The protagonist is a special one: a car, through which sketches ow from ten by- gone years. The irony and poignancy are manifold: an object more human than the real humans of the era; an object that happens to be one of the central products of the forthcoming “German miracle”; and, as the manipulator of images, a director who was one of the few who lived and worked through the Nazi period in a way best described as human and decent way. The cemetery of cars shows the idea of the disillusioned conclusion: there are no more people here, that’s how low we have fallen. The car is talkative. We tried to create order around us, but that was meaningless. When the car was in its youth, it seemed to have a thousand years ahead of it, but something went wrong and the years were limited to only twelve…
This remarkable episode film was made at the peak of the form that gave as disparate films as Dead of Night, Flicka och hyacinter, Retour à la vie or Paisà, obviously the greatest of them all. (And, indeed, Chris Marker has referred to In jenen Tagen as the German equivalent of Paisà). Being entirely in the hands of Helmut Käutner, none of the episodes is trivial; we are approaching the level of the authentic art of the short story. In jenen Tagen might well be the most important German film, of both, from the immediate post-war period, and perhaps many years after. Thrown into the bargain, these “fragments of human destinies” are a fascinating and ironic cross-section of the history of one country during the ten most dramatic years of its entire existence.

Peter von Bagh