Germany, Pale Mother: A Reparative Vision on Trauma and Healing

By Gabrielle Guz

(Written in December 2020 for my German Film After 1945 Class at Columbia University.)

Helma Sanders-Brahms’s Germany, Pale Mother (1980) garnered controversy when it premiered at the Thirtieth International Berlin Film Festival in February 1980. Though laudatory remarks came in regards to its captivatingly addressing WWII, “Third Reich,” and fascism, German critics seemed to direct their disagreement towards its auto-biographical sentimentalism. Following Germany’s period of reflection on their people’s sins, for instance, committed during the Holocaust, it felt almost inappropriate for someone like Sanders-Brahms — a child of the war, and thus, not a yet conscious witness then — to devote a film, whose characters live on the foreground of battle and almost evade their neighbors’ (namely, some nearby Jews’) suffering, to her mother’s story. Scholar Angelika Bammer, in her 1995 article, “Through a Daughter’s Eyes: Helma Sanders-Brahms’ Germany, Pale Mother,” quotes those like film critic Peter Hasenberg. Apparently, he, for one, found fault in the film and said that it might have been too political for a personal work and too personal for a political project. “Limiting herself [Sanders-Brahms] to personal memories” would have been enough, he countered. Enough to garner sympathy. But would that have really been “enough”?

International audiences were less harsh. The film received prizes and extended runs in Sydney, London, Tokyo, and New York. But the focus on the negative feedback remains because the questions are pertinent to understanding Sanders-Brahms’s aims: Why, instead of mirroring traditional war-related stories, like Wolfgang Staudte’s Murderers Among Us (1946) and Harald Braun’s Between Yesterday and Tomorrow (1948), did Sanders-Brahms create something so personal? What is its intended meaning — does it lean towards the allegorical more than the local, or vice versa? How does its unique affective structure contribute to postwar Germany’s decades-long reconciliation of its crimes? In which ways is that reconciliation reflected in the private versus public sphere? Given those hypothetical questions, it’d be worthwhile to assess Sanders-Brahms’s stance on this larger question: is there hope after sin and trauma, or is the horizon entirely bleak?

The filmmaker herself, however, objected to the idea that the political and personal should necessarily be mutually exclusive. In an interview cited in scholar Anton Kaes’s piece entitled “From Hitler to Heimat. The Return of History as Film,” Sanders-Brahms explained her mindset: “I don’t live any differently from my parents. I just live in other times.” There was no reason, in other words, not to look at the past, her past, Germany’s past. “Looking” back does not mean “returning” to the atrocity that that past bore; it means consciously reflecting on it for the sake of preventing its repetition. “Looking” back at what shaped (the political) the dynamic of a family like Sanders-Brahms’s (personal) means learning and, thus, hoping for a brighter future. Germany, Pale Mother deserves a reparative reading, after which it can be identified as a trauma narrative that showcases the seeming contradiction of “revisiting the dark past to look to a brighter future.” Even if appearing bleak, the film, evocative of the processes of a trauma narrative, cultivates a hopeful message of healing.

If the viewer focuses just on the narrative structure in Deutschland bleiche Mutter — that is, the plot points, from the exposition to the denouement, and the historical setting and cinematographic “atmosphere” — it’s not wholly wrong to surmise of it as a bleak story. Lene (Eva Mattes) falls in love and marries Hans (Ernst Jacobi), who turns into a complacent draftee in the Second World War, fighting in Poland alongside the Nazis. She is heard telling her sister, “I don’t want a [Nazi] Party member. They do not belong,” and yet ironically she marries someone who is soon to become part of that very party. Before they conceive a child, during Hans’ leave, Lene expresses how much she wishes to have a child. As the two of them ponder on the happy idea of possibly becoming parents, engulfed in a dark room whilst laying on their bed, little do they know that Anna (Anna Sanders) will be born at a less-than-happy time, right amidst an air raid. Not only that but Hans’ reaction the moment he first meets his daughter isn’t loving; he’s rather envious and irritated by her presence. Anna feels the same about her father. She, or more precisely Sanders-Brahms, confesses in a voice-over during non-diegetic, melancholic-esque piano music played in the scene when her parents return from their wedding ceremony, that her memories of Hans are grounded on his “always old” face. His spirit, which the direness of the war and nazism corrupted, never appealed to Anna as a young child. Hans’ seeming post-traumatic stress lends him an ill-founded impulse to physically beat Anna and verbally insult Lene. Stuck in an abusive marriage and in a fascisitc society, Lene develops a facial paralysis that rids her further from her will to live. Hans, tired of his wife’s and daughter’s “toxic” presence to his eventually happy mood towards a professional promotion at work, results in his abandoning them. Anna, at that point, is about to be orphaned. The general consensus regarding the “mood” of the film, considering all of those points, is understandably far from positive.

