Last Features: East German Cinema's Lost Generation 1571135553, 9781571135551

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1: On Fools and Clowns or Refusal as Engagement in Two Final DEFA Films: Egon Günther’s Stein and Jörg Foth’s Letztes aus der DaDaeR
2: “Film Must Fidget”: DEFA’s Untimely Poets
3: Absurd Endgames: Peter Welz’s Banale Tage
4: Flight into Reality: The Cinema of Helke Misselwitz
5: The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: Andreas Voigt’s Leipzig Pentalogy, 1986–96
6: Asynchronicity in DEFA’s Last Feature: Architects, Goats, and Godot
Filmography
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Last Features

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Screen Cultures: German Film and the Visual Series Editors: Gerd Gemünden (Dartmouth College) Johannes von Moltke (University of Michigan)

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Clowns Meh and Weh with opera singer Gerd Wolf in the film Letztes aus der DaDaeR. Courtesy of DEFA Stiftung; detail from photograph by Rüdiger Pelikan.

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Last Features East German Cinema’s Lost Generation

Reinhild Steingröver

Rochester, New York

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Copyright © 2014 Reinhild Steingröver All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. First published 2014 by Camden House Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA www.camden-house.com and of Boydell & Brewer Limited PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com ISBN-13: 978-1-57113-555-1 ISBN-10: 1-57113-555-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Steingröver, Reinhild. Last features: East German cinema’s lost generation / Reinhild Steingröver. pages cm. — (Screen cultures: German film and the visual) Includes bibliographical references and index. Includes filmography. ISBN-13: 978-1-57113-555-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-57113-555-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Motion pictures—Germany (East)—History and criticism. 2. Motion picture producers and directors—Germany (East) I. Title. PN1993.5.G3S64 2014 791.430943'1—dc23 2013042306 This publication is printed on acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America.

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Contents Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

1: On Fools and Clowns or Refusal as Engagement in Two Final DEFA Films: Egon Günther’s Stein and Jörg Foth’s Letztes aus der DaDaeR

21

2: “Film Must Fidget”: DEFA’s Untimely Poets

60

3: Absurd Endgames: Peter Welz’s Banale Tage

105

4: Flight into Reality: The Cinema of Helke Misselwitz

139

5: The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: Andreas Voigt’s Leipzig Pentalogy, 1986–96

172

6: Asynchronicity in DEFA’s Last Feature: Architects, Goats, and Godot

203

Filmography

239

Bibliography

243

Index

253

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Acknowledgments

A

T THE COMPLETION OF A LONG-TERM PROJECT, it is a great pleasure to acknowledge the help and support of the many people who made it possible. This book found its initial inspiration at the first DEFA Summer Institute in 2001, organized by Barton Byg, Skyler Arndt-Briggs, and Hiltrud Schulz from the DEFA Film Library in Amherst, Massachusetts. Their tireless efforts over the last twenty years have brought the films and filmmakers of East Germany to growing numbers of scholars from many disciplines as well as to enthusiastic audiences across North America. In addition to attending several summer institutes, I have greatly enjoyed hosting numerous visiting scholars, and filmmakers in Rochester on their North American tours organized by the DEFA Film Library. I am grateful to the staff of the George Eastman House International Museum for Film and Photography in Rochester for collaborating with me on these visits, especially former film programmers Jim Healy and Mike Neault, as well as my current partner in crime, Lori Donnelly. The research for this book began with a grant from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and has since then been generously supported by the DEFA Foundation in Berlin and the Professional Development Fund at the Eastman School of Music. For the latter, I thank Dean Donna Fox and her committee for the continued faith that this book would one day materialize, despite my annual assurances that this “might be the last trip to the archive.” It usually wasn’t, as the constantly changing archival landscape in Berlin made more and more materials available for scholars. Initially, not even all the films could be accessed as they were dispersed in various archives, or stowed away in boxes in filmmakers’ attics. The situation seemed even worse for production files, scripts, and other indispensible material. Nevertheless, many kind archivists and librarians went out of their way to facilitate my work and often pointed me towards material I could not have asked for since I was not aware it existed. Elke Schieber was the first to take the time to facilitate important encounters with the filmmakers but also to help me understand much about the context of the last generation at DEFA. Later, her colleagues in the Archive of the Film Museum Potsdam, especially Birgit Scholz, Heidrun Schmutzer, and Peter Warnecke offered warm hospitality, granted access to yet un-catalogued materials and shared many insights about the daily routine in the DEFA studio. Heidrun Wilkening kindly provided access to the estate of her late husband, producer

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Thomas Wilkening, and illuminating answers to my questions. At the Bundesarchiv Lichterfelde and the Bundesarchiv/Filmarchiv Berlin archivists Herr Müller and Frau Klawitter searched the vaults and made available, often on short notice, films and secondary materials. The librarians of the Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen Konrad Wolf, Babelsberg have hosted me every summer since 2003 and patiently supplied films, newspaper clippings, scholarly materials, and research help. The library truly became my summer domicile and I am deeply indebted to Frau Wiehring von Wendrin, Frau Reiser, Frau Göthe, Frau Illing, Frau Erkens, and Frau Rollnik for their great kindness and genuine interest. All the filmmakers whose work I discuss in this book took time to meet and talk about their work, often numerous times, and also provided additional documents. As a film scholar who had grown up in West Germany and studied at the Freie Universität Berlin until 1990, I had occasionally visited East Berlin but learned a tremendous amount about not just film culture but also life in the other half of Germany through these conversations. I thank Egon Günther, Jörg Foth, Ulrich Weiß, Herwig Kipping, Peter Welz, Helke Misselwitz, Andreas Voigt, Peter Kahane, and Andreas Dresen for hosting me in their homes as well as in several cases coming to Rochester to share their work with my students and colleagues. Jörg Foth and Andreas Voigt need to be thanked for not just answering my neverending questions and supplying me with countless DVDs, but for being patient conversation partners about this project over many years, as well as treasured and most generous friends. Ralf Schenk tirelessly supplied support, encouragement, and a steady flow of new books, old texts, and operatic distraction. His encyclopedic memory as well as his own voluminous and perceptive film-historical writings not only directly informed this book, but also served as models of nuanced analysis and professionalism for me. During the many research visits in Berlin, I was hosted by dear friends who cooked many nourishing meals, provided excellent bikes for my Potsdam commute, and most importantly never voiced any doubt that this book would one day be finished. I thank Andres Nader, Agnes Benoit, Barbara Etz, Eva Foth, Randall Halle, Mohamed Bamyeh, Martina and Nyenti Pech, Silvia Habekost, Tina Becker, and Jennifer Hosek for so much more than just a place to sleep. Several bicycles were hurt in the writing of this book and I am grateful to their owners for their generous indulgence and good humor. In Rochester, I benefitted from the vibrant climate of my home institution, the Eastman School of Music. I thank my colleagues and friends for being model scholars and artists, especially Jonathan Baldo, Tim Scheie, Jean Pedersen, Ernestine McHugh, Tom Donnan, Caterina Falli, Glenn Mackin, Rachel Remmel, Elena Bellina, Susan Uselmann, Tina Curren, and Yvette Singletary. I also thank Dean Douglas Lowry

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and Senior Executive Dean Jamal Rossi for their steadfast support of the Humanities. I further thank my amazing students for their openness and curiosity to experiment and cheerfully engage with sometimes baffling cinematic fare. Last but not least I thank my Eastman School cycling team for hanging together not just to conquer steep hills but also help each other through many writing and recording projects. Numerous film scholars have offered constructive feedback and insightful suggestions to various portions of this book. I thank especially Barton Byg, Angelika Fenner, Jennifer Hosek, Randall Halle, Thomas Elsaesser, David Bathrick, Larson Powell, John Davidson, Stefan Soldovieri, Brad Prager, Evan Torner, and Barbara Etz for stimulating conversations and commentary. Special thanks are owed to my perceptive anonymous readers, whose generous and constructive input has strengthened the book. At Camden House I thank editorial director Jim Walker, for his early enthusiasm for the book, his patience, and his commitment to the highest standards in scholarship and publishing. The other members of Camden House’s editorial and production team, including Julia Cook, Ryan Peterson, and Jane Best, plus freelance copyeditor Sue Innes, ensured that the book is as polished as it can be—any remaining errors are of course entirely my own responsibility. My families and friends demonstrated not only athletic stamina over a decade of cheering for this project but also provided much needed worklife balance. Hannah and Sophia have spent half their lives watching “Last Features” with me, and together with Rick are hoping that my next book will be on the Three Stooges. Nevertheless, their vivaciousness, comedic impulses, and beautiful music carried this project to its completion. This book is dedicated to Rick, Hannah, and Sophia.

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Introduction

I

BEGIN WITH A DISCLAIMER: this book is not really about all the last features that the East German film studio (DEFA) produced, nor is it a comprehensive survey of the entire last generation trained in East Germany’s film school in Babelsberg, just outside Berlin, nor is this entire generation lost entirely—if it were, this book would not exist. But Last Features: East German Cinema’s Lost Generation is still an apt title, because this book discusses in detail some of the most important films made in the DEFA studio between the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the studio’s closure in 1992, films made by members of the so-called Nachwuchsgruppe—that is, a group of some of the directors from the youngest and last generation of the studio. But I also include the last features by two directors of older generations, as they relate directly in theme or style to the works of their younger colleagues. My choice of films and directors was guided by my own interest in aesthetically innovative filmmaking but also by my search for films that would be of interest to international audiences because of their thematic content and cinematic language rather than being focused mainly on coming to terms with specific experiences in the GDR, as the so-called Abrechnungsfilme did. The last features of the DEFA studio offered their directors a chance to freely express their views on previously taboo topics about life in the GDR. Among these last features are powerful films often based on scripts by well-known GDR writers, such as Frank Beyer’s Der Verdacht (Suspicion, 1991), Roland Gräf’s Der Tangospieler (The Tango Player, 1990), Dietmar Hochmuth’s Motivsuche (Search for Motives, 1991), Heiner Carow’s Die Verfehlung (Suspicion, 1992), and Helmut Dzuiba’s Jan und Jana (1992), to name just a few. These films generally display the solid craft of their seasoned production teams as well as impressive acting skills by some of DEFA’s greatest stars, but aesthetically they typically relied on familiar DEFA approaches.1 Instead of simply chronicling all the last features, I focus on the films by Jörg Foth, Herwig Kipping, Peter Welz, Helke Misselwitz, Peter Kahane, Andreas Dresen, and, for the DEFA documentary studio, Andreas Voigt, because of their idiosyncratic styles and complex subject matters addressing issues beyond the GDR. The films by these artists all addressed the sociopolitical circumstances of their creation but also offered cinematic reflections on diverse broader themes, including the relationship of the artist and the state, the different forms of emigration and resistance to hegemonic power structures, the power and danger of utopian idealism, and the social dynamics

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of racism. The emotional intensity and aesthetic radicalism of these last features could not have been created within a vacuum. Who were these directors, what had inspired their unusual cinematic styles within the East German film studio, and what had become of them after German unification? Moreover, I was curious as to how these individual artists’ biographies could enhance our understanding of the East German film studio in particular, and the role of film art in the GDR in general. In 2002 Horst Claus noted: “Though the interrelationship between film and state in the former GDR will continue to be of interest as further documents from the GDR’s various ministries become accessible, the main focus will have to continue to move away from analyzing GDR cinema as a closed chapter.”2 The 2009 Wendeflicks3 film festival in Los Angeles, organized by the DEFA film library in Amherst, MA, premiered many of the films discussed in this book for a North American audience. The vivid interest and animated audience discussions confirmed that Claus’s contention applies to the last features, as their achievements mark important film-aesthetic contributions to German film history, beyond their mere historical importance as time capsules, that is, as films that have directly and indirectly captured the unsettled political atmosphere of the 1989–92 period in Germany.4 Over the last decade, scholarship has begun to focus more on interpreting these DEFA films as included within the nexus of aesthetic influence and innovation in international film history and to dedicate critical monographs to studies of single directors.5 A precondition for situating the last features within the context of international film history, however, is a solid understanding of the works themselves and their production histories, which has been lacking in scholarship to this date. While the last features were largely ignored by East and West German audiences upon their release during the historical upheaval of the unification period, the Wende, the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the wall in 2009 has occasioned a renewed interest in the offerings by East German directors. The release of many of these films on DVD in the Wendeflicks series has greatly facilitated a serious engagement with the last features.6 This book is the first to offer close readings of a significant number of DEFA’s last features. I am interested in how they reflect the momentous changes in Germany in 1989/90 but also wish to understand the last features within the larger context of their directors’ experiences and works in the GDR and in unified Germany. As such, this book offers insights into the internal processes at DEFA during the last decade of the GDR and illuminates the challenging working conditions for former East German directors in unified Germany. The aesthetic approach used by the last generation varied greatly and ranged from the conventional melodrama to post-Romantic visual collage, while their subject matter circled frequently around questions of resistance against dominant narratives, insistence on subjective perspectives,

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and interest in revisiting German history. These topics, as well as the collective work to reform conditions in the film school and studio for young directors over the course of the final decade of the GDR, show remarkable parallels to the efforts of filmmakers in West Germany in the 1970s and early 1980s. The interest among the last-generation directors in aesthetic experimentation, or at minimum their desire to craft individual cinematic languages, which culminated in the demand for a studio for low-budget productions (Billigproduktionen) to facilitate creative work in nonbureaucratic production conditions, also links to the earlier efforts of young West German filmmakers, who in the 1962 Oberhausen manifesto had demanded access to film funding for the development of a new film art in the Federal Republic. Despite the remarkable achievement of the last features, the chaotic production conditions in the political upheaval of 1989/90 impacted their form and focus. On the one hand, the raw quality of some of these films, for example, Peter Welz’s Banale Tage, serves as a reflection of the disorientation of the period and thus retains celluloid traces, in Prager’s sense, of the unsettled mood, which might have been forgotten with the passing of time under the influence of dominant historical narratives of the events surrounding unification. On the other hand, it must be acknowledged that the unexpected chance to direct a feature film was suddenly thrust upon directors who had not directed a full-length feature film in a very long time, if ever. The last features by Herwig Kipping and Ulrich Weiß bear witness to the difficulties of suddenly plunging back into the creative work of actually realizing cinematic visions after long periods of forced idleness. From a close reading of the last features by these directors, I trace their artistic evolution from early film-school exercises, diploma films, and theses, to documentary films or “niche work” in the Kinobox series, which, during periods when conflict made it impossible to work on major projects, provided creative outlets under relatively free conditions in the documentary film studio. Under the rubric Kinobox, the DEFA documentary studio produced five- to ten-minute-long films throughout the 1980s that ran before feature-film presentations in GDR cinemas. Some of these films were relatively straightforward documentaries on a broad range of topics about life and work in the GDR, but many filmmakers used these shorts as an opportunity for experimentation, as I will detail in this book. The short Kinobox films, like some of the student films produced at the Babelsberg film school, reveal the creative potential that was stifled during the production of feature-length works in the DEFA studio. Examining the bold beginnings of Peter Welz’s student films, for example Willkommen in der Kantine (Welcome to the Cafeteria) written by theater director Frank Castorf, not only explains why this recent filmschool graduate was entrusted with directing one of the three coveted

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features of the production group DaDaeR as I describe in the following, but also highlights the sense of experimentation and international cinematic focus of DEFA’s youngest generation. Welz’s Kantine not only employs an irreverent and absurdist tone to articulate generational unrest in regard to life in the GDR, but in its evocation and parody of themes from Hitchcock’s Psycho also references international film history. Intertextuality is also evident in Peter Kahane’s early work, for example his youth film Vorspiel (Audition, 1987), which evokes DEFA’s own vibrant 1950s film history to draw attention to the stagnant artistic climate in the studio in the 1980s, while Helke Misselwitz’s and Jörg Foth’s student films show the influence of Rainer Werner Fassbinder on their work. For directors of the last DEFA generation, the impact of Fassbinder’s work is as undeniable as are the parallels between Fassbinder’s FRG Trilogy and Olle Henry (Old Henry, 1983) by Ulrich Weiß, Foth’s and Misselwitz’s mentor (see chapter 2). Finally, the early works and writings by Herwig Kipping, particularly his diploma film Hommage à Hölderlin (1982) and his diploma thesis on Russian directors Dovzhenko and Pudovkin, provide important insights about the director’s strong roots in German Romanticism on the one hand and Russian avant-garde cinema on the other. Understanding the last features as one important step within the oeuvre of a director expands our understanding of their last DEFA features as merely Wendeflicks and documents how long the central themes of these films were percolating and evolving in any given artist’s work. The recourse to student films, writings, and unfinished projects points to a tragic aspect of the story of the last generation: the full potential of the directors discussed in this book may generally have been unrealized, as significant creative energies in their early careers were spent working toward changes within the restrictive studio in the GDR and/or accepting compromise projects in order to work in film at all, while critical time and talent was once again wasted in the attempt to gain a footing in the new media landscape of unified Germany. The last features discussed in this book all address the artist’s dilemma of having to work within an apparatus and struggling for independence at the same time, but none more directly than Peter Kahane’s Die Architekten (The Architects) with its nuanced portrayal of the generational experience of the Nachwuchsgruppe at DEFA. It is important to document the various aspects of these directors’ careers, including their activism against and within the system, their work in niches or under the radar outside large feature-film productions, and their infusion of as much creative energy as was possible into actually realized projects, because doing so disproves common misconceptions about the lack of rebellious spirit among the last directors at DEFA, their artistic failure regarding the Wendeflicks, and silent acquiescence in the post-unification boom of GDR comedies and Stasi melodramas. In the remainder of this introduction, I will chronicle the last generation’s activist struggles toward

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reform within DEFA and outline some of the limits of a generational approach to writing film history.

DEFA’s Lost Generation February 2, 1988, marks an important event in German film history, not for what actually happened but rather for what did not happen: it dates a manifesto, the culmination of years of reform efforts, written in preparation for the Fifth Congress of the film and television workers association (VFF) in the GDR, but never actually read at the convention. As required, all scheduled speeches were circulated beforehand among the hierarchy of the VFF for discussion and approval. The manifesto was the result of five years of discussion among the youngest generation of directors, producers, and cinematographers at DEFA, the so-called Nachwuchsgruppe/ Arbeitsgruppe 3 and was signed by cameraman Tony Loeser, producer Thomas Wilkening, and director Peter Kahane. It was to have been delivered by another representative from the fourth and last generation of DEFA-trained directors, Jörg Foth. The manifesto critically analyzed the training and employment situation at the Babelsberg school and the DEFA studios and demanded that all censorship and taboos be abolished, and that opportunities be provided earlier for younger talents to realize their unique visions. The authors of the manifesto declared DEFA films to have become boring and irrelevant to their increasingly sparse audience. Instead, the young generation lobbied for the formation of an alternative studio within DEFA for the production of experimental, low-budget films that would allow fresh talents to realize their creative potential quickly, without bureaucratic obstacles. The reaction by the leadership of the party, the studio, and the film workers’ association was swift: through a series of individual meetings with members of the younger group, they ensured that the manifesto remained unread, in order to avoid unnecessary provocation, and to allow for a productive, internal discussion of the manifesto’s content after the congress. In the hope that a less confrontational speech might indeed result in meaningful dialogue with the party and studio hierarchy, the group voted by a narrow margin to agree to the demand, and withdrew the manifesto itself. Instead, Jörg Foth delivered the now-famous speech “Unsere Welle war keine” (Our Moment Never Came) lamenting the late start for directors in the DEFA studio, the multiple layers of control in developing fresh material, and the climate of distrust toward the young directors. He stated, for example, that an average film underwent sixteen instances of examination, rejection, or alteration before it was approved, leaving no room for spontaneity and experimentation. In sum, he declared that his generation had been actively prevented from leaving its mark on East Germany’s film culture.

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Thomas Wilkening, one of the cosignatories of the manifesto, who was to play an important role in the transition from working in a socialist film studio to the free-market conditions after the fall of the wall, reflected later on the willingness of the reform-minded group to compromise at this crucial moment in their work: “Seen from today’s perspective we were quiet naïve. We believed in the possibility of educating our rulers.”7 As it turns out, their trust in the leaders was misplaced and the promised dialogue did not take place. Reform was only belatedly implemented in the course of the gradual changes in the political landscape in the GDR in general. While the demand for an alternative studio for low-budget productions was never met, funds for a new production group within DEFA were granted in the spring of 1989 and formally instituted on January 1, 1990. With a budget of 3.5 million Marks for the first year, the production group DaDaeR, under the leadership of twelve elected representatives of the youngest generation, headed by Thomas Wilkening, voted democratically to swiftly begin work on three unusual films: Jörg Foth’s musical clowns program with GDR cabaret performers Steffen Mensching and Hans-Eckardt Wenzel, Letztes aus der DaDaeR (Last Things from the GDR, 1990); Peter Welz’s directorial debut Banale Tage (Insignificant Days, 1991); and enfant terrible Herwig Kipping’s Das Land hinter dem Regenbogen (Land behind the Rainbow, 1991). None of these films could have passed the multiple levels of control in the traditional DEFA studio. Kipping’s poetic and elliptical film about the founding days of the GDR drew harsh reviews, chiefly from West German reviewers, but was honored with the German National Film Prize (Silver). This prize provided some of the funds that enabled Kipping to produce his next feature film, Novalis (1995), as one of the first releases of the now-privatized Thomas Wilkening production firm. It is a sad irony of history that this fulfillment of years of reformatory efforts coincided with the end of the studio itself. The production group existed for only 27 months, since its members, like all other DEFA employees, were terminated by March 31, 1992. Nevertheless, it did produce three important films, contributions to German film history that uniquely captured the historical mood of the collapse of the GDR and the unification period and would be useful foils against which to analyze later films, often produced by West Germans, about German unification, such as Good Bye, Lenin! (2003) and The Lives of Others (2006). February 2, 1988 was not the first time the young film workers at DEFA sought dialogue with and reforms within the studio hierarchy. During a casual conversation at the previous Congress of the VFF in 1982 between Politburo member Kurt Hager and film students and recent graduates of the film academy Babelsberg, including Maxim Dessau and Helke Misselwitz, the students complained about the poor training conditions and lack of opportunities in the academy and studio. Upon being

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invited to express their concerns more fully to Hager, Misselwitz and Dessau organized an unprecedented meeting in the House of Hungarian Culture in Berlin on October 28, 1982. At this meeting, about seventy recent graduates of the film academy freely expressed their anger at being a highly qualified but superfluous workforce, neither needed nor entrusted with shaping new visions for the nation’s movie theaters. Such open criticism in the presence of the entire film leadership was highly unusual in the studio, indeed in the GDR. It marked the beginning of a cycle of hopeful initiatives leading to frustrated realizations that the studio was not interested in truly engaging criticism. Rather, the leadership of the studio, the party, and the VFF simply channeled the youthful energies, with skillful procrastination maneuvers, into controlled dead-ends. As a result of the meeting in the House of Hungarian Culture, for example, the youngest generation expended considerable energy in producing a nearly fifty-page document that analyzed the training and employment situation for film artists in the GDR. This document, dated January 1983, was intended to serve as the basis for the hoped-for conversation with Kurt Hager himself. It detailed how even the slightest attempts at experimentation were suppressed, access to international films and artists was hampered, incompetence among faculty was rampant, and mistrust toward the young in the studio was a given. The seventeen theses at the end of the document, which, six years later at the next VFF Congress, Kurt Hager claimed never to have received, can be seen as a direct precursor to the manifesto of 1988. The party was skillful in procrastinating and keeping the young reformer group busy: by assigning them bureaucratic tasks, “losing” important documents, or refusing to participate in further gatherings under the pretext of time conflicts. Several times in the six years between the two VFF congresses, members of the reform group suggested dissolving the circle as ineffective, but they always regrouped, their efforts culminating in the creation of the 1988 manifesto and subsequently the founding of the production group DaDaeR. The young GDR film artists were quite aware that elsewhere in Eastern and Western Europe the demand for a small studio for auteur-type, inexpensive films was being realized. In fact, in 1983 a party official forwarded a document regarding the founding of such an initiative in the Bulgarian state film studio to the group, but recommended not distributing it further as such a development seemed unlikely for the GDR at that point. Much of the valuable creative capital spent during these years in the form of time and energy was irretrievably lost. Many of the filmmakers who were among the most active organizers of the reformer group, such as Maxim Dessau and Helke Misselwitz, did not independently direct their first feature films until 1990. Jörg Foth, who had served as spokesperson for the group most of the time, was able to direct and codirect several films

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during the 1980s, but never from his own scripts. Viewing the three films that DaDaeR finally produced, one can still sense the directors’ eagerness to model their films after auteur idols such as Fellini, Tarkovski, and Fassbinder. Jörg Foth’s Letztes aus der DaDaeR even stars the Fassbinder actress Irm Hermann, while Helke Misselwitz’s Herzsprung (Heart Leap, 1992) features Fassbinder actor Günter Lamprecht, in an obvious gesture toward the cult director of the New German Cinema in West Germany. Foth’s laconic summary regarding the efforts in those years points to the no-win situation of the youngest generation, hoping to reform unwieldy institutions (studio and academy) from within: “He who enters the apparatus gets lost, he who does not loses.”8 Instead of gaining more practical experience and applying their innovative ideas, the fourth and last generation of directors at DEFA had tilted at the proverbial windmills. Their earnest hope and tenacious diligence may seem naive or tame from today’s perspective. But for aspiring professional filmmakers in the GDR the only way accessing production means was to work in the DEFA studio. Claus Löser has documented the activities of the super-8 experimental film scene of the 1980s and shown that for many artists (painters, writers, sculptors) the provisional quality of 8mm cameras became a liberating aesthetic force.9 But its character was self-consciously improvisational. They sought liberation from the state-controlled art scene and relished the immediacy of the cheap, readily available Soviet cameras, the amateurish editing on the kitchen table, and the private screenings in apartments. Thomas Günther, son of prominent DEFA director Egon Günther, has described the importance of the unofficially published magazines and so-called artists’ books (Künstlerbücher) for the same time period. Even though this literature was produced in minuscule editions, often hand copied and privately distributed (and Stasi-infiltrated, as became clear later), “The magazines were a kind of life-saver for an entire generation of artists who were otherwise condemned to silence.”10 In hindsight, neither the artistic merit nor the political impact of these small publications can be measured independently of considerations of the historical circumstances under which they were created. But Günther emphasized one particular aspect of the work on the unofficially published collections of drawings and poetry that resonates directly with the posthumous assessment Cornelia Schleime made of her experiences with the super-8 alternative film scene, and Thomas Wilkening shared about his work in the young generation’s reform group at DEFA. Schleime stated: “The need for collectivity was the strongest motivation; it was about the abolition of the isolation of the creative individual.”11 As such, the efforts by the youngest generation of DEFA-trained artists should not be judged only by the films they made, of which there were relatively few, but also by their collective push for institutional change.

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The 1988 manifesto may not have caused the scandal it could have if it had been read, but it remains today as a testament to the idealistic commitment of DEFA’s youngest generation to make films that could be aesthetically innovative, entertaining, and socially relevant. The transition of the DEFA production group DaDaeR into the independent production company Thomas Wilkening in 1991 showed that this commitment continued into the newly unified free-market economy. Although the company had some success, the Federal Republic has not been kind to former DEFA film artists, as this book will demonstrate. The struggles of former DEFA directors to gain access to the new media market of unified Germany are instructive today for our understanding of how the West German perspective dominated the process of shaping the narrative of the collapse of the GDR and German unification. Now “free” to direct whatever they wanted, the former DEFA artists once again found themselves idle. Only this time there was not even a studio hierarchy to argue with.

Last Features in Context “Surveys of the totality, as they are currently in vogue, are created by overlooking everything that is individual and then summating.”12 Friedrich Schlegel’s bon mot is programmatic for my approach to the last chapter of DEFA film history, as the project evolved from my initial interest in providing an overview, a chronicle of all of the last films produced in the DEFA studio to a more narrowly focused study. Upon surveying the last crop of some thirty films made after the fall of the wall, I immediately felt drawn to the works of directors from the Nachwuchsgruppe as well as interested in their generational struggles to reform the system outlined above. Specifically, films by Jörg Foth, Peter Welz, Helke Misselwitz, Herwig Kipping, Andreas Voigt, and Peter Kahane captivated me because of their diverse and idiosyncratic formal approaches. Their films appeared fundamentally different than most of the DEFA films I had seen before as well as the last features by most of the older DEFA directors. The young directors’ last features bore out their professed impatience to embark on their own aesthetic experiments, influenced by trends in the international film world from which they were largely excluded as participants. This book will not just analyze the last features by Foth, Kipping, Welz, Misselwitz, Voigt, and Kahane as isolated productions but will instead read them within the context of each of these directors’ oeuvres before and after unification. By doing so, the book contradicts commonly held misconceptions about the lack of interest in aesthetic experimentation at DEFA, as well as lack of initiative among former DEFA directors to contribute their cinematic perspectives to the new national discussion of German identity after the fall of the wall. Moreover, the wider examination of the entirety of a director’s work challenges the notion of stylistic

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homogeneity among DEFA directors, a prejudice that has caused West German observers, including director and Babelsberg studio head Volker Schlöndorff, to pronounce wholesale dismissive verdicts, such as: “I have abolished the name DEFA. DEFA films were terrible.”13 The generational approach to general DEFA film history has been especially suitable for an overview of the most important political changes relating to film in the forty-year history of the studio, and has typically linked historical events in the country to changes in film policies and studio output. Ralf Schenk, for example, explains the reasons for the uncut release of Egon Günther’s controversial film Der Dritte (Her Third, 1971) despite the vocal protest from female party functionaries about the film’s lack of “morality and ethics, cleanliness, and helpfulness”14 by explaining the release in terms of the change in leadership from Walter Ulbricht to Erich Honecker as head of state and the ensuing temporary relaxation of restrictions on artists. Because of the complex direct and indirect ways that the political climate in the GDR impacted the studio, histories of DEFA film have tended to favor such connections more than chronicles of other national film cultures, at times to the detriment of close readings of individual films. If close readings of individual films of the last crop exist at all, they tend to be interested in genre questions.15 In regard to the youngest generation, scholarly references thus far have consisted largely of the mentioning of film titles and a brief if accurate description of their box-office failure.16 In the limited number of publications about the last features, scholars have approached them through a generational model of inquiry that assumed shared historical and political experiences and interests.17 Critical readings that examine the last films with a focus on their formal experimentation, thematic interests within the context of their directors’ biographies, and developments in the studio are still lacking more than twenty years after their release. While the directors of the last generation clearly shared certain experiences and concerns with each other, their diverse filmic signatures also point to the limits of the generational model and pose questions about their individual artistic developments prior to the last years in the studio. That is to say, the films discussed in this book were not produced within a vacuum but need to be understood within the context of each individual director’s oeuvre. Understanding better the rich diversity of aesthetic preferences (ranging from experimental to conventional), thematic interests (spanning a sustained passion for German Romantic poets to excavations of German history from the dominance of prevailing official narratives) and filmic influences (ranging from Czech New Wave and Russian AvantGarde cinema to French and West German auteurism) reveals rich levels of meaning in the last features. The films of Peter Kahane, for example, focused on generational struggles regarding individual and societal priorities long before his best-known film, Architekten, was released in 1990.

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To reduce the director’s work to only his last DEFA film is to skew his views and reduce the complexity of his thinking on generational questions to the moment of the encounter between East and West. Close readings of his earlier films offer insights into the development of his evolving criticism of restrictions on free expression in the GDR, during unification, and in unified Germany (see chapter 6). Reading the last features through the lens of the preceding films in a director’s career offers an important corrective to the reverse chronological approach: instead of viewing the surreally explosive images of Herwig Kipping’s Land hinter dem Regenbogen solely as the post-wall implosion of GDR iconography (Stalin, Marx, socialist banners and symbols), the film can be seen as a continuation of his sustained interest in German Romanticism and idealism, begun in his diploma film Hommage à Hölderlin (1982), an interest he shares with West German director Werner Herzog, among others. Much like the supporters of the Oberhausen Manifesto in West Germany of 1962, who demanded reforms for the film-funding system in the Federal Republic and support for artistically and critically challenging films to counterbalance the dominant escapist entertainment films of that time, the signatories of the DEFA manifesto of 1988 represented a broad diversity of artists. Despite the officially declared egalitarian socialist society, class, gender, and geography shaped the background of directors at DEFA just like everywhere else. In addition, individual interests, taste, and temperament are already evident in the student films of the last generation, as they ranged from linear-narrative genre cinema to experimental collage films. Thus at DEFA, just like in Oberhausen, directors were united against an older system of film production and funding but not united by a common aesthetic approach, as, for example, the DOGMA filmmakers were in the 1990s. A fitting comparison to characterize the efforts of the Nachwuchsgruppe in the GDR may be drawn to the New German Cinema in West Germany. While the work of the Nachwuchsgruppe was encouraged by the studio as a way to better control the youngest generation, the designation New German Cinema was coined from the outside to describe certain overarching connections between the fresh auteurist approaches of Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders, and others. Among both, the directors of the New German Cinema and the DEFA Nachwuchsgruppe, however, the individual styles and aesthetic goals varied greatly. Jörg Foth, for example, pursued in his film an aesthetically very different, far more cerebral exploration of life in the various musical and theatrical subcultures of the GDR than did Herwig Kipping’s radical visual experiments, which aimed to create sensory, synaesthetic experiences for audiences. The somewhat younger Peter Welz shared Foth’s interest in alternative youth cultures but not Foth’s experience of life in postwar 1950s Berlin. In the historical development of the GDR, the difference

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between having experienced Berlin before and after the building of the wall as a youth was formative. In addition, the artistic influences changed between Foth’s early 1970s experiences at the Babelsberg school and Welz’s time in the late 1980s: while Foth was drawn to the works of his mentor Ulrich Weiß, among others, Welz’s student films were based on scripts by theater director Frank Castorf and filmmaker Leander Haussmann, known, respectively, for their aggressive post-dramatic radicalism and rebellious satire. Like the directors of the New German Cinema, however, DEFA filmmakers in the late 1970s and early 1980s were pushing for more opportunities to realize their own unique visions of critical and socially relevant films, whether they employed genre film forms or elliptical narrative styles or worked mainly in documentary film. Indeed, the films of the New German Cinema and those by certain DEFA directors have shared many aesthetic affinities, as evident for example in the work of Ulrich Weiß (see chapter 2), as well as Jörg Foth, Helke Misselwitz, and others. Foth has described early film exercises at film school as attempts to recreate certain camera moves he had seen in Fassbinder’s films (see chapter 1). Contrary to common misconceptions, the students at Babelsberg had access not just to the films of Eastern European and Soviet cinemas but also to the works of international new waves, including the New German Cinema (at film festivals in Prague, on bad video copies at the film school, or on West German television). The impact of international new waves on aesthetic and thematic interest in re-visioning German history beyond the dominant official narrative is evident not only in Foth’s films but also in the early student shorts of Helke Misselwitz (see chapter 4), whose diploma film Die Fidele Bäckerin (The Merry Baker Woman, 1982) evinces strong parallels to Fassbinder’s FRG Trilogy, while her first feature film in unified Germany, Herzsprung, cites a famous scene from Ali, Fear Eats the Soul. The homogenous group concept as a methodological approach to the story of DEFA’s last films is further challenged by the reality of complicated patronage within the DEFA studio, which often more than any other factor impacted whether a young student would have a chance to direct films or even develop a script. The biographies of the directors discussed in this book illustrate how this system worked. Jörg Foth was brought back into the DEFA studio after having quit his assigned post in the DEFA Television studio, known for its ideologically rigid climate. Becoming assistant director for Weiß’s film Blauvogel (Blue Bird) meant his reentry into the fiction-film studio, where Foth later continued to work. For directors Misselwitz and Kipping, the chance to return to film after resigning their respective posts in television came when director Heiner Carow appointed them as master students at the Academy of the Arts, where they were able to work on film scripts, for example Kipping’s early drafts of Land hinter dem Regenbogen. Carow also acted as

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an important advocate for other young directors in less official ways: for example, by defending documentary film director Andreas Voigt’s final student film, Alfred, against its critics and thus helping to earn official permission to release the film (see chapter 5). To highlight the central importance of mentoring for the last generation of directors, this book includes discussion of the last features of two of the most important aesthetic and political mentors from older generations, Egon Günther (b. 1927) and Ulrich Weiß (b. 1942). As I show in chapter 1, Günther’s last DEFA film bears remarkable parallels to the last film by the much younger Foth (but also important differences from it), both engaging with the literary figure of the fool/ clown to respond to the events of 1989. In chapter 2, on the other hand, I examine not only the thematic parallels between the works of the older Weiß and the younger Kipping but also their shared affinity for radical aesthetics, which defies narrative linearity in favor of explosive visual symbolism, challenging montage, and bitter satire. Weiß’s and Kipping’s films demonstrate the radical aesthetic ambitions that existed at DEFA but were stifled in numerous ways, which I outline below. Their final DEFA films represent perhaps not so much the exact shape auteurist cinema might have taken had there been more openness for unconventional film aesthetics in the studio, but rather the explosive venting of pent-up frustration over many years of inability to work. One tragic aspect of this history is that much of the creative energy of the last directors was invested in either collectively or individually fighting the system in hopes of greater opportunity for free creative expression, as I mentioned above. When the new production group DaDaeR was finally formed in late 1989 it was in time to produce a small number of important films, but too late to realize a final body of work comparable to the lasting achievements of the New German Cinema. The generational model lastly does not directly address questions of genre or mode, in this case the distinction between fiction, documentary, animation, or children’s films, all of which were represented in the last crop of DEFA films. Just as I cross generational lines to highlight the complexity of intergenerational networking and influence by including the works of Egon Günther and Ulrich Weiß, I also include a chapter on documentary film (see chapter 5) to complement the discussion of feature films and to draw attention to the fact that for DEFA filmmakers, the road to fiction film often went through documentary film or television work (this was the case for Weiß, Foth, Kipping, and Misselwitz). In fact, a strong background in documentary-film training can be detected in many of the fiction films discussed in this book but most importantly informs the aesthetic of Helke Misselwitz (see chapter 4). The five Leipzig films by Andreas Voigt ideally complement the study of last features because they capture the time span of 1986 to 1997 with a focus

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on one city and a limited number of protagonists. The Leipzig films, the last two of which were produced independently after the DEFA studio had been shut down, perform through the documentary genre what the feature films studied in this book attempt to capture as well: a carefully focused reflection on the historical moment of dramatic historical change in 1989, an examination of the origins of the failed utopian project of the state that ended at that moment, a critical and self-critical look at how the state functioned and was sustained as long as it was, and a meditation on the aftermath of German unification from the margins of society. The Leipzig films serve as an important corrective to many misconceptions about life in the GDR, the course of the 1989 “revolution,” and life in unified Germany. The first film of the pentalogy, Alfred, demonstrated that young DEFA documentary directors in the 1980s were actively pursuing a reassessment of the State’s anti-fascist founding myth by complicating simplistic notions of resistance and opportunism in regard to the Nazi period, as Ulrich Weiß’s Dein unbekannter Bruder (Your Unknown Brother, 1982) had done, causing scandalous controversy (see chapter 2). The student films of Helke Misselwitz and Peter Kahane attest to the same interest in breaking generational taboos regarding the depiction of Germany’s past. Voigt’s remaining four films continue to complicate simplistic discourses about what motivated East German protesters to hit the streets by chronicling the Leipzig protests as they occurred, reminding viewers today that the demands of the people in the streets were not initially directed toward abandoning socialism and unifying with the West but at obtaining freedom of speech, elections, and travel. In later discussions about East Germans’ push for making it in the Western capitalist system, their ensuing disappointment, and the phenomenon of Ostalgie, it is sometimes forgotten that the demand for unification occurred only much later and was pushed as much by West German forces as by East German street protesters themselves.18 Lastly, Voigt’s films offer nuanced and in-depth probes into the new tasks of coping with the past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung) as his interview partners struggle for more than a decade with the painful histories of who informed on whom and why. The core themes of remembering and facing these questions and the resulting personal and family crises have been addressed in Christa Wolf’s highly acclaimed Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud (City of Angels or The Overcoat of Dr. Freud, 2010) but they are already articulated in the tragic biography of the journalist Renate, which is chronicled over the course of several of Voigt’s films till her suicide in 1996. As I complete this book, Voigt is preparing his sixth installment of the Leipzig series for the twenty-fifth anniversary of 1989. The documentary films of the pentalogy serve as cross-referents for many of the themes in the fiction films discussed in the other chapters,

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especially in regard to the early works of Helke Misselwitz, whose oeuvre straddles documentary and fiction films. While the documentaries she produced in the last year of the GDR as well as throughout the unification period found only small audiences (with the important exception of Winter Adé [Farewell Winter]), they have gained new importance since then because they offer a corrective to much mainstream fare produced about that time by West German filmmakers and television networks. In Wer fürchtet sich vorm schwarzen Mann (Who’s Afraid of the Black Man, 1989), for example, Misselwitz depicts the daily routine of coaldelivery workers in East Berlin, who offer differentiated views on their experiences in socialism and their brief visits to the West before the fall of the wall was conceivable. Misselwitz’s film also documents a communal work experience as a humane working environment. In the context of Ostalgie (nostalgia for the East) discussions of the 1990s, East Germans were frequently criticized for longing for a slower-paced workers’ paradise that never existed. Misselwitz’s unspectacular film counters this argument by highlighting life in one neighborhood that, while far from free of conflict and stress, is dominated by a sense of caring for the communal well-being of all. Her subsequent film, Sperrmüll (Bulk Refuse), features the diversity of reactions to the fall of the wall and unification within one East Berlin family, ranging from emigration to the West to resistance to unification itself and continued support for reformed socialism. Such differentiated views have become rare in the German media since 1990. Media historian Thomas Ahbe has argued that the media market in unified Germany is dominated by the West, resulting in skewed representations of East German history that have shaped the identity of the generation of younger Germans since the fall of the wall: “The westernization of the eastern German landscape meant that the eastern Germans saw themselves, their German past, their culture . . . described and evaluated mainly from a western German perspective and thus missed a forum through which their views could be presented, be it in the eastern German experience of the transformation process or their newly-won insights into the GDR and the recently unified Germany.”19 Ahbe also demonstrates that tendentious coverage has not significantly changed over the twenty years since unification, pointing to a highly selective use of facts about life in the former GDR by Western media to create one-sided histories about and for East Germans as the unknown, “foreign” group (237). Careful scholarship has recently been published that analyzes the representation of the East in German films made since unification,20 especially regarding the work of younger directors who began making films in unified Germany, but a focused examination of the biographies and works of DEFA’s last directors has not yet appeared. But even such categorizations as Eastern and Western German perspectives assume uniformity of perspective where there might be none:

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the case studies in this book show instead that films by former DEFA directors offer a multitude of perspectives beyond mere East/West dichotomies and address a wide variety of topics. Members of the last generation of DEFA directors were united in their efforts to achieve greater freedom for artistic expression but pursued very different aesthetic and political goals in their work. Each director’s oeuvre reveals idiosyncratic stylistic developments and nuanced, evolving positions vis-à-vis the political realities in the GDR and the utopian project of socialism. Members of other generations at DEFA in turn shared many of the young directors’ demands and also advocated for a third way throughout the unification process and its aftermath. Taken together, the films discussed in this book offer alternate views on life in the GDR and the unification process from within the GDR, which have mostly been ignored in what Thomas Ahbe calls the historical master narrative: “This master narrative would seem only to serve the current elite, for the enduring one-sided and negative portrayal of the GDR curtails ideas about political alternatives and reform, and simply validates the current federal German political system” (244). Ahbe cites Martin Sabrow’s classification of the dominant strains of GDR memory narratives in three categories, namely those that (1) focus on repression and dictatorship (dichotomies between victims and perpetrators) and the Stasi; or (2) describe the right life in the wrong state, that is, arguing that biographies are real and meaningful even if they took place under the wrong regime; or (3) continue to maintain the idealist belief in socialist aims (popular among the former GDR elites). The last features and many of the films made by their directors earlier in their careers defy such categorizations and in addition to their aesthetic qualities and narrative experiments offer critical and self-critical assessments of the evolving political realities. Stephen Brockmann’s Critical History of German Film ends with a discussion of Florian von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others and touches on the controversial depiction of East Germany in this highly successful melodrama by a West German director. Citing Andreas Dresen’s critical view of the film, Brockmann considers the potential of socially relevant films to engage a broad audience: Dresen’s intervention, and the popularity of West German films about the former GDR, suggest that two decades after the end of the socialist Germany, it remains difficult to communicate that historical reality to the larger populace to which the art of film directs itself. This is not in the first instance a problem of film aesthetics, but rather a question of the ability of large numbers of people to understand or even confront a reality radically at odds with their preoccupations and prejudices, to understand as it were the lives of people who were truly “other.” Film as an art form had always, at least theoretically, suggested the possibility of creating images of an

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alternate, radically different reality. But people’s willingness to confront such images was and is limited.21

The experience of the directors discussed in this book suggests that the challenge of finding an audience willing to confront difficult subjects in nuanced films pales compared to the difficulty of reaching cinema and television screens in the first place. All the case studies presented in the following pages give examples of the creative and tenacious ways in which East German directors attempted to enter the unified German media market and chronicle how such efforts were largely unsuccessful, supporting Peter Welz’s contention (and Thomas Ahbe’s research) that this lack of success for former DEFA directors was desired by the political and cultural elites of the Federal Republic (see chapter 3). At the very least, this book documents the previously unknown efforts by numerous directors from the former DEFA studio to gain funding for stories from an East German perspective over the past two decades. In 2012, in anticipation of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the wall, German television broadcasters declined the proposal by documentarist Andreas Voigt and director/producer Barbara Etz to reassemble some of the prominent DEFA directors of the last generation to reflect on the changes in Germany since 1989 with the explanation that they preferred “journalistic views” over artistic ones. For the directors of the last features, this kind of rejection of their artistic views is all too familiar an experience. This is unfortunate, because a closer examination of the last features, as well as their larger contexts, reveals a rich and largely unknown part of German film history that defies stereotypes and corrects misconceptions. Whether viewing Jörg Foth’s numerous meditations on the paradoxical experiences of trying to reform the system from within or working from the outside, Helke Misselwitz’s exploration of the limits of filmic representation, Peter Welz’s quotations from film history, Peter Kahane’s staging of generational conflicts, Herwig Kipping’s long view of German utopian models of history, Andreas Voigt’s focused study of inconspicuous lives, or Ulrich Weiß’s search for a third way—the last features of DEFA all reflect on the particular historical moment of 1989 while also extending their artistic, philosophical, and political reach to the periods before and after.

Notes 1

For a full list of the last features see Ralf Schenk, ed., Das zweite Leben der Filmstadt Babelsberg: DEFA Spielfilme, 1946–1992 (Berlin: Henschel Verlag, 1994), 517–36. 2

Horst Claus, “DEFA—State Studio, Style, Identity,” in The German Cinema Book, ed. Tim Bergfelder, Erica Carter, and Deniz Göktürk (London: BFI, 2002), 139–48.

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3

Wendeflicks is the title of a retrospective of films made by DEFA directors in the last three years of the DEFA studio, which premiered in the United States in March 2009. The series was organized by the DEFA film library in Amherst, MA, and co-curated by the author. 4

Brad Prager has described the historical value of films as time-capsules this way: “The study of German language film assembles the traces of otherwise ungraspable history—the bodies, noises and things of those German worlds that leave their indirect imprint on uncountable feet of celluloid.” Brad Prager, “Resemblances: Between German Film Studies and History,” German Studies Review 35, no. 3 (2012): 493. 5

Signaled for example by the series of panels on “DEFA at the Crossroads— International Approaches to East German Film History” at the 2012 German Studies Association meeting in Milwaukee. Regarding in-depth single-director studies see, for example, Larson Powell’s forthcoming book on the films of Konrad Wolf. See also his articles “Mama ich lebe: Konrad Wolf’s Intermedial Parable of Antifascism,” Edinburgh German Yearbook 3 (2009): 63–75; “Breaking the Frame of Painting: Konrad Wolf’s Goya,” Studies in European Cinema 5, no. 2 (2008): 131–41; “Une socialiste est une socialiste: Der geteilte Himmel zwischen Bild und Stimme,” in Resonanz-Räume: Die Stimme und die Medien, ed. Oksana Bulgakowa (Berlin: Bertz/Fischer, 2012), 130–37; “February 1, 1968: Konrad Wolf’s Ich war 19 premieres in East Berlin,” in A New History of German Cinema, ed. Jennifer Kapczynski and Michael Richardson (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012), 405–11; “Gattung, Geschichte, Nation: Konrad Wolfs Ich war 19,” in Konrad Wolf: Werk und Wirkung, ed. Michael Wedel and Elke Schieber (Berlin: VISTAS, 2009), 125–44. 6

See the website of Icestorm International and the DEFA Film Library at UMass, Amherst for a description of the fourteen titles included in the Wendeflicks series, which toured to twelve North American cities after the premiere in Los Angeles in April 2009. http://www.umass.edu/defa/filmtour/wendeflicks.shtml#Wende_ Flicks (accessed September 11, 2013). 7 “Aus heutiger Perspektive waren wir geradezu naiv. Wir glaubten an die Möglich-

keit der Königserziehung.” Thomas Wilkening, internal document describing the background of the production group DaDaeR, 16 Feb. 1990, Wilkening File, Archive Film Museum, Potsdam. 8

“Wer in den Apparat geht geht verloren. Wer nicht, verliert.” Jörg Foth, “Orangenmond im Niemandsland,” in Orangenmond im Niemandsland, ed. Torsten Schulz (Berlin: Vistas, 2004), 25. All translations of quotations in this book are my own, unless otherwise noted. 9 Claus Löser and Karin Fritzsche, eds., Gegenbilder: Filmische Subversion in der DDR, 1976–1989 (Berlin: Janus, 1996). 10

“Die Zeitschriften waren eine Art Lebensretter für eine ganze Generation junger Künstler, die ansonsten zum Schweigen verurteilt waren.” Thomas Günther, “Die subkulturellen Zeitschriften in der DDR und ihre kulturgeschichtliche Bedeutung,” in Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte: Beilage zur Wochenzeitung “Das Parlament,” May 8, 1992, 36.

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11

“Das Bedürfnis nach Kollektivität war die stärkste Motivation; es ging um die Abschaffung der Isolation des kreativen Individuums.” Günther, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, 27. 12

“Übersichten des Ganzen, wie sie jetzt Mode sind, entstehen, wenn einer alles einzelne übersieht, und dann summiert.” Friedrich Schlegel, “Athenäum Fragmente,” in Kritische und theoretische Schriften (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1978), 84. 13

“Den Namen DEFA habe ich abgeschafft, die DEFA Filme waren furchtbar.” Lars Grote, “Plausch mit Volker Schlöndorff auf seinem sonnengelben Sofa beim Warten auf den RBB,” in Märkische Allgemeine, Dec. 12, 2008. 14

“Moral und Ethik, Sauberkeit und Hilfsbereitschaft.” Ralf Schenk, Eine kleine Geschichte der DEFA (Berlin: DEFA Stiftung, 2006), 177. Schenk cites Minister of Culture Kurt Hagen’s reaction to such criticism against the film as: “He saw no reason not to screen the film in its current state. Every pro and con in film should and must be discussed publicly as well” (“Er sähe keinen Grund, den Film in seiner jetzigen Art nicht aufzuführen. . . . Alles Für und Wider im Film soll und muss auch öffentlich diskutiert werden.” 177). 15 See for example Berghahn’s comparison of Burning Life and Thelma and Louise in Daniela Berghahn, Hollywood behind the Wall: The Cinema of East Germany (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 229–35; or the discussion of melodrama in regard to Peter Kahane’s Architekten in Mary-Elizabeth O’Brien, Post-Wall German Cinema and National History: Utopianism and Dissent (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012), 110–21. 16

See, for example, Dagmar Schittly, Zwischen Regie und Regime: Die Filmpolitik der SED im Spiegel der DEFA Produktionen (Berlin: Ch. Links, 2002), 311–13, and Bärbel Dalichow, “Das letzte Kapitel, 1989–1993,” in Schenk, Das zweite Leben der Filmstadt Babelsberg, 338–55. 17

Laura McGee, “Revolution in the Studio? The DEFA’s Fourth Generation of Film Directors and Their Reform Efforts in the Last Decade of the GDR,” Film-History 15, no. 4 (2003): 444–64; and her “‘Ich wollte ewig einen richtigen Film machen! Und als es soweit war, konnte ich es nicht!’ The End Phase of the GDR in Films by DEFA Nachwuchsregiseure,” German Studies Review 26, no. 2 (2003): 315–32; see also Sabine Hake, German National Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2007). 18

Mary Fulbrook writes about the generation born in the late 1940s and early 1950s, that is, that of most of the directors discussed in my book: “These cohorts were also subsequently the greatest ‘losers’ with regard to the ways that unification actually took place. . . . Having achieved what for so many of this generation had been the long-term aim of ‘arrival in the West’ they now found it held little by way of future prospects; accordingly, they revised their view of the East German past, retrospectively seeing aspects of it in a far more positive light.” Mary Fulbrook, “Living through the GDR: History, Life Stories, and Generations in East Germany,” in The GDR Remembered: Representations of the East German State since 1989, ed. Nick Hodgin and Caroline Pearce (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011), 213–14.

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19

Thomas Ahbe, “Competing Master Narratives: Geschichtspolitik and Identity Discourse in Three German Societies,” in Hodgin and Pearce, The GDR Remembered, 232. 20

See for example the carefully researched and compelling history by Nick Hodgin, Screening the East: Heimat, Memory and Nostalgia in German Film since 1989 (London: Berghahn Books, 2011). Also noteworthy is the earlier work by Leonie Naughton, That Was the Wild East: Film Culture, Unification and the “New” Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002). 21

Stephen Brockmann, A Critical History of German Film (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010), 499–500.

