Filming Among the Rubble of Nazi Germany

In Pawel Pawlikowski’s spare, deeply-felt new film Fatherland, the great novelist Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) returns to Germany from his Californian exile, and travels with his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller) through their ruined, occupied homeland. Toward the end, they walk into a bomb-damaged church, and sit listening as two men play Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” on the organ. Mann weeps for all that is lost.

Pawlikowski has picked his moment well. That conference played a key part in building a new global settlement that aimed to ensure, through guaranteed rights and freedoms, through mutual trade and prosperity, that such a catastrophe could never happen again.

But today, that postwar order is coming under ever heavier bombardment. Predictions of its destruction are commonplace. It’s a good time to look through the lens of the 1940s, and contemplate just why that order was created in the first place.

Back then, Hollywood was filming in the ruins for real. Between 1947 and 1949, four great directors each went to Germany and shot an American spin on what the postwar Germans called the Trümmerfilm, or “rubble movie.”

The 1940s was perhaps Hollywood’s apotheosis. The war fostered new depth and seriousness; television had not yet weakened cinema’s dominion. This was the era of Humphrey Bogart, Ava Gardner, and film noir; of movies like Casablanca, Double Indemnity, and Notorious. The four rubble films themselves are hardly classics, but between them, they captured how a newly super-powerful United States was trying to understand how the world should be rebuilt. They dramatized the dilemmas and nightmares Americans faced as they decided whether to entangle themselves with Europe in the long term. Today, they remind us that the creation of the settlement we’re watching die was driven not only by idealism, but by guilt, hard-faced realism, and fear.

In Jacques Tourneur’s Berlin Express, shot in summer 1947, the wreckage of Frankfurt—the capital of the U.S. zone—stands for the dangers of failing to build a new, peaceful world. Agents of the revanchist Nazi underground kidnap a revered advocate of international unity to prevent him attending a conference on German reunification, hiding him in a derelict brewery.

This dramatized the dread felt by many, not least in Hollywood, that desperate Germans could all too easily turn to fascism once again. Among the attendees at that 1945 San Francisco conference was Orson Welles, who reported in his column in the New York Post that in the hotel lobbies and committee rooms, “the phony fear of Communism is smoke-screening the real menace of renascent Fascism.” Following this logic, Berlin Express strains to cast the Soviets as just one of the four friendly wartime allies.

But all this is undercut by an overarching, noir-ish sense of uncertainty. As a worldly Frenchwoman tells the film’s naive U.S. liberal, Europeans have learned the hard way to maintain “suspicion of everyone and everything.” Even Hollywood couldn’t quite gloss over the impossibility of the dream of a one-world utopia.

That same summer, another Hollywood director, Billy Wilder, was in Berlin, shooting a film that was much less optimistic about the United States’ chances of transforming Europe. Wilder was born to Jewish parents in Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; his career began in Berlin before he had to flee in 1933, first to France, then the United States. This was not his first return to Germany. In 1945, he had served as head of the film unit of the U.S. Information Control Division and had been involved with making Die Todesmühlen (Death Mills), a grueling 20-minute montage of footage from the liberated death camps, designed to force Germans to look their starvation-ravaged victims in the eye. Among the Holocaust’s victims were Wilder’s mother, stepfather, and grandmother.

The movie Wilder shot in 1947, A Foreign Affair, uses the city’s broken buildings to confront Americans with the moral ruin that Nazism, bombing, and invasion had wrought on the German population—and the degrading effect that this was having on U.S. soldiers. Characteristically, this is played as a screwball comedy, sending up the difficulty of “denazifying” people who are scrabbling in the rubble to survive.

The film follows a pious Iowa congresswoman who arrives intent on tackling the moral turpitude of fräulein-chasing GIs. (In this, she is reflecting an outdated domestic U.S. attitude: Soldiers had so widely ignored rules forbidding fraternization with civilians that the ban had been scrapped.) The congresswoman presents an army captain with a birthday cake baked by his beloved back home—which he promptly barters on the black market for a mattress for his mistress, Erika von Schlütow, a nightclub singer and former consort of a Nazi general, who now scrapes along in a derelict building.

Erika, played by Wilder’s old Berlin friend and fellow Hollywood exile Marlene Dietrich, is the picture of European worldliness. As she explains, “We’ve all become animals with exactly one instinct left—self-preservation.” She invites the congresswoman to imagine what it was like “to be a woman in this town when the Russians first swept in.”

Wilder has no solution to any of this; he was just trying to coax Americans to be honest about the depth of the problem they were trying to solve. Unsurprisingly, government officials soon pressured his studio to pull the film from U.S. cinemas. It was not seen in Germany until 1977.

