survival
of the unfit
by Douglas Messerli
Roberto Rossellini, Max Kolpé and Sergio Amidei (screenplay), Roberto Rossellini (director) Germania anno zero (Germany, Year Zero) / 1948
Superficially, the third
film of Roberto Rossellini’s “war series,” Germany, Year Zero,
seems to the most loosely episodic and open-ended of these works. But actually,
the seemingly formless street ramblings of the film’s young hero, 12-year-old
Edmund Kohler (Edmund Moeschke), are tightly interwoven with events that
come to symbolize both the moral corruption of the German people and their
inabilities to come to terms for their recent Nazi past.
Yes,
this is a street movie, filled with young boys and girls, peddlers and pimps,
thieves and gang-members; but their various encounters with the young boy are
not accidental, rather representative of the fragility of post-War German
culture, if you can even define the free-for-all struggle for survival in the
bomb-pocked landscape as representing any culture at all.
Edmund
is forced onto the streets because his other family members have all become
unable to cope. His father (Ernst Pittschau) is sickly and gradually starving
to death; the only good days for his family is when he gets temporarily moved
into a hospital, where he is well-fed and they have a bit more of whatever they
can daily scare together to share with one another.
The
boy’s brother, Karl-Heinz (Franz-Otto Krüger), dare not even go out, since,
having fought “up to the last moment” in the same neighborhood, he has
determined not even register and is fearful of being arrested. Had he
registered, at least, the family might have been allowed another ration card.
The
family’s sister, Eva (Ingetraud Hinze) spends most of her nights with another
woman living in the same building at bars, where she pawns free cigarettes,
drinks, and, whatever else she might come across—although she refuses to engage
in prostitution, which at least might have put more food into their mouths.
So
it is up to Edmund to forage for a few potatoes, a couple cans of processed
meat, and whatever else he might get for selling a neighbor’s scale or a former
teacher’s record of an Adolph Hitler speech—played loudly on a record player to
the very citizens who have been destroyed by its propaganda—to British or
American soldiers.
While
children of the same age are seen playing soccer and other games, Edmund,
unwelcome to join in their games, carries around his satchel as if he were
wearing the weight of the earth on his shoulders, which, symbolically, he is.
For him, and dozens like him, there is no childhood to be had. A former
teacher, Henning, clearly a pedophile, living in a house of like-minded men,
fondles him while demanding he sell the Hitler record, another of residents
hovering nearby if Edmund might escape Henning’s clutches. The sexually
innocent escapes the ordeal with ten marks for his sale, but another girl,
Christl, hardly older than he, seems to have sexually hooked
If
Henning cannot get into his shorts, he does get into Edmund’s head, with his
message of the survival of the fittest; in a world which is literally playing
out this concept, is it any wonder that Edmund determines to act, stealing a
bottle of poison and offering it up to his dying father with his tea. In doing
this, of course, Edmund, himself, stands in for the millions of regular German
citizens who willingly went along with Nazi dogma; yet Rossellini is perhaps also
suggesting that it is necessary that the young should quickly do away with the
old if a new Germany is to survive. In the war-torn Berlin of this film there
is no room for niceties, and Edmund’s schoolteacher’s lessons have relevance
for such an exhausted child.
The
child who is no longer a child watches others at play, but unable to join it,
kicks a rock down the street as if playing kick-the-can, wandering up into the
bombed-out ruins of his own apartment building. Below he watches as a truck
takes away his father’s coffin, along with many others it has collected en
masse. For a moment, the boy covers his eyes as if he has seen too
much. And before the viewer can even imagine what is going through
his mind, he jumps to his death.
Even
the future, so Rossellini suggests, is in utter jeopardy. It is perhaps only
those who no longer even attempt to change their future who can survive, a kind
of zombie culture that lives by just hanging on.
If
this film is sentimental, then I don’t comprehend the meaning of that word.
Melodramatic? Perhaps; it is an exaggerated time that I feel Rossellini has so
credulously captured on film.
Having
seen Peter Brook’s play Battlefield, another post-holocaust
examination, just a few days earlier, I was reminded yet again of Beckett’s
words at the end of The Unnameable: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”
Perhaps, in the case of Germany, Year Zero it is only the most
unfit who survive.
Los Angeles, June 1,
2017
Reprinted from World
Cinema Review (June 2017).
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