Billy Wilder's Cold War Berlin

Abstract

Billy Wilder’s decision to return to Germany as a U.S. colonel at the close of World War II emanated from personal needs along with the desire of the U.S. government to have a leading Hollywood director with European experience provide advice on reorganizing and denazifying the German film industry in the postwar period.1 Wilder’s personal concerns were twofold. First, he was in search of his mother and grandmother who had disappeared in the Holocaust. What he learned eventually from the Red Cross was that they had both been murdered in Auschwitz. His other worry was more immediately existential: “We wondered where we should go now that the war was over. None of us—I mean the emigres—really knew where we stood. Should we go home? Where was home?”2 What follows is an examination of three films about Germany that Wilder was involved in during the early Cold War period (1945–61). The first, Death Mills (Die Todesmuhlen, 1945), was a twenty-two-minute documentary he edited about the concentration camps; the other two, which he directed and coscripted, were the feature films A Foreign Affair (1948) and One, Two, Three (1961). My focus is on what these films suggest about Wilder’s changing relationship to postwar Germany and how these changes dovetail with, in part