Film Forum

GERMANIA, ANNO ZERO
Italy/France/Germany, 1948
Directed by Roberto Rossellini
Starring Edmund Moeschke, Ernst Pittschau, Ingetraud Hinze
Approx. 78 min. 35mm.

Following the international acclaim and box office success of ROME, OPEN CITY and PAISAN, Rossellini took the first of many obstreperous swerves that would come to define his career. His next film would be another dispatch from war-torn Europe, with scenes playing out amidst the rubble with unvarnished immediacy, with unfamiliar and nonprofessional actors populating the cast—but this time, the protagonists would not be resistance fighters liberating Italy, but the defeated Germans muddling through their wasteland reich. Financed largely by the French government, GERMANY, YEAR ZERO became an experiment in radical empathy and its limits, casting about for signs of new life in a nation of crooks, unrepentant Nazis, and pederasts. The only innocent soul is twelve-year-old protagonist Edmund, who cannot qualify for a work permit, but must somehow earn a living to support his household. Even the child recognizes that he has no role models in this world: his brother is a mopey ex-soldier who refuses to register for a ration card, his father is an invalid who muses he’d be better off dead, his neighbors are coarse and severe, his friends are common swindlers, and his former school teacher still preaches that the strong must snuff out the weak. Unsentimental in the extreme and devoid of any comic relief, GERMANY YEAR ZERO plays like a seance for souls who have yet to recognize themselves as the walking dead.

35mm print courtesy Cinecittà.

Reviews

“A long opening tracking shot through Berlin’s ruins under the Occupation in 1945 is both documentary and a hallucinatory voyage through a Stone Age city, the perfect illustration of that realist film can also forge fantasy. It sparks against the story of a thirteen-year-old boy who works the black market, sells Hitler souvenirs for chewing-gum, and who will kill his sick father out of naïve mercy and regard for the whisperings of his old Nazi teacher.”
– Don MacPherson, Time Out