This volume of essays by scholars of German film and culture examines the relatively neglected German films of the immediate post-World War II period, the so-called "rubble films." Often seen merely as symptoms of a particular German malady--the supposed inability to confront the sins of its immediate past--these films have rarely been examined for their aesthetic qualities and for what they actually depict about postwar German life, attitudes, and fears. Placed within the context of German film history of the postwar period and Allied censorship, the essays examine both well-known and nearly forgotten films for their narrative structure, aesthetic strategies, political ideologies, psychological portraits of damaged adults and orphaned youth, and the nuances of the history they reveal.

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This volume offers a cultural, aesthetic, and critical reappraisal of German 'rubble films' produced in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and constructs their meaning in a historical context.