User reviews

This is the third film in Rossellini's war trilogy; the other 2 films are Roma citta' aperta (Rome Open City) and Paisa. I thought this film was of the same quality as Paisa. Rossellini continues to use the same sort of staging and neorealist style as before. It's interesting to see the footage of (mostly destroyed) Berlin... It's interesting to see how a director from a country that was once allied with Nazi Germany decides to portray postwar life in Germany. A bleak film, but very Rossellini-ish: children as important characters, sexual perversion equated with moral turpitude, the telescoped-in time frame. As in his first film, Roma citta' aperta, Rossellini provides an intense story. Neorealism can sound dry--and some of the neorealist films were rather depressing and not exactly fun to watch--but this film is definitely more than watchable.

This masterpiece, filmed while the action and subject matter of the film, was at its most intense, is a must see. Featuring non-professional actors, in the neo-realist style which defined post-war Italian cinema, you will experience a lyrical view of Germany, actually devastated Berlin. This is how it was at Hour Zero, or "Anno Zero" when new currency was introduced, and the economy started again from scratch with each German receiving the same (very little) cash to rebuild their lives, and indeed their country. The film has magnificent scenes including the voice of Adolf Hitler coming from a record player among the ruins of the Chancellery, deaths in gutted buildings, and several especially poignant scenes of the young boy who has known nothing but misery during his few years of life, yet continues his fight to survive.

Rossellini's films just after World War II are to be appreciated as both social comment and for artistic advancement in the matter of film. This film, like no other, deals with Germany as a vanquished nation, driven downward toward annihilation. Edmund, a young boy, made to beggar himself in order to survive, gives one of the truly authentic portraits of youth driven to despair ever seen on the screen.

How used to sentimentality we Americans had become by the time Rossellini made this desolate vision of a destroyed post-war Europe.

How coddled and led astray were we by image after image of dimpled, freckled kids clutching hold of their pets. Children the likes of Mickey Rooney or Dean Stockwell. How engaging...and yet how unreal.

Edmund isn't just a child, we learn. But more so, a country.

A nation bombed into rubble and tasting its own ashes. Stripped of everything of any value and reduced to zero. Rejected by everyone and forced into murder...in the end made to stare death in the face.

Germany YEAR ZERO will shock you. Make you wince as the tragedy of a nation corrupted unfolds, and self-destructs.

Edmund is no longer just a boy made to suffer in a world he never made. In the end he's our conscience.

As a child of the post war Berlin ruins myself, I confess this film had a special relevance. But nothing could have prepared me for the sheer impact that Germany Year Zero has upon the soul. Roberto Rosselini captured a tragedy that has been largely ignored and his haunting work screams the pain of post war civilian suffering in Berlin louder than any documentary.

Not only filmed in the very streets where a million died only months before, all those appearing in Stunde Null were quite clearly living the very experience they were enacting. These were not actors. Their performances are clumsy and strained without the polish of professional training or Hollywood editing. But that was the magic of this production. This was not drama but rather a window of reality. Their faces were scarred by the terrors they had just survived and one can only wonder at their courage to enact their own daily suffering for the entertainment of others.

The essence of the plot is simple enough. It is the story of ordinary German civilians trying to survive the starvation and deprivations of 1945 Berlin. The central character is a 12 year old boy, Edmund, who has to endure anything and everything in order to provide for his family. And in the end.....

Well nobody knows what really happened to Edmund Moeschke, the ex Hitler Jugend who was playing himself. After filming the external shots in Berlin the entire cast were taken to Rome in 1946 where the interior scenes were put together. And of course most of them attempted to remain there. Edmund disappeared from history and probably met his end somewhere in the Roman streets. Certainly he has never emerged to claim the accolades that would undoubtedly be poured upon him were he to only mention his name.

But Edmund will never be forgotten because his tragic story touches the soul and speaks for millions of other youngsters who were so cruelly sacrificed in that terrible conflict. This is not a film: it is a masterpiece.

