“A life in rubble and ashes” on March 1st at 10:35 p.m. on ORF 2
Vienna (OTS) – Dresden 1946: The city was bombed during the Second World War and that means one thing above all: there is a housing shortage and Dresden must be rebuilt. The feature documentary “A Life in Rubble and Ash – Rubble Woman in Dresden” by Dorothea Nölle and Carsten Gutschmidt (ORF editing Andrea Lehner), which “Universum History” will show on Friday, March 1, 2024, at 10:35 p.m. on ORF 2, gives insights into the everyday life of a woman in ruins, which has little in common with the glorifying clichés of reconstruction.
It is a myth that persists to this day: after the end of the war, women in particular volunteered to help repair the war damage. In fact, it was mainly men and the work was by no means done voluntarily: it mainly involved former NSDAP members and German prisoners of war, as well as unemployed people in the Soviet occupied zone. The approximately 500 women who were among them in Dresden were deliberately presented in order to counteract the negative image of rubble work: the hard-working woman in a typically male job fit well into the socialist worldview in the East. The rubble woman myth was born. The documentary shows what everyday life was actually like for one of these women.
Whether they were forced to do so or out of sheer necessity, they did hard physical labor day after day in order to at least make ends meet for themselves and their families. Hardly anyone volunteered to take part in the so-called bucket brigades to remove mountains of rubble amidst collapsing parts of houses and undiscovered unexploded bombs. The feature documentary shows the fate of a woman representative of the rubble women: Elli fled from Silesia and ended up in Dresden completely penniless. Her husband died in the war, her parents did not survive the hardships of the flight, and she lost her sister in the process. Elli desperately tries to enable her two children and herself to survive. They are staying with the Winkler family, a retired couple who themselves live on the poverty line. The relationship is difficult; the people of Dresden do not want the refugees from Poland, but are dependent on their income. She has to give away part of the food stamps that Elli earns as a rubble woman as rent. The situation is made worse by the population’s fear of the Russian occupiers. In the midst of this almost hopeless misery, Elli tries not to give up hope for a better life for herself and her children.
In “A Life in Rubble and Ash – Rubble Woman in Dresden”, “Universum History” impressively documents the privations that shaped the lives of the glorified rubble women after the Second World War and classifies the post-war narratives in a historical and scientific way.