The IMDB page for Deutschland, Bleiche Mutter is here.

Deutschland, Bleiche Mutter is a film that has suffered from obscurity in the United States. It has also been criticized for what critics perceive to be its one-sided portrayal of the suffering in Germany during World War II, and for its "problematic" allegories involving Lene, the mother, who during the course of the film is raped by American soldiers and suffers from a facial paralysis, said to represent the balkanization of Germany.

Most of the scholarship regarding this film has focused on its position as a melodrama; however, I feel that it is valuable to examine it from the point of view of the narrational parameter of focalization. The film is externally focalized from Anna's point of view (Anna is Lene's daughter), from the beginning of the movie, even before she is an extant character: She narrates events before her birth, such as her parents meeting.

Critics have tended to gloss over Anna's position within the film, as Helma Sanders-Brahms has implied that the entire film itself is meant to represent her mother's experience, and to some extent her own, during the war.1 I believe that it is important to consider the narration on its own functions within the film without becoming unnecessarily caught up in the director's intent with respect to portraying her family's own story. Thus, I will examine the film through the point of view of Anna as her own character, not merely a doppelganger for Sanders-Brahms.

Genette defines external focalization by giving examples of popular detective novels: "Our third type will be external focalization, popularized between the two world wars by Dashiell Hammett's novels, in which the hero performs in front of us without our ever being allowed to know his thoughts or feelings."2 Anna's narration is similar. She narrates events and only rarely interpolates her thoughts and feelings, and even these are colored by her thoughts and experiences at the time she is actually narrating, as opposed to her thoughts and feelings when the events are actually occurring. "Let us not forget that focalization is essentially, in Blin's word, a restriction."3 With the exception of a few ruptures, the film is focalized through Anna, and with that comes necessary restrictions of spatiality (e.g., few or no scenes showing what another character is doing "meanwhile").

All scholarship on the film is in agreement with the idea that Deutschland, Bleiche Mutter falls within the melodramatic mode. However, no critics that I could find have talked about the role of the focalization with respect to the film's genre. I argue that Anna's focalized point of view is vital for establishing the film within the melodramatic mode (specifically: a familial melodrama), because her semi-omniscient point of view allows for more of the story to be told. Were the film focalized through Hans, it would easily become a war story. Were it told through Lene's point of view, it could have become focused on the love story. However, the use of Anna as a dominant narrator and mediator allows for the story of the family to be told.

As Anna, the narrator, says in the beginning, "Aber dies ist deine Liebegeschichte, meine Mutter, deine Liebegeschichte, mein Vater."4 Because the narrator has an emotional investment in the story5, the focalization is more believable (even though it is repeatedly ruptured with scenes that portray information that Anna has no explicable access to), and it helps to establish the story as a familial melodrama, rather than a war movie.

The film opens with Hanne Hiop, Bertolt Brecht's daughter, reading aloud the poem "Deutschland, Bleiche Mutter." The poem is presented as a textual epigraph against a black screen. The use of this epigraph sets up the allegory that Germany is a mother within the text of the film. The fact that Brecht's own daughter reads it heightens this parallel and sets up the idea of the generational gap and the film's concern with relationships between parents and children. Because the film itself, as an epigraph, is from the point of view of a narrator speaking about a country as mother, it helps to set the stage for the focalization of the film through a daughter.

The first image within the film, during the opening scene in which Lene and Hans meet, is that of water, a liminal space traditionally associated with the womb. The title, Deutschland Bleiche Mutter, is superimposed over the water, uniting these concepts on a less subtle level than the previous sequence does. Thus, the idea of the mother/daughter dichotomy is established before any people, female or otherwise, have even appeared on screen. Roger Cook writes, "The film will … negate its own premise: … that her parents' love story was happy, yet unfortunate because it happened to fall in those times."6 One can argue that love stories, with all their melodramatic missed connections, misunderstandings, and tragedies, are by definition unhappy. After all, romantic narratives involve obstacles, be they internal or external, to the relationship. Lene and Hans' love story is more than "unfortunate:" it is unhappy, and not merely because it takes place just in "those times." Anna's voice over helps to paint Lene and Hans' courtship in terms of the narrated rather than the historical. That is, the courtship is shown as a significant event, rather than an event incidental to the historical events occurring around them. This is despite Anna's insistence that the story itself is significant because it occurred at a certain time and place.

Cook states that "[w]hen [Anna] refers to the film as Lene's ‘love story,' she is making the spectator aware that the film narrative belongs to a particular genre and is thus subject to certain cinematic conventions and codes. Even though it is a daughter's account of how her mother and father met, fell in love, and married, the story is no less ‘fictional' … no less a series of constructed film images than the most traditional love story"7. The story takes on apocryphal details that would be appropriate for a small child retelling the tale of her parents' courtship. These details have the characteristics of a folk tale, for example, Lene's being the only dark-haired sister among eight daughters (as Hans relates to his friend in this scene), or Lene pricking her finger on the curtain after her wedding. These details seem somewhat embroidered, a fable retold by someone who has heard it second hand. This fits in with the film as being focalized through Anna. It would make sense for her perception of her parents' relationship to be filtered and biased. The fairy tale motifs are established from the beginning of the film and serve to set the relationship up as one in which the participants are both haunted by misfortune and anticipating their own destruction. They serve to establish a cultural reference point, reminding viewers of their own experiences with these ideas.

The opening scene anticipates the Robber Bride sequence that will come later in the film in its use and invocation of fortune, via the voice over's description of some things as "fortunate" and others as "unfortunate" and the visual events, such as the floating cat, which connote misfortune.

It is unusual that the story is focalized through Anna in this scene, even though she has not yet been conceived. The viewer knows this not just because of the voice over but because the story is visually focalized through a third person narrator. There are no first-person point of view shots in the first scene. The entire scene is presented as a tableau which a spectator is observing, and this mirrors the narrative structure of the film. Again I refer to Cook: "[the voice over narrations] contribute distance to this narrative"8. The visual set up of the establishing scene mirrors the distancing within the narrative structure. After the dog lunges at her, Lene is shown hunched over and alone, weeping in fright. Ellen Seiter observes, albeit incorrectly, that "In only one scene in the entire film does the mother appear outside of the family, apart from her daughter, husband, or sister."9 Anna's voice over establishes that "she learned to be silent from [Lene]."

The transgression committed by Anna, committed in the form of narration, indicates that she is clearly breaking this maxim. Her voice over alone negates any silence she may have learned. "The positive message of the film revolves around the potential women possess for intervening in those practices that construct female subjectivity."10 Her storytelling itself breaks the rules, and later ruptures in the narration will seal this problematic aspect. By becoming a woman who speaks, Anna differentiates herself from her mother, even though her whole experience of the war itself is only described second-hand. Seiter explains: "The daughter … experiences the war as a period of blissful and undisturbed union with her mother."11 This is an unusual way to look at the Second World War, to say the least.

Ellen Seiter explains that "[t]he film introduces references to Germany's political history into the family chronicle in four ways: intercutting of newsreel footage with dramatic scenes … radio broadcasts played in the background during dramatic scenes … iconography [and] political references in the dialogue. These references are used to increase the emotional realism of the characters, to stress the traumatic impact of the war on Lene, Hans, and Anna as individuals – not as historic figures or social types."12 The use of these incidental mentions is appropriate for positioning the film within the point of view of a child who experienced it only as a toddler, as well as for a film whose main generic conventions tie it to the melodramatic mode: the war is only seen first-hand during Hans' scenes, which are concerned less with battle and more with his relationship to Lene. Therefore, the melodramatic code is best maintained by the focalization of the film through Anna. Further, it establishes the war as something normative within the diegesis of the film; it almost indicates that the war occurs in iterative time, rather than being an event.

The scene that occurs between Lene and Hans after the first time he hits her is another one that seems curious, considering that the story is being narrated by their daughter. Lene tells Hans that she wants a baby from him, which further establishes the film as a melodrama: it is a conventional code within war melodramas for women to desire a baby, as a token of the men who are leaving them behind. Seiter explains, "This kind of description of a woman's desire for a child is nearly a war-movie cliché: it increases our anxiety about the father's possible death in combat while the child functions as a symbol of hope for the lovers."13

In another scene between Lene and Hans, that of their wedding night, the fairy-tale motif returns: Lene pricks her finger on a pin in the curtain. The idea of a timeless love story with universal referents (that is, a "perfectly ordinary love story" that is similar to many from the past and many that will occur in the future) returns, as the two lovers discuss their plans for the future, alone, in a sunny bedroom.

This aspect of the story is not necessarily bound by temporality; however, Lene next says "Wenigstens kein Bild vom Führers überm Bett."14 Again this serves to drive home the idea that their love story is unique because it occurred in this specific time and space. It is another distancing aspect to the narrative; while romance may be a scene common to many viewers' experiences, a romantic interlude occurring during Hitler's time as Fuhrer may not be.15 Regarding Lene's utterance, Cook writes, "In effect, Hitler's presence has infiltrated their bedroom and disrupted their marital relationship."16 It may be valid to conceive of this as a disruption, but the two details of this scene that make it unique are the folk-tale motif and the comment about the Fuehrer. The film concerns itself both with aspects that are not bounded by temporality (fairy-tale motifs, the universal experience of a marriage celebration, the planning for future) as well as those that are very bounded and defined by a very specific temporality (a mention of Hitler).

It is worth pointing out that although the film concerns itself with the apocalyptic vision of World War II, it also narrates events such as birth and the hope for the future in a way that portrays them as ordinary. In this way, the film is not post-apocalyptic; it maintains a faith in the future despite of the nearly unimaginable destruction wrought in the film. Were the film not focalized through Anna, this faith in the future would be less prevalent. Since the focalization is through the point of view of someone who was born after these events, and remembered the war only as a happy time to be with her mother, it seems natural that the events would be tinted with a hope for the future: after all, Anna has spent most of her life living in a time that was future in relation to the temporality of the events narrated. Were the film focalized through the parents, it would likely betray a loss of faith in the future due to the traumas they suffered during the war. However, in some ways their love story is ordinary: they marry and have a child. This faith in the future betrays the film as less bleak than many have perceived it.

