7 - Links and Chains: Trauma between the Generations in the Heimat Mode

Summary

THE POPULAR HEIMAT FILMS OF THE 1950S, characterized by formulaic happy endings, beautiful peaceful landscapes, romance, sing-along moments, and comedic confusion, range from lightly pastoral treatments to downright kitsch. They appear to stand as an emblem of popular escape and so to fit neatly into the twin narratives that have been applied retrospectively to the postwar period — German suffering as taboo, and repression of guilt. Scholarship on the recent explosion in the cultural representation of German wartime suffering has, however, acknowledged that discussion of the traumatic experiences of German soldiers and civilians in the Second World War was in fact widespread in the 1950s. As Robert G. Moeller comments, “In the first decade or so after the war, the past most Germans sought to master was one of the traumatic impact of war and defeat on Germans.” Soldiers were regarded as the “victims of Hitler’s war.” The broader civilian population, and expellees in particular, were also judged to have been victims of the war. The very emphasis on German suffering in the 1950s did indeed accompany an unwillingness or inability to acknowledge and engage with guilt and shame, but at the same time there was a tendency to emphasize that Germans were somehow duped by ideological fanatics, a criminal group at the very top who bore responsibility for Nazi crimes. Some critics have suggested that Heimat films in the 1950s did not engage with either suffering or shame but simply soothed and cheered a West German population which, looking resolutely to the future, had eyes only for material security. And yet, even as the viewing public looked forward, 1950s film production was heavily reliant on remaking films of the 1930s and 1940s. From the perspective of the 1960s, such continuities with a tainted tradition compounded the other sins of omission and commission.

The 1960s critique of the concept of Heimat notwithstanding, recent research has uncovered the extent to which widespread desires and anxieties were implicated in West German Heimat films from the 1950s. Building on this reappraisal of their capacity to engage with pressing social questions, I argue that both perpetration and a traumatic generational rupture — a significant aspect of wartime suffering — are frequently evident in 1950s Heimat films, some of which show a surprising refusal to contrive neat resolutions.