After watching "Roma, città aperta" in the 1970's and "Paisà" in the late 1980's, I finally saw "Germania anno zero", the last part of Roberto Rossellini's war trilogy. Compared to the first two installments, they all share the immediacy of the war, but this time Rossellini is more direct: no subplots, only a handful of characters, all of whom move around young Edmund (Edmund Mëschke), the 12-year-old German boy who lives in a miserable apartment with five other families, and who maintains his sick father, his brother who was a Nazi soldier and his sister, who is close to becoming a prostitute. Edmund pretends he's old enough to work, but when he's denied that opportunity, he steals, sells items in the black market, or allows his former teacher to caress him lasciviously for a few marks. What's more impressive in this film is the lack of sentimentality – compared to De Sica's children movies- and the absence of preaching: when one character does preach, he would have better stayed shut! I think that many scholars are no longer interested in the aesthetics of Italian Neorealism, but–in my appreciation- Roberto Rossellini is one of the big names in the history of cinema, far more important than other filmmakers who are idolized, and his war films are more interesting to me than later works as "Voyage in Italy".

I must confess to a lingering fascination of the condition of Germany, and the German peoples, immediately following WWII. The country, of course, was broken - destroyed - in ruins. More importantly, so were the people. The real life stories I have read speak to so many aspects of their condition: shame, starvation, disbelief, shock of the revelations of the evil of their own doing, and despair. Always despair. They are stories of how the human spirit can overcome the most horrific nightmares and conditions.

This movie drills to the heart of many of those issues, sometimes subtly, sometimes brazenly. Rossellini was never better.

I consider this movie to be a must view on two levels: First, it is quite frankly one of the best moves ever made. Easy words to throw around, and said too often about too many films. Those words apply here. Second, it is a must view for the understanding it can provide of what the world - particularly Germany and Europe - were like after WWII. It belongs to a small suite of movies (such as Schindler's List) that show real insight, a true view into the world during this bleak time in history.

Besides victory and its subsequent prestige, one of the many privileges the winners get is the participation to the process of History writing. Naturally, it doesn't mean that this writing would be made of lies, but sometimes, we can lie by omission … there must be a reason why the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagazaki doesn't get the same emotional coverage than the Holocaust, or talking the bombing of Dresde or Cologne or any German town, seems indecent. Naturally, out of all the three Axis countries, Germany will pay the war's biggest price and carry forever the seal of infamy.

And this is why, even today, it's still embarrassing or discomforting to talk about the suffering of the German people. They started the war, after all, so in a way, they had it coming, and who'd cry on people who were so blinded they let a man like Hitler take the power. Of course, it takes to know a minimum about history to understand that there are fifty shades of gray in these black and white images, and that a poor German grandmother still has less blood in her hands than the pilot of the Enola Gay. But that's the essence of war, it is written by winners, and this is why, "Germany: Year Zero" is not a film, it's a historical document.

Its historical significance lies on the simple fact that the film is shot in 1947, when Germany was still inhabited by people who lived the War, where kids were still young enough to remember the Soviets coming to Berlin, where Hitler's voice still resonated in people's mind. Germany was slowly recovering from the pleas of World War II, the Nazi's officers were all hanged, some nostalgic kept a low profile, no doubt that Germany was at her lowest level, and an Italian director, Roberto Rosselini decided to show that historical sequence for posterity, as a part of his Post-War trilogy. I don't know if Italy being an Ally to Germany inspired this sympathy, but I can only applaud the gutsy aspect of the project.

"Germany: Year Zero" focuses on a little boy, named Edmund, and in the purest Neo-realist tradition, we're invited to follow a kid's journey within the ruins of a devastated Berlin, trying to find ways to nourish his impoverished family. And as we follow him, we realize that the greatest heals are the moral ones, those that can't be sealed like that, women tempted to prostitute themselves, impotent men condemned to be a burden for their family, young kids forced to steal, to smuggle food, young girls to exchange a few touching and kissing for cigarettes, an ex-soldier hiding not to be enrolled with the police and so-on and so forth … yet the most painful character's arc is for the little Edmund. As usual for Neo-Realism, kids represent the innocent present corrupted by the corrupting effects of the past on the future.

Edmund looks like one of these Hitlerian youth pictures, he's 13 but sounds younger, he's obviously a good kid, who hasn't been brainwashed by Nazi propaganda, but his ineptitude to read between the adult lines and to understand the lies and the cynicism will lead him to devastating decisions. And this is the story, Rosselini tells us, not Germany, but a part of Germany's soul lost by the War, whose effects are still significant even if the swastika is history. The film shows us another facet of war, it isn't over when it's over, its effects and damages last, and we can almost talk about a sacrificed generation. Those who fought died, those who lived will suffer, and when the baby-boomers will grow old, they'll understand why the elder say "a good war, that would teach you".

