I had been wanting to watch this for quite a few years. The director, Helma Sanders-Brahms, was born in Germany in 1940, and is credited as both writer and director. So I'm surmising that, if not directly autobiography, this is drawing on the early life of some specific woman of approximately her age. The very last scene, intensely personal and very harrowing (to me), is surely taken from someone's life story.
Further suggesting that this is autobiography, the narration is given from the "I" perspective of the adult who had been the young girl, here born in 1942-43 in Germany. But everywhere I look people describe it as "semi-autobiographical", whatever that means.
As (auto)biography, it's rather lacking in narrative completeness, or a recognisable overall narrative trajectory, but to me that makes it more compelling if anything: this does have the appearance of scenes from someone's mother's life.
The people in it, such as the mother, Lene, played by Eva Mattes, are flawed and damaged, and also come across as helpless victims swept up in a tide of an impossibly tragic and epic period in history which is always there in the background as something unpredictable, incomprehensible and monolithic, a bit like the weather.
It's difficult or impossible to know whether Sanders-Brahms is trying to say "this is what a war like this does to people", or whether it's primarily "about" the sadness and trials which a dysfunctional family imposes on small children.
However, the film starts with a recitation, lasting quite some time, of the angry poem of the same name by Bertolt Brecht, written in the fateful year 1933. The flavour of that poem might be given by the final verse:
"O Germany, pale mother!
How have your sons arrayed you
That you sit among the peoples
A thing of scorn and fear!"
For that reason, if for no other, there's no doubt an idea of conflating of the mythic with the personal: maybe in some ways Lene *is* Germany of that period.
