This is what enchants me about Sirk: this delirious mixture of medieval and modern, sentimentality and subtlety, tame compositions and frenzied CinemaScope. Obviously one must talk about all this as Aragon talks about Elsa’s eyes, raving a little, a lot, passionately, no matter, the only logic which concerns Sirk is delirium. […] I find the film remarkable because it gives me the feeling that Ernst and his Lisbeth, this couple with the smooth Premingerian faces, by closing their eyes with passionate simplicity in Berlin under the bombs, ultimately delve deeper into themselves than any other character in a film to date. As Rossellini says, it is thanks to the war that they find love. They become, thanks to Hitler, man and woman as God created them. It is because one must love to live that one must live to love, says Ernst in killing a Russian partisan, or Lisbeth while delicately sipping her champagne. Love at leisure, says Sirk approvingly with every shot in homage to Baudelaire, love then and die. And his film is beautiful because one thinks of the war as one watches these images of love, and vice versa.
Jean-Luc Godard, in “Cahiers du cinéma”, 94, 1959