The Bridge

Bernhard Wicki's The Bridge (German: Die Brücke) opened in West Germany in October 1959 and went on to become a foundational text of postwar German cinema's reckoning with the Nazi era. The film earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film at the 32nd Academy Awards in 1960 and won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film the same season.

The screenplay is adapted from Manfred Gregor's 1958 autobiographical novel of the same name. Gregor (the pen name of Gregor Dorfmeister) had been a sixteen-year-old Hitler Youth member assigned to defend a bridge near Bad Tölz in the closing days of the war and was one of only two survivors of his squad; the book was a thinly fictionalised account. Wicki — Austrian-Swiss-born, then in his early forties — had been a professional actor and theatre director in Vienna and Munich before turning to film direction; this was his second feature.

The cast is composed almost entirely of teenage non-professionals recruited from Bavarian secondary schools, with Folker Bohnet, Fritz Wepper, Michael Hinz, Frank Glaubrecht, Karl Michael Balzer, Volker Lechtenbrink and Günther Hoffmann in the seven principal roles. Cinematography is by Gerd von Bonin, working in stark high-contrast black-and-white. The film is now widely cited as one of the most influential anti-war films of European cinema, alongside Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion (1937) and Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory (1957). Wicki would later direct sequences of The Longest Day (1962) and continue working in German cinema until his death in 2000.