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1: On Fools and Clowns or Refusal as Engagement in Two Final DEFA Films: Egon Günther’s Stein and Jörg Foth’s Letztes aus der DaDaeR

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I STARTED RESEARCHING THIS BOOK in 2001, I was inspired by the discovery that a handful of films by a very diverse group of directors had been made during the period that began with the final months of the GDR, included the early years of unified Germany, and ended with the final sale of the DEFA studio in 1992. Most of these films had received little attention in East and West Germany, let alone abroad. I set out researching the films and their production histories in hopes of gaining insight into the transitional period in Germany from 1989 to 1992 from the unique perspective of East German filmmakers who for the first time in their careers worked under relatively free circumstances as the studio and the country they had worked in unraveled. The films I saw were not at all what I had expected. To begin with, most of them, while containing many references to the Wende, did not directly thematize the collapse of the GDR or German unification. Rather, I thought, they worked through GDR-specific experiences such as the loss of utopianism, runs-ins with censorship and Stasi, generational struggles among filmmakers in the DEFA studio, and of course the grassroots protest and peace movement of 1989. However, after delving deeply into the works of directors such as Foth, Weiß, Günther, Kipping, Voigt, Misselwitz, Kahane, and Welz, I realized that their Wendefilme represented only a few of the remarkable achievements in complicated careers that reached back long before the events of 1989 and continued into unified Germany. The works of the directors discussed in this book take place both inside and outside the GDR film academy Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen (HFF) and feature-film studio at DEFA, as political and personal circumstances forced these artists to express themselves in documentaries, children’s film, and television reporting, as well as through writing. The artists discussed in this book represent different generations and aesthetics, but their works are united in their shared articulation of resistance to demands for political or aesthetic conformism. This gesture of resistance, which was expressed in the topics and aesthetics of their films, is not limited to a particular period in the GDR, for example the HEN

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aftermath of the 1968 Prague invasion or the fall-out from the 1976 expulsion of singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann. In fact, it is not even limited to a critique of the GDR but addresses more broadly mechanisms of ideological, dichotomous thought and the suppression of individual, subjective perspective, including in the media landscape of unified Germany. Importantly, this position of resistance was accompanied by the sincere desire to participate in public and artistic discussions about a more just society and understood the role of film as one of social relevance. Resistance and refusal thus did not prevent the artists’ being involvd with the system but rather propelled directors like Foth and Misselwitz into roles of leadership as spokespersons for the generational discussions about film’s social value at DEFA and fueled optimistic efforts for a new beginning in unified Germany under the leadership of Thomas Wilkening. The life and work of director Jörg Foth exemplifies this gesture of refusal (Verweigerung), and indeed his last television film, made in 1996, bears this title. While Foth’s Letztes aus der DaDaeR (1990) became emblematic for the Wendefilme, especially two decades after the fall of the wall, an examination of his overall oeuvre reveals a remarkable commitment to his search for innovative expressions of subjective individuality throughout his career. Not surprisingly, attempts by Foth and his colleagues to articulate alternatives to mainstream conformity met resistance both in the GDR and in unified Germany, resulting in limited access to production means. Just before members of the last director’s generation at DEFA received funding for their production group “DaDaeR,” Foth delivered his much quoted speech “Unsere Welle war keine” (Our Moment Never Came).1 This speech, held at the convention of film and television workers of the GDR in 1988, was a last cry of protest against the silencing of the youngest generation (see the introduction for a fuller description of this convention). Asked in 2011 whether he still felt that this summary was accurate for his generation’s films, Foth answered emphatically in the affirmative.2 The price of continued refusal is summarized in the careers, both in the GDR and unified Germany, of the filmmakers discussed in this book. How strongly former GDR directors held on to the hope that the fall of the wall would afford them the opportunities to tell their stories in unified Germany can be gleaned from an attempt by Foth to collect film scenarios of never-realized DEFA films in a book for the Aufbau publishing company in 1997 under the title Filme aus Papier (Paper Films). Despite eager interest by the publisher, the book could not be compiled, because many of Foth’s former colleagues from the last DEFA generation still clung to the hope that their projects might yet be realized. Many of the films I will discuss in this book reflect on the paradoxical struggle of artists to resist and participate at the same time, including the moral dilemma of being supported by the very state that was the target of their critique. Among the last DEFA productions two important films, which are the

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focus of this chapter, examine this conflict head-on: Egon Günther’s Stein and Foth’s Letztes aus der DaDaeR. While the bulk of this chapter explores the works of Jörg Foth, I will read his Wende clowns film against the foil of Günther’s film because taken together these films illustrate a generational span between one of DEFA’s most iconic directors (Günther), whose influential films were made in the 1960s and early 1970s, and Foth, a key representative of the last generation, who responded to the work of their predecessors but also sought to give voice to their own concerns. Egon Günther had been an important model for the young Foth as he entered film school in Babelsberg. Their paths crossed several times on film sets: for example when Foth assisted in Ulrich Weiß’s Blauvogel and when Günther asked Foth to appear in Stein, although the scene was later omitted. Egon Günther’s film Stein (1991) and Jörg Foth’s Letztes aus der DaDaeR (1990) were among the approximately thirty last features bearing the DEFA label. By choosing the fool’s or clown’s outsider perspective both films comment on the lost utopian project of socialism. Günther and Foth both demonstrate in their films a commitment to film as social critique even as they depict how this ambition was in effect thwarted early on in the GDR, leaving the artist the choice between playing the mad fool or the irreverent but ultimately harmless clown. Günther’s take is informed by his decision to leave the GDR in 1978 and produce films in West Germany. Foth’s film, on the other hand, expresses forcefully the frustration of the younger generation (Hineingeborene, those born in the GDR), who attempted reform even at the very end by making films that would contribute to social change, without ever believing in the geriatric, bureaucratized form of socialism they grew up in.3 Jörg Foth’s student film Blumenland (Flower Land, diploma film, 1975) already thematizes this generational change by portraying GDR youth who spend their days making artificial flowers in the recently collectivized flower industry in Saxony, while dreaming tentatively of forming a rock band in their free time. Foth encounters reluctant interviewees who respond monosyllabically to the director’s inquiries about plans and interests outside their day job: the production of artificial flowers. The most extensive interaction between a young woman and Foth centers on plans to form a “beat group” with some girlfriends, none of whom knew how to play an instrument. Upon request, their factory supervisor assured them of the company band’s (“Betriebskapelle”) support. As no actual help or guidance results from this unlikely source of inspiration for a rock band, the girls quickly resign themselves to the fact that their idea will not be realized. Their very limited “flower-power” consists of riding their motorcycles across the Czechoslovakian border. Foth edits his short film by alternating these halting conversations with sequences of motorcycles riding through lush landscapes to the

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film’s rock music soundtrack. While the film school may have expected a documentary about the transformation of the artificial flower industry from individual family businesses to socialist collectives, a process that took place around the time the film was made in 1975, the film uses the artificial flower production as a metaphor for the stifled and anachronistic life of the teens, dryly expressed, for example, by a young man whose expected to take over his family business but under the changed economic conditions now registers his career goal as company economist (“Betriebsökonom”) in the artificial flower collective (“Kunstblumenkombinat”). The matter-of-factly stated socialist terminology alone conveys a sense of deadly resignation that is picked up again in the metaphor of artificial flower production. The title Blumenland itself was chosen after Karl Eduard von Schnitzler, who had to approve student films for broadcasting on GDR television, refused to sign off on the original title: Ostermädchen Postermädchen (100 Jahre) because it contained the English word “poster.”4 The film was only broadcast once, not twice as was customary for student films, on GDR television, because of complaints from the party leaders of the artificial flower factory (VEB Kunstblume Kombinat). The film’s strategy of the matter-of fact depiction of the lifelessness of the youth working in the artificial flower industry is also used to describe relations to neighboring socialist countries. While the film emphasizes the friendly connections with the Kombinat’s Czechoslovakian business partners in deadpan interviews with the aspiring company economist, its final image of the young motorcycle gang crossing the border in the most orderly fashion evokes many of the unarticulated but palpably underlying wishes of the young people. Only a few years before, the East German army had crossed the border to help suppress the 1968 democratic uprising in Prague. Now the motorcyclists patiently wait for the thorough control of their papers; when the border gate finally lifts, the group’s exit is less a celebration of the freedom of the road than another state-sanctioned act of control. The film’s deadpan reporting and interviewing is interspersed with a number of long takes of quiet landscapes, sparsely lit night shots of bizarrely shaped dead trees, and quizzical owls, all accompanied by unsettling experimental sound tracks. These visual interludes create contrasting impressions of eerily alienating images amid an otherwise pastoral natural landscape and orderly factories. The artificiality of the fake flowers is here reflected in the starkly lit night landscapes and creates a deeply unsettling mood. The film’s language was so unusual that bets were placed at the film school as to whether the film would be officially sanctioned. Foth’s mentor Ulrich Weiß had suggested labeling the film as a “documentary revue” to explain its unusual approach. At DEFA this was an expression of a new aesthetic beginning by one of its then youngest directors—a

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beginning that was undesired and thus largely stifled until the belated founding of the DaDaeR production group two decades later.5 DEFA directors were by definition much more closely tied to state institutions than were writers and thus could not separate their work from the various instances of control and censorship. While writers faced continuous forms of restrictions, they had the option—albeit undesirable— of writing their texts and not publishing them, publishing them in the unofficial publishing venues of the alternative art scene, or attempting to publish them in West Germany. The private readings, screenings, and unofficial publications organized in apartments in the Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood in Berlin was one such unofficial literary scene where writers who opted for a quasi-outside status of this sort could gather. Jörg Foth was well acquainted with the literary publishing scene in the GDR. In 1978 he found himself delivering telegrams in East Berlin, because he had just asked to be released from his contract with the State Television studio. Despite having graduated with a diploma in feature-film directing, Foth preferred earning 50 Pfennig per delivered telegram over lending his talents to the highly ideological state media apparatus. Instead of writing film scripts, Foth now wrote literary miniatures about Poland. After receiving initial encouragement from an editor of the publishing company Der Morgen he was informed by the chief editor that the manuscript could not be published: “We don’t know when we can publish texts about Poland again. Wouldn’t you like to write something about Berlin?”6 As it turned out, even a collection of poetic reflections on life in East Berlin complemented by photographs by cinematographer Thomas Plenert and edited under the title Mikado could not be published in 1980. The short prose pieces are in part reminiscent of themes in Irina Liebmann’s more journalistic 1980s compilation of interviews, Berliner Mietshaus (Berlin Tenement Building). Ranging from satirically funny to self-reflectively poetic in style, these little miniatures function like fables in their movement from the inconspicuous to the philosophical, for example in the short text “Alp,” which was occasioned by the disappearance of a lake in Mecklenburg in 1978. The occurrence, which was reported matter-of-factly and succinctly in the daily papers, became the subject of many jokes and speculations and was restaged in Ulrich Weiß’s Miraculi (Miracles, 1991, see chapter 2). In “Alp” the event leads to the observation: “The desert will become a pasture and the pasture desert.”7 In the context of the story this is simply a descriptive sentence, but in its poetic pronouncement it also reads like a metaphorical comment on the intellectual life of the GDR in general and the film studio in particular. Foth had been active in a group of young filmmakers at the Babelsberg studio, a group who in 1982 would prepare a major reform document for the leadership. While these efforts did not yield the demanded results until the founding of the production group DaDaeR in 1990, Foth had

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expressed his generation’s loss of faith in the socialist project early on. His own rejection of working in his profession at any price, that is, as a director for GDR television in 1978, signals a theme that would characterize all of his work from his early student days to his 1996 television film entitled Die Verweigerung (The Refusal). However, as his feature film Letztes aus der DaDaeR (1990) makes abundantly clear, this act of refusal could take on many forms and entailed complex decisions. Letztes aus der DaDaeR captured many of his previous experiences with censorship, for example of his Polish miniatures, when the clowns reflect on the 1980s and state in an allusion to the formation of the solidarity movement and martial law in Poland of 1980/81: “Back then all words beginning with “Pol” were forbidden.”8 Unlike writers, filmmakers had no other outlets for their art than the official film studio DEFA.9 As a result, the question of the moral accountability of filmmakers and the possible role of art as a constructive force in society was a pertinent one for directors of any generation, including Egon Günther and Jörg Foth. The two films Stein and Letztes aus der DaDaeR, while not directly representative of their directors’ generations (those born around 1930 and 1950, respectively) are clearly influenced by their directors’ biographies. The particular production circumstances of both films—a return to DEFA after twelve years in West Germany for Günther, and a production by the new production group DaDaeR for Foth—should remind viewers from the start that this was not the usual DEFA fare. By the time the last features went into production, the studio’s future was more than uncertain and the old power structures had crumbled. Not surprisingly, Günther’s film reflects on this ending of the DEFA era with what might be called critical melancholia, while Foth celebrates it with palpable relief. Stein and Letztes aus der DaDaeR are exemplary films on the Wende, not only because of their subject matter—the end of the GDR—but because they reflect indirectly on the role of DEFA directors in the GDR through the prism of the fool or clown figure. More than two decades later they appear surprisingly contemporary. Instead of just satirizing and memorializing the former GDR, both films also contain reflections on the role of the artist vis-à-vis the state he or she lives in that is equally applicable to unified Germany. It is important to define the figures of fool and clown more closely before proceeding to a detailed discussion of the two films. Günther’s use of the fool is situated in the Shakespearean tradition of the wise fool in a world gone mad. The prototype for this is found in King Lear, and indeed the play features prominently in Stein. However, Günther’s fool Stein is not the disinterested truth-teller, the punctum indifferens of the film, but more like King Lear himself after his descent into madness: “For the king, having lost everything, including his wits, has now himself become the fool. He has touched bottom, he is an

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outcast from society, he has no longer any private axe to grind, so he now sees and speaks the truth.”10 In fact, Günther’s character Stein is not attempting to enlighten with wisdom in the guise of foolish verses but is withdrawing from the insane world by feigning madness. So as to be left alone by the authorities he removes himself (in the middle of a rehearsal of King Lear) from the theater world, preferring the company of children and social outcasts. Günther’s fool is a melancholic loner who uses his mask to turn inward. True to Freud’s definition of melancholia as the inability to let go of the beloved object, Stein is unable to free himself from the utopian concept of socialism and is paralyzed by the lack of alternatives. He operates on the notunreasonable premise that more outspoken resistance would likely lead to imprisonment or expulsion, while a less drastic withdrawal could bring him into uncomfortable proximity to the oppressive system. However, “the idea that one can drop out of society is based on the illusion that the personal and intellectual realms can be detached from the political,” as Friederike Eigler has stated in her discussion of the Prenzlauer Berg scene;11 similarly, the wise fool finds in the end that the mask of madness protects him from neither moral dilemmas nor the encroachment of the “mad” world. Foth’s film, by contrast, features the clown duo Mensching and Wenzel, who were known as the GDR’s courtly fools (“Hofnarren der DDR”) or, as the Berlin paper Tagesspiegel described them: “Brecht plus Goethe times Weill squared Eisler divided by Valentin equals Wenzel and Mensching”12 As David Robb has shown, the duo understood their role as clowns in the tradition of the commedia dell’arte: their satires and parodies were aimed at unmasking the discrepancy between appearance and being (“Sein und Schein”), between the official language of socialist ideology and reality. Robb traces the influence of Bakhtin’s theory of carnival on Wenzel’s and Mensching’s clown acts as he quotes the Russian theorist: “Laughter liberates not only from external censorship but first of all from the great interior censor; it liberates from . . . fear of the sacred, of prohibitions, of past and power.”13 Foth’s film plays with this liberating laughter, but looking back at the GDR after its collapse it also points to the temporary nature of such liberation. Much as the social order was restored at the end of the Harlequin’s act at the medieval carnival, Foth suggests that the clowns’ critical voices may have had a limited reach, but they nevertheless had an essential function. From the margins of society the clowns comment on its woes and thus indicate hope for the reformability of the system. The clowns’ masks therefore enable their bearers to engage the political world, whereas Günther’s fool uses his cover to hide from it. As the analysis will show, both fool and clowns experienced the possibilities and limits of their chosen masks before and during the Wende. Indeed, Günther’s choice of the fool and Foth’s preference for the clowns are programmatic.

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Stein is the more somber, perhaps even resigned film: it presents its hero as a tolerated social outcast who is paid by the state for his silent acquiescence. Günther’s choice of the wise fool in the Shakespearean tradition is consistent with his continuous effort to elevate the political specificity of his film to a more abstract and generally applicable level. Foth’s unruly clowns, by contrast, are by definition outside the norm but confront and provoke the public and the power structures from this selfimposed distance until they are chased away, ironically not by the powers that were but by their own audience. The tragicomic mood of the first film and the bitterly satirical tone of the second represent the personal and generational attitudes of their directors. Egon Günther frequently experienced censorship, including Stasi intimidation through the persecution of his teenage son, and finally left the GDR in 1978 to direct in West Germany. But he still had spent important formative years at DEFA and regarded the studio as his artistic home, where in spite of all his troubles he had directed such highly regarded films as Die Schlüssel (The Keys), and Der Dritte (Her Third). Jörg Foth, on the other hand, born in 1949, belonged to the generation of filmmakers whose limited influence he had once summed up in the phrase quoted above: “Our Moment Never Came.” Foth’s experience at DEFA differed fundamentally from Günther’s, as the studio had become more and more bureaucratized and mistrustful of its younger talent under studio director Hans Dieter Mäde. Many filmworkers around Foth have voiced frustration over being a well-educated but superfluous workforce in the studio. Scriptwriter Carmen Blazejewski described the generational dilemma as follows: “When I arrived in 1981 in the feature-film studio, the boat was full. There were forty-four directors under contract . . . for sixteen feature-film productions per year. There was no room for the youngest generation. We were superfluous, were not needed.”14 Peter Kahane’s 1990 film Die Architekten has thematized this problem most directly (see chapter 6) but Letztes aus der DaDaeR reflects the weariness of being strung along with empty promises as well, most pointedly when the clowns are carried off to the dump in a garbage truck. Mapping a topography of pollution, absurdities, censorship, and shared responsibility, Letztes aus der DaDaeR captures many aspects of GDR life at specific historical locations, while Stein strives for a more universal theme. Astonishingly, much of what both films criticize as specific to the GDR has remained relevant after the fall of the wall. Both films pose questions regarding the artist’s social responsibility and his struggles to preserve the subjective independence of one’s artistic vision regardless of the political system. Egon Günther, who had produced a feature film based on Johannes R. Becher’s novel Abschied in 1968 in the GDR and a filmic adaptation of Feuchtwanger’s novel Exil in 1980 for West German television, explores

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in Stein the story of an old actor who has chosen inner emigration over cooperation with the state. However GDR-specific this topic may be, the themes of this film are more universal: how to make moral choices, create humane living spaces, and cope with love, jealousy, and betrayal. Nevertheless, its setting in 1989 and its presentation of various generations of GDR citizens allow the film to also capture some of the ways in which the people participated in the political upheaval of that year. Stein experienced a curious fate upon release: barely noticed by the public but hailed by several critics as the most important feature film about the end of the East German state, it received standing ovations at the Munich film festival yet was ignored at the Berlinale. In his review, Ralf Schenk emphasized the director’s refusal to reduce forty years of GDR history to its final collapse and his decision to present instead a variety of individual responses to the regime while it was still intact: “Therefore this is the most important DEFA film about recent German history.”15 Critic Knut Hickethier echoed this view and lauded the sensitive portrayal of a certain GDR Zeitgeist when he observed that Günther had captured much more of the GDR than many documentary films.16 As if to confirm Schenk’s further assertion that Stein could only be understood by an audience that had lived through the GDR, we find much less favorable reviews in West Germany. Roland Rust of Cologne’s Filmdienst found the depiction of Stein’s protagonist flawed by “embarrassing senility” and characterized the overall film as weighed down with “exaggerated metaphors, sentimental music,” and a “tedious, drawn-out ending” among other faults.17 And H. G. Pflaum found the film as “undecided, ambivalent, and clueless as the country and time period about which it tells”18 By contrast, Karsten Herold wrote in his study of Günther’s work: “It is a mistake to regard Stein as a film about the end of the GDR. It is a meditation about refusal, about the impossibility of love.”19 It is precisely this theme of “Verweigerung” or refusal that connects Günther’s film with Foth’s. As mentioned above, the last film Foth directed for German television in unified Germany is titled Die Verweigerung and links stories from the GDR and unified Germany through this theme, as will be discussed below. What then is this specific GDR Zeitgeist that East German critics found reflected in this movie? How did Günther assess the artist’s role in the GDR from hindsight in 1990 and after having spent twelve years working mostly in West Germany? How was the film’s unique tone and style informed by Günther’s own biography and previous work? To answer these questions let me now turn to a more detailed discussion of the film itself. Stein tells the story of a famous old actor, Ernst Stein, who had left the theater twenty-one years earlier during a performance of King Lear as a protest against the invasion of Prague on August 21, 1968. Since that day

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Fig. 1.1. Actor Rolf Ludwig as Ernst Stein in Stein. Courtesy of DEFA Stiftung; photograph by Heinz Pufahl.

Stein has lived in inner emigration in his old villa outside Berlin, receiving paychecks from the GDR government but refusing direct contact with the outside world in general and the state in particular. He lives alone but is surrounded by a group of children and young adults who share his rejection of the regime: conscientious objectors, rebellious teens, and participants of the 1989 peace movement. It remains unclear throughout the film whether Stein’s inner exile has caused his mental decline and to what degree he uses insanity as a protective mask to isolate himself from his surroundings. But despite the children’s loving care Stein’s health declines until the unhappy ending of his love for the twenty-year-old Sara and the fall of the wall coincide with his death. Günther is not interested in telling a chronological or a coherent story. His narrative is composed of little episodes that highlight the protagonist’s anger, despair, loneliness, resilience, and will to resist integration into a system that had discredited itself decades before. In his effort to isolate himself as completely as possible he has chosen not to allow himself to get too emotionally attached to any of his young caretakers who roam the house, continuously mixing up their names, not opening his mail in twenty years, and preferring the use of a seashell to the actual telephone. On the other hand, the film presents a tentative model community of misfits who loosely band together in mutual support and repay Stein’s

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Fig. 1.2. Director Egon Günther with actress Evelin Dahm as Laura in Stein. Courtesy of DEFA Stiftung; photograph by Heinz Pufahl.

hospitality20 with their joint efforts to protect him from being moved to a psychiatric hospital or retirement home. Throughout the film Günther shows the tension between the attempt of a successful withdrawal from society as an act of refusal and the impossibility of such an endeavor. The political tensions and drastic changes in the outside world continue to affect Stein in profound ways. But instead of showing the political upheaval itself, as many other Wendefilme have done, the director focuses on their effect on the sensitive inner life of Stein, his awareness of his own guilt, jealousy, and impotence. Significantly, the film opens with a melodramatic struggle between Stein and two deserting soldiers of the Red Army who seek shelter in his house. Stein refuses to let them in, aware of their great distress but afraid for his own safety. It becomes increasingly clear to Stein that the attempt to observe his environment from the detached fool’s position is impossible to maintain. Günther skillfully uses space—more precisely the contrast between inside and outside paired with a disjointed, episodic narrative style, to reflect the tormented inner life of the protagonist. A large part of the film takes place in Stein’s spacious and sparsely furnished dining room. Repeatedly, the camera enters this room through a double doorframe, symbolizing the spectator’s entry into Stein’s private inner space, the landscape of his soul. Indeed, many of the short episodes that take place in this room suspend the laws of the outside world and convey a sense of carefully

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cultivated Weltfremdheit, for example, through the already mentioned use of the seashell instead of a telephone. But from the very first scene on, this inner sanctum is besieged by the troubles of the outside world. When he allows himself to fall in love with Sara, his resistance breaks down completely and he ventures outside into the political unrest on Berlin’s streets to search for her. This excursion into the city is the only scene in the film that directly shows the clashes between protesters and police in the fall of 1989. Stein appears disoriented and is harassed by the authorities. In an act of psychological self-defense he imagines a scene where he hypnotizes a police officer and has him drop his pants. Critics have noted the odd clash between the naturalism of the Berlin arrest scene and the dreamlike sequences in the country house, but it is precisely the harshness of the contrast that mirrors Stein’s shock when he feels forced to leave the relative safety of his country house and expose himself to the violent chaos of the outside world. However recognizably the romantic notion of the withdrawn artist surrounded by children is set up, Günther forcefully undermines the portrayal of Stein’s house as a safe haven. While the camera enters Stein’s interior space repeatedly from the outside at the beginning of the film, seemingly leaving the real world outside, the perspective changes gradually over the course of the film. As the protagonist is less and less able to fend off the world, the camera more and more looks out from the interior of the house, from what has become a dark and lonely space, at the visitors entering through the double doorframes. The protected, peaceful inner space now resembles a lonely prison. After Stein has suffered a nervous breakdown, the camera even gazes from Stein’s exhausted perspective through a translucent glass door at various children who have come to tell the old man that their parents will not allow further visits. Stein is left alone for the moment, in poor health; only the children’s voices calling in their good-byes penetrate his walls. Günther is thus able to use the metaphor of interior space for his explorations of the consequences of inner exile. By depicting Stein’s inner sanctum as a seemingly safe space where he is in relative control in the beginning and changing the direction of the camera’s gaze in the course of the film, Günther’s film delineates the precarious border between shutting the world out and locking oneself in. This metaphor is expanded in the contrast between the tortured moments of betrayal, loneliness, and nightmares that all take place inside, and the brief moments of happiness and understanding between Stein and the children that are staged outside in the beautiful wild garden. Yet the film makes it clear through its soundtrack of constant gunfire, heard even in its lighter moments such as the garden party, that the outside world cannot be shut out. Günther’s film thus explores a dilemma similar to the one the poets from the Prenzlauer Berg scene in Berlin had faced in the 1980s, namely the

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physical and discursive impossibility of maintaining an outsider position within the confines of the state. David Bathrick’s description of the Prenzlauer Berg poets is also applicable to Stein’s attempt to establish his outsider position: “The failure to accept the essentially contextual and ultimately political relationship between poet and state has led to a dangerous naiveté on the part of those who would want to resist the state by claiming to ignore it.”21 The film offers a seismographic portrait of nervous tensions, sadness, and frustration as well as tentative moments of hopeful community building and understanding that not only addresses the last months of the GDR but goes back to the late 1960s and paradigmatically employs the Prague invasion as a point of no return for the Socialist project. Indeed, 1968 is a pivotal turning point for both Günther’s and Foth’s generation, although the experience of the then forty-year-old Günther differed greatly from the then twenty-year-old Foth. Günther had several of his films banned or hampered in their distribution around that time period, beginning with the satirical comedy Wenn du groß bist, lieber Adam (When You Grow Up, Dear Adam, 1965), and including Abschied (Farewell, 1968), and his love story Die Schlüssel (The Keys, 1972), which explored Polish-German relations. He saw his seventeen-year-old son Thomas arrested and sent to prison for reading a Brecht poem at school in 1968 and finally was allowed to move to West Germany with a special visa in 1978. Wolfgang Emmerich has stated that writers such as Christa Wolf and Volker Braun had sealed the image of true Socialism “into the shrine of utopia: as that which has no place, but which should still exist.”22 Günther, by contrast, suggests in Stein that his faith in such a utopian idea had waned already in 1968. In 1968 Foth, on the other hand, had only just graduated from high school and begun his three-year military service. He would not start his formal training at the Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen, Babelsberg (HFF) until 1972. This meant that Foth’s generation did not personally experience the crucial years of 1965 and 1968 at DEFA but instead observed the crushing of reforms in neighboring Czechoslovakia as well as the student revolts and Vietnam protests in Western Europe. Stein’s focus on the period between 1968 and 1989 also stems from the evolution of the film—begun in 1986 by script writer Helga Schütz—and the changes made to the script by both Schütz and Günther as a direct result of the political events of 1989. In many ways this is fortuitous, because it broadens the depiction of forms of resistance from the tragic but nevertheless privileged figure of the famous old actor to the generation of teenagers, who cannot share his sadness over the loss of the Socialist utopia because they never believed in it in the first place. In spite of the bonds between the generations that are based on alternative models of community and mutual attraction (symbolized by Sara and Ernst), Günther does not attempt to artificially harmonize this generational gap.

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Fig. 1.3. Jörg Foth plays a doctor in a scene later deleted. Courtesy of DEFA Stiftung; photograph by Heinz Pufahl.

An excerpt from the script of Stein illustrates how the director used an indirect but succinct style to make this point. Sara and Ernst have just expressed their concern for each other and committed to search for the other if either one of them were to disappear for more than ten hours. As they walk peacefully next to each other in the garden, Sara challenges him: “Ernst. How much is two times two?” His prompt reply “Five” is met with her disappointed “Seven, dammit. Everybody knows that” (23). While this exchange is nonsensical on the surface it signifies their mutual commitment to resisting the norm. Moreover, Stein emphasizes the intentionality of his resistance to conformity when he concludes this exchange with the forceful assertion that he is not crazy.23 With such sparse means, cryptic dialogue, and ambivalent images and sequences Günther refuses to simplify the complicated political events and individual responses. At the risk of confusing his audience Günther has chosen to substitute poetic images and metaphorical language for the lengthy ideological discussions so typical of many DEFA films. Henryk Goldberg summed it up in his review: “Everything has meaning and nothing means anything. That is the comical side of the fool, and his dead-seriousness.”24 The film suggests that no withdrawal can be total and that the mask of the wise fool will neither protect him from further moral challenges nor provide the inner peace he longs for. Stein’s generous hospitality, for

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example, his “Anybody can spend the night in this house,” which forms the basis of the idealized community of fools, punks, and children, stops at Stein’s own fears and jealousies: the deserting soldiers and Sara’s latest young lover are not admitted to his house. The tragic recognition of guilt in the film is mediated through a final image of reconciliation and forgiveness. The film concludes with Stein’s vision of death, which transports him to Italy, a place he has longed for throughout the movie. He descends into the catacombs, together with the two Red Army soldiers whom he had failed to save in the beginning of the film. Their joint peaceful disappearance into this final resting place symbolizes the continued hope for utopian humanist ideals, replacing Socialism with the ideals of community as represented by the early Christians. However, the last frame returns from this idyllic landscape to the confusions of the present day, as the film concludes with documentary footage of the removal of the wall. It should be remembered that by the time of the film’s postproduction in early 1991, the dismantling of the wall was a symbol of both the end of an oppressive system and the uncertainty regarding life in unified Germany. This final shot relates to two previous documentary inserts that show the changing of the guards at the Neue Wache, Berlin’s prominent war memorial, at the beginning and in the middle of the film. The documentary inserts, a frequently used technique in Günther’s films, interrupt the diegetic reality of the film and remind the audience of the larger political context outside Stein’s villa, as does the final frame of the wall. Moreover, the inserts also offer ironic commentary on the plot itself, elevating the personal troubles of its protagonist to broader political concerns. Thus the initial documentary insert, showing GDR soldiers changing guard at the Neue Wache, follows on the heel of Stein’s self-accusatory musings after he has pushed the Red Army soldiers out of his house: “It is a cruel fact that man stumbles and paradise is lost.”25 Seen in this context, the documentary insert functions not only as a refocusing away from Ernst Stein’s crisis of personal guilt but as a statement on the loss of utopian ideals—ideals that were associated with the founding of the socialist state. With the death vision of the catacombs, Günther suggests that Stein’s moral failures will be judged against his attempted resistance in an almost Faustian way: “Man errs as long as he strives.”26 The influence of two of Günther’s lifelong favorites—Goethe and Brecht—is evident in the film’s double ending: the end of Stein’s story in Italy and the film’s return to documentary footage in Berlin. The director evokes both Goethe’s idealized concept of pure humanity and Brecht’s alienation technique to return us from utopian idealism to the specific political questions of the present. Günther refrains from offering an easy answer to the question of moral conduct for the intellectual in a totalitarian regime and is concerned with exploring and depicting the complexity of the dilemma

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instead: “We have to tell these stories ourselves. The citizens of the other Germany have difficulty comprehending the inside views of the GDR. They saw everything from the outside.”27 The theme of self-censorship is alluded to in several scenes that show Ernst’s failed attempt to write his autobiography. In a true fool’s manner he willingly hands over the mysterious “green folder” to the Academy of Arts’ overzealous administrator Christine Berg, who is eager to secure the memoirs of the dissident actor. As it turns out later, the folder contained nothing but empty white sheets—suggesting a connection between inner exile and self-censorship, resulting, for example, in the inability to write at all, a self-imposed stagnating silence with tragic dimensions. But even in scenes with great pathos the director is careful not to reduce complex contexts to simplistic sob stories. One such example is a scene where a group of young punks takes advantage of Stein’s “hospitality” and after a night of partying gather slightly hung-over around the massive dining room table the next morning. Questioned by Sara, they tearfully recount their individual stories of abuse, neglect, and state persecution. The scene is accompanied by solemn music from Purcell’s King Arthur. As we hear their haltingly-told stories about attempted escapes from the GDR, incarceration for petty offenses, and psychiatric confinement of rape victims, Purcell’s chorus chants: “We have sacrificed.” Emphasizing the importance of the sound track is the fact that the music and narrative are mixed at equal volume. But instead of simply stylizing both Stein and the juvenile punks as victims of state violence, we then learn about the punks’ brutal entry into Stein’s house the previous night. The regime’s violence is now continued in the interaction among its victims, thus complicating simplistic notions of victims and perpetrators. Another scene, which is in the script but absent from the film, thematizes Stein’s own complicity with the system. Sara charges him with having accepted continued salary payments after resigning from the stage in return for his silence. Lying in bed after this confrontation, Ernst considers the matter again in a tragicomic vein: he received funds from the state worth “half a tank.”28 It is not clear why Günther chose not to include this particular scene in the movie, yet it is consistent with his efforts to eliminate any references that are too specific to the GDR context, thereby limiting the otherwise universal theme of the artist’s resistance and responsibility. While the personal is political, the political is not always poetic. Günther explained in a 1991 interview with Rolf and Erika Richter: “When I have the feeling I’m getting too close with a metaphor, I attempt to distort immediately. When it becomes too congruent with political or cultural events, I begin to erase.”29 Consequently, there are many instances where direct references in the script to Stasi surveillance, police control, and even the role of the church in the 1989 peace movement are omitted in the film—an effort to universalize

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the conflicts rather than label them as exclusive to the GDR. The film’s theme of artists choosing between resistance and complicity with the state can thus be equally applied to their conformity with the West German capitalist system. Undoubtedly, this is also the result of Günther’s work in both the East and West German film industry, experiencing the limitations and restrictions on directors in each state. In this respect Stein differs significantly in style from the other DEFA feature films produced between 1990 and 1992. Many directors of Günther’s generation staged a final reckoning with the GDR system of control and censorship in their last DEFA films (for example, Heiner Carow’s Verfehlung, Roland Gräf’s Tangospieler, Horst Seemann’s Zwischen Pankow und Zehlendorf [Between Pankow and Zehlendorf]). Günther, by contrast, had channeled his experience of Stasi interference in the East and funding restrictions in the West to aim for a more abstract consideration of the artist’s role in society. Another example that is included in the film might illustrate this aesthetic strategy. In a lighter moment, the children are washing Stein’s collection of blue glasses while he wanders around the room idly. The image is one of peaceful contentment, including an affirmation of stereotypical gender roles, when suddenly the house begins to shake, causing the glasses to vibrate violently and then fall to the floor. Ernst calmly comments without attempting to save them that the army must be moving toward the city or the border to establish a position.30 This is the extent to which the film allows direct references to the volatile political events of the summer of 1989. The camera never shows the tanks but focuses on the children holding their arms around the table to prevent all the glasses from falling; belatedly, Ernst joins them. This image requires no further explication. In the above scene, some of the blue glass is shattering, only temporarily protected by the children, as the tanks move to suppress the democratic protest movement. On the other hand, not all of the blue glass breaks, thus preserving a sliver of hope for a better future. Günther shares with Foth’s generation a fundamental desire to use film for larger social purposes and was equally skeptical of the DEFA studio leadership’s priority of ideology and pedagogy over aesthetics.31 If there is a pedagogical aspect to Stein then it would have to be the film’s challenge to consider the moral ambiguities of the protagonist’s choices, not just for the GDR but in a broader, more universal context. Should Stein refuse to play King Lear after the Prague invasion, dissociating himself from the government? Or should he hope that the subversive power of Shakespeare’s text, the only means of public access available to him, will prevail? Should he leave the GDR in protest? Or should he stay in hopes of a better future and in support of his circle of social outcasts around him? Is it unethical to accept pay from the regime as hush money? Or is it subversive to use it for his hapless attempt of building a more humanitarian community, aware that total isolation is impossible?

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The film’s value today lies in its earnest portrayal of this struggle, which is necessarily somewhat tragic and happily somewhat comical. There is no solution to the question of where the artist’s public responsibilities lie but, as the film points out, choices will entail guilt. This is more honest than the insistence that art and politics can and need to be neatly separated. By raising these issues in such a universal way, Günther addresses former East and West Germans equally and avoids the pitfalls of indulgent self-stylizing victimhood or simplistic accusations of treason. Günther dramatizes this conflict through the figure of the fool, who like King Lear himself made the mistake of “getting old before becoming wise” and who despite his best efforts to withdraw remains firmly connected—not least by his love for Sara—to the “mad” world around him. Director Peter Kahane summarized the consequences of such willingness to compromise: “The price for the hope and patience is shared responsibility and guilt. And because this is so, we must fight against the simplifications in regard to the history of DEFA and the GDR.”32 If Goethe and Brecht seem like the guiding influences on Stein, we find at first glance a more Beckett-informed tone in Letztes aus der DaDaeR, symbolized from the very start by the clowns’ abbreviated names “Meh” and “Weh.” Mensching’s and Wenzel’s 1990 program was not the first to comment on political events in the GDR, nor was it their first filmic collaboration with Jörg Foth. Their first program “Neues aus der DaDaeR” (News from the DaDaeR) premiered in small cabarets across the country in 1982, followed by “Altes aus der DaDaeR” (Old News from the DaDaeR) in 1988: that is to say, Foth’s Letztes aus der DaDaeR was the filmic adaptation of an existing cabaret program that had been developed over the course of the 1980s and that continued into unified Germany. Foth was invited by TV producer Lew Homann to direct a “rehearsal film” with the duo in the early 1990s entitled Die Meisenwürger proben. The film shows Wenzel and Mensching in one of their last collaborations rehearsing a new program in a run-down rehearsal space with theater dramaturge Heiner Maaß, who had been a long-time friend and admirer of the clowns.33 Very much resembling an absurd endgame, Meh and Weh roam the desolate land in Letztes aus der DaDaeR, performing their swan song at historically significant locations and emphasizing the destruction of the GDR and its creative energies through boredom and stagnation. Blazejewski has detailed Foth’s and other younger directors’ failed efforts to realize a new film aesthetic and concludes “that the lack of opportunity for the youngest generation and thus of the development of new aesthetics or even renewal of DEFA film in general was structural.”34 The clowns return to the theme of waiting for nothing and aging without the hope for change over and over again. Foth’s programmatic critique of DEFA’s treatment of its last generation of directors is expressed by several of Mensching’s and Wenzel’s songs, for example:

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Fig. 1.4. Director Jörg Foth with clowns Hans Eckardt Wenzel (left) and Steffen Mensching (right), Letztes aus der DaDaeR. Courtesy of DEFA Stiftung; photograph by Rüdiger Pelikan. Time and Money are fleeting goods on this earth whoever is not dead yet will also soon die before you realize it, my friend time has run out and the happiness of this world you have not experienced . . . if they steal your time just let it go only the future cannot age it belongs to all.35

Foth makes it clear that the situation for the youngest generation of DEFA directors resembled the grotesque scenario of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. As the clowns perform the above song, for example, they explore a deserted factory. The camera’s focus is on the decrepit industrial wasteland, which audience members from the former GDR might recognize as the Rüdersdorfer lime works, a place where prisoners produced the concrete to build the Berlin wall. The film’s return to this historic location in the context of the fall of the wall adds poignancy to the

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clowns’ song about the unfulfilled hopes for a better future. Image and text act as mutual reinforcement for the scene’s bitterly satirical commentary. Taking stock of the caved in ceilings one clown asks: “Which way of the many is the shortest?”36—to which the other clown replies: “The left one is the right one. . . . The left one is the quickest, but also the most dangerous.” As the scene moves around the factory, the clowns age visibly and reminisce about the past only to discover that there are few positive memories, ending with the resigned statement that nothing exciting ever happened in the 1980s. Indeed, in early 1990 Foth regarded the past twenty years of struggles for more democratic structures in the film studio as a loss of decades of creative potential. Even the regularity of a fixed income for graduates of the film school, which was paid regardless of whether a director worked or not, had a negative impact: “Such an abstract salary, that is paid regardless of the logic of the employment situation, like unemployment payments, only serves to destroy one’s own identity, including one’s artistic sense of self.”37 Foth’s project in Letztes is in part a documentary. Unlike many later (n)ostalgic depictions of the GDR as the protected nation of readers (Leseland), where life was slower but somehow more wholesome, Foth’s film records his generation’s frustration over many wasted years of artistic stagnation. “Because the GDR reality was at times more bizarre and more tragic than one can describe through traditional cinematic tales, we wanted to translate the clowns’ program onto film.”38 If Günther’s main character, Stein, chose the fool’s cover to insulate himself from the reality around him and experienced a heightened alienation from himself and his environment as a result, the clowns in Foth’s film put on masks because of their profound alienation from the very start. Venturing into the world as clowns represents the opposite move from Stein’s and is designed to provoke audiences to a critical analysis of social reality. One scene in the film plays with this idea directly: the clowns visit a unification party on the Brocken mountain and mingle with drunken people. Wenzel begins to recite a monologue on mistrust and is increasingly cornered by a hostile crowd who see him as a spoilsport. The camera moves in to a close up of the clown’s stoic face and the menacing gestures of the upset partygoers. Then the film superimposes the clowns’ faces on shots of the crowd, giving the impression of forced happiness. The presence of the serious-looking clowns is clearly an unwanted intrusion in the determined festivities of a crowd that intones bleary-eyed, “We want to party till tomorrow morning, we will screw the chicks in the knee, the knee.”39 In this scene, the film experiments with a direct confrontation between the clowns’ cabaret program and a public celebration of German unification. The camera work and editing produce a melancholic effect that highlights the forced happiness of the party. The mood is too fragile to tolerate the presence of the questioning clowns. The film reemphasizes

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this notion toward the end, when a staged crowd of demonstrators chases the clowns away and chants: “Hang the clowns. We want money.”40 At this point, the film suggests the clowns have reached the end of their act: no longer do they provoke the crowd to analyze social conditions but instead the crowd turns its back on the unwanted spoilsports in the new capitalist system. And ironically, the clowns themselves are not exempt from the new pressures: plans for a new revolution have to be postponed because they conflict with a visit to the dentist. Foth’s film speaks directly to Günther’s question on the use or futility of withdrawal in protest. Both in the film and in interviews, Wenzel and Mensching have repeatedly stated their conviction in the necessity of remaining socially and politically involved, and provoking audiences through art. Wenzel explained in 1990: Radical withdrawal would have been the “purest attitude.” But we felt it was important, despite our knowledge of the dilemma, to utilize our options, to keep people here, and awake. I think that although Westerners are now questioning the impact many authors have had here, that it did make a difference. Among others the fact that a certain spirit and humanity has been preserved here.41

While the clown duo does not profess any illusions about the serious problems with “real existing socialism” the quote manifests the continued belief in the ideals of Geist and Humanität as values in the non-capitalist system. As such, they defended their sophisticated cabaret songs, for example adaptations of Hölderlin or Goethe poems, as accessible for an audience that was highly skilled in decoding political-literary parody. Mensching and Wenzel as the officially tolerated “courtly fools of the GDR”—albeit not without their own run-ins with the Stasi42— and Foth in his long years of struggle within the DEFA studio had to cling to their faith in reformable socialism in order to continue working. Letztes aus der DaDaeR therefore reflects the schizophrenic dilemma of the clowns—and young DEFA directors like Foth—who were committed to their artistic work within the system in spite of their knowledge of the failed utopian project. This situation is not unique to the GDR, as filmmakers in West Germany also struggled to reform the film-production mechanisms, albeit in a different political system. In both parts of Germany filmmakers born just after the Second World War, who came of age in the 1960s, challenged their parents’ generation with new aesthetics, ideas, and techniques. While Fassbinder indicted the materialistic over-saturation of his parents’ economic-miracle generation, Foth and his colleagues targeted the ideological indoctrination of GDR socialism by their fathers. In Letztes aus der DaDaeR the clowns offer this kind of critique by ironically citing Marx, whose name was as frequently evoked as his writings were forgotten:

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Fig. 1.5. Clowns Meh and Weh with opera singer Gerd Wolf, Letztes aus der DaDaeR. Courtesy of DEFA Stiftung; photograph by Rüdiger Pelikan.

“Humans make their own history” says one clown as they stand among cow carcasses in a slaughterhouse. “—but not voluntarily,” a worker adds in passing.43 The generational conflict between sons and their fathers is introduced as a general act of liberation beyond the specificity of a political system. That this was a broad concern among DEFA artists of the last generation is also apparent from an internal document that summarized the assessment of the production group DaDaeR of Herwig Kippings’s Land hinter dem Regenbogen from September 1990, where an anonymous author states: “It is also a film against the fathers, who are so important and against whose influence one must fight early on because their long and expansive rule ultimately signifies stagnation and death.”44 The slaughterhouse scene, entitled “Oh mein Papa” (referencing a 1930s Paul Burkhard song), is among the most controversial moments in the film, as it graphically lingers on the slaughter of several cows, the last of which requires additional gunshots before she finally succumbs. The sequence will have likely inspired audience members to convert to vegetarianism, but it is clearly meant to graphically symbolize the slaughter of utopian aspirations of the youngest generation by literally pushing back the curtains and exposing the ugly reality behind them. Like the cows, some idealists’ faith in the Socialist project died a slow and painful death, but it succumbed nevertheless. In order to illustrate the clowns’ lament about the death of youthful idealism killed by the ideological rigidity

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and bureaucratic inflexibility of their “father” generation, the film presents a carefully layered textual and visual pastiche consisting of biblical, Marxist, and literary quotes that contrast with the unflinching realism of the slaughterhouse footage. Initially, we see only the two clowns sitting on a bloody tiled floor and performing a parody of Faust’s monologue: Weh: Now I have studied philosophy, law, and also ideology for many years Here I am, a wretched fool, and am as wise as I was before. [shuts toilet seat] And grimly tinker at home with my shower stall. . . . Meh: That is just what I cannot comprehend First they want to know what makes the world spin and then they sit at home in slippers, and tinker with flimsy shower stalls.45

Marx’s (as quoted above) and Goethe’s idealist writings have been perverted by pedestrian bureaucrats, whose socialist realism has not only forgotten its utopian beginnings but also refuses to let its younger generations remember them. As Ulrich Weiß stated in 1992: “Socialism contains only age-old dreams and ideas. The interesting question is whether they had to remain utopian concepts or whether one could realize some of them. Many have criticized reality by remembering those dreams.”46 Like the cows in the subsequent slaughter sequence, some idealists’ faith in the Socialist project died a slow and painful death, but it succumbed nevertheless. As the cows are being shot and processed in a painful close-up, the clowns can be heard reciting the biblical story of Abraham preparing to slaughter his son, echoing both the ancient generational conflict and Thomas Brasch’s famous book Vor den Vätern sterben die Söhne (Before the Fathers, the Sons Will Die).47 Brasch had written this collection of short prose piece while he still lived in the East, where he had studied at the HFF, but published the book soon after his emigration from East to West Berlin in 1976. He bitterly indicts censorship and lack of free expression in all areas of GDR life, thus giving voice to the generational rebellion against the uniformity of ideological thought. Foth’s staging of this conflict in a slaughterhouse thus expresses a decades-old conflict with the immediacy that reflects the bitterness of having been unable to voice this frustration earlier, when it was intended as a constructive contribution to an inter-generational dialogue. Now middleaged themselves, the clowns and their director are well aware of the belatedness of their provocation. DaDaeR’s grotesque slaughterhouse images boldly break with the muted aesthetic of DEFA films from the 1980s, which Bärbel Dalichow has characterized pointedly as follows: “Mediocre

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fare, presented in mediocre form, will in the best case find mediocre interest.”48 The happy circumstance of having been granted funds even as late as 1989/90 gives a taste of what could have been achieved at DEFA had the group been permitted to form earlier. Letztes aus der DaDaeR intends to provoke with stark images, outrageous staging of satirical cabaret pieces, and camera work that heightens the impression of a thoroughly poisoned landscape, for example, in its wide-angle shots of a giant landfill or by adding fog to a scene on a polluted river with a close-up of a fish floating belly-up. No trace of nostalgia tints these images of the clowns’ final farewell to this failed version of socialism. Mensching and Wenzel stated in a 1990 interview that they could only survive the stagnation of the 1980s as clowns; not hiding behind the masquerade but rather creating a different reality with a different logic: “Theater only has a chance when it tries to create a new reality, not when it attempts to construct the existing one.”49 As such it does not spare the role of intellectuals in this history. The author Christoph Hein plays a garbage collector who dumps the clowns on top of a massive garbage pile and delivers a self-ironic soliloquy: “I always tried to live in an ivory tower. But an ocean of shit is surrounding it.”50 As the writer takes out the “trash,” that is, his fellow artists, he appears to be surplus himself, outside the general move toward unification but also self-conscious about his privileged past role: “The general stupidity is choking me. When I saw my country croak, I realized that I loved it. I feel the mournfulness of the Roman patricians in the fourth century. I sense horrendous barbarism arising.”51 This self-mocking tone includes Hein’s own elitist stance, while still maintaining a distance from the mainstream, aligning himself instead with a poet whose ambivalence about the new age makes him seem to be a kindred spirit in the time of historical change. In a guest lecture to students at Jena university in 1981, Hein echoes Heinrich Heine’s thoughts as he anticipates the new age: “An unspeakable sadness takes hold of me when I think about the ruin with which the victorious proletarians threaten my poetry, which will disappear together with the whole of the old Romantic world order.”52 The filmmakers and clowns include themselves in clown Hans-Eckart Wenzel’s self-critical depiction in 1998, when he warns against simplistic distinctions between dissidents and oppressors: “Today people are looking at history as if there had been a clear separation between dissidents and ideologues. But that is not how it was. The fissure went right through the individual.”53 In spite of favorable reviews of Letztes aus der DaDaeR, emphasizing the popularity of the clowns’ duo and the remarkable camera-work of Thomas Plenert, the film disappeared quickly from the public radar screen. When it was screened in a DEFA retrospective at the Potsdam film museum in 1996 however, critic Angelika Mihan confirmed its timelessness, comedy, and poetry and predicted that it would hold a prominent place in film history.54

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Fig. 1.6. Writer Christoph Hein as garbage collector, Letztes aus der DaDaeR. Courtesy of DEFA Stiftung; photograph by Rüdiger Pelikan.

Letztes aus der DaDaeR was the first feature that the newly founded production group Gruppe DaDaeR had voted to produce. DaDaeR was founded on January 1, 1990 and it went on to produce Helke Misselwitz’s Herzsprung, Herwig Kipping’s Land hinter dem Regenbogen, and Peter Welz’s Banale Tage (see the introduction). The use of Foth’s own team, including cameraman Thomas Plenert, was crucial for the film’s aesthetic in its uncompromising exposure of a bankrupt and ossified state. Foth’s relief over finally being able to work without the petty interferences from the studio hierarchy is palpable in the film. He stated in 1999: “The collapse of DEFA has relieved me somehow. Just like the collapse of the GDR. It was too much, too long, too stupid, too annoying the way we hoped for the slightest changes, which then did not happen anyway.”55 Letztes aus der DaDaeR was shot from late March to early May 1990 and premiered at Berlin’s Babylon cinema on October 7, 1990, three days after German unification. To the filmmakers’ surprise, East German distributor Progress Film, which had always distributed all DEFA films, declined to accept the film into their program. The young production group prepared to release the film independently and printed simple black and white posters in the style of a death notice found in newspapers when the West German Verlag der Autoren under Theo Hinz stepped in and offered to distribute the film. Letztes aus der DaDaeR thus enjoyed the unusual fate of having two posters (as well as two trailers) ready for its

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release: a stark black/white East German design, and a colorful and much larger West German version. However, distribution in West Germany proved difficult, as Hinz reported on November 19, 1990: only ten cinemas in West German cities had picked up the film, which had been seen by an estimated 2,500 viewers, while the main West German public broadcasting stations ARD and ZDF had declined to show it.56 The optimistic hopes of the filmmakers, who had described the project as an attempt to contribute actively in the current political debates of the rapidly changing country, were quickly dashed.57 It is remarkable to observe how quickly the euphoric tone that signaled the hopefulness of new beginnings changed. Foth declared in 1990: “. . . there can be no other way out of the state culture than to seek out and honor the subjectivity of art, and to nurture it with all available means.”58 After the film’s release into unified Germany ended all utopian hopes for a radical new beginning of a sovereign and democratic GDR, Jörg Foth and Irm Hermann concluded in a conversation in 1992: FOTH: The opening of the wall could have been the beginning of an enormous push for change. Politically, culturally, humanly. I thought, “all we have to do is work together and then it will happen, the better world.” HERRMANN: I had the same sensation of happiness as you. The same hope. I was really naive. . . . And I still cannot fathom what became of it all.59

Such hope for a true change of social structures had begun years earlier, namely with the first concert by Bob Dylan in East Berlin in 1987. The concert had been moved from West Berlin to the East Berlin district of Treptow because of slow ticket sales in the West. For Foth this signaled the beginning of a new era: “For me the Wende began. This short, straightforward concert was a victory for our patience and stamina, a signal for the end of the era of censorship. The wall had been overcome. Overnight, we lived in the world.”60 How difficult the transition into the “world” would be became apparent very quickly61 and is illustrated by the discussion around the studio approval for Foth’s short music film Tuba wa duo (1989). It was produced by the DEFA studio for the documentary film series Kinobox. Foth and cinematographer Thomas Plenert filmed Hans-Eckardt Wenzel’s absurdist Rüpeldrama about two tubas. The eleven-minute film shows two tuba players engaging in satirical conversation and creative tuba playing on the rooftops of apartment buildings across from Berlin’s Gethsemane church, which played an important role in the peace movement of 1989. The two musicians, much like the clowns in DaDaeR, perform the absurd meaninglessness of socialist lingo by substituting key terms, such as “worker” with “tuba” while maintaining the stilted, bureaucratic phrasing of official ideology: “In the daily struggle for

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the future the tuba may not remain on the margins. . . . The new way of thinking has to be applied to the tuba as well. As far as the tuba is concerned, we need to create Blasnost” (blasen=to blow).62 The fate of the underappreciated tuba is aligned with the right of individual self-articulation. The tuba players’ sound experiments with water and attached hoses create distorted soundscapes that are promptly and violently rejected by the inhabitants of the building: they shoot at the musicians much like the angry revelers on the Brocken in DaDaeR, who chase away the clowns. The tuba players’ comical parodies of GDR official language and insistence that it was Goethe’s shaky handwriting in old age that produced the consequential spelling error: “You are the source of all realist art—and socialist art is included” instead of “Tubist”63 thus leading to a fatalistic under-appreciation of this “conical” not “comical” instrument. In the film the tubists’ attempt to reclaim the right to such articulation of their individual voice leads to a collective assassination attempt by their fellow citizens, before the building’s final implosion puts an end to the shenanigans. In a final image we see the tubas falling from the rooftop and being flattened by a steamroller. The voice of the underdog has been silenced for good, it seems, by the socialist collective (the inhabitants of the house) and its government (the implosion of the building). In a gesture of life imitating art, the process of gaining studio approval for the film’s release proved to be remarkably similar to the official reaction to the irreverent voice of the young filmmakers. Documentary-film-studio director Heinz Rüsch requested a change of one central word as Jörg Foth explained in a speech on October 7, 2009 at the DVD release party of the film at cinema Babylon: “In the sentence ‘In the daily struggle for peace the tuba may not stand aside’ we exchanged the GDR word ‘peace’ with the GDR word ‘future’ and thus obtained the studio’s approval of the film and permission to release it.”64 Such demands by the studio director look like petty censorship at this late date in the GDR (January 1989) for a small documentary short. However, as Foth further elaborated, the documentary-studio director, the progressive and open-minded Rüsch, knew that his dream for a better Germany had failed. His only remaining cause was the protection of the word “peace”: “It was the only word that he forbade us to mock, unlike everything else in our film.”65 This anecdote illustrates the potential for common posthumous misreading of GDR history by outside observers who fail to grasp the fuller complexity of events and actions by individuals in the GDR at all stages of its history and echoes Hans Eckardt Wenzel’s observation that history cannot be neatly divided into dissidents and doctrinaires. Looking back at Jörg Foth’s films from those late days of the GDR, one is struck today by their playful irreverence and consistent focus on music, clowns, and other rebellious characters, including children, artists, and rock ’n’ roll dancers.

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His short film Ach du jeh (Oh dear, 1988), for example depicts a group of young musicians devoted to medieval music performed in historical costumes in market places. In short interviews, the players describe their musical preference for playing on the streets, close to their audiences, who are shown dancing around them in a field next to a medieval town wall. Musically, they trace the harmonies they play to Arabian influences, while their historic model is the German medieval street theater of “Hans Dampf und Wurst.” As one player explains, “Fools and musicians back then had amazing freedoms to be brazen, the famous freedom of the fool.”66 Linking this kind of artistic freedom to his own need for more immediacy in the arts, uncomplicated permits to perform on the streets, international musical exchange (hinted at through a montage of posters advertising unreachable concerts by Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn in Paris and Van Morrison in the UK) and a general desire for more individualistic expression (long hair, alternative clothing, and communal living in the country), one player summarizes the group’s philosophy succinctly as “Those who want to play, should play.”67 This short was another production for the Kinobox program and thematically corresponded to a project Foth was developing for the fiction-film studio on a thirteenth-century incident involving a mysterious case of a medieval flash mob staged by a group of dancing children. Taken together, Tuba wa duo and Ach du jeh (as well as his short Kinobox contribution Rock ’n’ Roll from 1987) demarcate the parameters of Foth’s staging of the clowns’ program in Letztes aus der DaDaeR: the absurd endgame of Tuba with its rooftop parody of empty socialist phrases is combined with the medieval model of the satirical “Hans Wurst” theater to form the clowns’ musical commedia dell’arte performance. The clowns’ program touches on similar topics, parodying language, socialist rituals, and lack of individual freedoms but more explicitly probing the transformative potential of Narrenfreiheit, the limits of speaking truth to power and the complexity of negotiating complicity and rebellion. What appeared as an innocently uncomplicated demand for Narrenfreiheit by the musicians in Ach du jeh has already become a more complex negotiation for meaningful language in the post-production discussions for Tuba (peace/future) and evolves into an at times self-critical assessment of the role artists’ protest has played in sustaining and undermining the socialist system in Letztes aus der DaDaeR. Parody and satire in all three films did not aim at discarding the ideal of socialist utopia in general, even less at demanding the introduction of Western-style capitalism in the GDR. But the films all voice frustrations with the ongoing contradictions of the GDR-specific real existing socialism and the artist’s role in it. In the “Hell” sequence of DaDaeR, for example, the clowns impersonate a general and a pop singer whose intertwined dance symbolizes the proximity between arts and politics in the GDR. As Jörg Foth wrote

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twenty years later in regard to this scene, “Nobody can point the finger at him [the ancient general], or throw the first stone. We all participated. This film is more self-portrait than accusation. This scene is about art and power, opportunism and identity/refusal.”68 No simplistic post-unification dichotomy between artistic opportunism and oppression can do justice to the nuanced and ever changing relationships of GDR artists to the socialist state, because it denies the fact that core socialist principles remained powerful ideals for some, while the belief in the reformability of real existing socialism motivated others. As many filmmakers have stated more than twenty years after unification, the mechanism for such a delicate negotiation between artists and power (“Geist und Macht”) in regard to film funding has not fundamentally changed under capitalism. Directors who were willing and able to adjust their style, choice of topic, and format to the television aesthetic, for example, had significantly greater chances of securing a post-Wende career in directing than those who found themselves unable to compromise on the standardized television formulas and insisted on the preservation of their individualistic vision of meaningful film production.69 In retrospect, a speech that writer Ronald M. Schernikau gave at the last meeting of the GDR writers’ association in 1990 has become prophetic. Schernikau, who had left West Germany to become naturalized as a GDR citizen two weeks before the fall of the wall summarized his own experience as a writer in West Germany. He said: “Artists will be alone.  .  .  . They do not yet know the degree of subservience that the West demands of each of its inhabitants.”70 In an address to the German Studies Association in October 2010, Steffen Mensching suggested that history lessons from the GDR might contribute to a vision of what a unified German culture can be. His words are especially applicable to the study of DEFA Wendefilme: “We have to ask about history for as long as contemporary witnesses can tell us about it. This is true for the GDR as well. Its contradictions are still regarded as a threat to the inner peace of unified Germany instead of as provocation, as material that contains potential for the future, as part of an all-German culture.”71 In several films made for television since the Wende, Jörg Foth has demonstrated how history lessons such as this might be applied. In his 1996 documentary Die Verweigerung for the broadcaster Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (MDR) Foth set out to track down the story of a former prison guard who because of his humanity in his work in GDR prisons was nicknamed “Angel” by the inmates. After the Wende Foth found him working at Hirschhügel, a psychiatric institution in the Thuringian mountains; alas, after some hesitation “Angel” declared himself unwilling to appear in the film. Originally Foth intended to present a portrait of the prison guard, whose duties included enforcing punishment for conscientious objectors

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to military service and who had managed to sustain a sense of dignity for the individual. In the prison in the GDR as well as in the psychiatric institution in unified Germany, “Angel’s” attitude was driven not by his power but by his interest in the other (“Zwischenmenschlichkeit”).72 Since “Angel” declined to participate, in the film we see instead Foth interviewing residents and caretakers at the institution and encountering a series of people fighting their personal battles with alcohol, addiction, or illness. Falling outside the norms of an achievement-oriented society (“Leistungsgesellschaft”), they appear disarmingly open in their fragile vulnerability as they tell of past struggles and their sense of community in their newfound home. Not surprisingly, all the stories reflect the entanglements of personal biographies and political histories: without explaining the reason for his residence at Hirschhügel, one man tells of his imprisonment in the GDR for gathering a sack of apples the night before the state-owned orchard was cut down without first harvesting the fruit. Another man tells of his social decline and alcoholism when the death of his parents, the fall of the wall, and the resulting loss of his job coincided. Foth allows viewers insight into the film’s process of having set out to learn about a specific biography in the GDR and then stumbling instead into an altogether different world in unified Germany, which paradoxically delivers possible answers to the questions he never posed to “Angel.” In other words, the sense of community and mutual acceptance that is palpable in the psychiatric institution in 1996 might derive from the same source that caused GDR prison inmates to call one of their guards “Angel,” namely a sense of openness in the encounter between people on the margins of society. Foth’s film thus finds what it set out to discover even without, or perhaps because of “Angel’s” refusal: to understand how a society functions at any given time in history, it is not enough to categorize people by their “uniforms.” Foth’s Die Verweigerung provides insights into the difficulty of understanding the role of, for example, an artist in the GDR who worked in the alternative arts scene while also supplying the Stasi with information. Only a fuller understanding of the nexus of personal circumstances, pressures, and intentions can lead to a comprehensive picture of how a society functioned. One interviewee in Verweigerung, whose initial refusal to perform military service in the GDR after the 1968 Prague invasion landed him in prison and under the care of “Angel,” makes this point explicit at the end of the film. Telling the story of how he was essentially set up for new trouble at the moment of his release from prison in 1969, he demonstrates how easily a person in the GDR was coerced into service as a Stasi informant: his choice after illegally posting a letter from an inmate to his wife to circumvent the prison censors was to return to prison again or to serve as an informant. He declined the offer to collaborate with the Stasi but points out how easily innocent citizens were caught

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in a catch-22. His comments about the destruction of the lives of East Germans after the fall of the wall when they are labeled “informants” are reminiscent of those of the journalist Renate in Andreas Voigt’s Leipzig films (see chapter 5): “How often people from the outside judge others without knowing the context.”73 Foth’s voice-over narrative, spoken by Steffen Mensching, links this history lesson to the changed media landscape in unified Germany, thereby suggesting that the simplistic division of former GDR citizens into groups of victims and perpetrators only serves the media’s thirst for sensationalist stories and its focus on high ratings (“Einschaltquoten”) instead of engaging in a serious examination of the past. Foth’s own experience as a film director in the new media landscape after 1990, much like that of Peter Welz, resulted in his own refusal to participate in such newly ideological depictions of recent German history, which ignore complex contradictions in the service of gaining maximum profits. Not surprisingly, such media criticism effectively ended Foth’s work for television. The reception of Foth’s work has been narrow, in part because even his best-known film, Letztes aus der DaDaeR, is often reduced to being a Wende-specific, albeit important, GDR satire. But with the benefit of more than two decades of distance to the events of 1989, it is now possible to take a broader look at his overall oeuvre and to discover his consistent focus on exploring the intersections of personal and political history in both in the GDR and unified Germany. This thematic leitmotif represents a parallel to the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose aesthetics had shaped his own since he was a young film student: in his 1974 filmschool exercise Musikübung he imitated together with Thomas Plenert a circular camera-tracking shot he had seen in Fassbinder’s Martha.74 In his 1992 interview with Irm Hermann, Foth explains: “In the early 70s we devoured everything by Fassbinder that was broadcast. In Warsaw, Prague, and Budapest we spent entire days in the cinema and watched Fassbinder, with Polish, Czech, and Hungarian subtitles.”75 Fassbinder’s media critique in West Germany remained a model for Foth and his generation. It was only belatedly translated to the East German context in the works of the DaDaeR group, ironically at a moment when its influence as an auteur voice had long waned in West Germany. In his first feature film, the children’s adventure Das Eismeer ruft (The Arctic Ocean is Calling, 1983) based on a popular book by Alex Wedding, for example, Foth’s use of archival film and sound footage is reminiscent of Fassbinder’s elaborate layering of fictional narratives with historical material in the FRG trilogy, most notably in The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979). In Eismeer Foth parallels the shipwreck story of the Soviet vessel Chelyuskin in 1934 with the expedition of a group of young children who leave their native Prague in hopes of rescuing the ship. While the young explorers never make it further than a few miles outside Prague

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and return home after one night away, the spirit of their adventure catapults them into worlds far beyond their reach. Foth creates this impression by projecting archival film of the 1934 disaster onto a large world map the children always carry to find their way. Sitting in a field as night draws in, the hapless campers remain glued to the map, where the film depicts the far more dire hardships of the stranded Russians. Later, after the Russians have been saved by a daring air rescue, the children return home in a parallel plot development. As they cruise down the Vltava River back into Prague on a raft, the film’s sound track blends the original jubilation that greeted the rescued Russians on their triumphant entry into their home city. International radio broadcasts by Soviet, British, French, and German announcers are heard giving jubilant reports, while the children are greeted back at home much like returning heroes. Significantly, the celebration of their safe return is preceded by a stern spanking from their parents for having run away. Symbolically, the children’s independent explorers’ is immediately reined in by their parents’ automatically punitive response. Foth’s layered soundtrack and his use of archival documentary footage, which was modeled by Fassbinder in the 1970s but also used in similar ways as recently as 2007 by Werner Herzog in his Encounters at the End of the World, link seemingly innocent stories such as the children’s adventure in Eismeer to the larger world. Moreover, Foth connects a fictional narrative to a historical event and links the two through his sound editing, as Fassbinder did with radio broadcasts of speeches by first Hitler, then Adenauer in Maria Braun. Similarly, Foth’s post-Wende TV documentaries of the early to mid-nineties situate the fate of the individual in a layered historical context that encompasses pre- and post-wall Germany. Foth uses film’s unique aesthetic capabilities to represent the permeability of political systems and historical continuities in general and the effect on the individual in particular. Films that measure up to such standards of social responsibility were eyed skeptically at DEFA when Foth and his colleagues demanded greater relevance for East German cinema. They are equally undesirable in unified Germany, where focus on ratings guides TV executives’ decision on film funding, which generally favors simplicity over ambivalence and complexity. An example from Letztes aus der DaDaeR illustrates Foth’s intertextual method as well as the political relevance of his films beyond historical categorizations such as pre- and post-wall. In a pivotal scene the two clowns have just escaped the angry mob of unification revelers when they encounter a curious zoo of humans in animal costumes who are being hunted by a group of GDR politicians in hunting garb. The clowns seek shelter in the cage of a human in monkey costume, who assures them that this “game” hunting is perfectly safe. Foth himself has explained that this scene alludes to the long tradition of racism in German culture, from

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Wilhelm Hauff’s “Der junge Engländer oder Der Affe als Mensch” (The Young Englishman or the Ape as Human, 1827) to Nazi posters that align jazz music with Jews and monkeys, and finally GDR bans on Beat music in the 1950s and 1960s, which repeats the same Nazi iconography in its wholesale indictment of Anglo-American Rock music.76 Foth comments: “When our clowns, that is, we, in the paradise scene find themselves in the human monkey cage, and the monkey speaks English, we are alluding to this racist tradition. We remember it as a nightmare, with the difference that we do not invent the English-speaking monkey but are caught with him in the same cage.”77 At first viewing, Letztes aus der DaDaeR might seem almost exclusively focused on particular issues in GDR history, including socialist jargon, five-year plans, and limitations on travel and free speech. However, a closer examination reveals how the film transcends such a limited comprehension. Topics such as generational struggles (the slaughterhouse scene), environmental pollution (the hell sequence) and the relationship between artist and state (the bestowing of medals of honor) are of universal significance. As the analysis of Foth’s early DEFA films and his post-unification work for television demonstrates, simplistic historical categorizations such as pre- and post-Wende ignore the fact that (cultural) history does not follow such artificial dictums but generally evinces more continuities than abrupt caesuras. Studying DEFA’s last features, then, does not just yield important insight into the culture of the GDR, or the particular sensibilities of a group of formerly East German directors at the moment when the Berlin wall was opened. Wendefilme such as Letztes aus der DaDaeR evince connections between East and West German cinema as well as historical continuities, including the transitions from Nazi Germany to divided and later unified Germany. Both Günther and Foth have used the figures of the fool and clown as a metaphor for resistance and compromise in 1990. A closer look at their films and the distance of twenty years has revealed that this resistance was not only a reaction to a particular regime at a particular time. Fool and clown appear equally potent provocateurs today, demonstrating that while acts of “refusal” might be foolish, they remain a viable form of socially engaged artistry. Other DEFA directors have used similar tropes to voice social criticism. Ulrich Weiß and Herwig Kipping, whose films are the subject of the next chapter, used the historical figures of poets Heine and Hölderlin respectively to articulate the artist’s dilemma between political satire in the public sphere and withdrawal into oneself. Like fool and clown, these poets experienced the limitations of the stage as their public pulpit in Lessing’s sense, but in the unique cinematic depictions of their lives Weiß and Kipping link their own artistic efforts to the greater German cultural legacy of defining the relationship between “Geist” and “Macht.”

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Notes 1

Jörg Foth, “Speech at the V. Congress of the Verband der Film und Fernsehschaffende der DDR,” Filmspiegel 19 (1989): 7. 2

Jörg Foth, interview by the author, Berlin, July 2011.

3

As Foth phrased it: “Jeder wollte Filme machen, die unser Land verändern” (as quoted in Dietmar Hochmut, DEFA NOVA (Berlin: Freunde der Deutschen Kinomathek, 1993), 33. 4

Apprentices were called “Ostermädchen” because their school year ended at Easter.

5

Jörg Foth in email correspondence, September 2011.

6

“Wir wissen nicht, wann Texte über Polen wieder veröffentlicht werden können. Möchten Sie nicht etwas über Berlin schreiben?” Quoting editor Wolfgang Tenzler in personal correspondence between Foth and the author. 7

“Wo Wüste war wird Wiese sein, und umgekehrt.” Jörg Foth. “Alp,” non-paginated unpublished manuscript. 8

“Damals in the 80ger Jahren waren alle Wörter die mit ‘Pol’ anfingen verboten” (Foth, Letztes aus der DaDaeR, 26:35). 9

See Claus Löser, Strategien der Verweigerung: Untersuchungen zum politischästhetischen Gestus unangepasster filmischer Artikulationen in der Spätphase der DDR (Berlin: DEFA Stiftung, 2011). 10

Enid Welsford, The Fool: His Social and Literary History (New York: Anchor Books, 1961), 266. 11

Friederike Eigler, “The Responsibility of the Intellectual: The Case of East Berlin‘s Counter-Culture,’” in Cultural Transformations in the New Germany: American and German Perspectives, ed. Friederike Eigler and Peter C. Pfeiffer (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 1993), 157–71. 12

“Brecht plus Goethe mal Weill hoch Eisler geteilt durch Valentin gleich Wenzel und Mensching.” David G. Robb, “Wenzel & Mensching: A Carnivalesque Clowns’ Act Spanning the GDR and United Germany,” German Studies Review 23, no. 1 (2000): 53. 13

Robb, “Wenzel & Mensching,” 57.

14

“Als ich 1981 . . . ins Spielfilm-Studio kam, war das Boot voll. Es gab 44 festangestellte Regisseure . . . pro Jahr wurden etwa 16 Spielfilme produziert.  .  .  . Es gab keinen Platz für mich, nirgends eine freie Kapazität für den Nachwuchs. Wir waren überflüssig, wurden nicht gebraucht.” Carmen Blazejewski, “Innenansichten—DEFA Nachwuchs in den Achtzigern,” in Zwischen Marx und Muck: DEFA-Filme für Kinder, ed. Ingelore König, Dieter Wiedemann, and Lothar Wolf (Berlin: Henschel, 1996), 40. 15

“Darum ist dieser DEFA Film mit Abstand der wichtigste, der jetzt über die jüngste deutsche Geschichte gedreht wurde.” Ralf Schenk, “Requiem auf eine Hoffnung,” Wochenpost Berlin, 2 Oct. 1991. 16

“Günther hat . . . doch mehr über diese DDR erzählt, mehr von ihrem Lebensgefühl vermittelt als manch ein sich realistisch gebender Film.” Knut Hickethier, “Stein,” epd Film 11 (1991): 39.

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17

“peinliche Senilität,” “überzogene Metaphorik, schwülstige Musik,” “zäh, zerdehnter Schluss.” Roland Rust, “Stein,” Filmdienst 44 (1991): 19. 18

“zerrissen, ambivalent und ratlos, wie das Land und die Zeit von der er erzählt.” H. G. Pflaum, “Tragödie eines lächerlichen Mannes,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, Oct. 7, 1992, 9. 19

“Es ist falsch in Stein einen Film über das Ende der DDR zu sehen, es ist eine Meditation über Verweigerung, über Unerfüllbarkeit von Liebe.” Karsten Herold, “Eine Betrachtung der filmkünstlerischen Arbeiten des Regisseurs Egon Günther,” Beiträge zur Film-und Fernsehwissenschaft (Berlin: Vistas, 1998), 34. 20

As stated in the film: “Hier kann jeder übernachten” (Günther, Stein, 57).

21

David Bathrick, “Language and Power,” in The Power of Intellectuals in Contemporary Germany, ed. Michael Geyer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 157. 22

Wolfgang Emmerich, “German Writers as Intellectuals: Strategies and Aporias of Engagement in East and West from 1945 until Today,” New German Critique 88 (Winter 2003): 50–52. 23

“Und ich bin verdammt noch mal ganz richtig in Kopf” (Günther, Stein, 23).

24

“Alles hat seine Bedeutung und nichts bedeutet etwas. Das ist das komische am Narren, und das ist sein verteufelter Ernst.” Henryk Goldberg, “Als Narr überlebend zwischen Traum und Wirklichkeit,” Neues Deutschland, Sept. 19, 1991. 25 “Es ist was Gemeines, daß Menschen fallen und Paradiese verlorengehen” (Günther, Stein, 4:00). 26

“Es irrt der Mensch solang er strebt.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie erster Teil (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1971), 11. 27

“Diese Geschichten müssen wir selber erzählen. Die Menschen im anderen Deutschland können die Innen-Ansicht der DDR schwer nachvollziehen, sahen alles von außen.” Egon Günther with Rolf and Erika Richter, “Wir brauchen keine neuen Herren,” Film und Fernsehen 2 (1991): 36. 28

“504 000 Mark, lieber Scholly! Soviel kostet ein halber Panzer. Ich hab’ einen halben Panzer verfressen” (Günther, Stein, 60). 29

“Wenn ich das Gefühl habe, mit einer Metapher ganz ‘dicht dran’ zu sein, versuche ich auch wieder, zu verwischen. Wenn es zu deckungsgleich wäre mit politischen oder kulturpolitischen Dingen, versuche ich immer wieder wegzuradieren” (Günther, “Diese Geschichten müssen wir selber erzählen,” 36). 30

“Die Armee zieht stadtwärts, glaube ich, oder zur Grenze . . . sie bezieht Stellung” (Günther, Stein, 62). 31

By “aesthetics” I do not simply mean the visual quality of a film but the freedom to compose an individual film language that reflects the subjective goals of the director and his or her team. 32

“Der Preis für die Hoffnungen und die Geduld ist auch Mitverantwortung und Mitschuld. Und gerade deshalb muss man gegen jede Art der Vereinfachung im Hinblick auf die DEFA oder die DDR Geschichte angehen.” Elke Schieber, “Der Preis für die Hoffnung: Mit Regisseur Peter Kahane sprach Elke Schieber,” Film und Fernsehen 10 (1990): 20.

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33

David Robb, Zwei Clowns im Lande des verlorenen Lachens: Das Liedertheater Wenzel & Mensching (Berlin: Christoph Links, 1998), 83. 34

“daß die Chancenlosigkeit des Nachwuchses und damit neuer Handschriften oder gar einer Erneuerung des DEFA Filmes überhaupt, grundsätzlicher Natur war” (Blazejewski, “Innenansichten, 46). 35

“Zeit und Geld vergänglich Gut / Hier auf dieser Erden / Wer noch nicht im Grabe ruht, / Der wird auch bald sterben / Eh du dich versiehst mein Freund / Ist die Zeit verronnen / Und vom Glücke dieser Welt / Hast du nichts gewonnen . . .] / Stiehlt man dir auch deine Zeit  / Lass es dir gefallen  / Nur die Zukunft altert nicht / Sie gehört uns allen” (Foth, Letztes aus der DaDaeR, 32). 36

“Welcher Weg der vielen ist denn nun der kürzeste?”—“Der linke Weg ist der rechte . . . Der linkeste ist der flinkeste, aber der gefährlichste auch” (Foth, Letztes aus der DaDaeR, 31). 37

“Doch ein so abstraktes Gehalt, dass außerhalb einer arbeitsrechtlichen Logik wie Arbeitslosengeld gezahlt wird, hilft die eigene, auch künstlerische Identität zu zerstören.” Jörg Foth, “Forever Young,” in Filmland DDR: Ein Reader zu Geschichte, Funktion und Wirkung der DEFA, ed. Harry Blunk and Dirk Jungnickel (Cologne: Verlag Wissenschaft & Politik, 1990), 100–101. 38

“Weil die DDR Wirklichkeit streckenweise skuriller und tragischer war als man sie mit traditionellen Kinogeschichten reflektieren konnte, wollten wir dieses Clownsprogramm filmisch umsetzen.” Frank Junghänel, “Odyssee mit Meh und Weh,” Märkische Volksstimme, Oct. 2, 1990. 39

“Wir wollen lustig sein bis morgen früh, die Weiber ficken wir nicht nur ins Knie, ja Knie” (Foth, Letztes aus der DaDaeR, 43). 40

“Hängt sie [die Clowns] auf. Wir wollen Geld.” Quoted from film, not contained in the original script. 41

“Der radikale Ausstieg wäre die ‘reine Haltung’ gewesen. Aber uns war es wichtig, trotz des Wissens darum, die Bedingungen auszunutzen, die Leute hierzuhalten, wachzuhalten. Ich glaube, dass das, was jetzt von westlicher Seite vielen Autoren hier abgestritten wird, doch eine ganze Menge bewirkt hat. Unter anderem, dass sich hier noch Geist und Humanität in bestimmten Grenzen bewahrt haben.” Thomas Otto and Lutz Pehnert, “Letztes aus der DaDaeR, Interview mit Wenzel und Mensching,” Junge Welt, Oct. 7, 1990, 8. 42

Robb, “Wenzel and Mensching,” 65.

43

“Die Menschen machen ihre eigene Geschichte—” “aber nicht aus freien Stücken.” 44

“Es ist auch ein Film gegen die Väter, die so wichtig sind und gegen deren Bestimmung man sich doch rechtzeitig wehren muss, weil ihre allzu lange und ausgedehnte Herrschaft letztlich Stagnation und Tod bedeuten.” Protokoll der Gruppe DaDaeR zur Diskussion von Schaukelpferd im Regen (an earlier title of Kipping’s film Land hinter dem Regenbogen), anonymous author, Sept. 18, 1990, Archiv Film Museum Potsdam. 45

“Weh: Habe nun ach Philosophie, Juristerei und auch die Ideologie studiert so manches Jahr/ Hier sitz ich nun ich armer Tor und bin so klug als wie zuvor (klappt Klodeckel zu) / Und bastle hier mit düsterer Miene / Daheim an meiner

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Duschkabine . . . Meh: Das ist die Sache die ich nicht versteh / Erst wollen sie wissen / Was die Welt im Innersten zusammenhält / Dann ziehen sie mit Filzpantinen und bauen fiese Duschkabinen.” Quoted from film, not contained in the original script. 46

Elke Schieber “Anfang vom Ende oder Kontinuität des Argwohns, 1980 bis 1989.” in Das Zweite Leben der Filmstadt Babelsberg, 1946–92, ed. Ralf Schenk (Berlin: Henschel, 1994), 267. 47

The clowns intone: “Vater ich fürchte mich weil du das Messer hast.” Thomas Brasch. Vor den Vätern sterben die Söhne (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977). 48

“An Mäßigem, mäßig Dargebotenem, kann bestenfalls mäßiges Interesse erzeugt werden.” Bärbel Dalichow, Zur Ästhetik von Debütfilmen der DEFA in den 80-er Jahren (Dissertation, Humboldt Universität Berlin, 1990), Punkt 12. 49

“Theater hat ja nur eine Chance . . . wenn es eine neue Realität schafft und nicht, wenn es versucht, die bestehende Realität zu konstruieren” Otto and Pehnert, “Letztes aus der DaDaeR,” 7. 50

“Ich habe immer versucht in einem Elfenbeinturm zu leben; aber ein Meer von Scheiße schlägt an seine Mauern” (Foth, Letztes aus der DaDaeR, 25). 51

“Die allgemeine Dummheit ertränkt mich. Als ich mein Land krepieren sah, spürte ich, dass ich es liebte. Ich empfinde die Trauer, die die römischen Patrizier im vierten Jahrhundert empfanden. Ich fühle eine heillose Barbarei aus dem Boden aufsteigen” (Foth, Letztes aus der DaDaeR, 24). Hein’s speech is quoting Gustave Flaubert, in a letter to Ivan Turgenev on November 13, 1872. Hein added the Arno Schmidt sentence: “Die halbe Nation ist irre und die andere nicht ganz bei Groschen” (Half the nation is crazy and the other half insane) to this quote. 52

“Eine unsägliche Betrübnis ergreift mich, wenn ich an den Untergang denke, womit das siegreiche Proletariat meine Gedichte bedroht, die mit der ganzen alten romantischen Weltordnung vergehen werden.” Christoph Hein, Die wahre Geschichte des Ah Q: Stücke und Essays (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1984), 165. 53

“Es ist ja so, dass heute die Geschichte so betrachtet wird, als ob es eine klare Trennung zwischen Dissidenten und Doktrinäre gegeben hätte. Und so war es nicht. Der Riß ging durch die Leute hindurch.” Hans Eckart Wenzel, “Interview with Jens Rosbach, Deutschland-Radio,” March 15, 1998, cited in David Robb, Clowns, Fools and Picaros: Popular Forms in Theatre, Fiction and Film (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 176. 54

“Hatte der Film vor sechs Jahren noch für Unverständnis oder Irritation gesorgt, so ist er auf erstaunliche Weise nicht gealtert, unverbraucht komisch und poetisch zugleich.  .  .  . Sicher ist, dass Letztes aus der DaDaeR in die Filmgeschichte eingehen wird und nicht nur in die deutsche.” Angelika Mihan, “Aberwitzige Endzeitstimmung,” Märkische Allgemeine, Dec. 14, 1996. 55

“Der Zusammenbruch der DEFA hat mich erleichtert. So wie der Zusammenbruch der DDR. Es war zuviel, zu lange, zu blödsinnig, zu ärgerlich, wie man auf kleinste Veränderungen gehofft hatte, die dann doch nicht möglich waren.” Jörg Foth, “Meine Töchter hatten hier ihren Mittelpunkt, aber jetzt ist es vorbei,” in Durchgangszimmer Prenzlauer Berg, ed. Barbara Felsmann and Annett Gröschner (Berlin: Lukas Verlag, 1999), 107.

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Letter from Theo Hinz, Verlag der Autoren, to Thomas Wilkening, Nov. 19, 1990, Archiv Film Museum Potsdam. 57

“Versuch der ersten Ortung, wie kulturelle linke Widerspruchsmodelle in der veränderten DDR noch funktionieren können.” Formblatt II—Frage 13: künstlerisch-ideologische Begründung des Filmstoffes in Produktionsakte Letztes aus der DaDaeR, Archiv Film Museum Potsdam. 58

“[dass] es aber keinen anderen Weg aus der Staatskultur gibt, als die Subjektivität in der Kunst zu achten und zu suchen und mit allen Mitteln zu fördern.” Jörg Foth, “Forever Young,” 105. 59

Foth, “Die Öffnung der Mauer hätte der Anfang eines gewaltigen Veränderungsschubes sein können. Politisch, kulturell, menschlich. Ich dachte, jetzt muss man sich nur noch zusammentun, dann passiert’s, die bessere Welt.” Hermann: “Ich hatte das gleiche Glücksempfinden wie du. Die gleiche Hoffnung. Ich war wirklich naiv. . . . Und ich kann immer noch nicht fassen, was daraus geworden ist.” Jörg Foth, “72, 82, 92—Jörg Foth fragt Irm Hermann,” Film und Fernsehen (1992): 57. 60

“Für mich begann die Wende. Dieses kurze, schnörkellose Konzert war ein Sieg unserer Geduld und Unbeirrsamkeit, ein Signal für das Ende der Ära der Verbote. Die Mauer war überwunden. Wir lebten über Nacht in der Welt.” Foth, “Forever Young,” 102. 61

On September 18, 1989, the so-called “Rockerresolution” was distributed widely to GDR media, rock-music fans, and citizens. It called on political leaders to engage in open dialogue about the “unbearable contradictions” between ideal and reality in the GDR. The resolution, which was drafted and signed by the clowns Mensching and Wenzel among other prominent GDR musicians, stated: “Es geht nicht um Reformen, die den Sozialismus in diesem Land abschaffen sondern um Reformen, die ihn weiterhin möglich machen.” http://www.ostmusik.de/1980_1.htm (accessed September 11, 2013). 62

“Im täglichen Kampf um die Zukunft, darf auch die Tuba nicht abseits stehen. . . . Auch für die Tuba ist das neue Denken gefragt. Auch für die Tuba gilt es Blasnost zu schaffen.” Jörg Foth, Tuba Wa Duo, 5:40. 63

“Du bist die Quelle aller realistischer Kunst—und die sozialistische ist eingeschlossen” instead of “Tubist die Quelle aller realistischer Kunst . . .” (Foth, Tuba 8:50). 64

“In dem Satz ‘Im täglichen Kampf um den Frieden, darf auch die Tuba nicht abseits stehen’ tauschten wir die DDR Vokabel Frieden gegen die DDR Vokabel Zukunft aus und erreichten so die Studioabnahme und Staatliche Zulassung.” Speech by Jörg Foth on October 7, 2009, at Babylon Cinema, Berlin on the occasion of the DVD release party of Letztes aus der DaDaeR. Personal copy by Foth supplied to the author. 65

“Es war das Wort seines Lebens, das er uns als einziges verbat, ‘durch den Kakao zu ziehen,’ wogegen er bei allem übrigen in unserem Film ausdrücklich nichts hatte” (Foth’s speech at Babylon Cinema, 2009). 66

“Narren und Spieler durften sich damals unheimliche Frechheiten erlauben, eben jene berühmten Narrenfreiheiten.” Jörg Foth, Ach du jeh, 6:50. 67

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“Wer spielen will, soll spielen” (Ach du jeh, 12:55).

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68

“Niemand kann mit dem Finger auf ihn [den greisen General] zeigen, den Stein auf ihn werfen. Wir haben alle mitgemacht. Der Film ist mehr Selbstporträt als Anklage. Es dreht sich in dieser Szene um das Verhältnis von Kunst und Macht, Anpassung/Hofgesang und Identität/Verweigerung.” Jörg Foth in personal correspondence with the author, Aug. 25, 2011. 69

Dietrich Leder, “Wie alles anfing,” in black box Filmpolitischer Informationsdienst 218, Jun./Jul. 2011. 70

“Die Künstler werden alleine sein . . . Sie wissen noch nichts von dem Maß der Unterwerfung, den der Westen jedem Einzelnen seiner Bewohner abverlangt.” Claudia Müller, Verliebt in die DDR (In Love with the GDR), television documentary, rbb, 2011, 47:11; see chapter 3 for further discussion of Schernikau. 71

“Wir müssen die Geschichte erfragen, solange die Zeitzeugen berichten können. Genauso verhält es sich mit der DDR. Ihre Widersprüchlichkeit wird im vereinigten Deutschland noch immer als Gefährdung des inneren Friedens betrachtet, nicht als Provokation, als Stoff, der Zukunft in sich birgt, als Teil der gesamtdeutschen Kultur.” Steffen Mensching, “Vorwärts und alles vergessen: Wieviel DDR steckt in der deutschen Einheit?” in German Studies Association Bulletin 2009, 47. 72

Foth, Die Verweigerung, 24:48.

73

“Wie oft unbeteiligte Menschen den Finger über andere erheben, ohne die Zusammenhänge zu kennen.” Foth, Die Verweigerung, 26:11. 74

“Die Rundumfahrt aus ‘Martha’ haben Thomas Plenert und ich damals in einer Kameraübung nachgedreht: Doris und Lars begegneten sich, während ich ein Fahrrad, Tommy und Kamera minutenlang im Kreis schob.” Foth, “72, 82, 92—Jörg Foth fragt Irm Hermann,” 56. 75

“Anfang der 70ger Jahre haben wir . . . alles verschlungen, was von Fassbinder gesendet wurde. In Warschau, Prag und Budapest verbrachten wir ganze Tage in den Kinos und sahen auch Fassbinder auf der Leinwand, polnisch, tschechisch und ungarisch untertitled” (Foth, “72, 82, 92,” 56). 76

Gottfried Kolditz, Das Stacheltier—der junge Engländer (The Hedgehog—the Young Englishman, Babelsberg: DEFA, 1958). This GDR TV adaptation of the Hauff text ends with the voice-over warning: “Darum folge niemandem, nur weil er englisch spricht.” See also Slatan Dudow’s Frauenschicksale (Women’s Fates, 1952), in which Western Swing dancing is visually associated with Blacks, apes, and capitalism. 77

“Wenn unsere Clowns, also wir, in der Szene Paradies in den Menschenaffenkäfig geraten und der Affe englisch spricht, knüpfen wir an diese rassistische Tradition an, wir erinnern sie als Alptraum, mit dem Unterschied, dass wir diese Erfindung des englisch-sprechenden Affen nicht machen, sondern mit ihr im selben Käfig gefangen sind.” Jörg Foth in personal correspondence with the author, Aug. 25, 2011.

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2: “Film Must Fidget”: DEFA’s Untimely Poets

D

EFA DOES NOT GENERALLY EVOKE notions of avant-garde film art— not just for dismissive Western critics and audiences after German unification but equally among GDR artists and viewers. Director Herwig Kipping, himself trained in Babelsberg, had already clearly stated this in his diploma thesis, Poesie und Film, in 1982: Film is highly developed and diverse in all socialist states; socialist film art is a leader on the international stage. Only the GDR is a disreputable exception. Our films are boring, musty, and provincial. Film here has to yet achieve its active importance as artistic mass media; a new generation with bolder and more meaningful concepts is needed. Where is the avant-garde? Where are the poets of film?1

Kipping and his generation of DEFA directors, sometimes referred to as the fourth (and last) generation or Nachwuchsgeneration tried to heed this call for a new aesthetic. The 1988 manifesto for the fifth congress of film and television workers (Verband für Film und Fernsehschaffende, VFF) that had requested more freedom and experimentation for younger film artists in the DEFA studio only expressed collectively for the last generation what slightly older directors such as Ulrich Weiß had struggled for in their individual careers. Rather than fulfilling genre expectations, Weiß developed a visual language that created visceral cinematic experiences, through evocative visuals, exacting camera work, and unusual soundtracks instead of didactic dialogue and explanatory voice-overs. His superiors considered the resulting interpretive ambiguity as aesthetically too open and thus politically diffuse. Unfazed by their reproaches that he was experimental, Weiß created cinematic worlds that centered on historical narratives, which he explored from the highly subjective point of view of the individual. His early Indianerfilm, Blauvogel, for example, offers a critique of the popular genre, including its depiction of the racialized other, but focuses mainly on the identity struggle of the (white) protagonist. Consequently, his unconventional films were often received frostily in the studio, with reactions ranging from alienated reserve to active suppression by the Ministry of Culture. Outside DEFA however, since the late 1970s an independent shortfilm movement of amateur filmmakers had emerged, who used the readily

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accessible super-8 cameras to experiment with film and seek new modes of artistic expression. Like the poets of the Prenzlauer Berg scene, these artists did not themselves seek to produce expressly political art or utilize the new technology for political protest, but discovered new realms for creative exploration. This attitude did not prevent the short films from being politicized later—both by Western critics and the GDR’s ministry for state security (Stasi). But as Cornelia Schleime, a central figure in the super-8 scene of the early 1980s, recalled later, the main impetus derived from on the one hand a desire to produce images different from the official DEFA fare and on the other the attraction to a specific aspect of film: “But in film, the images were suddenly moving, unlike oneself. I think that was the important aspect: movement. . . . One could of course reach a public through film, one we had organized privately.”2 Many of the participants of the super-8 movements in various cities of the GDR were painters and graphic artists by training, and often experimented in groups consisting of musicians, sculptors, writers, and their friends. The collective working aspect of these short productions (workshop style) proved to be an added bonus, as it provided relief from the isolation many artists experienced during the last decade of the GDR. As Gerhard Wolf pointed out, super-8 as a medium with its many technical limitations also determined its provisionary, experimental status—not primarily as “great art” of lasting inherent value but important creative impulse: “not made for a large audience but by the authors for themselves.”3 Painter and filmmaker a.  r. penck, a prominent super-8 enthusiast, emphasized later that the provisional quality of the material was its attraction, in that it was liberated from the expectation that it would tell a story and focused solely on the sensual aspect of the visuals: “because the official film was anti-visual.”4 The experience of liberation from film conventions because of the provisional quality of the technology was shared across borders: in West Germany, super-8 artists and video artists have made similar claims for their work in the 1960s and 1970s.5 While the super-8 artists saw their work in direct contrast to and distinct from the official DEFA studio, the DEFA directors in turn defined themselves as professionals who would work with high quality materials and equipment and a team of trained experts within a studio system. Nevertheless, director Kipping remembers attending screenings of super-8 films in private apartments and art centers in the late 1980s.6 In recent years the existence of this amateur film scene has been gaining recognition largely through the work of Claus Löser, himself a member of the scene and a graduate of the HFF Babelsberg (Dramaturgie). His books Strategien der Verweigerung and Gegenbilder-Filmische Subversion in der DDR, 1976–1989 provide an excellent introduction and overview of the scene.7 In addition, a major exhibit and retrospective took place

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in Leipzig in 2006 in connection with the exhibit 40 Jahre Videokunst in Deutschland.8 As such, the almost forgotten work of experimental amateur film is now receiving its due attention, both as works of the filmic avant-garde and as “time capsules” as Löser has called them, of the social history of the GDR. a. r. penck’s well-known Dresden films are but one such example. More recently, old super-8 tapes have become the source material for a fresh look at GDR youth culture in the 1980s. Marten Persiel’s documentary This Ain’t California (2012) uses super-8 films to tell the story of GDR skateboarders in Berlin, debunking the myth of the monolithic, state-controlled GDR youth. This brief overview of the scene outside official GDR filmmaking underscores that the few filmic experiments actually undertaken at DEFA by directors such as Jochen Kraußer, Lars-Peter Barthel, Herwig Kipping, Jörg Foth, Ulrich Weiß, and Jürgen Böttcher before and after the fall of the wall were not created within a vacuum. It should also be remembered that Babelsberg film students did have access to films of Eastern and Western European art cinemas of the 1960s to 1980s through travel to Poland and Czechoslovakia, television broadcasts, and film-school screenings. Finally, the relationship between official and unofficial filmmaking within an authoritarian or totalitarian state apparatus is not comparable to independent filmmaking within Western liberal states. In liberal states avant-garde work is associated with terms like alternative or experimental. In the GDR independent variation from state-sanctioned policies and experimentation in aesthetic styles led to censorship, dismissals, or even imprisonment.9 Moreover in a condition of strict economic planning and rationing, it was easily possible for the state to rigidly limit access to expensive resources like 35mm film or labs. The fate of director Jürgen Gosch and cinematographer Lars-Peter Barthel’s feature film Experimente (1980/81) illustrates this situation well. The film school provided a budget of 20,000 Marks for Barthel’s diploma film. Barthel recruited a team of talented artists, including writer Christoph Hein, actors Michael Gwisdesk, Hermann Beyer, and Heidemarie Schneider, and theater director Jürgen Gosch, who were interested in working without a script in “cheerful anarchy.”10 The loose relationship drama about two men and one woman was improvised while shooting. Christoph Hein remembers: “At some point none of us knew where this project was headed. We hoped that Jürgen Gosch had a plan. But it turned out that he did not know either.”11 The film was banned after a rough-cut screening at the film school, before ever being completed. Stasi notes detect influences by “Polansky, Gohda und Nestroj” (that is, Godard and Nestroy) and a representative of State Television remarked pointedly: “I have the impression that some people in this film academy have forgotten that German is spoken in this country, not Polish.”12 Barthel’s attempt to rescue the negative from vanishing by

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taking it from the film-school archive was discovered and the material was destroyed. Surviving fragments point to aesthetic similarities to the Polish cinema of Moral Unrest and the Czech New Wave, which GDR film students and directors had seen but were unable to emulate in their own work. The clowns Meh and Weh later lamented sardonically in Jörg Foth’s Letztes aus der DaDaeR in a direct reference to the regime’s unease about developments in Poland that in the 1980s all words that began with “Po” were banned. This chapter introduces the work of two directors, Herwig Kipping and Ulrich Weiß, who did work within the official DEFA film studio but whose work was inspired by the tradition of the historical avant-garde and European art cinema respectively. Their own creative aspirations were repeatedly stifled until the brief window of opportunity from 1990 to 1992, when each director was granted funds to realize a long planned project under the historically chaotic conditions of German unification and the end of the GDR as well as of the DEFA studio. The two resulting films Land hinter dem Regenbogen and Miraculi reflect those changes and reflect on them but need to be understood in the larger context of each director’s previous work and studio frustrations. The films they produced hint at the untold possibilities of much suppressed work, on a par with the works of the Eastern and Western European art cinemas of the same period. In particular, the works of Ulrich Weiß, who was able to complete five major feature films in the studio, demonstrate the strong influence of Czech cinema on the one hand and Weiß’s methodical deconstruction of DEFA film genres on the other. His films have been unjustly overlooked in the critical discussions of 1970s and 1980s art film to this day. The films of Herwig Kipping likewise are thoroughly original in their ironic and Romantic sensibility, which shows affinities to Russian art cinema by Tarkovsky and the early New German Cinema contributions by Werner Herzog. Kipping himself has cited Fassbinder’s low-budget auteur approach that relied on a steady group of close collaborators as his ideal cinematic production method.13 Filmmakers such as Kipping and Weiß attempted to use the potential of 35mm film stock, access to professional production facilities and talent, and their own schooling in the history of avant-garde film theory and practice, in order to engage with, appropriate, and undermine dominant film genres. In the case of the GDR, this meant that the focal point for Auseinandersetzung (critical engagement) was not Hollywood but the dominant socialist GDR aesthetic, such as the biopic or the anti-fascist film. Kipping, for example, exploded the dominant film mode through his own style of anarchic montage, inspired more by the emotive power of Pudovkin than the “Gedankenkino”14 of Eisenstein, combining surreal images and poetic texts. Weiß’s systematic deconstruction of genre conventions needs to be understood as an attack on the underlying

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ideological assumptions and dichotomous simplifications of the studio aesthetic. His five DEFA feature films increasingly resist the logic of linear narrative and the simplistic realism of conventional DEFA camera and editing work, in an effort to express formally the growing discrepancy between the studio’s insistence on coherence and his own individual experiences as an artist in the GDR. Fittingly, one of his earliest films was a documentary for GDR television on the occasion of Heine’s 175th birthday, in which he explores the poet’s ambivalent attitudes about revolution and Communism as well as the personal effects of the large political shifts in Heine’s world on him: “the major fissure went right through the heart of the poet.”15 Kipping and Weiß thus challenged viewers by expanding definitions of narrative, feature, and art film, and by violently blurring the boundaries between the genres in their films of the Wende period and before that time. It is deeply regrettable that the avid efforts of the youngest generations of DEFA directors, as described in the introduction, did not result in the desired experimental studio, to see what this adventurous spirit could have produced. Ulrich Weiß’s final DEFA film, Miraculi, was financed by the remaining general studio funds, but Kipping’s film was produced by DEFA’s newly founded group DaDaeR under Thomas Wilkening. Experimentation and innovation were the group’s explicit goals, as correspondence by Thomas Wilkening with various film directors and officials from the time document. On May 11, 1990, for example, Wilkening justifies the group’s decision to produce the controversial script by Kipping in a letter to the secretary of DEFA’s artistic council, Horst Hartwig: If Kipping should have a chance to test his unquestionably remarkable talent in feature film, then this can only occur through our production group with its special conditions. These special conditions were after all created out of the recognition that an entire generation of GDR filmmakers had been prevented from realizing their own projects and that the views of an entire generation remain unheard. There will not be too many opportunities to make up for lost time. Our group is of the opinion that Kipping’s material is especially suited to make an important contribution in this process.16

Herwig Kipping (b. 1948) and Ulrich Weiß (b. 1942) were two directors who had long been considered among the most original artists and, by extension, politically the least reliable. Both directors worked in feature films as well as documentaries and television productions, and encountered repeated troubles with censorship. They were both interested in Germany’s Romantic poets, albeit for very different reasons. Weiß directed his TV documentary on Heinrich Heine in 1972, while Kipping graduated with a feature film on Hölderlin in 1982 and wrote a

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script for a Heine film in 2005. Well versed in the films and theories of the Russian avant-garde as well as auteur directors such as Fellini, Godard, and Fassbinder, Kipping and Weiß repeatedly have emphasized the importance of film art as social critique. Kipping expressed his admiration for the poetic films of the Russian art cinema of Tarkowski, Dovzhenko, and Eisenstein in his diploma thesis, while Weiß wrote on an early documentary film by the DEFA experimentalist documentary and feature-film rebel Jürgen Böttcher (Der Sekretär, 1967) and often cited the aesthetically innovative, socially engaged films of the Czech New Wave (Nemec, Chytilova, Forman, and Menzel) as his model. Both directors were stonewalled in their efforts to create an East German cinematic tradition of poetic and critical films themselves. The prevailing dogmatic definition of socialist realism at DEFA in the 1970s, when Weiß and—a little later— Kipping began to make their films, allowed for only the crudest form of celebrating the “growth and development of our stable and blossoming workers’ and farmers’ state” as the infamous “Father letter” of 1981 had demanded.17 Neither Weiß nor Kipping was at odds with the philosophical core of socialism, but ironically both sabotaged their careers by making films that remembered some of those core values, as Weiß stated in an interview in 1994: “Socialism only contains age-old dreams and ideas. The interesting question is whether they had to remain utopian concepts or whether one could realize some of them. Many have criticized reality by remembering those dreams.”18 Weiß’s films are characterized by a high degree of stylization and stark visual metaphors that punctuate a less and less coherent film narrative, from the literary adaptations Blauvogel (1979) and Dein unbekannter Bruder in 1982 to the arabesque Miraculi in 1991. If the last film appears surreal at times, its surreality is of a satirical, Kafkaesque nature. Weiß’s own scripts were not realized in the studio, forcing him to direct, for example, literary adaptations rather than his own stories, except for his last film, Miraculi. He expressed his critique of DEFA’s prominent genres (Indianerfilm, antifascist resistance film, Trümmerfilm, that is, so-called rubble films made in or about the immediate aftermath of 1945) in the systematic deconstruction of their abstract generalizations by adopting a highly subjective point of view from which to tell the story. This approach allowed him to expose the fissures and discrepancies of binary ideological thinking and bureaucratic absurdities in public life and DEFA film traditions. Kipping’s surreal style, by contrast, stemmed from a more intuitive, psychological interest, relying more on the evocative power of visuals as poetic nightmares than the cerebral, symbolic composition of Weiß’s late works. Kipping’s first feature film, Hölderlin, was his diploma film for the film school and thus not produced under the more complex supervision of the DEFA studio, while his next feature film was produced in the production group DaDaeR. Neither Weiß

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nor Kipping saw himself as an experimental filmmaker outside the mainstream. They both sought to produce full-length feature films for cinema audiences. Both suffered from enforced idleness during most of the 1980s. As a result, their final DEFA productions in 1990/91 release their pent-up frustrations in visual, anarchic explosions. We can only speculate today how different the films would have looked if they had not represented their first opportunity to freely express themselves after many years of silence; an opportunity, it should be added, that was thrust upon Kipping and Weiß rather unexpectedly. Kipping’s Land hinter dem Regenbogen is his very first feature film, apart from his 50-minute-long student diploma film, Hölderlin (1982), and reflects the power and difficulty of picking up the pieces from a decade earlier. Weiß’s Miraculi represents his first chance to work without the stifling studio controls that forced his previous productions to maintain a precarious balance between what he envisioned and what was possible, as will be discussed below. Seen in this context, both films are important historical markers as well as significant aesthetic contributions that attest to the creative powers of their authors as well as the fatal consequences of state-imposed idleness.

Ulrich Weiß Ulrich Weiß (b. 1942), who falls somewhere between the third and fourth generations of DEFA directors, continuously struggled to labor under the scrutiny of the apparatus while remaining as true as possible to his artistic visions. He was not shy of breaking taboos, and his films count among the most controversial and interesting DEFA productions, including the children’s film Tambari (1977), the Indianerfilm Blauvogel (1979), the antifascist film Dein unbekannter Bruder (1982), the Trümmerfilm Olle Henry (1983), and the Wendefilm Miraculi (1992). Weiß had studied the classic films and writings of the Russian avantgarde directors early in his career and remained focused throughout his work in different genres on an issue Béla Balász had raised in 1930 regarding the relationship between film and its mass audience of the petitbourgeoisie. Balász had then reminded film workers to carefully weigh the artist’s creative interest in aesthetic innovation against the limitations of the audience: “It is an essential condition of film art to become popular art—not just at its lowest level but also at its highest level.”19 Balász had criticized German literature and film for being too intellectual and abstract, having failed to produce works of depth and humor such as those by Twain, Kipling, and Chaplin. Weiß, an avid reader of Balász, had also dared to remind the studio leaders that if they really wished to make films for a mass audience they would have to accept the masses’ appetite for Kitsch, defined as “inconsequential emotion.”20

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By contrast, Weiß himself had written a script early in his career, which he intended to be his second feature film after Tambari. Entitled Tanz im Volkshaus (Dance at the People’s House), it took Balázs’s challenge seriously, without sacrificing his artistic standards.21 Weiß had obtained funding for writing the script for this film, but the studio repeatedly rejected the project for production.22 The film’s historical context is the GDR during the cold war, the agrarian reform, the 1953 workers’ uprising, and Stalin’s death, but the focus is emphatically on the lives and loves of ordinary citizens in a small village, much like the films of Miloš Forman (for example, Loves of a Blonde, 1965) or Jiri Menzel (for example, Closely Observed Trains, 1966). Both Czech films modeled Weiß’s ideal of telling stories of ordinary people’s experiences that occur within the context of historical upheavals, such as the tale of teenage anxiety about first love set in a provincial Czech train station during the German occupation in Menzel’s Trains. While the historical events around them directly affect the lives of the train station personnel, the film’s point of view is the naively innocent perspective of young Miloš. Consequently, the anticipation of the boy’s first sexual encounter trumps the parallel plot of sabotage and resistance against the Germans. Menzel’s film tells a universal and yet highly specific coming-of-age story in humorous, satirical, and poetic visual language. However, the first-person voice-over narrative that proclaims the family tradition of utilizing uniforms for resistance through conscientious idleness in the opening credits as well as the alignment of the loss of Miloš’s virginity with the liberation from Nazi oppression in the end unmistakably provide the political subtext for pointed satire. Menzel summarized his approach to depicting the interaction between the individual and society as follows: “We all know that life is cruel and sad. What is the point of demonstrating this in film? Let us show we’re brave by laughing at life.”23 In other words, Weiß admired in Menzel’s films the skill to make socially engaged films that told stories that were situated in a historical context instead of using stories as mere illustrations of a particular historical truth. Rather than elevating the sabotage against the Nazi occupiers in Trains as a politically motivated heroic act, for example, Menzel shows Miloš’s pride as squarely resting on his sexual conquest the previous night, followed by an accidental attack on the German munitions train that promptly claims his life. Likewise, Ulrich Weiß hoped to explore 1950s village life through the various musical modes of the period: “samba, boogie-woogie, jitterbug and rock and roll.”24 The film was to focus on a village that builds musical instruments, where music accompanies every important social occasion: “For meetings, weddings, christenings, funerals, rallies, celebrations, commemorations, and in church. They play what is needed . . . dance music, marching music, background music, religious,

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symphonic, popular.”25 By accessing the 1950s not initially through the dominant political events of the period (for example, economic rebuilding, the cold war, Stalin’s death, relations between East and West Germany) but through the music of the era, Weiß was mindful of what Balázs had termed the “folksy” interests of cinema’s audience, while also attending to the aural quality of the past. This approach of taking seriously the expectations and limitations of a mass audience on the one hand and insisting on discovering the “filmic”26 in film on the other hand can be traced through all of Weiß’s films. But Weiß left no doubt in his script that socially engaged filmmaking also must have the freedom to criticize. In a seemingly apolitical description of a communal dance at the “Volkshaus,” where boys and girls are seated facing each other across the dance floor, while only married or engaged couples—“die Festen” enjoy the privilege of sitting in a gallery up above the dance floor, we read the following: “Once the dance commences, the girls wait to be asked by a boy from the other side. And if they wish, the way will lead one day up the circular staircase to the others [the privileged ones on the gallery]. And they all wish to go up. From there they can look down on the others. And they don’t know yet, or they deny, how often they will yearn to be among the ones on the ground floor.”27 However Weiß might have expressed this in the film, the script makes it clear that the director did not intend to limit his satire to the adolescent behavior of the dancing teens. Moving between drama and comedy, Weiß found further inspiration in the films of Miloš Forman, whose Loves of a Blonde modeled the use of music and dance for effective and subtle social parody. Forman contrasts two dance scenes: first a boring provincial dance, which positions the camera in the midst of the mostly middle-aged dancers, who waltz around it in a stately pace with bored, distant expressions in two consecutive dance sequences. Shortly after the provincial dance, the “blonde” of the film’s title attends a dance in Prague, which is filmed from a tilted high angle that allows the viewer to take in the entire, rapidly filling dance floor. The exclusively young dancers initially exude urbane modernity and dynamism. But the shot also contains the dancers by capturing the walls around them in a distorting wide angle that conveys an oddly constrained impression. The scene is thus both dynamically engaging through the choreographed dancers’ movements and contained by the clearly noticeable presence of the walls, which in the distorting lens appear to envelope the youths. When the heroine arrives at the Prague apartment of her boyfriends’ parents, the camera frames exactly the fuzzy television screen showing a pathetic music program that reflects its viewers’ tired boredom. Three expertly set-up shots of dancing tell volumes about the contrast between the city and the province, youth and their parents, and the teens’ expression of 1960s counter-cultural yearnings as well as its

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containment.28 Forman’s use of non-professional actors and unscripted improvisation were all models for Ulrich Weiß, who also wished to combine the comic with the tragic in his musical exploration of village life with the sensibility of their common cinematic ancestor: Charlie Chaplin. Forman explained: “The first filmmaker who really touched me was Charlie Chaplin. All his films. I don’t know whether I started liking films because Chaplin was so good, or if he touched something that was already in me that I didn’t know about before. I was very moved by his mixture of laughter and tears.”29 Weiß’s Volkshaus script shows how political events from 1953 to 1956 affected the villagers’ lives but did not define them. Weiß’s interest was the depiction of the ordinary lives of people who happened to live at a particular historical time and place, as opposed to following the preferred DEFA policy of using a worker’s life story to illustrate the advantages of a specific and historical governmental initiative. Weiß agreed with Balász’s critique of Eisenstein’s “intellectual film” and questioned the power of montage to dictate specific and predictable emotions, which in turn lead to specific thoughts in the viewer.30 A stranger to didactic intentions, in his filmmaking Weiß sought to explore the past through its popular sounds, music, and fashion. His interest in the cinematic rendition of everyday culture was decades ahead of historians, who did not turn their scholarly interest to the study of Alltagskultur, in particular with regard to the GDR, until the 1990s. Balász also suggested that artists, while being mindful of their audiences’ limitations, need to find their own subjective aesthetic, to experiment and push the boundaries of the traditionally accepted in order to develop film as art (148). Within the DEFA studio this was a particularly precarious balancing act between risking losing access to production opportunities when pushing too far and losing one’s own creative vision when yielding to studio or party pressure. As Weiß put it: “Like they said after Blauvogel: you destroyed the Indianerfilm for us, and after Your Unknown Brother: You destroyed the antifascist film for us, that is to say, you are a spoilsport.”31 Rather than directing a genre feature suitable for the Romanticism of the petit bourgeois through a cinema of “sedation,”32 Weiß aimed for a visceral cinematic experience through carefully composed images and sounds: “In Blauvogel someone says: ‘Isn’t our world just miraculous?’ Since you cannot explain miracles, or they would not be miracles, you have to experience them.”33 This insistence on the discovery of the sensual and experiential quality of film and rejection of what he termed the anti-visual dominant DEFA aesthetic links Weiß’s works to other filmmakers of the last generation, especially Herwig Kipping. Like all film students in the GDR, Weiß was trained in documentary film, and he wrote his diploma thesis on Jürgen Böttcher’s 1967 documentary Der Sekretär, the first DEFA film about a party secretary in a

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Fig. 2.1. Director Ulrich Weiß (top) on set of Blauvogel. Courtesy of DEFA Stiftung; photograph by Dietram Kleist.

large industrial plant, which Böttcher was assigned to make as a chance at rehabilitation (“Strafarbeit”) after the banning of his only feature film, Jahrgang 45 (Born in 1945, 1965).34 Weiß’s thesis (1972) masterfully deploys dialectic logic, citing Marx and Engels in the layered genitive constructions so typical of official bureaucratic pronouncements in the GDR that they appear parodistic today. However, tellingly, Weiß cites Marx’s essay on Prussian censorship and argues passionately for the “visceral-emotional content” of documentary film: The inclusion of accidental occurrences makes documentary film appear more realistic und makes it possible to discover the necessary in the accidental, the essence in the outer appearance, order in chaos, the essential in the superfluous, the extraordinary in the everyday. The viewer learns to discover for himself what is important in what is happening. He learns to see. It is therefore necessary to provide him with enough visceral-emotional material.35

Weiß’s Heine film of the same year bears out how sociopolitical complexity und contradiction might be captured in documentary film by emphasizing the different facets of Heine’s works and their continuing resonance in East and West Germany, Russia, China, and the United States. Importantly, the film validates Heine’s self-ironic Romanticism as well as his satirical fool’s role as a rebellious public critic, “with an

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unhappy passion for reason.”36 The poet’s resulting deep identity crisis is only the first of many such stories Weiß would tell in his films, all set during or in the direct aftermath of war or historical upheaval. In Blauvogel (1979), Weiß’s adaptation of Anna Jürgen’s bestselling 1950 children’s book of the same title, this interest in the identity crisis of an individual during times of war and upheaval, cast in taboo-breaking visual aesthetics, reaches early, and to this day unrecognized, heights. It is only mentioned as an exception to the norm in the major scholarly contributions on the idiosyncratic DEFA genre of Indianerfilm.37 Daniela Berghahn has pointed out that the Indianerfilm was the only successful serially produced genre at DEFA, as the films offered audiences popular entertainment through the star power of Gojko Mitic and escapist fantasies enabled by their filmic locations in Yugoslavia, Rumania, and Cuba. The studio justified using a Hollywood-identified genre as a retooled version for politically correct mass edification at a time when television had replaced cinema outings. Gerd Gemünden has argued persuasively that the Native Americans in these films served as East German projections of anti-imperialist and anti-fascist sentiments during the cold war and competed with the Winnetou Westerns produced in West Germany. DEFA’s Indianerfilme allowed East German audiences to identify with Native Americans as victims of capitalism and reached large audiences through the popular appeal of genre film. Indeed, millions of viewers flocked to see the inaugural Indianerfilm Söhne der großen Bärin (Sons of the Great Mother Bear) in the summer of 1965, prompting the studio to continue production in this successful genre. Gemünden suggested that this surprising success rested on the films’ strategy to “firmly appropriate the ‘other,’ that is, the North American Indians, as an ‘us.’”38 The story of Blauvogel as created by Anna Jürgen offered the opportunity for a film that follows this successful pattern of DEFA Indianerfilm: seven-year old settler-son George Ruster is kidnapped by Iroquois in the forests of the American Northeast in 1755 and through a series of adventures becomes acculturated into Native society, only to be returned to his British family seven years later as a result of a Franco-British peace treaty that requires the return of all hostages. George, now a young man, reluctantly moves back to his British family, which has meanwhile prospered. But he is unable to reenter white society and is soon alienated by their “unnatural” customs. Yearning for his Native American parents, he runs away to live with the Iroquois. Although the story is set among the “Waldindianer” of the Northeast as opposed to the Plains Indians of the typical Western, this basic plot could have accommodated the well-established DEFA tradition of pitching a peaceful, harmonious Native society against the imperialist greed of white settlers. But Ulrich Weiß’s approach to the material took the story into unexpected new directions: Blauvogel instead thematizes prominent tropes of

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Fig. 2.2. Actor Robin Jäger after his conversion from British settler-son George to Native American Blauvogel in the longhouse. Courtesy of DEFA Stiftung; photograph by Dietram Kleist.

the genre itself in order to question the simplistic depictions of identity and belonging. Unlike Arthur Penn’s 1970 Western spoof Little Big Man, which parodies ethnic passing narratives in order to ridicule Western clichés, Weiß was interested in complicating the question of (white) identity formation through the encounter with the other. The East German state, on the other hand, encouraged literature and films that conflated the “red man” with the “red revolution.”39 Ulrich Weiß’s film performs the inherent violence of dichotomously defined, fixed identity conceptions. Consequently, Blauvogel experienced a difficult approval procedure in the studio and had to be cut and altered in order to be released at all. When it was finally screened, it did not receive the same hyped promotion as the Gojko Mitic films. Looking at the film today, one might ask about the possibilities and limits of deconstructing the stereotypical representation of a culture within the framework of a genre film such as the Indianerfilm, which still depends on reinscribing that culture as the racialized other.40 In 1950 writer Anna Jürgen penned the bestselling novel Blauvogel, which was based on her travels to Native communities in Western New York and which she intended to dispel common clichés about Native Americans. The book broke important taboos (the white boy George becomes the Native boy Blauvogel) and earned endorsements from

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Native American organizations. The book’s focus, written shortly after the trauma of the Second World War, was to provide its young readers with a wholesome example of finding one’s home in an initially strange culture that gradually becomes one’s own. In that sense, the book would have been ideally suited for the DEFA Indianerfilm strategy of modeling the idealized Native community, which the white protagonists joins, as symbolic embodiment of the young East German state. However, Ulrich Weiß’s interest in 1979, when the book was handed to him with the charge to produce a proper Indianerfilm, lay in dispelling the binary identity concept on which the genre films depended. Consequently, both Native American and British cultures are represented as complex and diverse as opposed to homogenous, static (firmly situated in the past), and exclusive. Unlike the book, where the protagonist George after seven years in the Iroquois longhouse is unable to transition back to his biological family after the peace treaty of 1763 requires the return of all hostages, and thus runs away to live once more with his adoptive Native American family, Weiß’s protagonist leaves both communities, not feeling entirely at home in either, and wanders off in search of a self-defined identity. Rather than reducing the white settlers to cartoonish clichés of greedy capitalists, Weiß shows a settler family for whom the arrival in the United States means liberation from a life of servitude in Europe. At the same time, Weiß’s filming of the family’s clearing of the woods to establish a new homestead visualizes the inherent colonialist violence and cost to the land and its original inhabitants through tightly framed close-ups of humans straining to fell trees, and setting fires everywhere to clear the land. No music eases the strain of the work, only an amplified soundtrack of relentless rain, fires burning, ropes straining, and horses moaning as they labor against the knee-deep mud and resistance of the towering trees. Weiß’s camera appears attached to actor Kurt Böwe, the family’s patriarch, and with its close-up focus on the environmental destruction contradicts the protagonist’s repeated proclamations that he is constructing paradise. The visuals of falling trees and burning soil convey clearly that the claim to freedom and property for the newcomers means the expulsion and exploitation of the Native Americans and their environment. The rhetoric of the promised land that permeated Anna Jürgen’s original 1950 literary pretext may have echoed with official state ideological claims regarding the project of building a better German state, but by 1979 Weiß was critical of such utopian aspirations that were blind to their inherent violence against humans and nature. In Blauvogel the motif of choosing exclusive belonging and obedience to one community is critiqued as based on racist and environmentally unsustainable principles. When George is returned to his British

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family, for example, his father greets him exuberantly: “Paradise, Georgie, paradise. Look, have I lied to you?” (1:24).41 Weiß then cuts to a point of view shot, assuming George’s position as the prodigal son surveying what his father proudly claims as his own. In a low wide-angle shot the camera captures expansive barren soil with a single tree left standing on the far horizon. Instead of music the sound of wind blowing across this now empty landscape conveys the sense of forlorn destruction. George’s initiation ritual as prodigal son consists of cutting down the last-standing, centuries-old maple tree to signify his position as heir to the colonial settlement, an act he refuses to perform, leading to his departure for an unknown future. Intended to undermine the customary Indianerfilm strategy of inviting viewers to identify with the Native community, similarly exclusive beliefs on belonging are projected onto the inhabitants of the longhouse. The initiation ritual performed on the white child upon his capture, to transform George into Blauvogel, is also visualized as a violent act. George’s fear and disorientation upon being captured are expressed again through point-of-view shots in high angles of a threatening forest (enormous trees, steep cliffs, and mysteriously glittering mica), rapid editing, and jarring electronic music as George is being dragged through the woods. In stark contrast, his arrival at the Iroquois village proceeds in utter silence. George’s entrance into the Native culture is represented through a silently staring crowd of villagers, the sounds of cleansing mud being applied to his body, and his forceful washing in the river. No human sounds, dialogue, or voice-over disrupt the six-minute sequence, told entirely from the point of view of the bewildered child. When he is finally dressed in Native clothing, the camera highlights his new looks as masquerade on display by placing George’s small, solitary figure alone by a fire, with only the audible sounds of the fire. The camera approaches him in a slow tracking shot through the empty longhouse, replicating the staring gaze of the villagers upon the new arrival and conveying a sense of alienation and solitude. Instead of emphasizing the ease of passing into Native culture, the film emphasizes George’s foreignness visually. When speech finally returns, George’s conversion to Blauvogel is described in the racially charged language of German blood-based citizenship laws: “According to strict ancient custom, each drop of white blood has been washed from your veins as of this day” (25:00).42 When George later announces that he wants to return home to his biological family, his grandfather Weißhaar explains the law that governs his community: “We love you. We defend you. You are one of us. If you cross the borders of our tribe, you will be our enemy” (59:36).43 Such dichotomous conceptions of belonging were the target of Weiß’s criticism, and by assigning them to both Native Americans and Europeans, Weiß prevented audiences from projecting utopian ideals onto an appropriated other, as

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previous Indianerfilme had done. While Weiß is careful not to equalize the two communities and especially their respective suffering, his strategy depends on inevitably reinstating Native culture as exclusive, strange, and ultimately unknowable: “Their world was full of secrets” (35:14).44 Because Weiß aims to undermine the previous DEFA strategy of modeling socialist ideals through idealized Native heroes, he takes special pains to deconstruct a central trope of the Indianerfilm genre: blood brotherhood. No sooner have George/Blauvogel and his arch enemy, Little Fox, reached a truce, paving the way to Blauvogel’s full acceptance into the Native community, than Blauvogel betrays the position of the Iroquois to a group of British soldiers, to whom he proclaims his British identity: “I am not a turtle” (1:07).45 The ensuing attack on the Iroquois camp and death of Little Fox highlight the violence of George/ Blauvogel’s identity struggle: “This day had inflicted wounds that no amount of time would heal” (1:11),46 states the voice-over as George/ Blauvogel bestows his most prized possession, a knife from a British soldier, on his almost-friend Little Fox. This symbolic union of British and Native signifiers can literally occur only over a dead body. Weiß visually layers the simultaneity of his bonding with Little Fox and the arrival of the British soldiers who will immediately end this new friendship, by placing George in the top of a tall leafless tree. The camera shows the small solitary figure of George, who articulates his identity crisis in a voice over in an extreme high-angle long shot, which frames the child’s body with bare branches of the tree pointing in all directions and creating a labyrinthine impression of George caught in a web, a visual Weiß would repeat later in Dein unbekannter Bruder. If leaving the boundaries of the Native village would mark George an enemy of the Iroquois, then declaring himself British to the soldiers results in the death of his newfound friend. In this binary world, no positively defined, non-dichotomous identity is possible. Building on this critique, Weiß further deconstructs the visual toolkit of the Indianerfilm and its familiar attributes of “Indianness”: feathers, leggings, moccasins, and tomahawk. In Blauvogel, George’s dressing as a Native boy complete with red body paint only serves to further alienate him from his Iroquois family, with whom he can only bond when the red body paint washes off in the river. In other words, George has to stop masquerading as an Indian before he can begin to forge meaningful ties with them. Further, the colonialist violence of representing an oppressed culture is addressed directly. In a pivotal final scene, George/Blauvogel wanders around a fort where the British painter George Catlin, famous for his portraits of Native American chiefs, is painting.47 The original voice-over, which was scripted against Weiß’s wishes and added after the difficulties during the initial approval process in the studio states: “I was forced to

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remember the past images, because I now had to leave. I calmly anticipate the future because I have learned to search for meaning in everything.”48 The voice-over as requested by the studio thus conveyed the ever-optimistic view that progress toward a solidly formed (socialist) personality was taking place. However, these words do not appear in the final version of the film. Instead, Blauvogel wanders among Catlin’s portraits of Native Americans while his voice-over muses: “I had to remember the past images in order to remember who I am. I fear losing my sense of self” (1:17).49 As the ensuing plot makes clear, the painter’s portraits of the Natives are not helpful in this process of remembering or finding himself: an argument between two Natives over their portraits turns deadly. Before being swept away to his British family, Blauvogel recognizes the violent impact of representing the other: he bends over the dead body and states: “The painter killed him” (1:21).50 In this scene the colorful headdresses of the chiefs, who are being painted by Caitlin, contrast with the rest of the film, where the use of headdresses is minimal or absent, suggesting that the scene is staged for the benefit of the European painter. To emphasize this meta-reflexive gesture, Weiß positions a Native American in plain dress directly in front of one of the paintings of a chief in lavish feathers. Weiß does not adapt the story of child kidnapping to tell an adventurous fantasy tale about cultural passing into a Native (that is, ideal) society but to show the deep alienation of an individual who is estranged from himself and his communities. The film is an indictment of the dominant cinematic fantasy in East and West Germany, which invited audiences to assuage their respective national trauma of war, division, and cold war through identification with Native culture. But it might also be read as a reflection of Weiß’s own situation as a filmmaker at DEFA: he was aware of the innovative work of international new waves in Eastern and Western Europe as well as the Soviet Union, while his own country’s rigid film structures increasingly choked his ideas. In 1992 he asked “What chance does humanity have anyway? A third way?”51 In the same text he criticizes the ideological approach of DEFA films in the late 1970s by stating: “How can someone become a social being if he is not first himself?” (18)52 By insisting on the highly subjective point of view of the individual in crisis, depicted through precise camera work, the use of amplified sounds and electronic noise instead of more genre-specific diegetic and extra-diegetic music, and extended periods of silence to allow the story to unfold visually, Weiß challenged the traditional genre conventions and coherent narratives of identity that pervaded the DEFA studio. Weiß’s interest in exploring individual consciousness from a subjective perspective in Blauvogel was continued in his next feature, Dein unbekannter Bruder (1982); his fascination with the miraculous

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Fig. 2.3. Jörg Foth in a cameo appearance as painter George Caitlin in Blauvogel. Courtesy of DEFA Stiftung; photograph by Dietram Kleist.

manifests itself again in his last DEFA film, Miraculi (1991). While Dein unbekannter Bruder led to the most serious troubles of Weiß’s career, his last DEFA feature was only possible because the GDR and its studio had effectively collapsed before Weiß began shooting. It is noteworthy that Blauvogel was made by the artistic group Johannisthal, while his next film, Dein unbekannter Bruder, was developed in the group Roter Kreis, which had produced a successful run of Indianerfilme since 1965. His best-known feature film, Dein unbekannter Bruder, laid the foundation of his fame as well as his troubles in the studio: Weiß had dared to break a major DEFA taboo by directing a feature film in the important antifascist film genre that emphasized not the heroism but the fear of its protagonist. This time, the offense against genre conventions did not simply manifest itself in lost box-office revenue (Blauvogel’s demanding form would not gain the mass popularity of the Mitic films) but in the eyes of the Minister of Culture had the potential to question a cornerstone of GDR socialism: its antifascist foundation myth. The film prompted the initiation of Stasi surveillance under the code name “OPK Bruder” in 1981, in which Weiß was charged with producing an anarchist film (Anarchistenfilm) or confusing antifascist resistance with the activities of the Red Army Faction. Weiß was judged to be an uncooperative and obstinate artist in the Stasi report: “he looks his discussion partners innocently and compliantly in the eye and then does what he wants anyway.”53 While this might seem

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ridiculous in retrospect, the real consequences of Weiß’s unwillingness to compromise were anything but humorous: his film was withdrawn from the Cannes Festival, not reviewed in the official paper Neues Deutschland, and quickly shelved after a few screenings despite great public and critical interest. Instead, a public defamation appeared in the magazine Der antifaschistische Widerstandskämpfer, signed only by “H.H.,” that stated: “We feel that things were not the way depicted in the film. The majority of resistance fighters were not like it was shown in the film. We fought even under the most difficult circumstances for our communist convictions, certain that victory would be ours.”54 Tragically for Weiß, the members of the governing body had not studied Balász, who had pointed out: “Not the objective, factual reality matters but the unique, internal, spiritual reality of the work of art. It is about illusion. Mere naturalism is simply distracting.”55 The reality Weiß explored in this story was the struggle between resistance and opportunism, between commitment to a just cause and the urge to “forget the past” (1:24) as the traitor Walter repeatedly tells the anxious hero Arnold. As the struggle between these two forces unfolds, the plot never turns into an action picture but remains tensely psychological and unpredictable. Ralf Schenk has suggested that Arnold and Walter can even be read as two halves of a divided consciousness.56 Weiß’s cinematographic eye (his first Babelsberg degree was for training as a cameraman), his sensitivity for maximizing the aural and visual impact of the story with minimalist means, lends this film a mature cinematic aesthetic. The hero’s isolation, for example, is expressed efficiently through tight camera angles, low-angle long shots of Arnold on a tiny stool during his Gestapo interrogations, and the avoidance of open sky shots. The resulting visceral effect is one of claustrophobia and utter terror, even though almost no physical violence is depicted. The soundtrack in particular contributes to this effect, lacking almost completely in nondiegetic music, while all ordinary noises seem amplified, as if to mirror the nervous anxieties of Arnold, who is startled into traumatic flashbacks of his past Gestapo interrogations by ordinary everyday sounds like crumpling papers, creaking hinges, or a knock at the door. As Erika Richter has demonstrated, the film further uses long tracking shots of trains, boats, and cars to depict the hero’s paralysis.57 Indeed, such coupling of opposites is programmatic for the film: when Arnold is finally arrested again toward the end of the film his transport to the Gestapo prison in a car is accompanied by a rare orchestral sound, an ironically upbeat waltz. By contrast, Weiß uses a rare wide-angle shot under the expansive open sky at the beach ironically to show Walter after his exposure as a spy. The openness of the natural environment however, does not provide relief after a visually claustrophobic film. Instead, the shot signifies Walter’s utter isolation as a traitor who cannot live with himself anymore. On the other hand, Arnold in his tiny prison cell has made peace with his fate.

