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Billy Wilder's decision to return to Germany as a U.S. colonel at the close of World War II emanated from personal needs along with the desire of the U.S. government to have a leading Hollywood director with European experience provide advice on reorganizing and denazifying the German film industry in the postwar period.1 Wilder's personal concerns were twofold. First, he was in search of his mother and grandmother who had disappeared in the Holocaust. What he learned eventually from the Red Cross was that they had both been murdered in Auschwitz. His other worry was more immediately existential: "We wondered where we should go now that the war was over. None of us- I mean the émigrés- really knew where we stood. Should we go home? Where was home?"2
What follows is an examination of three films about Germany that Wilder was involved in during the early Cold War period (1945-61). The first, Death Mills (Die Todesmühlen, 1945), was a twenty-two-minute documentary he edited about the concentration camps; the other two, which he directed and coscripted, were the feature films A Foreign Affair (1948) and One, Two, Three (1961). My focus is on what these films suggest about Wilder's changing relationship to postwar Germany and how these changes dovetail with, in part resist but also give comedie articulation to, an emerging and then dominant Cold War culture.
The Making of Death Mills
The extent of Wilder's involvement with the final version of Death Mills is still a matter of dispute. What we do know is that this project to make what the Americans called an "education film" about the concentration camps was started in London by a Czech émigré named Hanus Burger, a lieutenant in the U.S. Army. Burger's attempt to place documentary footage from the camps into a larger fictional and historically explanatory frame exploring how and why a number of German youths in the early 1930s came to join the Nazi Party met with considerable resistance from his superiors working in the Psychological Warfare Division (PWD). This was partly because of time constraints brought on by the imminent end of the war but also because the PWD believed that such a fictionalized film would have "no impact."3 Hearing of Wilder's presence in...