Nazi Germany and Its Aftermath in Women Directors' Autobiographical Films of the Late 1970s: In the Murderer's House (Distinguished Dissertations)

This is an in-depth analysis of three works of students of German film history and post-war culture as it leads up to late-1980s political developments. The study puts films by West German film directors Helma Saunders-Brahms, Jutta Bruckner and Marianne Rosenbaum in the context of both German film politics/feminist film theory and the West German cultural, socio-political context of the 1980s. Their films take a close-up look at the average German family during the 1950s and how the facist experience affected the interpersonal relationships and German children's upbringing in the post-facist years, showing the deep-reaching transformations individual Germans and the family structure had undergone. The films' points of departure are distinct and intend to go beyond the known, both in film and in patriarchal culture.