The Bridge 2
When Hans and Albert return to the town, the leader of the demolition squad ridicules them. This is more than Hans can take and he becomes aggressive. The officer prepares to shoot Hans, but gets shot in the back by Albert. As the survivors of the squad retreat, one of them fatally shoots Hans and only Albert is left to return home. The story is based on a true story from the surviving veteran, we may assume to be Albert. Just before the credits we read that: 'This event occurred on April 27, 1945. It was so unimportant that it was never mentioned in any war communique.'
New York Times film critic, Bosley Crowther argues that nothing constructive comes from this film, that it is an exercise in masochism that re-inflicted the horrors of the war on a people that still suffered from fresh wounds. Unsupervised, the boys commitment to the Nazi ideology of how to fight the war keeps them at their post, leading to their senseless deaths. Crowther feels that the only message here is that “war is hell,” but there are other ways of viewing Die Brücke as well.
The closing line about the triviality of this event forces viewers to reflect on the senseless of the bloodshed they have just witnessed, as well as the fact that this event, when counted among the others, represents only a sliver of the hardships and horrors that German soldiers faced – not to mention the many other aspects of the war. Academics are inclined to look at this film the same way they do All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, as an exercise in historical memory and, possibly, imagination. In this sense, it leaves us asking questions, like how accurately do we remember the past and when an event leaves such an impact on the rest of our lives, how do we assign meaning to it.
Die Brücke acts as a cinematic piece of microhistory, which takes this small, relatively trivial event in the larger history of the Second World War, and uses it to ask questions about the larger picture. How much did Nazi ideology have to do with the boys stubborn courage and how much of it was their naïve adolescent bravery? Was it bravery at all?
Although Crowther may have found that this film was less enjoyable and about as productive as taking a bandaid off too quickly, the film’s list of awards attests to the fact that many other critics internationally have at least smiled on the existence of such piece of cinematography. Other critics call it a “shocking story” and compare it to such modern films as Saving Private Ryan (1998). Although the film has fallen out of popularity, since the 1960s, it stands apart from other post-war German films for its intense realism and anti-jingoistic message, which take all the nobility and honour out of military courage revealing the ways in which such attributes can be seen as stubbornness and utterly futile.
Many argue that Die Brücke is “one of the greatest anti-war films ever made.”
See Also
Hapke, Thomas. “Wilhelm Ostwald, the “Brücke” (Bridge), and Connections to Other Bibliographic Activities at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century.” In M. E. Bowden, T. B. Hahn, & R. V. Williams (Eds.), Proceedings of the 1998 Conference on the History and Heritage of Science Information Systems. Medford, NJ: Information Today. Available online
Moeller, Robert G. "Germans as Victims?: Thoughts on a Post-Cold War History of World War IIis Legacies" History & Memory 17.1/2 (Spring/Summer 2005): 147-194
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