Lecture by Eric Rentschler

Eric Rentschler is Professor and Chair of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. He is the author of several books on German film, including The Ministry of Illusion (1996), and is working on a book tentatively titled Courses in Time: Film in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1949–1989. He contributed curatorial insight and a brochure essay to the series After the War, Before the Wall: German Cinema, 1945–1960.

(Das Mädchen Rosemarie). It's based on a true story-the unsolved 1957 murder of class-climbing call girl Rosemarie Nitribitt-but with its sarcastic commentary rendered in Kurt Weill–style song, A Call Girl Named Rosemarie is hardly a typical docudrama. The film's real target is not the ambitious Rosemarie (memorably played by Nadja Tiller) but her clients, the politicians and industrialists who engineered the German economic miracle. Tracking Rosemarie's rise from street to penthouse, the film offers a penetrating view of rampant materialism and corruption at every level of German society. “Rugs in the hall, Picasso on the wall, and there's no past at all,” a Brechtian chorus sings while moving TV sets and blenders into Rosemarie's apartment; a factory owner proudly displays a sculpture made from an unexploded American bomb: “and now we export to ninety-two countries!” The blunt bitterness of this postwar tale makes Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun look like nostalgic, candy-coated fantasy.

Co-winner, Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, 1960