Alemania, año cero

... from UGC and director Roberto Rossellini. In the bombed out ruins of Germany's capital city, the Kohler family struggles to survive. The father (Ernst Pittschau) is sick and bedridden. Eldest son Karl-Heinz (Franz-Otto Kruger) is a former soldier in hiding from the police and unable to work. Daughter Eva (Ingetraud Hinze) goes out at night to try and skim what she can from the soldiers looking for companionship. Which leaves 12-year-old Edmund (Edmund Moeschke) to provide what food he can by working various menial jobs. He eventually falls in with petty criminals, and maybe worse, as the family's situation continues to deteriorate. Also featuring Erich Guhne, Jo Herbst, Christl Merker, and Hans Sangen.

Rossellini closes out his War Trilogy (after 1945's Rome Open City and 1946's Paisan) with this stark look at survival in a former war-zone. The actors are all non-professionals, and it shows, but one gets used to it, and Rossellini does a good job of keeping things within his performers' range. This is now the third film from 1948, following Berlin Express and A Foreign Affair, that I've watched recently that has been set in postwar Germany. Unlike those two, this one doesn't use the country as a backdrop for entertainment. Rather, this is an unflinching look into human misery and deprivation, and not for those looking for a good time. While I like the other two in Rossellini's trilogy more, this is still a very noteworthy, and recommended, film for those with the constitution for it.

This was on Criterion DVD, part of the Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy box set, containing all 3 films. Each disc has loads of extras pertaining to that particular film, and the Germany Year Zero disc also has a feature-length documentary on Rossellini's life and career. Highly recommended to anyone with an interest in the man, his work, or international films of the mid-20th century.

After watching "Roma, città aperta" in the 1970's and "Paisà" in the late 1980's, I finally saw "Germania anno zero", the last part of Roberto Rossellini's war trilogy. Compared to the first two installments, they all share the immediacy of the war, but this time Rossellini is more direct: no subplots, only a handful of characters, all of whom move around young Edmund (Edmund Mëschke), the 12-year-old German boy who lives in a miserable apartment with five other families, and who maintains his sick father, his brother who was a Nazi soldier and his sister, who is close to becoming a prostitute. Edmund pretends he's old enough to work, but when he's denied that opportunity, he steals, sells items in the black market, or allows his former teacher to caress him lasciviously for a few marks. What's more impressive in this film is the lack of sentimentality – compared to De Sica's children movies- and the absence of preaching: when one character does preach, he would have better stayed shut! I think that many scholars are no longer interested in the aesthetics of Italian Neorealism, but–in my appreciation- Roberto Rossellini is one of the big names in the history of cinema, far more important than other filmmakers who are idolized, and his war films are more interesting to me than later works as "Voyage in Italy".

I must confess to a lingering fascination of the condition of Germany, and the German peoples, immediately following WWII. The country, of course, was broken - destroyed - in ruins. More importantly, so were the people. The real life stories I have read speak to so many aspects of their condition: shame, starvation, disbelief, shock of the revelations of the evil of their own doing, and despair. Always despair. They are stories of how the human spirit can overcome the most horrific nightmares and conditions.

This movie drills to the heart of many of those issues, sometimes subtly, sometimes brazenly. Rossellini was never better.

I consider this movie to be a must view on two levels: First, it is quite frankly one of the best moves ever made. Easy words to throw around, and said too often about too many films. Those words apply here. Second, it is a must view for the understanding it can provide of what the world - particularly Germany and Europe - were like after WWII. It belongs to a small suite of movies (such as Schindler's List) that show real insight, a true view into the world during this bleak time in history.

Rossellini's films just after World War II are to be appreciated as both social comment and for artistic advancement in the matter of film. This film, like no other, deals with Germany as a vanquished nation, driven downward toward annihilation. Edmund, a young boy, made to beggar himself in order to survive, gives one of the truly authentic portraits of youth driven to despair ever seen on the screen.

How used to sentimentality we Americans had become by the time Rossellini made this desolate vision of a destroyed post-war Europe.

How coddled and led astray were we by image after image of dimpled, freckled kids clutching hold of their pets. Children the likes of Mickey Rooney or Dean Stockwell. How engaging...and yet how unreal.

Edmund isn't just a child, we learn. But more so, a country.

A nation bombed into rubble and tasting its own ashes. Stripped of everything of any value and reduced to zero. Rejected by everyone and forced into murder...in the end made to stare death in the face.

Germany YEAR ZERO will shock you. Make you wince as the tragedy of a nation corrupted unfolds, and self-destructs.

Edmund is no longer just a boy made to suffer in a world he never made. In the end he's our conscience.

This is the third film in Rossellini's war trilogy; the other 2 films are Roma citta' aperta (Rome Open City) and Paisa. I thought this film was of the same quality as Paisa. Rossellini continues to use the same sort of staging and neorealist style as before. It's interesting to see the footage of (mostly destroyed) Berlin... It's interesting to see how a director from a country that was once allied with Nazi Germany decides to portray postwar life in Germany. A bleak film, but very Rossellini-ish: children as important characters, sexual perversion equated with moral turpitude, the telescoped-in time frame. As in his first film, Roma citta' aperta, Rossellini provides an intense story. Neorealism can sound dry--and some of the neorealist films were rather depressing and not exactly fun to watch--but this film is definitely more than watchable.