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Germany, Year Zero Poster

Germany, Year Zero

"A soldier can lose everything but his courage."

In the ruins of post-WWII Berlin, a twelve-year-old boy is left to his own devices in order to help provide for his family.

Top Cast

  • Edmund Moeschke

    Edmund Moeschke

    Edmund

  • Ernst Pittschau

    Ernst Pittschau

    Father

  • Ingetraud Hinze

    Ingetraud Hinze

    Eva

  • Franz-Otto Krüger

    Franz-Otto Krüger

    Karl-Heinz

  • Erich Gühne

    Erich Gühne

    Teacher

  • Heidi Blänkner

    Heidi Blänkner

    Frau Rademaker (uncredited)

  • Jo Herbst

    Jo Herbst

    Jo (uncredited)

  • Barbara Hintz

    Barbara Hintz

    Thilde (uncredited)

  • Adolf Hitler

    Adolf Hitler

    Self (archive footage) (voice) (uncredited)

Overview

In the ruins of post-WWII Berlin, a twelve-year-old boy is left to his own devices in order to help provide for his family.

Rating

7.6 / 10
423 Reviews
1 Popular

2 Reviews

  • talisencrw
    talisencrw
    9 Jul 31, 2016

    What an awful position the despicable Nazis left their descendants at the close of the Second World War. Rossellini has the perfect, objective, almost documentarian painterly hand in his depiction of this, and I have the feeling that only someone from one of the losing Axis countries, such as he, could so astutely and profoundly bring across such a feeling of loss and guilt that haunted these 'survivors'. A very sad film to watch, yet at the very same time necessary and healing. Clearly my favourite of his works, next to his magnificent 'The Flowers of St. Francis'.

  • CinemaSerf
    CinemaSerf
    7 Jul 9, 2022

    Edmund Moeschke ("Edmund") is superb in this gritty and authentic looking post-war story of a young boy struggling, with his family, to make ends meet in Berlin after the fall of the Nazis. Scrounging, scrimping, scavenging - all to try and keep his ailing father and the rest of his family fed and warm. It is tightly cast and the scenarios - filmed just three years after the allies reduced much of the city to rubble are very poignant; the photography and sparing dialogue all lend well to the gently accumulating sense of desperation that culminates in tragedy. The children bring optimism and hope to the story - their innocence writ large as they embark on a new life for them as did the rest of Europe in 1948. Well worth a watch.

Trailers & Clips

Recommendations

Alone in Berlin

Berlin in June of 1940. While Nazi propaganda celebrates the regime’s victory over France, a kitchen-cum-living room in Prenzlauer Berg is filled with grief. Anna and Otto Quangel’s son has been killed at the front. This working class couple had long believed in the ‘Führer’ and followed him willingly, but now they realise that his promises are nothing but lies and deceit. They begin writing postcards as a form of resistance and in a bid to raise awareness: Stop the war machine! Kill Hitler! Putting their lives at risk, they distribute these cards in the entrances of tenement buildings and in stairwells. But the SS and the Gestapo are soon onto them, and even their neighbours pose a threat.

Alone in Berlin

6.7 2016