Karl Kruger	the doctor
Franz Treuberg	the general Von Laubniz
Heidi Blankner	Mrs Rademaker
Hans Sangen	Mr Rademaker
Ernest Pittschau	Edmund's father
Babsy Reckvell Schultz	Joe
Edmund Moeschke	Edmund Koeler
Alexandra Manys	Christal
Hans Langen
Franz Kruger	Karl-Heinz
Ingetraut Hintze	Edmund's brother
Barbara Hintze	Eva, Edmund's sister

In the Berlin defeated and destroyed after the second world war, wound in an atmosphere of nightmare and hunger, a boy, thirteen year-old, Edmund Koeler, has to handle to his family’s necessities, formed by the old ill father, by the helder brother wanted as ex Nazi, and by his sister, that in the evening is a prostitute in the allied military places. The little Edmund, for instigation of his old Nazi teacher, to which he asks for help, poisons his father: “the weak and the useless should be eliminated because the strongest, the best are saved”. Taken by the remorse and the doubt, he comes back to his teacher for enlightenment, but he sends him away treating him as an assassin. Abandoned by everybody, he gropes for the destroyed streets of the city, he passes in front of a church, from which, with the sweat sound of an organ, a promise of life comes out; but he goes on. Climbed on the bell tower, he sees his house, from which they are taking away the dead father and, desperate, he jumps into space.

First prize at the Festival of Locarlo (1948)

CRITIQUE

Desperate conclusion (Rossellini had just lost his child Romano) of the ideal trilogy that includes Roma città aperta and Paisà. Thin and agonizing, perhaps the film that expresses better the realist poetic of the director, also scriptwriter together with Carlo Lizzani and Max Colpet (and with Sergio Amidei for the Italian dialogues): moving the cinecamera among the rubbles, Rossellini melts “social investigation and moral investigation” gathering without rhetoric the spirit of a city where, as the offscreen voice says at the beginning, people “live in the tragedy as in their natural element”. The choice of being Edmund, physically, a prototype of the Aryan youth. (P. Mereghetti “Dizionario dei film 1998”)

NOTES

Music directed by Edgardo Micucci
Assistant directors: Max Coplet, Carlo Lizzani

The Germany at the end of the war; a child that wanders for the city, hallucinated look, contemplates the scenery of a destroyed city. These basic elements of Germania anno zero, one of Roberto Rossellini’s masterpieces, among the shiniest looks of the Italian Neorealism, and undoubtedly one of the undisputed teachers of the world cinema. That of Rossellini was undoubtedly a challenge: to tell a destroyed country, aiming once again the attention on Germany now that the war is ended and Nazism definitely defeated. The year zero of the title can be understood in many ways: either as a new beginning, the possibility and the necessity for cinema, that is to say, to aim the look to reality, on a place and a country that necessarily has to restart to live, after the Nazism and after the war. But year zero can also have another meaning. Rossellini directed the cine camera on the characters that seem not to be able to live anymore, that wander in a hallucinated reality, almosts as ghosts. The war, the rift that has struck in depth the western world - Rossellini seems to say - has made at this point impossible to return to a narrative classical cinema. The moral imperative of who make cinema (and it is an imperative shared by many other authors of that period) is translated in the necessity to investigate the reality, to question it, to show what the world has become. With Germania anno zero Rossellini shows more and more as Neorealism doesn’t confine itself simply to the repetition of the formula “actors taken from the road + external shooting + stories of ordinary poverty”, but points out a hypotesis of cinema, a way to explore the reality, to discover by cinema what surrounds us and that, perhaps, only cinema is able to show with unbelievable depth. It is not a case if just this film definitely consecrated Rossellini in France and in USA. Some years later, infact, a group of young critics united around the magazine “Cahiers du cinéma” will start to realize some films just following the moral imperative of who they pointed out as their teacher.
Their names are those of the authors that will give life to the “Nouvelle Vague”: Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer.