The Bridge (1959) (Criterion, Blu-ray, DVD) is a landmark film of post-war German cinema. Filmmakers (and perhaps audiences as well) were reluctant to confront World War II and its legacy in the years after the surrender to the Allies. Bernhard Wicki’s 1959 film, adapted from the semi-autobiographical novel by Manfred Gregor (the pen name of journalist Gregor Dorfmeister), was the first major German film to take on the subject, and it did so with a searing portrait of young soldiers unprepared for the realities of war thanks to the fantasies of Nazi propaganda.
Set in a rural German town in 1945, in the final days of the war as the Allies were converging on Berlin, it follows the story of seven high school boys who still believe in the German propaganda of duty and sacrifice to the Fatherland. The boys are Volkststurm, not regular army but a kind of Hitler Youth militia created in the last gasps of German defense, a Hail Mary pass that basically throws unprepared kids into the jaws of war. They can’t wait until they are called up and they get their wish and undergo a single day of basic training before the company is called to the front. Utterly unprepared for battle, their commander orders them to “guard” a bridge that is slated to be blown up. It’s an assignment meant to keep them out of combat, but when their squad leader is killed, they turn into patriotic zealots guided by the “wisdom” gleaned from propaganda films and rousing speeches and dismissive of the experience of veterans who attempt to offer advice.
The Bridge doesn’t debate politics or acknowledge the Holocaust and other crimes against humanity, and that works for this story. Director Bernhard Wicki is more interested in the cultural climate of Germany in the final days of the war, as an impotent hopelessness hangs over the adult survivors (even the local Nazi political leader, an opportunist and hypocrite who knows that his day is over, is preparing to flee) but the teenage boys are still in thrall to the fantasy of German supremacy promised by Hitler. It all plays out in the isolated bubble of a Bavarian town where the only men left too old, too young, or medically unfit for combat. The women run the shops and farms and the adults are resigned to Germany’s defeat as the bombs drop ever closer to the city and word of the Allied advance is met with a shrug. There’s no love left for Hitler except among the boys, still deluded by propaganda and patriotic fervor into believing they can turn it around and save their country. That also makes them arrogant, convinced that their idealism is truer than the experience of the women holding families together, old men who survived World War I, even veteran soldiers with a realistic perspective on the state of the war.
This is miniature, a portrait of 1945 Germany in microcosm, and Wicki eases us into the horror of combat by first focusing on quiet village life, where the boys are relatively protected from the reality of battle. They are all bluster and immature impulsiveness, ruled by hormonally-charged emotions and a distorted idea of national service. That’s fine for afterschool games but a bad combination with no military training and fantasies of war glory. Left alone to face the Americans (the chaos of the German retreat ends up killing the sole veteran soldier left behind to watch over the boys), they are no better than kids playing war with live rounds and discovering that there isn’t any glory in dying for your country. Wicki captures a sense of panic and desperation as the boys do their best to act like soldiers in the face of overwhelming forces. It’s a war film in close up, a minor skirmish in the scheme of things over a bridge with no tactical value, and it makes their sacrifice utterly meaningless by any measure.
The new 2K digital restoration is mastered from the original 35mm negative and a 35mm duplicate negative. It looks superb, a clean, sharp image with strong contrasts and no evident damage. It features a new 22-minute interview with Gregor Dorfmeister, who wrote the original autobiographical novel and discusses his real-life experience and the screen adaptation, and a ten-minute interview with filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff on the film’s impact in Germany, and an archival interview with director Bernhard Wicki discussing the film on a German TV talk show in 1989. Also includes a clip from the 2007 documentary Against the Grain: The Film Legend of Bernhard Wicki directed by Elisabeth Wicki-Endriss (the filmmaker’s widow) and a fold-out insert with an essay by film critic Terrence Rafferty.
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