The scene in which Anna is born is an important fulcrum point within the film. The juxtaposition of the narrative with actual newsreel footage of planes dropping bombs sets the scene apart from others within the film. The film seems to begin to transcend its mode as a melodrama and venture into the "docudrama" territory. However, the newsreel footage is not used merely to establish authority within the film; it creates stylistic and narrative parallels to the events in the story. It is almost as though reality begins to penetrate the enacted scenes in order to call further attention to Anna's physical presence within the story.

The fact that it is focalized through Anna heightens the melodramatic effect; the viewer experiences Lene's suffering as an observer rather than a participant. Because of this external focus on suffering, the film becomes concerned with the corporeal suffering Lene is experiencing. Her face, grimacing with the pain of childbirth, is aligned with newsreel images of planes dropping bombs. The scene is not focalized through Lene; there are visuals that she likely would not have been able to see (the planes dropping bombs, the aerial shots of the destroyed city) and the camera work is not from her visual point of view. Thus her pain becomes objectified; her face is shown from someone else's point of view. The midwife, also, is shown objectively, eliminating the possibility that the scene may be focalized through her. Anna's point of view dominates; as an unembodied person, her visual viewpoint remains unbounded by corporeality. Therefore, the viewer is able to stare directly at Lene's suffering face.

This objectification of her body and fetishization of her suffering augments the melodramatic mode of the film. As Linda Williams writes, "… [melodrama] is the genre that seems to endlessly repeat our melancholic sense of the loss of origins – impossibly hoping to return to an earlier state which is perhaps most fundamentally represented by the body of the mother"17. Nowhere else in the film does this seem as relevant as in the scene in which Anna is born.

Since Anna will later recall the war as a happy time in which she had her mother all to herself, it seems important to have her birth portrayed in this way. The viewer observes Lene's pain. Williams explains, "…The body of the spectator is caught up in an almost involuntary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of the body on the screen along with the fact that the body displayed is female."18 This empathetic viewing allows for the melodramatic code to be maintained, and it is maintained through this scene because it is focalized through Anna.

Another scene whose narrative seems to betray the focalization is the scene after which Lene's teeth are removed, when she locks herself alone in the room. Anna remains on one side of the door and Lene on the other, yet the camera shows the hidden space and the viewer can see Lene's face. Since the camera does not really privilege one or the other, this represents a rupture in the focalization of the film through Anna. If it were focalized through an embodied character that has limits to her knowledge, then it would be impossible for Anna to be able to watch her mother's meltdown (although it is possible this represents a retelling of the experience, but it seems unlikely that Lene would relate her side of this to Anna). Other instances in which Anna's focalization is ruptured are Hans' war experiences. Other scholarship has mentioned that several times during his time as a soldier, Hans shoots women who look like Lene. According to Hans, they look like Lene; the reason for this is that they are all played by Eva Mattes.

On another occasion, his fellow soldiers mock him for believing in love, spelling out "LIEBE" (love) with prophylactics. The specific date of these events is not revealed, but if we are to understand the film as focalized through Anna, some of them occurred before her birth. Again, she is narrating events that she has no way of knowing about as it seems highly unlikely that Hans, who proves himself an emotionally distant father in later scenes, would ever describe these events to his child. With the exception of these ruptures, the film is focalized through Anna's eyes. Were it not for this focalization, the film would not be so heavily associated with the melodramatic mode. An omniscient focalization or one limited to Lene or Hans would change the film dramatically, perhaps setting it within the genre of a war film (i.e., were the film focalized through Hans' point of view) or a different kind of melodrama (i.e., were the film focalized through Lene's point of view, the film might become one that was not so concerned with the familial saga).

Eileen Seiter contends that "[t]he daughter's relationship to the mother displaces the heterosexual romance from its conventional place at the center of the film narrative in Deutschland, Bleiche Mutter."19 The centrality of the mother/daughter relationship allows for the film to be a part of the subgenre known as the family melodrama. As Eileen Seiter has stated, "Deutschland, Bleiche Mutter belongs unmistakably to the tradition of the domestic or family melodrama."20 The focalization of the film through Anna allows for a greater breadth of narrativity.

The implications of this use of focalization and genre are too great to be explored in greater detail here, but they raise interesting questions. Seiter and Cook explored the idea of the daughter's narration with respect to the role of the woman in Germany, both during the war and after. Kaplan and others have focused on the film's depiction of the reality of World War II. Further research could include a study of the focalization comparing it to other filmmakers of melodramas contemporaneous with this film (Seiter mentions Fassbinder and Brückner only briefly), or the idea of the narrative as a construct, less than an absolute truth, and how this might relate to the melodramatic mode. It is unfortunate that most of the scholarship on this film has focused on criticizing it rather than analyzing it, because it holds a great deal of possibility for many areas of scholarship within the area of cinema studies.

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