Comparisons between 1950's and 1960's War Films

Konrad Wolf, the East German film director, once described himself as a “Vaterlandsverrätter” (Herlinghaus, 1982,10) because he experienced the war, not as a Landser, but as a Red Army Officer resisting and finally defeating the Nazi’s on the Eastern Front. This description of him was given to him by students in the late 1940’s when still a Soviet citizen he lectured the students of a University about Antifascism. Against the background that even in the mid 1950’s polls in West Germany showed that 53% of former Wehrmacht soldiers and at least 30% of civilians still believed that resistance to Hitler was “treason” (Köppen, 2010, 62) and the East German establishment believed that resistance to National Socialism was the norm (Wölfel, 2012,3) that he and other directors of the 1950’s and 1960’s grappled with the thorny subject of what it meant to be a resistor in Hitler’s Germany.

On Friday I was a speaker at the excellent "Subversion and Resistance in German Film Conference" at the University of Leeds. You can download a copy of my presentation here.