Like Wilder, Fred Zinnemann grew up Jewish in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and began his movie career in Berlin before moving to Hollywood, only to lose close family to the Holocaust. While his old colleague was shooting in Berlin, Zinnemann was at work in the ruins of Ingolstadt, Munich, Nuremberg, and Würzburg. He too wanted Americans to face what had happened in Europe, but his approach was both more emotional and more practical, explicitly intended to raise awareness of one of the war’s most painful consequences.

The Search is based on reports of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Association (UNRRA) about the teams trying to reunite lost and displaced children with any surviving family, and on interviews the director conducted with some of the children in UNRRA’s care. A few of them appear as characters in the film, blankly recounting stories of murder and enslavement. Zinnemann consciously left out the worst of what he had heard, reasoning that U.S. audiences would not be able to stomach it.

His film uses Germany’s ruins to evoke the destruction of the most basic human bonds—trust, motherhood, medical care, kindness. It follows a 9-year-old Czech boy, Karel Malik, who has survived Auschwitz but can barely speak. He has forgotten his name and his family. When he and his friend are put in an ambulance for medical treatment, past experience tells them they are going to be gassed, so they break out and flee into the rubble. Trying to swim across a river to escape the uniformed officials giving chase, Karel’s friend drowns. All this is intercut with Mrs. Malik’s refusal to give up searching for her son, even as each is told the other is dead. Finally, thanks to the compassion of an English UNRRA official and of a U.S. soldier (played by Montgomery Clift), mother and son are reunited, years after their cultured family life was torn apart.

Zinnemann’s film is pointedly international in its focus—the displaced children speak Polish, Czech, French, German; the adults trying to help them are from various Allied nations. It well expresses the horror that informed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in December 1948, a few months after the film’s release, and the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights.

Yet in all three of these films, there is something missing. As the critic J.E. Smyth has noted, Zinnemann had chosen to make his young protagonist Czech to draw attention to the newly free Republic of Czechoslovakia as a symbol of “future European regeneration.” But by the time it premiered in March 1948, Prague had fallen to a Stalinist coup. The new government banned The Search; the young actor who played Karel was forbidden to travel to the United States to receive his special juvenile Oscar. For all their sincere objections to tyranny, none of these films criticized Stalin’s Soviet Union—not even Wilder’s, even though the director had done so in 1939’s Ninotchka—despite its advance across Eastern Europe, and its brutalizing of both German civilians and displaced persons. As should have been obvious, the fear of Stalinism wasn’t “phony” after all.

Within months of the Czech coup, the Soviets had blockaded Berlin, determined to starve the city into submission and force the western Allies out. Instead, they launched a vast rescue operation, flying in supplies for 2 million West Berliners for over a year. This prompted the final U.S. rubble film, George Seaton’s The Big Lift—which captures what had happened to the one-eye-shut idealism of 1947. When Seaton started shooting in July 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty was a few weeks old; by the time he wrapped, China had fallen to communism and the Soviets had the atom bomb.

Like The Search, The Big Lift stars Clift as a warm-hearted U.S. officer—a pilot assigned to the airlift. But this time, his kindness leaves him open to being duped by a desperate German woman hiding a Nazi past. This makes the film an instance of an ideological turn toward anti-totalitarianism: hostile both to the Nazi past and the present Soviet threat.

This was distinct from the vicious hard-right anti-communism that was spreading at the same time and had spurred the House Un-American Activities Committee to summon Hollywood leftists to Washington, D.C., to be show-trialled. The Big Lift specifically sets its face against the United States’ own aggressive authoritarianism. Clift’s fellow officer, a Polish American called Hank Kowalski, is shown struggling to overcome his drive to revenge himself for the torture he endured as a prisoner of war, and his tendency to tyrannize his German girlfriend. She forces him first to make the case for democracy, and then to live up to it, citing the U.S. Constitution at him, and even calling him a “storm trooper.” She also calls out U.S. antisemitism.

Hollywood’s capitulation to the Red Scare is sometimes exaggerated: This was far from the only film that struck a liberal, pro-democratic, anti-totalitarian stance. And while Sen. Joseph McCarthy had launched his mendacious reign of terror by the time The Big Lift came out, this strain of liberal anti-totalitarianism long outlasted him.

But today, Fatherland is being released in a very different United States, where that ideology has been in retreat for years, terribly discredited by the war in Iraq, while the heirs to HUAC and McCarthy are in their pomp. The lesson from those old 1940s rubble films is that it’s not only the postwar order that lies in ruins. The robust liberal United States that once built that settlement is in dire need of reconstruction too.