***PRE-ORDER ANNOUNCEMENT*** We've been telling you about this set all week, but pre-orders are now open for what must certainly be Deaf Crocodile's heaviest and most important title yet... Murderers Among Us: Anti-Fascism Films from East Germany’s DEFA Studios deafcrocodile.com/products/m… “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” wrote English novelist L.P. Hartley in 1953. And yet, perhaps not so differently. Fascism and right-wing ideologies are on the rise worldwide these days, including here in America. It’s a good time to take a look at a remarkable group of films made by East Germany’s DEFA Studios in the post-WWII period which addressed the rise and rot of fascism in Germany since 1933 – even more remarkable given that they were made under strict Soviet and GDR control. All of filmmakers and actors had been directly or indirectly impacted by the war: director Falk Harnack (THE AXE OF WANDSBEK) had fought with the White Rose resistance group and lost his brother to the Nazis, while author Bruno Apitz (NAKED AMONG WOLVES) and WANDSBEK’s lead actor Erwin Geschonneck had survived the Nazi concentration camps. Other film artists had worked at the UFA studio under Nazi authorities, even producing anti-Semitic propaganda films. Fascism and WWII had marked all of them. To quote (East) German film historian Christianne Mückenberger, “Here were films made by directors of their own free will. Nobody needed to commission them. These were ‘confessional films’ ….” Shot primarily in stark black-and-white, these films – a selection of many anti-fascist films made by the DEFA Studios from 1946 to 1992 -- are pathologically obsessed with guilt, fear, and retribution, haunted by the terrors of the recent past and relentlessly asking, “How could this happen to us, to everyday people?” Our enormous thanks to the DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for collaborating with us on this release. THE MURDERERS ARE AMONG US (DIE MÖRDER SIND UNTER UNS) – 1946, 85 min., dir. Wolfgang Staudte. Lovely, sad-eyed artist Susanne Wallner (Hildegard Knef at her most haunting and vulnerable) returns from a concentration camp to find a traumatized former military surgeon, Dr. Hans Mertens (Ernst Wilhelm Borchert) living in her ruined apartment. While they try to piece their lives back together from the devastation all around, Dr. Mertens runs into a now-successful former comrade who triggers memories of a horrific war-time atrocity and the realization that former Nazis are all around them. Features stunning Noir-inflected photography by Friedl Behn-Grund and Eugen Klagemann, and haunted overtones of the later THE THIRD MAN (1949, dir. Carol Reed); it’s as if Alida Valli’s character from that film had her own movie. The first DEFA and post-WWII German production, this helped launch the Trümmerfilm (“Rubble film”) genre; the title intentionally references the original German title for Fritz Lang’s M. “I took my script first to the British, then to the Americans and finally to the French. Nobody wanted the material … Only the Russian Cultural Officer was interested in my project” – Wolfgang Staudte. [continued in comments]