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THE CITY STRIPPED BARE OF ITS HISTORIES, EVEN: CRISIS AND REPRESENTATION IN TWO GERMAN TRÜMMERFILME OF 1948.

The inaugural feature production of the post-war German film industry, Wolfgang

Staudte’s much vaunted and publicized 1946 film, Die Mörder sind unter uns was a

first on many levels. It was the first feature-length film produced by the newly

founded DEFA studios as well as being the first German drama to be subsequently

shown to an international audience as well as the cinema public of the defeated

nation. It also broke new ground in that it was the first film to acquire the, not always

positive, label of a Trümmerfilm or ‘Rubble Film’. Genre questions aside, what

Staudte’s film showed the world was a city narrative of Berlin that lay in abject

ruin:its protagonists populating stairwells and barely recognisable streets cloaked in

proto-expressionist shadows and shot at Dutch angles. The world of Staudte’s Berlin

is viewed through shattered glass and desperate drunken impotent rages of the

war-damaged male protagonist who seeks vengeance for a crime he can neither bear

to remember or forget. Ultimately, only the love of an angelic female figure saves him

from carrying out his murderous intent and restores him to his public utility as a

doctor.

Although the film received broadly positive press, there was a reticence among the

urban viewing public to be subjected to moralising dramas set in the ruins they had

huddled into the few remaining cinemas to forget, if only for a few hours. By 1948 the

backlash against the depiction of urban ruins in German film had made itself felt such

that it posed a definite problem for filmmakers. In the following paragraphs I intend

to show that the cinema of 1948 in Germany was effectively a cinema in the throes of

a crisis of representation. The moral imperative to make films depicting daily life and

with it the consequences, in their most evident and dominating visual form, of the

defeat of Nazism, ruined cities, became an acute crisis for film makers of the time and

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yielded novel engagements with the subject. Following a brief discussion of an

application of narratological concepts to my analysis I will go on to show how

narratives of a ruined city, in this case Berlin, were presented from within a set of

re-framing devices which effectively stripped the traumatic potency of the ruined

present from the narratives. The means with which the two films under discussion

utilised novel narrative techniques will make up the following part of my paper.

METALEPSIS & FOCALISATION: NARRATIVITY AND IDENTIFICATION.

Gerard Genette famously defined metalepsis in literary narratives as “any intrusion

by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe (or by diegetic

characters into a metadiegetic universe, etc.), or the inverse” . In the films I will 1

discuss, both intrusive extra- and intra- diegetic narrations as described in Genette’s

definition appear within focalised dramas, adding a level of meta-narrative

complexity to the films, which effectively mount a challenge to the spectacle and

shock in the visual presence of ruins on screen.

Using this working definition of narrative breach it is possible to examine the complex

narratological practices, which were employed in the post-war German film, as

devices that sought to overcome the problem of the involuntary visual breaches,

threatened by the traumatic spectacle of ruins in the Trümmerfilm. As theatrical

devices, the uses of metaleptic interventions were a means by which the shock and

spectacle of the ruined present could be challenged, ostensibly to displace the

dominance of the spectacular image. By disrupting the flow of narrative in the use of

direct address or re-framing it within another temporal sphere using focalised

meta-narratives was as much a means of transforming a narrative about the Nazi

past as it was of recoding the present. In re-contextualising the present from the

standpoint of alternative temporal or even fantastic realities film makers across all

zones sought to overwrite the political consequences of the national socialist past as a

part of their efforts to displace the traumas of the ruined present.

1Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse, trans. by Jane Lewin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 234­235.

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Before examining just how these uses of metaleptic breach Genette describes

underwent reorientation for the spectator in the context of cinema narratives, it is

useful to trace the historical beginnings of the theatrical concept of metalepsis to

illuminate what such a practice meant for audiences of drama in general and what it

meant for post-war German cinema audiences in particular. The practice of theatrical

meta-narrative and its deployment via metalepsis can be traced to Classical antiquity

offering a core theatrical narrative device in the privileging of information for the

audience which is not known to the play’s cast; this formulation describes one of the

key definitions of dramatic tension, and most especially a device used in classical

