cinema, 124-125). Once when Hans visits them on leave at the deserted Berlin apartment of the wealthy relatives of Lene, he is viewed to be an outsider of the family. The camera observes him from the perspective of the mother and the child with tight medium shots and close-ups, so that the audience perceives his presence as disruptive (Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film, 155). In the eyes of Anna, Hans's very appearance is associated with the war, she indicates it in the voice-over: "You were as young as she, my father. But in my memory your face is always as old as it was when you came home from the war they sent you to" (Deutschland, bleiche Mutte). That makes Anna think of Hans rather as a stranger who tries to steal the maternal care of Lene from her than as a father. Anna asks herself in voice-over, "What am I to do with a father? I was jealous of him and he of me" (Deutschland, bleiche Mutte). As for Lene, her daughter is the reason why she hangs on to life and motivates herself to be strong and accountable. In the Berlin apartment, Lene is singing and dancing with Anna while telling Hans that, "The worse it gets, the more I sing. Not so much for the child as for me" (Deutschland, bleiche Mutte). In the scene when Lene and Hans want to make love, Anna screams to take over the attention from Lene, who gets up, brings the child on their bed and cuddles her. Lene even has to keep suckling Anna as she has nothing else to feed her. "For Anna, being with her mother has in fact become a prerequisite for life. It is as if they have never properly separated and are still joined by an invisible umbilical cord." (Knight, Women and the New German Cinema, 124-125).
Sanders-Brahms expresses her sentimental attachment to this particular phase of her and her mother in voice-over: "Things really went well for us...Hobos -- Lene and I. And Lene and I loved each other in the bath rub and flew like witches over the rooftops. Lene and I. Me and Lene. In the middle of war" (Deutschland, bleiche Mutte).They have their best time in the midst of the war when they are surrounded by bombing and raiding. "Despite the parasitic nature of the relationship - which Lene admits drains her strength - both mother and daughter find pleasure in their bondings" (Knight, Women and the New German Cinema, 125).
On the contrast, Hans's expressions and gestures align him with the military order and Nazi ideology. Feeling excluded and standing alone by an empty fireplace, Hans proclaims to Lene that the men will fight to the last drop of their blood, and he echoes the Nazi rhetoric that his party-member friend Ulrich uses earlier in the film: "Victory or destruction, that is worthy of the German people" (Deutschland, bleiche
Mutte). Replying to him offscreen, Lene states that she wants to live and that the rich relatives who own the apartment have fled Berlin because they already know that they have lost the war. Hans goes back to his troop, and the family reunion ends with Anna triumphantly repeating "Gone! Gone!" to Hans. (Linville, "The Mother-Daughter Plot in History", 58.)
As discussed above, the closeness of this bond is underlined by the almost constant visual connection between the mother and the daughter. The film even employed a scene where Anna watched her mother being raped by two drunken American soldiers and comforted her afterwards by kissing her on the forehead. From there we receive a strong sense of their undescriptive connection to each other. "In the rape scene the framing powerfully highlights the fact of their intimate sameness: both their faces are framed in matching shots, the one seen from the point of view of the other. At the same time, the use of cross-cutting (from a close-up of Lene's face to a parallel close-up of Anna's, watching the rape of her mother) reinforces the ominous sense that, though they are separate and even when they are separated, their fates, in the end, are inseparable. This lesson, that the lives of mother and daughter are conjoined, fated to be the same, is further underscored by the film's narrational structure: a daughter (the filmmaker) is telling the story of her mother (the film's protagonist); the mother is the 'you' whom the narrating 'I' is addressing. And finally, as if to show that the cycle perpetually continues, Lene's small daughter Anna is played by Sanders-Brahms' own daughter, Anna Sanders" [ Angelika Bammer. (1985). "Through a Daughter's Eyes: Helma Sanders-Brahms' Germany Pale Mother". New German Critique, No. 36, Special Issue on Heimat (Autumn, 1985), pp. 91-109.].