But to debunk that notion, it is worthwhile to consider a reparative reading, an approach to establishing a heightened sense of critical consciousness that scholar Eve Sedgwick introduced in her book, Touching Feeling. Reparative analyses can apply to diverse material, especially when it even subtly pertains to conversations about mental health and depression, grief and feelings of abandonment as well as those related to the journey of healing. Sedgwick draws a distinction between reparative versus paranoid reading. Though both approaches are not necessarily mutually exclusive, the latter, which critics and viewers usually tend to lean towards, renders perspectives anticipatory and retroactive. A reparative reading, on the other hand, offers multiplicity and creativity. Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, Heather Love, who has also been inspired by Sedgwick, says that reparative reading is “enabling” because it departs from the “confidant pronouncements of professional critics” (Truth and Consequences: On Paranoid and Reparative Reading, 235). More precisely, the reason why Germany, Pale Mother deserves a reparative reading is because it is an artistic enactment of a trauma narrative.

Sanders-Brahms, who voices the narration and whose own daughter plays the character of Anna, might as well be imaginatively speaking to a therapist of sorts when she, albeit for creative purposes too, recounts traumatic aspects of her childhood to her film’s audience. Psychotherapists Rivka Tuval-Mashiach, Sara Freedman, Neta Bargai, Rut Boker, Hilt Hadar, and Arieh Y. Shalev expounded on what a trauma narrative entails in an article entitled “Coping With Trauma: Narrative and Cognitive Perspectives.” They identify it as the process of “unpairing” fear from sensorial/perceptual stimuli that are associated with previously endured danger. And while these narratives can take various forms, depending on the individual addressing it in psychotherapy, it is usually dictated by a child and written by her/his therapist. Trauma narratives, however, can also help adults who endured adversity as children, sometimes at such extreme lengths that they managed to disassociate from it, until they grew older and developed clinical depression, anxiety, or even behavioral disorders without understanding the main source of the aforementioned conditions. Three of the most fundamental steps in Trauma Narratives are: coherence (making sense of irrational thoughts, locating the source, understanding the concrete fears and their symptoms, and constructing the structure of the narrative), meaning (connecting one’s emotions to connections with one’s parents, or childhood overall, and considering their reactions to trauma through the lens of their upbringing), self-evaluation (reframing traumas so as to reclaim more autonomy, control, and self-identity). Thus, the outcome of an immersion into a trauma narrative is supposed to be reparative — more positive than negative.

Coincidentally, Germany, Pale Mother can also be broken down into three distinct plot points that are like those in a trauma narrative. One, the film opens into a public world of fascism, an ideology that permeated into the consciousnesses of the private mind and affected family dynamics (coherence). Two, during the war, the bond between the mother and daughter develops. Given that the two only have one another, their connection becomes ever more inalienable (meaning). Three, it ends at a time of post-war and reconciliation (self-evaluation).

To prove that Sanders-Brahms’s film is a trauma narrative that is reparative in its very form and, thus, means to be reparative in its vision, it’d be worthwhile to assess its structure, step by step — starting with the fact that the filmmaker herself (fictionally, Anna) seeks coherence to make sense of her and her mother’s traumas. Even if the film begins pre-Anna’s birth, her evocation of the environment that shaped her parents, their meeting, and her eventual birth is equivalent to her identifying her source of trauma in her parents that would, in a different manner, be passed onto her. The first step to her healing is identifying the origin of her trauma. That is initiated in the first sequence, following Hanne Hiob’s reading of her father Bertolt Brecht’s poem Germany, Pale Mother. As Hiob’s final utterances, regarding Germany’s allegorical demise, leave their reverberating mark — “What have your sons done to you that you stand among the people a mockery or a threat?” — a harsh, cacophonous tune introduces the establishing shot. A Nazi flag is shown reflected in a body of water, blurred because of the waves’ subtle movements. The decision to present the flag first as an image in the water, less than clear and domineering as it is when it isn’t distorted through a refraction, feels appropriate because it is then that Anna’s extradiegetic voice appears. The flag’s image invokes a kind of sensation of retrieving a memory of a time so long ago that it must appear vague and murky, similar to how the flag is depicted. Or, it suggests an act of reimagination, the kind that invokes an image of a past that whilst never seen by the teller of a particular trauma narrative, was once contrived through the stories one heard, or internalized, as a child about one’s family history. Those nearly twenty seconds of the opening sequence give off a sense, thus, of a reassessment of the environment that cultivated her parents’ identities; those identities would, ostensibly, form Anna’s upbringing and affect, consequently, her psyche.

