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In Pawel Pawlikowski’s spare, deeply-felt new film Fatherland, the great novelist Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) returns to Germany from his Californian exile, and travels with his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller) through their ruined, occupied homeland. Toward the end, they walk into a bomb-damaged church, and sit listening as two men play Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” on the organ. Mann weeps for all that is lost.

Pawlikowski has picked his moment well. That conference played a key part in building a new global settlement that aimed to ensure, through guaranteed rights and freedoms, through mutual trade and prosperity, that such a catastrophe could never happen again.

In Pawel Pawlikowski’s spare, deeply-felt new film Fatherland, the great novelist Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) returns to Germany from his Californian exile, and travels with his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller) through their ruined, occupied homeland. Toward the end, they walk into a bomb-damaged church, and sit listening as two men play Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” on the organ. Mann weeps for all that is lost.

Pawlikowski has picked his moment well. That conference played a key part in building a new global settlement that aimed to ensure, through guaranteed rights and freedoms, through mutual trade and prosperity, that such a catastrophe could never happen again.

But today, that postwar order is coming under ever heavier bombardment. Predictions of its destruction are commonplace. It’s a good time to look through the lens of the 1940s, and contemplate just why that order was created in the first place.

Back then, Hollywood was filming in the ruins for real. Between 1947 and 1949, four great directors each went to Germany and shot an American spin on what the postwar Germans called the Trümmerfilm, or “rubble movie.”

The 1940s was perhaps Hollywood’s apotheosis. The war fostered new depth and seriousness; television had not yet weakened cinema’s dominion. This was the era of Humphrey Bogart, Ava Gardner, and film noir; of movies like Casablanca, Double Indemnity, and Notorious. The four rubble films themselves are hardly classics, but between them, they captured how a newly super-powerful United States was trying to understand how the world should be rebuilt. They dramatized the dilemmas and nightmares Americans faced as they decided whether to entangle themselves with Europe in the long term. Today, they remind us that the creation of the settlement we’re watching die was driven not only by idealism, but by guilt, hard-faced realism, and fear.

In Jacques Tourneur’s Berlin Express, shot in summer 1947, the wreckage of Frankfurt—the capital of the U.S. zone—stands for the dangers of failing to build a new, peaceful world. Agents of the revanchist Nazi underground kidnap a revered advocate of international unity to prevent him attending a conference on German reunification, hiding him in a derelict brewery.

This dramatized the dread felt by many, not least in Hollywood, that desperate Germans could all too easily turn to fascism once........

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