Wilfried Wilms

Rubble without a Cause: The Air War in Postwar Film

Trummerfilm owes its existence to destruction and death. Oddly enough, death and destruction are by no means at its center. While most rubble films, as their backdrop, feature the ruins of destroyed cities, civilian death, and hopelessness, and zoom in for brief moments on disease and hunger as the necessary consequences of erasing urban civilian habitation on an unprecedented scale, the films mostly depict a new humanism coming from the shared experience of living in the rubble. In other words, we are hard-pressed to find even the beginnings of an extensive reflection on what caused the rubble, namely, the area bombing of German urban centers and their noncombatant inhabitants. The films give little account of how Germans processed, or perhaps even debated their experiences, of how a “coming to terms with” what caused this radical transformation of Germany’s cities to ruins took place—no evidence of conversation in local pubs, for example, or discussion in the privacy of their “Behelfsheime” (makeshift homes) or “Kellerwohnungen” (generally a euphemism for a cave-like space in the ruins), on a market place, or anywhere else.1 Rubble films contribute little to the public memory of these harrowing events. Yet not all was quiet on the Western front of the soon emerging Cold War. While silence was the standard response to the bombing war, it was not the only one.

Dismantling the Bourgeois Family: J.M.R. Lenz's "Soldatenfamilie"

Lenz’s play Die Soldaten (1776) ends with a distinct critique of the sensibility of the bourgeois family, a sensibility idiosyncratic of the 18th-century Enlightenment. Lenz, like Lessing, reacts to the paradox and interplay of an unassailable private realm that is supposed to lie outside the public, but that can only exist within it. His treatise Über die Soldatenehen bespeaks Lenz’s concern with society’s stability beyond the stage. The radically new idea in Lenz’s reform plan is to create a type of family that is no longer exclusively private and / or sentimental, but that is non-bourgeois in nature: the “Soldatenfamilie.” In service of the state and society, this family replaces the Enlightenment ideal of the politically mature (but antagonistic) ‘Bürgerfamilie.’ Lenz’s avantgardist model of the new family willingly forsakes its bourgeois sense of privacy.

Uncovering their Stories: The Rubble of Memory and the Bombing War

In A Foreign Affair (1948), Billy Wilder’s wonderfully satirical film about the American occupation of postwar Germany, an Army officer, Colonel Plummer from Indiana, takes a group of fact-finding representatives from Congress on a tour of destroyed Berlin. While conscientious Congresswoman Frost sees what to her are disturbing signs of GI fraternization with German women at every turn (including the sight of a woman pushing a typically German baby carriage bedecked with two crisply fluttering American flags, looking eerily like those cars of more recent vintage celebrating support for American troops in Iraq), the male members eagerly watch young boys play baseball among the ruins. “This is one of our youth clubs”, Plummer tells his charges: