Goethe Institute to Screen Harrowing ‘Murderers Are Among Us’

The Goethe Institute, 5700 Wilshire Blvd., will launch its “Happy Birthday DEFA: A Look at 50 Years of East German Film History” Tuesday at 6:30 p.m. with the unsubtitled “Es werden ein paar Filme bleiben” a new documentary on the DEFA studio outside Berlin. It will be followed at 8 p.m. with Wolfgang Staudte’s “The Murderers Are Among Us” (1946), the first film produced by the newly established DEFA company and, in fact, the first film produced anywhere in Germany after the war.

This harrowing, uncompromising film recalls Roberto Rossellini’s masterful “Germany--Year Zero” (1947) with its setting in the actual ruins of Berlin and climate of moral chaos. A young woman (Hildegarde Knef), just out of a concentration camp, returns to her apartment in a war-damaged but still habitable old building only to find it occupied by an intense doctor (Ernst Wilhelm Borchert), who drowns his bitterness and sorrow in drink.

Through these two people and the relationship that develops between them, with the doctor having to face a terrible secret in his past, plus the stories of the other apartment house residents, Staudte confronts his audience with the terrible toll that World War II exacted on the German people and their need to acknowledge and take responsibility for their actions. “The Murderers Among Us” has stunning, highly atmospheric, high-contrast black-and-white imagery and is a taut work of both style and courage. Information: (213) 525-3388.