Helma Sanders-Brahms is one of the most important filmmakers of the New German Cinema of the 70-80s. Her name is lesser known than that of some of her generation colleagues such as Reiner Werner Fassbinder, Win Wenders, Werner Herzog or Margarethe von Trotta, but it would have been enough to have made only ‘Deutschland Bleiche Mutter‘ (1980 – distributed on the English language market as ‘Germany Pale Mother’) to recognize her value and contribution. It is one of the most lucid and critical of the films that looks back with anger at Germany’s Nazi past and the immediate post-war period. The personal involvement makes it even more authentic and human.
‘Deutschland Bleiche Mutter‘ is more than an auteur film. Helma Sanders-Brahms not only wrote the scrupt and directed the film, but also developed in it events and characters from the history of her own family, including the story of love, war and hatred of her own parents. The story begins in the year before the outbreak of the Second World War. Hans and Helene are two young Germans who, somehow, had not been drawn into the fanaticism that had contaminated most of the people around them. They meet and live a beautiful and banal love story. Immediately after the marriage, perhaps because he is not a member of the Nazi party, Hans is called to arms and sent to the front. He is sent first to Poland, then to France and at the end of the war to Greece. Hans and Helene will meet twice more before the end of the war, and on one of these occasions their baby girl is conceived. Hans is far away at the front, a witness and perhaps an accomplice to the horrors taking place there. Helene, like millions of German women, must fight to survive with her little girl. Their house is destroyed by bombings, they take refuge first in Berlin and then in the countryside, they wander through the devastation of an increasingly destroyed Germany, she is raped and ends up robbing corpses. Luck helps both Helene and Hans to survive, but life after the war is not easy either. The traumas changed both of them for good – physically but especially psychologically. Love died out, suspicions, mistrust, frustrations for the interrupted destinies took its place. A new Germany is reborn around, in which the former Nazis are forgiven and they are also the ones who advance socially and economically.
‘Deutschland Bleiche Mutter‘ is not a film about the Holocaust or the horrors of war. The perspective is that of the Germans who did not commit crimes but did not resist either. Hans and Helene are not heroes but rather passive witnesses to what is going on around them. In such times, however, their attempt to be indifferent and live their lives has no chance of success. Helene assists without intervening in the violent persecution of her Jewish neighbors, Hans is a witness and perhaps also an executor of war crimes. Their survival is physical, but the humanity in them is largely destroyed. Helene suffers facial paralysis, half of her cheek is deformed and hides it with a black veil. We can interpret this detail of the heroine’s biography as a metaphor for the divided Germany after the war, with part of the country remaining behind the Iron Curtain. The performance of the two actors in the lead roles – Eva Mattes and Ernst Jacobi – is exceptional. Director Helma Sanders-Brahms combines filmed scenes with sequences from film archives and audio recordings to accurately reproduce the atmosphere of Germany before, during and especially after the war. There is no lack of very hard, almost cruel scenes – but so was the fate of the heroes in the film. Bertold Brecht’s poem, read at the beginning and from which the film’s title is taken, puts the whole story in context. Powerful and impressive, ‘Deutschland Bleiche Mutter‘ is a blunt and somber cinematic retrospective of a tragic period in German history.