What’s New? Allegorical Representations of Renewal in DEFA’s Youth Films, 1946–1949

Abstract

This essay investigates a small corpus of early DEFA films, “rubble film” productions about contemporary youth. Set among urban ruins, they focus on typical postwar dilemmas of young people: absent or war-traumatized fathers, broken families, child impoverishment, and the temptation of petty criminality to survive. Trummerfilme are transitional films in a temporal and thematic sense. They address topical issues of stabilizing the demoralized German survivors in a country whose infrastructure had been destroyed by aerial bombing and whose political institutions had been discredited. They articulate anxieties about endings and new beginnings, about losses and the unknown future. Visually these anxieties are sometimes expressed in striking camera work or editing, but more frequently they can be found woven into the narrative sediment of conflict between and among generations. Rubble films have been regarded both as documentary evidence of Germany’s postwar misery as well as allegories where the ruins are the external sign of internal desolation, a metaphor of Germany’s spiritual devastation.1 In the DEFA features under consideration here the notion of youth as a transitional time of self-realization and search is inscribed into the adventures that animate the young people. Moreover, the fact that the stories usually take place in the summer (sometimes explicitly identified as Summer 1945), when young people are not in school and hence unsupervised, becomes an analogue for the more general status of an unstable, transitional social environment.