The Gleiwitz Case

Director Gerhard Klein was born in Berlin on May 1, 1920, and grew up in Kreuzberg. As a young man he joined the resistance against the Nazis and was arrested twice. At age twenty he became a soldier and, eventually, a POW with the English. Klein was self-educated and worked as a cartoonist and documentary filmmaker after WWII.

He began working for DEFA as a scriptwriter for short and documentary films in 1946 and then, as of 1952, at the DEFA Studio for Feature Films. There he achieved his dream of becoming a filmmaker who could express the poetry of daily life and the fascination of his beloved Berlin. Together with his friend, scriptwriter Wolfgang Kohlhaase, he produced a series known as the “Berlin Films.” Kohlhaase paid Klein, his long-time collaborator, the highest compliment, when he remarked, “He could show you how a courtyard smells.”

Klein’s films were limited in number, in part because his productions were challenged by dogmatic film officials, who deemed his Berlin films aesthetically inappropriate models for a socialist state. Berlin around the Corner, for example, was among the films banned by East German officials in 1965; officials also faulted The Gleiwitz Case (1961), whose powerful style they interpreted as converging too closely with fascist aesthetics.

Klein died in 1970, while working on a film entitled Murder Case Zernik. —DEFA Film Library