BRIDGE, THE [GerMAn: DIE BRÜCKE] 47
Hitler’s suicide and a week before Germany’s surrender— Dorfmeister and four
other 16- year- old draftees were ordered to defend a bridge in the forest 12 miles
south of town. The next day American tanks spearheading an advance by the U.S.
141st Infantry Regiment (36th Infantry Division) approached the bridge. The Amer-
icans were fired upon by the Volkssturm boys. The lead tank was knocked out
and a crewman badly, perhaps fatally, wounded. In the ensuing firefight, two of
the five German boys were killed while Dorfmeister and the other two survivors
of the skirmish fled back to Bad Tölz through the woods. When they arrived in
town a few hours later, they were ordered by two Feldjägers (military policemen)
to man a machine- gun nest and defend Tölzer Isar Bridge. After the Feldjägers left,
Dorfmeister opted to go home, but his two comrades stayed to fight; they were
killed before the town fell to the Americans. Thirteen years later, Dorfmeister, writ-
ing under the pseudonym of Manfred Gregor, expressed lingering feelings of guilt
and grief by writing Die Brücke [The Bridge] (1958), a fictionalized account of the
incident that became a bestseller in West Germany and was translated into 15 lan-
guages. Producers Hermann Schwerin and Jochen Schwerin secured the film rights
and hired Austrian filmmaker Bernhard Wicki to direct a movie version. Wicki and
co writers Michael Mansfeld and Karl- Wilhelm Vivier wrote the adaptation.
Production
Die Brücke was shot in black and white in the fall of 1958 at Florian- Geyer- Brücke
[Florian Geyer Bridge] (demolished in 1991 and replaced in 1995) and at other loca-
tions in Cham, Bavaria, a town 150 miles northeast of Bad Tölz. None of the three
M24 Chaffee light tanks shown in the movie are real. Because the newly formed
Bundeswehr (postwar German Army) still did not have any tanks in 1959, Bern-
hard Wicki had to have wooden models constructed and then placed on top of
truck chassis (the truck wheels can clearly been seen under the body of each “tank”).
Plot Summary
In the final days of World War II, U.S. forces close in on a small Bavarian town. In
the town’s school, seven boisterous 16- year- old boys are teasing girls, following
the receding battle front on a wall map, and reading love passages from Romeo and
Juliet in their En glish class. Walter Forst (Michael Hinz) is deeply resentful of his
arrogant father (Hans Elwenspoek), the local Nazi Party Ortsgruppenleiter (local
group leader), who has chosen to send his wife away to a safe location and save
himself using the excuse of a Volkssturm meeting. Sigi Bernhard (Günther Hoff-
mann) refuses to let his mother send him out of town to avoid danger. Karl Horber
(Karl Michael Balzer) is infatuated with Barbara (Edeltraut Elsner), his father’s
young assistant at the hair salon, and is bewildered once he sees the two meet-
ing romantically. Klaus Hager (Volker Lechtenbrink) does not notice that his
classmate, Franziska (Cordula Trantow), has feelings for him. Jürgen Borchert
(Frank Glaubrecht), whose father was a German soldier who died in battle,
strug gles to do justice to his father’s legacy. To their surprise, the young men are
assigned to a local army platoon, and they are forced to deploy after only a sin-
gle day in the barracks. As they prepare to depart, the boys’ teacher asks Fröhlich