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During the early postwar period, few German feature films dealt explicitly with the National Socialist past and its aftereffects. As in other eras, filmmakers responded to the audience's wish for entertainment. Some directors and screenwriters in both the East and the West did feel that the disturbing present, even if not the recent past, should not be ignored completely, and several films of the late 1940s were set in destroyed German cities.1 But as these so-called "rubble films" tended to focus on devastation and the difficulties of reconstruction, even this serious genre addressed everyday life during the Nazi dictatorship with its persecutions, war crimes and genocide only indirectly or in passing. Therefore most films did not confront German viewers with unsettling analyses of their behavior between 1933 and 1945.2 However, Wolfgang Staudte's early postwar films were exceptions to this trend. This director obviously wanted to understand the complete moral collapse of "respectable" civil society that followed the Nazis' seizure of power. He was particularly interested in the less spectacular forms of complicity such as opportunism, cowardice, vanity, careerism, unscrupulousness and the simple lack of courage to stand up for one's beliefs. Western occupation forces labeled participants in these forms of collaboration with the Third Reich Mitlaufer i.e. persons who "followed along." The Mitlaufer constituted the fourth category in their denazification procedure, nestled between the "lesser offenders" and the "exonerated." While morally unflattering, the label Mitlaufer implied no juridical consequences.3
Staudte placed Mitlaufer the center of two of his films: Die Morder sind unter uns (The Murderers Are among Us) from 1946 and Rotation from 1948-49. In each film, the protagonist is apolitical and in no way supports the Nazi Party; indeed, he privately opposes the regime and the war. Nonetheless, both men arc complicit: one as an officer on the Eastern Front, and the other as an employee of the press that prints the main Nazi newspaper. Each fails to intervene in crimes that he witnesses, and even when one of them eventually makes up his mind to support the resistance, he acts too late and all too ineptly. So, neither character is a hero, at least not in the beginning. Each must face the evil consequences of his complicity and go through a process...