Die Frau am Weg is, like Die Sonnhofbäuerin, a film that could only have been made in 1948 – at least if we look first at this year’s Austrian production in its entirety. While all around the occupied Alpine republic the Cold War was getting hotter by the month, Austria was pretty busy with itself. On the one hand, 1948 marked the tenth anniversary of the Anschluss, with a lot of popular festivities and functions happening again for the first time in a decade. On the other hand, at least in cinema, it was the year of reckoning – more or less every important immediate postwar fiction feature dealing with Austria’s failings during the Nazi years was unleashed upon the local audience in 1948. In this year’s films, things were acknowledged and outright said that would not, for a very, very long time, be touched upon again in Austrian cinema.
The story of Christine, a border guard’s wife who meets an escaped prisoner, falls in love and wants to flee to Switzerland with him, includes a detail that still today feels staggering in its political forthrightness: when she understands that the prisoner was headed for a con centration camp and seemingly had been in one before, she asks whether it was as horrible there as people in her mountain village were saying. There it is, the ugly truth denied for too long but revealed in a noirish Heimat melodrama: everybody knew. Interesting detail: the text that opens the film addresses, towards its end, not only Austrian but also foreign viewers – this was destined to be a work for the ages, for all its topical relevance.

Olaf Möller