Category: Graham Wallace

The documentary film, “School in Cologne” made in 1948

6th December 2008

A few weeks ago I wrote, on this blog, about the short documentary film K.R.O. Germany 1947, which followed a day in the life of a British Kreis Resident Officer (or K.R.O.) in the British Zone of Germany after the war.

I recently viewed another film, ‘School in Cologne’, made by the same director, Graham Wallace, and released later in the same year, 1948.

Whereas the main character in ‘K.R.O. Germany’ was a British official, the Kreis Resident Officer, the main character in ‘School in Cologne’ was a young German schoolgirl, and the commentary was shared, equally, between a British Education Officer and the German girl, speaking perfect English with only a trace of a German accent.

The film shows just how much official British policy and attitudes would seem to have changed in the two and a half years since the grim picture of destruction and understated, almost grudging, sympathy shown in Humphrey Jennings’ film ‘A Defeated People’, made in the autumn of 1945; since the debate in the British Zone Review at much the same time, on whether it was acceptable for British men and women to "feel sorry for the Germans” and since British soldiers were told, in capital letters in The British Soldiers Pocketbook "THERE WILL BE NO BRUTALITY ABOUT A BRITISH OCCUPATION, BUT NEITHER WILL THERE BE SOFTNESS OR SENTIMENTALITY."

The first thing we see in the film ‘School in Cologne’ is a row of children’s feet, some with ragged shoes and some feet bare, while a trickle of rain falls into a tin, from a hole in the roof. The camera scans up to the faces of the children, and we see we are in a crowded classroom, with the children sitting four or five to a desk while the opening credits are displayed on the screen to the sound of the children singing a nursery rhyme. The film then shows the twin towers of Cologne cathedral, followed by children playing in the ruins, and the commentator says: “This is Cologne, in the third winter after the war. When I first came here, two and a half years ago, as a British Education Officer, the schools were still shut. Now they are open again, but our job of reorganising German education is far from finished.”

The film then cuts to a picture of the young German girl, 10-12 years old or so, running and skipping home, barefoot, to what remains of a ruined house. She takes over the commentary and says, in very good English with only a trace of a German accent: “We live in a street where only a few houses are standing. Our old home was burnt down. I live together with my brothers and sister and mother in two rooms under the roof.”

The reason the girl has no shoes, we learn, is because she and her brother have only one pair between them, and today, he has gone to the railway to collect coal for them to burn. The film shows her brother stealing coal briquettes, picking them up from the ground in a railway siding. He hides from a policeman under a railway truck and then runs away home, with his sack of stolen coal, after the policeman has passed. The sympathies of the audience are clearly intended to be with the boy, rather than with the policeman, as the Education Officer says: “The education of these children is one of our biggest problems in Germany. This boy never had any proper schooling during the war years. Now he is 14 years old. He cannot read, and he has never been taught what is right or wrong.”

To pictures of children walking to school, some barefoot, and one young boy with one leg walking on crutches, the Education Officer continues: “I found that when I arrived here, over half the schools in the city were completely destroyed, and of the others, not one was undamaged. Today some 84,000 children use these schools. They are desperately over-crowded. Several schools have to share one building and classes have to be held in shifts. There are still many children who cannot come to school in bad weather, because they have no proper clothing. One fifth of the children in Cologne have no shoes at all.”

The children enter a classroom, and we see the girl has brought her brother and sister with her. She takes over the commentary and says: “My little brother and sister are too young to go to school. But I have to bring them with me. There is no-one at home to look after them. Our father is dead and mother has to work all day in a factory.”

The film continues to show the difficulties faced by the teachers in the school: crowded classes, one textbook shared between four or five children in the class, only odd scraps of paper for the children to make notes and even their slates are broken. “The teachers do their best to improvise, using chalk and their imagination, but there is even a shortage of chalk.”

In a science lesson the teacher uses improvised bits of home-made apparatus to “demonstrate the principles of heat, in a room where the master and pupils have to wear their overcoats to keep warm,” because there is no heating in the school, even in winter.

To try to overcome the shortage of teaching materials, the British education authorities started a schools broadcasting service. We see the children in the classroom listening to the radio, and then the film cuts to a recording studio, where two English women in tweed suits read from a script, speaking very slowly and deliberately, in very proper accents:

“‘Good morning Mrs Smith. Please come in, you are early this morning.’
‘Well I am just on the way to the shops to buy something for lunch and for supper. And if you don’t go early in the morning, there is not much left to buy later.’”

The highlight of the school day is firstly lunch, when a huge cauldron of soup is wheeled into the classroom and ladled out to the children, and the girl says, as she gives her little brother and sister each a spoonful of soup: “This is the first food we have had today. You can imagine how much we enjoy it.”

And secondly the arrival of the post from England. The headmaster brings a number of parcels into the classroom and the girl says, to a close-up shot of her unpacking the parcel with a big smile on her face: “The school in Birmingham sends us clothing and books. I had a lovely big parcel from my English friend Katherine. I was very happy. I hope that one day we can meet and see each other.” The parcel contains clothes, a dress, and a packet of sweets, one of which she pops into her mouth.

The only time we see the British Education Officer, a youngish, very serious-looking man, in his late 30s or so, is when he comes to inspect the school. The children all stand up as he enters the classroom, and he inspects the books the teacher and children are using: “We are also producing new schoolbooks to replace the perverted lessons of the Nazis… With a staff of under 200, we have to tackle the enormous job of controlling all educational activities in the British Zone. We work in close contact with the German authorities, to guide German education along better lines.”

The film continues by showing one of the new British Information Centres, called 'Die Brücke' (The Bridge), in a German high street, where “adults and parties of students” come to read English books and newspapers and “attend lectures and discussion groups in English to further their understanding of England.” We then see a group of earnest young men engaged in discussion round a table: “These are ex-prisoners of war who have come back to school to make up for the lost war years. This man fought at Stalingrad, he was a POW in Canada, in North Africa, in Norway. Between them they have seen quite a lot of the world, and they can be a valuable influence in Germany. Now they are studying so that they can become teachers.”

The last two sequences repeat and sum up the message of the film. The children leave the classroom at the end of term, at the start of the Christmas holidays, each carrying a wooden toy they have made themselves, because there are no toys for sale in the shops. The last to leave the school is the boy with one leg, walking down the steps on crutches with his satchel on his back, as another group of children, the afternoon shift, walk up the steps to start their school day. We then see the first group of children again, now walking outside with the ruined city in the background – the twin towers of the cathedral, a square church tower, ruined houses, heaps of rubble. Then another group of children run down the steps from a school entrance, and as the camera pans up to a ruined dome above the, once imposing, school entrance, the Education Officer says: “Never before has the school been so important. In these ruined cities it is often the only barrier between these children and a life of complete barbarism.”

Finally, at the end of the film, we see a group of children at work in a half-destroyed and derelict school room, carrying ladders and building materials, clearing rubble, sweeping the floor, fitting new window frames, plastering walls. While they work, the soundtrack is of the children singing a Christmas carol and this continues while the commentator says: “Today in Cologne and in the other cities of Germany, the children are working with their teachers to rebuild their schools. Building material is scarce, but much can be salvaged from the ruins around them. Never before has there been such a desire for education as in Germany today. These children are repairing their schools, so as to be able to build up their own lives again. They must clear away the rubbish that Hitler left behind, so that their schools can be a free and solid foundation for the future. We are here to see that this is done.”

And the end title says:

Made for the Control Commission for Germany
By the Central Office of Information

References:

The documentary films ‘School in Cologne’ and ‘K.R.O. Germany, 1947’ were directed by Graham Wallace and produced by the Crown Film Unit. They are both held in the archives of the British Film Institute and I would like to thank BFI staff for locating the films and providing viewing facilities at the BFI Library in London.

 

More about the film: K.R.O. Germany 1947

5th November 2008

In my last post, I described the short documentary film K.R.O. Germany 1947, which was filmed in Germany in the Autumn of 1947 and first released in Britain in January 1948.

An article written by the film’s director, Graham Wallace, for the journal Documentary Film News, provides a further insight into why and how the film was made.

In the credits, the film was billed as a co-production between the British Crown Film Unit, and the German Junge Film Union, a group of young film makers established in Hamburg after the war. The director and unit manager were British, the cameraman, his assistant, the editor, electricians, production manager, script girl and sound technicians were all German.

In the article, the location for the film was identified as Peine, a small country town lying between Hanover and Brunswick, selected because life there was: “… typical, on a small scale, of life all over Germany. Here we find all the problems of the Black Market, shortages of clothing and food, overcrowded accommodation, idle factories and refugees that were the concern of the central character of our film – the Kreis Resident Officer.”

