The Mother-Daughter Plot in History: Helma Sanders-Brahms's Germany, Pale Mother

Abstract

A reconstruction of events in Germany from the years 1939 to 1955, Helma Sanders-Brahms's autobiographical film Germany, Pale Mother (Deutschland, bleiche Mutter, 1979) stands in an oblique relationship to as it is usually conceived and narrated in cinema. The film is Sanders-Brahms's attempt to rework the past and to come to terms with the impact of historical events on her family and on her identity as a daughter, a German, and a filmmaker. Because the film emphasizes private experience and privileges the mother-daughter dyad as it does, however, critics have claimed that Germany, Pale Mother actually evades rather than acknowledging accountability for it. Some argue that the film does represent history, but as virtually a thing apart from women's lives and responsibilities. For these critics, an essentializing, ahistorical perspective on women's experience mars the film, much as ahistoricism purportedly undermines feminist psychoanalytic theories that privilege pre-Oedipal bonding, theories that Germany, Pale Mother is said to endorse. Angelika Bammer asserts: In this film Sanders-Brahms seems to suggest that women are virtually outside history, as if were literally 'his-story' in which women had no part.' Eric Santner complains that the film identifies the mother as a victim of history rather than one of its players,2 a bifurcation