Unfortunately, the bond between Anna and Lene is broken by the returning of patriarchal order. At the end of the film, Lene is chained in the domestic sphere once again, rejecting Anna's love and even smacking her occasionally. The maximum of damage to their relationship is when Lene attempts to kill herself and leaves Anna begging outside the door for her to come out for a long time. Although Lene eventually chooses to stay alive for her daughter, the intimacy of the two of them has gone for good. Additionally, the finale of the film accounts that Lene has been silenced as the daughter's narrative voice emphasises that: "My mother, I learned to be silent, you said" (Deutschland, bleiche Mutte), implying Lene has withdrawn from the role as a strong and accountable mother as she used to be.
The Fairy Tale
The core of the film is expressed in a nearly twenty-minute long sequence, in which Lene begins to tell her daughter the Grimms' fairy tale of the robber bridegroom as the
war comes to an end. This allegory is so crucial in the content and structure of the film that it is necessary to discuss some details of it. The story is about a young bride and the suitor to whom her father has betrothed her. The groom who lives in the depths of the forest insists the young girl to visit him. He scatters the path with ashes to ensure she can find her way to his place. However, the girl is so filled with irrational fear that she also sprinkles the path with peas and lentils on her way through the forest to the groom's house. When she spots the house and is about to enter in, the girl is warned by the talking birds three times to "turn back, turn back, young bride, you are in a murderer's house" (Deutschland, bleiche Mutte). Hesitating, but she still carries on to the house. Fortunately, an old woman confirms the warning by helping her hide and witness another young girl undergo the tragedy which could have happened to her. The brutal robber groom and his gang kill the poor victim with poisoned wines, cut her body up into pieces and eat her. They chop off her finger to take off a golden ring she was wearing, but the finger springs from the table into the bride's lap as she huddles behind the stove. With the aid of the old woman, she leaves the house but to find that the ashes have blown away. The lucky bride, however, manages to escape and return home guiding by the peas and the lentils that have sprouted. As the wedding feast takes place, the bride tells the story of her horrible journey but disguises it as a dream of hers, punctuating with the repeated phrase "My love, this was only a dream" (Deutschland, bleiche Mutte). But when she reaches the point of the golden ring and the extremely cruel dismemberment, she turns the dream into the reality by showing the the hacked off finger itself to the guests of the wedding. "The robber, who had gone chalk white during the story, jumped up and was about to escape, but the guests captured him and turned him over to the court. He and his whole band were sentenced for their evil deeds" (Deutschland, bleiche Mutte).
This fairy tale of terror and retribution is well layered in its own narration and in the film's narration of it, indicating its analogy to the lives of Lene and Anna. "The parallels to Lene and Anna's situation are unmistakable, for during Lene's narration, mother and daughter stop in an abandoned factory suggesting a crematorium at the end of the war - one of several strong pieces of visual evidence that Germany itself is a house of death camps, a murderer's house" (Linville, "The Mother-Daughter Plot in History", 68). The film alludes that Germany under Nazism is literally the house of murderers and the smell of death permeates the fatherland. While Lene and Anna are wandering across the forest, they find a corpse on the snowfield. "This gruesome discovery is followed by a series of long, soundless aerial shots of Berlin's ghostly skeleton houses and documentary pictures of Hitler's burning bunker. These images, like the finger in the fairy tale, provide irrefutable evidence: if it were not for these documents, everyone would think that the story of Germany in the 'Thousand-Year Reich' was a bad dream" (Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film, 148). Additionally, the rape scene mentioned before is inserted in Lene's account of
the tale, referring to Germany as a national victim of the Second World War. Kaes also asserts the equation of Lene's rape by two American soldiers with the metaphorical "rape" of Germany by the victors of the war. "The allegorical logic of the film suggests that if the mother embodies Germany, then post-war Germany is the innocent victim of rape by America" (Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film, 148); and this logic is articulated when Lene says to her daughter after the two soldiers left: "That's the right of the victors, little girl. They take the things and the women" (Deutschland, bleiche Mutte). In a sense, Lene resigns herself to rapes almost without any complaint because the event was somehow submerged by a general feeling of being defiled [ Helke Sander, (1995). Remembering/Forgetting. October, Vol. 72, Berlin 1945: War and Rape "Liberators Take Liberties" (Spring, 1995), pp. 15-26.]. "For German women in 1945-certainly in Berlin and to its east-rape was experienced as a collective event in a situation of general crisis. While frightful and horrific, it seemed to provoke no guilt; if anything it confirmed their expectations and reinforced preexisting convictions of cultural superiority. Rape came as just one more (sometimes the worst, but sometimes not) in a series of horrible deprivations and humiliations of war and defeat: losing your home, becoming a refugee, having your menfolk killed, maimed, or taken prisoner, your children die or sicken of disease and malnutrition" [ Atina Grossmann, "A Question of Silence: The Rape of German Women by Occupation Soldiers". October, Vol. 72, Berlin 1945: War and Rape "Liberators Take Liberties" (Spring, 1995), pp. 42-63. ]. The deliberate treatment of this scene effectively dramatises the fact that Germany was a national victim of the war.