Greek tragedy. Diderot’s description of a well executed play was premised on the

construction of a subsequently termed “fourth wall” whereby the internal dynamic 2

of a play should take place among the actors such that they should imagine a fourth

wall between themselves and the audience watching. This appeal to a sincerity or

cohesive immersion by the play’s cast was altered by the advent of cinema where the

fourth wall existed by default and cinematographic taboos such as ‘crossing the line’

or looking directly into the camera were to be avoided because it would undermine

the core and unique ability of the cinematic form to shift perspective in camera

movement as an adopted viewpoint of the cinema spectator. The suspension of

disbelief as a core component of the cinema experience lent the medium special

narrative powers that could be exploited to great effect; none more so than in the

commodified entertainment industry of the 1930s and 1940s in Germany. Siegfried

Kracauer’s analysis of the Kalikowelt of mass illusion and ornament as a core

experience of urban modernity in the Weimar Republic highlighted the power of such

an abandonment of subjectivity and critical engagement as a precursor for the rise of

Hitler. The cinema for Kracauer and, to a similar extent, Walter Benjamin was a

special place of cultural exchange premised on an interchange of types of experience.

The shock of the visual in the cinematic context described by Benjamin was powerful

2 Although not expressly referred to as a ‘fourth wall’ Diderot posits the theatrical device as a part of his Discours in the following passage: “Soit donc que vous composiez, soit que vous jouiez, ne pensez non plus au spectateur que s’il n’existait pas. Imaginez sur le bord du théâtre un grand mur qui vous sépare du parterre : jouez comme si la toile ne se levait pas.” In Denis Diderot, Discours de la poésie dramatique (Paris: Demain, 1758), 1309–1310; See also Sergei Eisenstein’s use of Diderot’s idea in the fifth essay of his, Le mouvement de l’art (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1986), 86.

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precisely because it isolated the viewer in an environment where their attention was

directed and immersive as well as paradoxically communal and isolated. The

commercial successes of cinema in the 1930s both in Europe and in Hollywood had

moved from what might be termed the cinema of the spectacular to narrative forms

which utilised moving cameras and inter-cutting reverse shots and varying shot

lengths in editing to construct a visual narrative that had its own distinct visual

narrative language.

Tom Gunning’s seminal analysis of early American cinematic practices identified a

shift between a so-called “cinema of attractions” and a cinema of narrative integration

as being contingent on a coherent diegesis, something a metaleptic breach in direct

address to the camera would destroy . However, the cinema traditions outside 3

Hollywood, and most importantly for this analysis in the cinema of UFA in the mid

1930s to the 1940s did use direct address for specific narrative purposes. The

comedic effect of direct address was used as a trope by UFA comedies as a type of

punch line to round off an especially comic sequence, often in the closing scene of the

film. Notable examples of this practice appear in a number of Heinz Rühmann

vehicles notably, Der Gasmann and Die Feuerzangenbowle . The purpose was to 4 5

explicitly let the audience in on the joke, indeed to remind them what they were

seeing on screen was in fact a fantasy. The use of such metaleptic breaches typically

came at the end of comedies to facilitate a type of conclusion to the fantasy, adding an

all-encompassing punch line: a joke that provided a synthesis between the

performance on screen and the laughter in the stalls. Under such conditions the

metaleptic breach as punch line did not so much undermine the drama as bring the

audience into it, offering familiarity in a conspiratorial self-awareness of the farce . 6

The crucial difference for post-war film is that the intention of the metalepses and

direct address is inverted. Instead of reminding us that the on-screen activity is a

fantasy, the breaches of the fourth wall in cinema after 1945 dealing with the visual

impact of defeat or the unpopular subject of present hardships, sought to recover or

3Tom Gunning, D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph (Urbana IL: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 261.

4Carl Froelich, Der Gasmann (UFA, 1941). 5Helmut Weiss, Die Feuerzangenbowle (UFA, 1944). 6 The classmate who points out that there would be no such classrooms as the ones depicted in Die

Feuerzangenbowle is a well­known example, in that it states the obvious to comic effect.

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assuage the fears of the viewing public by using metalepsis as a means of introducing

an element of the fantastic to the overbearing presence of the real.

In his 1985 work Narrative Discourse, Gerard Genette posited that metaleptic

breaches do not just offer a softening of boundaries between narrative levels, but that

such breaches are in and of themselves so violent that they drive the narrative into

another “universe” such that the newly constituted diegetic realms come to possess a

distinct ontological status, dividing the fantastic from the real at a primary level for

the reader. I will argue this distinction has an urgent and vital role to play for the

German cinema spectator in the immediate post-war era.

