Can Melodrama Cure?

War Trauma and Crisis of Masculinity in Early DEFA Film

Anke Pinkert
Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, Volume 44, Number 1, February 2008, pp. 118-136 (Article)
Published by University of Toronto Press

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/smr/summary/v044/44.1.pinkert.html

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Can Melodrama Cure? War Trauma and Crisis of Masculinity in Early DEFA Film
ANKE PINKERT

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

After the end of the Second World War, the reconstruction of an antifascist-democratic society in Eastern Germany required the political and moral transformation of people who had lived under the Third Reich into new antifascist citizens. This process was an enormous challenge, especially with respect to the prisoners of war returning from the Soviet Union. Frank Biess describes them as mostly loyal and ideologically committed soldiers in the racial war of extermination on the eastern front where, as recent research indicates, many of them had also become bystanders, accomplices, and perpetrators of genocidal warfare (144; cf. also Bartov; Heer and Naumann). As Biess shows, in remaking the returnees into the Pioneers of a New Germany, the Socialist Unity Party (SED) privileged a pseudoreligious model of confession, conversion, and rebirth. Public and collective demonstrations of this radical transformation implied that the past of the returning soldiers who had served in the fascist Wehrmacht had to be relegated to a previous life that had to be left behind, if not forgotten (Biess 160). The lm company DEFA, licensed by the Soviet Military Administration in 1946 and evolving into a German-Soviet joint-stock company in 1947 and an East German, state-owned company in 1953 played a crucial public role in this process. Speaking at the inaugural ceremony, Colonel Tulpanov, an ofcial of the Soviet military administration, remarked that DEFA faced the important task of removing all vestiges of fascist and militarist ideology from the minds of the German people (Allan and Sandford 3). Consequently, the rst lms produced by DEFA, the so-called rubble lms, attempted to develop a lm language that was strong enough to confront the recent German past and to supply narratives that dealt with individual and collective antifascist transformation (Shandley 24). Central to this project was the production of an exemplary male antifascist subjectivity. That is, in order to reafrm the patriarchal notion of male mastery, lms showcased how men returning from war transcended their past experience through a rm commitment to the rebuilding of a democratic antifascist society. Yet what we nd in the cinematic historical archives of the 1940s, including lms such as Wolfgang Staudtes Die Mrder sind unter uns (1946), Gerhard Lamprechts Irgendwo in Berlin (1946), Georg C. Klarens Wozzeck (1947), Peter Pewass Straenbekanntschaft (1948), and Slatan Dudows Unser tglich Brot (1949), are not simply stories of healthy, optimistic returnees who will now start to build a future for themselves and their families with the same toughness that had helped them to survive the horrors of the war, as the Neue Berliner Illustrierte declared
seminar 44:1 (February 2008)

War Trauma and Crisis of Masculinity in Early DEFA Film 119 in 1946 (qtd. in Biess 148). Instead, the DEFA lms of the immediate postwar era, much like West German lms of thirty years later such as Helma Sanders-Brahmss Deutschland Bleiche Mutter (1980) and Rainer Werner Fassbinders Die Ehe der Maria Braun (1979), also depicted male characters impaired by the trauma of war, by defeat, and in fact also by civilian reentry. These cinematic representations show men who are not just physically broken, as the contemporary press (in 1945 and 1946, for example, in Neues Deutschland and Neue Berliner Illustrierte) preferred to construct them, but rather mentally debilitated, haunted by the war experience of the past and dissociated from, if not disruptive to, the present. Neither heroic survivor, as in the West German Papas Kino of the 1950s (cf. Moeller 12371), nor pioneer of a new antifascist Germany, as imagined by the SED, the gure of the returnee in early DEFA lm turned into a site of social, psychological, and representational uncertainty. Kaja Silvermans discussion of historical trauma in the context of postwar American cinema helps us understand that the unassimilable nature of certain historical events dislodges the male hero from the narratives and subject positions that make up the dominant ction of male sufciency (53). Examining dramatizations of returning soldiers in lms from the mid-1940s, such as Delmer Davess Pride of the Marines (1945), William Wylers The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), and Henry Levins The Guilt of Janet Ames (1947), Silverman shows how the trauma of war manifests itself as the compulsion to repeat violent experiences, which puts the conventional link between masculinity and control at risk. She concludes that intrusions of past experiences related to the war threaten the coherence of the male ego in ways that come close to exposing the void at the centre of subjectivity. At the same time, as the early postwar DEFA lms attest to the ability of history to interrupt the master narratives established by society, they strive to restore the injured male subject through the healing love of a woman, the opportunity to work, or paternal afrmation. These lms also attempt to repair this historical crisis by developing narratives centred on the reinsertion of the returnee into the social matrix of a new antifascist order. Although critics have provided insights into the socio-political dimension of such transformative narratives (cf. Biess; Pinkert 14253), this article examines the ways in which early postwar DEFA lms deploy gendered discourse to contain a crisis of masculinity caused by psychic suffering related to the war experience. It suggests that this crisis of postwar male agency and authority is addressed through a melodramatic cinematic imagination centred on the commitment and concessions made by women. In postwar DEFA lm, female protagonists are normatively cast within positions of purity and innocence, and the womens ideological function is to redeem men from their debilitating link to the fascist past. Conventionally, the psychic and social processes at work in the melodramatic imagination perpetuate the patriarchal order and leave the viewer with the sense that traditional family and gender roles are intact. In order to secure the imagination of stable societal and family relations, melodrama indulges in strong emotionalism, moral polarization, and overt schematization. Yet, at the same time as melodrama renders complex

