Birkbeck Cinema, Friday 12th October 2018: 18:00 – 21:00
Free entrance, book your tickets here.
The Murderers Are Among Us was the first film made in Germany after its defeat in 1945. It nearly didn’t get made: the French, British and American authorities opposed it. But the Soviets let it go ahead. Wolfgang Staudte had had run-ins with the Nazis, but he had also compromised on occasion–for example, by appearing in the anti-Semitic film Jud Süss. For the rest of his career, he’d be trying to settle accounts with the Nazi era. It’s a preoccupation of The Murderers Are Among Us. Survivors of the defeat hang on in bombed out cities. Susanne Wallner (Hildegard Knef) makes her way back to her apartment to find it wrecked and occupied by Dr Mertens (Ernst Wilhelm Borchert). Mertens has been so traumatized that he drinks to numb himself. If he is one kind of German, tormented by guilt less for what he did than for what he failed to stop, his old commander, Mr (formerly Captain) Brückner is another: incapable of guilt, possessed of an invincible sense of entitlement, and capable of atrocity. The film ends by gesturing towards the possibility of justice and a kind of romantic redemption. Yet Staudte’s vision keeps hinting at kinds of loss and damage that cannot be readily repaired.