Martyrs for the Nation

THIS CHAPTER EXPLORES the representation of Christians as victims of National Socialism in the cinema of the Federal Republic, and particularly the representation of Christian resisters who fell victim to Hitler’s regime. Such representations have not been a consistent feature of the Federal Republic of Germany’s film culture; rather, we can observe clusters of films that examine the predicament of Christians, whether as resisters or as more passive victims, emerging at different points in time with often very different emphases. The discussion below will provide a survey of these representations and locate them within the development of German memory culture, offering for the first time an overview of the shifting filmic representations of Christianity under National Socialism produced in the postwar period until the present day.

Aleida Assmann has noted close parallels between the Christian notion of martyrdom and the secularized national commemoration of the fallen. The Christian martyr, following the example of Jesus, dies as proof of the coming kingdom of God; to venerate and imitate the martyr is to express one’s faith in that better future. In the case of the national martyr, her or his death either points toward a victory not yet won or is looked back on as a forbear of the national victory now finally secured. Assmann argues that for Germans immediately after the Second World War the imposition of a “perpetrator memory,” demanded by the outside world, blocked such normal national commemoration, condemning Germans to silence about the past. As Robert G. Moeller’s work has amply demonstrated, however, to talk of silence about the past in postwar West Germany, and indeed silence about the suffering of Germans themselves as a consequence of the war, is something of an exaggeration: any expectation that Germans would regard themselves as perpetrators did not stop them mourning the destruction of their cities, their soldiers lost in the war or in captivity, or the flight and expulsion of refugees from former eastern territories. Moreover, a closer look at the political culture, and also the film culture, of the Federal Republic in its early years would equally appear to call Assmann’s generalization into question.