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The depiction of space thus draws attention to the film as artifact, a construction of a historic past from the perspective of a younger generation. The film further highlights this reflective mode through Arnold’s profession as a film projectionist. Weiß inserts a scene from Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935) and shows Arnold looking at the film’s long marching sequences through his projectionists’ peephole. When a troop of Nazi soldiers is later marching down the street toward Arnold’s apartment, the shot appears in direct contrast to Riefenstahl’s documentary-propagandist images, clearly stylized and constructed to mirror the subjective terror Arnold senses at their sight. Weiß invites his viewers to reflect on the question of resistance and betrayal from a postwar perspective instead of recreating the past with simplistic naturalism. The carefully choreographed props of fishing nets, shots of dark alleys, and the labyrinthine character of the Hamburg docks visualize Arnold’s paranoia as well as Walter’s conflict of conscience, while the relentlessly amplified sounds of everyday gestures serve as startling alienation devices of their constructed reality. Like George/Blauvogel, the hero in Dein unbekannter Bruder, Arnold, is thrown into a schizophrenic reality that he has to interpret and navigate. Like George, who in one scene is caught between rows of French and British soldiers while fleeing from the Iroquois, and Henry the boxer in Olle Henry, Arnold is never sure whom he can trust, who has betrayed him in the past, and who is waiting for him to make a mistake. In retrospect, viewers might be tempted to see parallels between the director’s experiences and those of his characters, but as mentioned above, the Stasi observation of Weiß only began during the production of this film. Moreover, Weiß’s complexly psychological films avoid easy dichotomies between East and West, socialism and capitalism. Rather, the topic of betrayal on small and large scales is a leitmotif that can be traced through all his feature films. Arnold articulates his determinately optimistic position on betrayal, which will cost him his life: “We must not be mistrustful of each other. That would be the same as being mistrustful of ourselves.”58 While Arnold may have been trying to overcome his mounting doubts about Walter’s trustworthiness, Weiß indicates that such optimistic faith in humanity is necessary for Arnold’s integrity as well as likely to be fatal: even before Arnold is betrayed by Walter, a strikingly documentary-styled scene anticipates Arnold’s demise by depicting the chase and capture of a pheasant by a pack of hunting dogs. Unlike most DEFA films from this period, which were notoriously talkative, Weiß’s visual and aural strategies required little dialogue. This did not just increase their psychological impact but also made his films more ambiguous, prompting the studio to demand, for example, the added voice-over for Blauvogel. In retrospect, we can only speculate today how highly sensitized GDR audiences in 1982 would have reacted to statements like Arnold’s, cited above: “That is as if we were mistrustful of

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ourselves.”59 Because the film was retracted so quickly, most never had a chance to find out. The Stasi observation that resulted from the scandal around Dein unbekannter Bruder notwithstanding, Weiß received a rare opportunity to direct again immediately. This unlikely opportunity was testament to the fact that even the studio recognized this young director’s unusual talent. Studio director Mäde affirmed this in a letter to Kurt Hager, member of the Politbüro in 1984, when he wrote: “Ulrich Weiß is generally regarded as unusually talented. His worldview and his opinions on social progress, however, are highly individualistic and diffuse.”60 The next feature film, Olle Henry, was misunderstood by Weiß’s assigned Stasi officer as politically unproblematic. Weiß himself summarized the film as the story of a boxer and a prostitute in 1945 who cannot cope with their memories of the war and fail to gain footing in postwar Germany. This remarkable film presents hauntingly evocative images of the so-called zero hour: next to a giant bombing crater sits a single disconnected rail-car, which houses the protagonists, whose erratic behavior and volatility mirror the psychological and physical scars of an unprocessed past. With the use of an effectively dissonant sound track, slow motion, and low-angle shots Weiß evokes the atmosphere of a society that is desperately attempting to simulate life in order to avoid facing the trauma of the past. It is a film of wrong beginnings, as Weiß stated. It culminates in a ghostly final sequence in which the boxer, who has sustained severe brain damage during his attempted comeback fight, and the prostitute, whose dream of returning the boxer to his former glory has been shattered, dance like marionettes in the harsh spotlight of a brothel. Their mechanical, puppet-like gestures illustrate that all life has been drained out of them. Life has ended before they can even hope to reenter or rebuild society. Instead of redirecting the solitary train car back into the flow of life, they sustain their final blow. Unlike Fassbinder’s FRG Trilogy, which had just been completed before the director’s untimely death in 1982, Weiß’s film does not thematize the coping mechanisms of consumerism, ideology, or religion to argue that the trauma of war had remained unprocessed. Rather, Olle Henry shows survivors of the war who are too broken to even sublimate the trauma. As such it, too, questions the myth of the heroic beginnings from which the GDR leadership drew its legitimation. Like Herwig Kipping’s Land hinter dem Regenbogen (1991), which I will discuss in the following, Olle Henry’s solitary and disconnected rail-car embodies the disillusionment of a postwar generation of directors who return to the beginnings of GDR socialism in order to question the childhood narratives of progress on which they were reared. Cinematically, Olle Henry responds to the stoic optimism of DEFA’s very first anti-fascist film, Die Mörder sind unter uns (The Murderers are among us, 1946). In the

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earlier film, clean-shaven survivors of the Holocaust and war vow that war criminals will be held accountable and that their victims in Germany will receive justice, but they were not able to attend to the deep scars of the survivors. While Fassbinder shows his characters in their desperate attempt to drown such trauma in materialist consumption or drugs, Weiß, and later Kipping, need to first uncover the very wounds of war that could not be acknowledged because of the burden of legitimizing the GDR as the better state through the anti-fascist founding myth. Weiß’s film thus uses a structure of alternating bleak tableaus of complete exhaustion with the characters’ sudden eruptions of hysteria that keep audiences on the edge. Instead of showing the iconic image of the survivors walking with uplifted, illuminated faces toward an imaginary better future and out of the ruins in Die Mörder, in Olle Henry the twice-defeated characters literally fall back into the crater hole of a bomb. Their arduous attempt at a new beginning was once again betrayed by the cynical machinations of a false friend. Like Dein unbekannter Bruder the film calls attention to its constructedness and highly subjective perspective. Olle Henry remains unjustly overlooked within the German film canon, despite its striking thematic and aesthetic affinities to the films of the West German auteur cinema of the 1970 and 1980s such as Fassbinder’s Veronika Voss (1982). After Olle Henry Weiß was unable to make another film until after the wall had fallen. In a final act in 1990, the GDR ministry of culture dispersed a last sum of 15 million Marks for feature films. Among the directors chosen to receive money were many who had experienced a forced hiatus during the studio’s final decade, including Weiß. Initially Weiß considered his old script of Tanz im Volkshaus, but for financial concerns, among others, he eventually decided on Miraculi instead. Weiß did not experience the fall of the wall with the same euphoria as many of his compatriots. Although he had been severely hampered in his film work, he had been allowed to travel to the West in the late 1980s and harbored no illusions regarding unification with West Germany. Thus his last film, Miraculi, reflects the tensions and restlessness of the immediate post-wall period through its elliptical form. The film consists of two stories: one, entitled “Der Kontrolleur” and written in 1978, tells of a young man who voluntarily works as a tram controller as a self-inflicted penance for a minor shoplifting incident. The story episodically explores themes of honesty, loyalty, community, and betrayal. Interwoven with this loose tale is the surreal incident of a lake that has disappeared over night, baffling the property owners along its shore. Like Herwig Kipping’s film Land hinter dem Regenbogen, Weiß’s Miraculi cannot be adequately summarized in a simple plot line. Its short episodes circle around concepts such as chance, game playing, and the interconnectedness of events big and small. In a visual domino effect, the opening sequence shows in close-up and slow motion how a fly first lands

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on the camera lens, then distracts a pool-playing youngster, whose hand slips, pushing a pack of cigarettes into a beer glass; the camera then pans back to the pool ball falling into the hole. This inconspicuous chain of events, like a butterfly effect, sets one of the film’s plot lines in motion, circling around in many more-or-less-connected episodes to the final motif of the lake that has disappeared, when the camera lingers in long shots on a devastated environment. Weiß’s film ends where Kipping’s film begins: with hauntingly disturbing aerial shots of destroyed landscape, ecological disaster, the camera panning over abandoned above-ground mining areas in the GDR. Kipping and Weiß use these sublimely horrific images as visual metaphors not just for the end of the GDR but for the apocalyptic nightmare of ecological and economic exploitation and physical and psychological exhaustion. Such grand sensations are linked with the banal misdemeanor of a youngster and the mishap at the pool table in the opening sequence. Weiß comments: “Everything is connected with everything—to narrate this fact is neither symbolist nor an experiment. At the most, it points to the global flow of our existence, and the hazards of its precarious equilibrium, which is destroyed when it is disturbed.”61 The forced idleness of seven years may have infused his last DEFA film with a more biting humor than it might have possessed if realized earlier. In contrast to Arnold’s above cited deeply humanistic: “We should not be mistrustful of each other,” for example, in Miraculi the tram controller apprentice Sebastian is instructed: “As long as humans cheat, they have to be controlled” (19:35).62 And shortly thereafter: “To a conductor, all passengers are potential cheats” (24:31).63 Sebastian, however, is searching for his own true self after being told during a Kafkaesque company trial that he might be on a trajectory toward becoming a habitual criminal. In a Brechtian vein, he decides to take the system at its word and practice honesty and forgiveness, only to expose the system around him as utterly uninterested in such core values. Instead, his supervisors regurgitate formulaic repetition of tired and empty mantras and reply to his searching question: “Who am I?” with the simple: “We know who you are, we know everything” (18:46).64 Weiß’s last DEFA film does not evince the humanistic hope that both Arnold in Bruder and Henry in Olle Henry possess despite their bleak historical contexts. Weiß’s faith in the reformability of the socialist system was not shattered by the collapse of the GDR itself but by continuously being undermined in his creative attempts to develop his film art. His own long struggles in the studio were cynically encouraged by requests for scripts that would never be realized, and by even producing films that would not be shown; as an artist who had ironically taken seriously many of the ideals the socialist state had officially proclaimed, he felt these relentless betrayals deeply. Like Arnold, Weiß valiantly fought against the destructive effect of distrust; like Arnold, he paid a high price for his idealism.

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Miraculi, literally meaning miracles, does not document the collapse of this idealist utopia as originated by a melodramatic grand narrative of state repression but instead as a result of countless little failures and betrayals at work, in the family, and among friends. Weiß fittingly takes a global approach in his last film and thematizes possible connections between small human gestures and global changes. The film contains many metaphors specific to the GDR but aims at universality. Aesthetically, it undermines any semblance of totalizing gestures: the scant narrative is continuously interrupted by sudden cuts to sequences of home movies in black-and-white, installation-like shots of a television placed in a tunnel, and stark visual metaphors such as a large metal door slamming shut. The television plays an excerpt from the 1990 film Step across the Border about the British avant-garde musician Fred Frith, which recurs several times throughout Miraculi. In Felliniesque mode, Weiß destabilizes the cinematic time and space in non-systematic ruminations that depict in non-chronological order the inevitable decline from playful infant, to earnestly searching and hopelessly lost youth, opportunistic and/or rigid middle age, and cheerfully fatalistic old age. He narrates miniature episodes around the protagonist Sebastian in highly stylized formats. In one scene, for example, Sebastian visits his grandmother to play cards. However, the visit appears to be only a loose pretext to allow the grandmother to pontificate on the nature of gambling and chance: “That’s such a little game . . . something . . . that it is not,”65 says the grandmother in response to Sebastian’s musing over the fact that his given cards determine his game. By contrast, she assures him that the cards are not the game, only the tools with which one plays; that is, she instructs her grandson, who has decided to take things at their face value, in the difference between being and appearance (“Sein und Schein”). Weiß described his method this way: “The diremption expresses itself in the form . . . the film consists of ellipses, lots of little comedies that together produce a tragedy.”66 The film’s loose plot, fragmented by images that look like found footage suggests in its many short encounters a string of disappointments and betrayals, lies and corruption. The film was made at a time where grand historical narratives and ideologies, like socialist utopian concepts, had officially collapsed. Instead of diagnosing a single cause for such global collapse, Weiß’s film zooms in on the microlevel of mistrustful human interaction. The film searches and does not find meaningful relationships either between humans or between humans and their environment. Families, society, and nature all are out of sync, marred by abuse and betrayal. As he did in his earlier features, Weiß depicts this sense of disorientation in the labyrinthine set of dark alleys, obscured sky, and a mysterious magician who tells Sebastian: “Relax, young man. Life is a game of our illusions.”67 This baroque play with appearances and being occurs

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in numerous gestures in Weiß’s work, signifying the search for ideals and identity: the betraying Judas-kiss in Bruder, the fake-looking red body paint in Blauvogel, and the Jesus drag in Miraculi. In a final miracle, nature itself expresses the alienated insanity (“Ver-rücktheit”) of its human population in the metaphor of the vanishing lake. This visually stunning final image of disoriented humans wandering around the muck of the vanished lake site, shot from a bird’s eye view and accompanied by Tibetan throat singers, resonates deeply with viewers, who have observed Sebastian’s unsuccessful search for meaning through family memories, work, medical discourse, and religious symbolism. The ecological apocalypse is preceded by a decadent buffet, a combination of the last supper (complete with tempting seduction by a sexy Magdalena) and the political satire of Nemec’s banquet scene in The Party and the Guests (1966). The final bird’s eye shot of the destroyed earth is also reminiscent of a similar shot in Blauvogel, when George and his Native American sister Malia are shown as tiny figures on a small island in a vast river. Malia tells George the creation story of the Iroquois as they bond for the first time, but the fragility of this new connection is highlighted by their tiny proportions as rendered in the bird’s-eye view. Miraculi’s surreal farce on morality and betrayal offers a view on the subject that is radically different from one of Ulrich Weiß’s earliest films, Paragraph 14 (1968). In this student film, which Weiß wrote, photographed, and directed as part of his diploma in camera at the Babelsberg film school, Weiß tells the story of two eighteen-year-old delinquents in a youth detention facility (Werkhof). Here the dynamic camera work emphasizes the bonding between the youngsters and their teachers, their optimism regarding a second chance, and the energy of “beat” conveyed through the soundtrack and an open classroom discussion of the appeal of English beat music. While the twenty-one-minute short film critiques the parent generation’s inability to provide supportive homes (like Gerhard Klein’s 1957 classic feature film Berlin—Ecke Schönhauser), enlightened teachers redirect the youths toward meaningful relationships and productive career paths. Twenty years later in 1989 such optimism has vanished: the rebellious act of shoplifting is no longer simply directed against a dysfunctional home life but is the expression of a far more serious global crisis. Erika Richter’s description captures the essence of the film, stating that Miraculi creates “from fragments of authentically experienced reality another reality.”68 The visual leitmotif connecting all of Weiß’s films is the moving rail-car, depicting paralysis in Dein unbekannter Bruder and the impossibility of arriving in Olle Henry. Aurally the films are linked by the sparse and dissonant soundtrack, which amplifies ambient sound in combination with jarring electronic guitar and piano chords, supporting the thematic leitmotif of betrayal.

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Like most of the final DEFA productions Miraculi drew negative reviews from West German critics and appreciative praise from their East German counterparts upon its release in 1992. Lothar Lambert called it “peculiar” (wunderlich, nicht wunderbar).69 Dieter Strutz found it to be an accident of a feature film (“Malheur eines Spielfilmes”),70 while Knut Hicketier attested that it had thoroughly exhausted its means: “more symbolic overload would not have been possible.”71 Meanwhile, reviewer Friedericke Freier found it reminiscent of Kafka and the tradition of the absurd.72 East German critic Ursula Heyne agrees with her and appreciated the causality of chance “reminiscent of Kafka, Godard and Beckett.”73 Ralf Schenk observed on the occasion of the film’s re-release in 1998 that Weiß was a rare director, “whose willingness to experiment and stylistic rigor powerfully conveys his philosophical ideas, beyond all filmic dogmatism.”74 All Weiß’s films aim to engage and challenge their audiences with a mix of subjective, stylized symbolism and abstraction on the one hand, and an increasingly less coherent narrative structure on the other hand. This format represents his commitment to wanting to reach a large and varied audience, but also to pushing the limits of their expectations in order to provoke and stimulate. One of his early documentary films ended with an intertitle, quoting Marx: “To teach the ear to hear, to enrich the senses is laborious, but has become a need for many.”75 Despite his difficult career at DEFA, Weiß’s Miraculi still pursues this non-didactic goal with experimental means. “Film must fidget,” Weiß has said famously— and so must its viewers.76

Herwig Kipping I would like to turn my attention to the remarkable but little-known works of director Herwig Kipping and ask to what extent his particular vision of poetic film, which he himself called for in 1982, might have been realized in the few films he was able to produce in the DEFA studio. Kipping’s diploma thesis, Poesie und Film, was a study of the films of the Russian avant-garde: Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, and Tarkowski. Like the early Russians, Kipping had propagated a concept of socialist avant-garde art that merges life and art but not through liquidation of art as art itself (as in some Western conceptions of the avant-garde) but in a merging of the political and the artistic. Hanns Eisler’s well-known definition might be recalled here: “Today, the artist remains an avant-gardist only if he can make the new art forms available for the lives and struggles of the broad masses.”77 This was of course an idealistic understanding of the avant-garde that Brecht, in some ways following Balász, sought to modify in 1952 when he rephrased: “Art and politics must march separately but follow one another.”78 Kipping was not so naive as to assume

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that avant-garde art could be truly groundbreaking, subversive, and original on the one hand and embraced by the masses on the other hand. Quite apart from the difficulty of being able to produce avant-garde art under the suspicious eyes of the party apparatus and the red tape of the studio, he knew that “poetic films are exhausting—factory workers don’t have the energy, to cope with such a demand.”79 Nevertheless, Kipping hoped to reach audiences with his unconventional fare by challenging them with new sensory experiences. Consciousness about pressing sociopolitical issues of GDR life in his opinion would not be raised through didactic socialist realist films but by reintroducing the poetic element into film. In film school Kipping openly rejected the dominant socialist realism at DEFA in his 1982 thesis and alluded to the formalism debate of earlier decades when he demanded the primacy of form over content and insisted on the validity of the subjective perspective of the filmmaker: “The poetic principle in film consists of utilizing all aesthetic means to produce images that express the subjective position of the director, his values, his opinion, his inner disposition, thoughts, feelings, moods for an allegorical depiction of a conflict that cannot be solved practically or logically.”80 Throughout his discussion of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovshenko, and Tarkovsky Kipping stresses two main points: the importance of the poetic principle and the role of art as “counter-art” (Gegenkunst). The poetic is understood by him as the depiction of the impossible, the imagining of that which cannot be: “Poetry always incorporates the impossible, the unreachable, the as of yet unattainable.”81 Truly poetic works will act as counter-art because they conceive as yet unrealized alternatives to common bourgeois practice and question the existing order through experimentation: This counter art is the avant-grade of socialist art, which searches and explores new ways and spaces in life and spirit. It stands in contradiction to the traditional, petit bourgeois, mechanistic, undialectic conceptions of art, values, meanings, and practices and generates and shapes the contradictions and aesthetic qualities of reality; in doing so, it reflects back on it and promotes it in the sense of the communist ideals.82

Congruent with his Romanticist view, Kipping propagates the work of genius in the familiar terms of freedom, intuitive creativity, anarchy, absolutism, and masculinity (“He must want the absolute”).83 Indeed, his approach to filmmaking is reminiscent of Schopenhauer’s description of genius as well as Faustian megalomania.84 Near the end, Kipping’s thesis takes on the urgent tone of a manifesto conjuring unity and commitment to the highest ideals of freedom and egalitarianism: “Socialism is quite nice, but it does not yet satisfy us. We want what Marx has taught us: a society of free people, in which the realm of necessity

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becomes the realm of freedom. We still live in the realm of necessity.”85 The passionate appeal for freedom, for subjective experimentation and for individual expression of genius, has to be understood in the historical context of the social crisis and stagnation of the 1980s.86 Kipping’s first feature film, his diploma film Hommage à Hölderlin (1982) reflects his commitment to finding a new visual language that depicts the irreducible contradictions of human experience. It focuses on the insanity in the late period of Hölderlin’s life and is yet another example of a DEFA film that engages themes of the insane, the fool, and the clown, as we have seen in films by Foth, Weiß, and Günther. Kipping refused to deliver a traditional biopic, such as Hermann Zschoche’s later production Hälfte des Lebens (Half of Life, 1984), which focused in a linear narrative on the early years of the poet, his lack of free expression as a tutor at the home of his aristocratic employer, and his unhappy love affair, which precipitated his descent into madness. Kipping’s film, which begins after Hölderlin has already lived in the Tübingen tower for seven years, is non-chronological and presents viewers instead with visions, nightmares, and personal reflections conveyed not through words but startling visuals, Romantic music by Schubert (Winterreise), and radical montage. Kipping’s editor, Karin Geiß, remembers the director’s editing approach as random and arbitrary, leading her to conclude that the order of the film’s individual sequences could be readily exchanged.87 The goal of this aesthetic strategy was to perceive the subjective poet’s reality from within and present it to the audience as his objective view of the world—an approach later repeated in Novalis—Die blaue Blume (1995)—to suggest that not the poet but the world is insane: “that the world is simply how he sees it . . . that the world is insane.”88 In one scene Hölderlin is resting in the forest, when his caretaker joins him. We hear her soothing cajoling words mixed low in the soundtrack. More prominently audible is a collage of Hölderlin’s inner thoughts on the place of the poet in the world over a sound track of avant-garde music. The layered sound track thus makes audible the schizophrenic experience of the poet and his increasing difficulty in differentiating between internal and external reality. The viewer learns little about Hölderlin’s biography or his life’s work. Instead we see a wandering poet, deeply alienated from society, nature, and even himself (as suggested by the figure of a boy staged as his younger alter-ego) set in composed landscapes of archaic props: water, skulls, masks, animals, fire, and ruins of Greek columns. Kipping’s writings on the film offer only indirect hints for interpretation: “In Hölderlin’s poetry he expresses his forceful marches into the land of freedom through an abundance of similes and metaphors.”89 Kipping’s visual collage was intended to function as a cinematic poem90 and appeal to the audience’s aesthetic sensibility as opposed to their intellect: “Aesthetic appropriation

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Fig. 2.4. Rolf Ludwig as Hölderlin in Hommage à Hölderlin. HFF Konrad Wolf; photograph by Martin Schlesinger.

is work of the senses.”91 While Zschoche’s Hölderlin takes place entirely in the elegant houses and gardens of the aristocracy, Kipping’s Hommage is staged in the solitude of the countryside, in the forest and inside the tower of his later confinement. Almost all the buildings depicted are in ruins, including the fragments of a house with a few walls and a piano to illustrate the separation of the poets from society: “All those who still love genius, the beautiful, and respect it, live like strangers in their own house.”92 The film’s central metaphors signal the stagnation and impotence that Kipping so palpably experienced himself as a filmmaker in the GDR and which by extension he ascribed to Hölderlin’s situation in Germany after 1815. The film contains repeated sequences with metronomes placed everywhere in the landscape, ticking the time away. With unmistakable symbolism, one metronome is placed inside a golden birdcage. Hommage also shows a clock on a church steeple that has stopped (echoing Benjamin’s Geschichtsphilosophische Thesen) and windmills without vanes. Kipping’s Hölderlin, unlike Cervantes’s Don Quixote, cannot even fight windmills any more but instead withdraws into himself in the face of the irresolvable contradictions in the world. This inner exile potentially affects not only the poet’s mental health but also the public reaction to his work. To illustrate this, Kipping shows Hölderlin tied up in thick rope and alone inside his dark tower when he recites the famous “Chastisement to the Germans” from Hyperion, also heard in Letztes aus

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der DaDaeR, in which Hölderlin scolds the Germans for their lack of courage and sensibility.93 These reflections on the balancing act of the artist between inner immigration and resistance on the one hand and isolation and insanity on the other hand are remarkable for a young film student who had not yet graduated, and reflect Kipping’s powerfully felt sense of alienation. Despite the sense of the poet’s isolation that Kipping’s film conveys, it is remarkably in tune with the zeitgeist of the last generation. Like Ulrich Weiß’s Heine film, Kipping highlights the theme of disillusionment, which is signified by the broken and discarded symbols of revolutionary hope: the French flag, a drum, a Greek column. But unlike Weiß’s Heine, Kipping’s Hölderlin from the first image of his wanderings in the woods, bent under the weight of the Greek column and accompanied by Schubert’s Fremd bin ich eingezogen lives entirely withdrawn from the world. Kipping’s diploma film led to difficulties within the school and by extension in the studio. Hölderlin was screened only in small circles for select audiences (not on television, as was customary for diploma films) and then quickly stored away, while the director himself was reassigned to work in the TV studio, where—once again parallel to the TV studio experience of Weiß and Foth—his next documentary project on a brigade of roofers earned him a disciplinary party investigation and final dismissal. Hommage à Hölderlin generated a very different response from the few critics who were able to see the film, summarized in exemplary fashion by Helmut Ullrich: “This is the type of film lyricism of which the great Hungarian film theorist Béla Balázs once dreamed.”94 Several of the stylistic elements that made Hommage so controversial can be traced back to Kipping’s interest in montage, as observed in the films of the historical avant-garde, both Russian and Surrealist. The very fast-cut sequences of seemingly random imagery, a kind of visual stream of consciousness, perhaps intended to visualize the poet’s interior thought processes, that appear repeatedly in the film can be found in nuce already in several of Kipping’s student films. In Bahnpostfahrer (Postaltrainrider, 1980), his second-year practice film in documentary at the film school, Kipping updates John Grierson’s classic Night Mail (1936), which had utilized poetry by Auden and music by Britten to render a rhythmic appreciation of the work of night train postal workers in England. In Kipping’s film, the focus is less on the work of the postal worker and more on his dreams for personal happiness quite outside his job. Consequently, the interviews with him are interspersed with uncommented montage sequences evoking the personal desires of the protagonist: close-ups of lips, candles, plants, and eyes, and long-held surreal-looking shots of a full moon behind a tall chimney, reminiscent of Vertov and Bunuel. The film opens with a quote by Rilke “But tell

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me, who are they, those vagrants, just a little more transient than we ourselves,”95 which sets the tone for the director’s interest in the subjective, personal, private, inconspicuous. This film does not celebrate the young mail sorter as a socialist worker hero, an exemplary member of the workforce. Unlike in Grierson’s film, a poem praising the lives of nocturnal postal workers, the viewer learns nothing about their work in Kipping’s film. Instead, the protagonist admits freely on camera his readiness to quit the job as soon as his dream girl is found. Similarly, another early film practice, entitled week end (1979), instead of celebrating the deserved resting days of productive workers, shows the deadly boredom, stagnation, and alienation of the couple from each other, themselves (“Who am I? Who are you?”), and their environment. The remarkably uncensored student films once again demonstrate many recurring ideas, visual strategies, and interests that resurfaced in later, frequently more scrutinized and thus censored films of the young directors. After several years of isolation and inability to work in film or television in the GDR, Kipping received a second chance in the form of a scholarship to develop a film about his childhood in a GDR village during the early 1950s. Begun in 1986 under the title Schaukelpferd im Regen (Rocking Horse in the Rain), this project allowed him to conduct interviews with family and friends in Mayen regarding the experiences of ordinary GDR citizens during the early days of socialism. Following this research, Kipping, like his fellow film student Helke Misselwitz later, became a “Meisterschüler” (post-graduate student) of Heiner Carow’s at the Academy of the Arts, where he wrote the script for Land hinter dem Regenbogen. But despite Carow’s influence and support, the film-script would never have found backing in the studio. Archaic images of grotesque violence, widespread corruption, and the religious iconography used to depict Stalinist policies made the film untenable. Only after the collapse of the GDR regime was Kipping able to use funding from the newly established group “DaDaeR” to realize his script under the title Land hinter dem Regenbogen. Without interference by studio officials Kipping set out to explore the roots of the socialist society that he grew up in. He provides a glimpse of his intentions through the selections of texts by authors such as Bunuel, Nietzsche, Dostojevsky, Hölderlin, Tarkovsky, and Rilke for the film’s press kit. In an excerpt from Bunuel’s autobiographical My Last Sigh, for example, we read: “We deny our history and invent, make up a new one. We are afraid of what we have done. Subconsciously we sense our guilt and deny it.”96 Kipping challenged the foundation myth of the GDR much as Weiß had done with Olle Henry in 1983. While the film was written before the end of that state could have been anticipated, the film’s criticism of grand historical narratives equally applies to the moment of filming in 1990, when another ideological victory was celebrated, namely that of Western capitalism over

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Eastern socialism. In its poetic-abstract universalism, Kipping’s anarchic critique has ironically not lost its meaning in the new world order. DEFA historian Rolf Richter described the cathartic nature of Kipping’s work and prophetically summed up the film’s importance: This film stands at the end of a historic period for films and asks questions about the new beginning. I sensed that the film might one day become a document for the turmoil of the times, for the tension, the liberation, the involvement, the distortions, and especially for the newly awakened desire for creative opposition, for eye opening art, which we wanted to pursue from now on because we had to make do without it and had fought for it for so long.97

Kipping creates nightmarish scenarios of violence and destruction, exploitation, and corruption in and around the small town of Stalina right around the time of Stalin’s death in 1953. Land hinter dem Regenbogen does not tell a chronological story but instead offers little vignettes with recurring characters, such as the Stalinist grandfather, who is trying to reform the local farms into a communist agrarian society. Among the adults of the village, the battles between representatives of the socialist reformers, the conservative forces, the secret Nazis, and the hard-line Communists erupt repeatedly in violent outbursts that result in arson, rape, and murder. The constant and arbitrary violence is mirrored in the interactions between the children: Hans, who is brutally beaten by his father, stamps on a young chicken, squashing it. Later he throws a hand grenade into a fishpond in order to kill another child’s pet fish. Throughout the film the men appear driven by the desire for instant sexual gratification. The Stalinist grandfather, for example, pursues his daughter-in-law, the socialist Heinrich offers his adolescent daughter to the county party official, to ingratiate himself with him, while two hooligan brothers of uncertain political affiliation rape a mentally handicapped girl. An outhouse in the village square serves as the political powerhouse for the activities of the party secretary and local brothel at the same time. Meanwhile, the old Nazi Dr. Probst, dressed in clerical robes, sets the broken arm of communist Franz-Werner into a permanent Nazi salute. The cruel reality of this Stalinist scenario does not change after the dictator’s death in 1953. The film depicts Soviet soldiers restoring order after a rebellion by the townspeople, a scene reminiscent of the June 1953 workers’ uprising in the GDR, but conditions remain the same for the villagers. Kipping gives the hollow ideologies religious overtones by linking the visual iconography of first Stalinism and then socialism with Christian symbols. The Stalinist grandfather is crucified on a signpost painted in black, red, and gold, which becomes his cross in a Christ-like sacrifice at the end of the film. As he gazes across the land he cries (to Stalin), “Father, Father, why have you forsaken me?”98

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In stark contrast to the power-hungry machinations among adults and children, the core values of the socialist utopia have been reduced to empty slogans and meaningless rhetoric. While the communist star is placed on the tip of an extraordinarily phallic-looking monument, the bust of Karl Marx is discarded into the eerie desert-like landscape that surrounds the village. The overturned desolate soil, photographed in an wide-angle aerial view, lends the opening sequence a surreal, apocalyptic quality and clashes with the optimistic socialist slogans that the party officials in the film offer in response to any given crisis. Exposing the hypocrisy of the official socialist language, indicting the refusal to face the grim reality of the workers’ collective, and accusing officials of theft, bribery, and corruption, Kipping does not find many bright spots in his country’s forty-year history. One exception is the character of the rainbow maker, a child who pursues Marie yet has no chance against the stronger but brutal Hans. Undeterred, the rainbow maker creates magical illusions with sparkly glass, shiny pearls, and reflective mirrors for Marie’s—and the audience’s—pleasure. In one scene he persuades Hans and Marie as well as a few adults to join him in a large barrel of rainwater, promising them a rainbow. As they all stare, an oil stain produces the promised rainbow on the water’s surface. The scene’s simplicity reflects a rare moment of communal peace, almost tenderness, without the kitschy overtones that such a symbol might easily produce. The magic of this scene arises despite the pollution, indeed from it rather than from a remote utopian origin. While the allusions to the specific history of the GDR and the language of the cold war are unmistakable, the director creates a visual language that goes beyond the German context. The archaic images of destroyed landscapes, violent power struggles, and sexual exploitation have a universal quality that indicts humanity’s destructive impulses and questions the viability of large-scale utopian models. Taking the example of the failed socialist experiment in the GDR, Kipping’s film suggests that humanist ideologies, including Marxism and even possibly idealist Romanticism, are all too easily parked in the desert, ignored in their essence, and abused for oppressive purposes. The resulting violence is imitated and continued throughout the generations, visualized through repeated close-up shots of a lonely hobbyhorse in the rain, and accompanied by the dramatic music of Gustav Mahler. But such a description does not completely capture the essence of the film. While its political metaphors are easily interpreted in the context of 1989, Land hinter dem Regenbogen is not simply a “pay-back-film” (Abrechnungsfilm) like many of the final DEFA productions. Kipping contrasts the dramatic aerial landscape shots with political iconography and Romantic images of children in white dresses: for example, he presents the viewer with close-up shots of the child Marie as she recites

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Fig. 2.5. The rainbowmaker dazzles Marie with a piece of glass in Land hinter dem Regenbogen. Courtesy of DEFA Stiftung; photograph by Dieter Jaeger.

Kipping’s philosophical manifesto: “Can one say of the roots of a tree that they are less close to heaven then its highest branch? Can one carry fire in the mouth without burning one’s lips?”99 The pathos of such exalted language, paired with the emotional music and explosive violence, fascinated some viewers and repelled others. Kipping’s own aesthetic approach was shaped by his Romanticist interests: Land behind the Rainbow contains elements of fairy tales, folk songs, and nursery rhymes as well as the music of Gustav Mahler, and has a fragmented and ironic story line. Kipping had previously unsuccessfully tried to make films about the Grimm brothers and Caroline Günderode.100 The look of the film is painterly, that is, it consists of iconic collages of allegorical images conveying symbolist meaning. A rocking horse in a cemetery is placed next to a witch who is draped in a long snake, while fire and fog envelope the surreal landscape. Two of Kipping’s three completed full-length feature films focus on the life and work of Romantic poets, Novalis and Hölderlin, while unrealized projects include completed scripts on Heine, Nietzsche, and Meister Eckhard. Kipping labeled his film-aesthetic approach “magical idealism,” emphasizing the need to elevate visual and metaphorical elements and poetic language over conventional narrative structures and dialogue. Kipping’s rejection of wordy DEFA realism and his preferred mode of fragmentary storytelling, as well as his interest in the mysterious link

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of his aesthetic to that of Weiß’s Miraculi. But his ruminations about truth and innocence are far less cerebral than Weiß’s sober-satirical depiction of late socialism. In Miraculi Weiß uses a coming-of-age tale to satirize the absurdities of the adult world through the eyes of an earnest young man—a type of anti-Bildungsroman. Kipping, in a film about his own as well as the GDR’s childhood, employs the Romantic notion of naive innocence through the child Marie, dressed in a long white dress. Her character stands in stark contrast to the corruption that originates from the world of politics, represented by the adults. However, the violence and corruption powerfully affect the children’s world. Marie, whose poetic voice-over is reminiscent of Herzog’s apocalyptic retelling of the creation myth in Fata Morgana (1972) as well as Peter Handke’s poetic narration for Wim Wender’s Himmel über Berlin (1987), is shown originally as one with nature. In the opening shot, she is shown spread-eagled across a massive tree trunk, as if enveloped by the natural world, while her voice-over states: “I was thus connected to everything, rooted in the things that grow.”101 This wholesome non-alienated state is immediately destroyed as the camera moves laterally from the poetic evocations of a mysterious earth in its Ur-state to a shot of two adults, who with great satisfaction kill a rabbit—the first of many acts of violent cruelty to come. The pure child Marie, while fascinated by the sparkly toys of the rainbow-maker, is from the start attracted to the abused and abusive boy Hans, who carries the endless acts of violence from the world of the adults to that of the children. The initial image of childhood innocence is thus increasingly replaced by the relentless cruelty of everyone but the rainbow-maker. Parents rape their children, or offer them for prostitution to the Party Secretary, grandparents encourage children to inform on their parents’ critical political views regarding the new socialist state, and neighbors backstab each other. By the end of the film, the ever-present violence and exploitation has scarred everyone: Hans has blown himself up, the grandfather is crucified, the mother has left the family, and the daughter attempts to hang herself after being raped. The film does not postulate an original state of innocence; rather it suspends time and place in favor of a synchronic depiction of history, where the purity of the child is always already tainted by the violence of her elders. The fairy-tale woods of the children’s playground lie side by side with the deforested, mined, and now desert-like landscape, while the once utopian idealism of the adult world has been perverted by totalitarian ideology, propped up by empty propaganda on banners and monuments. Land hinter dem Regenbogen shows the brutal loss of naive innocence through the rape of the child Marie, but the film does not subscribe to the myth of a zero hour. Innocence and violence exist side by side from the opening sequence on. Like Miraculi, which refuses to reduce the failure of the utopian project to a single cause, Kipping points

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Fig. 2.6. Director Herwig Kipping (left) with actor Franciszek Pieczka in Land hinter dem Regenbogen. Courtesy of DEFA Stiftung; photograph by Dieter Jaeger.

to recurring multigenerational power struggles and betrayal. Like Ulrich Weiß in his Olle Henry, Kipping calls into question the tabula rasa version of German historiography and with that the antifascist founding myth of the GDR, as well as the isolationist view that socialism’s failure was inevitable. Instead, Kipping contextualizes the perversion of Marxist ideas in the GDR by reminding viewers of the continued presence of older Nazi ideologies as well as the constant battles against West Germany’s consumerist capitalism. Throughout, the music of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony “Das Lied von der Erde” as well as excerpts from Mahler’s other symphonies and song cycles amplify the highly Romantic tone that the visuals evoke. The soundtrack lends gravitas, particularly when farcical sets such as the giant phallus in the village square might otherwise derail the film and reduce it to mere parody. Instead, Kipping creates an apocalyptic nightmare of creation’s physical and spiritual violation. Mahler’s mournful Lied von der Erde, which was inspired by ancient Chinese poetry and reflected the composer’s complex emotions regarding the beauty and transience of the world as well as his own alienation from it, accompanies a powerful opening bird’s-eye view of destroyed earth. The deserted country, a result of the GDR’s aggressive aboveground mining of brown coal, becomes a metaphor, not for economic prowess and socialist progress, but rather for its destructive impact on nature (and by implication, society.)102 By

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linking political satire with his unique style of poetic anarchy, Kipping’s film offers a wholesale indictment of all teleological narratives (including the cinematic) of progress. Kipping based his self-declared affinity for the Romantics on their awareness of inevitable failure, symbolized by the blue flower (his last film, Novalis, was subtitled Die blaue Blume). Yet Kipping also points to the potential to pervert Romantic idealism for universalism into fascist totalitarianism by framing scenes of Novalis within the Nazi architecture of Berlin’s Olympic stadium. He is clearly attracted to the irreducible contradictions of Romantic thought: the gentle Marie is attracted to the brutality of Hans; the idealistic grandfather is also a Stalinist tyrant; the communist doctrine of egalitarianism allows the violent exploitation of women. Compared with Kipping’s earlier Hölderlin film, Land hinter dem Regenbogen expresses the full force of years of pent-up creative energy and frustration. As in the case of Miraculi, we can only speculate how different the film may have looked and felt if Kipping had been given a chance to make it years earlier. However, it nevertheless palpably captures and unleashes that very frustration, giving audiences a feel for the devastating effects of silencing the critical and creative ideas of DEFA’s last generation. The end is decidedly less optimistic: Hommage à Hölderlin, despite its focus on the isolated and insane poet, ends with a close-up of actor Rolf Ludwig’s face, smiling directly and challengingly into the camera: a poet undefeated. Land, on the other hand, ends with an aerial view of a discarded bust of Karl Marx in the desert, amid destroyed, uninhabitable land. In 1990 the time was not yet ripe for this film to be appreciated. The combination of current political themes, Romantic overtones, and stark visuals earned Land hinter dem Regenbogen a mixed rating by the German Rating Board: “The film is very difficult to understand—maybe it cannot be understood at all. The scenes seem randomly put together. And why the animals are being arbitrarily slaughtered remains a mystery.”103 Antje Vollmer, who was instrumental in nominating Kipping’s film for the German Film Prize in 1992, called the director an “aesthetic anarchist.”104 The film won the silver medal, thus giving the director funds for his new project, Novalis, which proved to be as controversial in unified Germany as Hölderlin had been in the GDR some thirteen years earlier. Kipping’s intuitive approach, appetite for improvisation, pathos, and outlandish cinematography earned him mixed reviews and charges of being bombastic, obsessive, uncompromising, and, ironically, overly intellectual. Like Hölderlin and Land hinter dem Regenbogen, Novalis is driven by the director’s incessant quest to create visual metaphors for human experiences and their inevitably unfulfilled yearning. Despite his critical acclaim in the immediate post-wall years, Kipping’s transition into the new Germany has not been smooth. His numerous

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applications for film funding for his Nietzsche, Heine, and Eckard projects have remained unsuccessful. In the summer of 2005 he organized a private screening of a newly edited and expanded DVD version of Land hinter dem Regenbogen at the Babylon cinema in Berlin. The new 2-1/2 hour version contained mostly material taped from commercial television as well as computer-generated images that attempted to make the film less Wende specific and more universal. Kipping was eager to discuss the old and new versions with his audience and readily admitted the improvised character of the new film. He was utterly unconcerned about his process of recycling prefabricated media images, the familiar visual of our commercialized viewing habits. Mostly, he said, he needed to create new images and made do with what was available to him. Once again without funds to create his own visual collages, he thus reverted to found images, that is, preexisting television images of the Iraq war from news broadcasts and of Stalin from the History Channel and used basic technology in order to remain productive, in motion. Thomas Wilkening, head of the production group DaDaeR, wrote about the group’s goals in February 1990: “We will support the unusual, the experiment, the risk . . . because what was only a hunch a few months ago has now, with the hurriedly changing structures in this country, become certainty: art film will urgently require solidarity for its preservation.”105 A historical accident provided Weiß and Kipping with the means to produce their personal and surreal films during the chaos of German unification. They remain uniquely personal and raw visions of a time that has since been reconstructed in popular narrative films produced for international audiences, such as Good Bye, Lenin! (2002) and Lives of Others (2006). The latter films’ dramatic narratives fulfill the demand for popular cinema, but necessarily fall short of challenging audiences to ponder history critically through the lens of art. Kipping’s Land hinter dem Regenbogen remains as a meditation on false beginnings and the abuse of ideologies, while Weiß’s Miraculi captures the sense of physical and psychological exhaustion at the end of the GDR. Both films convey the rage and bitterness of their directors over lost chances. Their fragmentary form reflects a sense of disconnectedness in every sense of the word. In the larger world of art cinema and experimental film, Weiß’s and Kipping’s contribution may appear belated, untimely, but looking at them today, at a distance of several decades, they are ironically becoming more and more timely again because of how they captured the historical moment, intuitively following the Hegelian demand that form be content. For Ulrich Weiß, this meant highlighting the interconnectedness of betrayal at all levels: he presents a series of small, seemingly insignificant misdemeanors that all lead up to the total catastrophe. Kipping, on the other hand, investigates how childlike innocence is systematically poisoned by the power-hungry violence of ideologies that are born from perverted

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idealist utopian dreams. The sparse unpredictability of Weiß’s more cerebral aesthetic and the anarchic explosions of Kipping’s Romantic sensibility were both incompatible with the dominant DEFA style and could not have been made at the DEFA studio before 1990. Ironically, their time may have arrived only now, decades after German unification, when audiences have gained sufficient distance to recognize the films’ critical visions beyond the events of 1989.

Notes 1

Herwig Kipping, Poesie und Film (diploma thesis, Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen, Babelsberg, 1982), 230. 2

“Aber im Film bewegten sich die Bilder plötzlich, anders als wir selbst. Ich glaube das war der wichtige Punkt: Bewegung . . . Man konnte natürlich auch eine Öffentlichkeit durch Film erreichen, eine, die wir uns privat organisiert hatten.” Cornelia Schleime, “DEFA, die Sechste,” in DEFA 50: Gespräche aus acht Filmnächten, ed. Ingrid Poss (Velten: Brandenburgische Landeszentrale für politische Bildung, 1997), 139. 3

Poss, DEFA Gespräche, 145.

4

Poss, DEFA Gespräche, 150.

5

Compare Birgit Hein’s description of her beginnings in avant-garde film in the 1960s as described in Gabriele Jutz and Birgit Hein, “Interview, Gabriele Jutz with Birgit Hein,” in X Screen, Film Installations and Actions in the 1960s and 1970s, ed. Matthias Michalka (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2004), 118. 6

Herwig Kipping, interview with the author, Kino Babylon, Berlin, Jul. 2006.

7

Claus Löser, Strategien der Verweigerung, and Löser and Karin Fritsche, Gegenbilder: Filmische Subversion. 8

See http://on1.zkm.de/zkm/stories/storyReader$6074 for a description of the special exhibit on GDR filmmakers in the Leipzig exhibit. 9

Compare, for example, Claus Löser’s autobiographical experiences as described in Strategien der Verweigerung, 378–86. 10 Ralf Schenk, “Experimente: Ein unvollendeter Spielfilm des Theatermachers Jürgen Gosch,” FilmDienst 10 (2009): 11. See also the chapter on the film in Foth, Orangenmond im Niemandsland. 11 “Wir alle wussten irgendwann nicht mehr, wo es hingehen sollte. Und wir hatten die Hoffnung, dass Jürgen Gosch es weiss. Aber es stellte sich heraus, dass er es auch nicht wusste” (Schenk, Experimente, 11). 12 “Ich habe den Eindruck, dass einige an dieser Filmhochschule vergessen haben, dass man in diesem Lande deutsch spricht und nicht polnisch” (Schenk, Experimente, 11). 13 Herwig Kipping, interview with Ralf Schenk for publicity materials for Novalis—Die blaue Blume 1995, Archiv Film Museum Potsdam.

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Béla Balász, Der Geist des Films (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001), 75.

15

“grosser Weltriss auch durch das Herz des Dichters.” Hans Kaufmann in Ulrich Weiß, Meine Waffen sind nicht gebrochen—nur mein Herze brach, film for the 175th birthday of Heine, first broadcast Dec. 12, 1972, GDR television, 6:50. 16

“Wenn Kipping eine Chance haben sollte sein unzweifelhaft bemerkenswertes Talent im Spielfilm zu erproben, so kann das nur in unserer Produktionsgruppe mit ihren besonderen Bedingungen erfolgen. Diese besonderen Bedingungen wurden schließlich aus der Erkenntnis heraus geschaffen, daß eine gesamte Generation von DDR Filmschaffenden an der Verwirklichung ihrer eigenen Projekte gehindert wurden und daß die Ansichten einer gesamten Generation ungehört bleiben. Es wird nicht mehr allzu viele Gelegenheiten geben, verlorene Zeit nachzuholen. Unsere Gruppe ist der Meinung, daß Kippings Material besonders dazu geeignet ist, einen wichtigen Beitrag zu diesem Prozeß zu leisten.” Thomas Wilkening, “Letter to Horst Hartwig,” November 5, 1990, Archiv Film Museum Potsdam. Uncatalogued material from the estate of Thomas Wilkening. The archival materials cited here are in the process of being catalogued and at present do not have more specific classification numbers assigned. I am grateful to Birgit Scholz and her colleagues for allowing me access to the files. 17

“das Werden und Wachsen unseres stabilen und blühenden Arbeiter- und Bauernstaates” This planted letter to the editor of the Socialist Unity Party paper Neues Deutschland, signed by “Comrade Hubert Vater,” was widely considered to have been written by Erich Honecker, head of state, himself. It signaled increased party interference at the film studio. Cited in Elke Schieber, “Anfang vom Ende oder Kontinuität des Argwohns, 1980 bis 1989” in Schenk, Das zweite Leben der Filmstadt Babelsberg, 1946–92, 266. 18

“Der Sozialismus beinhaltet doch nur uralte Träume und Ideen. Spannend ist, ob sie Utopien bleiben müssen oder ob man davon etwas realisieren kann. Viele haben im Erinnern an diese Werte die Wirklichkeit kritisiert.” Schieber, “Anfang vom Ende,” 267. 19

“Es ist eine Lebensbedingung der Filmkunst, daß sie nicht nur auf ihrer niedrigsten, sondern auch auf ihrer höchsten Stufe volkstümlich werde.” Béla Balász, Geist des Films, 147. 20

“Gefühl ohne Konsequenz” (ibid., 155).

21

Weiß had considered realizing this film in 1991 but decided against it for financial reasons. The script was reprinted in Film und Fernsehen 1–2 (1996): 36–43. 22

Ulrich Weiß, “Über die Gefährdung des sensiblen Gleichgewichts unseres Daseins,” in apropos: Film 2003; Das 4. Jahrbuch der DEFA-Stiftung, ed. Ralf Schenk and Erika Richter (Berlin: Bertz, 2003), 158. 23

Peter Hames, The Czechoslovakian New Wave, 2nd ed. (London: Wallflower, 2005), 158.

24

Ulrich Weiß, “Tanz im Volkshaus—eine Skizze: Entwurf zu einem Film, der nie realisiert wurde,” Film und Fernsehen 1/2 (1996): 37. 25

“Zu Vereinsvergnügen, Hochzeiten, Kindtaufen, Beerdigungen, zu Demonstrationen, Feierstunden, Heimatabenden und in der Kirche. Sie spielen was

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gebraucht wird . . . Tanzmusik, Marschmusik, Stimmungsmusik, sakral, sinfonisch, folkloristisch” (ibid., 37). 26

Ulrich Weiß, interview with the author in Ferch, July 2011.

27

“Beginnt der Tanz, warten die Mädchen, bis einer von der anderen Seite sie holt. Und wenn sie eines Tages wollen, führt sie der Weg über die Wendeltreppe hinauf zu ihnen [den Priviligierten auf der Gallerie]. Und hinauf wollen sie alle. Von oben können sie auf die anderen hinabschauen. Sie wissen noch nicht, oder wollen es noch nicht wahrhaben, dass sie sich noch oft nach unten sehnen werden” (Weiß, “Tanz im Volkshaus,” 37). 28

Forman’s 1964 first feature film, Black Peter, already exemplified the powerful effects of simple but unconventional camera angles that expressed visually the generational conflict. In one of numerous scenes where Peter’s father lectures his son about proper conduct, the camera is placed level with Peter’s head, but behind him, and captures in extreme close-up, from Peter’s perspective, his towering father’s admonitions. Because of the camera angle, only the father’s lower face is visible, notably his mouth. 29

Hames, Czechoslovakian New Wave, 115.

30

Balász, Geist des Films, 75.

31

“Wie nach Blauvogel gesagt wurde: Haste uns den Indianerfilm kaputtgemacht und nach Dein unbekannter Bruder: Haste uns den antifaschistischen Film kaputtgemacht, das heisst, du machst uns unser Puppenspielzeug kaputt” (Weiß, “Über die Gefährdung,” 158). 32

Balázs, Geist des Films, 157.

