Wrack and Ruin: The Rubble Film at DEFA (12) |Home Ents Review

Raw and powerful, these five German films created amidst the rubble of Berlin at the end of World War 2 present an intriguing perspective on the effects of the war. Think The Third Man but from a German viewpoint. 

The five films in this hardbound slipcase limited edition are: The Murderers Are Among Us, Somewhere in Berlin, Police Raid, Marriage in the Shadows and The Blum Affair. 

The films tick a range of genre boxes, from intense psychological drama and political conspiracy to noirish crime and family drama – often in the same film. Although they were made under the auspices of the Soviet Military Administration, as propaganda exercises to aid denazification, the  films pack a punch and ooze extreme anxiety and fatalism. Hope feels like something to be worked at.  

The Murderers Are Among Us has a female concentration camp survivor coming back to Berlin, to find a traumatised, drunken soldier living in her family home. The couple come to rely on each other but must find out what lies behind his nightmares and violent outbursts. 

Somewhere in Berlin is the story of a group of children mucking about in the unstable ruins of the city. As they jump around playing war, they fall under both good and bad influences of a range of grown ups, including an elderly artist, a homecoming soldier, a black marketeer and a petty thief.  

In Police Raid, a returning soldier joins up with black marketeers after his policeman father is murdered. An almost straight crime story with some rather flat nightclub scenes, this is worth watching for its assorted villains and compromised characters, including the son and a dodgy copper. 

Marriage in the Shadows tells the story, starting in 1933, of two actors – a non-Jew and a Jew – and their marriage, at first out of necessity, after antisemitic laws come into effect. Their 10-year relationship is impacted by the ever tightening noose around Jews and the ‘deportations’ to the East, as they try to keep friends and family together. 

The Blum Affair is set in 1925 and tells the true story of a police and judicial investigation of a murder. The judge wants to be a man of his times and favours implicating a Jewish businessman. The film explores notions of judicial independence and political influence on the judiciary as well as antisemitism. 

These films are good examples of post-catastrophe cinema, aimed at urban Germans who had just survived the Third Reich. The earlier films can be said to pose the positive question ‘how do we go forward?’ at a community or national level. Marriage in the Shadows and The Blum Affair delve back into the Third Reich and Weimar Republic years to present the ‘full stories’ of censored news items that Germans would have been familiar with.