The Place of Rubble in the Trümmerfilm

Abstract

Shots of devastated German cities provide stirring vistas in postwar Trummer­ filme (rubble films). As low-angle compositions frame monuments of destruc tion against the vastness of cloudy skies, the shattered expanses of a depopulated metropolis resemble natural landscapes. At times the jagged shards of broken buildings bear an uncanny resemblance to the craggy contours of alpine peaks. But discussion of these often-studied films has rarely granted their most conspicuous shapes and spaces sustained or close attention. 1 In fact, rubble plays a prominent role in the Trummerfilm . The Trummerfilm , particularly the seminal exercise in this vein, Wolfgang Staudte’s Die Morder sind unter uns (The Murderers Are among Us, 1946), also figures in a much larger history of rubble representation. The postwar rubble in Berlin differed from that in Frankfurt, Hamburg, or Dresden. Modern Berlin, notes Wolfgang Schivelbusch, was a city machine in which advanced technology did not simply work over old structures but constituted the urban space’s prime substance. Unlike other more conventional German cities, Berlin was largely a product of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and for that reason steel skeletons undergirded much of its architecture. The capital’s buildings (even its historical edifices from the baroque to the Wilhelminian eras) were so massive that they withstood bombing during