And after watching "Germany: Year Zero", I was glad I didn't have to go through that nightmare to understand the value of life. But I confess I didn't need the story for that, seeing the characters surrounding Edmund was enough. This is why, I'm asking myself if we, movie lovers, feel forced to love a film just for the subject it tackles. I will never go as far as saying that it is a bad movie, I must say the story of Edmund didn't leave me quite an impression, I mean, I felt sorrier for German people than Edmund. And I almost feel guilty for that, I mean, for once that a filmmaker decides to focus on a post-war Germany... It's not that I wanted to love the film, I thought I would love it, I loved "Bicycle Thieves" and much more "Sciuscia" but "Germany: Year Zero" left me cold.

I know the film is supposed to show a child lose his innocence, being a victim of desolation and the destruction of all the values that brandished the German flag higher than any European culture, but I couldn't find any difference between Edmund from the beginning and Edmund from the ending. The film is supposed to be dark, I give you that, but how about showing a truly enthusiastic kid in the beginning, eager to make money from black market, and then palpable reactions from all the hardship he endured, in other words: the kid wasn't a good actor or lacked some direction from Rosselini to make his character's arc believable.

"But neo-realism often employs amateurs actors", well, the main protagonist in "Bicycle Thieves" was an amateur, how about the performance of the child who played his son, or the other child in "Sciuscia". Yes, this is coming from someone who love Italian neo-realistic period and its influence on the 50's New Wave, this artistic wave is responsible for Fellini's greatest work. but these are movies about characters, it's all about hooking your heart on another one, no matter how flawed he or she is. But here, it's like Rosselini took for granted that because we're watching a child, it will win our sympathy.

This film was without a doubt one of the most difficult films I have ever seen. The directing is very much Neorealist, and as such presents a very objective view of the devastation in post-war Germany and the lives of the people therein. I experienced what the characters went through, and grew numb and tired of the harsh reality of such a ravaged world right along with them. In the character of Edmund (main character) is presented a dark individual fallen victim to the consequences of war within a country, and as I as the audience witnessed the desperation of his life I was, dare I say, almost forced to disconnect myself from the experience. Disconcerting on a masterful level. I highly recommend this movie to anyone interested in being probed to examine and challenge their natural response to tragedy.

... from UGC and director Roberto Rossellini. In the bombed out ruins of Germany's capital city, the Kohler family struggles to survive. The father (Ernst Pittschau) is sick and bedridden. Eldest son Karl-Heinz (Franz-Otto Kruger) is a former soldier in hiding from the police and unable to work. Daughter Eva (Ingetraud Hinze) goes out at night to try and skim what she can from the soldiers looking for companionship. Which leaves 12-year-old Edmund (Edmund Moeschke) to provide what food he can by working various menial jobs. He eventually falls in with petty criminals, and maybe worse, as the family's situation continues to deteriorate. Also featuring Erich Guhne, Jo Herbst, Christl Merker, and Hans Sangen.

Rossellini closes out his War Trilogy (after 1945's Rome Open City and 1946's Paisan) with this stark look at survival in a former war-zone. The actors are all non-professionals, and it shows, but one gets used to it, and Rossellini does a good job of keeping things within his performers' range. This is now the third film from 1948, following Berlin Express and A Foreign Affair, that I've watched recently that has been set in postwar Germany. Unlike those two, this one doesn't use the country as a backdrop for entertainment. Rather, this is an unflinching look into human misery and deprivation, and not for those looking for a good time. While I like the other two in Rossellini's trilogy more, this is still a very noteworthy, and recommended, film for those with the constitution for it.

This was on Criterion DVD, part of the Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy box set, containing all 3 films. Each disc has loads of extras pertaining to that particular film, and the Germany Year Zero disc also has a feature-length documentary on Rossellini's life and career. Highly recommended to anyone with an interest in the man, his work, or international films of the mid-20th century.