The undifferentiated and spectacular forms of the ruins persisted on screen in

Germany up until 1949 and their presences in films were the subject of inventive and

purposeful reconfigurations through focalised standpoints from which to address the

present. I wish to focus in on two productions that employed specific narrative tropes

to counter the threat of the ruins in the frame and utilise focalisation and metaleptic

breach for narrative dynamism.

By 1948 the political situation in Germany had radically changed from the first

months of shock after May 1945 and the further misery of the so-called

Hungerwinter of 1947. Berlin had moved into the central stage of global politics once

more. However, the problem of representing the ruined city persisted and posed an

additional problem for film makers who feared, along with the rest of the population,

an imminent return to war. I will show how narrative reconfigurations of the past

and of futurity offered a solution to both the representations of a political impasse and

a means to re-classify the ruins of Berlin beyond that of a traumatic spectacle of stasis

in the ubiquity of destruction.

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PALINGENESIS AND STASIS: THE CITY BETWEEN HISTORY AND FUTURITY

R.A Stemmle’s Berliner Ballade was made in 1948 as a film adaptation of Günther

Neumann’s satirical, and somewhat reactionary, cabaret Schwarzer Jahrmarkt . The 7

film is credited for introducing the character of Otto Normalverbraucher into the

German lexical canon as a byword for a hapless everyman. Gustav von Wangenheim,

returning from wartime exile in Moscow, directed the DEFA production Und wieder

’48 a film about student life at the Humboldt University in Berlin - both films locate

the main narrative in 1948 - the present-day Berlin among the ruins. What is striking

however is the use of other time frames to locate and stabilise the dramas of the

present within extra-diegetic narrative continuities. The use of narrative re-framing

and metaleptic address as a means of subverting the crisis of representation is

employed by both films to repopulate meaning and cohesion into narratives of the

city that has been denuded of them.

The city in R.A. Stemmle’s Tri-Zone production Berliner Ballade is spoken of from a

focalised narrative position of an assured a futurity; a transcendental ideal – where

the conditions for the possibility of a better time beyond the present are set out in the

auditory guide of an omnipresent narrator who speaks from the temporal sphere of a

Berlin of 2048. This Berlin is everything 1948 is not and therefore the privations of

the present can be recast as interplay between nostalgic and satirical forms of

address. In so doing, the present is represented as a shared comédie larmoyante

where the conflicts of the past – the Nazi past – and a re-imagined present in the

portrayal of the division of Berlin – are conflated into a plot devised around a set of

theatrical absurdities in which the ordeals of ‘ordinary Berliners’ are played out on

screen. The depiction of the hapless Otto Normalverbraucher as a fall guy for his

times echoes a prevalent theme in German cinema of the time; the fatalism which is

evoked in Otto’s Quixotic efforts to get by in a world set against him serves to absolve

him, and by extension the 1948 viewership, of any sense of moral responsibility for

the past. The political events concerning the imminent division of Berlin along more

permanent lines are robbed of any actual ideological discourse. A scene featuring the

7 Günter. Neumann and others, Schwarzer Jahrmarkt: eine Revue der Stunde Null (Berlin: Blanvalet, 1975).

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meeting of the Allied powers in Potsdam depicts the various representatives

speaking, but their speech is overlaid with martial music from their respective

countries. In this way their discourse is rendered as equally alien and meaningless.

However what is most initially striking about Berliner Ballade is its opening sequence,

which traverses the register of address from the future a century hence to a present

which explicitly addresses the concerns of the 1948 viewership in a breach of the

narrator’s voice in address. The future narrator assures the 1948 audience that this is

no “Heimkehrer Film” by pre-empting the complaint:

NARRATOR: “Ach, Je!” Hätten sie damals gesagt; “Schon

wieder ein Heimkehrer-Film!” 8

The in-joke is in the past conditional, hätte. The understanding being that the real

audience had already passed the judgement. This piece of self-reflexivity at the end

of the comedic device of focalised fantasy places the film firmly within the crisis of

representation precisely because it acknowledges its own narrative deceit. The

paradoxical formation reconnects the drama with the audience by exposing the

tension between a pedagogical imperative to make films about the present and the

popular demands for entertainment that wanted nothing to do with it.

