Caelan Lacquement

GER 151- German Cinema

Professor Wildermuth
24 November 2017
The Ongoing Symbolism of Die Brücke
When Die Brücke came out in 1959 the world was in turmoil. The Korean War had

been over for a few years, the Vietnam War was ramping up, the USA and the USSR were at

odds with each other and dragging everyone else into the conflict with them, and right in the

middle of it all were East and West Germany. The Berlin Wall hadn’t been built yet, but

already the two parts of Germany were vastly different. While West Germany had had its

Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle), East Germany was struggling under the Soviet

occupation as the Soviets had taken many resources from their occupation zone in the

interests of rebuilding the USSR. Germans, both east and west, were afraid that they were

going to be forced into another war, this time with each other. For this reason, Bernhard

Wicki created Die Brücke, a story of the futility of war. This movie, inspired by the 1931

movie All Quiet on the Western Front, in turn inspired other movies, among them the

American war movie Saving Private Ryan (1998). While the director of Saving Private Ryan

possibly didn’t intend to carry over the message of the futility of war, you can see echoes of

Die Brücke and its message throughout Saving Private Ryan and specifically in the scene of

the battle for the bridge in the town of Rumelle.

The majority of movies before Die Brücke, with a few exceptions like “All Quiet on

the Western Front”, show deaths indirectly, whether through shadow and other imagery or by

implying that a death has occurred through sound or lack thereof. However, in Die Brücke the

deaths of the boys and the scene of the wounded men on the trucks are extremely graphic and

the way the scenes are filmed is incredibly drawn out, most likely to show that war is brutal

and that death is not beautiful and glorious, as the old saying goes (“Dulce et decorum est pro
patria mori” = “It is beautiful and glorious to die for one’s country”); it is ugly and pointless.

Again, since East and West Germany were smack in the middle of the Cold War many

Germans were afraid of being forced to fight their fellow countrymen in the East and West,

so Wicki used these prolonged shots of death and destruction as a way to try to discourage

Germans from participating in another war. For instance Sigi, the more hesitant of the seven

friends to fight the Allies, is the first to die because he ducked when an American war plane

came over the first time and his friends made fun of him, so when the plane comes over again

he is the only one standing when it drops its bombs and therefore is the first to die. So his

hesitation and individual choices are his undoing, and since he was the first to die and we

know that he was more reluctant to fight than his friends this makes his death scene feel all

the more fruitless and heartbreaking to watch.

Much in the same way that Die Brücke does, Saving Private Ryan also has prolonged

scenes of death and destruction. In the beginning when the American troops are first landing

at Omaha Beach, the German soldiers are waiting for them and open up with withering fire.

At one point during the horrifying rain of bullets Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks) is trying

to pull a wounded man to safety and has to duck to avoid an incoming shell; he gets up and

starts pulling the man again only to turn around and realise that he’s been cut in half. At

another point during the same scene we see a medic trying to save a man and he stops the

bleeding only to have the man shot in the head. While Americans seem to glorify war and

dying for one’s country nowadays as much as the Germans did during World War II, Saving

Private Ryan was noted for its extremely graphic depictions of battle scenes, something

which Die Brücke was also noted for, and many of the battle scenes also have a sense of

futility to them, much like the instances that I previously described in this paragraph.

The scene that most obviously links Saving Private Ryan and Die Brücke is the

symbolism of the bridge. In Die Brücke, “[The bridge] not only links but divides the boys’
hometown from the enemy. […] [It also] refers to the bridge between youth and adulthood,

something the teenagers were never to experience.” (Reimer and Zachau, 109) In Die Brücke,

the bridge and the deaths of six of the seven friends also symbolises Germany’s downfall and

the war’s transition in the minds of the people from glorious battle for the fatherland to a

pointless and tiring endeavour that sucked in men and resources and never truly gave them

back, if it gave them back at all.

In Saving Private Ryan, the scene of the battle for the bridge is the climax of the

journey that Captain Miller and his men took to find Private James Ryan. In this movie the

bridge also represents the division of the small American force from the larger and better

equipped German one, but it also represents a growth of character in the American translator,

Corporal Timothy Upham. At the beginning of the movie Upham is naïve and eager to please

and seems to believe in the inherent goodness of people, as is evidenced by his convincing

Captain Miller to let a captured German soldier go. By the end of the movie after the bridge

scene he’s not so forgiving, especially when he sees the same German soldier whose life he

saved killing his squad buddies. When he captures the German troops and the man recognises

him, he shoots him instead of letting him go because he realises that his squad members were

right all along. The bridge in Saving Private Ryan also represents the sacrifices that Captain

Miller and his men made so that Private Ryan might survive to make it home to his mother,

and it is a symbol of Ryan’s resolution in the face of his grief at his three brothers’ deaths:

“Tell [my mother] that when you found me […] I was with the only brothers I have left, and

there was no way I was gonna desert them.” (Saving Private Ryan)

Die Brücke and Saving Private Ryan are different in many ways. Die Brücke deals

with children being drafted into the Wehrmacht at a time when Germany’s need for soldiers

is desperate, while Saving Private Ryan deals with an American army squad searching for

one soldier. Die Brücke deals with nationalist fanaticism and how it can ruin a generation,
while Saving Private Ryan deals with what happens when you put the needs of the few over

the needs of the many. Die Brücke was created to make a point, while Saving Private Ryan

was likely created simply for entertainment purposes given that American cinema is usually

solely focused on entertainment value. But while they have their differences, the symbolism

of a single bridge and the graphic depiction of the gruesomeness of war are the two things

that they have in common, and the symbolism and gruesomeness made these movies stand

out during their time and have made them into timeless quintessential World War II movies

that will hold continuous lessons for new generations to come.

Works Cited

Reimer, Robert C., et al. “Die Brücke.” German Culture through Film: an Introduction to

German Cinema, Focus, an Imprint of Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2005, pp.

105–109.

Spielberg, Steven, director. Saving Private Ryan. Performance by Tom Hanks, and Matt

Damon, Paramount Pictures, 1998.

Wicki, Bernhard, director. Die Brücke. Fono Film, 1959.