How it really was: Germany Year Zero

20th May 2007

Last week I saw the film ‘Germany Year Zero’ made in 1947 by the Italian neo-realist film director, Roberto Rossellini.

The British Film Institute has been showing a major retrospective of his films at the BFI South Bank. To quote the programme notes:

“Of the great film-makers who emerged in Italy after WW2, Roberto Rossellini (1906-1977) was by far the most innovative. With [two of his earlier films] ‘Rome Open City’ in 1945 and ‘Paisa’ in 1946 he created, out of almost nothing, the new realist cinema that others were only cautiously dreaming about.”

On ‘Germany Year Zero’ the notes describe the film as:

“An underrated masterpiece, whose unsparing attitude did not fit into the prevailing mood of optimism at the time it came out.”

‘Germany Year Zero’ was made in 1947 and released in 1948. It was an Italian / French / German co-production, which in itself is interesting for the time. The actors were German, the production staff Italian and the distributors French.

The film tells a grim story. The programme notes even go so far as to call it a "horror movie" which is not correct, but you can see what they mean.

It tells the story of a young boy, Edmund, around 13 years old, living with his sick father, older sister and brother, in the ruins of Berlin at the end of the war. Many of the most striking shots in the film are those of the ruined city; the streets remarkably clean, but with the rubble swept into mounds along the edges, in front of the empty shells of the ruined buildings, as if it were snow after a particularly fierce blizzard. At one point a starving crowd gathers round a dead horse and start cutting off pieces of the meat to eat.

Edmund and his family live in a cramped apartment with at least two other families. His father is sick and unable to work and his older brother will not leave the apartment because he was a soldier who fought to the end of the war and is afraid he will be sent to prison. This leaves Edmund trying to earn enough to feed to entire family, without much success. He is sent home from work digging graves because he is too young. The owner of the apartment sends him out to sell weighing scales, the only thing they have left of any value, on the black market, which Edmund exchanges for a tin of meat. He joins a group of other young children living rough in the ruins stealing what they can and cheating others on the black market.

Eventually, stung by the constant complaints from his sick father that they would all be better off if he were dead, as a sick man is only a burden and an extra mouth to feed, and after meeting his former schoolteacher who reminded him of the Nazi doctrine that only the strong survive, and the weak go to the wall, Edmund steals a bottle of poison from the hospital, slips it into his father’s tea, and so kills him. Soon after this Edmund himself comes to a tragic end; a lost soul, without hope, in a world without meaning or morality.

The British, American and French occupying forces are barely evident in the film. They make an appearance on only a couple of occasions; French soldiers chat to the girls in the night-club Edmund’s sister goes to; British soldiers are shown as tourists visiting the spot where Hitler’s and Eva Braun’s bodies were supposed to have been burnt after they committed suicide; and later another two British soldiers are shown paying good money on the black market to buy a gramophone record of some of Hitler’s speeches.

To a modern viewer, the obvious question is: “were things really this bad – after all this is a feature film, not a documentary?”

After reading some other memoirs and contemporary accounts such as ‘Berlin Twilight’ (see my earlier posting), Humphrey Jennings’ documentary film ‘A Defeated People’ (discussed extensively on other postings in this blog) and Helga Schneider’s ‘The Bonfire of Berlin” (about which more next week), you have to come to the conclusion that for some people, if not for everyone, they probably were.