This initial metaleptic breach by the extradiegetic narrator in Berliner Ballade

ensures that the narrative and the dramatic cohesion of the film is kept at a level of

comic de-stabilisation such that any discussion of the more unpalatable aspects of the

unsure present could be overcome, or at least glossed over by a return to metaleptic

interventions of a meta-narrative from an assured futurity in a Utopian Berlin.

The return of Otto Normalverbraucher to his ruined Berlin flat, occupied by

strangers and swindlers, is a less than happy one and his stoic acceptance of absurdity

is well practised. Stemmle’s film places the Everyman, a citizen of the city as a foil for

the vicissitudes of history. He swaps a volume by Thomas Mann on his bookshelf for

8Robert A. Stemmle, Berliner Ballade [The Ballad of Berlin] (Comedia­Film GmbH, 1948.

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Alfred Rosenberg, placing the Mann work behind it and then replaces the Thomas

Mann after the war, hiding the Rosenberg behind it. With this vaguely pointed

reference to a sham of ‘inner emigration’, the past, like the present and all the

attendant ideological markers for it, is just a phase before the onset of a happy utopia

in 2048. Crucially the city itself takes on this aspect of continuity; Berlin may be in

ruins but it is not destroyed. The Berlin of 2048, the world hub, underwrites the

transitory nature of the destruction of Berlin, the ruined capital of the least loved

people on earth in 1948. To a domestic audience, the ruins under these focalised

conditions no longer bear the threat of trauma and stasis nor do they require the

audience of 1948 to shoulder any guilt and responsibility for the Third Reich. They

and all the events that constituted it, are simply part of the rich tapestry and playful

absurdity that makes Berlin so special, so well loved and so unique. History in

Berliner Ballade, then, is less a narrative than a character-attribute for the city-- a

transformation accomplished by the process of focalised distance.

The use of the cabaret form punctuates Stemmle’s film, offering a further

identification with an art form associated with the city’s free spirit. Additionally the

musical interludes offer a “revue” atmosphere to such otherwise unpalatable issues as

homelessness and destitution. What follows is a narrative where Berlin in ruins

becomes a player in a fantasy romance between Otto and the figment of his hungry

and fevered imagination made real – the girl in the dream-world cake shop. A

ravenous and uncharacteristically thin Gerd Fröbe slips into delirium in his roofless

room and into a reverie of pastries and whipped cream served by an angel of comfort

and cake.

Berlin, like the dream-born love affair in Berliner Ballade, undergoes a

transformation from the real to the fantastic. The city whose cosmopolitan

exceptionalism will see it through thick and thin appears on screen in ruins as another

facet of its charm. The city’s future, much like its past, is safely rewritten for public

consumption. The final part of Berliner Ballade takes place in a bar, where two

identical characters representing past militarism in vulgar caricature clash verbally,

escalating the bar room conflict to genocidal proportions. The camera closes in on

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their mouths gnashing and spitting with a mixture of theatrical sadism and rage. Otto

Normalverbraucher, present at the bar, is distraught and tries to stop them, but fails

and faints. Declaring him dead, the patrons of the establishment led by his flatmate

the black marketer, the cake shop girlfriend and the warlike twins, now reconciled

into a single person, put him in a coffin and lay him out for the funeral. His girlfriend

weeps and as the pallbearers pick up his coffin, they leave Otto behind lying on the

base. Oblivious to the fact, the funeral party bury the empty coffin. Each member of

the symbolically coded aspect of an immoral Germany represented by the cast at the

funeral vowing to reform their ways by burying their vices with Otto, a man who they

think they had killed with their thoughtlessness and depravity. The black marketeer

buries avarice and after much prompting the militaristic figure of war buries hate.

Meanwhile, the cake shop bride-to-be and the newly awoken Otto escape into the

future holding hands. The false sacrifice or misconstrued death at the close of Berliner

Ballade splits the narrative between the moral closures of a reified set of characters

at a funeral and the elopement from reality of Otto and his fantastical bride.

