Die Brucke (The Bridge) by Bernhard Wicki

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Recommended: Impact of military service on society

Die Brücke, 1959 (The Bridge) by Bernhard Wicki is frequently acknowledged as a momentous anti-war film, though its significance is more nuanced and multifaceted. Its view on war is further ambiguous than the tedious representation would advocate. This was several years after the Federal Republic of Germany reinstituted the army, joined the NATO alliance in 1955, and reinstated the military draft of young men in 1956.

Therefore, this film is not only a testimony about the German past but also the German present. It displays the irrational annihilation of six young Germans at the end of WWII, summoning up a very agonizing recollection of Nazi Germany’s futile effort to turn back the Allied invasion by hurling teenage boys into the fight. However, because West Germany had only recently reinstituted a military draft on young men, the film also implicates a standpoint against West German remilitarization. The conventional West German government comprehended this message as well. Die Brücke was released in the United States on May 1, 1961 to a critical and popular acclaim, offering an obvious reiteration of the war-is-hell theme, but does so with compelling visual imagery and legitimate emotional resonance.

The very uselessness of the boys’ service is crystal clear to viewers right at the beginning of the film. The vivid, blatant detail is enhanced by the black-and-white cinematography, ultimately apprehending the chaos amidst the desperately adhered to codes and conventions, structures that generate a misleading sense of mandate and expectedness. Within an interview conducted by Hans Ulrich Reichert of Tagesschau (Daily News) in 1959, Bernhard Wicki noted that he made the film not as a pro- or anti-war statement but ra...

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... Works Cited

In a review dated 2 May 1960, Bosley Crowther of The New York Times describes the film as “intense and compelling”, and as “notable” for “its concentrated emotional drive”. Time magazine similarly describes it (in a review dated 12 May 1961) as “a minutely observed, almost unwatchable massacre of the innocents”. The Bridge’s popular acclaim is attested to by its 1960 Academy Awards nomination for Best Foreign Language Film (it lost to Marcel Camus’ French entry, Orfeu Negro/Black Orpheus, 1959) and its Golden Globe win.

Interview with Wicki conducted by journalist Hans Ulrich Reichert, Tagesschau (Daily News), ep. no. 1488, 22 October 1959.

Cited in Gagnon, Celluloid Heroes, 130-31. Originally from Joe Hembus and Christa Bandmann, Klassiker des deutschen Tonfilms, 1930-1960 (Munich: Goldman, 1980), 189, 191.

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