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psychic and social relations into easily identiable codes that produce specic emotional effects in the spectator, it also reveals what is repressed in this process (cf. Brooks and Elsaesser; Kaplan). With respect to DEFAs postwar lms dealing with returning soldiers, this is especially the case where the cinematic recuperation of masculinity appears to fail. Mens lack of mastery in the immediate years after 1945 is exposed when they need to rely on womens redemptive role as nurturer and caretaker. Here, early DEFA lms provide great insight into the symbolic difculty of stabilizing traditional gender relations in Germanys postwar transitional culture riddled with broken families, skyrocketing divorce rates, venereal disease, mass rapes, and absent sexual partners (cf. Heinemann 10836). DEFA lms produced in the Soviet occupation zone between 1946 and 1949 show that discourses of German suffering were not simply absent from public representations of antifascist transformation but rather radically displaced and recongured. While the collective postwar memory in the West focussed on the economic deprivation and physical abuse of German men in Soviet prisoner-of-war camps (Moeller 125), the early cinematic productions in the East tended to recast German suffering, and especially that of men returning from war and struggling with reentry into postwar society, through a language of psychic failure centred on war trauma. From Staudtes Die Mrder sind unter uns, the rst lm produced by DEFA, to the subsequent lms Irgendwo in Berlin and, in more mediated ways, Wozzeck, early postwar representations display how deeply the experience of war violence had invaded the psyche of the returnee. In other words, far from hiding it, lms of the immediate postwar years displayed war-time suffering and its aftermath by processing it through a discourse of psychopathology that blends medical and psychoanalytical concepts with long-standing popular myths of madness and mental deviance. Here postwar DEFA lms drew on a cinematic memory of expressionist and Weimar lm, which in the 1910s and 1920s had explored madness and psychopathology as a source of social anxiety, escape, and criticism. Early expressionist lms such as Robert Wienes Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari (1919) had created external representations of troubled psychic interiors through stylized stage sets, exaggerated acting, and effective use of lights and shadows. The expressionist heritage became more diffuse in the exploration of psychological states of madness in later Weimar lms. Here, lms such as G. W. Pabsts Geheimnisse einer Seele (1926) developed a tradition of psychological realism in which characters possessed greater psychological depth that revealed links between psychic symptoms, fantasies, or compulsions and the unconscious. Fritz Langs M (1931), in contrast, focussed on the social relationship between the exclusion of people based on notions of psychological deviancy and the power of existing institutional powers, including the legal and medical system (see Bergstrom 16380). These different earlier trends concerned with transgressive or aberrant psychological states recur in DEFAs postwar imaginary through psychoanalytically coded ashback structures linking past and present experiences of the returnees, expressionist mood setting, dim lighting, and canted camera angles that give the postwar male protagonists a haunted quality. Although the link between psychic suffering and military structures

War Trauma and Crisis of Masculinity in Early DEFA Film 121 and demands were crucial to these new postwar narratives, the specic political meaning of genocidal warfare conducted during World War II tended to be erased from early DEFA lms. Issues of historical violence and German responsibility were absorbed by cinematic efforts to deal with the crisis of postwar masculinity through melodramatic enactments. Resonating with the public efforts to rehabilitate the returnee in the Soviet occupation zone, Staudtes Die Mrder sind unter uns provided the template for the catharsis and integration of the war-damaged soldier. The lm revolves around Hans Mertens, a doctor who served in the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. When he returns home from the war to the destroyed city of Berlin, he cannot gain a foothold in the devastated postwar present, where everyone seems determined to move on. When it turns out that the former captain of his platoon, Brckner, is still alive and without much remorse about his past involvement in war crimes, Mertens begins to dream of revenge. Brckner is the murderer among us, who needs to atone for the killing of Polish civilians Mertens witnessed during the war. In the original script submitted by Staudte to the Soviet administration, the lm, then titled Der Mann, den ich tten werde, ended with a scene of Mertens killing Brckner. Rejecting murder as a viable solution even if the crimes of the past must not go unpunished, the Soviet ofcials asked Staudte to change the ending of the lm. Instead of acting out his destructive impulses, Mertens, at the last moment, is saved by Susanne, the woman who loves him and who converts his desire for revenge into a demand for the legal prosecution of war criminals by the state. Contrary to the contemporary dominant ction of the returning POW ready to embark on Germanys reconstruction, the lm attends to the impasses and conicts experienced by former Wehrmacht soldiers in relation to the fundamental shifts in the social, institutional, and symbolic organization of society after 1945. Unable to forget the atrocities he witnessed in the East, Mertens fails to partake in the symbolic investiture, the act whereby the individual is endowed with a new social status, is lled with a symbolic mandate that henceforth informs his or her identity in the community (Santner xii). He rejects the demand to live in conformity with the social essence assigned to him through naming (doctor, optimistic returnee, etc.) and thus needs to be brought back within the limits of socially acceptable boundaries established in postwar Germany. Through a series of repeated hallucinations and ashbacks, the lm constructs Mertenss investiture crisis around the compulsion to repeat past experiences of an overwhelming and incapacitating sort. The lm buttresses this notion of war suffering as psychologically rather than physically motivated through other protagonists who overtly comment on Mertenss predicament; Susanne says to Mondschein:
Wrden sie einem Menschen ihre Hilfe versagen, nur weil er das Unglck hatte aus dem Krieg mit schweren Wunden heimgekommen zu sein [...] es gibt Verwundungen, die nicht sichtbar sind.

