Murderers Among Us : Anti-Fascism Films of DEFA Studios Blu-ray Box Set
THE MURDERERS ARE AMONG US (DIE MÖRDER SIND UNTER UNS) – 1946, 85 min., dir. Wolfgang Staudte. Lovely, sad-eyed artist Susanne Wallner (Hildegard Knef at her most haunting and vulnerable) returns from a concentration camp to find a traumatized former military surgeon, Dr. Hans Mertens (Ernst Wilhelm Borchert) living in her ruined apartment. While they try to piece their lives back together from the devastation all around, Dr. Mertens runs into a now-successful former comrade who triggers memories of a horrific war-time atrocity and the realization that former Nazis are all around them. Features stunning Noir-inflected photography by Friedl Behn-Grund and Eugen Klagemann, and haunted overtones of the later THE THIRD MAN (1949, dir. Carol Reed); it’s as if Alida Valli’s character from that film had her own movie. The first DEFA and post-WWII German production, this helped launch the Trümmerfilm (“Rubble film”) genre; the title intentionally references the original German title for Fritz Lang’s M. “I took my script first to the British, then to the Americans and finally to the French. Nobody wanted the material … Only the Russian Cultural Officer was interested in my project” – Wolfgang Staudte.
DEATH CAMP SACHSENHAUSEN (TODESLAGER SACHSENHAUSEN) – 1946, 40 min., dir. Richard Brandt. Not only one of the first DEFA documentaries ever made, this was also the first German film dealing with the machinery and terror of the Nazi extermination system. The film was commissioned by the Soviet military administration in Berlin while preparations for the Sachsenhausen trial were under way. Shot at the infamous Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin shortly after it was liberated, this is a harrowing, unforgettable testament to systematized murder: a stack of passports of dead inmates from Bolivia, Germany, Poland and Russia. Graphic footage and B&W photos of camp inmates, some surviving and many dead. The wooden posts in the gallows where prisoners were executed are marked for each victim. The film also includes audio commentary by a former camp official as he was being interrogated by Soviet officers. Newly restored by the DEFA Foundation for this release.
THE AXE OF WANDSBEK (DAS BEIL VON WANDSBEK) – 1951, 110 min., dir. Falk Harnack. Banned from theaters a month after it was released, THE AXE OF WANDSBEK opens with a group of children playing hopscotch in the street in front of a butcher’s shop, with “Heaven” and “Hell” scrawled in chalk on the pavement. It’s an eerie omen: the down-on-his-luck butcher, Albert Teetjen (Erwin Geschonneck) will soon agree to do a favor for an old WWI comrade and execute four Communist prisoners falsely accused of murder, so his ambitious Nazi buddy can convince Hitler to pay a visit to Hamburg. But the aftermath of the execution will come to haunt Albert at every step and mark him as an actual butcher. A bleak, relentless Stanley Kramer-like drama about the banality of evil and how it trickles down to every level of society, destroying all it touches. The film was adapted from a novel by Arnold Zweig, a German Jew who published the novel during exile in Palestine in 1943.
THE GLEIWITZ CASE (DER FALL GLEIWITZ) - 1961, 70 min., dir. Gerhard Klein.
Based on a false flag operation in 1939 when a group of Nazi soldiers attacked a radio station in the town of Gleiwitz on the Polish border, thereby giving Hitler justification to invade Poland. This is one of the most visually inventive and distinctive DEFA films of the era, filled with odd camera angles and asymmetrical edits. Brilliantly depicts the emotional distancing and deadening effects of fascism that allowed the Nazis to carry out their atrocities, with a strange inexorable quality to it: a thriller without suspense, with the terrible outcome predetermined by history.
NAKED AMONG WOLVES (NACKT UNTER WÖLFEN) - 1963, 124 min, dir. Frank Beyer. Inspired by the astonishing true life story of a young Jewish boy who was smuggled into the Buchenwald concentration camp in a suitcase and hidden by a group of prisoners, NAKED AMONG WOLVES was based on the acclaimed novel by Buchenwald survivor Bruno Apitz and anchored by one of the finest DEFA casts of the era, including a stellar performance by Armin Mueller-Stahl (SHINE, EASTERN PROMISES) in one of his earliest roles. An engrossing drama about camaraderie and sacrifice in the face of overwhelming danger and oppression, beautifully shot in B&W Totalvision scope. Much of it was filmed on location at the actual Buchenwald camp, lending an overwhelming sense of gravity and sadness to the story. (The boy in the novel was based on Stefan Jerzy Zweig, who went on to become an acclaimed cinematographer – watch our interview with Armin Mueller-Stahl for this release discussing his later friendship with Zweig.)
All films in German with English subtitles.
