Alfa e omega. Il senso della fine nella letteratura e nel cinema tedeschi dopo il 1945

Abstract

In German literature and cinema following 1945, the ending of a text or movie is part of a collective exercise in which the matter of catharsis is never an innocent one, since it is aggravated by the weight of a guilt that goes beyond the plea for forgiveness. The article focuses on a text which revolves systematically around the theme of the ending: Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus. The novel was written between during and immediately after the years of the War, and deals with the theme of the Apocalypse through the description of two musical works, Apocalipsis cum figuris and Lamentatio Doctoris Fausti, both written by the protagonist Adrian Leverkühn.
At first glance, distance between this late novel by Mann and the German cinema following the end of National Socialism could not be bigger. Nonetheless, West Germany cinema provides new ways to read “the sense of an ending” in German culture, since it elaborates unexpected strategies to cope with the “ending” within a spectacular and collective frame. As in the rest of the world, the main genre was melodrama, whose conventions are exploited to give different interpretations of the trauma of the “end”, as it emerges in the movies In Those Days (1947) by Helmut Käutner and in The Sinner (1951) by Willy Forst.