Incongruous Skies: The Films of Konrad Wolf

“Sometimes I’m against the crowd,” a club singer tells her friend. It’s an admission of stage fright, but what scares her about her audience—distractible folk in provincial East German halls—isn’t that she might falter before them. It’s the disconnect. Sunny wants to be a real star; this dusty clientele just wants Schläger music, some light entertainment of an evening, while tucking into wurst and chips. For an ambitious woman allying herself to the red-hot center of the solar system with the stage name “Sunny,” that lack of recognition might as well be a black hole. “When that ass was stuffing his face,” she rues at the bar after one transcendent performance, “it was over.” But while one ignorant ass wasn’t looking at her, Konrad Wolf was. As she performs that spectacular number—standing out against the crowd, garbed in singular, shimmering gold—Wolf’s final film, Solo Sunny (1980), has eyes only for her.

The German Democratic Republic wanted its cultural output to model the ideal socialist subject for East Germany’s youth. With personalities like Sunny, however, Wolf strayed recurrently from that party line. He directed fourteen narrative features at DEFA, the state-owned production studio, between 1955 and 1980, and was an ambassador for the GDR, presiding over the country’s Academy of Arts from 1965 until his death in 1982. Yet from that seemingly ironclad context, he forged an ambivalent cinema in which clear-cut inspirations for the socialist project are few. In lieu of bright communist poster-children, he thought of changeable characters—comrades among them—who were vulnerable to love, delusion, and disappointment. While some DEFA workhorses cranked out wishful fare about wartime survivors and tireless laborers (whose suffering arcs toward eventual triumph), Wolf made films about men whose heroic efforts are destined for failure, and women whose passions are heartrendingly incongruous with their times. In Solo Sunny, Wolf’s portrait of an artist who blazes against the oppressive conformism and brownish dilapidation of late-1970s East Berlin, the camera is drawn like a moth to its fame-seeking protagonist. And all through his empathetic cinema, Wolf sees people for who they are and who they aspire to be.

Wolf was born to Jewish communists in southwestern Germany in 1925—but that was not his home for long. When the Nazis ascended to power, the Wolfs fled to Moscow. Koni, as he was known from childhood, was soon making little drawings of Red Square; the Black Forest of his homeland, receding from his mind. He did not return to Germany until the final days of World War II, and when he did, he returned as an officer of the Red Army. He was appointed commander of Bernau (a town to the northeast of Berlin) and tasked with urging Nazi soldiers to surrender: Hitler was dead, and the war was almost over. Germany called that time “zero hour,” and across the late 1940s produced “rubble films” that were shot amid the ruins of conflict. By the time Wolf made a film that remembered the wreckage twenty years later, however, East Germany had cleared the rubble and was resolutely, as the national anthem of this nascent country proudly declared, “to the future turned.” Whatever comforting idea “zero hour” gave guilt-stricken Germans of resetting the clock and moving past scorched earth, in I Was Nineteen (1968), Wolf defers closure, finding embers still to stoke. 

I Was Nineteen opens on a long shot of calm springtime waters, before a raft, off in the distance, drifts across the surface and interrupts the stillness. It could be an image of new beginnings, but the raft carries a hanged man. Wolf calls attention to the suspended corpse in that opening scene with two medium close-ups: the lifeless head, and the wooden sign hanging off its chest. “Deserter!” it reads. “I licked Russian boots.” At this proximity, the dead body looks boyish. As the film continues—with World War II emitting a death rattle that claims a few more bodies in its last, futile gasps—Wolf will quietly accentuate again how very young the men thrown to conflict are. Gregor, the protagonist and an avatar for Koni in Bernau, often thinks of his mother, and wears uniform much too big for him, bunching at his narrow waist. While he is made commander, another soldier of similar age is rewarded with a bar of chocolate for his efforts; all the medals have run out. I Was Nineteen is a whimpering war film, then—unflinching, but less in bloodied depictions of violence than in casting blatant light on the unheroic dimensions of war.

Wolf wrote I Was Nineteen with Wolfgang Kohlhaase (who would collaborate with the director on other films, including Solo Sunny), working from his own wartime journals. He accords the film with stark, serious realism, utilizing a documentary eye that harks back to his apprenticeship as assistant director on Soviet nonfiction films in the early 1950s. But across his 25 years as director, his vision was variable—skim stones across his cinema, and they will hit on melodrama and modernism, on styles radically disorientated from the GDR’s signature socialist realism. That unpredictable aesthetic could derive from his formative years when, after the war, Wolf moved back and forth: some time in East Berlin (attending evening school, writing for newspapers, working with the new department of culture); some time in Moscow (where he enrolled in film school). Yet Wolf was itinerant in later years too; his prominent cultural position permitted him to travel to film festivals—and serve on juries with the likes of Patricia Highsmith—when movement was restricted for most. While others caught just glitching glimpses of West German television broadcasts, via tall aerials that scratched at East German skies, Wolf was in the West being exposed to other cinemas, from Italian neorealism to the French New Wave. These surely influenced his unusual, unfixed approach to narrative and film form. 

He found acclaim on the international film circuit when Stars (1959) screened in competition at Cannes, winning the Special Jury Prize. In this devastating film, Wolf looked back to the deportation of Sephardic Jews from Bulgaria to Auschwitz. When the script first arrived at DEFA, it was dismissed; the Holocaust was thought outdated, overdone. DEFA had produced tens of antifascist films before, it was true, but the Jewish-Bulgarian behind this script, Angel Wagenstein, had a different tale to tell. 

Stars has its morally satisfying villains—an oafish officer who hurries Jews to their death so that he might sooner go back to pillaging Bulgarian meat, wine, and women—but focuses most of all on Walter, a Nazi whose long, intelligent face seems to distinguish him from the rest (and he’s an archetypal Wolfian man in that manner). But Walter ultimately falls short of being good or evil; he confesses in one scene that he never excelled in life at anything. It is through this pitiful protagonist that Wolf troubles the striking high-contrast language of melodrama—black and white, good and evil—with his ambivalence. Encountering beautiful Ruth, one of the Jews destined for the concentration camps, might inspire heroic action in Walter, and even the film’s images want to see hope in the star-crossed couple. While he is framed against fair skies with picturebook clouds, Ruth is superimposed onto vital, flowing streams that suggest the persistence of life. Yet tragedy is inexorable; this story has already been written, and Wolf’s symbolism soon turns thunderous. Where romantic match-cuts had reached across barbed wire to join Walter to Ruth before, unignorable figures of death now come between the ill-fated couple. Wagenstein and Wolf see little chance for heroism in this darkness. Though their film is limned with the evanescent silver lining of an improbable love, Walter—whether he knows or not—is only playing at being the valiant knight.

Returning to Auschwitz like this made German officials nervous, and there was an attempt to stop Stars circulating at international festivals. In the end, it screened as Bulgaria’s submission to Cannes—but as Wagenstein remembered it in 2007, the film was banned for thirty years in Bulgaria itself. While Stars did not redeem Walter, it did not condemn him outright. The “abstract humanism” that affronted the Soviets was simultaneously admired by others; its novice lead actress, Sascha Kruscharska, was applauded in the headlines of French newspapers and decorated with enthusiastic flowers in East German streets. 

Wolf was the subject of celebration and scandal throughout his career. In the next decade, he was controversial again for making a film whose fragmented aesthetic constellated him, for a brief moment, with Paris’s Left Bank and West German cinema (scholars gesture at Alain Resnais, Marguerite Duras, and Alexander Kluge). The Divided Heaven (1964) adapts Christa Wolf’s novel of the same name, and both book and film take place in East Berlin in 1960, just before the construction of the Wall. At that time, thousands of East Germans were relocating West, where the economic success of capitalism gleamed in cellophane’s ubiquitous iridescence and new, mirror-bright glass. Yet the sparkle of consumerism means nothing to Rita, the protagonist of Divided Heaven, whose socialism is only threatened by her intense love for a man who is ten years older, and adamantly jaded with the East Germany he knows.

That narrative of Rita’s “intimate feeling” intruding on socialist commitment was read cautiously by the novel’s GDR critics, and her existential crisis—written with beautifully lyrical metaphors of quicksilver skies—was deemed “decadent.” Christa Wolf (unrelated to her friend Koni) was one of five to work on the script for the film adaptation, where temporal rifts intensify in what was an already nonlinear narrative. Werner Bergmann, the cinematographer, had worked with canted angles and split screens on Stars, but as this later collaboration with Wolf flashes back and forth in time, their tears and twists to the image are amplified. Where Wolf and Bergmann punctuated Stars with signs of imminent death, here walls, ruptures, and an advertisement for Persil detergent make obvious the ideological divide between two lovers, emboldening and underlining it to ominous effect.

Like Ruth, Rita is “a brown-haired maiden” who is adored by her Wolfian man for being too young to be cynical, to have forsaken all hope. Yet she is also free in ways that Ruth cannot be—and that modern freedom to be any number of women refracts amid this film’s exhilarating shattered visuals. She looks like a heroine of Russian literature in one scene: wearing a fur hat in the snow, her gaze lost to the blizzard of love. Elsewhere, she looks like a heroine of GDR propaganda: here, factory-ready in industrious overalls and dutiful headscarf; there, down on the factory floor, with her gaze fastened on the near distance, on the near future. At last: our socialist poster child! But Wolf steals Rita from that world soon enough, and takes her for cinema. In an abstracting close-up, Renate Blume as Rita resembles those European actresses synonymous with alienation (Maria Falconetti, Monica Vitti); her gaze, here, is adrift in vertiginous nothingness. 

Those who knew Wolf describe a man who was humble, reserved—sometimes so silent on set, in fact, that it frustrated actors. But I imagine him behind the camera on this film, eyes full of new-wave innovation, as a kindred spirit to his heroine: like her, determined but impressionable; like her, aware that some desires are irreconcilable, but living through the storm of that truth even so.

Soon, the GDR would put a halt to such mercurial arts, to the experiment and doubt of films like this, feeling anxious about teenagers being poisoned against the state. Censorship became stricter the year after Divided Heaven was released, and, even with Wolf’s prestigious name on its reel, that too-modernist film was shelved intermittently in East Germany. It is in this sternly authoritarian context that Wolf’s most memorable character would have been an adolescent. Sunny was just a girl stealing gumdrops from the Spätkauf when older girls were walking out on the East for the West. For her, socialism had never been a choice; socialism was just how it was. 

By the time Solo Sunny was released in 1980, an outspoken musician had been exiled (it was, in fact, an affair that Wolf mediated in his role as President of the Academy of Arts, being even-sided with clashing artists and politicians, perhaps to a fault). With the surveilling force of the Stasi and its informants, the GDR was punishing citizens left, right, and center for being against the crowd. This was bad for women like Sunny, whose prying, prude neighbors might report them to the authorities (sometimes even have them institutionalized) for having “flaws” in their socialist character, like littering an apartment block with strange men and loud music. There are more outrageous scenes than this, and Sunny likely aches for them. She laments in one scene that it isn’t possible to drink enough to block boredom out; night after monotonous night of performing, it’s the same limp GDR jokes and the same crap pick-up lines. 

Conservative audiences found this protagonist an unforgivable egotist, and were vociferous enough that Wolf, during one television discussion, defended the right for characters and citizens to have “edges.” Younger audiences appreciated those edges, and made Solo Sunny a box-office hit. Again, there was an intergenerational disconnect. When Sunny looked in the mirror—as if to keep checking she was still herself beneath the thick mascara and the scarlet lip, that she was not replaceable with someone else from whatever crowd—it wasn’t narcissism to the film’s fans, but soul-searching. And it rang true. Much of that pathos is down to Renate Krössner, who hits all the right notes in playing Sunny, with her idiosyncratically lispy delivery making major keys effervesce with fidgety charm, and minor keys echo with listless ennui. Soon, she was so iconic of the next generation giving a finger to state socialism that she had a hard time finding acting gigs. Yet in 1985, Krössner finally managed to emigrate West—which, of course, was twice as iconic. Like so many young East Germans, she wasn’t necessarily looking for an ideal Germany. She was, to borrow a line from I Was Nineteen, simply looking for a Germany in which she could live.

Wolf wanted that to be communist East Germany, and Christa Wolf said his death came at the right moment, that her friend and comrade would not have survived the sudden end of the socialist dream when the GDR collapsed in 1989. Yet, all the same, Koni knew that the future would never be determined by blueprints, that it was instead contingent on what young people did with the sorry mess of the twentieth century into which they had been thrown.