Die Brücke, or the The Bridge

[gwb123]

“Is there anything left between us and the Americans?”

 

A scary question to ask if you are one of seven teenage kids left alone to guard a small bridge in Germany in April 1945.  Especially since a week ago you were still a high school student.

“Die Brücke” or the “The Bridge” is a 1959 West German film based on a novel by Gregor Dorfmeister, and directed by Bernhard Wicki.

 

It was hailed as the first postwar anti-war movie of significance to be made in Germany.

 

Based on the commentary that accompanied the movie, there were several movies made in the 1950’s examining what the Germans had experienced during the war, especially those in the military.  But it was noted that these mainly focused on “the good Germans”: the ones who were far removed from the atrocities of the regime and who had fought honorably and had suffered the terrible ravages of war. 

 

One has to remember that in the 1950’s much of the world still had very strong feelings about the world, and Germany was treated very harshly.  Such movies were made as redemption, to ease the pain of enduring the unending accusations that came with the immediate postwar period.  (There were international leaders at the time who wanted to strip Germany of all industry and technology so that it could never rise to wage war again.)

 

Die Brücke went against that grain and forced a national conversation within Germany of what a wasteful failure the whole affair had been.  The movie also made an international impression, conveying that the Germans of the post war era were capable of deep introspection about the war years.  It won a number of international awards and was even shown in Moscow.  It was nominated for a 1959 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

 

 

I don’t want to give away too much of the plot.  You can imagine from the start it is not going to end well for those portrayed.

 

When we first meet the main characters, they are typical high school boys, concerned with school, girls, and their families.

 

Through the personal lives of the boys, we are given a micro view of what life was like in a small German town at the end of the war. We have one who is the son of landed gentry, who’s father went to war as an officer.  (The family estate is maintained by poorly motivated foreign workers, which was an interesting detail.)  Another has an aunt who supports herself by doing hand laundry for the rest of the town.  Then there is the son of the local Gauleiter, who as a father is as oppressive as he is cowardly.  Theirs is a major father-son conflict as the father abandons both his son and his town to escape the coming of the Americans.

 

After all of the backgrounds are established, the boys receive their draft notices and orders to report for training.  Their reactions range from bravado to thoughtful concern and acquiescence due to peer group pressure.

 

Whatever excitement they had about military service is quickly blunted by the rather hurried training by the hardnosed NCO’s of an army that is quickly disintegrating. 

 

With barely a day of training for our characters the entire training battalion is suddenly activated to meet the oncoming Americans.  These kids can barely put together their field gear when they are packed onto a truck to meet the foe.

 

While the officers and NCO’s are shown to be quite cynical about their own chances of survival, they still have enough compassion to place this teenage squad at a noncritical assignment: to guard an insignificant bridge that coincidentally is in their home town.

The irony of course, is intentional.  Just days before they had been playing on that same bridge with their girlfriends in total innocence.

 

I will stop there.  Suffice to say, it does not end well for them.

 

For my interests, the older I get the more curious I have become about what life was like for average Germans both during World War II and in the postwar era.  Most of all of this was settled by the time I served in Germany in the 1980’s, with the Western part of the country enjoying a fair degree of prosperity by then. But the war years were still a sensitive issue even there, and the history was always there in the background. This film shows the conflict of emotions that was still present just 14 years after war’s end.

 

On the technical side, to my eye much of the German equipment and uniforms looked authentic to the World War II period, which given the proximity to the war years was not surprising.  I was quite interested to see the sequences inside the German barracks as the kids were being trained and then mobilized.  Our troops occupied similar barracks in Baumholder when I was stationed there, right down to the niches in the hallways that served as rifle racks.

 

 

I will caution that there are gaffes.  The film commentary noted that “The Americans would not give us any tanks, so they had to be built”.  Apparently, the American command did not like the script (this was the 1950’s… things were still pretty uptight about our image in Europe back then).  The resulting ersatz thanks will give any viewer pause, but if you can get past that, its still a very strong story.

 

This is a good movie to add to your list if you have similar interests in the postwar German time period.  I obtained a copy on loan from DVD.com. Our copy was the 2015 Criterion Collection editions, which included interviews with the author and director. It is also available from Amazon.com, not to be confused with the spy thriller series of the same name.

 

(There was a 2008 remake of the movie, but per Wikipedia it was generally criticized for lacking the intensity of the original.)

 

The phots are from IMDB  https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052654/mediaindex?page=1&ref_=ttmi_mi_sm

 

For more background:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Brücke_(film)

[Dune Panther]

I can second everything written above about Die Brücke. This now-classic, compelling film stands the test of time and well illustrates the human cost of war (and much more).

