The Return of the Hero? Contemporary German War Films

AbstractSince 1945 depictions of Germans at war have invariably been contentious. Films such as Bernhard Wicki's Die Brucke/The Bridge (1959) or Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot (1981) sought to contextualize their protagonists' involvement in the war against a simplified framework of complicity with, or resistance to, National Socialism. Recent successes of Der Untergang/Downfall (Hirschbiegel, 2004) or Sophie Scholl—Die letzten Tage/The Final Days (Rothemund, 2005) revealed a lucrative market for continued examination of Germany's Nazi past. Following German unification in 1990 Bundeswehr ‘out of area’ deployments, notably in the Balkans and Afghanistan, have been the source of much soul-searching. The cherished notion of the ‘Burger in Uniform’ seemed in jeopardy: public responses to these deployments have revealed a society still adjusting to the reality of a new, more aggressive foreign policy. Only gradually has this subject crossed into the sphere of contemporary German cinema. This paper examines a nu...