Eureka Entertainment: Wrack and Ruin: The Rubble Film at DEFA (1945 -1948) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Eureka Entertainment

Eureka Entertainment have been scouring the annals of East and West Germany from the early 1940s through the 1960s and onward lately from their domestic releases Mabuse Lives! to their krimi box Terror in the Fog, publishing and highlighting rare import titles for the very first time outside of their country of origin.  Often packaged in deluxe limited collector’s hardbound boxes with the transfers included varying in quality depending on the source, as with the Terror in the Fog box which included one film in standard definition, Eureka’s newfound focus on postwar German cinema emerging largely from DEFA Films have also encompassed a number of titles still yet to be licensed to United States customers including the now out-of-print Strange New Worlds: Science Fiction at DEFA box.  Probably their most striking example of Region B locked titles yet to emerge from this new wave of East and West German films is undoubtedly the birth of DEFA with their post-WWII five-film box Wrack and Ruin: The Rubble Film at DEFA.

 
DEFA was the first German film studio allowed to make films within the country in East Germany following the Soviet occupation zone in 1946 with 35mm film stock overseen and supplied by the Soviet Military Administration, the aim of the first five DEFA films known as Trümmerfilme or ‘rubble films’ shot and set in the ruins of bombed out buildings in Berlin was to denazify the country through pictures that ruminated on anti-fascist themes and tried to grapple with the aftermath left in the wake of the Third Reich.  The resulting films, making their blu-ray disc premiere outside of Germany for the very first time, somehow or another get as close to ground zero as any other documentary or military film while still operating within the structured confines of narrative melodramatic genre cinema.  While being part of a greater effort to reckon with and renounce the Nazi party, seen today the rubble films represent extraordinary time capsuled travelogues through a battle-scarred Europe picking up the pieces of the Second World War.  As such, they bring you closer to the reality of war in Berlin than any other work of dramatic fiction being made today with each film being a nuanced and sensitive exploration of different problems facing Germany not only after the war but also that the rise of antisemitism started well before the first bombs were dropped.
 
In the first film in the set, The Murderers Are Among Us, it was the very first post-WWII German film and was fully written and directed by Wolfgang Staudte.  Staudte himself originally was an actor in the Nazi propaganda film Jud Süß, the most antisemitic film of all time which was commissioned at the behest of Joseph Goebbels, and in The Murderers Are Among Us you can sense the director reckoning with his own involvement in the propaganda machine.  Jumping immediately into Dutch-angled vistas of crumbling buildings and concrete piles, we happen upon an artist and concentration camp survivor named Susanne (Hildegard Knef) living in a partially destroyed apartment returning home to discover an intoxicated former military surgeon Dr. Mertens (Ernst Wilhelm Borchert) is crashing in her domain.  Initially their coexistence is strained and contentious but over time they warm up to each other and he tries to pick up work at a hospital only to succumb to PTSD when a woman screams.  Meanwhile Susanne discovers a letter in Mertens’ possession intended for his deceased captain’s widow and upon trying to deliver it she learns former Captain Ferdinand Brückner (Arno Paulsen) is still alive, prompting a shocked and distressed Mertens to get even more drunk with possible plans formulating to murder his Captain in retaliation for war crimes.

 
A work of German cinematic guilt and searching for forgiveness and reconciliation, the film which was the brainchild of Wolfgang Staudte was shopped around to American, British and French authorities who all passed on the screenplay fearing its political spectrum before landing on the Soviets provided he adjusted the ending, The Murderers Are Among Us as an immediate postwar film hits you like an iced cold bucket of water in the face urgently jolting you awake!  From its very real locations of an entire cityscape whose rooves have been destroyed as characters traverse the concrete rubble, from its unflinching regard for crimes of the past in an effort to try and rebuild anew for the future and something of a confessional, The Murderers Are Among Us starts out the series of rubble films with a loud and angry bang.  Almost like two invisible hands are grabbing you by the shoulders and violently shaking you, it served as a stark renewal of faith in the nation while also forcing you to acknowledge the atrocity of antisemitism and complicity in covering up each others’ crimes.
 
Next on the list is Gerhard Lamprecht’s 1946 film Somewhere in Berlin which was made by a director who remained in Germany but tried very hard to avoid any involvement in any Nazi propaganda films and instead focused on what would or wouldn’t evolve into the krimi film.  Written by Lamprecht, the film follows a group of children, largely street kids playing in the rubble, when one boy’s father shell-shocked and broken from being in a POW camp.  Less plot driven and more of an examination of the day-to-day meanderings of children of war, it plays a little bit like a postwar German analogue to William Wyler’s Dead End and its subset of Dead End Kids occasionally interacting with adult characters but largely staying trained within the sphere of children at play.  Made a mere months after the war ended, it becomes something of an ensemble study of life following the war or influenced by it in some way where a youth risks his life climbing to the top of a crumbling building as terrified onlookers await his inevitable fall. 

