At this year’s Oscars, the German Netflix war film Im Westen was nothing new, among other things, as Best Foreign Language Film excellent. Edward Berger’s film joins a long line of works about the horror of war.
One of the best films of this kind is Bernhard Wicki’s Die Brücke, which will be broadcast on Arte on Monday evening at 8:15 p.m. If this time doesn’t suit you, you can also stream the oppressive masterpiece in the Arte media library.
The bridge captures the terrifying horror of World War II
The film’s plot covers the final days of World War II in 1945. Here it happens that a group of young people is sent to the front, although they are actually still schoolchildren. Here, it doesn’t take long for them to be struck by the tragic horror of battle.
Based on Fates of minor protagonists Bernhard Wicki captures the horror of war in a particularly unpleasant way. When Die Brücke was released in cinemas in 1959, the Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote about the film, among other things:
One of the toughest, most acrimonious anti-war films to ever hit a screen.
As with almost all war films, Die Brücke also triggered discussions about whether the film had a deterrent anti-war effect or whether the fascination of war with the harrowing staging was rather glorified. In the end, however, everyone should have seen this work at least once.
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