 

My understanding is that the novel the film is based on was drawn from an actual, real-life event. While I do not know enough about this to confirm, the conditions of the time and the things the boys experienced in the film are accurate enough to be historically representative. Unlike some films that cheapen themselves with wildly inaccurate depictions of conflict & historical events.

 

Die Brücke is most definitely worth a watch and especially for those interested in the closing days of the war in Germany.     

[S.ChrisKelly]

"Born in Tailfingen, today part of Albstadt, Gregor Dorfmeister grew up in Bad Tölz, where he attended high school. In the spring of 1945 at age 16, he was a member of the Volkssturm in his home region and participated in defending two bridges against advancing American tanks. Seeing one of the tank-crew members wounded was "terrible. ... That's when I became a pacifist". Seven of eight of his young fellow German fighters were also killed in the day's battles before the town fell. In 1946 he finished high school."

 

Source:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_Dorfmeister

 

‘THE BRIDGE’ SHOWS A FORGOTTEN SIDE OF NAZI GERMANY’S FINAL DAYS

The Bridge, which tells the story of the Volkssturm in the final days of the Nazi party, is classic work of art.

By Jon Lisi / 26 June 2015

 

2015-06-23

 

In 1959, Bernhard Wicki made The Bridge, Germany’s first antiwar film since the end of World War II. The movie was an international success, and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film in 1960. After years of unavailability in the United States, the Criterion Collection has released The Bridge on Blu-ray and DVD so that American audiences can rediscover this historically, culturally, and cinematically important film about the effects of WWII from the German perspective.

 

Based on journalist Gregor Dorfmeister’s autobiographical novel, The Bridge follows a group of high school boys who are called to defend Germany in the last days of WWII. The boys are ordered to protect the Florian-Geyer-Brücke, an insignificant bridge in the small Bavarian town of Cham. As their parents and teachers fear for their safety, they naively believe that their role in the Volkssturm is important, and they regularly repeat the honor code “a soldier who defends just one square meter of ground defends Germany” to legitimize their service.

 

The quiet first half of the film revolves around ordinary life in Cham as the boys focus on school, family, friends, and girls. Their childhood is innocent. Any discussions they have of war are defined by a typical teenage obsession with honor and heroism. Like most boys who play GI Joe in the schoolyard, they are too young to comprehend the catastrophic consequences of war.

 

Overnight, their lives are disrupted when they are thrown into a war for which they are unprepared. Wicki grounds The Bridge in a specific time and place, but war films resonate because the anti-war message is timeless and universal. Too often, powerful governments wage war against other countries, and powerless young people are used as pawns to fight the battles. Of course, a number of wars throughout history have been necessary, but Wicki wants us to contemplate where we should draw the line. As he explains in a 1989 interview included in the bonus features, “To die or to be a hero means absolutely nothing if it’s not for the right cause.”

 

For example, the young boys in The Bridge are recruited by the Nazi Party at a time when the Party has collapsed. They are chosen simply because there’s no one left in Germany to fight. Their youthful idealism, which most likely stems from being brainwashed by Nazi propaganda, clouds their judgment. They are unable to comprehend the realities of the situation, even as everyone else in Cham senses the futility of their service.

 

A title card at the end of the film reads, “This event occurred on 27 April 1945.” This date is significant, and the tragic irony shouldn’t escape students of history. On 30 April, three days after the events of the film, Adolf Hitler committed suicide, an act that symbolizes the defeat of the Nazi Party.

 

Over 7,000 suicides occurred in Germany in 1945. According to historian Christian Goeschel in his article “Suicide at the End of the Third Reich”, these mass suicides show that the Nazi Party “had come to terms with their losses on a very personal and emotional level” (Journal of Contemporary History, 2006, 172). Psychiatrist Erich Menninger-Lerchenthal supports this claim, and in 1947, he proposed that the mass suicides “do not have anything to do with mental illness or some moral and intellectual deviance, but predominantly with the continuity of a heavy political defeat and the fear of being held responsible.” (The European Suicide Problem, 13.)

 

Different cultures have different conceptions of suicide, but it’s difficult to see the bravery of these mass suicides when we consider the young boys in the Volkssturm who were ordered to defend their Fatherland at all costs. As Hitler and other prominent leaders of the Nazi Party cowardly hid from the consequences of their actions and took their lives when the pressure from outside forces was too high, innocent young soldiers continued to fight for their Führer. Wicki’s defiant anti-war statement is clear: honor codes like “a soldier who defends just one square meter of ground defends Germany” are meaningless when warmongers who create the code hide in a bunker to avoid conflict. The Bridge asks us to honor the young boys who never had a chance, even as we most importantly honor the more than 11 million who were systematically slaughtered by the Nazi Party.

