East German Cinema

By: Arsaib

—-It was an accident of history, probably, that Berlin’s key filmmaking centers – including the location of the legendary Ufa studios, the Metropolis playground itself – were occupied by Russian forces in the latter days of World War II. Not an accident is the fact that the Soviets set up a filmmaking apparatus much more quickly than the West did; a collective of filmmakers, Filmaktiv, formed in October 1945, documentary films were in production as early as January 1946, and the state-operated film studio, DEFA (for Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft) established itself shortly thereafter. The history of East German film is fundamentally the history of DEFA, which hit the ground running with Germany’s first postwar feature, Wolfgang Staudte’s Die Mörder sind unter uns (The Murderers are Among Us, 1946).

There’s no soft-pedaling the central problem with DEFA: the Communist regime controlled the film industry, and the artists who worked within that industry had to fashion their work according to the prevailing winds blowing across the Soviet bloc. The chronicle of DEFA is marked by the kind of clampdown-thaw-clampdown rhythm that ruled cultural life in the other Soviet-bloc countries, which meant that projects were perpetually altered or canceled according to the whims of the censors, and careers could be foreshortened by someone making the wrong movie at the wrong time. As Bertolt Brecht drolly put it in the early days of the studio, “DEFA has all sorts of problems finding subjects, especially contemporary ones. The head office lists significant themes: underground movement, distribution of land, two-year-plan, the new man, etc. – then writers are supposed to devise stories that interpret the theme and its associated problems. This naturally often goes wrong.”

The mandate for Socialist Realism made the early 1950s a period of searching for DEFA; among the most notable projects of the era was Kurt Maetzig’s two-part biography of the German communist Ernst Thälmann, Ernst Thälmann: Sohn seiner Klasse (Ernst Thalmann: Son of the Working Class, 1954) and Ernst Thälmann: Führer seiner Klasse (Ernst Thalmann: Leader of the Working Class, 1955). The films were successful but Maetzig later expressed his embarrassment about their dutiful approach. Stalin’s death in 1953 began a liberalization process, and DEFA films of the latter part of the decade roamed across more provocative territory, including Berlin: Ecke Schönhauser (Berlin: Schonhauser Corner, 1957), a rebellious-teen picture directed by Gerhard Klein and written by Wolfgang Kohlhaase (it was the third in a series of Berlin movies by the filmmaking team).

Curiously, the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 actually initiated another easing of restrictions on East German film – as though with the Wall built, the authorities could relax a little with their captive audience. By 1965 the most ambitious East German filmmakers were embarking on rangier projects, but in December of ‘65 the Socialist Unity Party’s Central Committee held its Eleventh Plenary and an entire year’s worth of films made at DEFA were summarily wiped out – banned if they had been completed, and canceled if they were in pre-production—for being “un-socialist” and “pessimistic.” This group is sometimes known as the “Rabbit Films,” after the title of one banned picture, Maetzig’s 1965 Das Kaninchen bin ich (The Rabbit is Me; see below for more detail).

After a while, to East German audiences, DEFA films were a cause for skepticism. Frank Beyer made a film, Spur der Steine (Trace of Stones), in 1966, in which a man asks a woman out on a date by saying, “For a date with you, I’d even watch a DEFA film.” Of course, this film was banned, thus adding an extra layer of irony.

The heavy hand of the Brezhnev era settled over East German film, although some inspired titles continued to sneak out; for instance, Frank Beyer created the only East German film ever nominated in the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar category, 1975’s Jakob der Lügner (Jakob the Liar; later remade, gruelingly, with Robin Williams). Genre films succeeded, such as the daffy series of “Eastern Westerns” featuring American Indians as heroes (see Die Söhne der großen Bärin (Sons of the Great Bear, below). The “Biermann Affair” of 1976 – the GDR’s expulsion of the outspoken performer Wolf Biermann – prompted a talent drain, as other actors and artists left the East.

Decent films sneaked through during the subsequent decade, while the GDR and the rest of the world waited for Gorbachev. The usual censorship problems obtained, such as the case of Ulrich Weiss’s Dein unbekannter Bruder (Your Unknown Brother, 1982), which was initially invited to the Cannes Film Festival but then withdrawn when GDR officials grew nervous about its ambiguous depiction of the 1930s anti-fascist movement.

In the wake of September 1989 and the exultant toppling of the Wall, banned films were revived and screened across Germany; in 1992 DEFA was sold to a French conglomerate, which is either a sad end or some kind of ironic justice, depending on your point of view. (Robert Horton, East German Cinema Guide)

—- “Some months before the sale of the DEFA studios to the French Conglomerate, the Compagnie Générale des Eaux (CGE) in December 1992, the name DEFA (Deutsche Film AG) was expunged from the official register of German companies. During the forty-five years of its existence, DEFA, the state-owned film company of the GDR, produced some 750 films. Although fourteen of these featured in a recent list of the hundred best German films of all time, few who did not grow up in the former GDR are familiar with more than a handful of them. This was not always the case. The first post-war German film to be shown outside Germany was a DEFA film, Wolfgang Staudte’s Die Mörder sind unter uns (The Murderers are Among Us, 1946). In the 1950s and 1960s, DEFA films were regularly screened at international festivals. But a number of factors resulted in East German cinema being confined to relative obscurity, among them the impact of the Cold War and the sense of betrayal felt by left-wing intellectuals following the Soviet intervention in the Prague Spring of 1968. In addition, unlike the national cinemas of other Eastern Bloc states, the development of East German cinema was hampered by an adherence to an increasingly outmoded realist aesthetic, a shortcoming which was to become increasingly apparent when set against the rise of the New German Cinema in the Federal Republic during the late 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s. In the light of these and other factors, it is tempting to dismiss East German cinema as dull and propagandistic, as merely an appendage of the state ideological apparatus. To do so, however, is to ignore the often considerable tensions that existed between the film-makers and their political masters and to overlook the excellence and originality of a number of films produced by DEFA at very different periods of the company’s existence” (Sean Allan: DEFA: East German Cinema, 1946-1992: Berghahn Books, 1999).

—- "Nearly a decade after the demise of DEFA (Deutsche Film A.G.), East Germany’s state-controlled film company, can we begin to think of an “integrative” history of GDR cinema, at once within German film history, and of German film history within the international debates around “national cinema”? After the fall of the wall, the task of “integrating” not only territories and people, but also the arts and cultural life was evident. Equally evident was the danger of simply appropriating them or rewriting their differences. In the area of cinema, the GDR film culture posed special problems, since – compared to the literary life – it had remained terra incognita for the West German and Western public. Where it was considered, it either figured in relation to the old BRD-cinema as representing a parallel ‘commercial’ cinema (under the special conditions of state capitalism), or as a parallel ‘auteur cinema’ (Konrad Wolf, Frank Bayer, Heiner Carow etc. as the “equivalents” of Kluge, Reitz, Herzog, Fassbinder, etc.). The result were rather skewed symmetries. Nor was it really feasible to conceive of East German cinema as a ‘counter-cinema’ in the sense that the political cinema of Jean-Luc Godard in the 1970s, the films of Glauber Rocha, or the New Brazilian cinema were once referred to as counter-cinemas.

Thus, the exact ‘placing’ of GDR cinema must remain an open issue… When looking at how the mapping of GDR cinema has been explicitly or implicitly tackled, one notices that in a number of (traditional) film histories the approach tends to be ‘paratactic,’ which is to say, the DEFA/GDR cinema is ‘added to’ to the existing cinema(s) of the Federal Republic, as if the problem was one of ‘filling in’ the blanks and ‘white areas’ on the cinematic and cultural map. But such a map is no more than the guide to a minefield as soon as someone steps into the territory itself. It is a minefield of contending discourses, normative judgments and prescriptive debates" (Thomas Elsaesser and Michael Wedel: European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood: Amsterdam University Press, 2005).

—- "DEFA does not belong to the GDR alone, and cannot bear the sole ‘blame’ for the GDR, if for no other reason than its continuous relationship with FRG cinema. In the beginning this was true in practical terms, since it was not until 1961 and the Berlin Wall that DEFA had an exclusive Eastern identity. And from a Western point of view, where convenient, early DEFA films were even treated as simply German. Later there was an explicit campaign to keep Western talent out of DEFA and keep DEFA films out of the West. But DEFA contributions exist in many Western films, including Roberto Rossellini’s Germania anno zero (1947), Straub/Huillet’s Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach (The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, 1967), Wenders’s Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire, 1987) or documentaries such as Helga Reidemeister’s DrehOrt Berlin (Location Berlin, 1987) or Aufrecht Gehen (Walking Tall, 1988), a film on the life of Rudi Dutschke. Co-productions became more and more common after the 1970s, such as Peter Schamoni’s Frühlingssinfonie (Spring Symphony, 1982/3), Bernhard Wicki’s Die Grünstein-Variante (The Grünstein Variation, 1984), based on a script by Kohlhaase, and Frank Beyer’s work for West German television. International co-productions beyond West Germany, although seldom practical, were also undertaken with French, British and other partners, especially in Eastern Europe. The failure of continuous collaboration among socialist countries despite official slogans of solidarity also deserves study in regard to the interconnections between film history and nation-building. But from the West German point of view, the GDR remained a phantom in national imaginary – as evidenced by Helke Sander’s ReDuPers (The All-round Reduced Personality, 1978), Alexander Kluge’s Abschied von Gestern (Yesterday Girl, 1966), and films by Thomas Brasch.

Further refutation of a hermetic definition of DEFA is the long list of beloved and admired screen stars and stage actors of West Germany who began their careers in GDR films. Most prominent among these are international figures such as Armin Mueller Stahl and Katharina Thalbach, Jutta Hoffmann, Hilmar Thate, Angelica Domröse, Jörg Gudzuhn and the very popular Manfred Krug. Directors were a somewhat rarer occurrence, but were able to work in the West as well, and technicians were always, like actors, quite well respected for their skill and good training, despite the commonplace about the technical backwardness of the GDR" (Barton Byg, director of the DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and author of Landscapes of Resistance: The German Films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub).

*Since I’m only featuring the East German films I have seen, please only suggest those that you have seen. Thank you. :)

Wolfgang Staudte
The Murderers are Among Us (1946)
Rotation (1949)
The Kaiser’s Lackey (1951)

Konrad Wolf
Sun Seekers (1958/72)
Stars (1959)
The Divided Heaven (1964)
I Was Nineteen (1968)
Goya, or the Hard Way to Enlightenment (1971)
Solo Sunny (1980) (co-director: Wolfgang Kohlhaase)