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The distressed psychic interior of the protagonist is represented through extreme angles, looming shadows, and a claustrophobic mise en scne familiar from earlier expressionist lms. While the psychiatric discourse in the immediate postwar years had unhinged the link between war violence and psychic suffering, Staudtes early DEFA lm bridged this gap by reworking the obsession with madness in lm of the Weimar period into the dramatization of medical discourse concerning the traumatic symptoms of war. Mertens seems to startle easily, reacts irritably at small provocations, and never seems to sleep. In order to numb himself he surrenders to alcohol and entertainment, but memories of violent war-time experiences continue to intrude into his waking life in unpredictable ways (Herman 35). Triggered by the moaning sound of a man nearby, for example, he suddenly turns inward, collapses, and relives some violent past experience with all the vividness and emotional force of the original event, producing garbled speech, erratic sounds of machine guns, and horric screams. Staging Mertenss mental breakdown in the public space of a clinic, Staudte casts the returnees psychic impairment through a set of medical conventions that mark the gure of the former Wehrmacht soldier, at least momentarily, as a patient. This is as close as postwar public discourse comes to linking the supposedly private realm of mens psychopathological disturbances and the public domain of medical care. What the lm illustrates here is how much the social and political stability of a postwar society depended on the psychological recovery of its members. This process in turn relied largely on symbolic operations by means of which the experience of war violence and mass death was endowed with meaning. Not unlike Hollywood cinema during these years, Die Mrder sind unter uns imagines the heros integration into post-World War II society through a melodramatic resolution. The male hero is cured of the incessant intrusions of war memories by the female heroine who disavows his lack of mastery by learning to love him with her imagination. Regardless of how enraged, withdrawn, and dismissive Mertens appears, Susannes role is to help him sublimate his destructive impulses related to the war experience and reintegrate into postwar life an instance of how women are portrayed as connected to civilization, nurturing, and self-sacrice in early postwar German lm (Byg 181; see also Stephan 172). According to Thomas Elsaesser, this change from a linear externalization of action to a sublimation of dramatic value into more complex forms of symbolizations is also characteristic of the melodramatic mode (57). It is most famously played out in the nal scene of the lm, where Susanne prevents Mertens from killing his former ofcer and appeals to state justice. In this shift between the social and the personal realm, the female heroine emerges in conventional terms as a woman who seeks wholeness through domestic love, but she also exercises the degree of rationality and detached judgment that is temporarily necessary to reroute the psychologically unstable postwar male subject onto a more positive path of moral agency. The fact that postwar DEFA lm buttresses the psychic and moral rehabilitation of this male protagonist with transformative narratives of female innocence and domestic love has as much to do with melodramatic conventions as with the contested status of psychotherapeutic practices at the time. The profound helplessness

War Trauma and Crisis of Masculinity in Early DEFA Film 123 and private isolation of men aficted with war injuries is the topic around which a subplot of Lamprechts Irgendwo in Berlin revolves. The lms main protagonist, the returnee Iller, successfully reenters postwar society through the loving support of his wife and son and a strong will to participate in the reconstruction of Berlin. Set against this integrationist narrative, the lms subplot centres on another former Wehrmacht soldier, Steidel, who appears severely shell-shocked as a result of the war. That is, as the lm strives towards closure and postwar beginning, it also displays how the fantasy of a harmonious domestic and social totality in which the individual nds meaning relied on exclusionary practices through which boundaries between present and past, remembering and forgetting could be established. Steidels public delusional performances of militaristic rituals on the balcony of his apartment, positioned notably above the buzz of activity in the ruins of the city, separate him from any constructive social postwar activities. Staring blankly into space, this character displays the Wahrnehmungsstarre to use Louis Sasss phrase (44) that after the war had come to dene the public image of the psychically, and often socially, displaced returnee (cf. Barnouw 17381). Although a montage of newsreel footage serves to link the protagonists present state of mind to the experience of war violence, the psychic disintegration of this character, in contrast to Mertens in Die Mrder sind unter uns, is no longer rendered in modern terms as a transient psychic reaction that occurs within socially acceptable limits. Instead, the lm casts the psychic impairment of the male protagonist through a set of contemporary cultural associations with immutable asylum-style insanity and lunacy. In this process of shifting away from history and towards nature, the lm renders the ideological connection to genocidal warfare and mass murder still relevant in Staudtes lm as tenuous as Steidels delusional psychic interior. Nevertheless, the gure of Steidel serves as a crucial cinematic site where the social and psychological risks of an irreparably damaged postwar masculinity are articulated. Steidels recent exposure to war violence is dramatized through an ostentatious performance of psychopathological characteristics. From the dominant display of a facial scar, his reduced speech and quiet sadness, to the limpness of facial muscles, soft smile, and diverted gaze, the representational language indexes in great detail the radically altered personality and physical idiosyncrasies psychiatrists in the 1940s ascribed to those who appeared to have suffered traumatic brain injury (Lindenberg 22528). This physiological discourse of brain injury, which harks back to earlier organic notions of trauma as bodily wound that Freud had challenged after World War I, legitimized the Hirnverletzte as the only real remainder of war-related suffering in postwar Germany. As a comment by Steidels mother in the lm conrms, however, the public perception of these men tapped into long-standing cultural associations between idiocy and maternal care. She condes to a friend that the neighbours keep complaining about his erratic behaviour, and when asked what the doctors have to say, she rather fatalistically adds that none of them can help her son. Notably, the representation of the son foregrounds certain tendencies towards regression that square with socio-medical descriptions of war-damaged soldiers at