 

In an interview included in the bonus features, German filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff cites The Bridge as a major influence on “New German Cinema”. Wicki, who was briefly imprisoned in a German concentration camp when he was 18 years old for alleged leftist sympathies, had a personal connection to Dorfmeister’s novel, and future German filmmakers such as Schlöndorff responded favorably to Wicki’s anti-war message.

 

According to Schlöndorff, most German filmmakers in the ‘50s made war films about “the good German”, and Wicki, an Austrian-born artist who spent much of his life in Germany, was the first filmmaker of his generation to undermine this concept. In addition to his radical politics, his neorealist approach to production, as demonstrated by his decision to cast nonprofessional actors as the boys, represented a stylistic breakthrough for German cinema. Wicki inspired members of “New German Cinema” like Schlöndorff to distance themselves from the older generation of German filmmakers who glorified the Nazi Party’s perpetuation of war and refused to reason with what Schlöndorff calls its “self-satisfied” ideology. In opposition to the old guard, “New German Cinema” auteurs collectively made low-budget, politically-charged films, and they valued artistic quality over commercial success.

 

Criterion’s release of The Bridge will make Wicki’s must-see film more accessible to American audiences. The film has rightfully been revered by German filmmakers for decades, and given its significance, it deserves to be canonized as a classic work of art.

 

Source:

https://www.popmatters.com/194838-the-bridge-2495514257.html

 

Addendum:

Cham (Czech: Kouba) is the capital of the district of Cham in the Upper Palatinate in Bavaria in Germany.
Cham lies within the Cham-Furth lowland, which is bordered on the south by the Bavarian Forest and on the north by the Oberpfälzer Wald. The city lies on the Regen River, which joins the Danube at Regensburg.

 

Source:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cham,_Germany

 

Die Brücke

Film Location

 

Bernhard Wicki's film Die Brücke (The Bridge) won 44 festival awards including the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film and was nominated for an Academy Award in the same category. The film kickstarted the career of several German actors, including Michael Hinz, Volker Lechtenbrink, Cordula Trantow and Fritz Wepper. Virtually no-one in the industry had anticipated this kind of success. In fact, most stakeholders had advised director Wicki not to produce the movie at all for fear it would not find an audience.

 

One of the strengths of the film is certainly its authenticity. Though the story is based on the novel of the same name by Gregor Dorfmeister and set in Upper Bavaria, after an extensive location search Wicki opted for the city of Cham in the Bavarian Forest. Its main asset was the concrete Florian-Geyer bridge with the silouette of period-appropriate buildings in the background. (first image, Stadtarchiv Cham).

 

An additional bonus for the filmmakers was that the area on the southern end of the bridge was free of any buildings. This was important, as the film crew had to construct a set consisting of a couple of houses and several stone walls. This is the direction from which the three Sherman tanks and a group of soldiers from the US Army advance toward the town. 

 

In this picture the set construction south of the bridge is under way: the two houses were mere facades. Even the three tanks were replicas built in Munich, as the US Army refused to provide the real deal. (2nd image, Stadtarchiv Cham).

 

Die Brücke is based on Gregor Dorfmeister's personal account of defending a real bridge in the town of Bad Tölz against US forces in the Spring of 1945. Although he filmed in summer, Wicki wanted to stay true to the look and feel of a German spring. He ordered his crew to remove the leaf-bearing branches of several trees along the river bank - without asking the town's administration for permission. This resulted in a legal battle lasting for months.

 

View from the bridge onto the defoliated trees along the river bank. A crew member is preparing the set for filming one of the battle scenes. (3rd image, Stadtarchiv Cham).

 

Almost 60 years later, many of the buildings behind the bridge still exist. The bridge itself, however, was replaced with a modern construction in 1991. 

 

We visited in the winter of 2019 when the trees really were lacking any foliage! (4th image, Stefan Roesch).

 

A metal banderole with several film stills celebrates the 40th anniversary of this incredible movie. (5th image, Stefan Roesch).

 

Source:

https://www.filmquest.co/film-locations/die-bruecke/

 

 

 

 

Addendum:  There was also a Reserve-Lazarett Cham functioning in Cham, Bavaria during the Second World War.

 

More images from FilmQuest: