Germany Year Zero (Roberto Rossellini, 1948)

Edmund Moeschke in Germany Year Zero

Edmund Köhler: Edmund Moeschke
Herr Köhler: Ernst Pittschau
Eva Köhler: Ingetraud Hinze
Karl-Heinz Köhler: Franz-Otto Krüger
Herr Henning: Erich Gühne

Director: Roberto Rossellini
Screenplay: Roberto Rossellini, Carlo Lizzani, Max Kolpé
Cinematography: Robert Juillard
Film editing: Eraldo Da Roma
Music: Renzo Rossellini

Roberto Rossellini's harsh, tragic vision of Germany in the immediate aftermath of World War II is suffused with an odd mixture of sentimentality and Schadenfreude. Any film that centers on the experiences of a 12-year-old boy in the ruins of Berlin is bound to be touched with sentiment, of course, but Rossellini's Edmund Köhler becomes less a real human child than the embodiment of ideas about the war, its causes, and its legacy. At the film's beginning, Edmund is seen with a kind of documentary clarity as he's fired from a job as a gravedigger because he's too young, then on his way home encounters a crowd of people hacking meat from the carcass of a horse that has apparently fallen dead in the street. Shooed away from there, he manages to scavenge a few lumps of coal that fall from a passing truck. It's when he reaches home that he becomes a figure in a fable: His family, billeted by the authorities on the reluctant owner of an apartment house, consists of an invalid father, a somewhat petulant older sister, and a brother whose refusal to register with the authorities -- he was a soldier in the Wehrmacht to the bitter end and remains convinced that the Nazis were right -- deprives them of a stipend they need to survive. His sister cadges cigarettes -- a virtual currency in the postwar barter system -- from men in nightclubs but is too proud to prostitute herself, so Edmund is the primary support of the household. This eventually puts him in the literal and figurative clutches of an unfortunately stereotypical homosexual, a former teacher of his whose pederastic tendencies are manifest in his constant fondling of the boy. The nightmarish story of what happens to Edmund is well told, but Rossellini's determination to make it a kind of Götterdämmerung of the German people, deservedly punished for their crime of bringing Hitler to power, undermines what gives the film its real strength: its documentary vision of a city and a country in ruins.

Filmstruck Criterion Channel