Fashion Amidst the Ruins: Revisiting the Early Rubble Films And the Heavens Above (1947) and The Murderers are Among Us (1946)

This paper revisits two early rubble films from 1946 and 1947 against the background of the contemporary fashion and women’s press in Berlin in order to reconstruct a historic female experience of the immediate postwar period that goes beyond the clichéd images of the German woman as Trümmerfrau, Amiflitt-chen, or a victim of rape. By taking a closer look at the presentations of clothes and various sartorial practices in these two films, this article delineates a wider range of subjective positions associated with female characters and a broader array of attractive identities offered to a predominantly female spectatorship.