Color Film of Berlin, July 1945

[HPL2008]

You see plainly that piece by piece, the women cleared out the rubble. That's how it happened. I was taught German in university by a woman who belonged to this generation.

FB of course already knows this, but allow me to add that members of this generation of women are collectively known as Trümmerfrauen ["rubble women"] in Germany. (This is not a derogatory term, but a respectful one.)

[birkie]

Berlin must have been a stunning city pre war. Thank goodness Paris was spared the same fate during the war.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

FB of course already knows this, but allow me to add that members of this generation of women are collectively known as Trümmerfrauen ["rubble women"] in Germany. (This is not a derogatory term, but a respectful one.)

Thank you, Andreas. My entire image of Europe in the years from 1969-1980 arose from these people. They were my teachers and even colleagues. They were the generation of my parents, whereby my family left the Rhineland long before any Schickelgruber or Eicke or Buerckel got going.

I cannot overstate my debt to these people, and I miss them nowadays. They had a sense of humor and common sense entirely absent from my own hysterical and fussy generation and from others.

Helmut Schmidt is more or less the last of the Mohicans of these people.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

Berlin must have been a stunning city pre war. Thank goodness Paris was spared the same fate during the war.

Here is how Billy Wilder portrayed it around 1930. This is my neighborhood in Berlin, by the way.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hg_vL6lQ6I

[Friedrich-Berthold]

and here is the film he made eighteen years later, after his return in military government to his home, after his family had been murdered.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7L5MEgfgzw

This film was just on Turner in the U.S.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3U1k07wUE0E

[Friedrich-Berthold]

FB of course already knows this, but allow me to add that members of this generation of women are collectively known as Trümmerfrauen ["rubble women"] in Germany. (This is not a derogatory term, but a respectful one.)

The year 1945 was the year zero, but it was also the moment when the Nazi discrimination against women vanished, and the women of Germany essentially arose to save the day.

If you want to know what it feels like to be a refugee or displaced person of war, open your eyes and look around.

Who among us can say that we might also end up the same way at some point in things to come....?

[Paul D]

I have seen the Trümmerberg created by the famous Trümmerfrauen but cannot remember the actual huge tonnage of rubble they moved to create them , an incrdible physical effort by the women taking into consideration the circumstances they were living !

[Friedrich-Berthold]

Most major German towns have such a locale. There is also a prominent one outside of Muenchen at Frottmaning, when you make your way on the outer ring Autobahn toward Salzburg coming from the airport and or points north and west.

See list here.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schuttberg#M.C3.BCnchen

[Friedrich-Berthold]

I imagine that you are prone to find some SS buttons and other Lekereien or such in these places, if you looked.

[HPL2008]

and here is the film he made eighteen years later, after his return in military government to his home, after his family had been murdered.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7L5MEgfgzw

This film was just on Turner in the U.S.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3U1k07wUE0E

And let's not forget Wilder's excellent* (but initially unsuccessful) 1961 satirical comedy "One, Two, Three", set in Cold War-era Berlin prior to the building of the Berlin Wall:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwPqbnKXTLY

(In fact, building of the Wall begin during the shoot in Berlin, forcing the production to relocate to the Bavaria Filmstudios at Munich, where a film set with the Brandenburg Gate was built for the scenes set there.)

Divided Berlin is as important for the story and general feel of the film as, say, post-war Vienna was for "The Third Man".
Perfectly crafted, as could be expected from any film by this director, it has a clever story, fast pace and excellent cast, headed by James Cagney, but mostly consisting of German actors, including a young Horst Buchholz as a Communist activist and Hanns Lothar as the hilarious ex-SS man-turned Coca Cola Company employee Schlemmer**).


*) Well, all of his films are excellent, of course. ("Sunset Boulevard" is one of my all-time favorite films. But I digress.)
**) Which always makes me think of Heißmeyer's career. (Well, he had extensive job experience in spreading brown sauce, didn't he?)