The Murderers Are Among Us
The Murderers Are Among Us (UK) Murderers Among Us (US) Die Mörder sind unter uns (Germany) | |
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Cinematography | Friedl Behn-Grund Eugen Klagemann |
Edited by | Hans Heinrich |
Music by | Ernst Roters |
Release date |
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Running time | 91 minutes |
Country | Germany |
Language | German |
Die Mörder sind unter uns, a German film known in English as Murderers Among Us in the United States or The Murderers Are Among Us in the United Kingdom was one of the first
Plot
Berlin in 1945 after Germany's defeat in the war. The former military surgeon Dr. Hans Mertens (
They reluctantly live together at first, then become friends. Susanne finds a letter to a Mrs. Brückner in the apartment and confronts Mertens about it. Mertens tries to get a job at a hospital, but a screaming woman gives him flashbacks and he is left incapacitated. Meanwhile, Susanne meets with Ferdinand Brückner (
Soon after, Mertens decides to kill Brückner. He leads Brückner away under the pretense of going to a bar and takes him along a purportedly shorter route, through the rubble and abandoned buildings of Berlin. When he thinks they are alone, he draws his gun. As he does so, a woman in need of a doctor runs out of one of the ruined buildings. Brückner tells her that Mertens is a doctor, but Mertens is reluctant to help. The woman tells him her only child stopped breathing an hour before, and he goes along with her, while Brückner leaves for the bar alone. Mertens performs a tracheotomy on the girl, then Mertens returns home and proclaims his love for Susanne.
The film skips forward to Christmas Eve. Susanne and Mertens are still living together, and Mertens is now a practicing surgeon. Mertens tells Susanne he has to finish something. He goes to Brückner's factory, where Brückner and his employees are singing Christmas carols. Mertens has a flashback, which reveals that Brückner had ordered the shooting of over a hundred civilians on Christmas Eve of 1942 in a Polish village on the Eastern Front. Mertens tries to kill Brückner again, but Susanne stops him at the last minute. Instead of killing Brückner they denounce him and he is put on trial for war crimes.
Filming
To get permission for the film, Staudte had gone to the British, the French, and the Americans, but they all rejected the proposal, citing its political nature as the reason for refusing to grant the film a license. The Soviets, on the other hand, accepted the script with a change to the film's ending. Originally the film was supposed to be named Der Mann den ich töten werde (The Man I will kill) and Mertens was supposed to succeed in killing Brückner, but the script and the title were changed because the
, which was to be called Mörder unter uns (Murderer Among Us).The Murderers Among Us debuted on 15 October 1946 in the
Denazification
In the post-war period, it was a goal of both the American and the Soviet authorities to reeducate the German public. For the Americans, this meant exporting American films to West Germany. For the Soviets, this meant the establishment of
Ernst Wilhelm Borchert was removed from advertisements for the movie because he had been accused and arrested for lying on denazification paperwork,[3] but an article published in the Neue Zeit in 1947 later reported that he'd been exonerated by the Denazification Commission for Artists.[4]
Part of denazification was also the search toward finding a new German culture. Being a part of German culture, post-war period German cinema had a role to play and embarked on this search by exploring different film styles. The Murderers Are Among Us embarks on this search by drawing namely on the Western and the domestic melodrama.[5] The movie adopts certain features of the classical Western, while also giving them a unique twist. Hans, although presented as a Western hero, is an atypical one, as he does not give into vengeance at the end of the movie. The style of the domestic melodrama is also given a twist by being awkwardly placed in a Western-like movie. It serves the purpose of wanting to restore order through the character of Susanne and her attempt to establish a household for Hans, cure his precarious emotional state, and re-integrate him in society.
The melding of these film styles explains why despite being “an often overlooked cinematic legacy” The Murderers Are Among Us “tells us much about the politics of the past in early postwar German culture,”[6] namely the tension between establishing a new society and culture while also coming to terms with a Nazi past.
Reception
The picture sold 6,468,921 tickets.[7]
Most of the reviews were positive, although some criticized the fact that the characters appeared in modern and trendy clothes, which did not reflect the reality of the living conditions of Berliners in the immediate post-war period. In this film, Staudte was not only dealing with Germany's past, but also with his own, as he had been involved in the filming of the
See also
References
- ISBN 0-8078-4512-4
- ^ ISBN 978-1-57113-468-4.
- ISBN 978-1-84545-605-4.
- ^ "Biography of Ernst Wilhelm Borchert".
- ^ Shandley, Robert R. (2001). Rubble Films: German Cinema in Shadow of 3Rd Reich. Temple University Press. p. Chapter 2.
- ^ Shandley, Robert R. (2001). Rubble Films: German Cinema in Shadow of 3Rd Reich. Temple University Press. p. 22.
- ^ List of the 50 highest-grossing DEFA films.
- The Murderers are among us in progress-film.de, the distributor of the complete DEFA film heritage
- Die Mörder sind unter uns, 1946 in filmref.com. Retrieved 2007-01-19.
- Murderers Are Among Us, The (Moerder sind unter uns, Die) in German-films.de. Retrieved 2007-01-19.