Yet Rentschler is careful not to glorify the films from this period, saying that he is “skeptical.”

“I believe these films are interesting in the view of the project of trying to reinvent Germany in the modern world,” he says. “[But] these films are not saying things that ought to be said. There is a blockage at work.”

It is telling that while bombed-out German cities serve as the backdrop to many of the films, the Third Reich is seldom their subject. It is disturbing—if not offensive—that while the Nazis and war are occasionally referenced, the persecution of Jews is never addressed.

Instead of documenting or reflecting upon Nazi atrocities, these films choose to focus on more abstract themes of irrepressible memory and inescapable history.

In The Lost Man, Lorre’s character is a serial murderer and a Nazi, but he does not kill on behalf of the Party, and his victims are not Jewish. The film engages a guilty history, but it is the guilt of a lone psychopath rather than the guilt of an entire nation. Lorre suggests that Dr. Rothe’s transformation from an upstanding doctor to a murderer is linked to the political climate of the time, but the politics in the film are driven by wartime espionage, not by anti-Semitism.

The resulting message—as is the case in many of the films in the series—is that the German people were the victims of the Nazi regime, not victimizers on its behalf. Still, Dr. Rothe is a man tormented by his murderous past, and even the film’s harshest critics would be hard-pressed to ignore Rothe’s metaphorical significance.

As Rentschler concludes in an essay written for the series, post-war German film is “a contested and controversial cinema.”

“No matter what conclusions we might reach, if we want to comprehend the shape and substance of German dreams during the early post-war years, we can find no better resource,” he writes.

—“After the War/Before the Wall: German Cinema 1945-60” runs at the Harvard Film Archive until March 19.