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the time as our infants. At the point where the narrative and visual language of the lm links the two former soldiers from his balcony, Steidel presumably sees Iller return to the city Steidel utters only one child-like sound: Da! If the gure of Iller attains the symbolic function of historical progress, Steidel embodies an affect of apathy and sullenness that ties him to the past. Varying the postwar trope of a precarious masculinity by recasting the traumatized soldier in the social and private role of a child, Irgendwo in Berlin illustrates just how much the symbolic process of remasculinization (Poiger) in postwar German lm had to challenge the public imagination. Where, in contrast to the main narrative of Iller, no melodramatic resolution of domestic conjugal love could be offered to the postwar viewer, spectatorial identication was put at risk. This was made explicit by a male critic who reviewed the lm for Der Tagesspiegel and who stated he found the gure of Steidel simply embarrassing to watch (Luft): One can empathize with a child, but with a man as child? This failure of identication, empathy, and ultimately catharsis results from an alteration of maternal melodrama codes invoked here in the subplot of Irgendwo in Berlin. The mothers care for the son contains the element of dedicated devotion that positions her within the mythic pattern of maternal sacrice. The debilitated son, however, rather than being able to free himself from the weakness that excessive maternal attention conventionally implies, continues to depend on her care. In other words, he is unable to fulll the normative position in which the male is both the focus of maternal affection and the one capable of being in control (Kaplan 70, 87). Afrming the authoritative notion that postwar masculinity cannot be restored around men who struggle with their war experience, the lm concludes with a nal triumphant scene in which the main protagonist, Iller, imagined as exemplary male antifascist citizen and paternal gure, is pushed forward into a linear course of constructive action and progressive history. Literally positioned on top of a pile of rubble and surrounded by his community, he begins to embark on rebuilding a new antifascist postwar society. The normative closure of a positively recuperated masculinity provided by the overall narratives of Die Mrder sind unter uns and Irgendwo in Berlin is put at risk in Klarens 1948 lm Wozzeck, an adaptation of Georg Bchners Woyzeck. Although Bchners play drew from the actual medical and legal case of Johann Christian Woyzeck, a retired soldier of the Prussian military who in 1821 killed his mistress, visual cues tie Klarens rendition to the historical era of the Second World War. Owing to this allegorical dimension, it can tell us more than any other of the early DEFA lms about the complex role played by gender and sexuality in the cinematic postwar attempts to reafrm the power of the male subject temporarily dislocated from an ideological reality centred on the unity of the family and the adequacy of the male subject. DEFA expected Klarens Wozzeck to become one of the most important lms that would introduce a new chapter in lm history, similar to Wienes Caligari and Langs Nibelungen more than two decades earlier (Begleitmaterial 2). The lm was perceived to be the most stylistically challenging and pedagogically driven lm among the early postwar productions. With the participation of the

War Trauma and Crisis of Masculinity in Early DEFA Film 125 Moscow distribution company Sovexport, DEFAs press and advertisement bureau packaged the lm through a carefully organized public relations and distribution campaign. Cinemas throughout the Soviet and French occupation zone received detailed instructions about how to advertise the lm to a larger audience. Advertisement schedules, posters, stills, plot summaries as well as suggestions regarding locations, time frame, and design of local promotions were aimed at turning Klarens adaptation of Bchners play into a popular success (Begleitmaterial 18). At the time, when the lm market in all occupation zones was dominated by mass entertainment, foreign imports, and old UFA productions (Hanisch 612, 2025), the lm received rather mixed reviews. Some critics hailed it as the rst good lm after all the recent peinlichen Verirrungen imposed by DEFA on the postwar public; others disapproved of the deviations from Bchners original play and Klarens added didacticism; many complained about the lms symbolic, often all too stylized visual language and music in the tradition of expressionism and Weimar cinema. These stylistic references were perceived as anachronistic rather than indicative of a newly emerging progressive lm era (Busse; Kast; Krafft; Lennig; Montijo). Regardless of their different assessments, however, most critics embraced without further questioning the moral rehabilitation of the former Wehrmacht soldier offered by Klarens lm. An advertisement in the distribution package stated how the postwar audience was to create a causal link between political coercion and violent acts committed by individuals: Ein Mensch, der durch die Gesellschaft zum Mrder wird und von ihr gemordet, das ist Wozzeck, der einfache brave Soldat, erdrckt durch eine Umwelt, die er nicht versteht und die mitleidlos ber ihn hinwegschreitet (Begleitmaterial 7). As if DEFA were uncertain whether the audience would be able to create the allegorical connections between the adaptation of the play and the postwar context, Klaren frames the story with a narrative in which the writer Bchner appears as a protagonist. This overdetermined character functions as a mouthpiece though which the lms antifascist interpretation, the DEFA-Deutsch, as the Tagesspiegel put it, is voiced and legitimized (Montijo). Counteracting the notion of collective guilt disseminated by the occupational Western forces right after the war, the gure of Bchner condemns the systemic conditions responsible for the violence executed by ordinary soldiers (schuldlos schuldig geworden; Kast) and comes close to articulating the economic and class-based interpretation of militarism, capitalism, and, by extension, fascism privileged by the SED. What might have appeared abstract on the level of the lms framing narrative the link between the social elite in Bchners play and the high-ranking Nazis recently put on trial in postwar Germany worked its way into the postwar public as an effective strategy of moral atonement and rehabilitation. Within this process, one reviewer in Der Vorwrts went so far as to conate the suffering of German men who had served in the Wehrmacht with that of concentration camp inmates:
[...] eine Aktualitt im Deutschland unserer Tage [steht] ausser Frage. Wozzecks Qulgeister von damals leben noch heute. Nach dem Hitlerkrieg mgen sie sogar

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als Mrder unter uns leben. Der gefhllos am Objekt Wozzeck experimentierende Doktor, den Paul Henkels geradezu hassenswert darstellte, knnte er nicht an KZ-Hftlingen seine verbrecherischen Forschungen verbt haben? Und die drei Musterexemplare alt-preussisch-hitlerischer Militaristen: Hauptmann, Tambourmajor, Unterofzier, die durch Arno Paulsen, Richard Husler und R. Lieffertz-Vincenti differenzierteste Verkrperungen erhielten, sind sie nicht in Erinnerung als Leuteschinder, die manchen Wozzeck in der Wehrmacht seelisch und krperlich auf dem Gewissen haben? Gewiss sie leben heute im zivilen Mimikry unter uns, aber im Geiste schinden sie noch wacker weiter. Der Film warnt uns vor ihnen. (Kast)

