Boys as war heroes? Depicting German youth in Bernhard Wicki’s The Bridge (1959)

Abstract

The fate of children became material for several German movies of the 1950s with children even appearing in the popular wave of war films. The Bridge (1959) whose cinematic narrative depicts seven schoolboys defending their village’s bridge against the Americans became the most acclaimed, as well as popular, war film of the decade. Focusing on the plight of German youth as a framework for analysis, I will demonstrate how The Bridge registers the cultural shift from a political to a psychological paradigm in the understanding of adolescent behaviour in the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1950s. Furthermore, while The Bridge sidesteps the sensitive topics of the Holocaust and the Wehrmacht’s complicity with the Nazis like most other popular West German war films, it differs in its critique of the very possibility of a heroic narrative from its National Socialist past.