One of Roberto Rossellini's masterpieces, Germany Year Zero, suffers only from one minor liability, which is not totally the filmmaker's fault. The film was shot in German with the native language, but it was later shown around the world (at least I think around the world) in an Italian-dubbed print, which is also the version currently available on American DVD. True, Rossellini (as far as I know) didn't speak German, and he had it in Italian so he wouldn't have trouble getting the film distributed in his native land where he broke ground with Open City and Paisan. But it is a fair enough indication that not EVERYTHING in a film such as Germany Year Zero is based in total reality based on seeing this version. Once this is looked past though, one can get into the actual story and characters, which is what Rossellini is after- getting at least the emotional loss in this world perfectly clear.

Germany Year Zero - the third in a so-called trilogy of films that began with his breakthrough Open City and continued with Paisan - was brilliantly executed, in the quasi-documentary cinematography by Robert Juillard, the appropriately sorrowful score by Renzo Rossellini, and in the performances by first timers like Edmund Moeschke as Edmund Koeler (the main character), Ingetraude Hinze as Eva Koeler (Edmund's desperate sister), and Erich Guhne as Herr Enning (Edmund's ex-teacher who becomes a crucial supporting character). Edmund is a pre-teen who's lived through the devastation of the War, like his family, the families he lives with, and everyone else around him in the city, and he tries to get work despite his all-too-young age. Things seem bleak for his family, as his brother doesn't want to work for fear of being caught as a prisoner of the war, his elderly father can't work, and his sister goes out every night looking for things that only help herself. When Edmund runs into his once school-teacher (Enning), who is part of the cold, evil remnants of the Nazi regime, and this leads into the last act of the film, with startling, heart-breaking results.

While the story of Edmund- and of the line that scorches a kid's conscience between childhood innocence and the horrors of the real world- is a compelling and historically important one to tell, what Rossellini achieves here more than anything is the sense of dread in a desolate atmosphere. He achieved that in Open City too (I have yet to see Paisan so I can't comment), but that film had the tendency to take a little too much time involving us in sub-plots. In Germany Year Zero, however, the images presented stay with the viewer long after the film has ended since they're akin to the kind of sensibility Polanski had with The Pianist, in a technical sense- we're following someone in his own personal struggle for survival in an environment that's in rubble, with many of the people around the character without much hope. There's also the theme of sacrifice, like in the other two films in Rossellini's trilogy, and that plus a theme of a sort of helpless hope in human spirit, stays true through the seventy minutes of this film. Highly recommended (the language dubbing practically regardless).

An intricate web was weaved with the lives of post World War Two's deprived people amongst the reins of Berlin, Germany and that of mans ultimate struggle for survival. That web is the work of Italian film maker, Roberto Rossellini. His final installation of the war trilogy, beginning with Open City (1945), follow by Paisà (1946), ended with an amazing expression of talent from behind the camera and in front. What is not to be forgotten from the film Germany Year Zero (1947-8) is that time in history when people lived `as if tragedy was natural'. We watch as the social infection of survival of the fittest works its way into the life of a twelve year old, German boy named Edmund Koeler (played by Edmund Moeschke). The challenge of survival begins its grip on young Edmund as a result of dealing with life in post-war consequences. The simply desperate life of Edmund and his family was further brought to life with the cinematography that gives shape to the psychological states of it characters through stylized visuals land marking the film noir derived from German expressionism. Along with several dehumanizing high angle shots, the shadowy look into this family's life makes for a powerful film, as well as a powerful message.

To complete his famous War trilogy, Roberto Rossellini turns his own now mastered language to post war Germany where he finds a character so innocent he can now guide us to observe the consequences experienced by the actions of the nazis. This is such an inspiring film. In the memory of his recently deceased son, Rossellini finds a way to encapture the essence of childhood and a education through the destruction of war to finally punctuate these three films that in the end demonstrate the outcome of such evil and the innocent it affected. Empathic in the way that illustrates why the allies had to win that war. True cinema.

Roberto Rossellini's grim, though disappointingly flat melodrama Germany, Year Zero opens with a boldly written preface that attempts to make clear the reasons for the movie's existence. Attempting to place the film as something closer to a sociological artifact than a fictional drama, it rambles on about where it was shot, what it aims to do, the tragic location of the production and an implication of humanist ideology.

