Cinematic Conversion in Frank Wisbar’s Dogs, Do You Want to Live Forever?

Sa？etak During the 1950s, West German cinemas screened approximately 600 war films, nearly ten percent of the domestic production. Faulting these features for their avoidance of significant issues such as the causes of World War II, the Holocaust, or the Wehrmacht’s misdeeds and atrocities, previous commentators have in the main focused on the failure of these films to engage the past in a thoroughgoing manner. As a response to this criticism, my essay will show how Frank Wisbar’s Dogs, Do You Want to Live Forever? (1959), a feature film about the Battle of Stalingrad, provides a conversion narrative that corresponds to the needs of the Adenauer era. As this film looks back to its past, it simultaneously looks forward and promotes the values of a new and emerging democracy