Rubble without a Cause: The Air War in Postwar Film

Abstract

Trümmerfilm owes its existence to destruction and death. Oddly enough, death and destruction are by no means at its center. While most rubble films, as their backdrop, feature the ruins of destroyed cities, civilian death, and hopelessness, and zoom in for brief moments on disease and hunger as the necessary consequences of erasing urban civilian habitation on an unprecedented scale, the films mostly depict a new humanism coming from the shared experience of living in the rubble. In other words, we are hard-pressed to find even the beginnings of an extensive reflection on what caused the rubble, namely, the area bombing of German urban centers and their noncombatant inhabitants. The films give little account of how Germans processed, or perhaps even debated their experiences, of how a “coming to terms with” what caused this radical transformation of Germany’s cities to ruins took place—no evidence of conversation in local pubs, for example, or discussion in the privacy of their “Behelfsheime” (makeshift homes) or “Kellerwohnungen” (generally a euphemism for a cave-like space in the ruins), on a market place, or anywhere else.¹ Rubble films contribute little to the public memory of these harrowing events. Yet not all was quiet on the Western front of the soon emerging Cold War. While silence was the standard response to the bombing war, it was not the only one.