Billy Wilder's Cold War Berlin

The Hollywood director Billy Wilder was involved in three postwar films about Germany: a twenty-two-minute documentary about the concentration camps titled Death Mills (1945) that he edited; the other two, which he directed and coscripted, were the feature films A Foreign Affair (1948) and One, Two, Three (1961). My focus is on what the production and reception of these three films suggest about Wilder's evolving relationship to postwar Germany's coming to terms with its Nazi past, and how this evolution dovetails with, in part resists but also gives comedic articulation to, an emerging and then dominant Cold War culture. © 2010 by New German Critique, Inc.