It's not an entirely convincing argument for the film to make, since there's a fair amount of dramatic artifice on display here, and it bares its weakness as insecure with the possibility of differing interpretations, which will happen anyway. Certainly, for someone whose extensive disclaimer emboldens its apparent aim to be completely objective, Rossellini is not being objective in this movie. There's an obvious ideological agenda astir in telling this story of a twelve-year-old German boy who does what he can to simplify his family's suffering in Germany's post-war bane. The director includes a pungent Christian moral that is prompt chiefly so audiences can be expected to have heavy hearts when it becomes distinct that owing to the boy's severe way of life, a strand of faith is not enough to pull him back from the height of condemnation. Rossellini also has no problem using his style to denounce most of his characters. Whatever he might include in the film's opening paragraphs, he is without a doubt cognizant that using an overhead shot or a close-up here has a clear inborn judgmental intention, and he doesn't arrest his style from including such cinematic language. Nothing demands that a film be necessarily impartial, so this one's emphasis on its own objectivity is dubious.

Even as Germany Year Zero promotes a definite agenda, it remains admirable, because it forfeits or forgets no technical and storytelling virtues, although . Rather than sets, real locations are used, but the film feels a bit less documentary-like than many other neorealist features. There's a strong sense of structure present in the plotting that makes the events feel more deterministic and less capricious than they should if a breeding of reality was this rubble film's decisive aim. By happy chance, this narrative coarseness comes off like a succession of lamentable twists of fate, and as such it doesn't blister the credibility of the film, even as it makes it feel more like a written piece. Fiction is by no means an art form to feel one is above, so Rossellini's beginning pretense might have more to do with his unwillingness to accept his material for what it is than his lack of understanding as to what he was doing in the film.

The cold sober atmosphere that dominates this transparent moral tale never allows the audience to take for granted how agonized conditions were while the movie was being made. The boy's father is withering on his death bed from malnutrition. A trip to a congested hospital is seen as a blessing, not only because it staves off the threat of his death, but because when he's not at home there's one less mouth to feed. Doses of grim truth like that seep past any innate contrivance in the film-making and coarsen the film with a sense of immediacy. It's about the hope of transcending the natural law of survival of the fittest as a way of ennobling the human race.

Even though the film was made by a master Italian director, Roberto Rosselini, this film is the best German Neo-Realism piece ever made. It might have been too painful a subject for German directors at the time, but Fritz Lang and others had other fish to fry. The scenes of Berlin in 1948 are unforgettable. One can only imagine how horrible it must have been in 1945. The central character of Edmund, a young boy about ten or so, is so visceral, that you feel like grabbing him out of the movie and trying to protect him. Pedophiles, Black-marketeers, Petty crooks, prostitutes of all ages, and scavengers of every ilk infested the entrie city. Almost no German was immune. Every member of the family portrayed in the film has a cross to bear. The culmination of these problems is a solution so horrific, that I cannot mention it in the review; not to mention the consequences of that solution. A must-see film for those who want to experience living in the Hell that was Germany in 1945 or so.

A tragic, sad and very dark neo-realistic artifact. With unimaginable scenes from the bombed Berlin streets and depictions of the miserable life of the residents. In spite of the acting and the music being relatively off, the movie focuses on documenting the certain time and place. Which in that area, Rossellini succeeds very well.

This film was the first of a string of flops that never ended for Rossellini, after the international acclaim heaped on his first two neo-realist films, "Open City" and "Paisan". From here he began his well-publicized affair with Ingrid Bergman that finished off his career in florid melodramas like "Europa 51" and "Voyage to Italy".

A darling of "autistic" - er, rather, "auteurist" - film scholars, Rossellini made the odd choice of making a film in Berlin, with a German cast all dubbed into Italian. Watching the film with English subtitles proved to be too distracting, what with three different idioms on the screen at once. Rossellini once again proves he can work well with non-professionals, especially children. But his results remind me of Oscar Wilde's jibe at puppet shows: "What an economy of means! And what an economy of ends!" The music is horribly goading, like you're watching a suspense thriller in which there are neither suspense nor thrills. And rather than tragic, the ending is simply unconvincing - its very suddenness contributes to its pointlessness. Granted, watching more than an hour's worth of Berlin in ruins might make a viewer want to do the same.