33

“In Blauvogel sagt einer: ‘Ist sie nicht wunderbar, unsere Welt?’ Wunder aber kannst du nicht erklären, sonst sind sie es nicht. Du musst sie erleben” (Weiß, “Über die Gefährdung,” 20). 34

Böttcher’s film was banned as a result of a sweeping ban on the entire year’s production of DEFA feature films in 1965, the so-called “Kannichen” films. 35

“Das Einbeziehen der zufälligen Erscheinung fördert die Wirklichkeitsnähe des Dokumentarfilmes und schafft erst die Möglichkeit in der Zufälligkeit die Notwendigkeit, in der äußeren Erscheinung das Wesen, in der Unordnung die Ordnung, im Unwesentlichen das Wesentliche, im Alltäglichen das Außergewöhnliche zu finden. Der Rezipient lernt selbst in der Erscheinung das Wesentliche zu entdecken. Er lernt sehen. Deshalb ist es auch notwendig ihm genügend sinnlich-emotionales Material zu liefern. Ulrich Weiß, Zur Beziehung zwischen handelnder Figur und Umgebung beim Arrangieren einer Grundsituation im Dokumentarfilm dargestellt an Jürgen Böttchers Film ‘Der Sekretär,’ (diploma thesis, HFF, 1972), 72. 36

Weiß’s film uses the famous Heine quote from the sixteenth chapter of the book LeGrand on the theme of the artist as a fool in bourgeois society. Heinrich Heine, Ideen: Das Buch LeGrand (Berlin: Greifenverlag, 2009). 37

See Daniela Berghahn, Hollywood behind the Wall. Berghahn writes: “With the exception of Blauvogel . . . all were made by the same artistic work group, Roter Kreis, which specialized in the genre” (42); Katrin Sieg, Ethnic Drag: Performing Race, Nation, Sexuality in West Germany (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2002), esp. chapter 4, “Winnetou’s Grandchildren: Indian Identification, Ethnic

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Expertise, White Embodiment,” 115–50; Gerd Gemünden, “Between Karl May and Karl Marx: The DEFA Indianerfilme (1965–83),” in New German Critique 82 (Winter 2001): 25–38. Gemünden writes: “I will not consider here two films made without Gojko Mitic, Blauvogel (1979) and Atkins (1985), because even though they involve Native Americans, the story is not told from their perspective” (25). 38

Gemünden, “Between Karl May and Karl Marx,” 30.

39

Sieg, Ethnic Drag, 144.

40

See the work of Glenn Penny on the representation of Native Americans in the GDR. Penny offers a differentiated account of the various discourses, with particular focus on the work of Liselotte Welskopf Henrich, the author of the popular books on which the first DEFA Indianerfilm, Söhne der großen Bärin, was based. H. Glenn Penny, “Red Power: Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich and the Indian Activist Networks in East and West Germany,” Central European History 41, no. 3 (Sept. 2008): 447–76. And H. Glenn Penny, “Elusive Authenticity: The Quest for the Authentic Indian in German Public Culture,” in Comparative Studies in Society and History 48, no. 4 (2006): 798–819. 41

“Das Paradies, Georgie, das Paradies. Schau, hab’ ich dich belogen?”

42

“Nach alter strenger Sitte ist mit diesem Tag jeder Tropfen weißen Blutes aus deinen Adern gewaschen” (ibid., 25:00). 43

“Wir lieben dich. Wir verteidigen dich. Du bist einer von uns. Wenn du die Grenzen unseres Stammes überschreitest, bist du unser Feind.” 44

“Ihre Welt war voller Geheimnisse.”

45

“Ich bin keine Schildkröte.”

46

“Dieser Tag hatte Wunden geschlagen, die keine Zeit mehr heilte.”

47

Caitlin is played by Jörg Foth, who was assistant director in this film.

48

“Ich war gezwungen mich der vergangenen Bilder zu erinnern, weil ich nun gehen muss. Dem Kommenden sehe ich mit Gelassenheit entgegen, denn ich habe gelernt, in allem einen Sinn zu suchen.” Shooting script for Blauvogel (1979), personal copy of Jörg Foth, n.p. 49

“Ich musste mich der vergangenen Bilder erinnern, damit ich erkenne, wer ich bin. Ich habe Angst mein Gesicht zu verlieren.” 50

“Der Maler hat ihn getötet.”

51

“Was ist denn überhaupt eine Chance für die Menschheit? Ein dritter Weg?” in Ulrich Weiß, “Der dritte Weg oder zwischen den Stühlen ist auch ein Platz” Film und Fernsehen 2 (1992): 19. 52

“Wie soll einer ein gesellschaftliches Wesen sein, wenn er nicht zuerst er selber ist.” The limitations of deconstructing representations of the other within the conventions of a genre such as Indianerfilm became painfully evident during discussions with representatives of Native American communities from the region where the film is set. While exploring a possible screening within a Native American lecture series under the theme “Lives Caught between Cultures” it was pointed out that a filmic depiction of masks and rituals violated spiritual beliefs and undermined the efforts of Native American faithkeepers today to fight against

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clichéd representations from the outside. Despite its progressive identity politics, the film, once censored in the GDR, could once again not be shown without offending some Native American sensibilities. 53

Axel Geiß, Repression und Freiheit: DEFA Regisseure zwischen Fremd und Selbstbestimmung (Potsdam: Brandenburgische Landeszentrale für politische Bildung, 1997), 157: “.  .  . [dass] dieser in Arbeitsgesprächen bzw. Diskussionen seinen Gesprächspartnern ‘treudoof’ ins Gesicht sieht und dann doch macht was er will.” 54

“Wir meinen, dass es so wie dargestellt nicht war. Und so wie dargestellt ist auch das Gros der antifaschistischen Widerstandskämpfer nicht gewesen. Wir haben für unsere kommunistischen Ideale auch unter den schwierigsten Bedingungen gekämpft, von der Gewissheit überzeugt, dass der Sieg unser sein wird” (ibid., 160). 55

Balász, Geist des Films, 131.

56

Ralf Schenk, “Ulrich Weiß,” in DEFA—Spielfilm-Regisseure und ihre Kritiker, ed. Rolf Richter (Berlin: Henschel Verlag, 1983), 244.

57

Compare Erika Richter, “Zum Oeuvre von Ulrich Weiß: Kommentierte Filmographie,” in Schenk and Richter, apropos: Film 2003, 174–90. 58

“Wir dürfen nicht misstrauisch gegeneinander sein. Das ist, als wären wir misstrauisch gegen uns selbst” (Mein unbekannter Bruder, 1:29). 59

“Das ist, als wären wir misstrauisch gegen uns selbst” (Bruder, 1:29).

60

Geiß, Repression und Freiheit, 165.

61

Ulrich Weiß, “Der dritte Weg,“20.

62

“Solange Menschen betrügen, solange muss man Menschen kontrollieren.”

63

“Für einen Kontrolleur sind alle Fahrgäste potentielle Betrüger.”

64

“Wir wissen, wer du bist—wir wissen alles.”

65

“So ein Spielchen ist das . . . etwas . . . was es nicht ist.”

66

Weiß, “Der dritte Weg,” 20.

67

“Locker bleiben, junger Mann. Das Leben ist ein Spiel unserer Illusionen” (Miraculi, 56:41). 68

Richter, “Zum Oeuvre von Ulrich Weiß,” 190.

69

Lothar Lambert, “Tief gegrübelt,” Tagesspiegel, Oct. 26, 1992.

70

Dieter Strutz, “Ein Wunder, das eher wunderlich als wunderbar ist,” Berliner Morgenpost, Nov. 19, 1992. 71

Knut Hicketier, “Miraculi,” epd Film 10 (1993): 43–44.

72

Friedericke Freier, “Ulrich Weiß’ Miraculi,” Tageszeitung, Jan. 28, 1993.

73

Ursula Heyne, “Der See, der über Nacht verschwindet,” Neues Deutschland, Nov. 19, 1992. 74

Ralf Schenk, “So waren wir nicht,” Tagesspiegel, Jan. 24, 1998.

75

Radonitzer, “Drei Versuche vom Antihelden,” in Schenk and Richter, apropos: Film 2003, 172. 76

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Radonitzer, “Drei Versuche vom Antihelden,” 170.

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77

Cited in Karlheinz Barck, Dieter Schlenstedt, and Wolfgang Thierse, eds., “Einleitung,” Künstlerische Avant-garde (Berlin: Akademieverlag, 1979), 10. 78

Cited in Gudrun Klatt, “Schwierigkeiten mit der Avant-garde: Beobachtungen zum Umgang mit dem Erbe der sozialistischen Avant-garde während der Übergangsperiode in der DDR,” in Barck, Schlenstedt, and Thierse, Künstlerische Avant-garde, 267. 79

Kipping, Poesie und Film, 216.

80

“Das poetische Prinzip im Film besteht darin, daß alle Gestaltungsmittel dazu benutzt werden, solche Einstellungen zu produzieren, die das subjektive Verhältnis seines Machers, seine Wertung, seine Haltung, seine innere Einstellung, seine Gedanken, Gefühle und Stimmungen im Sinne seines dominierenden Gedankens, Gefühls, Stimmung auszudrücken, so daß eine sinnbildhafte Darstellung eines prakktisch und logisch unlösbaren Konflikts entsteht.” Ibid., 202–3. 81

“Poesie verkörpert stets auch das Unmögliche, das was unerreichbar ist, nicht nur, was noch nicht erreichbar ist” (ibid., 245). 82

“Diese Gegenkunst ist die Avant-garde der sozialistischen Kunst, die experimentell und konzeptionell neue Wege und Räume des Lebens und des Geistes sucht und erkundet, die in Opposition zu herkömmlichen, kleinbürgerlichen, mechanistischen, undialektischen Kunstauffassungen, Werten, Bedeutungen, und Praktiken stehend, die Widersprüche und ästhetischen Qualitäten der Wirklichkeit erarbeitend und gestaltend, auf diese zurückwirkt und sie im Sinne der kommunistischen Ideale vorantreibt” (ibid., 239). 83

“Er muss das Absolute wollen” (ibid., 248).

84

“Du willst etwas vollenden, du willst erleuchtet sein, du willst dich vereinigen mit dem Innersten, was diese Welt zusammenhält.” Kipping, interview with Ralf Schenk for publicity materials for Novalis—Die blaue Blume. 85

“Der Sozialismus ist zwar ganz schön, aber er reicht uns nicht, wir wollen das, was Marx uns gelehrt hat, eine Gesellschaft freier Menschen, in der das Reich der Notwendigkeit zum Reich der Freiheit wird und wir leben noch im Reich der Notwendigkeit” (Kipping, Poesie und Film, 262). 86

Elisabeth Miltschitzky, Hölderlin—ein traumatisierter Dichter als Filmheld (Marburg: Tectum Verlag, 1999), 98. 87

Miltschitzky, Hölderlin, 26.

88

“dass die Welt einfach so ist, wie er sie sieht . . . dass die Welt wahnsinnig ist” (ibid., 27). 89

“In seiner Dichtung drückt er seine inneren Gewaltmärsche in das Land der Freiheit durch eine Fülle von Vergleichen und Metaphern aus” (ibid., 30). 90

“Filmgedicht” (ibid., 23).

91

“Ästhetische Aneignung ist Arbeit der Sinne” (ibid., 15).

92

“Die den Genius noch achten, die das Schöne lieben und es achten, sie leben in der Welt wie Fremdlinge im eigenen Haus” (Kipping, Hommage, 33:49). 93

In Zschoche’s Hälfte des Lebens this famous quote is also used but in the context of Hölderlin’s unhappy love for his employer’s wife and subsequent dismissal from the household. The quote’s political subtext is thus trivialized on the surface

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as an expression of a private crisis, but sensitive GDR viewers might still have taken note of its critical potential. 94

(Miltschitzky, 33).

95

“Wer aber sind sie, sag mir, die Fahrenden, diese ein wenig Flüchtigern noch als wir selbst.” Rainer Maria Rilke, “Fünfte Elegie,” Duieneser Elegien (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1923). Cited in Herwig Kipping, Bahnpostfahrer, HFF documentary film, 1980. 96

“Wir leugnen unsere Geschichte und erfinden, erschwindeln uns eine neue. Wir haben Angst vor dem, was wir angerichtet haben. Wir spüren unbewußt unsere Schuld und wir verleugnen sie.” Louis Bunuel, Mein letzter Seufzer (Berlin: Verlag Volk und Welt, 1984), 7. 97

“Dieser Film steht am Ende einer filmgeschichtlichen Periode, und er stellt die Frage nach dem Neubeginn. Und ich ahnte, daß er einst vielleicht ein Dokument sein würde für dieses Umkippen der Zeiten, für Anspannung, Befreiung, Verstrickungen, Verrenkungen, vor allem für eine neu erwachte Lust an kreativer Wiedersetzlichkeit, an diesen augenöffnenden Dingen, denen wir von jetzt ab immer verfallen sein wollten, weil wir sie so entbehrt und auch mühsam errungen hatten.” Rolf Richter, Land hinter dem Regenbogen, Pressemappe (Berlin: BasisFilm Verleih, 1991), 10. 98

“Vater, Vater, warum hast du mich verlassen?” Herwig Kipping, Land hinter dem Regenbogen—Drehbuch (Babelsberg: DEFA, 1990), 63. 99

“Kann man von den Wurzeln eines Baumes sagen, daß sie dem Himmel weniger nahe sind als sein höchster Ast? Kann man Feuer im Munde tragen, ohne sich die Lippen zu verbrennen?” Ibid., 5. 100

Dietmar Hochmuth, “Herwig Kipping.” in DEFA Nova (Berlin: Freunde der deutschen Kinemathek, 1993), 103.

101

“So war ich verbündet mit allem, verwurzelt mit den Dingen die wachsen” (Kipping, Land hinter dem Regenbogen, 1:10). 102

The ecological nightmare of the Lausitz region, where above-ground coal mining had displaced many villages and left large stretches of land destroyed, become the setting and toppic of many Wende-period feature and documentary films, including for directors like Misselwitz and Welz. 103

Hochmuth, “Herwig Kipping,” in DEFA Nova (Berlin: Freunde der deutschen Kinemathek, 1993), 92. 104 “ästhetischer Anarchist,” Antje Vollmer, “Endlich: Ein neuer deutscher Film,” Tageszeitung, Jul. 3, 1992. 105

Thomas Wilkening, “Produktionsgruppe DaDaeR,” in Defa Blende 4–5 (1990): 3.

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3: Absurd Endgames: Peter Welz’s Banale Tage

W

HEN THE WALL FELL,

Peter Welz was twenty-six years old and about to graduate with a degree in feature-film direction from the film school in Babelsberg (HFF). He was lucky: unlike his mentors and teachers in the HFF and film studio, he did not have to wait long years to debut with his first feature film but joined his mentor Jörg Foth and older colleagues Herwig Kipping and Helke Misselwitz in directing one of the only three films that the newly founded production group DaDaeR produced.1 Peter Welz was well known to his older colleagues because of his two student films, Willkommen in der Kantine and Unsere Familie (Our Family, 1989), which were written by Frank Castorf and Leander Haussmann respectively and had attracted significant attention for their unusual aesthetic at the film school as well as at a film festival in Munich, where Welz experienced the fall of the Berlin wall on November 9, 1989.2 After the founding of the DaDaeR group in January 1990, DEFA dramaturge Timothy Grossmann found the story Banale Tage by author Michael Sollorz when he was looking for suitable scripts. It was contained in an anthology of stories by the youngest generation of writers in the archive of East Berlin’s Association of Writers (Schriftstellerverband). The anthology was originally intended for publication in the fall of 1990, but like many other projects became a casualty of the political changes. Grossmann and Welz met with Sollorz in early 1990 and quickly began to develop the script and produce the film as the second film of the group DaDaeR. The rough-cut film was approved by DaDaeR chief, Thomas Wilkening, on September 27, 1990. While the film won a prize at the Max Ophüls Festival in Saarbrücken in 1991, its official Berlin premiere did not take place until early 1992 in the Babylon cinema. The script for Banale Tage was written very quickly and thus blends much of the atmosphere of the Wende year 1990 with reflections about 1970s GDR youth culture. Welz remembers rewriting the script often the night before the next day’s shooting, as the rapidly changing political situation in Germany seemed to make older versions obsolete before they were even filmed.3 While Letztes aus der DaDaeR and Land hinter dem Regenbogen were debuts by then-forty-year-old directors, which focused on the beginning and the end of the GDR respectively, Welz’s film takes stock of the GDR from the perspective of its youngest film artists, those

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born in the 1960s, and focuses on youth culture in the late 1970s when that generation came of age. Welz had focused on this topic in his three student films and we can see a great deal of continuity in narrative themes, casting, and aesthetic principles in Banale Tage. Like some of the other late DEFA films, for example Heiner Carow’s Coming Out (1989), which premiered on November 9, or Roland Gräf’s Tangospieler (1991), Banale Tage would undoubtedly have caused a major stir in the East German film studio and among audiences if the GDR had not ended just then. Welz’s film is a provocative examination of socialist reality for teenagers who were born after the wall had already been built—like its director and much of the crew. The film is not only uncommonly frank in its critical gaze on the lack of opportunities for youth to freely express themselves at work, school, church, or theater, but it presents its absurdist scenario in a radical visual language and humorously self-reflexive manner that was a drastic departure for DEFA films and presented a challenge to both viewers and critics. Indeed, the minutes of the production group approval of the rough cut in September 1990 state this explicitly: “It is important that this film demonstrates a new cinematic language. Visually, this film does not reflect the typical DEFA style.”4 This fulfilled a central demand by members of the youngest DEFA generation in the last decade of the studio’s existence. Producer Thomas Wilkening characterized this new aesthetic in a letter on behalf of the production group DaDaeR in May 1991, which in response to the new market economy requested the conversion of the DEFA production group into an independent DaDaeR Film GmbH located on the former studio space: The three films that were produced during this period, Letztes aus der DaDaeR, Banale Tage, and Land hinter dem Regenbogen, broke with that fatal tradition that caused especially foreign observers to conclude that DEFA films were becoming more and more similar. As different from each other as these three films are, they all present the views of a new generation, search for fresh beginnings, and display a rigor in the approach to their topics that has not been seen in DEFA films for a long time.5

For Welz’s film this commitment to a radical new language meant a self-reflexively theatrical form of scenic narration aimed at capturing GDR archetypes such as the factory supervisor, the minister of culture, or the school principal instead of fully developed individual characters. The dialogues are delivered in a mixture of stilted and everyday language, while the sets symbolically convey the impression of a mechanically stillfunctioning but utterly disillusioned society.6 The rapidly changing external reality in Germany in 1990 rendered the initial focus of criticism of GDR social norms a moving target and led to numerous changes in the

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script during filming. As a result, the film appears far more disjointed and hesitant than Welz’s formally tight student films made in 1988 and 1989. From the vantage point of twenty years later, the film has become a valuable film-historical artifact, as it expresses forcefully a critique of overprotective paternalism toward the youngest GDR generation in the 1970s and 1980s, while at the same time being aware of its own anachronism, as this critique is delivered at the moment of the system’s collapse. Perhaps because of its production circumstances during the Wende the film is also a critical commentary on the possibilities of self-realization for the individual in any political regime in that it explores youthful rebellion versus petit-bourgeois rigidity. Despite the specific GDR context— for example, the parody of paramilitary exercises in the factory—the film retains its pointed critique against conformist opportunism anywhere, which is still valid today, long after the GDR ceased to exist. But while critics questioned the timeliness of a film about 1970s GDR culture twenty-five years ago, Banale Tage’s sober analysis of the bleak outlook for a disillusioned youth with few options for self-fulfillment has once more become relevant today. Upon its release Banale Tage was the least successful of the three films produced by DaDaeR, both in terms of critical reception and audience attention. While many of the films from the period 1990 to 1992 challenge audiences today with frequently heavy symbolism or raw emotion, Banale Tage tackles the deadly boredom of life in the stagnant socialism that was the norm in the GDR of the 1970s with a mix of detached humor and palpably felt pain over the many lost opportunities, time, and idealism. The film allegorically shows grandparents as fairy-tale-reading anachronisms and informants, parents as cynical alcoholics, and teenagers as fatalistic rebels with nowhere to go. But its detached absurdist style also made it difficult for viewers to become emotionally engaged in the characters’ bleak boredom or to be captivated by the visual qualities that reflect the bland interior spaces of 1970s East German architecture. Moreover, the film refuses easy genre categorization and instead switches repeatedly from a tentatively sketched buddy feature in realist mode to highly stylized scenes with symbolic and self-consciously artificial dialogue. Although the more experimental aesthetic of this feature precisely fulfills the production group DaDaeR’s program of innovative new formats, audiences and critics in newly unified Germany either were not aware of this or had no interest in seeing the film through this critical film-historical lens. Lastly, to fully appreciate the film, knowledge about certain events specific to the GDR is useful, for example to be able to grasp the allusion to the 1978 Berlin staging of Tibor Déry’s novel on the infamous Rolling Stones concert at Altamont, California, in 1969.7 In one of the earliest drafts for a manifesto that demanded the formation of an independent production group at the congress of film and

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television workers in 1988, Tony Loeser, Peter Kahane, and Thomas Wilkening opened their statement with the declaration: “Film is an expression of a social contract.”8 Thus while Welz’s film depicts the futility of rebellious acts in the GDR by characters from different generations and backgrounds, the filmmakers were ironically still motivated by their hope that critical films could make meaningfully provocative contributions toward societal change. The film locates the unspectacular causes of the GDR’s demise in the bureaucratic pettiness of its authority figures (the school principal), the weak compliance of its artists (the theater dramaturge), and the resigned apathy of its citizens (the parents and factory supervisors). GDR socialism, according to Banale Tage, lent itself less to spectacular high melodrama such as its West German rendition in Lives of Others (2006) but was more appropriately depicted through absurdity and parody. In this climate, even the remaining flicker of creative spirit is extinguished by the ultimate futility of the action. The protagonists repeatedly describe life as proceeding in “concentric circles” (1:46) and observe: “You arrive in a new place and it looks the same” (1:25:49).9 The latter statement refers both to the GDR history told in the film and the extra-filmic reality at the times of production, that is, the transition from GDR to FRG. Banale Tage differs from the tone and focus not only of the many Wende comedies from the immediate post-wall period10 but even of many of the last DEFA films. Welz’s film is truly unique in presenting its postmortem without the frequently evoked pathos of disillusioned idealism, desperately negotiated compromise, or bitter disappointment. This is what makes the film both important and challenging and has prevented it from gaining a wide audience. Unlike the West German directors of Trabi and Stasi blockbusters, or even of some of the last features of DEFA’s older generations, including Frank Beyer’s Der Verdacht (1991) and Nikolaikirche (1995), Welz is not interested in showing the GDR as a totalitarian dictatorship, where citizens are persecuted for uttering critical views or even worse betray each other at the slightest hint of a threat. Such spectacular scenarios make perfect cinematic backdrops for Hollywood-style melodrama, but they cannot capture the ordinary and yet complex banality of youthful struggles for meaningful self-realization under any political system. While the Stasi is present in the caricatures of two officious agents, the true cause for the oppressiveness of life is not the permanent Stasi surveillance but the inability to realize oneself as an individual in any sphere of life—to experiment and explore. Instead, apprentice Thomas and high-school student Michael have to choose between small-minded petit-bourgeois proletarians, rule-oriented educators, and opportunistic artists for their role models, all of whom speak in worn-out platitudes. Despondent or hypocritical adults barely even function as targets for resistance: their

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example is all too pathetic to provide inspiration and energy for any serious revolt against them by the young. Consequently, the teenagers’ haphazard gestures of rebellion are tentative and non-committal. Instead of joining Thomas at the appointed time to break into an abandoned apartment and establish independent living quarters, Michael is easily distracted by his father’s request to get drunk with him, and he abandons Thomas. On the other hand, when Michael joins Thomas’s sit-in on tram tracks, forcing the conductor to stop and allow the last stragglers from a rock concert in the outskirts of town to catch a ride back, Thomas refuses to take the tram himself. He instead insists on walking home. Michael, who is the younger and more naively idealistic of the two, suggests that their joint protest on the tram tracks marks a significant inner transformation and the beginning of their newfound courage to take control of their lives. Thomas, son of authoritarian working-class parents, is an apprentice in a factory and despite his youth has few illusions left.11 He responds to Michael’s enthusiasm with the resignation of a realist: “That is just vanity. Everything repeats itself” (22:24).12 Welz’s film suggests that the late-socialist society is no fertile ground for utopian reform efforts by the youngest generation—those born in the GDR after the wall was built. Welz, himself part of this generation, offers his post-utopian assessment of the 1970s without the optimistic energy of previous generations. But on the other hand, Welz also tells stories of young people’s rebellion against their parents’ generation that have universal appeal. While the protagonists of Banale Tage do not have to contend with the crisis of unemployment, as many young Germans from East and West had to during the time the film was made in 1990, their experience of being expendable is equally applicable to the GDR of the 1970s and unified Germany of 1990 and beyond. The typical situation of young GDR filmmakers themselves may illustrate this point: “I was expecting after graduation in 1989 to begin work at DEFA, ten years as assistant somewhere, and then at age forty my first feature film.”13 This delayed realization of youthful aspirations was of course precisely one of the main complaints of the youngest generation of filmmakers at DEFA throughout the 1980s and the topic of Peter Kahane’s allegorical last DEFA feature Die Architekten (1990) (see chapter 6). Banale Tage, too, thematizes the lack of trust and opportunity for the young: the statement “We can get along very well without the likes of you” (16:20) occurs repeatedly.14 However, such GDR-specific themes in the film apply equally to the situation of young East German filmmakers after the end of socialism. Welz and many of his generation found that their stories about the East did not fit the expectation of film and television executives, who preferred to allocate funds for less critical stories about German unification than Welz and writer Stefan Kolditz presented, for example, in Welz’s

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second feature film, Burning Life (1994). Welz explains how he was criticized for presenting a gloomy view of post-unification Germany in Burning Life: “for the audacity of being critical especially during such times as now, when we are experiencing such an excellent economic boom.”15 After unsuccessfully submitting numerous scripts for film and television production with various collaborators (again including writer Stefan Kolditz and producer Andrea Hoffmann/Ost-Film), Welz concluded that the “colonial” mentality in the post-unification media landscape was simply not interested in artistic works by former East German filmmakers: “Reflections on the Wende from an East German perspective are simply not wanted.”16 He remembers being invited by West German TV producers to a brainstorming weekend in the Black Forest after the Wende, receiving much encouragement for the development of scripts and ideas but never any actual support for realizing his stories about unification. With writer Stefan Kolditz, he also attended the weekend retreat of the former members of the DaDaeR group at Schloss Wiepersdorf, April 25–26, 1991, when the group attempted to produce a TV series about forty years of GDR life— “stories from the GDR, which after all were also German stories”17—in the style of the West German Heimat series by director Edgar Reitz, among other projects. None of the stories they worked on ever received funding for shooting from either TV broadcasters or private sources. While Banale Tage was and still is today sometimes understood as an indictment of the GDR as a repressive dictatorship, the film’s central conclusion “You arrive in a new place and everything looks the same” applies to filmmakers unable to realize their creative visions in both East and unified Germany. Ten years after Banale Tage, the writer-director team of Thomas Brussig (b. 1963) and Leander Haussmann (b. 1959) also reacted against the thencommon cinematic depiction of the GDR as a totalitarian regime. With the distance of a decade, they found comical expression for what Brussig flippantly described as the GDR’s hippie culture: “He [Haussmann] said, for example: the GDR was the complete hippie republic. We lay on mattresses and drank and called in sick all the time. It was so relaxed. I liked that he did not write the typical story about the totalitarian system.”18 Ten years of intense public debates about Stasi surveillance and the involvements of prominent artists and politicians prompted younger East German writers and filmmakers like Brussig to tell GDR (hi)stories through comical tales of rock music and first romance, stories that validated the everyday experience of ordinary citizens in a self-consciously romanticized GDR. Kerstin and Gunnar Decker described such revisionist Ostalgie as “the ability to lament that things are no longer as they never used to be.”19 While such 1990s Ostalgie (nostalgia for the East) was initially rejected as revisionist by critics, later assessments considered this approach as having therapeutic value in coping with the often sobering disappointment of post-unification realities. Daphne Berdahl in particular has written on the importance of

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validating past life experience and GDR identity for East Germans, who felt they were treated as second-class citizens in the Federal Republic after 1990.20 Ostalgic remembrances gave rise to a revival of GDR consumer products, TV shows, and films a decade after the wall fell, and have been extensively discussed by German film historians.21 Reflecting back on twenty years of films about the former GDR, Peter Welz questioned whether the relatively minor success of Banale Tage as well as his road movie Burning Life (1994) had to do with poor timing,— that is, it may have appeared too early for German audiences to laugh about issues concerning unification—while the comedies Sonnenallee and the West German Good Bye, Lenin! found large audiences in the late 1990s and early 2000s. However, Welz points to Norbert Baumgarten’s East German soccer comedy Befreite Zone (Liberated Zone, 2003), which also failed to find popular success. Welz contends that the film’s racial politics were the reason for the lukewarm reception: “The statement that a black person can be a hero in the East is not permitted. Because the East is xenophobic. That cannot be questioned.”22 In Baumgarten’s film, by contrast, Africanborn soccer player “Blondie” becomes the hero of a small East German village that pins its hope for economic revival to his ability to score goals. The contradictory behavior of town hooligans, who beat up Vietnamese residents but worship a black soccer player, was found to be trivializing neo-Nazi activities, while the black soccer player’s nickname, “Blondie,” an ironic reference to Schalke 04 star Gerald Asamoah, was traced erroneously to Hitler’s dog, “Blondie.”23 The reception histories of Welz’s and Baumgarten’s films and especially the unwritten history of the many more futile attempts to secure funding for alternate views on the development of the former GDR into the New German States of unified Germany, which is supported by interviews with all the East German directors discussed in this book, complicates the view that good timing alone allowed certain films about the recent German past to be made and distributed to wide international success while other voices were not heard. All post-Wende accounts of GDR history reflect the ever-changing attitudes toward the East and fulfill a variety of ideological functions, ranging from condescending West German wall comedies to cold-war melodramas that deliver revisionist justification for the victory of the West. How the GDR is depicted depends crucially on the director’s personal experiences with the country, his personal politics, and the time of production. Thomas Brussig, who in addition to the cult film Sonnenallee (1999) authored the bestselling wall spoof Heroes Like Us (1995), explained how his own self-consciously romanticizing version of GDR youth culture was only possible once he had gained significant distance from his anger and disappointment over the suffered injustices in the GDR, which had originally fueled his interest in writing about his youth in the East. He states: “During a period shortly after the Wende

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I experienced anger over the absence of any kind of coming to terms with the GDR. Here [Sonnenallee] I finally had the feeling I was narrating the period in a relaxed way, with a light touch and a wink. That expressed a certain distance.”24 Perhaps it was the light touch by Brussig and Haussmann that catapulted Sonnenallee into popular success, but it was likely the film’s overall non-controversial and likeable focus on teenage romance that secured its appeal as well as guaranteed further funding for other projects from public sources. Over the past twenty years the filmic depiction of the GDR and its demise has been dominated by West German artists, with contributions by only a select few East German artists. The youngest generation of directors, whose critical views DEFA leaders had mistrusted in the GDR, found themselves in a remarkably similar situation in unified Germany. When Welz directed his debut, the state he described and the studio that had shaped him were disintegrating. Like all Wendefilme, Welz’s film, while exploring a specific moment of GDR history, also captures the mood of the unique historical circumstances of 1990 and remains today a valuable signpost of an irretrievable past. The much-belated gesture of granting the independent production group DaDaeR funding at the studio’s last moments may have come too late for its proclaimed goal of revitalizing a tired DEFA aesthetic. But it was just in time to facilitate the production of three remarkably important films that bear witness to a now easily forgotten moment in time.25 When Banale Tage was released, not many viewers were interested in a depiction of life in the GDR in the 1970s. If they were East Germans, they were too busy adjusting to the rapid transition in their everyday life, and West Germans had not been greatly interested in DEFA fare in general and were not about to change that during the last two years of the studio’s existence. Among reviewers, Carl Andersen of Neues Deutschland summarized many critics’ reactions, ranging from baffled to hostile: “Deadly boring film, lacking ideas and not subversive but overly symbolist.”26 Even supportive critics such as Heinz Kersten and Angelika Nguyen (who as a former DEFA dramaturge had in fact participated in the discussion regarding the approval of the rough-cut version) concluded that the film left its audience somewhere between “fascination and irritation.”27 Clearly, the time wasn’t ripe for Welz’s bitterly ironic swan song. Twenty-five years later, however, audiences with more distance to the period have discovered that the film has aged well.

Banale Tage The film begins with a meta-filmic commentary by the two protagonists, Thomas and Michael, that introduces the central idea of life as a game with a predetermined outcome. Like a Greek fate, the individual’s social

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role seems decided by unnamed forces, with no personal choice possible. The opening image of sand drizzling evenly in three piles through a leaky factory roof efficiently evokes the inevitable passing of time (hourglass) marking not progress but decay. Cast in a cool blue filter, the image’s poetry sets the tone for the stylized dialogue that follows. Michael’s tentative: “Riding along or getting out—there is a difference” is met by Thomas’s dismissive: “Only seemingly. But nobody notices it. Concentric circles” (1:46).28 Indeed, the film circles in episodes around the questions of social change as a result of individual resistance and courage, friendship and loyalty, and coming of age. The stories playfully explore the effect of milieu and political context on human behavior in a series of encounters at work, school, and home. In a second foreshadowing prelude, the boys revive Michael’s father, dramaturge Peter Wagner, from his symbolic death on the beach, using the language of game playing: “You have not yet been eliminated” (6). The film’s beginning and end mark such metafilmic reflections on its own storytelling. The resulting detachment starkly contrasts with the film’s documentary realism in other scenes and directly undermines the emotional depth that the characters are able to portray. Ulrich Weiß’s film Miraculi utilizes a similar strategy: the opening sequence shows a game of billiards that stages a visual butterfly effect and suggests the connectedness of all things. In a later episode of the film, the protagonist’s card game symbolizes chance connections in life. In Banale Tage, by contrast, the frequent allusions to game-playing point to the film’s constructedness and reflect its own awareness of its theatrical artificiality. In an earlier script version, author Michel Sollorz even appears in the film to express his own frustration over his inability to truly capture the historical moment in his film: “I cannot describe it any better,” he exclaims. Welz, as a student of Brecht and Godard, repeatedly reminds his audience that his filmic version of the past is just that: a highly subjective visual representation. Consequently, complex sociopolitical questions are frequently reduced to succinct language games, for example when Thomas tells Michael: “You confuse playing with playing along” (20:22).29 Thomas’s pronouncement further appears as an indirect commentary on another last DEFA film, Peter Kahane’s Architekten (1990), which explores the question of whether resistance against or participation in the system is more productive. Kahane’s film depicts precisely the consequences of too much compromising, the “playing along” that Thomas rejects in hopes of someday fully participating in the game. In an early version of Welz’s film script, the film ends with Michael reading a Schopenhauer quote (from Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit) to the camera: “Hope is a condition of the soul that leads you to believe that what you desire will come about. It is caused by a special movement of the spirit, namely a mixture of joy and desire.”30 Placing this quote at the end of a film in which the characters’ circular movements are futile

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Fig. 3.1. Thomas (left, played by Christian Kuchenbuch) and Michael (Florian Lukas), Banale Tage. Courtesy of DEFA Stiftung; photograph by Herbert Kroiss.

and never arrive anywhere is deeply ironic, yet also signals the painful realization that this hope has been betrayed. Any hint of joy or desire in the film is immediately stifled rather than shown as an expression of hope, while the only possible movement takes place along pointless concentric circles, never leading to change or progress. In the final version of the film Michael reads the Schopenhauer quote not to the camera but to his school friend Karin, thus infusing it with a lighter note by alluding to his sexual desires. Like everything else in Banale Tage, even the fulfillment of this wish results in profound disappointment. Tellingly, the film’s short prelude also introduces a second dominant concept: asked by Thomas about his greatest fear in life, Michael answers promptly: “War? Cancer? Boredom?” (5). Thomas corrects his friend by stating: “That you are being left alone, pushed away” (17:40).31 Later in the film both youths are told by their superiors that the GDR will do just fine without them: “We can manage very well without certain people” (16:20). The story lists as causes for this deadly boredom a combination of paternalistic control on the one hand and the suggestion that the youngest generation is expendable on the other hand; the script contains numerous allusions to the feeling of being trapped, for example, when the boys are discussing squatting in an apartment. Thomas’s surprised question to Michael as to whether his parents will “let him out” is answered: “Very funny. Where to?” (30:29).32 The reason for this entrapment is

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not only found in the inability to travel but lies more profoundly in the entanglement of multiple social spheres, such as work and Stasi, church and state, and, most devastatingly, artists and state. Visually this entanglement is effectively rendered in the drunken polonaise that ensnarls artists and politicians after the theater premiere of Déry’s Fictive Report about an American Pop Festival. The mood is macabre and funereal, illustrating Thomas’s conviction that life consists of concentric circles. The polonaise is staged in the middle of the film as a climactic point between the prelude in the empty factory and at the beach and the end again at the beach and then finally in the factory: the film’s structure itself mimics the central theme of circular repetition. Such subtlety was lost on the film’s contemporary critics. Harshest among the negative judgments was the evaluation by the West German Film Rating Board in Wiesbaden, the Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle (FSK), which wrote: Unfortunately the film is simply tedious. Bert Brecht sends his regards but the greeting did not really reach the director. Dramaturgically clueless, one heavy-handed profundity chases the next and turns this glimpse of life and culture of GDR youth into endless tedium. . . . A film that depends only on symbolism and metaphors betrays reality. We can grant the requested release for viewers 12 years and older. Boredom and general bafflement are the only expected responses from that age group. The committee does not want to inflict this film on viewers younger than 12, not least because the film depicts constant urination (5 times) and puking (one time).33

Perhaps it is not surprising that a West German film rating commission in 1991 was unable to comprehend the young East German filmmakers’ attempt to depict the world of their youth in a “comically bitter film about our messed-up beginnings,” as dramaturge Timothy Grossmann put it.34 But even among members of the artistic group DaDaeR, the aesthetic difficulty of navigating between images of documentary-style realism and dialogues laden with metaphorical symbolism was discussed after the completion of the revision of the first version of the script for the final version, which was approved on May 21, 1990. Timothy Grossmann vigorously defended the film’s unusual aesthetic and called the criticized “artificial dialogue in realistic scenes” intentional.35 Referring to the fact that the political realities in the GDR changed faster than the film could be produced, Grossmann commented: The country where this film originated died faster than its last clapper board closed. Overnight it therefore faced a larger task. The film is also a swan song to the GDR, biting, honest, but also comical. But futility existed and exists outside the GDR as well. Art is waffle [Waffel instead of Waffe, weapon] in the struggles of our time.36

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The “futility” that Grossmann cites as a universal (that is, pan-German) phenomenon is no longer just an apt critique of failed opportunity for individual self-realization by teenagers in 1970s GDR, as depicted in the film, but equally applies to the situation of now-ex-GDR citizens attempting to make sense of the recently unified German state.37 Thus the dialog is often commenting equally on context-specific details of 1970s socialism and meta-critically on the situation of 1990. This is nowhere more obvious than in the Brechtian ending, when all actors step out of their roles and mingle on the set with the writer, cinematographer, and others from behind the camera. Looking at their own images on monitors, one actor groans: “Oh man, always the same old films” (1:26).38 While making the first and last DEFA film of his career, director Welz is aware that his film, as aesthetically innovative for the old studio as it may be, is already obsolete in the very moment of its creation. While this quote is not contained in the final version of the script, it was inserted into the final cut of the film, representing just one of the important alterations that were made during the filming in response to the rapidly changing political situation. As the film became increasingly absurd in dialogue and Welz increasingly aware of the film’s anachronism in the face of the quickly realized German unification, Welz offers his characters and crew the possibility of commenting on their own film. Staring at themselves in monitors or looking out from those same monitors, Michael, Karin, and others indicate that their personal histories are already slipping from their memories and that conveying the true absurdity of their experience after the disappearance of their state won’t be easy: the actress playing Michael’s mother states with ambivalence: “I simply can’t look at this anymore” (1:27)39 (literally: “I can’t see this anymore”). The phrasing suggests that she is tired of it and but also more prophetically from today’s perspective that her experiences are beginning to slip away from her already, literally becoming invisible. In the finished film Michael listens to these last two statements, crouches in front of a monitor depicting his own image, and switches it off. When Thomas’s image appears on another monitor, Michael switches that off as well with the comment: “Forget about it. Nobody will care” (1:29:04),40 suggesting that their story is over. If the film was intended to engage GDR audiences with the questions of its youth, the altered political reality of German unification assured the filmmakers now that their stories would indeed interest no one, a comment sadly born out by the experiences of East German filmmakers after 1989. The film ends in the same cavernous and decrepit space where it began. The two friends, first seen in a full frame, and then again on a monitor that is watched by the actors playing the adult generation in the film, defiantly share a cigarette under a sign that reads “No Smoking.”

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Michael prompts his friend: “Sag mal was” (Say something; 1:28). Thomas gazes directly into the camera and says: “Was?” The film within the film ends with one last absurdly defiant gesture while the adults merely stare at their screen image passively. The older generations’ dazed disorientation now appears to be not so much a reaction to the provocation by the younger generation but to the awareness of this last film’s futility: in keeping with the lack of pathos, the final frames of the film consist of the two recurring clown-like characters dancing around the motionless adults and playing the German folk-tune Schön ist die Jugend (How Beautiful Is Youth) on the accordion. A farcical swan song to an absurd (his)story. The tune is heard once before, when two border guards wearing flowers on their helmets walk along the beach, pass Michael’s father, and ask: “Young man, tell me, are we here to measure the distance to the sun or to warm ourselves in its rays?” to which the incensed dramaturge responds: “Time seems to want to establish a new order of things, young man. But we will only experience the toppling of the old” (1:13:52).41 As the soldiers dance along the beach, the ironical musical commentary Schön ist die Jugend confirms the bitter conclusion of Peter Wagner’s lost hopes. The soldiers also play the workers’ song Brüder zur Sonne, zur Freiheit (Brothers toward the Sun, toward Freedom) at this moment of utter defeat of all former utopian hopes. The scene is played in a lighthearted, farcical manner by soldiers dressed like clowns, but the underlying sense of loss of all that was meaningful and familiar (language, music, geography) is evident just under the surface. The teenagers’ (and by extension the filmmaker’s) bad timing is translated into the film’s central motif of a-synchronicity (Ungleichzeitigkeit) and manifested throughout the film in numerous forms of displacements and ironic montage. Characters continuously miss and misunderstand each other, misread a situation, and generally inhabit a world that is paradoxically both overly predictable and at the same time thoroughly out of sync: a character in one scene, for example, answers a question posed in a different scene, a fairy-tale-reading grandmother is indeed a Stasi informer, a seemingly provocative artist is actually opportunistically pandering to the Minister of Culture. Some of these asynchronies underwent significant alterations from the script to the film, marking the effect of the production context on the film. At a critical moment in the film, for example, when Michael has missed an appointment with Thomas, causing the latter to squat in a vacant apartment by himself while Michael first gets drunk with his father and later loses his virginity to classmate Karin, the film shows Thomas’s first lonely night in his new quarters. The room is desolate as he attempts to make himself comfortable on his bed of newspapers. In the script, Michael’s voiceover is to be dubbed into the scene, reading an emotionally worded manifesto about the promise of the future: “Not

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stubbornness, not refusal to encounter the future. A boundless greed, that it might finally arrive, finally begin. And it will be unprecedented, huge, and unique. It will change us once it finally begins. Soon, soon.”42 The images are crosscut from the room Thomas is in to Michael’s bourgeois parental home, while the audio track of his reading is to be continued seamlessly. The irony of Michael’s naive pathos as accompaniment to Thomas’s miserable if determined gesture of resistance is then heightened as the camera searches Michael’s face for traces of newfound maturity after his first sexual encounter. Michael is aware that Karin may have used him for her purposes rather than being the object of his manly conquest, and his manifesto’s hyperbolic language about the anticipated glorious future event is parodied. Welz locates the time for such idealistic exuberance in a bygone past, as indicated in the photograph of the Spanish Civil War fighters above Grandma’s bed. The formerly inspiring revolutionary anticipation is as anachronistic as their language. In the film, however, Michael’s manifesto is replaced by a solo saxophone soundtrack. The reference to the better future is reduced to the single word “soon” (“Bald”) printed on flyers that rain onto the friends as they walk down the street. Thomas briefly glances at the flyer then tosses it aside. While Thomas is realistic about his limited opportunity for expressing alternative views of the prescribed socialist form of a petit-bourgeois life style, he is intrigued by the prospect of seeing a play at the Berlin Volksbühne about Mick Jagger. This key scene in the film refers to the 1978 staging of Hungarian writer Tibor Déry’s Fictive Report about an American PopFestival (1974).43 The novel draws parallels between the drug-induced violence and murder at the 1969 Altamont rock concert in California featuring the Rolling Stones, and Germany’s fascist past. In its stage production at East Berlin’s Volksbühne, which opened December 1, 1978, under the direction of Hans Dieter Meves, the incident was used for a wholesale indictment of American rock and youth culture. Meves explained his intention in an interview for the East German journal Theater der Zeit: We did reach our target audience of young people, ages 16 to 18, but we observed a split. Some had overcome their pop period, so to speak, had worked through it and felt affirmed by our play. Others are looking for affirmation of pop culture as an idol, an apparent free space from real or imaginary limitations. They felt disappointed because we did not deliver that. Even such disappointment can become productive. Those who, for example, look at the mannequins in the atrium differently when they leave than when they came in—we have noticed that—have already comprehended something.44

For many in the audience the theater’s “demagogic tactic,” as Jörg Foth called it, which lured young audiences with the promise of rock music

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(the Rolling Stone’s Sympathy for the Devil was used prominently in the production, as was a life-size poster of Mick Jagger) only to associate it then with drug-induced delirium, desperate hopelessness, and even the Holocaust, was seen as a cynical betrayal. Sound engineer Klaus Gendreizig’s anger about the theater’s duplicity is still palpable some twenty-three years later: After the staging of Tibor Déry’s “Fictive Report about a Rock Festival” I was done with the Volksbühne theater. That was about 1976/77. Since then I have not set foot in there, till today. The play was hypocritical shit. I also could not deal with the pseudo-intellectual nonsense of the stage crew. When I went to have a beer in the Café Burger and I saw those guys with their fake round eye-wear and their striped butcher’s shirts talk about how they wanted to change the world but really never did anything more than move stage sets, I found that stupid, too.45

Welz, who was a teenager in East Berlin when productions of this play took place across the GDR, uses this generational experience of widespread disillusion over the wholesale ideological indictment of countercultural impulses in the GDR as the central metaphor in the film. Welz’s attempt to buy music rights for twenty seconds of The Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil, the pivotal song that the band performed as crowds of fans clashed with members of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle club at the ill-fated rock festival in Altamont, failed, since the cost for the music rights was prohibitive for this small production. Welz compensated by placing a copy of the song lyrics in the press materials. During the pre-production discussions of the script, dramaturge Timothy Grossmann had emphasized how significant the performance of Déry’s play in Berlin in 1978 was for the younger generation, and how greatly it was anticipated, as the first public engagement with American rock music. The excerpted re-creation of this event expresses his disgust and disappointment that the theater was unwilling to openly engage the GDR youth, who craved more alternatives to official SED culture. The choice of this metaphor for the film also points to DEFA’s unwillingness to provide support for films about rock music. In deliberately stilted dialogue about the conflicts between “work and love,” two opposite “angels” perform the compromise customary for the GDR: Hell’s Angel: In general, humans like to obey. Why should one rob them of this pleasure? Perhaps this is the only thing that maintains their balance. Angel ascending to heaven [in a cardboard cloud]: Banning part of a person and depriving him of life, forcing upon all humans the partial exile of their selves through a pathological lack of comprehension.46

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After Erich Honecker’s initially hope-inspiring declaration in 1971 that a secure socialism does not know any taboos, the political climate had once again changed drastically by 1978, a few years after Wolf Biermann’s expulsion from the GDR. Banale Tage is set in the aftermath of high-profile clampdowns like this, which had signaled another period of increased suspicion, especially toward young people. But the film focuses not on well-known cases of repression such as the Biermann affair but on exploring the after-effects of a far more ordinary repressiveness in schools and factories of the GDR in the late 1970s. Many scenes of Thomas’s factory life show the absurdity of the apprentices carrying out pointless but required paramilitary exercises, while earning derisive commentary from their older colleagues. The more protected if no less stupefying school routine that Michael endures explains the very different reactions of Welz’s two protagonists to the Déry performance in the Volksbühne: while Michael is excited by the hippie puppets, Thomas instantly grasps their pedagogical purpose: “Too bad. They are only mannequins. They demonstrate how rotten the world is.” Seconds later, the Minister of Culture passes the scene and comments in parallel phrasing: “Thank goodness. Only mannequins” (58:54).47 The budding friendship between Michael and Thomas, which begins when they join forces in protest against being metaphorically and literally left in the cold by sitting in front of a tram, suffers an irreparable blow in this scene. While Michael takes no notice of the complicity between state (the Minister of Culture)48 and intellectuals (Michael’s father), Thomas openly challenges this compliance. And while Michael’s superficial attention is easily distracted by the relaxed feeling of the event, the promise of free booze, and his privileged role as the son of the dramaturge, Thomas understands the duplicitous character of this theater event. Instead of having learned his lesson about the destructive nature of pop culture, as director Meves desired, Thomas responds with his first real, dissident act: throwing flyers from a roof-top—which characteristically has no effect at all on his environment. Thomas, however, is arrested shortly after this incident and vanishes without a trace. Thomas, who is as keenly aware of the futility of hoping for inspiration from the theater as Michael is oblivious, responds to his friend’s innocent “Did you not like it?” with a determined “I did. It was precisely what I needed” (1:03).49 His hope for any opening in the ideological conformity has been killed by this public show of artistic obedience to state power. As such, it fuels his determination toward action, which in turn leads to his quick arrest. The futile flyer release signifies a high point of action in the film and suggests that even the tiniest rebellious impulse among the GDR youth was crippled: Thomas’s factory supervisor, as a lone cyclist, loses his balance as flyers engulf him, but even he does not pause to read the note of protest. This brief film sequence functions as an

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Fig. 3.2. Director Peter Welz (left) with Christian Kuchenbuch, Banale Tage. Courtesy of DEFA Stiftung; photograph by Herbert Kroiss.

effective visual metaphor for the utter futility of Thomas’s impotent protest. The theater’s compliance with state ideology regarding Western rock culture spurs Thomas’s desperate and risky response, but the only effect is his swift arrest. Neither his flyers nor his disappearance create any disturbance in his environment. Choosing the theater, and not a state or school representative, as the cause for Thomas’s protest action highlights the fact that there was nowhere to turn for teenagers interested in exploring alternative cultures in the GDR. Neither church (which is also portrayed as ineffective in the film) nor the theater offered escape from the conformity and ideological saturation of society. Peter Welz further complicates the theater metaphor by casting writer Ronald Schernikau in the role of Bernd, an actor portraying a Hell’s Angel in the Déry play. Schernikau, who died of complications from AIDS shortly after the film was completed, was born in the GDR in 1960 but moved to West Germany with his mother in 1966. As a student at the FU Berlin he was also a member of the West Berlin Communist Party (SEW) and later studied literature at Leipzig’s famous Literaturinstitut. Encouraged by writer Peter Hacks, he became a citizen of the GDR in early fall of 1989. Playing a Hell’s Angel in a play that signified the GDR’s official contempt for individual expression on the one hand and the willing participation of GDR artists in the state’s attempts at creating the conformist “socialist personality” on the other hand is a highly ironic

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gesture for an author who had moved to East Germany only a few months earlier out of the conviction that meaningful literature could be written only there. In the film, the theater dramaturge’s wife asks Schernikau’s character Bernd, “Where were you engaged before?”50 which carries both the obvious meaning regarding his theater career as well as the underlying reference to Schernikau’s move from West to East Germany. The writer’s well-known activism for gay and communist causes in both East and West Germany is alluded to at a moment when Germany approached political unification, which for many activists signaled a moment of grassroots political defeat and the economic victory of the capitalist system. Schernikau’s biography bears some parallels to the well-publicized case of Gisela Elsner, a West German writer who late in her career could publish her works only in the GDR and whose support for GDR socialism was dealt a fatal blow by the fall of the wall. In the prize-winning film Die Unberührbare (2000), her son Oskar Roehler reconstructs her last years, between 1989 and her suicide in 1992. Unlike Roehler’s stark black-andwhite film, which earned high praise from East and West German critics and audiences, Banale Tage went largely unnoticed a decade earlier. In addition to its different aesthetic approach, Die Unberührbare benefitted from the changed political climate one decade after unification, when widespread disillusion about unemployment in the East and increased tensions between former East and West Germans made audiences more receptive to the tragic fate of a writer’s lost utopian idealism in regard to the GDR. Furthermore, Gisela Elsner’s high profile as a member of the Gruppe 47 and later the Gruppe 61, as well as her suicide, added significantly to the cinematic drama, especially when compared to the younger Schernikau, who died of AIDS and makes a short cameo appearance in Welz’s film. Banale Tage’s author, Michael Sollorz, chose the 1978 Déry performance as a symbol of the GDR’s claustrophobic atmosphere that consciously targeted GDR youth’s interest in alternative music cultures and suffocated even the slightest attempts at individual expression by utilizing all the forces in the state, educational, and artistic spheres. The play within the play approach adds a self-reflexive level to the film that includes the arts scene in its indictment of the ideological complicity of the adult world. This self-reflective mode is continued at the end, when the actors comment on their own just-completed filmic assessment of this past, despairing over the insufficiency and futility of the effort. The treatment of the Tibor Déry play is preceded by the film’s most stylized parallel montage, in which three separate actions are crosscut against each other. All three events mark disappointing conquests: Michael and Karin’s sexual encounter, or more precisely, Michael’s rather sober deflowering by a more experienced Karin. Further, an absurd, platitude-laden exchange between Michael’s father, the dramaturge, and school principal Boll, which alternates between a mechanical exchange of

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worn-out socialist phrases, brief moments of honesty, and sexual tension. After seemingly defending opposite positions vis-à-vis Michael’s reading of forbidden literature, they depart together into the night. Lastly, we witness Thomas breaking into a vacant apartment alone to establish his independent space. Abandoned by Michael, who was distracted first by drinking with his father and then sex with Karin, Thomas is determined to take action against the claustrophobic conformity of society. At the same time, the effort is a miserable experience for him as he seeks comfort on a newspaper in a cold and empty apartment. The editing is tightly timed to establish direct connections between the three plots. Michael’s attempts at getting to know Karin and her mysterious family circumstances (she lives with her grandmother in an large, elegant apartment and deflects questions about her absent parents), for example, are crosscut against Principal Boll’s questions for Michael’s father about banned books: Michael: “What’s the matter with you?” Karin: “You ask me that?” Wagner: “Exactly. That is what the people are asking, too. And we owe them an answer. For now, they are still asking” (47:36).51 While both couples briefly engage in conversation that could lead to profound exchanges about their personal circumstances and political convictions, they deflect quickly from this course by turning to mechanically executed sexual encounters. The climactic moment layers Thomas’s violent bursting of the splintering wooden door with Karin’s orgasmic scream and Wagner’s exclamation: “We are ridiculous!” (49:45).52 Portraying such pathetic conquests in succinct parallel montage effectively signifies connections between the end of innocence for the youngest generation (Michael’s eagerly anticipated but humiliating deflowering) and the openly displayed cynicism of the middle generation of educators and artists (Boll and Wagner’s dialogue make it clear that both are simply role-playing instead of representing political positions of conviction), and finally the beginning of the end for Thomas, who will vanish in a Stasi prison soon after committing his first major act of defiance. The clinical and unemotional intercourse between Karin and Michael is linked to the mechanical and formulaic discourse of the educational system that focuses on instructing teenagers to turn West-German shopping bags inside out to hide the cat-food advertisement or confiscating censored literature, instead of actually engaging the young about their views and aspirations. The artist Peter Wagner, while more witty and creative, is no less damaging, as he has the effect of instilling cynical apathy in the next generation. Even while he articulates his own responsibility toward speaking truth to those in power, he demonstrates neither conviction nor courage in this endeavor but instead drowns his frustrated disillusionment at his failure by means of sexual affairs and alcohol. Only Thomas, from a less privileged and less educated background, musters the energy to actively attempt change by seeking his own space.