And so, Anna commences with: “I can remember nothing about the time of my birth. No blame can be attached to me for the events before my birth. I didn’t exist then. I began when my father first saw my mother.” If there would have been a different opening scene in lieu of the aforementioned, it could have well been Anna, approximately thirty-something years older, sitting in a therapist’s office, deep in some kind of therapeutic hypnosis conducive to the aforementioned reimagination of the past while channeling the source of an anguish that she has long tried to understand. As the viewer would soon thereafter ascertain, that anguish has to do with her mother’s story because it is the mother who evidently shaped the woman Anna (or Sanders-Brahms) would become. That wouldn’t be so far-fetched either. Rebecca Reed, a former student at the University of Victoria, majoring in German and Slavic Studies, wrote a thesis in 2003 that touched upon the theme of memory and grief in Germany, Pale Mother. In an interview with Reed, Sanders-Brahms revealed that the idea for the film came to her when she was pregnant with her own daughter in 1977. The fact that she was expecting helped in terms of trying to place herself, once again, into her mother’s shoes. As Reed conveys, Sanders-Brahms then thought about how her mother “might have lived [through] the experience, having a child in the middle of the war.”

Reflecting, then, on her mother’s story, Sanders-Brahms, through her character Anna, realizes the overarching descriptor of Lene’s trauma: entrapment. Not only was Lene trying to navigate through fascism, but also through the fact that she would, by the basis of gendered norms, be subjected to silence as a woman. Anna, in turn, would have to “inherit” that silence, at least for the years when Germany's governmental regime wasn’t progressive. There is a contradiction, along those lines, in Anna’s opening narration. She rationally claims that no blame can be attached to her regarding the history that unfolded before she was born, and yet, she also says that she “began” when her father looked at her mother. It’s important to note that that wasn’t stated vice versa, and that it was specifically her father’s “look” at her mother that wrought Anna’s being. That implies metaphorically that mostly everything that happened to Lene, since she came across Hans, was a consequence of his presence in her life. His deceiving innocence, unlike that of Ulrich’s, propelled her falling in love with him. His eventually joining the Nazis contributed to her dwindling sense of conscientiousness. His DNA literally brought a bundle of joy and high responsibility into her life — in the form of Anna. And his increasing corruption caused her own physical and psychological demise. Keeping all of that in mind, Anna’s first voice-over is already filled with a deep sense of revelation on the part of her mother’s trauma. In Anna’s mind, her father is her mother’s source of trauma. Having infused Lene’s life with love for a time, he also brought eventual melancholy into the family.

As the camera tilts upwards, a rowboat zips through from the left side of the frame. Hans is seen rowing the boat and the frame widens a little bit. Ulrich, her father’s nazi friend, blurts out: “Hello there, young lady.” He turns to Hans, all while the camera remains fixated on the two men dressed in white smiling at a seeming woman who is not yet visible in the frame. “Hey, honey, turn round then,” Ulrich playfully commands as dogs’ barking is heard in the background, still non-diegetically. The camera only turns, almost suddenly, when an invocation of “heil hitler'' is uttered. Seconds later, indeed, a woman, also dressed in white, appears in the background as one of the dogs suddenly attacks her. The two men merely continue to watch, almost amusingly, as the woman fights off the dog with a briefcase. Chuckling, Hans says, “she didn’t even scream,” while Ulrich asserts that she is “a real German woman.” The very notion that the two men reacted so light-heartedly to what could have been a potentially fatal encounter with a German Shepherd and SA officers disturbs not only Anna’s reimagination of a time before even her conception, but also provokes the viewers to desiring a clarification of what exactly “a real German woman” means. It’s rather clear that, for the men in the diegetic frame, “a real German woman” means one who is stoic in the face of danger, somewhat complacent, somewhat dependent, and overall, most preferably silent. Unfortunately, those presupposed traits associated with Ulrich’s and Hans’s observation of Lene is what first piques Hans’s interest in her. Before he even gets to know her, her beauty (her rare black hair for an Aryan) and her silence intrigues Hans — making him interested in meeting her eye-to-eye at a rowing club to which Ulrich invites him.