This notion of the Wehrmacht soldiers victimization implicit in the socio-political message of Klarens lm is underlined with a language of psychic suffering familiar from previous DEFA lms but otherwise conspicuously absent from postwar public discourse. As in Bchners original drama, Klarens main protagonist is aficted by a set of mental disturbances, ranging from hallucinations, voices, and delusions to symptomatic blockings, slippages, and disjunctions in speech and thought. Notably, Bchners text detailed realistic and clinically plausible symptoms of psychotic behaviour circulating in well-publicized medical sources at the time (Crighton 25859). Klaren faithfully adopted the original text for the inner narrative of his lm. These symptoms create a psychological topography (Mckenberger and Jordan 89), whose lack of cohesion is visually underscored by subjective shots from Wozzecks perspective, stylized expressionist lighting, slant camera angles, extreme soft focus, and montage. There is something unpredictable in the precarious sense of self played out through Wozzecks psychic interior that in many ways undermines the causal socio-economic link between social and psychic misery provided by the framing narrative. Most strikingly, in a highly stylized scene in which one of Wozzecks psychotic breakdowns disrupts the narrative ow quite literally through the intrusion of ghosts, death begins to inltrate life. To draw on Aleida Assmann, who has identied the evocation of ghosts as a temporal Gedchtnismetapher with a long-standing cultural tradition, the boundaries between present and past begin to blur (17179). The visions of apocalyptic destruction, which in the original play illustrated Woyzecks paranoid fantasies through a language of religious symbolism, take on a highly charged, historically specic meaning in Klarens postwar rendition. Here, in an inserted montage, the dead appear to rise from underneath a eld of graves marked by symmetrically aligned rows of anonymous crosses. These abstract arrangements of emergency cemeteries were not only iconic images in the visual landscape of postwar Germany (Barnouw 169), but, inadvertently or not, this scene in Klarens lm also cites the nal montage shot of Staudtes Die Mrder sind unter uns. In the closing scene of Staudtes lm a vast eld of crosses signied attempts to commemorate the German war dead within a more general concern with all victims who innocently died. Owing to the scenes operatic quality and to what one reviewer described as the lms cumbersome Festlichkeit des

War Trauma and Crisis of Masculinity in Early DEFA Film 127 Schmerzes (Busse), Wozzeck had failed to evoke in the viewer a kind of reective empathy, as another critic put it (Lennig). This reaction might have had as much to do with the somewhat belaboured imagistic language of Klarens lm as with a permanent numbness among the postwar population (Geyer 18). What the lm effectively dramatizes through the ghostly graveyard scene is the tenuous status of the war dead within postwar DEFA lm in other words, a kind of unbefriedetes Vergessen (Weinrich), a ghostly imaginary of those who, albeit unspecied, died or were murdered and who return to haunt the interior psychic landscapes of those who live on (Assmann 174). Notably, the lm also demonstrates that references to the dead can emerge only through the representational language of psychotic discourse. This, in turn, weakened the link between war experience and male psychic suffering implied by the lm in the eyes of the public. As one critic stated:
Der Wahnsinn des Fsiliers Franz Wozzeck kann weder aus seiner proletarischen noch aus seiner soldatischen Existenz abgeleitet werden. Man braucht nicht einige Jahre bei einem Psychiater gearbeitet zu haben, um zu begreifen, dass die Natur mit der Verwirrung des Geistes und der Vernsterung der Seele alle gesellschaftlichen Klassen schlgt, dass weder das Proletariat noch das Brgertum, noch die Intelligenz in ihrer sozialen Stellung an sich eine Garantie gegen die mitleidlose Dialektik der Natur besitzen. Die Wozzecks werden nicht auf den Kasernenhfen geboren, im Gegenteil scheint uns die militrische Disziplin gerade wie eine letzte brutale Klammer die auseinanderfallenden Teile der sich ausenden geistigseelischen Existenz erbarmungslos und unmenschlich zusammenzuhalten. Die Armut Wozzecks und sein dsteres soldatisches Schicksal verschrfen den pathologischen Fall, aber rufen ihn nicht hervor. Wenn er berhaupt aufgehoben werden kann, dann nur durch die psychiatrische Therapie im Sinne der strengen und logisch so faszinierenden Naturkausalitt des Neurologen. (Johansen)

Bchners play had left Woyzecks madness open to interpretation. Sliding between agency and passivity, resistance and victimization, reality and fantasy, the original text varies interrelated causalities to show how structures of society dislocate man from his fragile identity (Crighton 269). In Klarens postwar lm, in contrast, the psychic disintegration of the main protagonist serves more simplistically as a form of moral exculpation (Was in Wozzeck selbst ermordet wurde, bevor er zum Mrder wird, fhrt uns der Film vor Augen; Begleitmaterial 3), even if from the perspective of a postwar transition towards civility Wozzecks violent act could not remain unpunished either. What was contested in the historic case of Wozzeck, the question whether he was legally accountable for the murder he had committed a question left open in Bchners play is transformed by the postwar adaptation into an unequivocal message. The lm ends with the staging of a public procession, showing Wozzeck led through town, presumably, to the scaffold where he will be put to death. To stay within the allegorical dimension of the lm, what could have reined in a destructive male desire to act out violent experience presumably related to class