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He does so despite his own conviction that resistance is ultimately futile: in the opening scene, when he stops a tram by sitting on the tracks, he motivates others to join the protest by singing “We shall overcome.” But unlike Michael, whose naive enthusiasm for rebellion has been awakened by the action’s immediate success, Thomas judges his own action senseless in the very same moment that he executes his protest: “It’s useless anyway” (43).53 After a brief hopeful flickering, and energized by his encounter with Michael and his world of books and the theater, Thomas turns his back on any legal attempt to change things from within the system. His unspectacular protest, its swift consequences, and his quiet vanishing are presented not with (melo)drama but instead with a sober matter-of-factness that is as banal as it is inevitable. Banale Tage takes stock of youth culture in the GDR socialism of the late 1970s, at a moment when mass protests have led to the end of the country that it depicts. Welz zooms in on the utter waste of time, effort, and creative human potential, as did Jörg Foth and Herwig Kipping. However, Banale Tage lacks the explosive rage that fuels Kipping’s film and the clownesque comedy that sustains Foth’s feature. Welz looks back at his youth and finds more absurdity than tragedy. Because he was only in his mid-twenties in 1989, he had not yet suffered the setbacks and injuries that mark the films of his older colleagues. Having been mentored by Jörg Foth during his student years at HFF and having assisted in Foth’s first feature film, Biologie! (1989), Welz knew all too well that most DEFA directors had to wait until they were twice his age before being given a chance to direct their first feature. Banale Tage dissects the process of undermining individual expression at school, at work, and in the arts and describes its fatal effects on large segments of the population, not just the teenage protagonists. Thomas’s oppressed working-class mother, for example, is shown as having a secret if somewhat ambivalent relationship with an admirer who picks her up from the factory in a bright red Trabi every day, while his father seeks escape with his porno magazines in the basement. As such, the film pictures multiple generations of frustrated and repressed citizens. Rather than staging GDR society of the 1970s as a battleground between devious Stasi ideologues and courageous dissidents, Welz shows a GDR already on artificial life-support and existentially undermined by its lack of creativity, flexibility, and conviction regarding the success of a socialist utopia. In the aftermath of the fall of the wall, historians have struggled to understand the nature of political repression in the GDR. Anna Saunders summarizes the discussion succinctly: “The search for appropriate terminology has thus seen many attempts to encapsulate both the repressive elements of the regime and the complex relations between state and society, with suggestions such as ‘welfare dictatorship’ (Konrad Jarausch), ‘modern dictatorship’ (Jürgen Kocka) and ‘thoroughly dominated

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society’ (durchherrschte Gesellschaft) (Alf Lüdtke).”54 The state’s efforts to create a youth conforming to its definition of a “socialist personality” was all-encompassing, permeating its educational system as well as mass organizations like the FDJ and sports and cultural associations. Historian Christoph Kleßmann has called the “Second German Dictatorship” a failure because the GDR fell short of one crucial objective: “One of totalitarianism’s most striking features—mobilization for utopian goals—occurred only partially in the GDR or was not achieved at all. Instead, it was stagnation, carelessness, and apathy that were much more typical in East German society.”55 Without minimizing the potential dangers for active resistance against the government, Welz’s film documents an enduring, multigenerational loss of faith in the salvageability of the socialist system and describes its suffocating effect on the individual’s aspirations and indeed relationships. The Film Review Board in its harsh evaluation criticized in particular the heavy-handed use of symbolism and metaphor, asserting that the film “betrays its reality.” In fact, the continuous and unpredictable slippage from realism to symbolism reflects a reality that was perceived as surreal, unfathomable, and nonsensical in the GDR, both in the 1970s and during the Wende period. Challenging the viewer, Banale Tage was uncompromising in documenting this absurd generational experience and cheerfully utilized the review board’s judgment for its own clever marketing campaign. Like the other films of the young production group DaDaeR, Banale Tage was unexpectedly not picked up by the DEFA distributor Progress. Basis Film Verleih stepped in and distributed the film. The filmmakers themselves created an innovative marketing approach for Banale Tage by offering an eclectic collection of literary texts stuffed into a typical GDR paper shopping bag the size of a lunch bag. The materials included a DADA-styled collage of fake newspaper headlines riffing on the Wiesbaden decision, such as “Breaking News! Wiesbaden has exposed pissing as symbolism! In the East, puking was only a metaphor!56 Expressing very early the limits of German-German understanding after the fall of the wall, the materials poke fun at the idea that West-German censors were unable to grasp that anything but a naturalistic approach could effectively portray the East German experience. To drive this point home, the press materials also cite a scene from Beckett’s Waiting for Godot that draws parallels between the nonsensical reality of the GDR and Western literature’s most famous articulation of the modern condition as absurd farce (see also chapter 6 for a discussion of Andreas Dresen’s use of the play in his debut film Stilles Land). Further parody quotes Stasi reports on the dangers of artists who have been shown to possess “ideological insecurities” because of insufficiently internalized scientific worldviews (5), a charge that had been leveled amongst others against director Ulrich Weiß after his completion of the

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highly controversial Dein unbekannter Bruder (1982).57 This in turn is followed by excerpts from Hans Joachim Maaz’s then newly published bestselling “GDR psychogram,” Gefühlsstau: “Real existing socialism was the way of life of an entire people, which was presented as a large tragic scenario in different parts: the criminal powerful, the ambitious careerists, the repressed and conformist opportunists, the refugees, chasing from one illusion to the next, the self-destructive opponents, and those hopeless idealists clinging to their utopian beliefs.”58 Many of the other East German films of the last DEFA year told tragic stories of this type: Frank Beyer’s Versprechen (The Promise, 1991) described the destructive intrigues of the Stasi against a family and a young couple, Roland Gräf’s Tangospieler portrayed the futility of opposition, Peter Kahane’s Architekten narrated the complete destuction of a stubborn idealist, Heiner Carow’s Verfehlung (The Mistake, 1992) focused on the mean-spirited machinations of a jaded lover who wielded political power to revenge personal insult. Most of these films utilize melodramatic genre conventions as appropriate vehicles for their stories. The destruction, injuries, and disappointments narrated in these films derive from betrayal, disillusion, and a loss of faith in relationships and ideals. Banale Tage’s radically different aesthetic results from a very different generational experience. The melodramatic pathos is unsuitable for the absurdist farce, which proceeds from the assumption that hope, idealism, and even anger or sadness have long been undermined by the general social paralysis. The committed portrayal of such emotional blockage (Maaz’s term) even in the GDR’s youngest generation challenged its viewers and may have contributed to the film’s lack of success upon its release in 1992. But it also uniquely captured the quickly forgotten banality of boredom summarized in a song text by the GDR rock band Pankow, which is also cited in the press materials: “I ran around, ran around too much, but nothing ever happened.”59

Developing a New Aesthetic Unnoticed by the Wiesbaden Film Board, the film’s unusual blend of realism and symbolism pays tribute to the style of earlier DEFA films from the period Banale Tage itself depicts in order to point to the missed opportunities so frequently cited in internal discussions among the film’s makers. While the script was being prepared in 1990, Welz revisited student films produced at HFF in the 1970s, including Jörg Foth’s Blumenland (1975). Foth’s film portrays GDR youth who spend their days making artificial flowers in the recently collectivized flower industry in Saxony, while dreaming tentatively of forming a rock band in their free time. At the HFF, Blumenland was an expression of a new aesthetic beginning by one of its then-youngest directors—a beginning that was undesired and

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thus largely stifled until the belated founding of the DaDaeR production group two decades later (see chapter 1 for a more detailed discussion of Blumenland). Welz’s consultation of Foth’s earlier student film during the preparation for Banale Tage is thus also a homage to the filmic renewal attempt by his predecessors. Sadly, the parallel between the long struggle by Foth’s generation for more flexible and independent production conditions at DEFA, which remained without response from the studio leadership until the very last moment, and Thomas and Michael’s meek attempts at rebellion are all too obvious. In this sense Banale Tage joins Peter Kahane’s Architekten in eulogizing DEFA’s last and, to a large extent, lost generation of filmmakers. Despite being twenty years their junior, Peter Welz was intimately familiar with those earlier attempts at developing a new visual language for East German film. As a child actor, he performed in several important films by renowned DEFA directors.60 During his time at the film school in Babelsberg he was mentored by Jörg Foth and appeared in Foth’s 1989 feature film Biologie! His short student film Willkommen in der Kantine was based on a script by notorious theater director Frank Castorf. Castorf worked as director in the provincial East German town of Anklam, where Andreas Dresen would shoot Stilles Land (1990).61 Welz’s graduation film, Unsere Familie, was written by Leander Haussmann, whose breakthrough success as a film director was Sonnenallee (1999). In Welz’s student films we find many of the same sensibilities, topics, and visual language of his feature debut. In a central scene of Unsere Familie, for example, a young boy declaims one of the core phrases that reappears in Banale Tage: “Strange, one arrives in a new place and everything looks the same” (Unsere Familie, 35:38).62 In both films this phrase succinctly expresses the fatalistic acknowledgement that true rebellion appears impossible under the ossified GDR regime. Both films also suspend laws of time and place and self-consciously incorporate filmwithin-film scenes. The phrase quoted above on the sameness of life, for example, is spoken by a younger version of the main character to his older self, thus ironically staging a self-reflexive monologue about the inability of emancipating oneself as a youngster in the GDR. In another scene in Unsere Familie the father angrily chases after his adult son in an inn. When he opens the bedroom door, however, a movie screen with a younger version of his son’s face fills the doorframe, continuing to speak a stylized monologue about the vanity of material possessions. Just before this, the adult son is watching home movies of himself as a child and calls it “the best movie ever made” (24:52),63 while the father fails to recognize the child in the home movie as his son. Meta-filmic references abound in all Welz films: Banale Tage allows its actors to view themselves in monitors and comment on their film.

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Unsere Familie utilizes fake home movies and imitates teaching films to portray the parents’ generation’s mindless insistence on orderly existence. The film opens with a voice-over from a faux instructional cooking film: “Today we will bake a torte,” and continues to insert sequences of this deadpan baking instruction throughout the film. The voice-over narration is illustrated by a generic mother figure, who drones on in endlessly regurgitated admonitions to her son to eat, dress better, be more polite, and get up earlier, regardless of what events may have occurred in her son’s life in the meantime. The conflation of private family life and public visual culture effectively invokes a suffocating atmosphere, like that evoked by the depiction of school, factory, church, and theater in Banale Tage. Even the road-movie sequences in this student film do not offer any escape. While the soundtrack ironically insinuates the seemingly liberating triumph of the getaway, the landscape does not provide the expected openroad shot that suggests freedom but instead tracks depressingly industrial scenery. The conversation is absurdly conformist (but with role reversal as the son warns his father to watch the speed limit) and the car soon breaks down. During their brief getaway, father and son literally introduce themselves to each other. In another parallel to Banale Tage, the father asks: “Who are you?”—to which the son responds flippantly: “Jagger . . . I was once Jogger, which became Jagger. Mick was later” (10:10).64 The son poses his question differently: “What are you?” to which the father promptly returns: “Economist. Master Economist” (10:40).65 Like Banale Tage Welz’s diploma film stages the generational conflict between the parents who speak in the worn-out phrases of old instructional television films, and their children, who react against this stifling environment with a mixture of stylized violence that imitates various film genres without being able to inhabit them successfully (gangster film, road movie, melodrama). Aesthetically, the film acknowledges its own belatedness by alluding to a number of film-historical traditions that have famously staged this conflict before, including melodramatic noir, French New Vague, Czech New Wave, Fassbinder’s New German Cinema, and the Theater of the Absurd. Shot in black and white, the film’s car chases, for example, are reminiscent of Godard’s 1960 aesthetic,66 while the deadpan absurd restaurant scenes evoke Bunuel’s farcical parody of bourgeois life. The costumes and landscape shots, which emphasize environmental destruction, on the other hand, squarely locate the film in the GDR of the 1980s, characterized by petit-bourgeois predictability and mind-numbing boredom: “In my entire life I have never seen such a bleak street” (13:25).67 Welz blends film parody, absurd theater, Kafkaesque satire, psychoanalytic puns, and documentary-style sequences into an innovatively edited film that suspends the laws of time and place, thus returning

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again and again to the impossibility of escaping from the restrictive environment. To heighten the absurdity of this stagnant situation, Welz stages a classic pub scene, where a group of regulars assess the state of the economy and their personal goals in earnest GDR lingo: “Where the workers have the power, freedom reigns.  .  .  . At the moment not even one third of all youth under 25 experience the achievement- and personalitypromoting atmosphere of a youth collective” (22:18).68 Instead of casting a middle-aged group of actors for these formulaic exchanges, Welz uses four teenage punks who speak their lines with deliberate seriousness, thus alienating form from content with provocative effect. Having the overused phrases about motivating the youth collectives, rewarding hard work, and achieving new heights of progress for socialism spoken by punks whose craving for more individuality is expressed through shorn heads, leather jackets and ripped T-shirts and who decline beer in favor of lemonade makes for succinct parody.69 Welz’s simple but effective reversal of roles is played out here and elsewhere to parody the long exhausted socialist utopian vision. In 1989, Haussmann and Welz addressed their audience with a provocative demand for greater freedom both in society and in regard to film form. Their bitterly absurd conclusion is the son’s reversed speech act: “Get lost” (37:15).70 Welz frames the generational conflict between the older adults and their young adult children who were born into the GDR after the wall had been built in 1961 in terms of the frequently evoked family relations between a paternalistic state and its citizen children. Ironically, the father figure in the film does not recognize his son, while the son is struggling to articulate an alternative vision for a different life, signaling that all is not well with the titular Unsere Familie. Willkommen in der Kantine (1988) was Welz’s so-called “Hauptprüfungsfilm,” that is, a film of significant length before the final diploma film. Based on a story by Martin Stephan and a screenplay by Frank Castorf, the film cast many of the same actors and featured many of the themes of his following two films. As in Unsere Familie the main character is a bored young worker who stares into the camera at the film’s end and declares provocatively: “I will leave. Yet, if I had to say “forever,” I couldn’t bear it. We’ll see each other again” (29:30).71 Welz tests various alienation techniques (Verfremdung) that he uses in his later films, including sound distortion applied to formulaic talk by GDR functionaries, and stilted language mechanically recited with stylized deliberateness by puppet-like actors. As he did in Unsere Familie, he casts a boy actor to deliver grown-up lines and uses bright, contrasting light to avoid any naturalistic environments.72 Employing the same unconventional blending of stilted (often quoted) dialogue and parody, Welz again cites filmic influences: the canteen worker has left her desolate shift in the factory kitchen. The first

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third of the film highlights the stupefying boredom of her life. The film then cuts to a shower scene that quickly references Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) in numerous allusions, including the canteen worker’s reference to the “beautifully horrific” Janet Leigh murder scene in the shower, and the mounting of a small 8mm camera onto a tripod in front of her by her male intruder, who holds Truffaut’s Hitchcock book to the camera. In stark contrast to Psycho’s famous shower scene however, Welz quotes the film here to highlight the complete lack of mystery and suspense in the lives of the youngest generation in the GDR as well as the inability of the young filmmakers to freely experiment with new aesthetics. The shower curtains are literally pulled back and the empty spaciousness of the factory shower room is heightened by a low camera angle (as opposed to Marion Crane’s claustrophobic motel shower setting). Moreover, the presumed attacker enters the room with a grotesquely oversized knife and delivers a didactic monologue on how Hitchcock created suspense through editing while complying with moral conventions of the time, which would not tolerate a shot of Janet Leigh’s breasts. In mock response to this 1960s moment of censorship, the camera shows a close-up of the actress’ breasts. While basic needs are met, as the opening canteen scene showing two workers slowly eating a meal illustrates, the characters’ private and public lives suffer from the dearth of surprise, suspense, and subtlety. A similar point is made by a later interruption of a stereotypically staged romance scene by the child actor and the ex-wife of the male lover literally turning the lights onto a couple in their romantic hideout. In addition to their pseudo-psychoanalytic lecturing of the baffled lovers, a tuxedo-clad man enters the family soap drama and nails a handwritten poster onto the wall with instructions that read: “Noise and loud sounds of any kind are to be avoided. TVs are to be switched off at 10pm. The working population has a right to their night rest” (20:12).73 Once more, the public didacticism that aimed to create conformist GDR citizens by means of detailed instruction regarding orderly lives is parodied here. In an underhanded double entendre, one character steps out of her role and comments on the sign: “That part about the TV, I agree with that.” Another responds: “Oh yes, everything can be heard here” (22:03),74 thus matter-of-factly suggesting that GDR state television did not offer anything but the most formulaic fare and that attempts at dissent would be known to the Stasi through their elaborate spying devices. The film stages the interrupted romance as a family soap opera, but in fact the dysfunctional, repressed and frustrated family it portrays is a metaphor for GDR society, one that is continued in Unsere Familie. Welz’s first three films are thus closely linked by their shared focus on the generational conflict between the youngest GDR generation and their parents. Unlike the films of his older DEFA colleagues, Welz does not depict this conflict as an ideological battle staged within a totalitarian

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regime. Rather, his tone is decidedly absurdist as he portrays the socialist endgame as an exhausted and highly dysfunctional family melodrama that lacks the passion for a genuinely passionate struggle. Using language that consists of ironic quotations of worn-out socialist phrases, and filmic language that cites other models without being able to inhabit them, and creating exterior and interior landscapes that reflect the artificially restricted spaces for the young generation, Welz delivers biting satire in a unique visual aesthetic. Lacking even the negative emotional power of disappointed utopianism, Welz presents characters in all three films whose lives appear to be condemned to repetitive “concentric circles.” The uniformity of GDR reality, the overly regulated and organized nature of life at school, at work, in the cultural realm, and even in the family is creatively parodied in response to the anxious control the Socialist Unity Party sought to exert over all its citizens but particularly its youth. Since the party focused especially on “culture” as a means of educating East German youth to embrace its socialist ideals, it limited the possibility of individual expression, particularly outside its mass organizations. The party’s insistence on absolute control over the cultural activities of its citizens through mass organizations was summed up by Walter Ulbricht in a speech at the infamous 11th plenum of the SED party meeting in 1965: “No freedom for crazy people. Otherwise we’ll soon have absolute freedom everywhere.”75 Welz’s absurdist humor, the wittiness of many of the filmic and literary citations, and the unpredictability of suspending time and place challenge the casual viewer. To achieve the dense intertextuality between his early films, Welz collaborated in many of his films with the same group of actors, and crew, in particular with cinematographer Michael Schaufert, with whom he had been friends since their joint student days at the HFF. Welz had to go to great lengths to receive permission for Schaufert, who was a cameraman for the GDR television studio, to work on Banale Tage. The DEFA feature-film union of cinematographers protested that it was unnecessary to employ an “outsider” for the project76 but Welz persisted. Demanding freedom of choice in assembling a film crew had been a key concern for the youngest generation of DEFA directors. Like the director/cinematographer team of Jörg Foth, his mentor, and Thomas Plenert, Welz sought to insure the integrity of his aesthetic vision by collaborating with Schaufert, as he did again for his first post-Wende feature film, Burning Life (1994). Burning Life continues his focus on the rapidly changing Eastern German landscape and develops several themes of his first three films further. The road movie sequences in Unsere Familie, for example, now resurface in his first film made in unified Germany for independent producer Alexander Gehrke, a former HFF classmate, in collaboration with television producers. Elements from his “buddy film” Banale Tage are translated here into the story of two rogue women who accidentally join forces to

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rob banks in depressed East German towns, only to distribute the money to needy citizens. This modern Robin Hood duo was often referred to as the East German Thelma and Louise since the film was written at the same time that Ridley Scott’s film hit the screens in 1991. Writer Stefan Kolditz dispels suggestions that Welz’s film was a German remake: “Thelma and Louise is about two women who disentangle themselves from the world of men and gender stereotypes; our film, in contrast, is about two women who are reacting to social upheaval.”77 The social upheaval is manifested, for example, in the bulldozing of a village in Thuringia to make room for an enormous golf course built by outside investors, in response to which the mayor hangs himself. His daughter, played by Anna Thalbach, was unable to prevent her despondent father from suicide and begins to rob banks Robin Hood–style in response. Welz now shows twenty-some-yearolds in Eastern Germany who are no longer primarily struggling for emancipation from parents or state in the East but are carrying the burden of seeing their newly “liberated” parents rendered economically powerless and at the mercy of Western investors. Referring to her father’s suicide, Anna says: “I watched him carefully. Except for five minutes” (1:31).78 If the youngest generation struggled against the seemingly omnipotent paternalism of its elders (including the state) in Banale Tage, they powerlessly witness their parents’ impotent depression in the new world order in Burning Life. Depicting the Eastern landscape as exploited in the environmental destruction of its natural world and the economic depression that causes the population to cheer for the Robin Hood gangster duo, the film raises serious questions about the success of the recent unification with the capitalist West. Like Welz’s earlier films, it offers an important counter-voice against the wall comedies and sentimental unification stories of the early 1990s that created sugarcoated fantasies about German unification.79 But the film also delivers continuities through inserted asides that demonstrate the unbroken absurdities of modern life regardless of political regime. The figure of the diminutive insurance agent who sells “security in uncertain times” to wide-eyed East Germans and who discovers the abandoned Russian getaway car in the middle of an environmental wasteland represents one such continuity. Welz inserts the scene in the devastated area of former aboveground mining that is reminiscent of a similar shot from Unsere Familie, when the same actor, Michael Klobe (who also acted in Banale Tage) chases the getaway car of father and son down a similarly desolate landscape absurdly demanding the return of unpaid gasoline and displaying all the unpleasant traits of an opportunistic petit-bourgeois who seeks to capitalize on any misfortune regardless of the political circumstances. In both films, Welz ridicules grossly exaggerated human pettiness staged in destroyed environments. In this sense, it is the continuity rather than the differences between before and after 1989 German landscapes that make the early films of Peter Welz so remarkable.

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Notes 1

Helke Misselwitz’s Herzsprung was based on the script Illusion des Erwachens, which DaDaeR had supported financially. The political changes after the Wende caused Misselwitz to completely rewrite the film. It was produced by Thomas Wilkening Filmgesellschaft mbH, a successor of the production group DaDaeR. 2

Stefan Kolditz, “Burning Life: A Recollection,” DVD special features for Peter Welz, Burning Life (Amherst: Icestorm International, 2008). 3

Welz, interview with the author at Babylon cinema, Berlin, Jul. 25, 2011.

4

“Als Gesamteindruck ist ihm wichtig, dass eine neue Art der Filmsprache angegangen wird . . . Der Film ist optisch nicht der übliche DEFA-Film.” Dr. Predel in “Protokoll der Rohschnittabnahme des Films ‘Banale Tage’ von Peter Welz am 27.9.1990,” at Archiv Film Museum Potsdam. 5

“Die drei während dieser Zeit produzierten Filme Letztes aus der DaDaeR, Banale Tage, und Land hinter dem Regenbogen brechen mit jener fatalen Tradition, die vor allen von ausländischen Beobachtern in den Vorwurf mündete, die DEFA Filme würden sich immer ähnlicher werden. So vielfältig diese drei Filme auch untereinander sind, sie präsentieren die Sichtweisen einer neuen Generation, suchen angemessene Neuansätze und bringen einen Rigorismus im Umgang mit ihren Gegenständen zum Ausdruck, den man im DEFA Film lange nicht mehr kannte.” Thomas Wilkening, internal letter to Herr von Sell, DEFA, May 28, 1991, Wilkening Akte at Archiv Film Museum Potsdam.

6

As dramaturge Timothy Grossmann put it: “der Sieg der Motorik über den Inhalt,” in “Stellungnahme zum Film,” Dec. 14, 1990. Produktionsakte Banale Tage, Archiv Film Museum, Potsdam. 7

Welz acknowledges that he was not interested in spelling everything out for the audience and had thus challenged viewers to follow the allusions to events and themes. 8

“Film ist ein gesellschaftliches Verhältnis.” Internal working paper penned by Tony Loeser, Peter Kahane, and Thomas Wilkening as representatives of the Arbeitsgruppe 3, Nachwuchs “Entwurf Manifest der Arbeitsgruppe Sektion Spielfilm,” Feb. 18, 1988, Wilkening Akte, Archiv Film Museum Potsdam. 9

“Du kommst an einen neuen Ort und es sieht alles genauso aus.” Welz reported that this quote stems from a Wim Wenders film and was suggested by his cinematographer Michael Schaufert. E-mail correspondence with Welz, Sept. 7, 2011. 10

See especially Leonie Naughton, That Was the Wild East, and Paul Cook, Representing East Germany since Unification: From Colonization to Nostalgia (Oxford: Berg, 2005).

11

The film shows several scenes in the factory where blatant pandering to party slogans is duly rewarded, breeding a culture of cowardice and dishonesty. 12

“Nur Eitelkeit. Die Dinge wiederholen sich.” In the script the following sentence is inserted: “Du willst bloss nicht glauben, dass alles längst beschlossen ist” (script, 44; you just don’t want to believe that everything has long since been decided).

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13

“Ich hatte mich darauf eingestellt, dass ich 1989 nach dem Studium in der DEFA anfange, zehn Jahre als Assistent irgendwo und dann mit vierzig meinen ersten Film mache.” Peter Welz, in an interview with the author, Jul. 25, 2011, Cinema Babylon, Berlin. 14

“Auf solche wie dich verzichten wir hier gerne.”

15

“Daß gerade in diesem tollen Aufschwung, in dem wir uns jetzt befinden, dass daran dann rumgemäkelt wird.” Welz, interview with author, Jul. 25, 2011. 16

“Daß die Reflektion der Wende aus einer Ostsicht bitte schön nicht gewollt ist.” Ibid., 2011. 17

“Geschichten aus der DDR, die schließlich auch deutsche Geschichten sind.” Thomas Wilkening in a letter to Minister of Culture of the State of Brandenburg, Dr. Neufeldt, Apr. 29, 1991, asking for film funding for several projects by young DEFA directors. Wilkening Akte, Archiv Film Museum Potsdam. 18

“Er [Haussmann] sagte etwa: die DDR war die totale Hippie-Republik, wir haben auf Matratzen gelegen und gesoffen und uns ständig krank schreiben lassen. Das war so unverkrampft. Ich mochte es, daß er nicht die typische Geschichte vom totalitaristischen System gebracht hat.” Brussig, “Sonnenallee, Interview mit Leander Haussmann und Thomas Brussig,” http://www.thomasbrussig.de/ Seiten/Interviews/inte3.htm. 19

Kerstin and Gunnar Decker, Gefühlsausbrüche oder Ewig puberiert der Ostdeutsche (Berlin: Das Neue Berlin, 2000), 21. 20

Daphne Berdahl, Where the World Ended: Re-Unification and Identity in the German Borderland (Berkeley: California University Press, 1999).

21

See, for example, Jennifer Kapczynski and Michael Richardson, eds., A New History of German Cinema (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012); Brad Prager and Jaimey Fisher, eds., The Collapse of the Conventional: Film and Politics at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010); Nick Hodgin, Screening the East; David Clarke, German Cinema since Unification (New York: Continuum, 2006); and Paul Cook and Chris Homewood, eds., New Directions in German Cinema (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2011). 22

“Diese Aussage, dass der Schwarze im Osten ein Held sein kann, darf nicht sein. Denn der Osten ist fremdenfeindlich. Das darf nicht anders sein.” Welz, interview with author, Aug. 25, 2011. 23

Interview, Norbert Baumgarten with the author, July 21, 2011 in Berlin.

24

“Das war etwas, was sich über eine Zeit kurz nach der Wende gezogen hat, Wut über die nicht stattfindende Auseinandersetzung mit der DDR. Hier [Sonnenalleehatte ich wirklich das Gefühl, mit einer Lässigkeit und Leichtigkeit, mit einem Augenzwinkern über die Zeit zu erzählen. Das drückte Souveränität aus.” Brussig, “Sonnenallee, Interview mit Leander Haussmann und Thomas Brussig.” 25

“Der Kinospielfilm ‘Herzsprung,’ Buch und Regie Helke Misselwitz, wurde als Gemeinschaftsproduktion der Thomas Wilkening Filmgesellschaft mbH mit der DEFA Studio Babelsberg GmbH und dem ZDF realisiert. Es war der erste abendfüllende Film der ausführenden Produzenten Thomas Wilkening Filmgesellschaft. Zugleich war er der Spielfilmerstling von Helke Misselwitz.” Quoted from email correspondence with Heidrun Wilkening, Jun 9, 2008.

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26

“Tödlich langweiliger Film, einfallslos und nicht subversiv sondern übermässig symbolistisch.” Carl Andersen, Neues Deutschland, Jan. 24, 1992. 27

Angelika Nguyen, Neues Deutschland, Dec. 4, 1990.

28

“Mitfahren oder Aussteigen—das ist doch ein Unterschied.”—“Nur scheinbar. Und keener merkt’s. Konzentrische Kreise.” 29

“Du verwechselst Spielen mit Mitspielen.”

30

“Die Hoffnung ist ein Zustand der Seele, wo man glaubt, dass das Gewünschte eintreffen würde. Sie wird durch eine besondere Bewegung der Lebensgeister veranlasst, nämlich durch eine Mischung von Freude und Verlangen” (Script, 91). 31

“Krieg? Krebs? Langeweile?”—“Dass du allein gelassen wirst, weggestossen.”

32

“Witzbold! Wohin denn?”

33

“Der Film ist leider nur zäh. Bert Brecht läßt grüßen aber der Gruß kam beim Filmemacher nicht richtig an. Unbeholfen dramatisiert und erzählt reiht sich eine plakative Tiefgründigkeit an die nächste und lassen diesen Einblick in die Kulturen und Konflikte von DDR Jugendlichen zur endlosen Langeweile verkommen . . . Ein Film, der nur auf Symbole und Metaphern baut, verrät die Realität. Der beantragten Freigabe ab 12 Jahren konnte entsprochen werden. Langeweile und allgemeines Unverständnis kann bei dieser Altersgruppe als einzige Wirkung erwartet werden. Der Altersgruppe unter 12 Jahren möchte der Ausschuß den Film nicht zumuten, nicht zuletzt weil auf penetrante Art und Weise 5 x uriniert und 1 x gekotzt wird.” “Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle (FSK) Wiesbaden,” Produktionsakte Banale Tage, Aug. 19, 1991, Archiv Film Museum Potsdam. 34

“Es ist ein komisch bittrer Film über unsere verpatzten Möglichkeiten.” Timothy Grossmann, “Stellungnahme zum Film,” Produkionsakte Banale Tage, Dec. 14, 1990, Archiv Film Museum Potsdam. 35

“Kunstdialoge in Realszenen,” Timothy Grossmann, “Abnahmeprotokoll des Szenariums ‘Banale Tage,’” May 1, 1990, Produktionsakte Banale Tage, Archiv Film Museum Potsdam. 36

“Das Land, welchem dieser Film entsprang, starb schneller als die letzte Klappe des Films. Über Nacht wurde ihm daher eine größere Aufgabe übertragen. Dieser Film ist auch ein Abgesang auf die DDR, ein bissiger, ein ehrlicher, aber auch ein komischer. Doch die Vergeblicheit die wohnte und wohnt auch außerhalb der DDR. Kunst ist Waffel in den Kämpfen unserer Zeit.” Grossmann, “Abnahmeprotokoll des Szenariums ‘Banale Tage.’” 37

This sentiment is comically captured in a scene in Burning Life where Anna and Lisa demand that the customers in a bank they rob sing the German national anthem while they make their getaway. The obedient customers of the former East German town ask earnestly befuddled: “Which one?” and offer a shaky rendition of the West German anthem.

38

“Immer diese alten Filme.”

39

“Ich kann das einfach nicht mehr sehen.”

40

“Kannste stecken lassen, deine Sprüche. Interessiert kein Schwein.”

41

“Junger Mann, sagen sie mir, sind wir da die Höhe der Sonne zu ermessen oder uns an ihren Strahlen zu erwärmen?”—“Die Zeit scheint wohl eine neue

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Ordnung der Dinge herbeiführen zu wollen, junger Mann. Aber wir werden nur noch den Umsturz der Alten erleben.” 42

“Nicht Trotz, nicht die Weigerung, dem Kommenden zu begegnen. Eine unbändige Gier, dass es endlich kommen, endlich beginnen möge. Und es muss unerhört sein, gross, und einmalig. Es wird uns verändern, wenn es erst beginnt. Bald, Bald” (script 119/20). 43 Tibor Déry, Erdachter Report über ein amerikanisches Pop-Festival, trans. Hans Skjrecki (Berlin: Volk & Welt, 1974). 44

“Die von uns angestrebte Zielgruppe, junge Menschen so zwischen 16 und 18, haben wir erreicht, aber es ist eine Spaltung des Publikums zu beobachten. Die einen haben ihre Pop-periode sozusagen überwunden, verarbeitet und fühlen sich durch uns bestätigt. Andere möchten die Popkultur bestätigt finden als Idol, als scheinbaren Freiraum gegenüber realen oder vorgestellten Zwängen und fühlen sich enttäuscht, weil wir das nicht liefern. Auch diese Enttäuschung kann produktiv werden. Wer z. B. die Puppen in der Kassenhalle beim Herausgehen mit anderen Augen ansieht als beim Hereinkommen—wir beobachten das—hat schon etwas begriffen.” Martin Linzer, “Karger Report: Gespräch mit HansDieter Meves,” Theater der Zeit 34, no. 2 (1979): 45. 45

“Aber seit der Inszenierung von Tibor Deris ‘Fiktivem Report über ein Rockfestival’ [sic] war für mich die Volksbühne gestorben. Das war so 1976/77. Seitdem habe ich da nie wieder einen Fuß hineingesetzt, bis heute. Das Stück war für mich verlogene Scheiße, und auch mit den intellektuellen Spinnereien der Bühnenarbeiter konnte ich nichts anfangen. Wenn ich Bier trinken war im Café Burger und es saßen an den Nebentischen diese Nickelbrillenträger mit dem Fensterglas in der Fassung und mit ihren Fleischerhemden, die erzählten wie und womit sie die Welt verändern wollten, aber eigentlich nichts weiter taten als Kulissen schieben, dann war mir das zu abgedreht.” Klaus Gendreizig, “Fünfundreißig Jahre in derselben Straße,” in Felsmann and Gröschner, Durchgangszimmer Prenzlauer Berg, 119. 46

“Hells Angel: Im allgemeinen gehorchen die Menschen gerne. Warum sollte man sie dieser Freude berauben? Vielleicht ist das das Einzige, was sie im Gleichgewicht hält?—Angel ascending to heaven: Einen Teil des Menschen verbannen und des Lebens berauben, allen Menschen durch krankhaftes Unverständnis das Exil eines Teils ihrer Selbst aufzwingen.” Welz had used the image of a woman ascending in a cloud also in Unsere Familie, where the girlfriend leaves her lover after the intrusion by his mother by climbing onto the cloud and vanishing. 47

“Schade, bloß Puppen. Sie führ’n uns vor, wie verkommen die Welt ist.”— “Gott sei Dank, bloß Puppen.” 48

The film further plays with the idea of duplicity by double casting certain characters: one actor portrays both the priest and the minister of culture, while another one plays both the theater’s cloak-room assistant and the grandmother. 49

“Hat’s dir nicht gefallen?”—“Doch, doch. Es war genau das, was ich brauchte.”

50

“Wo waren Sie zuvor engagiert?” (Welz, script, Banale Tage, 51).

51

“Was ist mit dir?”—Karin: “Das fragst du mich?” Wagner: “Genau. Das fragen die Leute auch. Und wir sind ihnen die Antwort schuldig. Noch fragen sie.”

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ABSURD ENDGAMES 52

“Wir sind lächerlich.”

53

“Ist doch sinnlos.”

54

Anna Saunders, Honnecker’s Children, 10.

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55

Christoph Kleßmann, “Rethinking the Second German Dictatorship,” in Dictatorship as Experience: Towards a Socio-Cultural History of the GDR, ed. Konrad Jarausch (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999), 368. 56

“Eine Meldung geht um die Welt! Wiesbaden: Pissen endlich als Symbol entlarvt! Kotzen war im Osten nur Metapher!” Press materials, Banale Tage (Berlin: Basis Film Verleih, 1991), 4, Archiv Film Museum Potsdam. 57

See chapter 2 for a discussion of this film.

58

“Der real existierende Sozialismus war die Lebensweise eines ganzen Volkes, die als großes tragisches Szenario in verschiedenen Rollen aufgeführt wurde: die kriminellen Machthaber, die erfolgssüchtigen Karrieristen, die gehemmten und angepassten Mitläufer, die von einer Illusion zur anderen jagenden Flüchtlinge, die sich im Prozess verzehrenden Oppositionellen, und die abgehobenen Utopisten.” Hans Joachim Maaz, Gefühlsstau: Ein Psychogramm der DDR (Berlin: Argon, 1990), here cited from press materials for Banale Tage. 59

“Ich bin rumgerannt, zuviel rumgerannt, zuviel rumgerannt, es ist doch nichts passiert.” Pankow song lyrics cited in Banale Tage press material, 7. 60

Welz played the main part in Heiner Carow’s Ikarus (1977) and also acted in Ralf Kirsten’s Ich zwinge dich zu Leben (1978) among other parts.

61

Since 1992 Castorf has been the controversial director of the Volksbühne in Berlin.

62

“Komisch, da kommt einer an einen ganz anderen Ort und alles sieht ganz genauso aus.” 63

“Der beste Film der je gedreht wurde.”

64

“Jagger . . . War früher Jogger. Daraus wurde dann später Jagger.”

65

“Ökonom. Diplom-Ökonom.”

66

Welz wrote his diploma thesis on Godard. See Laura McGee, “Peter Welz and the Last DEFA Generation,” on DVD special features for Burning Life (Amherst, MA: Icestorm International, 2008). 67

“In meinem ganzen Leben habe ich noch nie so eine öde Strasse gesehen.”

68

“Da wo die Werktätigen die Macht haben, da ist die Freiheit zu Hause. . . . Zur Zeit erlebt nicht einmal ein Drittel aller Jugendlichen bis 25 die leistungs- und persönlichkeitsfördernde Atmosphäre eines Jugendkollektivs.” 69

This scene also parodies capitalist lingo by imitating a West German candy commercial: “Wollt Ihr Bier?—Nein—Wollt ihr Korn?—Nein—Was wollt Ihr denn?— Li-mo-na-de.” alluding to a popular MAOAM candy commercial which in turn is reminiscent of Goebbels’s famous 1943 speech about total war. 70

“Haut doch ab.”

71

“Ich gehe. Und doch, wenn ich sagen müsste für immer—ich würde es nicht aushalten. Wir sehen uns wieder.”

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72 Like his mentor Jörg Foth in Blumenland, Welz experiments with unusual light and filters for his interiors, imparting an otherworldly effect for the factory and apartment spaces. This metaphor is taken to its ironic end when the protagonist’s girlfriend departs from the apartment on a cloud. 73

“Lärm und Krach jeglicher Art sind zu vermeiden. Fernseher sind um 10:00 Uhr abends abzuschalten. Die arbeitende Bevölkerung hat ein Recht auf ihre Nachtruhe.” 74

“Das mit dem Fernseher find ich gut.”—“Jaja, hier kann man alles hören.”

75

“Keine Freiheit für Verrückte, sonst haben wir absolute Freiheiten überall.” Walter Ulbricht here cited in Horst Groschopp, “Kulturhäuser in der DDR: Vorläufer, Konzepte, Gebrauch; Versuch einer historischen Rekonstruktion,” in Kulturhäuser in Brandenburg: Eine Bestandsaufnahme, ed. Thomas Ruben and Bernd Wagner (Potsdam: Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, 1994), 97. 76

In a three-page letter written on March 29, 1990, Peter Krause, union representative for DEFA feature-film cinematographers, suggested to Welz that Schaufert’s films should be shown to four feature-film cinematographers, after which Welz would be asked to explain why Schaufert would be the only person qualified to shoot Banale Tage. This level of interfering studio bureaucracy is remarkable at a time when the newly founded production group DaDaeR was hoping to work independently of the studio’s cumbersome policies. It demonstrates that restrictive obstacles for younger film directors did not always originate from the political concerns by top officials in the studio hierarchy but were generated also by the long-held customs and organizational structures of the large studio organization. 77

Stefan Kolditz, “Burning Life: A Recollection.”

78

“Ich habe ihn keinen Moment aus den Augen gelassen. Bis auf fünf Minuten.”

79

Liz Mittmann, “Fantasizing Integration and Escape in the Post-Unification Road Movie,” in Light Motives: German Popular Film in Perspective, ed. Randall Halle and Margaret McCarthy (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003), 326–48.

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4: “Flight into Reality”: The Cinema of Helke Misselwitz

T

HE OPENING SEQUENCE of Helke Misselwitz’s 2003 television documentary Quartier der Illusionen (District of Illusions), about the Berlin train station Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse, succinctly displays many of the filmmaker’s lifelong thematic interests and cinematic techniques. The film opens with distorted shots of unidentifiable locations and objects in greenish hues that appear more like an abstract painting than documentary images. While the viewer is still attempting to decode the visuals, heavy breathing from a hurrying person becomes audible as the images gradually take more shape, barely enough to make out stairs, a bridge, a river, a platform, photographed in slow exposure. Helke Misselwitz’s distinct voice, immediately familiar to viewers who have seen her previous documentary films, speaks a voice-over reminiscent of her first featurelength documentary film, Winter Adé:

Every homecoming to my neighborhood at Friedrichstrasse station fills me with longing for my childhood. Every place with train tracks that allow for a quick departure appears like home to me. The coincidence of my birth before a closed train crossing, the sound of rolling train wheels, which accompanied my coming into the world, will remind me of that first innocent moment till time kisses me on the mouth.1

This voice-over gives way to an excerpt from Schubert’s Winterreise in an eclectic rendition by opera singer Nino Sandow, who also played the male lead in Misselwitz’s 1992 feature film Herzsprung. Within the first two minutes of the film, Misselwitz cites two of her previous films (Winter Adé also begins with her voice-over narration of her birth at the actual train crossing in Zwickau), followed later by an excerpt from another earlier documentary (Sperrmüll, 1990). The sequence combines images of the train station shot first in a radically abstract style, immediately followed by a sequence in crisply realist mode. While the abstract images are accompanied by the straightforward voice-over narration, the later, documentary, images are edited with Sandow’s “distorted” interpretation of the Romantic classic song cycle about a lone wanderer. Image and sound thus complement each other, lending a simultaneously documentary and poetic character to the various sequences. Such blending of documentary

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and poetic aesthetics in the same film, regardless of the genre, can be traced back through her entire oeuvre. Thematically, the opening sequence alludes to topics of visceral memory (childhood sounds), (auto)biography, excavations of a past that reverberates through the present, meta-filmic reflection (regarding her own work but also alluding to classic city films such as Walter Ruttmann’s 1927 Berlin, Sinfonie der Grossstadt), media and ideology critique, and epistemological probing of visual representation. Misselwitz’s work in experimental, documentary, and fiction film has circled around these themes with remarkable consistency in the GDR, the unification period, and unified Germany, while her aesthetic style can be described as blending exacting documentary observations with poetic condensation, which was often derived from German Romanticist traditions (folk songs and fairy tales, but also Schubert’s song cycles). These quotes of Romantic works or texts are often either distorted (as they are here through the modern interpretation of Winterreise) or contrasted with sharply realist modes, as will become apparent in the discussion of Herzsprung. Misselwitz is best known as a documentary filmmaker who pioneered feminist aesthetics in the GDR in her acclaimed film about GDR women’s lives, Winter Adé. The incorporation of her own biography, her visible and audible presence in the films, her emphasis on subjective authenticity, and of course her frequent focus on women all support such a categorization. Her status as one of the very few female directors at DEFA is often emphasized in critical reviews and scholarship on her work2 and compared to that of West German female filmmakers who were marginalized: “Furthermore, she was relegated first to television and then to the documentary division of the DEFA. The regular working hours there accommodated home life as opposed to the more hectic schedule and longer working hours of a career making feature films.”3 Without doubt, women filmmakers at DEFA faced more challenges in obtaining contracts in the desirable fiction-film division of the studio—evinced by the fact that among the relatively large number of female film students only very few achieved the status of working directors. Even in the supposedly more woman-friendly environment of the television studio only five out of fifty directors were women.4 But Misselwitz’s biography of working for television, then refusing the delegation to return there after her diploma, was mirrored by those of Herwig Kipping and Jörg Foth, among others. Misselwitz’s mentor Ulrich Weiß also moved between the divisions of documentary and feature film as the political winds changed, drifting wherever he was able to realize any work at all. Her mentor Jürgen Böttcher in the artistic group “document” in the documentary division at DEFA left feature-film directing after the banning of Jahrgang 45 (Born in 1945, 1965) and

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repeatedly withdrew from making documentary films to paint under his artist’s name, “Strawalde.” In Misselwitz’s case the chance to make the documentary film Winter Adé for DEFA proved to be a boon, as it gave her a chance to direct a full-length film, even though she had refused to return to the television studio after her graduation from film school (normally an automatic career-ending move in the GDR). The project gave her an opportunity to work in the artistically less restricted and more creative climate of the DEFA documentary division alongside innovative documentary filmmakers such as Jürgen Böttcher, Volker Koepp, and Andreas Voigt, and to work with her preferred cinematographer, Thomas Plenert. In the documentary division Misselwitz also had a chance to make numerous Kinobox short-film contributions in which she tried out experimental, documentary, and fiction modes, as I will detail in this chapter. Rather than understanding Misselwitz’s relegation to documentary film as a marginalizing move, as some West German critics have argued, we should regard this chance to direct Winter Adé as most fortuitous, given the circumstances of the DEFA studio in the late 1980s, where featurelength fiction-film assignments for directors of the youngest generation were almost impossible to obtain, as I have already shown. Misselwitz’s experience of producing three consecutive feature-length documentaries, together with her Kinobox shorts, decisively shaped her crossover aesthetic style and provides further evidence for the main contention of this book: that the last generation of DEFA directors, while being the “unwanted generation” as Peter Kahane expressed it (see chapter 6) nevertheless managed to find diverse creative outlets for their innovative visions. Misselwitz’s career in experimental, documentary, and fiction film and also as producer, administrator, and professor is exemplary in this regard, as I will describe in this chapter. While the assignment to make Winter Adé might have been motivated by clichéd gender prejudice to make a “women’s film,” it in fact afforded Misselwitz her decisive breakthrough opportunity. In the film, Misselwitz uses a train journey from the South to the North of the GDR as a symbolic visualization for movement (and stagnation) in women’s lives in late socialism: “Moving through society as an expression for the prescribed tracks, the possibility that tracks can end, that one might change tracks.”5 A highly personal voice-over, beginning with her above-mentioned birth in an ambulance at a train crossing furthermore makes it clear that this film is personal for the director. She then extended an invitation to her viewers to share their own experiences as women, workers, mothers, and teens with others and conducted over one hundred post-screening audience discussions, facilitating opportunities for her audience to speak out. Winter Adé aimed to demystify GDR women’s reality beyond the official declarations of egalitarianism and progress: “I wanted to tell about the

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women I knew. Not about the women in the magazines. Political in the sense of telling true stories.”6 In this chapter I will investigate the particular expression of “truth” and “poetry” that Misselwitz has repeatedly claimed as characteristic of her work by tracing the major themes and cinematic techniques described in the opening sequence of Quartier der Illusionen back to her student films, her experiences at DEFA and in the Nachwuchsgruppe, as well as her career in unified Germany. In doing so, I will attend to the specific instances of obstacles and censorship in the GDR (for example in the case of her student film Haus.Frauen) but avoid interpreting her oeuvre exclusively through the limiting and unspecific label of GDR documentary. Ulrike Gramann has aptly described the reductive effect of interpreting former East German filmmakers’ works solely through an ideologically politicized lens. Writing about Misselwitz’s short Kinobox film TangoTraum (Tango Dream, 1985) she states: The gesture of insatiable longing that the film expresses was understood politically in the GDR. It says little that the mere hint that texts were banned at a different time and in a different place was understood by all involved as a scandalous allusion to the conditions in the country. From a distance I now see how neurotic this discourse was. . . . What surprises me in Helke Misselwitz’s film today is that it finds a distance to the sorrow that was specific to the GDR.7

Misselwitz’s reputation as a skilled documentarist derived from the three films that turned in effect into a trilogy of documentaries about the late GDR and the unification process: Winter Adé, Wer fürchtet sich vorm schwarzen Mann, and Sperrmüll. She was not able to debut in fiction film until Herzsprung and Engelchen (Little Angel, 1996), as I will detail below. Like Jürgen Böttcher in the artistic group “document,” Misselwitz depicted the daily workflow of her protagonists’ lives, showing their routines in great detail by means of intimate camera placements. Böttcher had demonstrated in numerous films, including most famously in Rangierer (Shunters, 1984) and Die Mauer (The Wall, 1990), how uncommented, skillfully edited images sufficed to convey complex atmospheric stories of hazardous physical work or monumental historical changes respectively. Böttcher had famously omitted all voice-over commentary and interviews in 1984 at a time when censorship would have made voice-over commentary and candid interviews impossible, and set new standards for vérité-inspired documentaries.8 He had produced many pioneering films over his long career, including conveying with impressive immediacy the physically dangerous work of iron workers through daring camera placement in Ofenbauer (Oven Builders, 1962), and the multifaceted identities of “socialist workers” in Drei von Vielen (Three among Many, 1963) and Stars (1963).

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Böttcher’s poetic aesthetic of silence in Rangierer, as Wolfgang Gersch has described it,9 was no longer necessary five years later in the changed political situation of 1988/89. Misselwitz was able to overcome the inherent anonymity and distance of Böttcher’s wordless visual meditations by reintroducing the voice: her own as well as that of her protagonists, who because of her skillful interviews and patience reveal intimate details about themselves through family photos, personal documents, physical characteristics, and stories. Misselwitz’s three Wende documentary films display a remarkable level of commitment to examining the impact of sociopolitical structures on personal biographies, such as those of women in the late GDR in Winter Adé, a family business in Berlin in Wer fürchtet sich vorm schwarzen Mann, and teen musicians during the period of German unification in Sperrmüll. Film historian Daniela Berghahn has maintained that this commitment has remained the lasting contribution of former DEFA filmmakers to post-unification German film culture: “East German films of the 1990s are socially committed films that are driven by a strong humanist and utopian impulse.”10 As a professor of directing at the Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen Konrad Wolf since 1997, Misselwitz has instilled this passion for film’s critical potential in her students. One of the last films for which she served as artistic advisor before her recent retirement at age sixty-five, for example, is David F. Wnendt’s acclaimed diploma film Kriegerin (English title Combat Girls, 2011), which was released to cinemas worldwide in 2012. The film, set in “a small town somewhere in the East,” picks up on some of the themes in Herzsprung in its powerful depiction of right-wing violence against nonwhite residents in Germany today. While her fiction-film debut, Herzsprung, condensed many of the challenging problems of the transition period from East to unified Germany into a fictional tale, Wer fürchtet sich vorm schwarzen Mann is a preservation film, one that documents not only a soon-to-vanish trade from socialist East Berlin—the coal-delivery business—but also a way of life that had existed since 1922 in the working-class neighborhood of Prenzlauer Berg, that is, long before the founding of the GDR. Sperrmüll, like Petra Tschörtner’s Berlin Prenzlauer Berg (1990), Jörg Foth’s Prenzlauer Berg Walzer (1990/93), and Andreas Voigt’s Leipzig films (see chapter 5) records opposing views from the margins of the unification process, views that have almost been forgotten today. Jennifer Creech sums up the explosive effect of Misselwitz’s first feature-length documentary, Winter Adé, in the GDR at a moment of increasing social restlessness: “The film intervenes in official political discourses of East German women’s history and becomes a site of critical truth that lays bare the inconsistencies and contradictions of real, existing socialism.”11 Misselwitz’s long-standing critique of media images in her films has targeted simplistic historical narratives (Fidele Bäckerin,

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Fremde Oder [Foreign Oder]), socialist (Winter Adé), and capitalist ideology (Sperrmüll, Quartier der Illusionen). The earliest manifestation of this interest can be found in her diploma thesis, “The Image of Women in Fascist German Film—the Impact of the Respective Political Goal on their Depiction, Examined through the Example of Select Films from the Third Reich,”12 in which she differentiated between the “Wunschbild und Wirklichkeit” (ideal image and reality, 50) of women in films of the Nazi period. Demanding the freedom to investigate and articulate such contradictions without ideological pre-conceptions, she writes: We should speak more openly about such issues than we have done thus far, especially while it is still possible to document and preserve the testimony of those affected. Not in order to judge but in order to understand, not just rationally but emotionally. Historical identification cannot come about only through strong positive heroes, who opposed the wrong system, but also through the countless little and weak people, especially if they were, as the example of women illustrates, twice oppressed.13

This statement emphasizes both how important it is to document the multifaceted past and how necessary it is to imagine, beyond dichotomous simplifications, the complexities of individual experiences. Her diploma film, Die fidele Bäckerin, models how this can be accomplished by utilizing the found records of a real person and filling in the gaps with poetic sequences that offer the filmmaker’s interpretive meditations. For example, when the bombed-out baker Maria Schwarzbach of the film’s title dreams of a normalized life during the destruction of the Second World War, Misselwitz visualizes these dreams by showing the actress in her bourgeois attire (starched apron) serving an impeccably decorated torte to imaginary customers in the midst of a field of rubble. The baker willfully ignores the very rubble on which she stands, in her iron grip on the apparent security of her petit-bourgeois values (cleanliness, order, proper appearance). Misselwitz’s fictional account of Maria Schwarzbach is very specific about detailing the unique circumstances and decisions of one person who is attempting to survive the war. At the same time, she stages scenes that symbolically represent the actions of many: for example, the ubiquitous erasing of the names of victims of the Holocaust in the pragmatic service of guilt suppression. Taking ownership of a newly “vacated” bakery to substitute for her own bombed-out shop, Maria Schwarzbach writes her own name over that of “David Frankfurter” on the bakery’s sign. But the former owner’s name remains visible like a palimpsest as a reminder that history cannot be erased. Maria, however, is blind to such traces of the past and remains focused on maintaining her proper petit-bourgeois image: she applies lipstick using a Christmas tree ornament as a mirror, ignoring

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the utter destruction around her. Any historical re-creations of historical experiences remain highly stylized, with minimal props, to indicate that this is a later generation’s attempt, not tore-create history as it was, but to seek to understand what motivated ordinary citizens to behave in certain ways under specific historical circumstances. Critics and scholars have been quick to conflate the socially engaged utopianism of Misselwitz and her fellow former DEFA directors with an undefined DEFA tradition. Misselwitz herself traces her inspiration back to the poetic-dream visions and nightmares of poet Friedrich Hölderlin, the subject of classmate Herwig Kipping’s contemporaneous diploma film (see chapter 2). From Kipping’s script, Misselwitz quotes the Romantic poet’s artistic credo as a model for her own work: To educate my young charge to become human, that was and remains my goal. Motivated by the conviction that humanity means reason, I wanted to develop his most noble qualities and further his awareness of his moral freedom. . . . My love is directed to the entirety of humanity, except for the spoiled, enslaved, lazy. . . . We live at a period when we are working toward better days; education, the betterment of humanity is my aim. The individual may thus become a catalyst of a hope that promises a better future for all.14

Hölderlin’s idealistic dedication to the education and moral betterment of humanity through poetry inspired utopian models in the young DEFA directors during their student training. In Ulrich Weiß’s 1972 television documentary on the poet Heinrich Heine, we find a similar emphasis on blending late Romanticist sensibility with enlightened reason: “‘Oh, that’s all true! But I have this unhappy passion for reason! I love her, although she does not love me back. I give her everything but she grants me nothing. I cannot let go of her.’”15 Finding their individual cinematic voices was a complex process that involved mentors, collaborations with cinematographers, and chance opportunities, and differed for each of the members of the last generation, as this study has documented. In Misselwitz’s case, her personal style was shaped by her early interest in photography, which among other things resulted in a photo film for the Kinobox series entitled Gundula Schulz—Aktfotographie (Gundula Schulz—Nude Photography, 1983). In this short film, Misselwitz introduces her audience to a portrait photographer who is dissatisfied with the disconnect between media images of women and the realities of women’s lives. Instead, she explains her work as the search for the portrait that allows viewers to perceive the past of an individual through her presentday image. In her feature-length documentaries of the Wende period Misselwitz applies this strategy to families, businesses, and entire neighborhoods in Berlin, much as she had done in her fictional story about Maria Schwarzbach in her diploma film.

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Wer fürchtet sich vorm schwarzen Mann, for example, tells the story of a family business, a coal-delivery service in operation since the Weimar Republic and forced to relocate once in 1961 because of the building of the Berlin wall. The film has become a rare document of the lives of workers and their neighborhood in the last days of the GDR, preserving what would soon be irretrievably lost cultural knowledge.16 The title Wer fürchtet sich vorm schwarzen Mann, like Winter Adé, quotes a popular nursery rhyme, and appropriately the viewer is taken for a ride on a coal truck to experience a worker’s ordinary day on a coal-delivery route through East Berlin in January 1989. The camera, placed behind the driver on a tiny truck, accompanies the workers on many trips up and down countless stairs into apartments and cellars; it uses extremely high angles and close-ups to record the men as they carry heavy loads over seemingly endless stairs. The images are cut in a fast, rhythmic pace that highlights the physical strain of the work, reminiscent of the montage of garbage workers in Herwig Kipping’s student film Müllwagen (Garbage Truck, 1978/79). Contrasting with this heavy physical labor is the caring, family-like atmosphere of the business run by the resolute Frau Uhle. Misselwitz opens her film with a shot of four generations of women from this family business arranged like a traditional photo-album portrait. The shot is held for a long time, indicating that this live “action” tableau of a family history was arranged for the benefit of the camera. The very opening frame thus points to the constructedness of this documentary, much like the stylized re-creations of imagined history in Fidele Bäckerin. At the same time, the shot allows the viewer time to ponder the long history of this family and their business, represented by four generations of women. The emphasis on the subjective nature of the project is continued as Frau Uhle intoduces the workers, candidly listing each worker’s positive and negative attributes. For example: “This is Erwin. When he is sober, he is lovely, but when he is drunk I would like to give him his walking papers. . . . And that is Pummel, he’s a good worker but needs a wake-up call every morning. But he can work like a young god” (2:27).17 The dingy office, where the small but outspoken Frau Uhle reigns as efficient central dispatcher of her taciturn men (“I speak faster than I think,” 23:58),18 is a place where neighborhood news is exchanged, mourning relatives are consoled over a recent loss in the family, and her employees’ difficulties are discussed. Frau Uhle’s daughter, for example, tells about visiting a former coal deliveryman in prison. “One rises to the challenge” (41:34),19 she says of her discomfort at seeing the man in handcuffs; she explains that his own mother is not comfortable visiting a prison and that he has no one else who would come and spend time with him once a month. This sequence does not just depict the quiet humanity of caring neighbors and colleagues but also captures and preserves

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Fig. 4.1. Frau Uhle (center) and her daughter with their employees in Wer fürchtet sich vorm Schwarzen Mann. Courtesy of DEFA Stiftung; photo by Heiko Koinzer.

the language of a vanishing world: when Frau Uhle matter-of-factly talks about her workers’ past prison sentences she euphemizes, “he had to go study—learn Spanish” (40:39).20 However, she shows great compassion for occasional missteps: “If you scratch the surface a little, those guys are not criminals but just people who did not make the right choices in life” (40:26).21 In the film, Frau Uhle’s dirty coal-delivery office appears as a place of uncomplicated tolerance with important functions for the neighborhood. Despite her efficiency and concern regarding timely deliveries, the lasting impression is that of an unhurried life. When a machine breaks down, four men spend what appears to be days trying to fix it. While they experiment with various repairs, they joke, argue, sing together, and tease each other. Misselwitz’s camera lingers on this scene for minutes (32:26– 35:26; 36:57–40:00; 42:44–44:35), without recording visible progress. In three short episodes the film cuts back and forth between strenuous stair climbing and leisurely machine repair, highlighting the lengthy duration of the slow-paced repair work. When Misselwitz questions the workers about the apparent lack of progress, they shrug unconcerned: “The coals won’t turn white” (40:13).22 The emphasis lies on documenting (in real time) a workplace where multi-tasking and harried, isolated work are alien concepts. The coal

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deliverymen work together, not driven by socialist-brigade ambitions of building a just country, as so many GDR television workplace documentaries sought to convey, but as colleagues who appear to enjoy each other’s company at work as well as for the evening ritual of a joint round of beers. Filmed on the eve of German unification, the film is not nostalgic for a sentimentalized past but captures a form of community and work that is as inconspicuous as it is quickly disappearing. Misselwitz’s skill for creating the same trusting atmosphere toward the camera that reviewers lauded in Winter Adé translates into relaxed and intimate images. She is not afraid to literally touch her interview subjects, for example, as she examines worker Kalle’s tattoos. In response to her question about the tattoo’s origin, he briefly admits that he was imprisoned for fleeing the GDR in 1961. With a few simple words, Kalle sums up the impact of the cold war and German division on his personal life: escape in 1961, prison, work and family in East Berlin, later a pass to visit West Berlin but without spending-money. His conclusion: “One muddles through” (31:35).23 Earlier, Misselwitz feels the callused hands of another man, asking: “Can one caress with these hands?” The disarmed man shrugs: “No one has complained so far” (28:58).24 Contrary to an earlier DEFA tradition that sought to utilize individual biographies as exemplary illustrations for socialist progress, and thus often reduced complex life experiences to clichéd types, Misselwitz simply records the worker’s truncated narrative of having fled the GDR and served time in prison, without interpreting his biography from a particular angle. The sequence has provided a brief glimpse into his life, without aiming to explain, typify, or generalize. While the schematic division between the slower-paced but more community-focused East and a hectic, competitively minded West Germany has become a problematic cliché in some post-wall cinematic depictions, Wer fürchtet sich was made before the fall of the wall was conceivable. Misselwitz, especially after her public and critical success with Winter Adé, is able to draw frank stories from the workers that include complex personal problems instead of simply celebrating their work as socialist worker heroes. Long before critics found cultural value in “ostalgic” re-creations of everyday life in the GDR a decade or more after unification, Misselwitz seeks to explore individual biographies beyond a limiting ideological lens. Some of the stories she gathers have political implications, like Kalle’s. Others offer commentary on general developments in society, like the teacher’s complaints of lack of respect from her elementary students. Others raise topics that were taboo in the GDR, such as the multifaceted family tragedy of the suicide of a pedophile father. In the end, Frau Uhle sums up what all of Misselwitz’s films aim to produce: small fragments of historical truth, authentic experiences or insights that have often been buried under official ideology or rejected as inconvenient. She says: “You know, people do not want to hear the truth.