Berliner Ballade is a film that places itself into a self-reflexive narrative device. It is

introduced as being a film from the past shown to a future audience, affecting a comic

trope which de-centres the narrative at a focalised remove that is itself part of a

metaleptic process. The narrator that introduces the film does so to an audience

viewing it in 2048 as a special screening, one that requires the future technology of

cinema to be turned off in order to view it properly. This introduction both assures

the audience that the cinema will ‘get better’ in ways that the 1948 audience

understands, in a reference to colour film, and also in ways yet to be imagined by it.

This fantastical future address directly to the audience of the future is an assurance

to the audience of 1948 that the film they are about to see is aware of itself as a part

of a cinema that itself has no future, a cinema about the ruined present.

The de-centred narrative in this opening sequence, the screen filling with oscillations

of sine waves and a test tone, declares its exoticism and archival quality. What follows

immediately afterwards is an explication of what the audience of 2048 supposedly

already knows about Berlin but the real viewership does not, and transversely the

dissolve to the ruined present is presented as an alien place – unimaginable by the

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future audience and all too common for the real one. This switch of narrative

perspective not only imbues the focalised narrator with omniscience: it gives him

omnipresence. The extra-diegetic encounter with the so-called Normalverbrauchers,

the hapless inhabitants of Berlin in 1948 becomes fully realised in the encounter with

the coal smuggler who is offered a cigarette from without the frame of the screen. The

future narrator is not only able to shift into the diegesis of the film; he is able to do so

from outside of his temporal location in 2048. In this metaleptic act the omniscient

and omnipresent narrator also attained a level of omnipotence, chiefly to assuage the

fears of a cinema audience that they might be treated to uncomfortable truths or

motifs that could not instantly be removed by a meta-narrative in the hands of a

kindly guide.

UND WIEDER ’48: REPETITION, RUIN AND REVOLUTION

Under the conditions of a crisis of narrative legitimacy in the post-war years, dramas

such as Und wieder ’48 and Berliner Ballade attempted to overcome the

over-determined spectacular appearance of the ruins by offering a narrative

re-framing of them as part of a symbolic order beyond the crises of 1948. However,

Gustav von Wangeheim's Und wieder ’48 could not have a pedigree at a further

remove from that of Robert Stemmle’s whimsical Berlin. The Soviet Zone DEFA

production sought to make sense of the political crisis facing a divided Germany in

1948 by recourse to a narrative of crisis facing the then divided nation in 1848.

The film opens with and features a story of a film production, already affecting a

metaleptic conduit of play within the play into the film from the first frame: as the

film progresses, the film within the film merges into a narrative synthesis on screen

charged with a dynamism of a Marxist dialectic. The historical determinism

underwriting von Wagenheim’s film rests crucially on the reconnection of historical

narratives to an ideological imperative for the present. The catalyst for this is the city

itself. The young history student, Else, who among others has been hired as an extra,

is less than flattering in her opinion of the film being made about 1848 in the ruins

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when asked by the director. For her the Berlin rebellion of 1848 was much more than

the puerile comedy the film director and his clueless writer had imagined for the

screen. For Else the ruins of the city in 1948 pose an imminent question, a question

unanswered by the failures of 1848. To make her point she stages a Cabaret show at

the University, more in the tradition of Berlin political satire than the fatalistic

interludes in Berliner Ballade. During her act, she draws direct parallels from 1848,

effectively staging a counter drama to the film being shot in the ruins.

As in Berliner Ballade, what is striking is just how little the Berlin of 1948 is presented

as anything to do with the Berlin of 1933. The focalised narrative frame in Und

wieder ’48 is located a century in the past rather than the future. The love story

between the conservative returning soldier embarking on his much-delayed medical

career and the younger sprightly history student follows a parallel trajectory to his

ideological awakening. The audience is treated to a tour of the present through the

lens of the past. The wise fool, Gustav Knetsch-Nante played by Willi Rose, who is

introduced in the opening scenes of the film as an actor in the film being shot in the

ruins, returns in character but as the same figure in the narrative of 1948. In the 13th

sequence in von Wangenheim’s film he crosses over into a role of a historical and

ideological tour guide for a group of Berliners, including the young medical student

Heinz Althaus. Leading them up through a shattered staircase and onto a balcony

overlooking the Schlüterhof in Berlin, where he describes the scene of 1848 looking

out into the present of 1948:

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KNETSCH ERKLÄRT, DAß IM JAHRE 1848 DER KÖNIG AUF DIESEM BALKON GESTANDEN HABE, ALS