In the article "Germany Pale Mother: Screen Memories of Nazism", Naughton probes more about the allegorical referents of the fairy-tale sequencet, conceiving that:
"The narrative elements include, for example, reference to a path scattered with ashes, redolent of the macabre reality of Nazism, which saw the construction of road ways from the ashes and bones of cremated concentration camp inmates. The reference is one which finds its reverberation through the locations in which the tale is narrated: at one point, Lene's recital of the tale is interrupted as she and her daughter pass a towering chimney stack, depicted in a lingering tilt shot. Elsewhere, when Lene and Anna enter the ruined shell of a building, in the background, ovens evocative of a crematorium are conspicuous. In another location where the narration is continued, concentration camp transports are brought to mind with the inclusion of an abandoned railway terminus, the railway tracks overgrown and disused. Denazification also manifests itself in the narrative closure of the tale, with the murderers captured and sentenced for their crimes.
The tale of the robber bridegroom is one which also manages to integrate
the biographical and familial components of the film, establishing parallels
between the narrative function of the bride within the tale and incidents in Lene's life. Lene duplicates the fictional role of the bride who is told she will marry death and live in the house of her murdering husband, an identity which Hans himself assumes as a soldier during the war. Other details link Lene and her fictional counterpart: in one scene which interrupts the narration of the tale, Lene is approached by Allied soldiers who offer her wine before they assault and rape her; when reunited with her sister, Lene (like the maiden in the tale) drinks three glasses of wine; while the brutality with which Hans, in one early scene of the film, rips the clothes off his wife finds its recurrence in the story. In the final scene, it is Lene who, in her psychic distress, accuses Hans of wanting to kill her" (Naughton, "Summary: The Robber Bridegroom", in "Germany Pale Mother: Screen Memories of Nazism").
Sanders-Brahms thoughtfully applied this fairy tale to unveil the film's theme which lays its emphasis on the national trauma and national identity of Germany as a whole. Germany, Pale Mother recounts how the Second World War traumatises Hans, Lene and Anna individually; and at the same time, destroys the felicity of an ordinary family, reflecting its impairment to the whole nation.
