Germany Year Zero

[Foxbat]

Written and directed by Roberto Rossellini
Starring Edmund Moeschke, Ingetraud Hinze, Franz-Otto Kruger

Italian with English subtitles

!947 – Berlin is a bombed out wasteland. Within the crumbling remains of this once proud city, its inhabitants fight for survival in any way they can. Edmund, a fifteen-year-old boy shares a room in a crowded apartment with his sister, elder brother and sick father. His sister goes out at night to earn cigarettes to use as currency on the black market, his father is too ill to work, and his elder brother hides from the authorities – afraid that his military past may be used against him. This leaves only Edmund to try and earn a living any way he can.

Everyday, he wanders the rubble-strewn streets in search of food or money to take back to his family. Most times his search is fruitless but every now and then, he picks up a few potatoes or some money. One day, he meets his old school teacher who now profits from the sale of Nazi propaganda. This becomes a catalyst to a chain of events culminating in a shocking conclusion to this film.

Brutal and unflinching, Rossellini shows it like it is. He neither excuses nor apologises for the events leading to this position but shows a Germany devastated and lost, not only in terms of the war but lost within itself – wracked with the guilt of its Nazi past but still trying to survive, to find some kind of future for itself. The terrible irony of this situation is summed up in one particular scene from the film – Edmund attempts to sell a recording of one of Hitler’s speeches to a couple of allied soldiers. He plays the record for them on an old hand-wound gramophone. The camera pans across a deserted and devastated wasteland as the words of the dead Fuhrer rants and raves his bile into the silent Berlin streets.

This is a fine example of Italian Neo-Realist cinema, but the most significant thing about Germany Year Zero is that it is still as relevant today as it was when it was first made.

It is a sad fact on this small planet of ours that children and their families struggling to survive in bombed-out cities is still a common sight on our news programmes so many years after Rossellini made this shocking masterpiece.