IHM DIE BERLINER IHRE TOTEN UND VERWUNDETEN GEZEIGT HABEN:

KNETSCH

:

dat wat er mit seine Jarde und sein Kartätschen-prinzbruder

anjerichtet hat. Sie haben ihn gezwungen seinen Deckel

abzunehmen, wie es sich für einen Menschen gehöre. Un

nachher ham se sich wieder belatschern lassen. Und nu ham

wa den Salat und die Trümmerfrauen. Wissen Se, et is een

Leiden det Janze! 9

In his working-class Berlin dialect, Knetsch makes the unequivocal connection: ‘1948’,

the Trümmerfrauen and the ‘mess’ is a direct result of the lessons of history, which

were not learned in 1848. The movement of the character of Gustav Knetsch-Nante,

from the character in the film about 1848 to a voice the revolutionary past in the film

we are watching set in the ruined present, not only identifies him as a source of

historical continuity, it imbues him with a special narrative legitimacy. The focalised

move from an actor playing a character on set and his Brechtian breach into a

character from 1848 simultaneously addressing his audience in the film and in the

cinema establishes him as a conduit for a special type of meta-narrative. Far from

subsuming the narrative of 1948, the breach of narratives is intended as a bridge, one

that brings the revolutionary spirit of 1848 into the present, invoking a rightful

revolutionary conclusion for the postwar future. The impact of the speech by Gustav

Knetsch on the balcony is possible precisely because it references the ruins. In

marked contrast to Stemmle's Berliner Ballade, The focalisation of von Wangenheim’s

production comes from within. The initial shot of Und wieder ’48 is of a burning

barricade from which a tattered flag is plucked by a revolutionary, this opening

deliberately temporally as well as spatially ambiguous, the rubble of the barricade is

9Reprinted in Peter Pleyer, Deutscher Nachkriegsfilm 1946­1948 (Münster: Fahle, 1965), 342.

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revealed as real remnant of the war, but the flag is a prop for the film. Once the

theatrical layers of the opening sequence of the film are differentiated by a pullback

revealing a film-crew shooting on an outdoor stage set representing Berlin of 1848,

Knetsch appears in a dialogue with an actor playing a flustered travelling tradesman

from Hanover who produces a large scroll passport marked with many signatures and

seals as proof of his legitimate presence. The wily Knetsch remarks on the absurdity

of having to have passports to travel within German lands and informs the distraught

tradesman of the struggle in Berlin, pointing to a hole in the lamppost they are

standing by as evidence of the strife. The fact that the damage which is described as

being from canon shot was almost certainly made by a more advanced weapon of

1945 further advances the film’s ideological point by merging the temporal upheaval

of 1848 with the spatial scars of 1948. What is at stake in the film within the film and

the dissent voiced by its actors, both principal and periphery is the power of history

to shape the present. The truth in history is to be found, in von Wangenheim’s film,

not in the Nazi past but in a bridge between centuries, a return of unfinished business

in the form of revolutionary dialectical immanence. Heinz Althaus the male

protagonist played by the familiar Trümmerfilm face of Ernst Borchert, has an

altercation with his old comrades in arms at his father’s house about his new found

obsession with the 1848 revolutionary student leader Gustav Schlöffel . His affinity 10

with the core historical character, whose letters and speeches he has been reading,

ring true, much to the distaste of his conservative friends. His father wearily contends

that it is impossible to know exactly what happened in the past. Heinz counters that it

is not necessary to know all the details and particularities, rather the spirit and

presence of the conflicts faced by the young revolutionaries of 1848. Heinz stares into

the camera, his gaze not alighting on the camera but rather beyond it as he imagines

himself as Gustav Schlöffel facing trial in 1848. The fade into the imagined flashback

is a return to Heinz in his costume during the filming of the production at the opening

of the film, except now the film has transformed into an imagined set of events which

are coded as being more true to the facts than their enactment in the film within the

film. The visual entry into class-consciousness becomes manifest on screen, stemming

10See: Hugh Ridley, “Intellectual Freedom in Germany’s 1848 Revolution: The Trial of Gustav Adolph Schlöffel,” German Life and Letters, 32 (1979), 308­317.

