Rubble Noir

Abstract

It is perhaps appropriate that the first German feature film made in the American zone of occupation, Zwischen Gestern und Morgen (1947), was a criminal thriller, a noir of sorts, shot in what remained of Munich’s Regina Palast Hotel. The plot, fragmented through a series of flashbacks, shuttles between the immediate postwar era and the Nazi period as various characters recount the events surrounding the tragic fate of one of the hotel’s late guests, the Jewish stage actress, Nelly Dreyfuss (Sybille Schmitz). In the 1930s, Nelly furtively breaks the Nuremberg laws when she checks into the Regina so that she may experience, one last time, the luxury of her cosmopolitan Weimar life. When the Nazi secret police (“disguised” in trench coats and fedoras) pursue her through the hotel’s dark corridors, Nelly takes her own life by throwing herself from the banister of the interior grand staircase. Now, in 1946, one of her acquaintances, Michael Rott (Viktor de Kowa), has returned to the Regina from his exile in Switzerland. He comes in search of another woman he loved only to find himself accused of having stolen Nelly’s jewels before he himself fled the Nazis. To clear his name, these jewels must be recovered from the rubble that is already in the process of being removed.

Spatial structures are the dreams of a society. Whenever the hieroglyph of any such spatial structure is decoded, the foundation of the social reality is revealed.

—Siegfried Kracauer¹