However, not all is lost in the case of the woman, Lene, presented so enigmatically in the frame. Yes, as Bammer points out, “we watch her struggle through the [men’s] eyes''; yes, her presence is “marked by a simultaneous absence: voice without body, body without speech”; but it’s the idea that her presence is “disturbing” and “unsettling” that warrants Sanders-Brahms’s provocative redefinition of “a true German woman” (98-99) There is a point of juxtaposition of Anna’s voice-over (her outspokenness) versus Lene’s supposed stoicism (her silence). Anna’s talking over a scene that is visually presented through a male gaze reacquises female control. As the viewers try to orient themselves in Sanders-Brahms’s “cinematic world,” they search for a reliable story-teller, or narrator, and therein, they find Anna. To compensate for Ulrich’s and Hans’s scrutinizing gazes on Lene, her voice-over also aims to scrutinize them. The camera, which can then be considered an alias of Anna’s perspective, fixates on them longer than it does on Lene. Anna’s “bearing witness” to the scene gives her the ability to underscore Ulrich’s and Hans’s bad sides. For instance, she calls one a “Nazi,” and the other a soon-to-be Nazi. And the camera then focuses for a few seconds on a dead cat floating down the river, to which Ulrich says that “he can’t stand cats.” Scholar Barbara Byrne, who wrote an article “Cats in Literature,” asserts that cats are interesting to artists because they represent characteristics that people would most like to develop, such as “complete independence” and “patient intelligence” (955). Understanding that symbolism, it seems that Ulrich despises seeing those traits when exhibited in women. As long as women are dependent and silent, then that suits him.

To override that enforcement of silence, it feels appropriate for Sanders-Brahms to direct the camera’s tilt upwards, passing not only the dead cat’s flowing through the river, but also Lene’s reflection in the water. Whilst that reflection, paralleled to the dead cat’s latent traits, metaphorically belongs to the ways that Ulrich and Hans see Lene, her true figure, as the camera closes up on her, is Anna’s perception of her mother. Seated conveniently “above” the body of water on which the men row, Lene’s true nature, as seen through her daughter’s eyes, is, in fact, “above” any kind of belittling misogynistic perception that the men contrive. When Anna continues her voice-over, Lene, who has been for the past few seconds shown sitting with her face pressed to her palm as though in deep remorse, finally looks up as if hearing her daughter’s voice. Anna says, then: “My mother. I have learnt to be silent, you said. You taught me to speak. My mother tongue.” Ironically, then and there, Anna delineates, however pointedly, how she differs from her mom. Anna isn’t silent because Lene’s silence taught Anna how to speak. Already, delving into her mother’s trauma, and grasping it, shows her how to move beyond it. That, on its own, is reparative because she breaks her mother’s silence.

After an extensive journey through a coherence of her mother’s trauma origins, Anna tries to find meaning and a deeper connection with her mother. During the war, the bond between the mother and daughter develops even more so because of their mutual trauma as a result of their home’s destruction post-bombing. The second step to Anna’s positive healing is finding concrete significance in understanding the complexities of trauma.

She learns about the specificities of trauma through a fairytale whose story is coincidentally relevant to her mother’s. As they walk through the thick of the woods, almost always hidden in-between trees and their branches, through a war-torn Germany, through sites that look like they used to hold concentration camps, Lene recites to Anna a folktale called “The Robber Bridegroom.” Essentially, that story is about a bride who witnesses her fiance and his “friends” murdering a young woman and eating her flesh. A finger that they cut off ends up in the bride’s breasts and an older woman, intending to protect the bride, convinces the men to leave before they spot the bride. Apparently, the story goes that all of the aforementioned gory was actually the bride’s dream, a dream she tells to her family at a feast, until she takes out the finger and gives away the murderers at the table — her fiance and his gang. Ostensibly, the very bride who was about to get herself into trouble, lest the older woman wouldn’t have stood up for her, triumphs over the murderers. Lene’s telling, then, the folktale to Anna as they ironically trek through an environment that any second could endanger them as victimized females in a not only facistic country but a patriarchal society shows the power that mere talking can offer in overcoming trauma.

