The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) Revisited: Combat Cinema, American Culture and the German Past

Abstract

This article discusses the ways critical debates in West Germany—about the increased production of war films and whether such films were ‘pro-war’ or ‘anti-war’—raised central issues about the relationship between US popular culture and the politics of German cultural memory in two significant war films of the late fifties: David Lean's Bridge on the River Kwai (USA/GB 1957) and Bernhard Wicki's Die Brucke (The Bridge, FRG 1959). Whereas Kwai was heralded as an ‘anti-war’ epic in Columbia Pictures’ publicity campaign for the film in West Germany, many German commentators saw things differently. They made Kwai the centre of a critical discussion about the ways ostensibly anti-war US productions were ambiguously pro-war in the West German context, focusing attention upon the ways the film's music, its characters, and the symbolic function of the bridge ultimately encouraged a glorification of militarism as German commentators understood it, based upon their own past experiences. In contrast, Wicki's Die Brucke offered a filmic ‘response’ to Kwai’s ultimately ‘Cold War anti-war’ formula through an implicit visual contrast to and critique of the bridge, men and music in Kwai. Overall, an analysis of these two films in terms of the pro-war versus anti-war film debates of the time reveals cross-cultural and transnational dynamics at work in the heretofore exclusively German discussion of the politics of cultural memory in West Germany. Ultimately, this essay argues, these debates encouraged an expansion of West German memory culture rather than a denial of the past.