18/6/2014 The Place of Rubble in the Trmmerfilm

http://ngc.dukejournals.org/content/37/2_110/9.short 1/1

New German Critique

ngc.dukejournals.org

doi: 10.1215/0094033X-2010-002New German Critique 2010 Volume 37, Number 2 110: 9-30

The Place of Rubble in the Trmmerfilm

Eric Rentschler

Abstract

The first feature film from a vanquished nation, Wolfgang Staudte's Murderers Are

among Us (Mrder sind unter uns, 1946), repeatedly equates the physical destruction

of German cities with psychic devastation, suggesting how heavily the past weighed

on some, though not all, of the nation's survivors. As the rubble on the streets and the

destruction in a returned soldier's mind, material damage and mental wreckage,

become intertwined, the compensatory narrative suggests that both have been caused

by outside forces. By scrutinizing the prominent role of rubble in the so-called rubble

film, this essay historicizes the myths at work in Staudte's famous exercise in this

vein and suggests their afterlife in present-day revisitations of the German war

experience.