Instructions
The Bridge has often been referred to as a powerful anti-war film. One early reviewer, for example,
described the film as "one of the most brutal, most merciless, and most bitter anti-war films that has
ever run on a movie screen" ("einer der härtesten, schonungslosesten, bittersten Antikriegsfilme, die
je über eine Leinwand liefen" -- Hans-Dieter Roos in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, 1959).
Do you agree that The Bridge is a powerful anti-war film? Or is it more of an "anti pointless deaths of
very young soldiers right at the end of a war that their country is losing anyway"-film?
Formulate a clear thesis about this question, and support it with 2-5 pieces of evidence from the film.
The pieces of evidence should be presented as bullet points, not discussed in full paragraphs. This
is not an essay, it is just a thesis statement and a list of 2-5 points of evidence.
Please submit through Sakai Assignments as an attached file. I strongly prefer .doc or .docx files;
.pages is acceptable. The best alternative is .pdf.
Bernhard Wicki’s astonishing The Bridge was the first major antiwar film to come out
of Germany after World War II, as well as the nation’s first postwar film to be widely
shown internationally, even securing an Oscar nomination. Set near the end of the
conflict, it follows a group of teenage boys in a small town as they contend with
everyday matters like school, girls, and parents, before enlisting as soldiers and being
forced to defend their home turf in a confused, terrifying battle. This expressively shot,
emotionally bruising drama dared to humanize young German soldiers at a historically
tender moment, and proved influential for the coming generation of New German
Cinema auteurs.
Bernhard Wicki's directorial debut, this is an excellent little film with little plot and no known
names on the roster. In the final days of World War II, German teenagers join the Nazi army in a
futile attempt to stop the enemy invasion. A sympathetic officer places the boys as guards of a
seemingly unimportant bridge. The seven youths are thrown into battle when American tanks
unexpectedly appear and try to cross the bridge. The film has a definite anti-war messag
Example: Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are the best type of sandwich because they are
versatile, easy to make, and taste good. In this persuasive thesis statement, you see that I
state my opinion (the best type of sandwich), which means I have chosen a stance
In 1959, Bernhard Wicki made The Bridge, Germany’s first antiwar film since the end
of World War II. The movie was an international success, and received an Academy
Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film in 1960. After years of
unavailability in the United States, the Criterion Collection has released The
Bridge on Blu-ray and DVD so that American audiences can rediscover this
historically, culturally, and cinematically important film about the effects of WWII
from the German perspective.
Based on journalist Gregor Dorfmeister’s autobiographical novel, The Bridge follows
a group of high school boys who are called to defend Germany in the last days of
WWII. The boys are ordered to protect the Florian-Geyer-Brücke, an insignificant
bridge in the small Bavarian town of Cham. As their parents and teachers fear for their
safety, they naively believe that their role in the Volkssturm is important, and they
regularly repeat the honor code “a soldier who defends just one square meter of
ground defends Germany” to legitimize their service.
The quiet first half of the film revolves around ordinary life in Cham as the boys focus
on school, family, friends, and girls. Their childhood is innocent. Any discussions
they have of war are defined by a typical teenage obsession with honor and heroism.
Like most boys who play GI Joe in the schoolyard, they are too young to comprehend
the catastrophic consequences of war.
Overnight, their lives are disrupted when they are thrown into a war for which they
are unprepared. Wicki grounds The Bridge in a specific time and place, but war films
resonate because the anti-war message is timeless and universal. Too often, powerful
governments wage war against other countries, and powerless young people are used
as pawns to fight the battles. Of course, a number of wars throughout history have
been necessary, but Wicki wants us to contemplate where we should draw the line. As
he explains in a 1989 interview included in the bonus features, “To die or to be a hero
means absolutely nothing if it’s not for the right cause.”
For example, the young boys in The Bridge are recruited by the Nazi Party at a time
when the Party has collapsed. They are chosen simply because there’s no one left in
Germany to fight. Their youthful idealism, which most likely stems from being
brainwashed by Nazi propaganda, clouds their judgment. They are unable to
comprehend the realities of the situation, even as everyone else in Cham senses the
futility of their service.
A title card at the end of the film reads, “This event occurred on 27 April 1945.” This
date is significant, and the tragic irony shouldn’t escape students of history. On 30
April, three days after the events of the film, Adolf Hitler committed suicide, an act
that symbolizes the defeat of the Nazi Party.
Over 7,000 suicides occurred in Germany in 1945. According to historian Christian
Goeschel in his article “Suicide at the End of the Third Reich”, these mass suicides
show that the Nazi Party “had come to terms with their losses on a very personal and
emotional level” (Journal of Contemporary History, 2006, 172). Psychiatrist Erich
Menninger-Lerchenthal supports this claim, and in 1947, he proposed that the mass
suicides “do not have anything to do with mental illness or some moral and
intellectual deviance, but predominantly with the continuity of a heavy political defeat
and the fear of being held responsible.” (The European Suicide Problem, 13.)
Different cultures have different conceptions of suicide, but it’s difficult to see the
bravery of these mass suicides when we consider the young boys in the Volkssturm
who were ordered to defend their Fatherland at all costs. As Hitler and other
prominent leaders of the Nazi Party cowardly hid from the consequences of their
actions and took their lives when the pressure from outside forces was too high,
innocent young soldiers continued to fight for their Führer. Wicki’s defiant anti-war
statement is clear: honor codes like “a soldier who defends just one square meter of
ground defends Germany” are meaningless when warmongers who create the code
hide in a bunker to avoid conflict. The Bridge asks us to honor the young boys who
never had a chance, even as we most importantly honor the more than 11 million who
were systematically slaughtered by the Nazi Party.
In an interview included in the bonus features, German filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff
cites The Bridge as a major influence on “New German Cinema”. Wicki, who was
briefly imprisoned in a German concentration camp when he was 18 years old for
alleged leftist sympathies, had a personal connection to Dorfmeister’s novel, and
future German filmmakers such as Schlöndorff responded favorably to Wicki’s antiwar message.
According to Schlöndorff, most German filmmakers in the ‘50s made war films about
“the good German”, and Wicki, an Austrian-born artist who spent much of his life in
Germany, was the first filmmaker of his generation to undermine this concept. In
addition to his radical politics, his neorealist approach to production, as demonstrated
by his decision to cast nonprofessional actors as the boys, represented a stylistic
breakthrough for German cinema. Wicki inspired members of “New German Cinema”
like Schlöndorff to distance themselves from the older generation of German
filmmakers who glorified the Nazi Party’s perpetuation of war and refused to reason
with what Schlöndorff calls its “self-satisfied” ideology. In opposition to the old
guard, “New German Cinema” auteurs collectively made low-budget, politicallycharged films, and they valued artistic quality over commercial success.
Criterion’s release of The Bridge will make Wicki's must-see film more accessible to
American audiences. The film has rightfully been revered by German filmmakers for
decades, and given its significance, it deserves to be canonized as a classic work of
art.----------An anti-war film's goal is to show the physical and psychological destruction
warfarecauses to the soldiers and to innocent civilians.