Scholar Margarete Johanna Landwehr, who wrote Folklore Cinema: Popular Film as Vernacular Culture, points out the profundity of the irony that while Lene is virtually silent throughout most of the film, this folktale sequence is the only one where she “transcends her victim status through the power of storytelling” (135). That explains, too, why in the initial sequence Anna’s voice-over mentions that contradiction between her mother’s silence and her mother’s simultaneous ability to teach Anna how to speak. However, while the power of that kind of storytelling is empowering for someone like Lene, the fact is that an aspect of it is also escapist. Landwehr notes that the folktale is for Lene a “temporary escape from the harsh, violent reality” of war and her suffering” (137). In other words, even by repressing her pain behind a folktale that is utopian and renders the victimized easily victorious, Lene still cannot hide from Anna what the girl herself bears witness to: Russian soldiers raping her mother right in front of her eyes. It brings her right back into the cruelty of reality that her mother tries to downplay.

If folktales, according to psychoanalysts Carl Jung and Bruno Bettelheim, are forms of trauma narratives because they are filled with universally understood motifs and they help people distance their present versions from their past ones and reflect, then Anna learns more about her mother’s traumas than Lene does. There, thus, develops another interesting juxtaposition that, once again, motivates the older Anna, who attempts to understand the traumas from her childhood, to speak of that which her mother never spoke about explicitly. Having witnessed her mother’s rape, as only one example of many of her mother’s other traumas, Anna becomes less naive. Sanders-Brahms’s choice to include that sequence and that juxtaposed glory of the victim in the folktale versus reality offers a reparative perspective on trauma. Instead of merely surmising that trauma is easily solvable, like it is in a folktale, through repressive mechanisms, or wholly bleak in the eyes of paranoid viewers, Sanders-Brahms proposes a focus on finding meaning in-between the lines. Traumas do not yield utopias, but they also do not imply never-ending years spent in dystopia. Traumas require confrontation. Sanders-Brahms, through her albeit fictionalized film, is herself confronting her and her mother’s past. And once again, she is speaking up for her mother.

There is a move in that aforementioned sequence already towards the last step in a positive trauma narrative, which is self-evaluation. The adult Anna, looking back at her past and remembering the memorable folktales that her mother told her, undermines the original connotation to “A True German Woman.” Through her own story, Anna redefines that phrase. For her, “A True German Woman” is one who listens and reacts to her internal cries in lieu of submitting to repression and silence — which is what happens at the end.

The closing sequence, while seemingly bleak because of Lene’s suicide attempt and Hans’s abandonment of his family, also plays as a hopeful resolution. How hopeful? Anna is not fully abandoned. Anna and Lene, about to lose one another, actually return to each other. Lene further loses her control over her identity when Hans, embittered, returns and admits that Lene’s condition irritates him. But Anna saves Lene from the misery and loss of control into which Hans places her. In fact, considering how much she detests her father for the way he treats her mother, in her eyes, and consequently, in the viewers’ eyes, his leaving might be immediately painful to Lene, but also a relief. Having long viewed her father as a large source of her mother’s anguish, parting with him (considering that he symbolizes cruelty) isn’t all that negative.

Her father’s departure, though, almost means losing her mother, too. Only Anna’s blonde hair is seen when she knocks with all of her might at the bathroom door. She reiterates, heart-wrenchingly, “I am so alone. Please don’t leave me alone.” And her knock continues, until her hand seemingly loses energy and she turns around, with her face reddened, crying quietly, her countenance in her two palms. Several seconds later, she is knocking again, then with her head, lightly, when her mother finally opens the bathroom door. The camera tilts slowly and focuses on Lene’s face as she stares, numbingly to the right of the frame. Anna’s voice-over goes: “Sometimes I think she is still behind it. And I am still standing outside.” But the truth is that Lene isn’t any longer standing behind the door. Anna brings Lene back to life, quite literally too. Anna’s touch, her head nestled into her mother’s body, her arms around her waist, brings her mother back to consciousness. It gives her purpose, adds a subtle smile to her fatigued face.

Scholar Susan E. Linville, who wrote “The Mother-Daughter Plot in History: Helma Sanders-Brahms’s Germany, Pale Mother,” notes that the filmmaker depicts Lene’s “abject misery” in such a way in the end in order to emphasize the desire “for the mother to reproduce the mother” (64). In other words, it’s true that Lene’s story can’t garner much optimism. Anyone in her position would also be in dire distress. But as long as Anna, her daughter, does not repeat her mother’s fate, as long as there is no circularity in terms of staying stagnant in her mother’s way of living, silently, then it already warrants a reparative perspective. Anna isn’t only a survivor of a difficult childhood, but she is also her and her mother’s savior. She, Anna or Sanders-Brahms, breaks her mother’s silence.

