Nazi Germany and Its Aftermath in Women Directors’ Autobiographical Films of the Late 1970s: In the Murderer’s House

An in-depth analysis of three pivotal works for students of German film history and post-war culture as it leads to the present political developments, the study puts films by West German film directors Helma Sanders-Brahms, Jutta Brückner, and Marianne Rosenbaum in the context of both German film politics/feminist film theory and the West German cultural, socio-political context of the last decade. Their films take an insistent close-up look at the average German family during the 1950s and how the fascist experience affected the interpersonal relationships and German children’s upbringing in the post-fascist years, showing the deep-reaching transformations individual Germans and the family structure had undergone. The films’ points of departure are distinctly new and intend to go beyond the known both in film and in patriarchal culture.