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Really, most people always wish to be more than they actually are. It’s silly. I myself must after all know who I am” (48:00).25 This seemingly innocent commentary is poignant at a moment when many GDR citizens in general and DEFA directors in particular were articulating the schizophrenic reality marked by the ever-widening gap between official ideology and experienced life (see chapter 3). Mirroring the family portrait of Frau Uhle’s family at the opening of Wer fürchtet sich, Misselwitz inserts several long held shots of the workers at home with their families, arranged on their living-room sofa. The film thus conveys a more comprehensive sense of the coal deliverymen’s work, lives, and personal struggles. Misselwitz’s montage of sequences of heavy physical work, social banter in the office, and intimate family portraits preempts any attempt to reduce individual characters to simple types such as “former inmate,” or “exemplary worker.” Providing brief glimpses into different facets of each character’s life suggests the limitations of documentary film—it is unable to convey the complexity of an individual biography or a place’s history. In Wer fürchtet sich, as in Winter Adé, Misselwitz emphasizes particularity and subjectivity, raising more questions than she is answering. Her films are not ideological but rather curious about a history that she explores through the messy specificity of a particular biography, much as the directors of the Czech New Wave had modeled it and as Misselwitz’s advisor Ulrich Weiß had hoped to do in his never-realized Tanz im Volkshaus (see chapter 2). In Sperrmüll (1990), which was written by Gerd Kroske, the political implications of the individual biography move to the foreground. The film is titled aptly “Sperrmüll,” the name of protagonist Enrico’s band, which features percussion played on found objects. Sperrmüll, meaning “bulky trash” can also refer to the trashing of many consumer objects of the vanishing GDR, ranging from Trabis to living-room sets—a symbolic wholesale discarding of an entire country’s culture and history. Seventeenyear-old Enrico does not just find musical inspiration in “Sperrmüll,” that is, in the act of retooling objects that others have thrown away, but also does not want to throw away all that he has known and experienced in his native GDR. While his mother, who married a West German man in June 1989, leaves the GDR that summer with her new husband and Enrico’s younger sibling for West Berlin, Enrico remains in East Berlin “because I have lots of plans here” (13:00).26 Angelika acknowledges sadly the absurd finality of this separation before her departure at Friedrichstrasse a few months before the fall of the wall: “I am moving just a few streets over but will be so far away” (16:50),27 but she respects her son’s decision to stay in the East in order to become a musician. Their tolerant support for the complexities of each other’s choices clashes starkly with government policies that allow only for mutually exclusive distinctions between an East and West German identity. At this point in the film a close-up

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of Angelika’s exit paper is shown, labeled “Certification of Identity” (Identitätsbescheinigung, 17:30) as a polemical comment on the oversimplified reduction of Angelika’s complex identity as an East German now married to a West German with a child in each half of Berlin. Sperrmüll contrasts Enrico’s nuanced, critical attitude toward the GDR, which nevertheless does not imply a desire to unify with the West, with the official coverage on East and West German TV regarding the events of October 1989. Enrico states on Christmas Day 1989: “If things go really wrong here, we could even see German unification. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. It would be pretty sad” (36:09).28 Earlier, Misselwitz inserts a segment with flickering TV screens and a voice-over that indicts both sides of the ideological divide: “What is more despicable: the hysteria of the West or the silence of the East?” (20:47).29 After the fall of the wall the film crew catches up with Angelika in the West and is shown the camping trailer in her in-laws’ garage, where the newlyweds initially lived in West Berlin. While her son is critical of the GDR but wishes to retain socialism, Angelika points to the negative aspects of her new life, including more stress and less security, but is happy with her choice. The film ends with a trip on a tour boat through Berlin, offering the viewer a glance at the now borderless transition from East to West and back. If the train tracks in Winter Adé symbolized the need for movement and the limitations of the border, the newly opened sightseeing ship’s tour takes inventory of the soon-to-be-erased traces of the past: a long-held close-up shot shows the GDR symbol on the facade of the Palace of the Republic, a symbol itself of the GDR’s former utopian aspirations and failure.30 Earlier in the film Enrico pointed to a doormat in front of his room in the shape of the GDR flag, proclaiming: “This will always be GDR territory,”31 indicating that what has shaped him during the first two decades of his life will not be erased through the shifting of the national border but survives as a place that has shaped his identity and has potential as an idealist concept for the future. If Winter Adé was identified as a Western-style feminist documentary, Sperrmüll was labeled as a typical DEFA narrative document that chronicled not just the end of the GDR but also the end of this very documentary tradition: But Helke Misselwitz’s cinematic narrative technique and mode of remembrance is itself now a relic of the past: even while the Goethe Institute was distributing Sperrmüll internationally, the structures of the DEFA documentary studio collapsed, as it was commercially no longer viable.32

Did the end of the studio mean the end of an undefined “DEFA documentary style?” After all, DEFA documentary films ranged from “unabashed propaganda to highly stylized essay film.”33 And where has

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documentary film ever been “commercially viable”? As the post-wall work of Andreas Voigt, Jörg Foth, Andreas Kleinert, Petra Tschörtner, Peter Welz, Peter Kahane, and many others demonstrates, documentaries that un-dogmatically and patiently probed the nexus of historical structures and personal biographies continued to be produced in unified Germany. Misselwitz’s own post-wall productions, including Leben ein Traum (1994), Meine Liebe, Deine Liebe (My Love, Your Love, 1995), Fremde Oder (2001), and Quartier der Illusionen (2008) are manifestations of her continued commitment and ability to produce closely observed, unhurried films that refuse to reduce contradictory complexity to simple dichotomies and even seek out such complexity. One striking aspect of Misselwitz’s aesthetic is her highly personal and interactive approach to her protagonists in front of the camera: she touches tattoos and paints her interviewee’s fingernails. Her personal involvement in her subjects’ lives extends beyond the merely participatory mode of documentary filmmaking. In an interview she has stated that she prefers making fiction film, because this personal involvement and commitment to her real-life protagonists can be overwhelming.34 Her personal involvement in the films is disclosed through her occasional presence in front of the camera, and more often her questioning from behind the camera. In several of her films she also provides voiceover commentary, often incorporating her own biography into the story, for example, in the opening of Winter Adé, which begins at the site of the train tracks where she herself was born in an ambulance in 1947. Misselwitz achieves extraordinary openness in her subjects, several of whom allow the camera into the intimate space of the workplace shower (Winter Adé, Wer fürchtet sich). Such willingness to expose personal vulnerability is mirrored in her interviewees’ sharing of private stories, which are recorded in often tightly framed interiors that evoke intimacy. In the 1995 production Meine Liebe, Deine Liebe, for example, Misselwitz films seniors in a retirement home for artists. Many of the conversations take place in the residents’ bedrooms, in their beds or armchairs. However, the physically diminished appearance of her protagonists is belied by the wealth of lively stories that are reanimated for the audience through photographs, music, and vivid narration. This post-wall film almost dialogues with the early Kinobox short Haus.Frauen (1982) and its collage of women from different times, classes, and occupations who over time might have inhabited the old decrepit villa where Misselwitz films. Haus.Frauen opens with Misselwitz’s voice, reading over a blue screen Paul Celan’s poem “Nachts wenn das Pendel der Liebe schwingt” (At Night When the Pendulum of Love Swings), which evokes the lasting impact of the past as we anticipate a nebulous future fate: “from the grove, darkened by dreams, we perceive the breath of the vanished and that which we missed remains elusive, large, like the contours of the

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future” (1:00).35 The short student film, for which shooting was not approved after submission of the script, investigates different possible roles women may have played at different times by imagining who may have lived in an old villa in Berlin: bourgeois lady, vamp, mother, war widow, servant, or construction worker, under changing political regimes. In the end, a child’s voice (Helke Misselwitz’s young daughter) offers the epitaph (written by the child herself) for the fictional inhabitants’ biographies: “One day, an old woman will seat herself next to me and tell me all about it, whether it’s been fun for her” (14:55).36 Celan’s poem provides the key terms for an understanding of Misselwitz’s films: again and again she probes the present for traces of an elusive and incompletely understood past, like the house in Haus.Frauen, which has witnessed much yet cannot easily yield the many stories that have taken place in it. If Thomas Heise probes the synchronicity of multiple events taking place in one house in 1984 (Das Haus, see chapter 5), Misselwitz is interested in the diachronic, in the fullest potential and past of a place or a person. The challenge to capture and or imagine the transient, fleeting quality of memory and incomplete or fading visual archives, expressed by Celan’s mournful longing for the “vanished and missed” (“Verhauchte . . . Versäumte”), informs all her documentary films and to some extent her fiction films as well. Misselwitz returns to a different house in 1995, namely the Marie-Seebach Stift in Weimar, where retired artists live, to repeat her daughter’s question about the past. But like TangoTraum this later documentary shows the limitations of recreating the past through memories and even a visual archive. The residents’ answers construct a nexus of personal experiences, such as the relationship of one man, a retired bassoonist, with a beautiful woman named Ilse Spiegel, and the political: Ilse could not be his bride because she was “half-Jewish” (1:21). As he reminisces about Ilse Spiegel and her “difficulties” during the Nazi period by showing Misselwitz old home movies on a small-gauge projector, he asks: “Are the images losing focus today? They are seventy years old, after all” (1:23).37 His innocent question regarding the picture quality metaphorically returns to the Celan poem of Misselwitz’s earlier film in its evocation of the difficulty of accurately remembering the past, which so decidedly shapes the present. Misselwitz emphasizes this point earlier in the film, when she edits two contradictory statements about recollections regarding the nearby concentration camp Buchenwald back-to-back. The first woman replies to the question whether she had been aware about what took place in the camp during the war: “We all knew nothing. We were content, after all. We were manipulated. We were happy” (32:40). In the next interview, another woman remembers it differently: “We all knew about that. Word got around. People did not talk about it. Too dangerous” (37:22).38 Misselwitz has directly addressed this inability

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or unwillingness to speak about the past in her diploma film, Die fidele Bäckerin (1982), while her mentor Ulrich Weiß had been very publicly reprimanded for his unheroic depiction of anti-fascist resistance in Dein unbekannter Bruder (1982—see chapter 2). Die fidele Bäckerin offers yet another contrasting view to the dominant narrative of the anti-Nazi resistance fighter as hero. Her film deals with the complex actions of a petitbourgeois baker, who survives the war through a seemingly contradictory mix of opportunism and courage. Questioning the ideological limitations on the depiction of the past and the present remained Misselwitz’s central concern. She herself was on several occasions asked to cut sequences from her films, for example the last image of a ship in TangoTraum had to be eliminated because “longing for someplace else was not allowed.”39 In Winter Adé she was ordered to mix the sound of a train over a sentence spoken by a woman who is questioning the GDR’s real commitment to egalitarianism. While she did produce two different versions of Winter Adé, one with the critical sentence drowned out and one unaltered, she decided to show the uncensored version at the official studio-approval screening, which went smoothly. Six years earlier, she felt more pressure to comply with the request to eliminate the last image from TangoTraum because: “When one can do so little, one has after all the urge to reach a public.”40 Mounting two contradictory statements side by side in Meine Liebe, Deine Liebe is not an attempt to discredit one or the other interviewee but rather an illustration of the complexity of memory work, respect for individually experienced history, and a challenge to create conditions that allow for honest discourse about the past beyond ideological preconceptions, self-censoring fear, and forgetfulness. How difficult it has become to unearth authentic images in the contemporary media culture is efficiently conveyed in a brief scene in Quartier der Illusionen. The camera follows a woman into an instant-photo booth inside the train station. The mechanical voice from inside the booth is edited into the soundtrack as if it were the film’s voice-over narrative. The impersonal voice instructs: “Once you have inserted the required amount, you will receive the desired image.”41 In a film about image construction and masquerade (the film is shot during carnival season), this robotic instruction appears to summarize the ease with which images of oneself can now be constructed, purchased, and manipulated. In all her films Misselwitz engages the tension between the surface appearance of what the camera can capture and the deeper meaning inherent in those images. In doing so, she directly explores what shapes the creation and reception of images, but beyond this she explores deeper epistemological questions of what can be known, and more precisely, what the image can yield. Misselwitz hesitates neither to take her viewers to the limits of this quest nor to expose her own process along the way.

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In her short Kinobox film TangoTraum (1985), for example, she accumulates a wealth of research on the history and nature of the tango, in order to discover the essence of the dance. “Tango is a sad thought that one can dance,”42 she explains in her voice-over. In her darkened room she projects legendary Argentinean dancer Carlos Gardell’s historical performances onto an improvised screen, which she literally attempts to animate by moving it gently. In the end, she resolutely declares the endeavor an impossibility. She systematically demonstrates her failure to reanimate the past by showing historical photos of South American maps, dancers, and events, playing archival recordings, and providing a voiceover that reconstructs the history of this dance. At one point, the director emerges from behind the camera herself, wearing a long black dress and rehearsing a few tentative steps. From the tiny enclosures of her own room “in Berlin’s most boring street”43 she explores in every conceivable way the secret of “tango” as a concept from another time, place, and culture. But in the end, she concludes in a voice-over: Tango is something that is deeply rooted in the way of life and the soul of a people. I can perhaps approach this, but I will never arrive. Even if I had had the opportunity to film in Buenos Aires, I could never have discovered what tango really is. I would have been more informative, more authentic but it would have remained a secret. One has to live the tango.44

The film ends with a swift gathering of the spread-out photos and their unceremonious dumping into the wastebasket. The dream of tango will remain a dream, but the film has allowed its viewers the experience of exploring this dream collectively. The film was to end with an image of a large ocean ship sailing past her window, but the shot was cut.45 At the time of its production, TangoTraum was interpreted largely as a powerful expression of the longing to travel beyond the narrow confines of the GDR. Seen today, it in fact raises core questions regarding the limits of what can be known—in a temporal-historical and a spatial-cultural sense—and by extension what can be represented on film. By sharing the process of attempting to capture the elusive essence of tango, Misselwitz demonstrates to her audience the limits of documenting beyond the surface of an object and the challenge of depicting what Kipping termed the poetic content of a concept, or in this case a dream. If TangoTraum illustrates the limits of what can be visualized through archival records, her diploma film, Die fidele Bäckerin, takes the opposite approach by playfully inventing a stylized, self-consciously constructed biography based on found records.46 Later, in her TV documentary Leben—Ein Traum (1995), Misselwitz documents how quickly reality that was taken for granted is radically altered, only to turn into a nightmare. She chronicles the displacement of an entire village in former

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Fig. 4.2. Director Helke Misselwitz on the set of Wer fürchtet sich vorm Schwarzen Mann. Courtesy of DEFA Stiftung; photograph by Heiko Koinzer.

East Germany, which is eradicated to facilitate above-ground coal mining. In the larger context of German unification, this short documentary appears like a case study for the vanished GDR. As enormous machines begin excavating the coal, turning the former village of Kausche into a nightmarish landscape of destruction, Misselwitz’s camera preserves this process of vanishing life. After the houses are gone and their owners’ biographies forgotten, the visual record preserves both knowledge of the past life and the rapid process of its vanishing. Schooled in the art of exact observation and documentation of social change, and sustained by her lifelong interest in media critique, Misselwitz finally had a chance to try her hand at fiction film when the wall fell. In addition to the three films by the production group DaDaeR by Foth, Kipping, and Welz, a fourth film was in the planning stages in 1990: Helke Misselwitz’s Illusion des Erwachens (Illusion of Awakening), based on a book by Michaela Schahab. The book chronicled the story of a female pedagogy student who arrives on a state-owned farm for an internship to work with disenfranchised youth. The raw violence, disturbed social relations, and absence of hope for the future, paired with sexual violence against the protagonist, offer a harsh critique of the GDR’s educational system, the country’s unwillingness to openly address questions of violence against women, and the lack of prospects for its young generation. Misselwitz’s scenario was graphically direct in its indictment of

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the deadly stagnation of late GDR society: in one scene the protagonist intentionally breaks her finger in a desperate act to experience any kind of feeling at all. Misselwitz had just finished her documentary Sperrmüll in 1990 when she received funding for the script development of Illusion des Erwachens from the production group DaDaeR with the intention of producing the film when the script was finished. But Misselwitz found that the political events in the country moved faster than her project could adapt to and she decided to abandon the film altogether, despite having already secured financing for the project. In the fiscally uncertain situation of post-studio reality, this was a brave move. She instead wrote a new story that captured life in a former East German village shortly after German unification. Herzsprung (1992), named after a real town in the Prignitz region, retained a few elements of the previous project, including the character of a young woman on a state-owned farm (LPG) and the potential for violence, which could easily escalate among the disenchanted local youth. However, the aggression in the post-unification script was now directed against a quintessential outsider: a black stranger, whose name and story are never disclosed. Both scenarios explore the social dynamic of a threatened group unleashing its frustrations against an other. The film was Misselwitz’s first full-length fiction film, shot ten years after her diploma film, Die fidele Bäckerin (59 min), and it was coproduced by DaDaeR’s privatized successor production company “Thomas Wilkening Filmgesellschaft mbH” headed by Wilkening and Misselwitz. Produced in cooperation with the public German television broadcaster “ZDF,” Herzsprung addressed many of the burning social issues of the recently unified country, including the latent and new racism, widespread unemployment, and depression in former East Germany. The film was nominated for the German film prize but received mixed reviews, largely and predictably divided along former East/West lines, as was the case for most other films discussed in this book. The film might logically be grouped with the DaDaeR productions, as its directors collectively created counter-narratives to official history. They addressed the founding myth of the GDR’s early years in the 1950s (Kipping), the disillusioned middle years of the 1970s (Welz), and the stagnation of the 1980s (Foth). Misselwitz, writing as the GDR disappeared, turned her gaze to disenfranchised East Germans, who struggled to orient themselves in the new order and reacted with impotent rage either against themselves (Johanna’s farmer husband kills first his herd of cattle, then himself in desperation over his economic ruin in a subplot that was inspired by real events) or against the outsider scapegoat (the local youth turn into skinheads and attack the black newcomer in town). Misselwitz’s film, which was followed later by Peter Welz’s Burning Life (1994) is one of the earliest

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films critical of German unification, made at a time when many East German fiction-film directors were still processing the GDR’s socialist past (including but not limited to all the films discussed in this book).47 Misselwitz, like her colleagues, was careful to avoid simplistic stereotypes about depressed and overwhelmed East Germans in the new economy. Instead, she invented a diverse and resourceful cast of characters, who find different creative strategies to cope with the dramatic postwall changes. Her documentary-film experience of making Wer fürchtet sich vorm schwarzen Mann and Sperrmüll clearly informed her nuanced approach in Herzsprung to the complex impact of unification on East Germans and minorities. As a documentary filmmaker who had chronicled the changing lives of ordinary East Berliners between 1988 and 1992, Misselwitz now created fictional characters who expressed in complex ways the strengths, anxieties, loneliness, and ability to adapt that she had observed in her documentary subjects. The production history of this film was marked by turbulent changes, including the rapid switch from the finished script and secured financing of Illusion des Erwachens to Herzsprung during a time when the DEFA studio was sold, all the familiar production processes had to be abandoned, and the director also officially signed as coproducer in the new economic system of unified Germany. Misselwitz had graduated with her directing diploma in 1982, a decade before she was able to debut with her first fiction film, work with actors, and adjust to the large set of a featurefilm shoot. In addition to being writer, coproducer, and director for her first fiction film, Misselwitz also became vice-chair of the Association for Film and Television in Berlin in 1990/91 and helped secure the DEFA heritage by working to create the DEFA Foundation.48 Consequently, Herzsprung represents a remarkable accomplishment just by its mere existence, as it demonstrates the ability of former East German directors to enter the new free-market production reality in unified Germany while maintaining a firm commitment to making socially relevant and poetic films. Indeed, in its unique aesthetic hybridity that blends the probing gaze of a documentary camera with Romantic fairy-tale elements, the film shows how former DEFA directors hoped to contribute to a German cinema, not of socialist realism but of social critique, not unlike what the directors of the so-called Berlin School would do a decade later. At a time when West German directors launched the comedy wave of the 1990s, including a series of condescending films about the supposedly bumbling first steps of naive East Germans into capitalism (exemplified by Peter Timm’s highly popular Go Trabi Go), former DEFA directors of the last generation, including documentarians Thomas Heise, Helke Misselwitz, and Andreas Voigt, addressed not only the effect of sudden unemployment and dealing with the socialist past but also the alarming rise of racist hate crimes in former East Germany. While these films were located

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in East Germany, their depiction of disenfranchised youth and structural, long-term unemployment were applicable to Germany as a whole. West German reviewers showed little appreciation for such committed attempts to use film for social reflection and an invitation for broad discussion. Rolf Rüdiger Hamacher complained instead of “obtrusive symbolism,” which he sees rooted in the “homeyness of typical DEFA films.”49 Peter Körte, writing in the Frankfurter Rundschau, likewise expresses disdain for the film’s “DDR Folklore” and “Tristesse” and couches his critique in dismissive language that equates GDR filmmakers with GDR grocery stores: “A convenience store of daily problems, lined up in shelves like in the old GDR shops, well behaved, helpless, and with didactic eagerness, which the documentary filmmaker Misselwitz spared herself and us. Everything signifies something—and nothing just itself.”50 In her widely praised documentary Winter Adé West German critics had found much material critical of the East German regime and proof that the GDR’s claim of gender equality did not match the reality of East German women’s lives. Herzsprung, on the other hand, could not easily be utilized for arguments of ideological superiority, since some of the problems depicted resulted directly from German unification. Perhaps the film is indeed unsuitable for easy consumption, as Peter Hoff pointed out in his criticism of its treatment by its coproducing television broadcaster (ZDF): “Herzsprung is not a film for channel surfers. It demands a little more attention in its artistic idiosyncrasy than the administrators of the public broadcasting station were willing to provide.”51 East German reviewers, on the other hand, found positive echoes of the best DEFA films (for example Paul and Paula). Where West German reviewers mocked heavy symbolism, their East German colleagues lauded “images of great symbolic power” and a story that was “entirely unsentimental and narrated with great artificial intensity”52 Physicality, raw emotion, and allusions to fairy tales and the tradition of German Romanticism had divided East and West German reviewers of the other DaDaeR films, as we have seen in previous chapters. Ralf Schenk summed up the response to Herzsprung of many East German writers: “An emotional ballad . . . that intentionally continues in the tradition of Romanticism with its mourning, its pain, and its despair over the German misery. A film of great physicality and sensuality with a soundscape that quotes the music of past works: folk songs, kitchen songs, tangos.”53 Twenty years later Herzsprung remains as a document from the margins of the immediate post-unification period. The film contrasts overt and highly stylized symbolism (for example, red shoes/red car: bloody massacre; bridal dress: violent death) with a carefully constructed complicated atmosphere of hope and desolation, energetic new beginnings and mourning for the old at the time of historic change in a forgotten landscape. Building directly on her experience of capturing the changing

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GDR reality in her documentaries, Misselwitz created a fictitious fairy tale that was yet very much grounded in reality. The opening scene with the factory workers plucking geese before being let go as a result of unification was filmed in the former DEFA studio cafeteria, a place that had already closed down when the film premiered, while the approval screening for Herzsprung was the last screening that took place in the duplication facility in Babelsberg. The film’s shooting and production are thus inextricably linked to the systematic closing of studio businesses and abolition of infrastructures that had shaped life in former East Germany. This complex relationship of history and storytelling is already reflected in the fictional yet real name of the story’s location, “Herzsprung.” As the film’s epigraph states before the credits roll, “The town of Herzsprung really exists. You will not find it the way you saw it here” (1:00:25).54 Unlike the films of the so-called “heritage cinema” mode from the later 1990s and early 2000s,55 Misselwitz does not use the references to actual places and events as a legitimating device for the authenticity of her historical storytelling but rather utilizes the real as a jumping-off point for her fairy tale. Thus instead of announcing in the beginning “based on real events,” the film emphasizes the difference between the real and fictional levels of the story. It thus liberates itself from the documentarist’s burden of accuracy and indulges, through its Romantic melodrama elements, in the possibilities of metaphorical poetics. Misselwitz, for example, takes inspiration from the metaphorical meaning of the actual town’s name but creates a fictional village for her tale. The double signification of “Herzsprung,” meaning both “heart leap” (as in the English title of the film) and broken heart effectively conflates both contradictory meanings in one place and insists on the simultaneity of hope and resignation among the story’s protagonists as the plot weaves tragic loss and tender new love seamlessly together: Johanna’s broken heart is temporarily consoled by a charismatic stranger while her father finds new joy in a tender old-age love after a life of hardship and loss. In neither case does the film suggest that the protagonists’ new loves will guarantee a happy end. Herzsprung is not a Romantic drama in the simplistic meaning of the word but rather influenced by the Romanticism of Misselwitz’s film-school classmate Herwig Kipping and the surrealism of her mentor Ulrich Weiß: that is, the film’s characters pursue happiness with full awareness of the likelihood of failure. As Johanna, the story’s main character, states explicitly, the fairy tale is not escapist, nor does it blind her to the bleak realities of unemployment, xenophobia, and despair. Rather, she is determined to risk the high probability of having her heart broken in exchange for experiencing at least temporary happiness. When her concerned father warns her that the traveling stranger will leave her again, she replies: “I know. . . . You will console me when it happens” (1:00:14).56 Johanna’s very fragility as

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she suffers a series of losses (husband, farm, factory job) belies her determined strength as she continues to search for new employment and new love, experiencing further exploitation (the lecherous West German factory manager) and abuse (defamation by jealous local skinheads). East German and West German film traditions have used female characters to symbolically impersonate significant historical moments. East German reviewers of Herzsprung have alluded to this when they found reminiscences of Heiner Carow’s Paula in Misselwitz’s Johanna,57 while Fassbinder’s Maria Braun shares many traits with the protagonist of Die fidele Bäckerin Maria in her determination to survive historical upheaval. The casting of Günther Lamprecht (Berlin Alexanderplatz, Marriage of Maria Braun) in Herzsprung as Johanna’s father links Fassbinder’s German historical melodramas to Misselwitz’s film—just as the performance of Irm Hermann did in Foth’s Letztes aus der DaDaeR. However, if Maria Braun introduces herself to the world as “the Mata Hari of the German economic miracle” and announces that postwar Germany is simply “a bad time for emotions,” Johanna instead insists on experiencing and expressing her emotions in simple physicality as if to assure herself that she is still alive. Instead of lengthy dialogue scenes, Misselwitz shows her main character repeatedly dancing with abandon: after her husband’s funeral, after her first night with the stranger, just before her death in the burning trailer. This element of the film appears as a carry-over from the script of Illusion des Erwachens, where the young female protagonist desperately needs to reassure herself of her ability to feel and breaks her finger to feel anything at all amid a culture of numbing disconnectedness. In Herzsprung the source of the deadening trauma is different. Instead of the boredom and lack of perspective in East Germany in the 1980s, the overwhelming experience is one of loss of all that was secure and familiar: country, jobs, family, and the knowledge of what the future would bring. Johanna and Jakob’s insistence on living out their small personal love may be feeble and fleeting but remains nevertheless an important life-affirming gesture. The film’s divided reviews might well be grounded in the difficulty of categorizing the main character. To some she appears a passive victim of domestic abuse by her husband, a flirtatious object of desire for several male characters, and a devoted daughter to her protective father. Unlike her spunky girlfriend Lisa, who heads out to the beaches of Southern Europe and begins a new life for herself at a place of her choice and with a man she selects, leaving the desolate East German town and all her belongings behind, Johanna at first glance lacks the self-determination that West German feminist reviewers lauded in the portrayal of the female protagonists in Misselwitz’s 1988 documentary Winter Adé. Instead, Johanna becomes the sacrificial lamb in her cut-off white wedding dress, an accidental victim of violence directed against a black stranger.

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However, in Herzsprung Misselwitz does not create melodrama through a slick, predictable narrative and lush, high-fidelity sound track that evokes moods of mourning, passion, and melancholy. Rather, her musical sources are eclectic and unpredictable, ranging from Caruso to Billie Holiday, Russian folk, East German rock, and Wolf Biermann songs. Instead of serving, in the Hollywood tradition, as an emotional road map, the Russian and East German musical sounds represent some of the traditions that shaped the characters and are now vanishing. Accordingly, the music is often diegetic, emerging from an ancient tape player in Johanna’s room or the car radio, quite unlike that produced by the string orchestras of typical melodramas. This avoids dictating an emotional response for the audience on the one hand and yet enhances the film’s physicality and sensuality by emphasizing moods over cerebral dialogue on the other. Such an approach was not only a clear departure from the notorious dialogue-rich DEFA tradition, which Misselwitz and her classmates had worked to change since 1982, but it was also alien both to more cerebral auteur traditions of West German cinema till 1990 and to the mainstream melodramas following Hollywood models after 1990. Misselwitz’s unapologetic foregrounding of her characters’ emotional state within a story that minimizes dialogue and utilizes many hand-held camera sequences in tight quarters introduced a new style to the German screen, one that left many viewers unsettled or irritated. Johanna’s raw emotionality functions not just to highlight her vulnerability but is in fact also a source of resistance and strength. This is evident not only when she pours champagne over her West German suitor’s pants instead of prostituting herself but especially when she insists on pursuing a relationship she knows will not last. Johanna’s decision to enter a relationship with a traveling musician who tells her: “My body belongs to me, but my heart is yours” (1:00:16)58 indicates her hunger for life while surrounded by death. Instead of being intimidated by racist threats, she ignores all warnings (by her father, her mail carrier, and the anonymous graffiti writers who scrawled “Negro-whore” across her shop window) in order to pursue her right to self-determination. Herzsprung has not received much attention from feminist critics, despite being Misselwitz’s next major release after the popular Winter Adé. Compared with the strong women in her earlier documentary, who are managing their complex lives despite the contradictions of gender inequalities in the GDR and openly voice their criticism in front of the camera, Johanna is a more challenging character for feminists. The viewer is asked to embrace Johanna’s strength in her assertion of her freedom to pursue a hopeless love in her red heels and white dress. The film was shot before the racist attacks of 1992 on housing for asylum seekers in Rostock and Vietnamese residents in Hoyerswerda and gained new meaning through these highly publicized and shocking hate crimes. In the film, opera singer

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Nino Sandow’s character remains the “stranger” and functions as the ultimate outsider: the viewer never learns his name, his story, or whether he is East or West German, and so on. His role was not intended to represent the racial other of unified Germany, which became the scapegoat for unleashed racism in both former German states after unification. Misselwitz herself stated that the character functioned rather as a reminder that racism had existed in the GDR long before unification without having been publically discussed. Like sexism, racism had officially been overcome through socialist egalitarian principles and was thus a taboo subject there.59 Twenty years after Herzsprung’s production, Misselwitz suggested that she might have liked to reverse the actors who played Soljanka and the stranger to undermine the obvious indexical marker of difference, skin color: “Not cast the roles so unambiguously, in order to underline that it’s against the stranger, the unknown, and not against the representative of an alleged race.”60 The audience never learns the stranger’s story; his function in the film is as a catalyst that sets the plot in motion. His presence temporarily gives Johanna new life, but it also evokes ghosts of the past, when both the memorial for the victims of a former concentration camp and Johanna’s shop window are smeared with Nazi-like graffiti: “Foreigners into the concentration camps” and “Negro-whore.” Through these scenes, which lead not to public outrage among the villagers but to warnings from her mail carrier to be more careful, that is, to avoid a relationship with the black stranger, Misselwitz corrects the official story of the anti-racist GDR society just as she had complicated the notion of gender equality in Winter Adé four years earlier. Furthermore, she points to the fact that racism predates German division and unification. While Johanna’s father welcomes the stranger to town without apparent prejudice, he does not understand why referring to the stranger as the “Neger” should be a problem. As Hannes Schönemann has defended the treatment of racism in his review of the film: Those are the bright moments in German cinema, when in 1992 a man can return home happily drunk and is allowed to say: “a Negro has arrived for you.” And if such a sentence is incorporated into the texture of the film in such a way that no one registers serious complaint, that no one doubts the six-layered significance of this sentence, then it narrates a truth that in many other films is tediously extracted through much complicated analysis.61

Misselwitz’s main concern, to show how individuals are impacted by their past histories, is evident here: despite 40 years of socialist, anti-racist official ideology, the Nazi-style anonymous denunciation (graffiti), intimidation (black doll dangling on a noose in the window of the diner where the stranger works), and finally violence that has escalated out of control leading to murder serve as reminders that racism existed on both sides

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of the wall and persisted after unification as well. The advice of the mail carrier to Johanna to be careful in response to the graffiti illustrates this point well: she has not learned from the past to protest against such racism and instead blames (one of) the victims. This interest in the behavior of ordinary citizens during totalitarian rule is not new in Misselwitz’s films. In Die fidele Bäckerin a curious neighbor played by Käte Reichel discovers not only that the baker has been supplying food to Jews hiding in the building’s attic but also who in the building had denounced whom to the Gestapo during the war. When the war is over, she is clear about her attitude to coping with the past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung). Referring to the de-Nazification attempts by the Allies, she states resolutely: “I won’t say anything. Talking leads to nothing. Nothing good anyway” (48:15).62 The baker, Maria Schwarzbach, on the other hand, eagerly collaborates with the attempts to indict war criminals “as an antifascist, not out of spite” (57:04),63 as she states, but it is obvious that her motivation derives solely from her own profit in the denunciation. Misselwitz’s focus in Herzsprung is firmly on the dynamics of the village community, not the stranger. Like her former classmates Thomas Heise und Andreas Voigt, who explored the origins for racist attacks by young skinheads and were charged with humanizing them instead of indicting their actions in their films (see chapter 5) Misselwitz depicts the three skinheads as purposeless and bored rather than driven by ideological hate. This neither trivializes nor excuses the violence they commit but further challenges audience expectations, as Kraft Wetzel has pointed out: “Misselwitz did not make it easy for herself, avoided the usual clichés of ‘rightwing violence’ . . . most of all, she understands them [the skinheads] as children who want to be loved—like the other figures in her film.”64 While the film does not minimize the effect racism has on the stranger who has been attacked, it demonstrates primarily how the violence that originates in the closed village community inescapably returns to it, killing Johanna. If the film was written to substitute for an earlier story that was surpassed by the rapid historical events of the Wende, Herzsprung’s reception ironically also was directly impacted by the events outside the film. The deadly attacks on asylum seekers in Rostock and Vietnamese residents in Hoyerswerda after the film’s release in 1992 inevitably influenced how it was viewed. Was casting a black actor as the quintessential outsider a critical reflection of how non-White residents are routinely excluded from the white-defined, national German community, or was it reinforcing the very stereotype of the unknowable other? Was using Nino Sandow as a mere catalyst for the village dynamic further stressing that the presence of the black other had no real meaning in itself, especially since his character remains mysterious and vacuous?

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At the same time, Misselwitz offers an ironic citation of an iconic moment in German cinema’s depiction of the racialized other. In a scene reminiscent of Fassbinder’s Ali, Fear Eats the Soul (1974), Johanna, like Emmi in the earlier film, peeks through a door at the naked object of her desire in the shower. While Fassbinder’s camera inhabits Emmi’s point of view, allowing the viewer to indulge his/her voyeuristic gaze to linger on Ali’s objectified body, Misselwitz’s restaging of this scene turns the tables on Johanna as well as the viewer when the stranger grabs the fully clothed Johanna and pulls her into the shower with him, commenting ironically: “Why do you white people always have to shower in your clothes?” (57:09).65 Herzsprung’s unique contribution to German film culture derives not only from its willingness to engage the burning social issues of its time but also from its idiosyncratic aesthetic blending of documentary realism and stylization: in the opening sequence we see a group of women workers in aprons and rubber boots plucking geese (filmed in the DEFA studio kitchen). Feathers flying everywhere, the women sing a traditional folk song about a past dream and end with the lines: “What might this dream mean? Oh my beloved, are you dead?” (1:29),66 when Johanna is summoned to the office to receive her unceremonious dismissal. A bureaucratic male voice from off camera intones: “Well, we all have to adjust now. I wish you all the best, for your personal life as well” (3:58).67 Then the camera cuts to a close-up still image of four plucked and naked geese, long, red necks dangling off the counter. The image delivers succinct commentary on the situation of most villagers in the dying town of “Herzsprung”—where like the song lyrics indicated, it is unclear whether this is life, a nightmare, or death. In Herzsprung Misselwitz blends the directness of the documentary camera with its long takes (she had directed numerous documentary films with cinematographer Thomas Plenert, who also photographed Herzsprung) with the stylizing sequences of a Romantic fairy-tale aesthetic, such as the opening sequence of feathers gently flying like snow or a later shot of the musician playing a folk tune while hiking through a pastoral landscape, followed by a host of village children. The carefully composed visual tableaus clash sharply with the documentary-like rendition of deserted barns and empty shops in a dying East German village after the fall of the wall. Together they form a haunting yet unsentimental reflection of protagonist Johanna’s inner struggle to combat the seemingly never-ending string of disasters with a tenacious mixture of realism and romantic yearning. By contrasting the life-affirming vitality of the children dancing to the stranger’s music with the desolation of departing trains, or the sensual gestures of painting toenails red against a close-up of the pile of charred meat at the funeral feast (“Leichenschmaus”), Misselwitz condenses the fictional tale’s many tragedies and brief moments of happiness

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into a complex representation of the characters’ oscillation between despair and hope during the immediate post-unification moment. In her Wende trilogy of documentary films, the unhurried pace of the cinematography and montage have preserved individual reflections on diverse ways of life in the GDR, as well as a unique historical moment during unification. In Herzsprung likewise, the long takes appear to study objects, landscapes, and even characters as if they were vanishing props in a quickly changing world. Indeed, Misselwitz’s short Kinobox contribution Stillleben—eine Reise zu den Dingen (Still Life, 1984) is an important precursor of this probing camera, as it uses the visit to an exhibit of stilllife paintings for a meditation on the Baroque theme of memento mori. Misselwitz had worked almost exclusively in documentary film until 1990, and her two fiction films (in addition to Herzsprung, she also directed the melodrama Engelchen, 1996)68 do not represent a turn from this critical focus on reality. In response to director Petra Tschörtner’s question about whether he writes in order to escape the confusing reality of collapsing political systems and vanishing states, writer Giwi Margwelaschwili explained that he sees “writing as escape into reality.”69 Helke Misselwitz’s fiction films likewise present invented stories that reflect directly on the specific historical and political circumstances of their production. In response to the question “What makes a good film?” Helke Misselwitz stated in 2009: “That I may participate, am allowed to think. That I am encouraged to associate. A wealth of conflict and poetry. That beauty arises from truthfulness.”70 Misselwitz’s own films assume their audience’s willingness to be critically and emotionally engaged, from her short student films to her documentaries for the DEFA studio and her fiction and documentary films produced after German unification. Her choice of the term truthfulness (“Wahrhaftigkeit”) is revealing as it denotes literally a truth that is attached to something (“haften”). Truthfulness in her films thus derives from close observation but must also be contextual, subjective, particular, and partial. In her late memoir, Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud, writer Christa Wolf contends that “facts listed chronologically do not necessarily reflect reality.”71 Helke Misselwitz is not interested in mere illustrations of specific social types, such as “coal deliverymen,” “women in the GDR,” “youth protesters in 1989,” or “GDR artists.” Her recorded stories are not edited into tidy narratives but allowed to maintain contradictory narratives concerning individual biography or historical events. In the skillfully captured tension of contradiction, Misselwitz’s films contain the messy truthfulness of lived experience and memories. Her films have often been categorized as women’s films because of the dominance of female protagonists in her best-known work (Winter Adé, Herzsprung, and Engelchen) and because of her status as a female director in the GDR in a male-dominated studio. Yet the vivid feminist interest that Winter

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Adé sustained among critics in East and West ebbed after the release of the multidimensional depiction of female subjectivity and sexuality in Herzsprung. Helke Misselwitz’s filmmaking began with an interest in history and the interplay between the historical and the individual as well as the impact of history on the present. Not surprisingly, her narratives caused irritation, regardless whether they were produced in the GDR, during the Wende, or in unified Germany. Aesthetically, Misselwitz’s films combine the visceral realism of the photographic image with a poetic sensibility nurtured from among other things the tradition of German Romanticism (folk tales and songs) that probe and expose the contradictions between appearance and being, between official ideology (in East and unified Germany) and individual reality, and between what can be said and what can be shown. Misselwitz’s films are visually distinctive because her documentaries display the condensed poetry of fiction film and the self-reflexive acknowledgment of its own subjective truthfulness on the one hand, while on the other her fiction films contain a strong sense of documentary realism. In Winter Adé (1988) and Wer fürchtet sich vorm schwarzen Mann (1989), the choice of angles, lenses, and editing pace effectively comment on the particularity of her depiction of the life stories. In her fiction films Herzsprung (1992) and Engelchen (1996), on the other hand, the camera frequently captures landscapes as well as still images in long, unhurried takes, which provide viewers with contemplative space. Misselwitz takes inspiration for her intermedial films from painting (Stillleben), photography (Aktfotografie Gundula Schulz), music (TangoTraum), or poetry (Haus.Frauen) and engages the tension between the surface appearance of what the camera can capture and the deeper meaning inherent in those images. In doing so, she directly explores how ideology shapes the meaning of images, but beyond this she explores deeper epistemological questions of what can be known, and more precisely, what the image can yield. Misselwitz hesitates neither to take her viewers to the limits of this quest nor to expose her own process along the way.

Notes 1

“Jedes Heimkommen in mein Viertel am Bahnhof Friedrichstraße erfüllt mich mit Sehnsucht nach der Kindheit. Jeder Ort mit einem Gleisanschluss den man rasch verlassen kann, kommt mir heimatlich vor. Die Zufälligkeit meiner Geburt vor einer geschlossenen Bahnschranke, das Geräusch von rollenden Eisenbahnrädern, das mein Aufdieweltkommen begleitete, erinnert an den ersten unschuldigen Augenblick, bis die Zeit mich auf den Mund küsst.” Helke Misselwitz, Quartier der Illusionen, TV documentary RBB/credofilm, 2003, 0:46. 2

Karen Rosenberg, “Looking for Spring: Karen Rosenberg interviews Helke Misselwitz,” in Women’s Review of Books 7, nos. 10–11 (Jul. 1990): 6–7. Karen

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Ritzenhoff, “Helke Misselwitz’ Sperrmüll oder eine Art unfreiwilliger Erinnerungsfilm,” in DDR—erinnern, vergessen: Das visuelle Gedächtnis des Dokumentarfilms, ed. Tobias Ebbrecht, Hilde Hoffmann, and Jörg Schweinitz (Marburg: Schüren, 2009), 271–85. Jennifer Creech, “Image, Voice, and Truth: Narrating Women’s History in Helke Misselwitz’s Winter Adé,” Seminar 42, no. 4 (Nov. 2007): 411–26. 3

Ute Lischke, “The Films of Helke Misselwitz: Reconstructing Gender and Identity in the Former GDR,” in Women Filmmakers: Refocusing, ed. Judith Plessis and Valerie Raoul (New York: Routledge, 2003), 180–88. 4

Gabriele Denecke, quoted in Beate Schönfeldt, Der DEFA Komplex 5: FrauenFilm-Träume; Regisseurinnen, TV documentary, 1993. 5

“Bewegung in der Gesellschaft als Ausdruck dafür, dass es vorgeschriebene Gleise gibt, auf denen man gehen muss, dass Gleise auch abbrechen können, dass man Gleise wechseln kann.” Ralf Schenk, “Toleranz und Zärtlichkeit: Die Regisseurin Helke Misselwitz,” Filmdienst 20 (1996): 7. 6

“Ich wollte von den Frauen erzählen, die ich kannte. Nicht von den Frauen aus den Illustrierten. Politisch im Sinne von wahre Geschichten erzählen.” Christian Läpple, Einfühlsame Einblicke in Private Ansichten—Regisseurin Helke Misselwitz im Porträt, ZDF documentary, Jan. 21, 2009. 7

“Die Geste der unstillbaren Sehnsucht die der Film aufnimmt, wurde in der DDR politisch begriffen. Wenig sagt es, dass allein die Andeutung, andernorts und zu anderen Zeiten seien Texte verboten worden, als skandalöse Anspielung an die Verhältnisse im Staat verstanden wurde, und zwar von allen Beteiligten. Aus der Distanz sehe ich, wie neurotisch dieser Diskurs war. . . . Was mich heute an Helke Misselwitz’ Film überrascht, ist, dass er eine Distanz zu dem der DDR eigentümlichen Kummer findet.” Ulrike Gramann, “Sehnsucht Adé,” Frauen und Film 62 (June 2000): 128. 8

Other filmmakers discussed in this book experienced difficulties with censorship for attempting to convey workers’ actual reality frankly, for example Herwig Kipping for his TV documentary about roofers, Sechs auf dem Dach (1984), which resulted in disciplinary action against him. 9

Wolfgang Gersch, Szenen eines Landes: Die DDR und ihre Filme (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 2006), 196.

10

Daniela Berghahn, “East German Cinema after Unification,” in German Cinema since Unification, ed. David Clarke (New York: Continuum, 2006), 99. 11

Creech, “Image, Voice, and Truth,” 424.

12

Helke Misselwitz, “Das Frauenbild im faschistischen deutschen Film—die Abhängigkeit seiner Darstellungsweise von der jeweiligen politischen Taktik, untersucht an ausgewählten Filmbeispielen des ‘Dritten Reiches.’” (Diploma thesis, Hochschule Film und Fernsehen, Babelsberg, Nov. 3, 1982). 13

“Wir sollten offener darüber sprechen, als das bisher geschehen ist, vor allem solange es noch möglich ist, die Aussagen der Betroffenen dokumentarisch aufzubewahren. Nicht um zu verurteilen, sondern um zu verstehen, nicht nur rational, sondern auch emotional. Die geschichtliche Identifikation kann nicht nur durch die starken positiven Helden erfolgen, die sich dem falschen System

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widersetzt haben, sondern auch die unzähligen Schwachen und Kleinen, zumal sie, wie das Beispiel der Frauen belegt, zweimal unterdrückt wurden.” Misselwitz, “Das Frauenbild im faschistischen deutschen Film,” 51. 14

“Meinen Zögling zum Menschen zu bilden, das war und ist eben mein Zweck. Überzeugt davon, dass alle Humanität Vernunft heißt, wollte ich sein Edelstes entwickeln und ihn zum Bewusstsein seiner sittlichen Freiheit bringen . . . Meine Liebe ist eben das ganze Menschengeschlecht, freilich nicht das verdorbene, knechtische, träge.  .  .  . Wir leben in einer Zeit, wo alles hinarbeitet auf bessere Tage. Ich möchte ins Allgemeine wirken, Bildung, Besserung des Menschengeschlechtes ist mein Ziel. Der Einzelne kann so zum Träger einer Hoffnung werden, die die bessere Zukunft aller einschließt.” Helke Misselwitz, “Gedanken zum Diplomfilm,” Beiträge zur Film und Fernsehwissenschaft 3 (1982): 63. 15

Ulrich Weiß, Meine Waffen sind nicht gebrochen-nur mein Herze brach, GDR television documentary, 1972. Weiß cites Heine’s 16th chapter from the Buch LeGrand. “Ach, das ist alles wahr. Aber ich habe nun mal diese unglückliche Passion für die Vernunft. Ich liebe sie, obgleich sie mich nicht mit Gegenliebe beglückt. Ich gebe ihr alles und sie gewährt mir nichts. Ich kann nicht von ihr lassen.”

16

In addition to all the directors discussed in this book, filmmaker Petra Tschörtner deserves special mention in this context for her contributions to such “preservation” efforts. Her documentary Berlin, Prenzlauer Berg (1990) is the model of a document that captures a thriving neighborhood culture under threat of extinction. 17

“Das ist Erwin. Wenn er nüchtern ist, ist er liebenswert aber wenn er besoffen ist, könnt ich ihn zum Mond schießen. . . . Und Pummel, ist ’n guter Arbeiter aber muss jeden Morgen geweckt werden. Aber arbeiten kann er wie ein junger Gott.” 18

“ich spreche schneller als ich denke.”

19

“Man kann vieles, wenn man gefordert wird.”

20

“er musste studieren gehen—spanisch lernen.”

21

“Wenn man mal hinter die Kulisse guckt, sind das ja keine Verbrecher, sondern Leute, die nicht das richtige aus ihrem Leben gemacht haben.” 22

“die Kohlen werden nicht weiß.”

23

“Man lebt sich so durch.”

24

“Kann man damit streicheln und zärtlich sein?”—“Beklagt hat sich noch keine.” 25

“Wissen Sie, die Leute wollen die Wahrheit nicht hören. Eigentlich will der Mensch doch immer mehr sein als er ist. Ist doch Quatsch. Ich selbst muss doch wissen, was ich bin und wer ich bin.” 26

“weil ich noch viel vor hab’ hier.”

27

“Ziehe ein paar Straßen weiter und bin doch so weit weg.”

28

“Wenn alles schiefgeht, könnte ich mir vorstellen, dass es hier noch mal eine Wiedervereinigung geben wird. Und das wünsche ich keenem. Wäre ganz schön traurig.”

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29

“Welcher Ekel reizt mehr: die Hysterie des Westens oder die Abstinenz des Ostens?” 30

The Palast der Republik was the seat of the East German parliament and object of lengthy heated debates about the preservation of GDR history; it was finally demolished in 2008. The facade of the former imperial castle is to be built at the site. 31

“hier wird immer DDR Gebiet sein.”

32

“Doch der filmische Erzähl- und Erinnerungsmodus von Helke Misselwitz ist selbst auch ein Relikt der Vergangenheit: bereits während Sperrmüll über die Goethe-Institute international verbreitet wurde, fielen die Strukturen des DEFA Dokumentarfilmstudios auseinander, das kommerziell nicht überlebensfähig war” (Ritzenhoff, Helke Misselwitz’ Sperrmüll, 284). 33

“platte Hofberichtserstattung bis zu dem formbewussten Filmessay” (Gersch, Szenen eines Landes, 195). 34

Christian Läpple, Einfühlsame Einblicke in Private Ansichten.

35

“aus traumgeschwärztem Hain, weht uns an das Verhauchte, und das Versäumte geht um, groß wie die Schemen der Zukunft.” 36

“Eines Tages wird sich eine alte Frau neben mich setzen und mir alles erzählen, ob es für sie lustig war.” The film script was censored, but Misselwitz and cinematographer Thomas Plenert simply went to the location of the old villa and shot an improvised scenario, and the film later passed without difficulty in the film school. 37

“Verlieren die Bilder heute an Schärfe? Sie sind ja siebzig Jahre alt.”

38

“Wir haben alle nichts gewusst. Wir waren doch zufrieden. Wir waren doch manipuliert. Wir waren doch glücklich”—“Das wussten wir alle. Das sprach sich rum. Darüber wurde nicht gesprochen. War zu gefährlich.” 39

“Sehnsucht nach woanders geht nicht” (Schönfeldt, Der DEFA Komplex 5).

40

“Wenn man so wenig machen kann, hat man doch den Drang in die Öffentlichkeit zu kommen” (ibid.). 41

“Wenn Sie den erforderlichen Betrag eingeworfen haben, erhalten Sie ihr gewünschtes Bild” (Quartier, 33:55). 42

“Tango ist ein trauriger Gedanke, den man tanzen kann” (Misselwitz, TangoTraum, 1985, 2:41). 43

“in der langweiligsten Strasse Berlins” (Schönfeldt, Der DEFA Komplex 5).

44

“Der Tango ist etwas, was tief verwurzelt ist in der Lebensweise, in der Seele eines Volkes, der ich mich vielleicht nähern kann; aber ich werde nicht ankommen. Selbst wenn ich die Möglichkeit gehabt hätte, in Buenos Aires zu drehen, hätte ich nie eigentlich erfahren, was Tango eigentlich ist. Er wäre informativer, authentischer geworden, aber es wäre ein Geheimnis geblieben. Man muss den Tango leben.” Schenk, “Toleranz und Zärtlichkeit, 5. 45

The motif of the ship returns as the final image in Winter Adé three years later.

46

The diploma film was inspired by a box of personal records about the baker Maria Schwarzbach, which Misselwitz accidentally found. This theme of retooling “trash” for creative work resurfaces in Sperrmüll.

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47

This was particularly true for films by directors from DEFA’s older generations, including Frank Beyer’s Das Versprechen, Heiner Carow’s Die Verfehlung, Roland Gräf’s Der Tangospieler, and Horst Seemann’s Von Pankow nach Zehlendorf. Many of these films were based on scripts written before the collapse of the GDR and were made with remaining studio funds. Few of them found an audience. Several were based on literary texts penned many years earlier and thus largely focused on critiquing specific aspects of GDR life. 48

Ralf Schenk, Der DEFA Komplex 5.

49

“aufdringliche(r) Symbolik”—“Betulichkeit typischer DEFA Produktionen” Rolf-Rüdiger Hamacher, “Der deutsche Film bei den 26. Hofer Filmtagen,” Filmdienst 24 (1992): 15. 50

“Ein Gemischtwarenladen der Alltagsprobleme in Regalen aufgereiht wie im alten Konsum, brav, hilflos und mit einem didaktischen Eifer, den die Dokumentaristin Misselwitz sich und uns erspart hat. Alle und alles stehen für etwas—und nichts für sich selbst.” Peter Körte, “DDR adé, Helke Misselwitz’ erster Spielfilm ‘Herzsprung,’” Frankfurter Rundschau, Nov. 20, 1992, n.p. 51

“Herzsprung ist kein Film für Zapper. Er verlangt schon ein bisschen mehr Beachtung seiner künstlerischen Eigenart, als die Filmredaktion des Zweiten ihm entgegenzubringen bereit war.” Peter Hoff, “Kein Fall für Filmförderung: ‘Herzsprung’ im ZDF oder Wie man einem Kunstwerk das Publikum vergrault,” Neues Deutschland, Jun. 15, 1994, n.p.

52

“Bilder von bemerkenswerter symbolischer Kraft”—“ganz unsentimental und mit grosser artifizieller Intensität . . . erzählt.” Ingeborg Weinhold, “Kontrastreich,” Leipziger Volkszeitung, Jun. 15, 1994; Rudolf Scholz, “Deutsche Ängste,” Sächsische Zeitung, Jun. 15, 1994, n.p. 53

“Eine emotionale Ballade . . . die bewusst an die Romantik mit ihrer Trauer, ihrem Weh, ihrer Verzweiflung an der deutschen Misere anknüpft. Ein Film von starker Körperlichkeit und Sinnlichkeit auf einem Klangteppich, der an die Musik früherer Arbeiten erinnert: Volkslieder, Küchenlieder, Tangos.” Ralf Schenk, Der DEFA Komplex 5. 54

“Den Ort Herzsprung gibt es wirklich. So wie Sie ihn hier gesehen haben, werden Sie ihn nicht finden.” 55

Lutz Köpnick uses the term “heritage cinema” to refer to films that painstakingly recreate historical sets including aural soundscapes that convey a sense of authenticity and lend credibility to their claims of accurately representing history. See his essay “Reframing the Past: Heritage Cinema and Holocaust in the 1990s,” special issue on postwall cinema, New German Critique 87 (Fall 2002): 47–82. 56

“Ich weiß . . . Du wirst mich trösten wenn es soweit ist.”

57

In 1985 Misselwitz became a post-graduate student of Heiner Carow’s at the Academy of Arts in East Berlin, as did her fellow student Herwig Kipping. Misselwitz and Kipping have given credit to Carow for protecting their artistic ambitions and securing for them opportunities to work. 58

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59

Helke Misselwitz and Hiltrud Schulz, “Herzsprung and Filmmaking during the Wende: Interview with Helke Misselwitz,” special feature on Herzsprung DVD (Amherst, MA: Icestorm International, 2009).

60

Ibid.

61

“Das sind sie die Lichter in einem Film deutscher Machart, wenn 1992 ein Mann bierselig nach Hause kommt und sagen darf: . . . ‘für dich ist ein Neger angekommen.’ Und wenn dieser Satz so eingewoben ist, dass niemand ernsthaft Bedenken anmeldet, niemand die sechsschichtige Bedeutung dieses Satzes in Zweifel zieht, dann ist eine Wahrheit erzählt, die in vielen anderen Filmen umständlich und analysereich ausgewrungen wird.” Hannes Schönemann, “Herzsprung,” Film und Fernsehen 6/1 (1992/93): 135 (double issue). 62

“Ich sage nischt. Sagen bringt nichts. Nischt Jutes.”

63

“als Antifaschistin, nicht aus Gehässigkeit.”

64

Kraft Wetzel, “Evil Germans? Rightwing Violence in Light of Recent German Films,” on Herzsprung DVD, special features (Amherst, MA: Icestorm International, 2009), n.p. 65

“Warum müsst ihr Weißen immer in Kleidern duschen?”

66

“was mag der Traum bedeuten? Ach, Liebste, bist du tot?”

67

“Tja, wir müssen uns jetzt alle umstellen. Ich wünsche Ihnen jedenfalls alles Gute auch im persönlichen Leben.” 68

In Engelchen the protagonist’s isolated despair makes it increasingly difficult for her to differentiate between her wishful world of dreams and reality. Misselwitz introduces the theme of mental illness into this exploration of the loneliness and instant gratification in late capitalist society. The protagonist Engelchen (Little Angel) works in a lipstick factory, a symbolic manifestation of her disoriented alienation in image-driven consumer society. Unable to afford the advertised luxury goods that promise the happiness and love she craves, Engelchen resorts to shoplifting. Stealing a bridal gown for an imagined fairy tale wedding leads to stealing a baby, as the boundaries between Engelchen’s dreams and her reality increasingly blur. Engelchen offers a powerful critique of life in the Berlin Republic’s capitalist consumer culture, in which marginalized individuals like Engelchen struggle to maintain a grip on sanity as the gap between images of promised happiness through material satisfaction clash violently with the gritty reality of lonely isolation.

69

“Schreiben als Flucht in die Realität.” Petra Tschörtner, Herr Giwi oder die umgekehrte Emigration, TV documentary, 1997. 70

“Dass ich beteiligt sein darf, denken kann. Dass ich assoziieren kann. Reichtum an Konflikten und Poesie. Dass die Schönheit aus der Wahrhaftigkeit kommt.” Läpple, Einfühlsame Einblicke in Private Ansichten. 71

“Tatsachen, aneineandergereiht, ergeben noch nicht die Wirklichkeit.” Christa Wolf, Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2010), 257.

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5: The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: Andreas Voigt’s Leipzig Pentalogy, 1986–96

W

produced at DEFA in the final years experienced a much-delayed show of interest by audiences, documentary films often garnered immediate attention, as they functioned as reflective mirrors for the political and social upheavals of 1989. But like the feature films made between 1989 and 1992, the lasting value of these documentary films is only emerging years after the events they depict. Looking at Andreas Voigt’s series of five documentary films about Leipzig from 1986 to 1996 from the perspective of twenty-five years after the fall of the wall confirms a statement by cinematographer Thomas Plenert at the Leipzig documentary festival in 1989: “I think it is important that a film retain its relevance for many years.”1 This unique pentalogy of films captures the changing mood from before the mobilization of GDR citizens—through their protests—and the ensuing dramatic changes, including the disappearance of the GDR itself. They do so directly, as they focus on the protests of 1989 and topics such as monetary union, restructuring of the social, economic, and legal system of the former GDR, and the effect on peoples’ workplaces, among others. But more interestingly, the films reflect the changes in the country indirectly in their own changing foci, beginning with a film that was Voigt’s diploma film for graduation from the film academy (HFF) Babelsberg and ending with a film jointly financed by a German public broadcasting station (MDR), state and federal film subsidies, and a private production company (A Jour Production). As different as the production conditions for the five films may have been, they shared dramatic releases in the East and West: the first film, Alfred, caused a stir in the Babelsberg film school during its official evaluation for acceptance as a diploma film. The fourth film, Glaube, Liebe, Hoffnung, provoked several lawsuits and injunctions by its subjects as well as by Leipzig’s District Attorney. Unlike the newscasts from the period, which covered the big events and the actions by politicians, these films focus in depth on the effects of the macro-historical events on the lives of ordinary people from a broad spectrum of backgrounds. By accompanying five or six individuals over the course of ten years, viewers of these documentaries can appreciate the complexities of coping with the rapidly changing world in East Germany. HILE MANY OF THE LAST FEATURE FILMS

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More importantly, the stories exemplify the need for nuanced study of recent history to avoid oversimplified divisions into winners and losers, perpetrators and victims. One reviewer aptly argued that the films show many hundreds of pages of social-science research.2 Twenty-five years after the fall of the wall, when historians are questioning the usefulness of the “totalitarianism model” for understanding the history of the GDR, and turning to everyday history (Alltagsgeschichte) in search of “more adequate representation and fuller understanding of GDR history” as Mary Fulbrook has written,3 Voigt’s films are especially valuable documents. Far from being outdated, they rather anticipated such calls for a more complex assessment of the past. Voigt does not claim to be either comprehensive or representative, but his camera’s focus on citizens in Leipzig is helpful in understanding both the hopefulness and earnestness of the protesters in the fall of 1989 and the sobering realities of life after unification. The films further avoid replicating the all-too-familiar images of dancing crowds on the wall in Berlin by exploring life in workingclass neighborhoods on the outskirts of Leipzig, such as Connewitz, and Grünau, where change was initially slow to arrive, but unemployment was particularly drastic after the end of the GDR. Conceptually, all the films except the first do not simply document the public events on the streets but take their audiences into factories, military barracks, pubs, private homes, and a jail. They therefore assemble a far more complex portrait of the multifaceted consequences of the change in East Germany’s political system. Voigt’s films move from capturing the crowds in the streets to a more intimate focus on the lives of a handful of individuals, thus taking viewers from the streets to the living room, from the political events in the public space to their consequences in the private sphere. Historian Konrad Jarausch has pointed to the value of such individual life experiences, especially when they seem to contradict our understanding of history: “Instead of inspiring frantic efforts to produce a single authoritative narrative, these divergences of memory challenge historians to take the life stories of ordinary people into account when constructing their account of the past.”4 Yet filmmaker Andreas Voigt is not interested in working as a historian—he is a documentarist with a camera, trained in the DEFA studio but like his films’ subjects released into the free market place of unified Germany. As such, he is as much an interested participant in the events he is filming as the people in front of his camera. In fact, the third film of the series, Letztes Jahr Titanic (Last Year Titanic, 1991), ends with an interviewee turning the table and asking Voigt about his future. The director replies candidly that DEFA will close down and all employees will lose their jobs—just like the subjects of his film. This admission on camera freely states the participatory mode and his subjective involvement in the events he chronicles.

