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The Point of No Return

Towards the end of World War II, the Nazis drafted numerous young boys like the ones featured in Bernhard Wicki's anti-war film Die Brücke (1959) (translated to English as The Bridge), into the war as a last resort, knowing full well that the battle and their road to victory was a lost cause. At the beginning of the movie, seven naive and inexperienced German teenage boys are drafted to serve in a local Nazi army unit. By the end of the film, all but one of the German teenage boys tasked with defending a small bridge is killed, and a text on the screen reads: "This event occurred on April 27, 1945. It was so unimportant that it was never mentioned in any war communique." This text leads me to the subject of the loss of emotional, psychological, and metaphorical innocence in the backdrop of war, which is a prominent theme in The Bridge.


In this movie, seven German teenage boys (Karl, Klaus, Walter, Jürgen, Hans, Albert, and Sigi) (played by Karl Michael Balzer, Volker Lechtenbrink, Michael Hinz, Frank Glaubrecht, Folker Bohnet, Fritz Wepper, and Günther Hoffmann, respectively) find themselves ecstatic by the prospect of fighting for the Führer and the Fatherland but are completely unprepared for the trauma war inflicts on the human body and soul. Despite the commanding officers' efforts to shield the boys from the bloodshed on the battlefields by having them guard a small and insignificant bridge outside their hometown, the teenagers are left outnumbered and outgunned as they attempt to defend the bridge from incoming American troops. As they stand watching over the bridge, their dreams of "glorious" battles promoted in their Nazi-inspired education come to an end when they witness their fellow troops severely wounded with some missing their limbs, abandon them as they flee from in the incoming Americans. What follows is a brutal onslaught of machine-gun fire, cannon fire, explosions, destruction of property, and bloodshed of not only the German boys but several American soldiers, which involves someone shooting a soldier's guts out, a highly graphic image for 1950s audiences. At one point, Albert shoots a member of the German demolition squad out of disenchantment for everything the Nazis lied to young people like him about. In the end, only he is left to tell the tale of his experience, but his survival has simultaneously killed his desire to live after he turns on one of his fellow German officials.


By its third act, The Bridge presents a grim theme about there being no winners in war, which hits home in an unsettlingly realistic and violent manner. This film's emotional ending is reminiscent of Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (1954) where only a small number of the protagonists are left alive, but unlike Seven Samurai's final line: "In the end, we lost this battle too. The victory belongs to the farmers, not to us," the boys' taking of lives, including their own, are not honorable, but done in vain. This is also a perfect allusion to Nazi Germany's attempted and failed quest to conquer the western world during World War II: a manifesto driven by racial and xenophobic fears, and mass genocide that was destined to fail due to human arrogance and short-sightedness.

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