Film Archive
Murderers Are Among Us, The (Moerder sind unter uns, Die)
Berlin 1945. Susanne Wallner, a young photographer, returns home from the concentration camp, but her flat is occupied. The surgeon Mertens, who recently returned from the war, is trying to suppress his terrible memories through excessive drinking. They come to an arrangement and, with Susanne's help, Dr. Mertens slowly returns to his former self. Then he meets his former captain Bruckner, now a slippery businessman who couldn't care less whether he makes cooking pots out of steel helmets or vice versa. Mertens' conscience rebels, and on Christmas Eve 1945, he wants to demand atonement for a massacre of men, women and children which had been ordered three years previously by Bruckner. At the last moment, Susanne is able to convince him that the retaliation of such guilt is not a private affair and that the war criminal should be brought before a court.
Wolfgang Staudte was born in Saarbruecken in 1906 and died in Slovenia in 1984. He appeared as an actor on the stage for Max Reinhardt and Erwin Piscator. Working at the East German studios DEFA after 1945, he became widely known with the very first German postwar feature film, The Murderers Are Among Us (Die Moerder sind unter uns, 1946), and subsequently continued with such films as Rotation (1949), the Heinrich Mann-adaptation The Kaiser's Lackey (Der Untertan, 1951), and The Story of Little Muck (Die Geschichte vom kleinen Muck, 1953). Staudte's decision, however, in 1955 to continue his work in the West forced him to compromise with commercial demands. In Roses for the Prosecutor (Rosen fuer den Staatsanwalt, 1959) and Stag Party (Herrenpartie, 1964), he returned to his critical stance, connecting the fascist past with West Germany's present.Category Feature Film Cinema
Year of Production 1946
Director Wolfgang Staudte
Screenplay Wolfgang Staudte
Directors of Photography Friedl Behn-Grund, Eugen Klagemann
Editor Hans Heinrich
Music by Ernst Roters
Production Company DEFA/Berlin
Principal Cast Ernst Wilhelm Borchert, Elly Burgmer, Hildegard Knef, Erna Sellmer
Length 91 min, 2,475 m
Format 35 mm, b&w, 1:1.33
Original Version German
Subtitled Versions English, French, Spanish
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