 
The next film in the list, German-American actor Werner Klinger’s Razzia or Police Raid from 1947, a rubble film that makes a clear line into the krimi picture as a cautionary tale about the dangers of the black market racketeering in postwar Berlin.  When Chief Inspector Friedrich Naumann (Paul Bildt) organizes a raid on the Ali Baba Club a suspected black market front which is responsible for food and supply shortages, his findings lead him to gang boss and club owner Goll (Harry Frank) and his singer partner-in-crime Yvonne (Nina Kosta).  Soon after investigating Goll’s premises on his own, he vanishes without a trace leading his son Paul (Friedhelm von Petersson) to believe it may be a murder plot.  More or less a krimi film set within the realm of rubble torn Berlin, the film written by Harald G. Petersson eventually turns into a bit of a prohibition crime era styled krimi thriller of sorts replete with chases and daring gun battles all throughout the concrete ruins.  Less of a political guilt film and more of a genre thriller set within the framework of the rubble picture, Police Raid boasting striking expressionistic cinematography and compelling characters giving viewership an insight into the problem of racketeering arising amid the occupation effort.

 
Fourth in line is Kurt Maetzig’s 1947 before-during-after wartime melodrama Marriage in the Shadows co-written by Hans Scweikart which touches on the rubble vista when war finally does break out but mostly tries to explore how the power and impunity of the celebrity actor or actress only held out so long when up against the crackdown of the Nazi party.  Concerning a prominent theater and film acting couple Hans Wieland (Paul Klinger) and his wife Elizabeth (Ilse Steppat), contention arises when their theater company under Nazi pressure begin trying to cajole Hans into divorcing Elizabeth over her Jewishness.  Initially the persecution of the Jews becomes more amplified with arrest orders issued following an incident where Hans introduces Elizabeth to a high-ranking German official at a film premiere only to learn of her background later.  Eventually threats are made to Hans’ safety and well being should he stay married to Elizabeth even after German cities are being bombed.  Soon, faced with a desperate decision, the couple will have to make a tragic choice rather than face being torn apart by powers that be, ending on a dedication to a real-life acting couple who chose to die together by suicide rather than separate.

 
Lastly and perhaps most specifically in terms of investigating how the rise of the Third Reich and antisemitism didn’t begin in the 1940s but decades earlier with the rise of Adolf Hitler and the publication of his Nazi textbook Mein Kampf, the fifth and final film in the series Erich Engel’s 1948 film The Blum Affair.  Loosely based on the real life 1926 case in Magdeburg in which a German Jewish industrialist is tried for a murder he didn’t commit, The Blum Affair follows Dr. Blum (Kurt Ehrhardt) a Jewish manufacturer accused of killing his booker.  While state authorities and judges seem to suspect the robbery and murder was committed by another German man in cahoots with a female bystander dragged into helping to hide the body, the already prejudiced judicial system rife with growing antisemitism seizes the opportunity to falsely accuse a Jewish man of a crime he didn’t commit.  As the defense attorneys try to mount a case against the prosecution, a private investigator hired to spy on the only ‘witness’ to the crime which uncovers early warning signs of the proliferation of Nazism. 

 
A dark and foreboding crime investigation procedural and harbinger of things to come that doesn’t necessarily show off any rubble ruins but dives into an even deeper kind of decay showcasing the rise of antisemitism, of the films here The Blum Affair is far and away the most thoroughly chilling and disturbing.  Take for instance a closing shot in which a character remarks the battle for justice has only just begun and the screen fades to black as an echoing bell is struck.  Without showing anything but darkness, it hints at a vast looming apocalypse that hasn’t truly shown its face yet.  Featuring arresting set pieces by art director Emil Hasler and luminous, confrontational cinematography particularly in low light levels and across-the-board powerful ensemble performances, The Blum Affair is a bit like a thundering gavel strike whose themes and images linger within the viewer long after fading to black without any end credits. 

 
Spread across three discs with the first film getting a standalone disc and case while the remaining four films are housed on two discs in one case, Wrack and Ruin: The Rubble Film at DEFA comes in a hardbound cardboard box with limited artwork designed by Carly A-F replete with reversible sleeve art as well as a collectible booklet featuring numerous essays by German film historians.  Each film comes with its own audio commentary by crime cinema and German cinema experts and moreover, in the extras along with newly created video essays and interviews are original archival DEFA documentaries made between 1946 and 1947.  Among them are Rebuilding Berlin, Rebuilding Potsdam, a concentration camp Holocaust documentary Death Camp Sachsenhausen and archival newsreels featuring animation (DEFA’s first) and on-set footage of the production of The Murderers Are Among Us and Marriage in the Shadows. 

 
To call this Eureka Entertainment box a monumental release would be really putting it very mildly as it encompasses a small library of films that get to the essence of what it means to experience defeat, remorse and a desire to begin again rising from the ashes and concrete rubble of the past for a better and more hopeful future.  While indeed part of an occupation effort to denazify the country, as historical documents and works of cinema all five features included here are indelible to any worldly historian inclined cinephile.  Given the rarity and expense of the box it is unlikely many outside of all-region disc player owners will be able to see these films until they are or aren’t licensed domestically.  A real shame as this could well have snuck around and grabbed the crown for Blu-Ray-Box-Set-of-the-Year in the United States out from under Terror in the Fog.  As it stands for those who are able to access and peruse these, Wrack and Ruin: The Rubble Film at DEFA is an absolutely extraordinary, brilliant and often devastatingly powerful series of East German films which should be revered and respected as the turning point in which Germany and its cinema tried to atone for sins of the past with a hopeful clean slate for the future.  Films not just for world cinephiles or Germans but for humanity itself.  Between this, Mabuse Lives! and Terror in the Fog, Eureka Entertainment is truly unblinkingly soaring for the skies!

--Andrew Kotwicki