Making the film in post-war Germany was not easy, in the director’s words: “very much harder than working under the most trying conditions in England.” There was a shortage of film and equipment. The German team were poorly paid, short of food, and hungry: “Like everyone else in Germany, they are strictly rationed on a low level, though they are entitled to draw heavy-workers’ rations. Even these, by English standards, are meagre indeed … Much of their salary went to buying extra food.” English members of the unit helped out with part of their, higher, rations. Transport was difficult. Motor transport was almost unobtainable locally, and “at one time we transported our lights through the streets of Peine on a horse-drawn cart!”

Processing the film locally in the British Zone proved impossible, as the laboratories  were subject to frequent power cuts which meant they “… cannot work for days at a time, until there is a guarantee of current being available for long enough to run a roll of film through the bath.” Eventually it had to be sent to Berlin and then returned to the team for viewing and editing. Interruptions in the electric current also caused problems when shooting, as the lights were run off the local electricity supply:  “This was never constant for more than a few minutes. All the members of the unit had to stand by the lamps ready to move them forwards or backwards with the voltage fluctuations.”

Probably most interesting was the description in the article of relations between the film unit and the local population. In contrast with the impression given in the film of the quiet and authoritative K.R.O. listening attentively to the German Bürgermeister (the mayor), sympathising with his problems, but also giving the German authorities clear instructions he expected to be obeyed, the article explained that, although at first the Burgermeister willingly consented to appear in the film, he later had second thoughts. “Apparently he had been accused by his colleagues on the council of undue ‘collaboration’ with the English and he was fearful for his re-election at the forthcoming municipal elections.”  Similarly, in contrast with the picture shown in the film of the K.R.O. sympathising with the plight of 300 refugees in temporary accommodation and being welcomed there when he visited them, the article revealed that they “regarded our operations as a put-up propaganda job by the English and demanded to know what we are going to do about sending them back home or giving them proper accommodation.”

On the other hand, as Graham Wallace explained in the article: “again and again we received great help and friendship from the people of Peine who appreciated what we were trying to do. They felt strongly the lack of mutual information about our two countries and if our little film would in any way help to promote an understanding of German problems in England, then they were quite willing to help.”

The only serious antagonism (and this was in 1947, well before political and diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies had formally broken down) was not with the Germans in Peine, but when the unit was filming near the border with the Russian Zone, when the sight of English and German technicians working together “aroused deep suspicion in the minds of the Russians guarding the frontier between the two Zones … otherwise we might well have been making a film in the English countryside, instead of in occupied Germany.”

The final paragraph of the article sums up, in many ways, a typical British view of post-war Germany and the German people.

“And when the shooting was finished and the unit broke up, the two English technicians had a much deeper insight and understanding of Germany today and the difficulties under which the German technicians work. The German technicians, too, had learnt something of the English tradition of documentary film production and later the [German] cameraman was able to visit England for two weeks to study our methods at first hand.”

Though Graham Wallace is describing film-making here, the same sentiments could be transferred to many other areas. Note how he describes himself, the director, and the British unit manager, as the two ‘English technicians’, modestly implying an equality of status with their German subordinates and colleagues. But note also how the “English tradition of documentary film production” is clearly assumed to be superior to the German tradition, which had been condescendingly referred to earlier in the article as dealing, not with “real people and their daily work”, but “for the main part of excellent instructional films or pretty studies of ‘Spring in an Alpine valley’ and other well-worn themes.” And the solution: was for one of the German technicians, the cameraman, to visit England and learn the English way of doing things, for himself.

 

Kreis Resident Officer – The film K.R.O. Germany 1947

2nd November 2008

In January 1948, a short 10 minute documentary film, called simply K.R.O. Germany 1947, was released in Britain. The film was part of a continued public relations effort by the British Control Commission for Germany, to show people back home the work they were doing in the best possible light.

It aimed to show a day in the life of a Kreis Resident Officer (or K.R.O.) – the Control Commission’s ‘man on the ground’ in the British Zone of Germany. In the words of the film, narrated by the K.R.O himself:

“Germany is split up into a number of units. The smallest of these is a district – or Kreis – one hundred and fifty thousand people live in this one, in one large town and fifty-eight villages, which come under the supervision of a British civilian officer – called the Kreis Resident Officer or K.R.O.