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oppression and the conditions of war more deliberately than the ideological and narrative closure provided by this nal scene? Yet there is a brief awkward moment at the end, a kind of lapse that almost imperceptibly weakens the discursive and representational links established by the overall lm. A closer look at this slippage can unravel how anxieties surrounding gender, sexuality, and the status of the family played out in postwar reconstruction unfold across the lm and its public reception. The mise en scne of the closing sequence appears naturalistic, barely concealing the imitative quality of the stage set. An establishing shot of a crowded street captures in the distance a wagon surrounded by people and moving towards the camera. From here we cut to a medium shot of Wozzeck sitting on top of the wagon, with his hands tied behind his back and transxed in the iconic motionless stare that became symptomatic of visual representations of the troubled postwar male. After a few seconds, he turns his gaze slightly; the camera spots through an unusually raw and altogether realistic shot Wozzecks and Maries little son at the side of the street. The son appears to be all by himself, and, with his eyes blinded by light or the sun, we see him innocently smiling and waving. The camera cuts back to a medium close-up of Wozzeck presumably passing the boy and then, seemingly out of nowhere, he utters: Machs besser, Bub! Another shot/reverse shot completes the sequence by sealing this somewhat tenuous encounter between the gaze of father and son. The lm ends on a medium shot of Wozzeck, looking decisively into the future that will bring his death. Jacques Lacans concept of psychosis can help explain the symbolic shifts performed here at the end of the lm. According to his theories, psychotic structures always involve a general weakening of the paternal function the element that anchors the symbolic order as a whole and can, but does not have to be, fullled by the esh-and-blood father (cf. Fink 79101). While this article is less focussed on mapping this insight onto the subjectivity of Wozzeck as father gure within the inner diegesis, this approach can attune us to how the lm produces symbolic meanings across a general crisis of the paternal function in the context of the early postwar years. Seen from that perspective, the father-son transmission staged at the end of Klarens adaptation of Bchners play echoes the specular scenarios produced by postwar DEFA rubble lms (Fisher). Even if Wozzeck must die, the scene dramatizes the stabilizing performance of the paternal function that is generally weakened. This is done rst of all by overwriting the imaginary excess that denes Wozzecks psychotic afictions (i.e., paranoia, hallucinations) with the symbolic language of the law. Moreover, Wozzeck afrms his own place in the symbolic order with a brief authoritative enunciation directed at his son. This symbolic realignment of Wozzeck with the paternal function and, by extension, with the conventional idea of masculinity-as-mastery, is buttressed through the reinsertion of Wozzeck into an active way of looking. When he looks at his son, the lm xes a whole series of earlier specular scenarios in which power relations between the sexes are put at risk. Scenes such as the spectacularly eroticized display of Wozzecks tortured body or Maries relatively unmediated look at the ofcer as love object invert cinematic conventions according to which man is the subject and woman the object of the gaze.

War Trauma and Crisis of Masculinity in Early DEFA Film 129 Yet, as the lm restabilizes the dominant ction of normative masculinity through a paternal lineage, something disturbing is in play in the symbolic shifts at the end of the lm something that points to just how profound the symbolic crisis was in the context of postwar Germany. After all, the precarious paternal reinsertion enacted in the nal scene of Wozzeck comes as Roy Jerome points out (7) at the price of the murder of a woman and mother. Machs besser, Bub! Wozzeck calls out to his son. And sliding here for a moment between the political register of the lms framing narrative, which aims at socio-economic progress articulated through Bchner, who gives voice to the new ideological norm, and the subjective register of a psychotic deadlock, in which structurally there is nothing repressed, no secrets hidden, and little, if any, guilt occurs, Wozzecks comment unfolds through ambivalent meanings. One contemporary viewer pointed to this eerie lapse between socio-critical and psychotic register: Machs besser, Bub!, ruft Wozzeck auf dem Weg zur Richtsttte (denn bei der DEFA wird er hingerichtet) seinem am Strassenrand spielenden Shnchen zu. Was soll der besser machen? Den Mord am untreuen Mdchen? (Busse). Along the psychotic register of the lms inner diegesis the tenuous male reinsertion (embodied by Wozzeck) resonates uncannily with the meaning of a kind of homosocial pact. The narrative justication for this exclusion of women can be found in Maries desire for and affair with the Tambour-Major, a higher-ranking ofcer. But Maries unfaithfulness not only belongs to the realm of the plot structure located in the nineteenth century, it also constitutes an especially dense transfer point in the lm upon which historically specic social anxieties are placed that were not unrelated to the social and economic upheavals of the transitional era. The complex issue of sexuality, marriage, the rehabilitation of masculinity, and the redomestication of women, publicly and privately contested during those years, converged in the lms reception around the issue of female promiscuity. As Der Tagesspiegel commented, Helga Zlchs Marie ist Trieb und Sentimentalitt, ist menschlich ohne Menschlichkeit. Immerhin macht sie es glaubhaft, dass Frauen eher dem bunten Rock und den prallen Schenkeln, als dem Geist verfallen. The Sozialdemokrat, on the other hand, appeared unhappy that Zlch ist nicht das einfach triebhaft lieblose Geschpf, sondern eher eine Lehrertochter auf Abwegen. And Klaren, who cast the lms economy of desire through his own contemporary associations, suggested:
[Der Tambour-Major] ist aber auch ein Kerl, wie sie gewissen Frauen, besonders unter den Deutschen, gefhrlich werden. Was fr ein Mann, giert die Nachbarin und mchte so jung wie Marie sein: Ein Baum [...]. Kein Wunder, dass Marie stolz ist vor allen Weibern, als der Umworbene sich herablsst. So kommen Kriegstrauungen zustande.

Given the tone of these reviews, it is not surprising that the voice of reason, conveyed by the Bchner character to the postwar audience, lapses in a seemingly uncensored off-moment into a passionate attack on Maries unfaithfulness, if not defence of her murder. This metacommentary goes beyond the explanatory link

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between social deprivation and sexual compensation provided by the lm. The following exchange between Bchner and his friend Hannes unfolds:
Bchner: [...] begreif doch Hannes, du hast so viel, er [Wozzeck] hatte nichts. Nur vor ihr [Marie] war er ein Mensch, den sonst alles zur Kreatur gemacht hat. Hannes: Nimm ihm diesen Bundesgenossen und er hrt auf zu sein.

