The Misogyny of the Trümmerfilm - Space and Gender in Post-War German film A thesis submitted to the University of Reading For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Modern Languages and European Studies Richard M. McKenzie January 2017 1 | Page Acknowledgements I would like to express my thanks to my supervisors Dr Ute Wölfel and Prof. John Sandford for their support, guidance and supervision whilst my thesis was developing and being written. It has been a pleasure to discuss the complexities of the Trümmerfilm with you both over multiple coffees during the last few years. I am also grateful for the financial support provided by the Reading University Modern Foreign Languages Department at the beginning of my PhD study. My thanks must also go to Kathryn, Sophie and Isabelle McKenzie, with my parents and sister, for their forbearance whilst I concentrated on my thesis. In addition to my supervisors and family, I would like to record my thanks to my friends; Prof. Paul Francis, Dr Peter Lowman, Dr Daniela La Penna, Dr Simon Mortimer, Dr J.L. Moys and D.M. Pursglove for their vital encouragement at different points over the last few years. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the debt that I owe to two people. Firstly, Herr Wilfred Muscheid of the Frankfurt International School who introduced me to the intricacies of the German language ultimately making my PhD study possible. Secondly, I would like to acknowledge the influence of the late Prof. Lindsey Hughes, lecturer in the former Reading University Russian Department, who, with her departmental colleagues, taught me many of the basic academic tools and determination that I have needed to complete my PhD. Richard M. McKenzie Reading University 2 | Page Declaration “I confirm that this is my own work and the use of all material from other sources has been properly and fully acknowledged.” Signed: 3 | Page The Misogyny of the Trümmerfilm – Space and Gender in Post-War German Film 4 | Page Abstract Scholarly reviews of the Trümmerfilm1 have hitherto concentrated on the its redemptive qualities. In these readings of the films, the defeated German soldiers, Landser, or émigrés return to Germany and into the arms of their beautiful and faithful wives. The wives provide the safe space that the returned men need in order to be restored, reconciled and re-integrated into the new Germany. In this role, Germany’s women are responsible for ‘setting their men on course’ to rebuild the new nation and bring it out of its defeat. Robert Shandley has suggested2 that it is possible to view the original Trümmerfilm, Wolfgang Staudte’s 1946 film Die Mörder sind unter uns, through a genre lens, namely that of the Western movie. He notes that the genre expectations of this film were “thwarted” (Sieglohr, 2000, 99) by the intervention of the film’s female lead, but he does not carry this idea on by examining the gender implications of this thwarting, nor does he conduct a Cross-German study of the Trümmerfilm in its western and eastern forms to explore whether this is a trend. This thesis will build on Shandley’s comments and will first attempt to show whether the Trümmerfilm can indeed be seen as constituting a “genre” and then explore the implications of Shandley’s comments across eight Trümmerfilme, four from the western zones and four eastern zone. These films will be examined through the lenses of the Western and Kriminalfilm genres. These are used at Shandley’s suggestion and are genres that have clear sets of codes, spaces, gender relations and trope outcomes. This use of a genre lens reveals that male dominance of space is slowly ceded to the films’ leading women and the standard trope outcomes are “thwarted”, thereby contradicting trope expectations. The transgression of the expected genre expectations and the 1 Pinkert, Anke, (2008), Can Melodrama Cure? War Trauma and Crisis of Masculinity in Early DEFA Film, In: A Journal of Germanic Studies – Vol. 44, No. 1, (February), pp. 118-136 Kapczynski, Jennifer M. (2008), The German patient: crisis and recovery in postwar culture, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press 2 Shandley, Robert R. (2001), Rubble Films, German Cinema in the Shadow of the Third Reich, Philadeplhia, Temple University Press 5 | Page ceding of the control of male spaces expose the implicit criticism of German women inherent in these films. The interpretation of the films thus changes from redemptive to critical and this study thereby exposes the misogyny of the Trümmerfilm. 6 | Page Preface Thomas Elsaesser and Michael Wedel have suggested the term “National Foundation” film (Elsaesser, Wedel, 2001, 20) for those texts that help to define a nation’s view of itself and assist in the national understanding of self. Once these “National Foundations” become clear it is possible to assess what effects, if any, these foundations have on the present day. They wrote: it no longer seems too farfetched to think of the common basis of several directors' cinematic versions of 'national foundation films' as rooted in the classical movie tropes, such as the frontier with its definition of national identity and otherness, its geography of homelands, enclaves of civilization, and minority reservations (Elsaesser, Wedel, 2001, 20). Elsaesser and Wedel suggest that it is possible to understand the influence of a group of films on the “national foundation” by examining the film through another classic film genre such as the Western or the Road Movie. This thesis flows out of work undertaken in completing my MA (Res) dissertation, which examined two major German Democratic Republic (GDR) anti-fascist films using the genre lens method suggested by Elsaesser and Wedel. In order to examine the films in my dissertation, I had to undertake a short investigation of the earliest post-war German films. This aroused my interest, but I found many of the conclusions drawn about the interpretations of the Trümmerfilm unsatisfactory. However, there was not the space within the confines of a Masters to explore this. In order to investigate this further, I began to examine post-war Germany’s “Foundational Film”, the Trümmerfilm, using the lens of films of the classic Western and Kriminalfilm genres adding a new layer of spatial examination, concentrating on the characters’ control of space, to expose the films’ meanings. In examining German manifestations of the post-war film it became clear that the existing scholarly narrative concerning these films could be challenged. I will, therefore, attempt to 7 | Page construct a new narrative, which will then be used as a basis to re-examine the Trümmerfilm as a whole. 8 | Page Table of Contents Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................................ 2 Declaration ............................................................................................................................................. 3 Abstract .................................................................................................................................................. 5 Preface ................................................................................................................................................... 7 Table of Contents ................................................................................................................................... 9 Chapter One ......................................................................................................................................... 15 The Trümmerfilm .................................................................................................................................. 15 Research question ............................................................................................................................ 17 Research method ............................................................................................................................. 19 The Question of ‘Genre‘ ....................................................................................................................... 20 Mode of Production ......................................................................................................................... 21 Genre Formulas ................................................................................................................................ 22 How Many Genres? .......................................................................................................................... 25 Melodrama ....................................................................................................................................... 26 Film noir – A Non-genre ? ................................................................................................................. 27 Genre-Cycles .................................................................................................................................... 30 Trümmerfilm – A genre? .................................................................................................................. 31 A Genre filter .................................................................................................................................... 33 What is a Trümmerfilm? ................................................................................................................... 34 Gender roles ....................................................................................................................................