German Postwar Films: Life and Love in the Ruins

This volume of essays by scholars of German film and culture examines the relatively neglected German films of the immediate post-World War II period, the so-called "rubble films." Often seen merely as symptoms of a particular German malady--the supposed inability to confront the sins of its immediate past--these films have rarely been examined for their aesthetic qualities and for what they actually depict about postwar German life, attitudes, and fears. Placed within the context of German film history of the postwar period and Allied censorship, the essays examine both well-known and nearly forgotten films for their narrative structure, aesthetic strategies, political ideologies, psychological portraits of damaged adults and orphaned youth, and the nuances of the history they reveal.

Wilfried Wilms is Associate Professor of German Studies, University of Denver. He is the editor of Bombs Away: Representing the Air War over Europe and Japan (together with William Rasch) and has published numerous scholarly articles on German intellectual history, literature, and film, as well as American film. He is presently working on a book focusing on postwar Germany under Allied occupation.

William Rasch is Professor of German Studies, Indiana University. He is the author of Sovereignty and its Discontents: On the Primacy of Conflict and the Structure of the Political and Niklas Luhmann’s Modernity: The Paradoxes of Differentiation. He has edited a collection of essays by Luhmann called Theories of Distinction: Redescribing the Descriptions of Modernity.