Lied 5, 'Das Wirtschaftswunderlied' - how does the film visually support the song? And what does it tell you about Germany at this time?
Kurt Hoffman's Wir Wunderkinder is a film which details two parallel german lives, that of the clean living, good Hans Böckel and that of the opportunistic Bruno Tiches, from their childhood in the Kaiserreich, through the Weimar years and the third Reich, to the economic miracle of the Bundesrepublik. Many engaging elements make up the course of this film, including its use of political and social satire and romantic comedy, but the most interesting aspect is the storytelling, which takes the form of two well known cabaret singers playing songs over pieces of film in a cinema, while bantering between each other. Their music not only details, often satirically, the german history of whatever period the film is concerned with, but the style and tempo always reflects the moods of the times.
The first song, for example, holds a very twenties style rhythm and is indeed played to a Charleston dancer in a club where we meet the older but still youthful Tiches. Der Arische Marsch is very soldierlike, played at the beginning of Hitler's reign, and has a clever pun at the end ('im Marsch, im Arsch').
The last song, Das Wirtschaftswunderlied, is a good example of simultaneity between not only the music and the lyrical content, but the visuals on screen as well. Set after the war when the four occupying forces divided the nation into two separate countries, the soviet East and the Franco-US-British West. It was around this time of severe poverty and hardship that the west ploughed millions of dollars into rebuilding the West German economy, specifically to recreate her as a buffer state for the western powers beside the eastern bloc, but also to avoid the situation created after the First World War. Then, the Germans were punished for defeat and heavily sanctioned, breeding the kind of hate and desire for revenge that spawned Hitler. This time the defeated Deutschland was to be helped back onto her feet, and the economic explosion that took place rapidly made Germany into one of Europe's leading economies. All of this is documented in the visuals of this song.
The first shots, accompanying slower, more downbeat music, show a town of rubble, bombed out old buildings, and a woman collecting debris. Windows are boarded up, ("Aus Pappe und aus Holz sind die Gardinen,"), and on fences are found a 'Zettelmosaik' of notices offering goods in exchange for food, like some kind of classified adverts board in a newspaper. Those who smoke must grow their own tobacco, as seen by the man hanging leaves out to dry. A nation defeated, occupied and divided, the feeling is that of the lonely man walking along the rubble strewn lane: was machen wir jetzt?
And then of course the music changes and becomes much more uptempo. It was in 1948 that the old Reichsmark was abandoned for the new Deutschmark of the new West Germany, and every West German was given forty DM to start themselves off in the new economy. The film now shows shots of shops being reopened gradually, and a woman passes with a large wooden frame of some kind as if to be rebuilding. There is a nice flash car parked outside of a clean row of shops: Jetzt kommt das Wirtschaftswunder! We are given a picture depicting a well dressed fat German man sat feasting posh wine and Eisbein, with the corresponding lyrics that state the German stomach is already getting much rounder.
There is no need to save on petrol any more if you drive, we are told, as a car whizzes by. In the shop windows we are shown that goods are quickly becoming more plentiful, and of course in Germany at this time the shopkeepers were restocking their shelves with goods they'd saved since the days of the depression, when high inflation meant that to sell anything would have been useless; the money would be worth nothing the next day. This changes to a shot of a man buying a newspaper from a vendor, with headlines offering the memoirs of old Nazis, as the song explains. And speaking of former Nazis the next image is Bruno Tiches, in his car at the traffic lights.
The following sequence heralds a bridge in the song, which has a more sinister feel to its music. The lyrics offer Germany hope that they can overcome all their ills and still remain a very strong people, building themselves up higher and higher - but not necessarily in the expansionist - wider and wider - methods of the Reichs. The film displays a range of images, huge modern trains pulling into stations, soldiers lining up with their rifles, and then importantly a huge crowd of West German football supporters, from the 1954 World Cup. This is telling us that West Germany at least will retain their national pride but show it in much less aggressive battlefields - in the arenas of the sports world, for example. The images correspond with the text beautifully at the end of the bridge, with the mouths crying "Hoch! Hoch!" and the high rise buildings erecting; culminating in a very humourous shot of a small dog urinating by a tree, very low down, keeping it light-hearted still.
However, for all its new-found wealth, there are still those who are poor; the picture goes with the text again and shows some children playing beside what looks like an old barracks, where it seems they are living, in the shadow of the apartment towers. The lyrics remind us again that the old nazi boys have not simply disappeared and are meanwhile reaping money from the state in this fledgling republic, now, as the poster announces, divided by the war's victors. This reminder brings the viewer nicely back to Bruno Tiches, now an older man in a Mercedes (his cars have been improving all throughout the film), who is arriving to appear before an assessor to prove he was not a Hitlerite in the war. Similarly there were thousands of former nazi party members who, denying their past, flourished in the new West Germany. It was during this time that many Germans were questioned about their involvement with the Third Reich and assessed accordingly, being put on trial if they didn't come away with a clean sheet, or Persilschein (after the washing powder!).
To express effectively in this medium the rebirth of a country in the years following defeat is not necessarily an easy task. It is very simple to just tell the story on film with matching text, for example, to say that 'the Russians took this land and the West took this land and poured in lots of money and gave each German forty Deutschmarks and then shops reopened and towers were built' but this sequence does not do that, it merely implies it. It is not a history lesson, it throws us images and we gather the mood from that by becoming interested in it. I think therefore that Wir Wunderkinder is successful in supporting the song and gives the viewer of the 1990s a picture of the young West Germany that the history books more than often leave out.
Pete Scully, November 1998