Can Melodrama Cure?: War Trauma and Crisis of Masculinity in Early DEFA Film

After the end of the Second World War, the reconstruction of an antifascist-democratic society in Eastern Germany required the political and moral transformation of people who had lived under the Third Reich into new antifascist citizens. This process was an enormous challenge, especially with respect to the prisoners of war returning from the Soviet Union. Frank Biess describes them as “mostly loyal and ideologically committed soldiers in the racial war of extermination on the eastern front where, as recent research indicates, many of them had also become bystanders, accomplices, and perpetrators of genocidal warfare” (144; cf. also Bartov; Heer and Naumann). As Biess shows, in remaking the returnees into the “Pioneers of a New Germany,” the Socialist Unity Party (SED) privileged a pseudoreligious model of confession, conversion, and rebirth. Public and collective demonstrations of this radical transformation implied that the past of the returning soldiers who had served in the fascist Wehrmacht had to be relegated to a previous life that had to be left behind, if not forgotten (Biess 160). The film company DEFA, licensed by the Soviet Military Administration in 1946 – and evolving into a German-Soviet joint-stock company in 1947 and an East German, state-owned company in 1953 – played a crucial public role in this process. Speaking at the inaugural ceremony, Colonel Tulpanov, an official of the Soviet military administration, remarked that DEFA faced the important task of removing all vestiges of fascist and militarist ideology from the minds of the German people (Allan and Sandford 3). Consequently, the first films produced by DEFA, the so-called rubble films, attempted to develop a film language that was strong enough to confront the recent German past and to supply narratives that dealt with individual and collective antifascist transformation (Shandley 24). Central to this project was the production of an exemplary male antifascist subjectivity. That is, in order to reaffirm the patriarchal notion of male mastery, films showcased how men returning from war transcended their past experience through a firm commitment to the rebuilding of a democratic antifascist society. Yet what we find in the cinematic historical archives of the 1940s, including films such as Wolfgang Staudte’s Die Mörder sind unter uns (1946), Gerhard Lamprecht’s Irgendwo in Berlin (1946), Georg C. Klaren’s Wozzeck (1947), Peter Pewas’s Straßenbekanntschaft (1948), and Slatan Dudow’s Unser täglich Brot (1949), are not simply stories of healthy, optimistic returnees who “will now start to build a future for themselves and their families with the same toughness that had helped them to survive the horrors of the war,” as the Neue Berliner Illustrierte declared in 1946 (qtd. in Biess 148). Instead, the DEFA films of the immediate postwar era, much like West German films of thirty years later such as Helma Sanders-Brahms’s Deutschland Bleiche Mutter (1980) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Die Ehe der Maria Braun (1979), also depicted male characters impaired by the trauma of war, by defeat, and in fact also by civilian reentry. These cinematic representations show men who are not just physically broken, as the contemporary press (in 1945 and 1946, for example, in Neues Deutschland and Neue Berliner Illustrierte) preferred to construct them, but rather mentally debilitated, haunted by the war experience of the past and dissociated from, if not disruptive to, the present.

Neither heroic survivor, as in the West German “Papa’s Kino” of the 1950s (cf. Moeller 123–71), nor pioneer of a new antifascist Germany, as imagined by the SED, the figure of the returnee in early DEFA film turned into a site of social, psychological, and representational uncertainty. Kaja Silverman’s discussion of historical trauma in the context of postwar American cinema helps us understand that the unassimilable nature of certain historical events dislodges the male hero from the narratives and subject positions that make up the dominant fiction of male sufficiency (53). Examining dramatizations of returning soldiers in films from the mid-1940s, such as Delmer Daves’s Pride of the Marines (1945), William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), and...