Reordering the material of the past: gender and the morality of things in early postwar Germany

The essay focuses on two rubble films The Murderers Are Among Us and Between Yesterday and Tomorrow in order to explore how these films deal with the legacy of Nazi material culture in gendered terms. The objects on screen are analyzed as ‘tangible events’ relating to the disrupted order of things in postwar Germany, including the legacy of dispossession and ‘Aryanization’ of German space. Just as the problem of male guilt relates in these films in a peculiar way to the dispossessed belongings of a female victim, the problem of dispossession (and the related mass murder) is intermingled with the challenge of postwar gender relations. The physical act of cleaning up and re-ordering is not only established as a female task but is also intended to solve the problem of the Third Reich’s uncomfortably present material leftovers through women’s bodily interventions.