Between the lines: Konrad Wolf's 'Mama, ich lebe' and the dilemmas of betrayal

The article offers a close reading of Konrad Wolf’s anti-fascist Second World War film 'Mama, ich lebe' (DEFA, 1977). 'Mama, ich lebe', like all East German films about the Nazi past, deals with the re-founding of post-war Germany. Unlike the usual approach which focused on political redemption of the past crimes, Wolf’s approach explores rupture and failure of political agency as the pre-condition for a new beginning. The rupture is effected by the defection of four Wehrmacht soldiers who decide to cooperate with the Soviet enemy. Their betrayal of the national collective is ethically motivated and arises from their responsibility for the Soviet ‘other’. Its radicalness opens up a moment of utopian freedom and conciliation for the traitors. Yet the back side of betrayal is insecurity and confliction with regard to their role and roots. While the four meet their role as traitors with self-deception about their ambivalent position, they are eventually forced to acknowledge their position as one of self-defeat. Their ‘ethical betrayal’ (Parikh 2009) does therefore not lead to utopian fulfilment but to the traitors’ expiatory sacrifice as the only form of accountability and self-justification. In Wolf’s film antifascism as a tale of political redemption is thus revised and becomes a tale of necessary individual atonement.

The zero, the centre and the empty utopia: from Rossellini to Walter Salles

This article examines utopian gestures and inaugural desires in two films which became symbolic of the Brazilian Film Revival in the late 1990s: Central Station (1998) and Midnight (1999). Both evolve around the idea of an overcrowded or empty centre in a country trapped between past and future, in which the motif of the zero stands for both the announcement and the negation of utopia. The analysis draws parallels between them and new wave films which also elaborate on the idea of the zero, with examples picked from Italian neo-realism, the Brazilian Cinema Novo and the New German Cinema. In Central Station, the ‘point zero’, or the core of the homeland, is retrieved in the archaic backlands, where political issues are resolved in the private sphere and the social drama turns into family melodrama. Midnight, in its turn, recycles Glauber Rocha’s utopian prophecies in the new millennium’s hour zero, when the earthly paradise represented by the sea is re-encountered by the middle-class character, but not by the poor migrant. In both cases, public injustice is compensated by the heroes’ personal achievements, but those do not refer to the real nation, its history or society. Their utopian breadth, based on nostalgia, citation and genre techniques, is of a virtual kind, attune to cinema only.