Bchner replies emphatically: Ja, wenn ein Armer den Armen verliert, verliert er sich selbst, nur der Zusammenhang hlt ihn. The camera zooms in on a straight-on close-up of his face and, as if directly addressing the viewer rather than the other protagonist, he continues with a markedly different, warning tone in his voice: Wer diesen Bund bricht, dem wird nicht vergeben. In case the viewer missed this connection, Klaren secures the verdict with a dissolve that takes the viewer into the inner diegesis where Marie is shown in front of a small altar praying for forgiveness, not long before a burning desire drives her again into the hands of the ofcer, or so we are to assume. This transition barely conceals how the lms overall concern with class oppression as an interpretive framework for recently experienced fascism moves towards gendered discourse. Couched in a rhetoric of class, the visual coding of the Tambour Major as higher-ranking (Wehrmacht) ofcer spins the plot element of Maries unfaithfulness in a way that disperses a whole series of contemporary associations between female seduction, complicity, and Nazism. But, of course, within the lms allegorical postwar dimension, the meanings produced here across the discourse of unfaithfulness, non-forgiveness, and possibly revenge also resonate with the historical experience of sexual estrangement, divorce, adultery, rape, and promiscuity that shaped the postwar crisis of gender and sexuality in complicated ways. Needless to say, in both these overlapping scenarios women are ultimately perceived as the locus of responsibility and blame. The desexualized language of union and camaraderie conveyed in Bchners interjection echoes the postwar efforts in the Eastern zone to integrate women into the work force and possibly change their economic and social role in postwar society (Heinemann 76, 107). At the same time, the discourse of unfaithfulness powerfully redistributes popular perceptions concerning womens conjugal and sexual life at wars end. If anything, in the transitional years in the Soviet occupation zone, dominant anxieties did not pertain to womens affairs and fraternizing with military ofcers (although they did exist and were castigated). Nor did these anxieties congeal around the relatively marginal grey zone, in which sexual relationships between German women and occupational military personnel drew unstable lines between rape, prostitution, and consensual (albeit generally instrumental) sex (Grossman 54; see also Seghers 8485 and 11314). Rather, real and discursive uncertainties in the immediate postwar period related to the pervasive experience of German women raped by Russian soldiers. As has been brought to light more clearly in recent years, the mass rapes of German women by Russian soldiers at the end of the war in the Spring of 1945 constituted a collective crisis situation (Mhlhauser 389), a

War Trauma and Crisis of Masculinity in Early DEFA Film 131 common experience (Heinemann 81) if not ubiquitous routine (Grossman 53) that impacted postwar gender relations in the East in ways largely unknown to the Western zones (Naimark 47). Although initially the rapes of German women were addressed through medical, legal, and social-hygiene discourse, including a DEFA documentary on venereal disease Es ist leider so! (DEFA 194664 3), the increasing return of men from war imprisonment in 1946 and 1947 changed this situation rapidly. Durch die Vorwrfe, die Frauen seien schamlos gewesen und htten ihre Ehemnner, Vter, und Shne und die deutsche Nation entehrt, wurden die anfnglichen fast alltglichen Thematisierungen der Vergewaltigungen in der Frauengesellschaft zum Schweigen gebracht, Regina Mhlhuser writes in her interview project (390). Atina Grossman emphasizes this point, [w]ith the return of prisoners of war and the remasculinization of German society, the topic [of rape] was suppressed, not as too shameful for women to discuss, but as too humiliating for German men and too risky for women who feared (with much justication, given the reports of estrangement and even murder) the reactions of their menfolk (61). Norman Naimark conrms these observations in his extensive study on the Soviet occupation zone, where he cites a 1947 report of the Ministry of Work and Social Welfare: the experience of mass rape was seen by men as reducing all [the women] to whores all these factors exacerbated stress on marriage in the Soviet zone (126) and led women to repress their spiritual and psychological suffering (128). This culture of silence continued to exist in the GDR, where the taboo of sexual violence at the end of World War II had to be maintained in ofcial and, if for different reasons, private discourse in order to uphold the political and moral superiority of the Soviet Union (cf. Dahlke 275311). This is not to suggest that Klarens lm could or should have dealt with these underlying issues of marriage rubble (Heinemann) that shaped the reconstruction of economic, social, and gender relations in the Soviet zone. It took ten more years until some of these violations became visible in cinematic representations as inscription on the female body. Rather, the lm strings a chain of associations between adultery, promiscuity, punishment, and even murder that, together with the ne line between consensual and enforced sex implied in the seduction scene, casts a wide net of meaning concerning postwar preoccupations with stained female sexuality (Marie: Ich bin stolz vor allen Frauen ... lass mich ... rhr mich nicht an ... meinetwegen, alles eins). Moreover, and more importantly, linking in the public imagination female sexuality and disloyalty (and issuing a verdict of nonforgiveness) that is, shifting womens historical experience of sexual violation into a representational register of promiscuous activity Wozzeck partakes in a much larger real and discursive crisis of German masculinity related to the sexual, marital, and familial instabilities in postwar German society. This can be illustrated with a scene that stages a military street parade in which, by way of editing, the lm visually triangulates Marie with a one-legged soldier moving on crutches the iconic image of male castration and damaged masculinity since the First World War and the Tambour Major, propped perhaps all too obviously with a baton. This scene shows how, even in the pedagogically oriented

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DEFA lms produced after the Second World War, the meaning of injuries as the permanent reminders and remainders of war shift from a national register to one of gender. While the postwar viewer as do, presumably, the onlookers on the street within the lms diegesis perceives both the crippled war veteran and the physically intact Tambour Major, Maries gaze is aligned only with the latter, the Nur-Mann, as a reviewer put it in Die Neue Zeit (Ert). The emasculated disabled soldier falling behind the spectacular public parade never enters Maries eld of vision. It is in this oversight that both the lms investment in and the derailment of a melodramatic solution to the postwar crisis of war-damaged masculinity through female innocence is most powerfully illustrated. The scene renders Maries desire for the Major as lack of empathy with the war-injured soldier. As she, unlike the women gures in the previous lms, fails to be emotionally available to the war veteran, she slides away from a position of feminine purity. What is construed here as Maries moral failure to attend to the war-damaged soldier prescriptively displays how much the restoration of masculinity relied on womens imaginative abilities to afrm male mastery, despite their better knowledge of the perilous postwar realities of mens competency and potency. How deep and widespread these intricate mechanisms of (self-)deception ran in the private and social sphere during the transitional years was expressed in an article entitled Man as Ballast, whose author stated I know a great many women who devote their entire energy to making sure their husbands dont notice the helplessness and humiliation of their situation (qtd. in Heinemann 122). Whereas DEFA in the 1940s provided representational models of romantic or marital care for the debilitated soldier, the lm Wozzeck, placed in this context, illustrates the difculty of the cinematic imagination to stabilize German postwar masculinity by way of resexualization. Instead, the male subject in Wozzeck nds himself in a deadlock of desire, which is debilitating in a way that he cannot even imagine a way out the only thing he can do is to strike out blindly [...] to release his frustration in the meaningless outburst of destructive energy (iek 84). Violently acting out his frustration, the war-damaged soldier is not cured or transformed in this scenario, but it is the debased female purity that ultimately offers a second route for the recuperation of masculine authority, providing Wozzeck the opportunity to assume the paternal position in the symbolic order. In other words, there are two strategies of remasculinization offered by early DEFA lms: the touch of female innocence (via mother/wife) or the retribution against womens failure. Either way, within this simplied moral cinematic universe a normative notion of female innocence provides an important imaginary passageway to rehabilitation. Rather than sustaining representations of German men tarnished by war violence and mass death in a cinematic imaginary of a transformative present, postwar DEFA lms privileged narratives of sudden closure contrived social and domestic insertions, psychopathological exclusions as well as real and metaphoric deaths. Here they act in relation to but also often different from the SEDs vision of the returnee as the pioneer of the new Germany. In fact, the often overlapping scenarios of traumatic civilian reentry, displacement, and precarious postwar integration produced by DEFA in the 40s drew a great deal on notions of psychic

War Trauma and Crisis of Masculinity in Early DEFA Film 133 suffering rather than on a more politicized discourse of political atonement and conversion. In the larger context of a reordering of power and gender relations after the war, this vibrant interest in often irreversible psychic topographies harking back to Weimar cinema shows that in some respects early DEFA lm was less in accord with the political goals and discourse of the Soviet Administration and the SED than is commonly assumed (see also Shandley 1718). The predominance of psychopathological notions further attests to missing viable historical and symbolic narratives related to the postwar gure of the former Wehrmacht soldier entrenched in past histories of both pain and perpetration. Although DEFA lms are often construed as antifascist projects devoted to reeducating the postwar audience in the Soviet zone, they equally engage in the complex alignment and mutual reinforcement between gender and political orders. Throughout the lms of the 1940s the representations of mens psychic suffering serve as ways to deal with the past the Second World War and National Socialism without addressing the more vexed issues of responsibility and guilt. While the lms invest in melodramatic codes of female innocence and devotion to shore up the ruins of a war-damaged masculinity, their attempts to resolidify the patriarchal order remain precarious at best. Here they reveal more palpably than any other public discourse in the Soviet occupation zone how deep male deciencies ran in the postwar imagination despite the partys efforts at rehabilitation. Ultimately, these lms resorted to mythic constructions of femininity in order to respond to the threats and instabilities that resulted from changing social and political formations. In hindsight, early DEFA lms share more with other postwar cinemas concerned with the readjustment of gender relations than traditional national lm histories or histories of East German lm have allowed us to see a development with parallels in American cinema (Michel 26083). Despite stylistic differences and historical specicities, lms produced in the Soviet occupation zone and other early postwar lms such as Wylers The Best Years of Our Lives, Roberto Rossellinis Germany anno zero (1947), Vittorio De Sicas The Bicycle Thief (1948), or Aleksandr Stolpers The Story of a Real Man (1948) enact a crisis of masculinity caused by physical and psychological injuries, economic deprivation, or social displacement related to the Second World War. By the end of the 1940s, DEFAs attempts to restore workable representations of German masculinity out of the stories centred on debilitated soldiers had foundered. As if to start over, looking at Germanys recent past through a very different lens, lms such as Staudtes Rotation (1949) and Dudows Unser tglich Brot (1949) cast postwar renewal through the GDRs foundational narrative of antifascist (male) resistance. Yet, most memorably, Unser Tglich Brot also marked the vanishing of the war-damaged German soldiers from the cinematic imagination. As if the gure who bore the most immediate memory of war suffering and crime needed to be forgotten, Dudows national epic integrates all stranded and displaced family members into the antifascist community formed around the exemplary male antifascist resistance ghter all except the son who fought in the Second World War. The socially maladapted former Wehrmacht soldier cannot nd authority through an engagement in socialist construction and domestic love. In a scene devoid of any sentimentality

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(and music for that matter), the protagonist, alone at the train tracks one night, calmly walks into the dark until he disappears in the recesses of the visual eld, and the bright lights and sharp sounds of a locomotive override the desolate image of self-annihilation. The lm resorts to the staging of suicide to cleanse the postfascist East German imaginary from those untting reminders of the past that could not be switched over to the winning side of history and the normative conception of antifascist masculinity. This erasure cleared the way for DEFAs fervent commitment to foundational stories of communist resistance until, in the mid 1960s, the German Wehrmacht soldier reemerged on the East German screen as an antifascist, or at least a converted antifascist hero.

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