I am the K.R.O. of this particular Kreis. It is my job to know everything that goes on. To advise, observe and report on local affairs. The Control Commission relies on K.R.O.s to ensure that their orders for making Germany work again are carried out.”

In previous postings on this blog, I’ve described earlier efforts by the Control Commission to portray their work in Germany to people back home, in three official sources all produced in the first year after the end of the war in May 1945: the film A Defeated People, directed by Humphrey Jennings, the British Zone Review and the exhibition Germany under Control. It was therefore interesting to see how much had changed in the two years since then.

In contrast to the film A Defeated People, which showed a grim picture of destruction, tempered only by under-stated sympathy and concern for the suffering of people as individuals, the picture shown in K.R.O. Germany was that of a benevolent and sympathetic British official, whose job was “to make the Germans do things for themselves and learn that they can’t call on us for ever.” To quote a review of the film in July 1948, in the magazine 'Film Sponsor':

“Necessarily we have only brief glimpses of his day, and of the difficult problems with which he must cope. But within its tiny limits the film does manage to convey something of life over there, its difficulties, hungers and sorrows.

One of its great assets is the officer himself, a middle-aged unmilitary type with a manner at the same time gentle and authoritative.”

The film opens by scanning across a townscape of ruins and empty shells of houses. We then see, coming in to the picture, a young barefoot boy pulling a handcart through the ruins, rifling through the rubbish in a dustbin, picking out an old discarded leather shoe and trying it for size, while the narrator says:

“This is the British Zone of Germany in the Autumn of 1947.

In 1939 this was a prosperous country town. Today fifty percent of the houses are in ruins. Even so, forty thousand people are still living here. Scenes likes these are familiar to everyone like myself, working in the Control Commission for Germany.
….

Life is hard for the Germans. Food is scarce and the people are hungry. They may have to queue for hours only to find that supplies have run out. The Bürgermeister – in England we would call him the mayor – has to listen to all the complaints and grouses – and he passes them on to me.  If they concern us, I take them up with the British authorities for immediate action.”

One of the biggest problems in the town was finding accommodation for refugees. The town council had done all they could to find room, but there were still ten thousand people living in the town in overcrowded cellars. The K.R.O. had to take a firm line and say that although he sympathised with the Bürgermeister “… if he did not do something more, then the Council would have to elect a new Bürgermeister. I insisted that he must find accommodation for the refugees before winter …”
 
According to the film, the refugees were either “prisoners of war who have been released” or “civilians who have been uprooted by the war, and swept into distant parts of Germany” now returning home. This was the only time the film made the point (which was stressed several times in A Defeated People) that the German people brought all this upon themselves. To a close-up picture of a man with one leg, walking on crutches, the narrator says: “This is the price that Germany is having to pay for waging war.”

Interestingly there was no mention in the film of the real reason for the large numbers of refugees in the British Zone of Germany after the war – the expulsion of an estimated 12 million ethnic Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia, around 7 million of whom reached the Western zones of Germany by 1949, forming an average of around 16% of the total population, but more, up to 33% or higher in rural areas. The German refugee crisis had been a controversial topic in Britain and the subject of a high profile campaign in 1945 and 1946 by, among others, the publisher Victor Gollancz.

The film showed the K.R.O. visiting around 300 refugees, all living together in temporary accommodation in an open hall, sympathising with them, offering one man a cigarette because he felt sorry for him, and commenting:

“I find it a sad and rather terrible sight, to see all these men, women and children living like animals in the straw. But at least they have a place where they can rest.”
 
After visiting a school, to make sure the children had enough to eat, a factory, where the machinery had been standing idle since 1939 but which would soon be working again, and a farm where he found the farmer had a big house which could accommodate some more refugees, the K.R.O. returned home to his office, to complete his paperwork and report for his superiors. Finally, late in the evening, he had a call from the local police chief, who had received reports of three black marketeers raiding a farm and wanted the K.R.O. to go out with him to back him up.

The film ended with the K.R.O saying, to a picture of him and the German police officer walking down the road together in the dark:

“The Kreis Resident officer has a very important job in Germany today. He is the man on the ground. He has to see that our plans for making Germany work again are carried out … and that the Germans do the job properly.”
 

The film K.R.O. Germany, directed by Graham Wallace and produced by the Crown Film Unit, is held in the archives of the British Film Institute. I would like to thank BFI staff for locating the film and providing viewing facilities at the BFI Library in London.