Taking Liberties with Liberties Taken: On the Politics of Helke Sander's "BeFreier und Befreite"

Abstract

Let us begin where the film begins, with the wordplay in its title. The word Befreier designates a liberator (or liberators), but the film's title spells Befreier with a capital f, thus drawing attention to the word Freier contained within it. In antiquated German, Freier designates a suitor (or suitors), one who would seek the hand of a maiden; in modern German it designates a john or johns (in the sense of a prostitute's customer). Thus, the film announces its polemic from the word go, or more precisely, from the idiosyncratic orthography of the word BeFreier: here, then, sexual relations and sexual exploitation are manifestly inscribed within liberation. Befreite (no capital f here) refers to the object of these activities: one who is (or, again, many who are) liberated, wooed, or, if you will, john-ed. Thus, the title can be understood to mean Liberators and Liberated, Liberators and Wooed, Wooers and Liberated, Johns and Liberated, Johns and Wooed, and so on. The film sets out to explore the terrain opened up by these rather disparate meanings. The English title-Liberators Take Liberties-does not reproduce the wordplay of the German, but it is telling in its own way. There is an inversion in this title too, not on the lexical level but on the level of meaning. Here, that is, the liberators are revealed to be nothing of the sort. To put the film's polemic most bluntly: instead of liberating the women of Berlin from fascism, the occupation soldiers raped them. This film is not just about those events, but also about their suppression: for almost fifty years, there has been hardly any public discussion of the mass rape of women in Germany during April and May of 1945. The very fact that these rapes are now being publicly discussed is due in large part to Helke Sander's film and is one of its most significant achievements. Given this achievement, it seems especially important to consider how the film inflects its presentation of what happened in 1945. As will become clear in the course of this