Lang ist der Weg directed by Herbert B. Fredersdorf and Marek Goldstein, and: Morituri directed by Eugen York (review)

The “rubble movies” of the late 1940s, as a genre, dealt with the everyday survival of returning World War II veterans and their estranged spouses. The plots usually revolved around the intricate re-negotiation of gender and family values. Most importantly, rubble movies created a popular discourse tentatively addressing questions of crime and punishment. Helmut Käutner’s In jenen Tagen and Wolfgang Staudte’s Die Mörder sind unter uns (both 1947) are early examples of this post-war film genre. Although the movies of this brief, yet aesthetically very fruitful, period differ in their ideological messages, almost all German rubble movies operate from an apologetic perspective, by representing the experiences of common men living under the Nazi regime. Considering this revisionist attitude, it does not come as a surprise that many early post-war filmmakers tried to reach the German audience by comparing the suffering of victims with the experience of perpetrators, and highlighted universal—but depoliticized—humanitarian values.

Lang ist der Weg (1949) and Morituri (1948), two rarely shown German movies from this period, diverge from this paradigm. Both films have a different narrative perspective, since their focal point is the plight of Nazi-regime victims. Both films initially take place in Poland and center around the fate of several victims during the latter part of the Second World War, or shortly thereafter. While Lang ist der Weg is an American-German co-production, Morituri—produced by Artur Brauner’s legendary CCC-Film—was licensed by the Soviet military administration. In Lang ist der Weg, the narrative begins when German troops occupy Poland in 1939, causing the main protagonists, the Jelin family, to be pushed into the ghetto and then transported to the concentration camp at Auschwitz. David, the son of the family, manages to flee from the deportation train, and barely survives the war. Afterward, he meets a young woman named Dora in Warsaw, who is in a similarly desperate situation. They decide to travel westward, and arrive in Landsberg/Bavaria at a camp for “Displaced Persons.” There they get married, and David finds his long lost mother, who had miraculously survived the war. Re-united as a family, they plan to emigrate to the newly founded state of Israel.

In Morituri a group of inmates manages to escape from a concentration camp with the help of a Polish doctor. In the course of their flight, they run into more refugees, who reside in a hideout in the woods. Fearing discovery by German patrols, they don’t dare to leave the forest. Toward the end of the war, German soldiers come dangerously close to their hideout, but in the last minute the refugees survive when the German army has to retreat because of approaching Soviet troops. Although the two movies vacillate between documentary and drama, their innovative formalism helps to explain why contemporary critics received both of the films positively, praising their moral intentions as well as their modernist aesthetics. Director Eugen York and his cinematographer Werner Krien successfully invoke the tradition of Weimar expressionism in Morituri, with its dramatic deployment of light and shadow. The dire portrayal of the devastated refugees shows an elective affinity to Italian Neo-realism. Using multiple languages throughout the drama lends Morituri veracity, a device that Brauner’s own CCC-production made use of many years later in Agnieszka Holland’s successful wartime movie Europa, Europa (1989). The non-judgmental humanitarian message of the films allows German spectators to witness the plight of their victims, without feeling immediately accused. But unlike most of the other rubble movies, neither Lang ist der Weg nor Morituri was commercially successful; it appears that the German public was unwilling to identify with the Jewish and Polish characters. On several occasions, newspapers reported that spectators were whistling, howling, and leaving the cinema during the screening of Morituri. Apparently, the German public could not empathize with the victims...