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from Heinz’s connection between the reactions to hardship in 1848 and whose affinity

with the hardships in Weimar Germany as well as the present. The imagined

flashback then is a vital step in the recognition of the cyclical nature of class history.

The subtext of recognising the outcomes of the failure to address the crises of the

Weimar era is left for the audience to fill in, an invitation to an ideological recognition

of the processes of history, similar to those presented for a critique of Capitalism

presented at the close of Slatán Dudow’s 1932 film Kuhle Wampe. The lacunas in the

explication of events are left deliberately open to be filled in by the audience. Heinz’s

gaze, while not being a form of purposeful direct address, insofar as the dialogue

remains diegetic, ould equally be extra-diegetic. In this way the fourth wall nominally

remains intact but nonetheless offers a breach in that its engagement with the

audience is an invitation to reinterpret the Nazi past from a revolutionary perspective

along with the character of Heinz Althaus as he inhabits the figure of Gustav Schlöffel

in his imagination.

With von Wangenheim’s film the initial levity and frivolousness of the film production

is transformed to a call to arms at the close of the production (both in the film within

the film and in the film itself). The lovers meet and reconcile at the historical

Wartburg, talking to the audience in a revolutionary duet about the imperatives of

1948 – dressed in the clothes of 1848. The lessons of history, so von Wangenheim

would have us believe, are cyclical until resolved. Far from being simply a

“lecture-driven film” in which Else appears as a “Marxist Nun”, her appearance in 11

the film is more akin to a Marxist guardian angel of history. The fact that she does not

appear as an object of sexual desire in the film should not consign her to being a Nun,

however figuratively framed. The subtext is clear: Berlin in ruins will be in destroyed

again unless the marriage of the revolutionary past is consummated in the ruined

present. The conflation of narrative frames at the close of Und wieder ’48 present an

inverse to the distance in the focalised omnipresence of the narrator in the opening

sequence of Berliner Ballade – but the result is effectively the same. The radical

emptiness of a Stunde Null, a temporal impasse epitomised on screen by the shocking

11Shandley, Rubble Films: German Cinema in the Shadow of the Third Reich, 141­143.

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images of the ruined city, is transformed by being taken out of its time and placed

within new contexts. These uses of focalisation and metaleptic breach serve to

re-temporalize the stasis of the present, offering hopes for a future beyond the

trauma. Just as Otto Normalverbraucher escapes into the preordained future with

his fantasy bride at the close of Berliner Ballade, so too the protagonists join on the

path to revolutionary fulfilment in Und wieder ’48; in both films the temporal

divisions collapse and the spatial threat of the ruins is overcome. So the city, stripped

bare by her histories, redeems her narratives and buries her pasts.

DANIEL JONAH WOLPERT

TRINITY HALL

UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

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UNCORRECTED PROOF

WORKS CITED

1. FILM

Dudow, Slatan, Kuhle Wampe Oder: Wem Gehört Die Welt? (Prometheus, 1932). Froelich, Carl, Der Gasmann (UFA, 1941). Staudte, Wolfgang, Die Mörder sind unter uns (DEFA, 1946). Stemmle, Robert A., Berliner Ballade (Comedia-Film GmbH, 1948). Wangenheim, Gustav von, Und wieder ’48 (DEFA, 1948). Weiss, Helmut, Die Feuerzangenbowle (UFA, 1944).

2. TEXT

Diderot, Denis, Discours de la poésie dramatique (Paris: Demain, 1758) Eisentein, Sergei, Le mouvement de l’art (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, [1928] 1986) Genette, Gerard, Narrative Discourse, trans. by Jane Lewin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,

1986). Gunning, Tom, D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early

Years at Biograph (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991). Neumann, Günter, Friedrich Luft, Karl Vibach, Tatjana Sais, and Erich Rauschenbach,

Schwarzer Jahrmarkt: eine Revue der Stunde Null (Berlin: Blanvalet, 1975). Pleyer, Peter, Deutscher Nachkriegsfilm 1946-1948 (Münster: Fahle, 1965). Ridley, Hugh, “Intellectual Freedom in Germany’s 1848 Revolution: The Trial of Gustav

Adolph Schlöffel,” German Life and Letters, 32 (1979), 308-317. Shandley, Robert R., Rubble Films: German Cinema in the Shadow of the Third Reich

(Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2001).

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