Breaking the Post-War Goose-Step: Three Films by Michael Verhoeven

This article evaluates three movies by Michael Verhoeven—The White Rose (1981), The Nasty Girl (1990), and My Mother's Courage (1995)—as an accidental but coherent trilogy. Focusing on their narratives, cinematic styles, and historical contexts, it argues that these movies represent German society and German ambiguities towards its memory of the past more perceptively than is commonly acknowledged. The trilogy reflects the cultural shifts in German society over the last thirty years in a unique way while simultaneously, albeit with differing success, attempting to engender these shifts. Thus, Verhoeven's movies pushed the proverbial envelope and challenged German audiences to question the comfortable consensus which attempted to "draw a line under the past."