Planes, Trains, and the Occasional Car: The Rubble Film as Demobilization Film

Abstract

Scholars and critics have generally asserted that the rubble films of the late 1940s and early 1950s intended and achieved a break from the Nazi-coordinated film industry that preceded it.² During the Allied-imposed Filmpause of 1945–1946, there were many calls to abandon the relentlessly entertaining style of the Nazi-coordinated film industry and to instigate instead a socially critical, historically engaged, film-realist approach—and most have characterized the mainstream cinema as moving, successfully or not, in that direction. But the epigraph’s unusually harsh review of Gustav Fröhlich’s Wege im Zwielicht (1947) suggests something usually neglected in the scholarship on the rubble film: the possibility of continuities between cinema made during and after the Nazi regime.

We should finally put an end to these coarse troop manners (Landsknechtmanieren) on screen, with their ideology taught and drilled in barrack parlors (Kasernenstuben) and brown youth homes and with the Germa n inwardness (and its ancillary terminology) put on full display … But this recent German film [Wege im Zwielicht] is played in exactly this key. This is very familiar to us and, if a little coquettish nihilism, in flat, banal formulations, didn’t intervene now and again, Mr. Goebbels could easily have taken up this film in his production list. So perfectly would that fit right in …¹