Lecture by Russell Merritt

(Die Mörder sind unter uns). This is the first and most famous of the postwar German “rubble films,” a short-lived genre. A train rushing by with people hanging precariously off the sides sets an ominous tone for this story of individuals picking their way through the psychological debris of the Holocaust. Hildegard Knef, in her first screen appearance, portrays a concentration camp survivor returning home to find her old apartment inhabited by a shell-shocked surgeon (Ernst Wilhelm Borchert) who can't stand the sight of blood. Together they face his demons-including a merciless army captain, now a businessman blithely turning steel helmets into cooking pots. Staudte revives the stark angles of post-WWI Expressionism to effect a startling realism-the sky above, the rubble below. Also recalling the films of the first postwar period, gossip and superstition abound. But in 1945, the outspoken Staudte indulges the ironies of guilt and defeatism. “We're all nice people, aren't we?” a showgirl asks, a question much of German cinema would very soon take for fact when the rubble was forgotten.