Austrian Trümmerfilm?: What a Genre’s Absence Reveals about National Postwar Cinema and Film Studies

The article begins from a comparison of German Trümmerfilme (“rubble films”) that came to define the genre and contemporaneous Austrian films also representing post–World War II physical and cultural devastation, but that are largely excluded from scholarly discussions of Trümmerfilm. By considering the exemplar films’ aesthetic, narrative, and symbolic strategies, as well as the conditions of production and ideologies undergirding postwar filmmaking, the analysis reveals scholarly biases surrounding historiographic divisions between these national cinemas. The author concludes by proposing a reconceptualization of Trümmerfilm as a comparative cultural category that could serve to productively expand the scope of postwar film studies.