Germany, Pale Mother

This film is so difficult to watch, but its brilliance is still exceptional. Helma Sander-Brahms should be world famous simply for this movie. I wish more of her films were available in the United States. In this film, the use of old documentary footage of post-war Germany combined with Sander-Brahms' own exquisite images is breathtaking. The film is a painful study of the devastation and heartbreak that the children of post-war Germany had to face in the wake of World War II; an entire generation coming to terms with the massive genocide that their parent's generation had participated in. Sander-Brahms pulls the viewer into her own personal and extremely sad story. She is brave and unforgiving and that is what makes her film so haunting.

This film gives the audience and unprecedented look into the pain and suffering brought on by war. This film uniquely covers the follows a typical German family before, during and after WWII. This movie is so groundbreaking in it realism that is used regularly in German Language Classed to study Germany through WWII.

This movie broke my heart.

I've seen many Holocaust-centric films that are more about the pov of Jews and other clear victims of Nazi insanity. A couple of exceptions, or films that at least encompass a number of perspectives, include The Tin Drum, Divided We Fall, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, and Europa, Europa.Germany, Pale Mother is remarkable for several reasons, not the least of which is the answer it gives to a question I've had, namely,how much did the "average" (for lack of a better descriptor) German suffer? The Germans who weren't Nazis but who weren't resisters or rescuers? The "everyday" people? What did they think about what was going on around them? Without giving away the story, I'll just say that the film, which is based on the life of the filmmaker and her parents, manages to expand the microcosmic view (those "everyday" lives) into something much bigger; indicating that "what goes around, comes around," indeed - even if you're just collaborating via "neutrality" and/or attempting to ignore what's going on around you. It indicates that the negativity that was unleashed in and around Germany went far beyond what happened in the early concentration -- and, later, death camps.While it's not a perfect film, there are moments -- some of the film's best -- that remind me of the stylized work of Fassbinder and Schlondorff. And there's a a set piece; a sort of Brothers Grimm fairy tale sequence that's among the most horrifying and frightening things I've ever seen or read about the Holocaust. Which is saying a lot.As another reviewer commented, I wish I could see more of Sanders-Brahms' films.

Germany, Pale Mother focuses on the struggles of a German family during World War II as narrated by a daughter looking back on her parent's history. She addresses her Mother and Father directly trying to comprehend their experience of the war. The opening scene show her Mother,Lene, standing up to a Nazi officer with a German Shepard. The dog barks and bites at her clothes, but she does not scream or even make a noise. Later we see her wiping her eyes and trembling with fear. This scene demonstrates the complex portrayal of Lene who has the strength and determination to march across the country with her small child after sifting through the rubble that was once her home, but still wishes her husband had "joined the party" if that had kept him from going to war. The narrator tells her father that she can't imagine him as a young man because she always pictures him as the old man he became after returning from the front. A love story and family memoir brilliantly entwined with the tumultuous socio-political atmosphere of Nazi Germany. This film is considered groundbreaking because of its intense realism and the depiction of the female perspective of war, but superb acting and expert film making help it to stand out as a "modern classic."

The first half of the film gives a fairly interesting snapshot of pre-World War II Germany, with a mix of politics, romance and familiy life on the homefront. Later, a more existential and abstact film emerges, as the characters seem to degenerate into quirky, eccentric, boring and unlikable types. Because it is also draggy, you need to watch this movie on 2X fast forward and follow the closed captions--not difficult to do and saves about an hour of your viewing time.

An excellent story about how the German people were affected by World War II on the home front.