“And I must be grown up and alone,” Anna goes on to say to finish her voice-over. “But she is still there. Lene is still there.” The soft, melancholic tune that played in the beginning of the film, then reverberates through that final sequence. No word is uttered anymore when the mother and daughter stand in an embrace. There is no in-between figure, like an Ulrich or a Hans, to ridicule them as too sentimental or too involved in the overwhelm of their emotions. No, then and there, they, in fact, morph into “true German women” — the kinds who immerse in their emotions fully, instead of submitting to mere stoicism and silence. Anna isn’t passive to her pain of possibly losing her mother. She is active. She screams, knocks on the door, asks for her mother to open the door. And Lene, in lieu of silently leaving her life behind, listens to her daughter’s beckoning and cries. Neither of them, in that final moment, choose utter silence. By embracing their emotions and emotional bonds, they return to each other — as mother and daughter. Not only do they last in that moment, however. Lene “is still there” for Anna long after that moment of “return.” She is “still there” because by giving voice to Lene’s story, she reshapes her own way of living. And by confronting her mother’s traumas, she prevents repeating her mother’s probable mistakes, and in turn, shows her own daughter a better approach to embracing the idea of “A True German Woman” — that is, turning away from silence.

Sanders-Brahms’s Germany, Pale Mother was a large contribution to an era in German Cinema when the male account resounded louder, when film topics were much more depoliticized than they needed to be because of a desire to forget the Nazi past. But the film was also made during a period that had at least several artists who wanted to rectify the fascist past. The New German Cinema, which developed mainly in the 1960s and 1970s, propelled filmmakers to seek funds and address socially relevant topics. Part of it was also in response to the “German Autumn of 1977” when turbulence was reawakened in German citizens, and they scurried to prevent themselves from any version of a repetition of their authoritarian past. Those circumstances were part of some filmmakers’ urge to break the silence and alert viewers to a certain higher consciousness about their nation’s past. Sanders-Brahms was one of them. Germany, Pale Mother and its subjective lens into the directors history emphasizes a more effective grasp of history. Shaping history as a more personalized story makes it more accessible, nuanced, and confrontational. However, the film also furthers an elevated form of reflection. Its ability to separate the narrator, and also the viewers, from the past through distanciation invoked with the voice-over and also to follow closely the development of a world through Anna’s eyes does not merely subject the film to a “melancholic” mood, but to a critical consciousness that allows viewers to be affected with emotions (as a result of what the film presents) and be able to reflect on a past that shouldn’t be repeated. Anna, through confronting her trauma, develops a similar critical consciousness: rehashing her mother’s story, she realizes that she can be different and that she doesn’t have to be silent.

Works Cited

1. Bammer, Angelika. "Through a Daughter's Eyes: Helma Sanders-Brahms' Germany, Pale Mother." New German Critique, no. 36 (1985): 91-109. Accessed November 21, 2020. doi:10.2307/488303.

2. Kaes, Anton (1989) From Hitler to Heimat. The Return of History as Film, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press.

3. Sedgwick, E. K., & Frank, A. Touching Feeling: Affect, pedagogy, performativity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.

4. Love, Heather. "TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES: ON PARANOID READING AND REPARATIVE READING." Criticism 52, no. 2 (2010): 235-41. Accessed December 4, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23131405.

5. Tuval-Mashiach, Rivka & Freedman, Sara & Bargai, Neta & Boker, Rut & Hadar, Hilit & Shalev, Arieh. (2004). Coping with Trauma: Narrative and Cognitive Perspectives. Psychiatry. 67. 280-93. 10.1521/psyc.67.3.280.48977.

6. Reed, Rebecca. “Storytelling and Survival in the “Murderer’s House”: Gender, Voice(lessness) and Memory in Helma Sanders-Brahms’ Deutschland, bleiche Mutter.” University of Victoria, 2003.

7. Byrne, Barbara. "Cats in Literature." Elementary English 51, no. 7 (1974): 955-58. Accessed December 22, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41388424.

8. Landwehr, Margarete Johanna. "Märchen as Trauma Narrative: Helma Sanders-Brahms’s Film Germany, Pale Mother." In Folklore/Cinema: Popular Film as Vernacular Culture, edited by Sherman Sharon R. and Koven Mikel J., 130-48. Logan, Utah: University Press of Colorado, 2007. Accessed December 22, 2020. doi:10.2307/j.ctt4cgnbm.10.

9. Linville, Susan E."The Mother-Daughter Plot in History: Helma Sanders-Brahms's Germany, Pale Mother." New German Critique, no. 55 (1992): 51-70. Accessed December 23, 2020. doi:10.2307/488289