National Trauma and National Identity
Constructed through the eyes of women, Germany, Pale Mother offers significant insight into the social history of Nazi Germany and post-war western Germany by telling the story of Sanders-Brahms's own mother and of herself as a child born at the end of the Second World War. In 1945, 3.5 million men had been killed in Germany, hundreds of thousands crippled by the war, and about 12 million soldiers remained in prison camps; as a result, 65 percent of the population were women (Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film, 152). In Sanders-Brahms's film, these statistics are translated into the story of the family history of Hans, Lene and Anna. The mother, "Lene, appears as a victim, psychologically and physically, of the recent German past. Her psychosomatic facial paralysis at the end of the film externalizes the physical destruction brought about by German history" (Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film, 142). As for the father, Hans represents the resentful men of the war generation. "A kind and gentle young man when he is sent off to be a soldier by the young bride he has barely had time to know, Hans returns years later, aged and hardened and broken in spirit, to a marriage that had died while he was forced to live by killing" (Bammer, "Through a Daughter's Eyes: Helma Sanders-Brahms' Germany Pale Mother", 97). Inevitably, the destructive experiences of her parents inflict a trauma upon the daughter. As an innocent child, Anna, who is also the
narrator of the film, helplessly endures the depravity of both her father and mother. In real life, Sanders-Brahms never get married for the impact of her parent's miserable marriage on her personal life.
Based on personal experience, artistic creation, and historical context, Germany, Pale Mother blend autobiographical, fictional, and historical elements together. Although an essence of autobiographical work is its authenticity as well as subjectivity, "this did not prevent Sanders-Brahms from fictionally reshaping her life and that of her parents, condensing their lives and imparting to them a higher level of generality". (Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film, 145.) Narrating from the standpoint of women, however, "Germany, Pale Mother is not just a 'women's film' or a feminist film; it is also a German film, a product of current West German cultural and political history. This history, and its resultant cultural production, has been marked by the struggle of a new generation of German artists - writers, painters, poets and filmmakers - to find words and images with which to understand and articulate their experience as Germans, an experience passed on to them by the generation of their parents whom denial and shame had, for the most part, rendered silent" (Bammer, "Through a Daughter's Eyes: Helma Sanders-Brahms' Germany Pale Mother", 95). Through the film, Sanders-Brahms revives the way the Second World War has traumatised Germany nationally, exemplifying the process of German people rebuilding their national identity as a defeated nation in the post-war era. Borne with the ever-present anguish of the collectively given shame and pain, Germany can only find its place in this world again by, as what the film Germany, Pale Mother does, facing and contemplating the truth of the history of that particular period.
References
Bammer, Angelika. (1985). "Through a Daughter's Eyes: Helma Sanders-Brahms' Germany Pale Mother". New German Critique, No. 36, Special Issue on Heimat (Autumn, 1985), pp. 91-109.
Grossmann, Atina. "A Question of Silence: The Rape of German Women by Occupation Soldiers". October, Vol. 72, Berlin 1945: War and Rape "Liberators Take Liberties" (Spring, 1995), pp. 42-63.
Kaes, Anton. (1989). "The Presence of the Past: Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun" and "Our Childhoods, Ourselves: Helma Sanders-Brahms's Germany, Pale Mother" in, his From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film. First Harvard University Press paperback edition, (1992).
Keene, Judith. (1997). "Mothering Daughters: Subjectivity and History in the work of Helma Sanders-Brahms's Germany Pale Mother". Film Historia, Vol 7, No 1 (1997), pp. 3-12.
Knight, Julia. (1957). "Is There a Feminine Aesthetic" in her Women and the New German Cinema. Verso, London, (1992).
Linville, Susan E. (1998). "The Mother-Daughter Plot in History", in Feminism, Film, and Fascism: Women's Auto/Biographical Film in Post-war Germany. New German Critique, No. 55 (Winter, 1992), pp. 51-70.
Naughton, Leonie. (1992). "Germany Pale Mother: Screen Memories of Nazism". Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media and Culture, Vol 5, No 2 (1992).
Sander, Helke. (1995). Remembering/Forgetting. October, Vol. 72, Berlin 1945: War and Rape "Liberators Take Liberties" (Spring, 1995), pp. 15-26.
Filmography
Deutschland, bleiche Mutter [Germany, Pale Mother]. Produced and directed by Helma Sanders-Brahms. 1979; Color; 130 minutes. German with English subtitles. Distributor: West Glen Films.
Die Ehe der Maria Braun [The Marriage of Maria Braun]. Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. 1978; color; 120 minutes. Distributor: New Yorker Films. Video: RCA/Columbia Home Video.