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As a filmmaker he makes it clear that “film is an image, it is a very subjective image.”5 Voigt is thus not constructing a coherent historical view of the years from 1986 to 1996 but is seeking people from a broad range of society who are willing to allow the camera access to their quickly changing lives. He is interested in collecting complicated life stories and not afraid to ask very personal questions. In all five films he remains outside the image, but his voice is heard throughout, engaging in dialogue with his subjects. He never introduces his interview partners, nor does he provide an explanatory voice-over. He thus makes no attempt to edit his own presence out of the picture but creates extra distance between interviewee and interviewer by placing the camera in the middle. The full frame of the image belongs to the interview subject, often in long steady takes without breaking the focus through point-of-view shots. The tension created between the very personal questions and the special distance between interviewer and interviewee yields surprising intimacy without overpowering the films’ subjects with the director’s presence. Through editing, choice of music, and location, however, Voigt openly interprets his subjects’ stories, a strategy that he begins in the first film, Alfred, and continues to the last, Große Weite Welt, as I will show in the following analysis of the films.

DEFA Style? In the critical literature on DEFA films, scholars have considered the question of a DEFA documentary style and its fate after 1989.6 However, as most film historians point out, the question of what this DEFA documentary style was is far from easy to answer. Frequently, documentary styles are categorized by generational developments, from the founding years in the 1950s, to the early hints of perestroika in the mid-1980s. In the case of the youngest generation of documentary filmmakers, the influence of the middle generation, represented by Winfried Junge, Volker Koepp, and Jürgen Böttcher is noted.7 For Voigt these directors were personally influential because they all worked within the “Gruppe Document” of the documentary-film studio. Like the feature filmmakers, documentary filmmakers were assigned to work within certain artistic groups, each with its own character. “Gruppe Document,” which Voigt joined in 1978 as dramaturge for a film on Poland, was considered the most aesthetically diverse and creative among the various documentary groups. Voigt was a doctoral student in economics at the time and hired for the project because of his Polish language skills, having previously studied a year in Krakow. Even before beginning his own external studies in documentary film directing at the film academy, Voigt had worked with directors Junge and Koepp on their films (for example, Junge’s long-term documentaries on the village of

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Golzow and Koepp’s Haus und Hof) and participated in the general artistic and intellectual climate of the group. Having previously experienced the much more open and exciting cultural life in Poland and joining a filmmaker’s group that contained internationally renowned artists such as Jürgen Böttcher shaped Voigt’s own artistic development.8 Like Junge and Koepp (in his Wittstock films), Voigt became an important chronicler of change by depicting ruptures in individual biographies and landscapes over decades. Like Böttcher and Koepp, he was interested in Germany’s relationship with its Eastern neighbors and made films about and in formerly contested border regions after unification, including Grenzland— eine Reise (1992) and Ostpreussenland (1995). Jürgen Böttcher had modeled a new approach to documentary film in the GDR from the early 1960s on. Instead of following the official directive to depict exemplary lives in the young socialist worker and farmer state, he was attracted to more complex characters, like the three workers in Drei von Vielen (1961), which shows three workers who pursue artistic interests as passionately as their day jobs. In Stars (1963) Böttcher is less interested in the particulars of the female workers’ industrial accomplishments in a light bulb factory, focusing more on the social dynamics among the women. Ofenbauer (1972) on the surface celebrates the amazing feat of moving an eighteen-ton heavy chimney-like oven a few yards to facilitate a more efficient replacement process, but the images’ immediacy as a result of the placement of the camera in the midst of the tense operation is more reminiscent of Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo than of a typical socialist realist factory film. Finally, in Böttcher’s seminal Rangierer the director delivered a groundbreaking montage of masterfully edited sequences of workers redirecting trains in various directions in a wintery Dresden industrial train yard. The film is edited without any voice-over or intertitles, highlighting the diegetic industrial sounds of screeching brakes, metal wagons slamming into each other, and snow crunching under heavy boots. The density of the visual and aural montage conveys powerfully the dangerous and hard work the men perform: no commentary is required. The lack of interviews and voice-over, however, was also Böttcher’s response to the increasingly stifling censorship situation in the studio and his refusal to engage the apparatus on that level. In his next film, Kurzer Besuch bei Hermann Glöckner (Short Visit with Hermann Glöckner, 1985), Böttcher visits the “constructivist” ninety-year-old painter and films him painting sparse circles in long, uncommented takes. Once more, little verbal commentary is necessary as the film portrays the cheerfully stubborn dedication of one individual artist to his own aesthetic vision, unmoved by the dictates of official socialist policies. Documentarist Thomas Heise (b. 1955) pursued a similar strategy in his film Das Haus (1984) about the Berolina building on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, which housed the offices of Berlin’s municipal

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administration, including the offices for housing, welfare, labor, and youth. The film also avoids a voice-over or any other commentary except for the visual structuring device of a sequence of visitors riding a paternoster elevator between floors. As the film crew moves from one city office to the next and simply chronicles the interviews between citizens and their caseworkers, the film uses intertitles to repeat phrases the caseworkers utter such as “I can already erase that,” “there is no private workroom for a student,” “Your daughter is not listed in the plan. My plan is the law. First the plan and then all else.”9 Reproduced as intertitles, the phrases highlight the bureaucratic processing of people, which the tiny moving paternoster cubicles visually reinforce. Voigt’s personal style developed through his exposure to the directors of Gruppe Document, with whom he shared many affinities, including the long-term chronicles of Junge and Koepp, the precise observation of Böttcher, and the attention to socially marginalized individuals such as radical youth like Heise. Like his colleagues from the youngest generation (for example, Tschörtner, Misselwitz, and Heise) Voigt displays his interest in the very personal experiences and dreams of his individual subjects. In contrast, Jürgen Böttcher’s engaging film Martha (1978) portrays its protagonist as the last surviving Trümmerfrau (rubble woman), that is, one of the countless women who literally rebuilt Berlin after the Second World War. In 1978, Martha still works among the rubble, sorting debris from the stony rubble in a junkyard. Böttcher, who has spoken about the lasting impact of his early childhood impressions in destroyed Dresden, repeatedly asks about her experiences in 1945, inserting footage of the destroyed city. He appears more interested in her persona as “the last surviving Trümmerfrau” than her individuality. The intimacy that documentary filmmakers of the younger generation, including Voigt, establish with their subjects signals a heightened commitment to the subjective and contradictory individuality of the protagonist. While film historians generally share the view that real creative autonomy was as impossible to achieve in DEFA’s documentary-film division as it was in feature films, it is important to remember that documentary films were produced by several different institutions within the GDR: the television studio, the documentary-film studio, which was again subdivided into its various artistic groups, and the production division of the film archive (staatliche Filmdokumentation beim staatlichen Filmarchiv). In the latter organization independently minded young artists like Thomas Heise found a more protected niche out of the limelight of the DEFA studio. As documentary films were less on the radar screen of censoring authorities, unexpectedly creative works were also produced in the children’s documentary-film division, for example, by directors such as Günter Jordan and Jochen Kraußer. Jordan’s Berlin Auguststrasse (1979) and Kraußer’s Die Leuchtkraft der Ziege (The Luminosity of the Goat,

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1987) may not have received permission to be released in theaters, but both films nevertheless had an important impact through film-club and school screenings. Die Leuchtkraft der Ziege in particular is a disarmingly comical, surreal farce that pokes fun at many things in the GDR; it prominently features hapless filmmakers in a parody of the country’s stifling artistic production conditions (see chapter 6). Documentary films produced at the DEFA studio were made for cinematic release under the jurisdiction of the film division of the Ministry of Culture and their directors generally enjoyed more freedom than documentary filmmakers at the GDR television studios. The latter operated directly under the supervision of the central committee of the Socialist Unity Party and its division for “agitation and propaganda.” A creative niche for small-scale documentary-film experiments was DEFA’s “Kinobox” series, which produced documentary shorts that changed monthly for pre-feature film presentation in cinemas in the 1970s and 1980s. Directors such as Helke Misselwitz and Andreas Voigt, that is, members of the last generation of documentary filmmakers who went on to successful post-Wende careers, found space for important early film experiments here. Andreas Voigt’s early Kinobox contributions included a portrait of an artist whose painting of the worker Alfred Florstedt later led to his diploma film, Alfred. A highly entertaining gem was his five-minute short Mann mit Krokodil, which dryly captured the absurd tale of a pet crocodile’s annual excursion via Trabant taxi to its vacation domicile at his owner’s summer house in the country. As the surprised cabdriver skeptically eyes his unorthodox passenger, the voice-over states matter-of-factly “Once a year Jonas is shackled.”10 The story does not claim any political importance or greater moral significance but is a treasure of a closely observed unusual occurrence in the midst of the hectic urban bustle of Berlin. In addition to finding niches such as the Kinobox productions for creative opportunities, having older, influential directors as patrons could make the decisive difference: both Misselwitz and Voigt were protégés of director Heiner Carow, which provided them with small openings to develop their own filmic language instead of assisting merely on projects by older established colleagues. Given the different locations where documentaries were produced under varying conditions, as well as considering the impact the ever-changing larger political climate in the country had on filmmakers, the search for a definitive DEFA documentary style appears naively simplistic and by extension complicates the question of whether “the” DEFA documentary style may or may not have survived into unified Germany. In addition to the political and generational changes among directors, younger cinematographers also made their mark in the last decade of the GDR. Elke Schieber has pointed out that this younger generation of cinematographers knew that GDR audiences had much more faith

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in images than words and “developed out of a sense of responsibility a special sensitivity for situations that change through the act of filming and reveal something fundamental.”11 Schieber cites cinematographers Christian Lehmann, Sebastian Richter, and Rainer Schulz as prime examples for such aesthetic change. All three cameramen have worked repeatedly with director Andreas Voigt. Helen Hughes has suggested that the absence of commentary in Voigt’s documentaries is a relict of the old DEFA tradition that attempted to insert critical ambivalence into a film by letting images that concurred with official propaganda but contradicted popular experience speak for themselves. With regard to Voigt’s refusal to comment on the right-wing views of his subjects in Glaube, Liebe, Hoffnung she questions whether this style is still effective in the “plurality of public opinion” of post-unified Germany as it might be misconstrued as “indifference or indecision” about the depicted extremists’ views.12 By contrast, one might suggest that if audiences in the GDR could be trusted to identify critical commentary in DEFA documentaries that flew below the censors’ radars, audiences in unified Germany might be considered visually sophisticated enough to understand the filmmaker’s montage not as an uncritical endorsement of right- or left-wing extremists’ views but as explorations of what motivates young Germans to use violence against foreigners and perceived foreigners. Audiences from the former East and West Germany might thus be able to differentiate between images that endorse and glorify extremist violence and images that probe the reasons for disenfranchised youth to engage in such acts. Thomas Heise, who himself was criticized for his depiction of right-wing radicals in Stau (1993), commented in a related context: “It is not the task of documentary film to teach lessons about which view of the world is the correct one. Everybody has to decide that for himself, or at least to strive to find out for himself. Perhaps it is the task of film to remind viewers occasionally of the existence of real reality.”13

The Leipzig Pentalogy The series begins with the biography of a worker in Leipzig, Alfred Florstedt, whose life encompasses all the major events of German history of the twentieth century from the First World War to nearly the end of the GDR. During the filming of Alfred in 1985 it was inconceivable that the GDR would not exist a few years later. The film was thus not intended to be the first of five Leipzig films. The second film, Leipzig im Herbst (Leipzig in the Fall, 1989), came about when Voigt and a few other DEFA directors and cameramen from the documentary studio felt that as filmmakers they could no longer ignore the events of the fall of 1989. Leaving the annual meeting of documentary filmmakers in

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Neubrandenburg in October 1989, Voigt and his colleagues petitioned the director of the DEFA documentary studio on October 15 for equipment and permission to film the weekly demonstrations in Berlin, Leipzig, and Dresden. Voigt and his colleagues wrote: “In regard to the current sociopolitical developments in the GDR it is our duty as documentary filmmakers to accompany this process. On the one hand, we need to engage through film in this all-encompassing dialogue. On the other, we need to collect material, capture events that will have great importance as a document of these weeks and months later on. We must film now.”14 The studio responded guardedly, by permitting the use of camera and sound equipment but specifying that the shooting was intended for archival purposes only. The succinct permission note stated simply that Voigt was charged with filming for documentary purposes,15 and was signed by the assistant director Seidl, as director Rüsch was “usually ill” on critical days, as Voigt put it dryly.16 This way, the crew would gather potentially important material but could claim that it was for “research” purposes in case the protests were to turn violent and a government crackdown occurred. Three teams, with Voigt opting for Leipzig as his focus, thus took their equipment to the streets to document the rapidly expanding protests in October and early November of 1989. Calling his film “a material” rather than a fully conceived documentary film, Voigt’s document nevertheless was the only one of the three teams’ material that became a film. Although Leipzig im Herbst was shot only from October 16 to November 6, 1989, it became the opening sensation of that year’s Leipzig Documentary Film Festival just ten days after the last day of shooting. Encouraged by the success of the film, which won a specially created prize of the international jury in recognition of its unprecedented accomplishments, Voigt continued the work and documented the last year of the GDR and unification with West Germany in Letztes Jahr Titanic (1991). It is here that Voigt introduces us to five characters whose lives he follows over the next decade. It should be remembered that the end of the GDR as an independent state could not have been predicted at the beginning of the shoot for this film in December 1989. Returning to Leipzig in 1992, a time when violent attacks on immigrants, asylum seekers, and black Germans reached new heights, Voigt engages with three radical youth in the most controversial of his five films, Glaube, Liebe, Hoffnung (1994), trying to find out what motivated such violence. In his final film, Große Weite Welt (Big Wide World, 1997), the team returns to reconnect with the five characters from the third film (Titanic). Unfortunately, efforts to secure funding for another film that would locate the protagonists of the second film Leipzig im Herbst to assess the situation twenty years after the fall of the wall were unsuccessful. TV broadcasting stations funded instead a large number of made-for-TV dramas that featured spectacular escape stories, or Stasi spy tales, further cementing the dominant view

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of the oppressive GDR (“Unrechtsstaat DDR”) and thus preparing TV audiences for the opulent celebration of German unification, sponsored by the car manufacturer Audi, at the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the wall, the “Festival of Freedom” on November 9, 2009. In 2013 Voigt returned once more with a script for revisiting the characters from the pentalogy for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the wall.

Alfred What unifies all five films is Voigt’s interest in connecting the private experience of an individual with the public events of macro-history in a working-class neighborhood of Leipzig. After seeing a painted portrait of worker Alfred Florstedt in a friend’s studio in 1985, Voigt was curious about the old man and interviewed him for two days on tape, hoping to use the audio material as a starting point for a film at some point. A week later, Alfred Florstedt died, and Voigt decided to attempt a film based on the audio and few photos he took of Alfred. Relatively conventional in format, the film chronicles Alfred’s biography from birth to his retirement, touching on his fate during the First World War, the Weimar years, the Second World War, the cold war, and the various stages of GDR history. These important cornerstones of German national history and that of Alfred himself are intertwined by means of the theme of Alfred’s continuous involvement with political life in various parties. Even though he was persecuted for his political beliefs under the Nazis as well as the Communists in the GDR in the 1950s, Alfred never tired of his political work, as an anarchist, a Communist, and a union leader. As he stated pointedly to the filmmaker: “Those who do not engage in politics are the ones victimized by it.”17 Such a portrait of “a German life” is a worthy and fascinating project in itself, as it illustrates an ordinary worker’s extraordinary struggles for political participation during the twentieth century in Germany. The audience gains insight into the unexpected complexities of these struggles almost by accident. Alfred’s cousin, for example, describes his political convictions during the Weimar years as those of an anarchist. She explains that their families, while living across the street from each other, had little interaction, because Alfred’s family was socialist while her own was Communist. Socialists and Communists simply could not interact in those years, she says, even if they were related and found themselves on the same side of the political spectrum. However, Alfred’s repeated run-ins with the socialist party authorities in the GDR in the 1950s was not a topic that film-school authorities felt comfortable addressing even in the mid-1980s. The troubles around the release of Alfred are difficult to comprehend from hindsight and outside the experience of having lived in the GDR, as the taboo surrounding any

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criticism of 1950s socialist policy was absolute and remained so almost until the end of the country. This book contains numerous stories about filmmakers such as Ulrich Weiß and Herwig Kipping, who were shut down after voicing alternative views of the early building years of the East German State. As I have shown in chapter 2, Herwig Kipping’s depiction of the party’s Stalinist period in Land hinter dem Regenbogen was a rare cinematic exploration of the power struggles in the GDR in the 1950s and was only possible after the wall had already fallen. Voigt’s use of newspaper stories and party disciplinary documents that illustrate Alfred’s past troubles with the party irked the censors. Even more problematic was another provocative sequence. When reporting about Alfred’s wife, Claire, and her work in a factory, Voigt interviews female workers in a plant where Alfred once worked. In one of the most compelling scenes of the film, two female workers discuss their daily struggles to find a balance between work and family responsibilities. Rather than presenting a rosy picture of the emancipated GDR worker, fulfilled by work and family life, these women talk about the stresses of having too little time for their families, few dreams, and little happiness. As one of them says when asked about her dreams: “Of course one has dreams, until one reaches a certain age. But once you have a family and a job, you stop dreaming” (20:00).18 The women date this point, when everyday reality replaces youthful ideals, at the age of thirty. The film, made in 1985, anticipates some core themes regarding women in the GDR that Helke Misselwitz would explore three years later in Winter Adé and is far more radical and personal than the interviews with female factory workers in earlier films by Böttcher and Koepp, such as Stars and Mädchen in Wittstock. Voigt’s rare voice-over (his later four films avoid voice-over commentary) just before this sequence accompanies a tracking shot along train tracks through the industrial landscape and connects Alfred’s story with the present time: “Thinking of the past. Wishing to change the world quickly. Hoping to still experience that. The revolutionary ideal and reality” (19:00).19 The women’s resigned assessment of everyday reality (Alltag) contrasts with Alfred’s spirited and lifelong fight against rigid structures on the one hand and on the other hand reflects on the state of affairs in the GDR of 1985. Voigt clearly saw the correlations between Alfred’s passionate struggles and his own generation of filmmakers, who were frustrated by the inflexible production structures at DEFA. He stated in an interview with the paper Sonntag in October of 1989: “We did not, in fact could not, make films about the essential experiences and conflicts of our generation.”20 The film’s critical aesthetic might appear subtle today, but was obvious for sensitized GDR audiences at the time. Voigt relates his film’s “historical” documentary focus to the current situation and problems in the GDR of the later 1980s by editing frequent train

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sequences into the interview material. While it could be argued that these are simply needed to animate the numerous shots of still photos (a necessity since Alfred had died prior to the shooting of the film), the moving camera fulfills two central tasks: it explores Alfred’s former neighborhood in search of traces of his biography, and it compares views of the Leipzig of Alfred’s youth with the modern-day equivalent. The seemingly innocent images reveal astonishingly little contrast. Leipzig-Plagwitz looks like a forgotten landscape from the past century, not the model image of the modern GDR economy that the leadership propagandized to its citizens and the world. Train tracks evoke the themes of travel, exploration, movement, modernity, progress, and departures. They signify Alfred’s idealistic hopes for a better future, contrast with the female workers’ sense of being stuck, and illustrate the filmmaker’s desire for opportunities to explore his generation’s topics and aesthetics. In addition to being a sensitive tribute to an extraordinary ordinary person, the film highlights three clusters of problems in the GDR that visually anticipate much of what is verbalized in the material of Leipzig im Herbst: tedium, lack of freedom for self-realization, and decaying infrastructures. The film thematizes the stress of family and work life and sets expectations for personal happiness against the dreary realities of shift work in the manufacturing industry. Voigt’s film does not confirm the official socialist propaganda of the emancipated GDR women specifically and the workers’ paradise in general. On the other hand, the women in the film do not state that they dislike the work and would prefer to stay at home. They seem comfortable in their collegial relationships and sympathize with each other’s complaints, thus hinting at the existence of a mutual support system. While their complaint about the daily stress is serious, they do not speak about feelings of isolation or lack of self-confidence. The dominant stress is of a different kind than that of West German women in the 1970s and 1980s, who were much less likely to work outside the house: the women workers in Alfred appear self-confident and independent, if stressed by the double burden. This is not to suggest that all workers depicted in the films appear as primarily stressed, overburdened laborers. In a scene in a foundry, the film shows young metal workers performing tedious mechanical tasks, appearing less stressed than bored by the routinized labor. Supporting this impression of the workers’ lives as both secure and wearisome is the visual language of the film. Voigt and his cameraman Sebastian Richter capture the atmosphere of the Leipzig working-class district of Plagwitz in picturesque images that convey a sense of backwardness, decay, and some underlying timelessness. The most important aesthetic structuring device is a repeated long tracking shot, filmed from a freight train that passes through a neighborhood of manufacturing plants, industrial sites, brick warehouses, and, surprisingly, the

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occasional residential tenement building in between. The area has a raw beauty, but the film also suggests that time has not progressed. Most of these tracking shots are devoid of human figures, increasing the impression of a deserted landscape. Depending on the viewer’s perspective, these train sequences may appear idyllic to some, for example in their focus on a horse-drawn cart on cobblestone streets. Others might be reminded of poetic sequences in Walter Ruttmann’s early-morning impressions of a still-sleepy metropolis in Berlin, Symphony of a Great City. Voigt’s superiors at the film academy in Babelsberg in 1986, however, did not share such sensibilities and immediately understood the film’s critical attitude. A filmic portrait of a worker who ended his life as a distinguished comrade in the Socialist Unity Party (SED) could hardly have won favors with the authorities by depicting the workingclass neighborhood of Leipzig-Plagwitz as run down and sleepy, while its workers appear either stressed by the double burden of work and family or bored by the tedium of their jobs. Alfred’s parting shot at the film’s end comes in response to the director’s question of where he found the strength to fight so many different political systems over the course of his life: “If you don’t believe that life will take a turn for the better, you needn’t even begin” (39:10).21 Unwittingly, the film becomes an immediate precursor to the second installment of the pentalogy, Leipzig im Herbst, which features the citizens’ outspoken protests against the restrictive conditions in the GDR, demanding freedom of speech and travel, and democratic participation in government. In a way the November protesters signal a return to the combative spirit of Alfred Florstedt, who fought both Nazis and Stalinists because of his own views on social justice. Voigt’s film conveys appreciation for both Alfred’s indomitable spirit and his critical assessment of the workers’ situation in Plagwitz of 1986 by means of careful editing and evocative photography. Looking at it from today’s perspective, viewers might be surprised to learn that this seemingly non-confrontational film caused serious uproar in the film academy during its evaluation process as Voigt’s diploma film. It faced stiff opposition against being broadcast on GDR television, or being screened at the Leipzig documentary festival. The unflattering depiction of Leipzig’s heavy-metal industrial district, Alfred’s difficulties with the socialist unity party, which lead to his expulsion in 1950, and his eventual rehabilitation in 1956, and finally the modern workers who have given up their dreams of a brighter future was considered a provocation against the officially sanctioned views of the GDR as a modern, democratic workers’ state. Voigt stated that this film would have not been possible even ten years earlier, and even in 1986 depended strongly on the steadfast support of two influential DEFA figures: feature-film director Heiner Carow, who had taken a personal interest in the work of Voigt and of several other

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promising young directors, including Helke Misselwitz and Herwig Kipping, and newly appointed film-school (HFF) director Lothar Bisky, who led the school from 1986 to 1990 and brought about a major change in its final years with his open-minded encouragement for the youngest generation of directors. Even with such high-level patronage, Alfred was only released for semi-private screening in film clubs but not for television broadcast, as was common for diploma films. In 1990 Alfred was among the formerly censored diploma films that were broadcast on television. Andreas Voigt successfully challenged an attempt by the television broadcaster to change the production date from 1986 to 1990.22 The fact that changes were taking place at the film academy in the later 1980s is illustrated by an incident Andreas Voigt related in an interview with the author.23 In 1987 Kurt Hager, chief party ideologue and member of the Politbüro—the highest governing body in the GDR—visited the film academy to personally view a few recent films by its graduates in the school’s cinema in the Stalinhaus. After viewing Alfred, he turned to Voigt with an approving nod and said: “Make more films like this, young man.”24 Such approval from the highest authority enabled film-school director Bisky to further defend the film and finally release it for its screening at the Leipzig film festival, which in turn earned Voigt an invitation to the important West German Oberhausen film festival. Voigt establishes a few trademark features of all of his works in this first film. He is never seen in the film, although his voice is heard asking questions from behind the camera. Arguing that the tendency toward a false naturalism in documentary film is furthered by the director’s appearance on camera, Voigt prefers to create more distance between the protagonist, the camera and the director by interacting with his interviewees from behind the camera.25 Furthermore, Voigt never speaks for his protagonists. He allows them to express themselves, answering his questions, but never summarizes what they have said for the audience in a voice-over or intertitles. In fact, in his second, third, and fourth films, he does not introduce his protagonists at all. He simply asks them questions, to which they respond. Whatever impression or story emerges over the course of the films is theirs to tell. Voigt’s commentary establishes itself through the editing on the one hand and several structuring visual motifs on the other hand. The dominant visual motif of the train cutting through the industrial neighborhood reappears in the following films, most prominently in the opening and closing shots of the train pulling in and out of the main train station in Leipzig in the third and fifth films, while the second film features a short sequence of the freight train rattling through a Leipzig industrial area that is highly reminiscent of similar sequences in Alfred. The significance of these recurring sequences shifts from the first to the last film: in the first film, they establish a connection between

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Alfred’s neighborhood in the 1920s and beyond, and the time of filming in the late 1980s, with an eye to assessing the circumstances of workers in Leipzig today. The images thus contrast the reality of the 1980s against the ideals Alfred had struggled for. In Leipzig im Herbst, the train sequence functions as a contextualizing device for two interviews with workers in a manufacturing plant like the one that Voigt had visited in 1986 and would revisit for his later Leipzig films. Within the narrative flow of the film, the train tracks support his interviewees’ contention that thorough reforms and modernizations are urgently needed. The camera cuts from an interview with young and old workers in the factory, where the older worker states that forty years of his generation’s hard work had amounted to nothing, while the younger workers complain about stagnating and regressive developments in the factory. The dominant, all-encompassing control of the party is identified as the main source of frustration. Voigt contrasts this sequence with a shot of a billboard outside the factory, proclaiming proudly: “With the people and for the people we realize the goals of the party. Onward to the 40th anniversary of the GDR” (Voigt, Titanic, 13:18).26 Next we see the train tracks between two factory buildings with boarded-up doors and broken windows, placidly illuminated by pale sunlight and photographed in stark black and white stock. More pointedly than in Alfred this short montage contains the director’s commentary on the events in Leipzig of 1989: the discrepancy between the party proclamations of progress and prosperity and the frustration of the people, who experience stifling structures and bureaucratic meddling by the government, is elegantly and efficiently made evident without resorting to any explanatory commentary, echoing Elke Schieber’s assertion that GDR audiences trusted images more than words. The fact that the political climate had drastically changed and large crowds of people protested publicly in November 1989 is reflected in the more directly critical montage of this film. The indirect contrasting of reality and official propaganda in Alfred has given way to a pointed irony in Leipzig im Herbst. The filmmakers take a self-confident stand by announcing to each interviewee that they are representing the DEFA documentary-film studio, as opposed to the television studio or Stasi cameras. GDR audiences disliked GDR television films, but they appreciated DEFA documentary films produced as features for cinematic release because of their more complex approach to depicting GDR realities.

Leipzig im Herbst Indeed, Voigt’s introduction of himself as a DEFA documentary studio representative is greeted with cheers and applause in the opening scene of Leipzig im Herbst, further signaling that filmmakers and protesters are

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embarking on a new path of more outspoken public discourse. Voigt’s initial request for equipment and permission to film on October 15, in order to engage directly in the dialogue on the street with his camera, is accepted by a public that demands freedom of the press and welcomes the DEFA documentary-film team eagerly. The film illustrates what such an open discourse may look like in its encounters with a broad range of protesting citizens, police officials, church leaders, and workers. Importantly from today’s perspective, the protesters do not primarily claim their desire for travel or consumer goods as their motivation to speak out. Freedom of speech, participation in government, and free elections are their main concerns, articulated with great dignity and earnestness by individuals who state that they have never been political before and are demonstrating now for serious reforms, not the abolishment of socialism. How far such sentiments had spread at this point in the dramatic developments of 1989 is elegantly conveyed by a central scene showing garbage collectors cleaning up the discarded banners of a recent protest march. Before flinging them into the truck, they pause to read several signs and comment approvingly that they would rather preserve these signs than discard them. The film’s climactic scenes build around contrasting interviews with young army soldiers, whose mandatory military service required them to be on the other side of the protests from their families and friends, and whose loyalties were torn between their sworn duty as soldiers and their personal beliefs. These frank conversations are edited against interviews with two army officers, who outline the events of October 9, 1989 in Leipzig, where only a last-minute order averted a violent clash between police and protesters that seemed almost inevitable. The interviews reveal how easily a bloody escalation of the conflict (either by order from above or by accident in response to an uncontrolled violent trigger from either side) could have taken place. Leipzig im Herbst was shot between October 16 and November 6, 1989, but its featured interviews recall especially the tense events around October 7th and 9th in Leipzig. The film is not a teleological chronicle that culminates logically in the fall of the wall on November 9th, thus “releasing” GDR citizens into the West. Such descriptions of the events of 1989 are common in the twentieth-anniversary celebrations such as the official “freedom festival.” Instead, like many Wendeflicks made by East German directors around the years 1989 to 1992, this film is interested in the GDR itself, its problems, its ideas for reforms, and the astonishing power of the citizens’ takeover of the streets and the podium, even in the face of incalculable danger. In the next film, Titanic, the situation in the GDR is discussed by street protesters, but there they also talk about the FRG and its role in the future of the GDR. In Leipzig the focus is solely on the East German state and the historic moment of hopeful optimism for what it might become.

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Fig. 5.1. Protesters in Leipzig in 1989, Leipzig im Herbst. DEFA Stiftung.

Leipzig im Herbst is notable for the immediacy with which it conveys the events of 1989. There was little time to filter the events—the excitement of the film as a historical document where filmmakers and street protesters are equally involved participants is palpable. The previously relied-on method of subtle critique through visual metaphors has given way to the frank exchange of diverse views by engaged citizens.

Letztes Jahr Titanic In the third film, Letztes Jahr Titanic (1991), which chronicles the events from December 1989 to December 1990, the train motif reappears in the opening and closing sequences, as the film team arrives and departs by train in the Leipzig train station. The film changes from color to black and white, reminiscent of the first two films in the series, as it begins its exploration on the streets and in the factories of Leipzig. A later sequence picks up the familiar train motif as it shows a freight train moving between the tenement buildings. The location is identical to sequences in both Alfred and Leipzig im Herbst and is once more part of a subtle but effective montage: the director begins with a conversation with Sylvia, one of the film’s central characters, about her plans to sell her bar in Leipzig and move to Bavaria to purchase a new pub there and start over. A close-up of her hopeful yet uncertain face is edited against the heavy train moving through the tight opening between two residential buildings. The image

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is unsettling, as freight trains normally do not cut through tight residential spaces. The next image is of a carnival street scene, picturing a person dressed as the Statue of Liberty, and a group of revelers alternately singing drinking songs and chanting demands for the incarceration of the former GDR president, Erich Honecker. As in the use of the train motif in the previous two films, Voigt uses the image here to evoke powerful and contradictory ideas: Sylvia’s plans to depart for the West, as she does not believe in the possibility of a brighter future in Leipzig; the draw of the West, once more symbolized by the costume of Lady Liberty; and the image of Bavarian conservative politician Franz Josef Strauss on another reveler’s poster, all interconnected by the incongruous shot of the freight train. If the train symbolized the wish for travel and change in the earlier two films, this dream has now become a real possibility. But the image of the heavy train cutting through a tight opening also conveys the director’s view that this departure will not be easy. Voigt captures this historical moment of opportunity and ambivalence in the brief shot of the train slicing through the city without any voiceover commentary.27 The topic of departing for a better life in the West also corresponds to an early interview with steelworker Wolfgang, who tells Voigt about his repeated attempts to escape for the West in the early days of the GDR, for which he twice served time in jail. After his release he married and had children, a story reminiscent of the two women in Alfred, who found that life’s dreams and higher aspirations typically find their end in the everyday routine of marriage and work. Wolfgang, like Sylvia, wishes to depart for the West now that his children are grown and his work place is likely to be abolished. As it turns out, he reiterates this plan several times in the film, always further postponing the departure date. In the end he does not manage to go. Voigt explained in an interview in 1998 why Wolfgang chose not to participate in future films: “[The worker] always talks about leaving and has still not left today. He did not want to participate in further filming because he would have had to face his past illusions, and that would have hurt.”28 Titanic, the third of the five films, is the centerpiece of the pentalogy. It uniquely captures the unsettled atmosphere of the Wende year, 1989/90. If Leipzig im Herbst features the anger and hopefulness of GDR citizens, as well as the somewhat speechless helplessness of its officials, Titanic depicts a country deeply shaken by its sudden dissolution. The atmosphere at a Titanic-themed farewell party to the GDR is symptomatic of the pervasive sense of uncertainty of those days. Partygoers dance somewhat mechanically, without real joy or excitement in their celebration. When a performance artist intones through a megaphone: “Ladies and gentlemen, please proceed in a calm and orderly fashion to the life-boats,” a group of young men slowly take off their tuxedos and

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stand quietly, vulnerable and exposed in their nakedness, on the proverbial sinking ship. The scene echoes precisely the dominant mood of anxiety also expressed in street celebrations. Here citizens attempt to conjure up the party spirit by intoning the German national anthem. Opting for the ordinarily shunned first stanza, “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,” a few revelers attempt to sound as self-confidently patriotic as the text of the anthem would suggest. Alas, neither text nor melody seems well practiced. Switching randomly between the first stanza of the (West) German anthem and the popular drinking song “So ein Tag, so wunderschön wie heute” the small group gives the overall impression of great forlorn uncertainty, forced excitement, and an utter lack of self-assurance. Supporting the theme of departure, in line with the Titanic motif of the sinking ship, the film introduces several characters planning to leave for the West. The desire to start over and realize one’s own potential, not to mention the fear of losing one’s job in the East, are the reasons for this migration, which has persisted for the last twenty years, as much of the former manufacturing industry in East Germany has been dismantled. Importantly, the relations between East Germans and foreign workers in the GDR, described in several interviews as “excellent,” appear more fragile in light of the new economic situation. Tensions emerge quickly in a bar scene when a local East German feels that African musicians, who are his fellow workers in the manufacturing plant, receive an undue amount of attention by the documentary-film crew, while GDR citizens are ignored. Like the seamstresses depicted in a different interview, who articulate their fear for their jobs and the strong view that their Vietnamese coworkers should be the first to go when lay-offs begin, since “they can always return to their own country,” the argument in the bar illustrates the great sense of uncertainty and tension regarding the future. The two interviews also connect to the theme of violence against foreigners, which is the main focus in the next film, Glaube, Liebe, Hoffnung. Pointedly, Voigt concludes this segment with a brief shot of an old apartment building imploding. As the city is already preparing for the building craze that is about to begin, the old and familiar structures are quickly being demolished, literally vanishing from view within seconds in this shot. In Titanic Voigt’s team encounters other signs of the rapid change that took place within a matter of weeks after the fall of the wall. Sandwiched between the scenes of street revelers droning the German national anthem, and the seamstresses discussing their worries about their job security, Voigt finds a pair of enterprising West Germans who found opportunity in the East. The Bavarians produce porno films with “Leipzig housewives,” and rave about the ideal market conditions, the “open-minded attitude” of the East German women, and the record profits that strong demand in this new market has already yielded for them. These two characters appear lewd and unsavory in the film, and the

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Fig. 5.2. Director Andreas Voigt in conversation with young radical John in Glaube, Liebe, Hoffnung. ajour film, Sebastian Richter.

setting of the founding of Leipzig’s “Sexliga,” shown immediately following the interview with the Bavarians, is bizarre. Resembling a socialist-party convention in a conference room, rows of middle-aged, conservatively dressed men and women are sitting quietly watching the tawdry performance of two strippers. No further information about the goals, motivations, or plans for the “Sexliga” is provided, creating a baffling intermezzo between interviews about job losses and system change. But the film’s editing again speaks for itself: the new freedoms affect all aspects of life in the former GDR, from the singing of a new anthem, to the workplace, and the bedroom. In a summative gesture that refers back to the filmmaker’s own situation, Titanic features a montage of a closed cinema, adorned by an old poster on the crumbling facade proclaiming: “Film becomes an event only in the cinema” (59:19).29 In a cross-cutting shot, we then see a brightly illuminated “Video World” store, hinting that the filmmaker’s own work at DEFA, with its claim to making films that can have a cultural, and political impact on society, will now have to make room for the commercial home-entertainment industry. In this context the character of Renate is introduced. She is the only person who actively reflects on the old system, her role in that society, and her struggles to adjust to the new system. Voigt structures her story into three segments that build the dramaturgical tension, give the audience a chance to slowly ponder her complicated history, and allow the

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director once more to place her story within the context of the overall narrative of the film. The initial encounter occurs about two-thirds of the way the film, showing Renate on a train. The traveling motif again signifies her own journey—she is shown on the train as she ponders her past in the GDR and her future in the new system. Renate is the most complex character in the five films, and her story illustrates the complexities of Vergangenheitsbewältigung beyond easy dichotomies. Most striking is her candor, as well as the courage with which she describes her own belief in the socialist project, her faith in the system, her thorough study of classic texts of political science, economy, and philosophy that all led her to the conviction that the GDR was the better German state. Her analysis of her own idealism is sincere and counters the tabula rasa condemnations of socialism as totalitarianism that dominated the populist discourse regarding the GDR from 1989 until the twentieth-anniversary celebration as a triumph of free market capitalism over socialism. Renate’s examination of her own former utopian idealism helps to explain why the GDR was a relatively stable system for forty years, as it was supported at least until the mid-1970s by a significant proportion of the country’s intellectuals. Her testimony also reminds viewers that the underlying principles of the socialist experiment, while increasingly further removed from the actual reality of their implementation, once held a powerful and stabilizing appeal for many GDR citizens. These principles were certainly bitterly disappointed, but they still resonated in a number of interviews of the Leipzig films, including in conversations with radical youths, old factory workers, and young punks. The complete disregard of these ideals in the rush toward German unification (as Konrad Jarausch once famously termed it) explains some of the frustrations and disappointments of the characters in the pentalogy. While the old utopian ideals had been perverted in the real existing socialism of the GDR, they still continued to inspire hope and motivated citizens to protest in the events leading up to 1989. The rapidly changing chants from “We are the people” to “We are one people” and the urge toward quick monetary union with the West left little room for a more measured contemplation of alternative models for reform and/or unification. Andreas Voigt himself articulates this sense of dissatisfaction with the lack of thorough analysis of what led to the collapse of the old system and what alternatives to a fast-track unification with the West could be realized. In an interview with the paper Tageszeitung he states: “Therefore the events in the GDR were not a revolution. We did not manage to destroy the old structures.”30 Renate’s explanation of her initial belief in the system, a belief that extended so far that she searched for flaws in her own attitude when she found imperfections in the socialist reality, is important if we are to understand her later role as an informer for the Stasi. It is only in the

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second segment of her interview that we learn that she was coerced into informant’s duties through blackmail after being raped by a Stasi official. Neither she herself nor Voigt presents her as a mere victim of the Stasi; they paint a complex picture of an idealist intellectual who was both a victim and a perpetrator of the system. Renate struggles visibly with her own history as an informant. She is worried about the professional, social, and personal repercussions of this history on her life in unified Germany. But she also questions her actions of the past, asking: “From what point on should we all have been smarter than we were back then? My ideal society seemed to me a realizable goal in the GDR” (1:06:16).31 Such earnest and tortured attempts to come to terms with the past, on a macro- and micro-historical level, are rarely seen in filmic treatments of the Wende. Instead, easily consumed caricatures like Stasi officer Wiesler in the Oscar-winning box-office hit Lives of Others (2006) have satisfied the popular imagination with stereotypical surveillance villains. Renate’s tortured tale demonstrates instead how a large, oppressive apparatus that consists of individual agents with complex and contradictory motivations can function. Her final appearance in this film confirms the impression of her inner strength as well as the complicated inner turmoil many East Germans experienced: barely having had a chance to digest the past and anticipating an uncertain future, she is torn between fear and hope at the end of Titanic. This situation has not significantly changed five years later, when the film team catches up with her for Große Weite Welt (1996). Renate is still digesting the Stasi past, musing about the decision of many former informants to deny their past in order to not be excluded from jobs in the new economy. Rejecting such a path for herself, she is struggling with the consequences of an openly admitted informant’s past on her private and professional life. Voigt now films her in the glass elevator of a newly constructed high-rise in Leipzig, on the way to a job interview. She has done much to adapt to the capitalist market: obtained a drivers license, brushed up on her Russian, and learned English, but to no avail. Her optimism, expressed verbally and visually in the elevator ride upwards, is disappointed once more and she remains unemployed. Five years of continued struggles finally end with her suicide, a tragedy that occurs after the film is completed. Director Voigt has referred to her story as having “the dimensions of an ancient tragedy.”32 Indeed, but perhaps with the difference that Renate’s fate was not preordained by divine forces. Political, economic, and social pressures resulting from the unification process have created many individual fates like Renate’s, particularly for her generation of East Germans, that is, those who were in midlife when the wall fell. Much of the value of Voigt’s Leipzig pentalogy lies in the care with which such stories are preserved and presented. The films neither condone nor condemn the individual

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for past and present conduct but instead provide the time and space for a reflective articulation of the difficulty of Vergangenheitsbewältigung.

Große Weite Welt The fifth film, Große Weite Welt, is introduced once more by the shot of the train arriving at the Leipzig train station, again switching from color to black and white to signal the different time frames of the film: here Voigt inserts segments from his earlier films to reintroduce audiences to his characters from the past and contrast the earlier interviews with life in 1996. Sylvia’s hopeful departure for the West and a new life in Bavaria has not really found fulfillment: she and her husband Dietmar have established a new life in a small town in the West, but her attempts to start a new business for herself have failed. She is home, unemployed, while her husband is working. Voigt’s camera effectively captures the dramatic change in the energetic bartender of 1990 who danced with her regular guests at her lively farewell party in Leipzig, and is now photographed alone in her kitchen. She appears quieter, wistful, as she reads from a travel book about the Caribbean Islands. Her husband Dietmar meanwhile, a hobby diver, is filmed emerging in his diving gear from a lake, playing on the double meaning of the German “abtauchen” (in German, the word means to dive under but also to disappear). Both want to go further West, leaving Germany altogether. Their dream of a better life is still not fully realized, but seems much less attainable in late middle age. No voice-over commentary is needed here, either, to articulate the complexities of their departure from East to West: Voigt’s staging in the kitchen, at the lake, and with the travel book tells the story visually and pointedly. In a telling shot, for example, we see Sylvia and Dietmar on the sidewalk of their small town in Bavaria, observing a carnival parade moving past them. It brings to mind the carnival parade of 1990 in Titanic, which despite all uncertainty was marked by upbeat hopes for the future, but this small town parade is characterized by its orderly procession. Silvia’s and Dietmar’s faces are impassive; they appear to be mere onlookers, not integrated into the social fabric of the community. The images of the couple on the margin of the festivities again contrast with Silvia’s lively farewell dance in her Leipzig pub. This last film of the pentalogy, like the third film, Letztes Jahr Titanic, begins with a train ride into the Leipzig main station, once more signaling its geographic location in the East but also, in its change from color film to black and white, the motif of time travel. Pointedly, however, the film does not end with the train ride away from Leipzig’s train station, as does Titanic, but instead with a forlorn-looking single car occupied by one of the film’s protagonists, Sven, and his girlfriend Diana in the empty parking lot of a strip mall on the outskirts of Leipzig.

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Ten years after unification, the lives of the five Leipzig citizens have been transformed significantly: the former punk girl is now a conservatively dressed office worker in Stuttgart, who lives out her wilder side by dressing up in leather clothes and partying with her cross-dressing friend on the weekends. The former bartender is a lonely-seeming housewife in Bavaria, with dreams of life on a Caribbean island. The former radical left wing skinhead (the so-called “redskin”) youth, “Papa,” is now a career soldier in the German army, about to marry his nineteen-year-old girlfriend Diana, and hoping for a small family. Former journalist Renate, who had earnestly struggled with her own past involvement in the Stasi, details her continued efforts to adjust to the new economy without finding an opportunity for herself and tragically commits suicide. Much of this is summed up in the change from the opening shot, the by-now-familiar train ride into Leipzig, to the closing shot of the small car in the empty mall lot. The train has been replaced by the car. Interviews in the earlier films usually took place in manufacturing plants, since that was where the protagonists spent their days. Now many of those plants have closed and strip malls have altered the cityscape of many East German towns. While workers spoke of stresses at work or the difficulty of balancing work and family in the early Leipzig films, we now see images of individuals at home, in small gardens, kitchens, overstuffed chairs, or cars. The contrast of the footage from the earlier films, where the protagonists speak of their hopes and dreams for the future, and the sobering realities in 1996 is clearly expressed in their statements about the various forms of alienation under capitalism. Voigt and cameraman Sebastian Richter skillfully reinforce these statements with a strong visual language that is as unobtrusive as it is memorable. As Martin Mund summarized, “Voigt documents a pervasive fatigue and exhaustion, an increasing loneliness, an escape to the private sphere, an almost complete de-politicization of people’s ideals.”33 Visual metaphors such as Dietmar in his diving suit, Papa and Diana in the car in the empty strip mall lot, or the garden shack at night from the outside, while the now retired or unemployed former seamstresses have moved inside, are potent images for the changes that have taken place between 1986 and 1996. As Hans-Jörg Rother opined: “The fifth and for now concluding film by the Berlin director about people in Leipzig is one of those important cinematic events of contemporary German culture that reveals a lot without wishing to make any claims.”34 The tracking shots of trains that structured Alfred and functioned as important visual metaphors in the second and third film are gradually replaced with shots of cars, especially cars driving through drive-through restaurants. The landscape of Leipzig has changed from the picturesque but sleepy horse carts on cobblestones of 1985 to the new fast-food chains that pepper the modernized cityscape. The increasing withdrawal of the protagonists into the private sphere—into their kitchens, weekend

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cabins, and backyards—contrasts sharply with the outwardly directed political struggles of Alfred and the outspoken earnestness of the street protesters in 1989. The last film, while sober in its assessment of the effects of German unification in Leipzig, is not judgmental in its editing. The protagonists are not depicted as having sold out their former ideals after 1989. Voigt is interested in the complex negotiations each of his protagonists has to undertake in both East and West in order to reach his or her personal goals. The stories of the radical redskin “Papa” and the journalist Renate best illustrate these struggles. Their lives demonstrate that the historical analysis of socialist and capitalist systems cannot proceed along simplistic, binary lines. While West German journalists demanded a straightforward indictment of former Stasi informants after the release of Titanic,35 Voigt insists on a more nuanced approach. His films demonstrate that a real understanding of the repressive mechanism of mass surveillance in the GDR can only be gained by analyzing the apparatus as consisting of individuals.

Glaube, Liebe, Hoffnung The fourth film in the series is perhaps the most incongruous and was at the same time the most controversial. Responding to the sharp spike in street violence by radical youth in East Germany in 1992, Voigt visited a youth club in Leipzig-Connewitz known for its concentration of radicals and suggested making a film with them. The resulting Glaube, Liebe, Hoffnung (1994) focuses on three young men, the two right-wing skinheads Dirk and Andre, and the left-wing “redskin” nicknamed Papa. The segments that introduce the lives and worldviews of these skinheads are juztaposed with sequences with West German investor Dr. Schneider, whose real-estate empire quickly expanded eastward after the fall of the wall. Voigt shows him opening a newly renovated, upscale shopping center in a historic Leipzig building, and jovially dispensing advice about the market economy to an East German cabdriver. After the film’s release, Schneider sued and received a temporary injunction, and the scenes showing him had to be censored. Claiming to have been misled about the true nature of the film, he refused to be included in a film about violent skinheads. Fortunately for the film, these events coincided with the revelation that the billionaire investor was a fraud who suddenly disappeared. The film could thus be restored and shown in its original form. The Schneider sequence was criticized by reviewers, who found the balance between the business dealings of the West German capitalist and the violence against non-white inhabitants perpetrated by skinheads in Leipzig depicted disproportionately. As one critic wrote, “The neoNazis appear as victims of a society that does not need them. The real

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perpetrators, Voigt insinuates, are characters like the West German businessman Mr. Schneider, who travels with his wife between Frankfurt and Leipzig, and buys a house here and there—which Voigt observes with disgust.”36 The review, published in the left-leaning West German daily Tageszeitung, performs precisely the simplistic comparative weighing of one evil against another that the film avoids. TAZ reviewer Kuhlbrodt argues that while neo-Nazis are as unpleasant as “capitalist picture-book pigs” like Schneider, one would nevertheless prefer to meet the business man on the street rather than the violent skinheads. Such reductive readings miss the point of Voigt’s montage. The interviews and camera work are measured, restrained, and sober in the jail cell with neo-Nazi Dirk as well as in the posh office of Dr. Schneider. The film’s editing does not pit Eastern street radicals against Western crooked venture capitalists. Rather, Voigt encounters both with an interest in exploring their respective worlds and worldviews. His attempt to understand the young radicals is highly revealing, showing how social problems ranging from unemployment to family violence and neglect affect marginalized youth. At the same time it is entirely unnecessary to comment on Dr. Schneider’s jovial speeches on how East and West Germans are all facing the economic challenges of unification together, and that his concern for the preservation of historic architecture trumps any business interests he might have. The elegance of such footage consists of Schneider’s own display of self-satisfied arrogance, requiring no verbal elaborations from the filmmaker. In juxtaposing these sequences with the scenes with the left- and right-wing youth Voigt is making a clear commentary. Unlike Kuhlbrodt however, I read this technique as expository of two important phenomena that shaped East German cities such as Leipzig in the early years after unification: the emergence of increased violence against foreigners and black Germans on the one hand, and the capitalist takeover of the East German economy by West German investors on the other. Voigt’s intention here is not to pit one group against the other with an interest in establishing a hierarchy of evils. Rather, the montage delineates the tense post-unification economic reality of East Germans, who lack not only jobs and job training, but also capital for taking advantage of the economic opportunities in rebuilding the East. The dialectic between the portrayal of the skinheads and the investor does not show understanding for the violence of the youth while indicting the businessman. Instead, as in the story of Renate, the film refrains from pitting “the victim” against “the perpetrator.” Dirk, Andre, and Papa are not excused for their violent attacks on foreigners and others. But instead of using them for moralistic condemnations and righteous outrage, Voigt is interested in finding out where the violence originates. The portraits that emerge tell us that they have experienced a great deal of violence in their own lives, and that

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they have no prospects for a meaningful career, no productive adult role models, and most seriously, no motivating goals for their personal futures. The interviews with the skinheads, whether left- or right-wing, are harrowing, because they depict young people unable to envision any productive future for themselves, or to provide even vaguely political reasons for their hatred of others. Asked why they attack asylum seekers, these youths state simply that it is “fun.” Asked why he wrote a song about gassing foreigners, Andre shrugs and states simply that gas rhymes with fun (Gas/ Spaß). Boredom, alienation, and a lack of social structures or family support are common factors for all three. Perhaps one of the most disturbing answers to Voigt’s repeated question regarding the origin of the violence they perpetrate is delivered by Matthias, who after his court trial for “disorderly conduct” and “agitation against the people” (Volksverhetzung) shrugs, and says that the violence has always been in him. The film does not begin and end with the customary train ride in and out of the Leipzig train station but instead shows two skinheads practicing shooting with their handguns on a bare, wintery field. The image is grippingly desolate. The audience sees only the uniforms of the skinheads (bomber jackets, army boots, shaved heads), their backs turned to the camera, symbolically away from society. The frame shows the youths’ singular focus on their weapon; as the interviews reveal later on, a girlfriend and a gun are the only two objects worthy of love. The guns are important for their own protection—for the neo-Nazis, their sense of disrupting the social order, and for the redskin, securing “calm and orderliness (“Ruhe und Ordnung”). But guns are not just of great value for the radical youth. As Glaube, Liebe, Hoffnung illustrates, violence is on the rise in general in post-unified Germany. Reviewers have pointed to the thematic parallels between Voigt’s film and Winfried Bonengel’s Beruf Neonazi (1993), as well as Thomas Heise’s Stau (1992), which now, together with Neustadt (1994) and Kinder, wie die Zeit vergeht (completed in 2008), has become a trilogy itself. Bonengel’s film caused a scandal because of its complete lack of commentary on the racist, Holocaust-denying statements made by protagonist Eward Althans. Unlike Bonengel and Heise in their slightly earlier films, Voigt does engage his interviewee Andre in conversation after he has performed his song “Ausländer rein” (Foreigners Enter), which appears at first glance like a reversal of the neoNazi slogan “Ausländer raus” (Foreigners Out)—that is, until the lyrics continue: “Ausländer rein, rein ins Gas” (Foreigners enter, enter into the gas). While critics of Beruf Neonazi and Stau rebuked their directors for refraining from commentary, reviewers called Voigt’s response to Andre “pedagogical” and critiqued the “empathetic social worker sound.”37 How politically sensitive either approach was is demonstrated by the fact that both Beruf Neonazi and Glaube, Liebe, Hoffnung became objects of legal injunctions on the grounds of sedition (Volksverhetzung).

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Fig. 5.3. Target practice, Glaube, Liebe, Hoffnung. ajour film, Sebastian Richter.

Voigt is not just examining the views of right- and left-wing youth, however. The film also features interviews with a gun-shop owner, and of course the fraudulent Dr. Schneider. Furthermore, Voigt discusses Papa’s work for a private security firm, as well as Dirk’s views on the foreign legion and the German army. Out of all these segments, the impression of a society arises in which security (or better, the lack thereof) is of increasing concern for its citizens, all of whom express various forms of anxiety and frustration. Neo-Nazi Dirk rages against his impotence to fight the real political powers of the state, left-wing skinhead Papa wants to ensure that there will be no right-wing disruptions, while former worker Klaus feels victimized by the economic crisis of epidemic unemployment in the East that followed unification. Only the gun-shop owner feels “well protected” as she glances with satisfaction over her inventory of guns, knives, and other weapons. Once again, the film derives its power from the simplicity of the audiovisual presentation: seeing the small, late-middle-aged woman surrounded by the armory of modern protection and hearing the metallic sounds of weapons being tested by her juvenile customers is startling to audiences, as the scene is depicted as matter-of-factly as if it were a bakery or a hardware store. But with the same normalcy as the youth might have purchased a bottle of milk from the corner store a decade earlier, the tools for executing the violence the film has explored

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are now being traded. This cold shift in social relations, visualized so unspectacularly, leaves viewers with the chilling realization that fundamental changes have indeed shaken this society. The strategy here and elsewhere in this controversial film is not journalistic, sociological, historical, or moral. Rather, Voigt has maintained his filmic style, his “handwriting” as Günther Jordan would put it, remarkably steadily from his early student days to his post-Wende works. As Jordan has argued, film style among DEFA documentary filmmakers was not just historical baggage determined by the conditions of studio and party hierarchies and censorship in the GDR but “tools that cannot be random in the march through the world, toward people, into the world of art.”38 For Voigt, this means taking time, and giving space to his subjects, taking them seriously and treating them respectfully, even, and perhaps especially, when he disagrees with their viewpoints. The individual portraits of Leipzig residents that emerge from ten years of filmmaking are diverse and contradictory, sad and sometimes inspiring. Voigt finds images to convey their stories that speak volumes in brief snapshots: the return into the private sphere, the loneliness of the overstuffed living room, the sadness of a carnival group, the hopefulness of an elevator ride, the weight of a freight train, the backs of disaffected youth, and finally the frequent long shots of quiet groups of unemployed workers sitting idle and forlorn in front of closed manufacturing sites. The reception history, from the censorship debate around Alfred in 1986 to the legal injunctions against Glaube, Liebe, Hoffnung in 1994 demonstrate that while political conditions in Germany have been fundamentally altered, Voigt’s quietly provocative style has remained remarkably consistent. In the GDR his strategy of blending the historical with the contemporary irked the censors, as it disturbed the harmonious view of modern socialism they wished to project. In unified Germany, the director’s refusal to verbally position himself vis-à-vis his extremist subjects struck reviewers as cowardly, while city officials complained about negative imagery harmful to their hopes for attracting trade and tourism and thus stood in the way of TV broadcasts.39 If Voigt’s documentary style is thus indeed labeled “typical DEFA style,” then Thomas Schmidt’s oft-cited statement about the superfluous DEFA documentary film after the fall of the wall must be questioned: “The pressure to express oneself in such a way that censorship or the apparatus does not discover the politically dicey things, yet to still narrate reality, is a result of censorship. The moment it disappears, [documentary film] loses its function as ersatz medium for the journalistic work that is lacking in television or the print media.”40 Voigt’s films in their steady pre- and post-Wende aesthetic have earned the distinction of remaining provocative and artful documents of complex realities and experiences from the margins of society.

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Notes 1

Thomas Plenert, “Für mich ist wichtig, dass ein Film über die Jahre hinweg seine Gültigkeit behält.” Cited in Renate Treide, “Leipzig 89: Mittendrin,” Volkswacht, Gera, Nov. 28, 1989. 2

Oliver Plötzsch, “Böse Jungs, Arme Jungs: Liebe kann man nicht herbeiprügeln,” Leipziger Volkszeitung, Mar. 1994. 3

Mary Fulbrook, “Putting the People Back In: The Contentious State of GDR History,” German History 24, no. 4 (2006): 619. 4

Konrad Jarausch, “Living with Broken Memories: Some Narratological Comments,” in The Divided Past: Re-Writing Post-War German History, ed. Christoph Kleßmann (New York: Berg, 2001), 193. 5

Andreas Voigt quoted in Helen Hughes, “Documenting the Wende: The Films of Andreas Voigt,” in DEFA: East German Cinema, 1946–1992, ed. John Sandford and Sean Allan (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999), 298. 6

Cf. Marc Silberman, “Postwall Documentaries: New Images for a New Germany?” Cinema Journal 33, no. 2 (Winter 1994): 22–41; Karen Ritzenhoff, “The Dissolution of the GDR in DEFA Documentaries,” Seminar 33, no. 4 (1997); Eggo Müller, “Dokumente der Distanz: Identitätsbestimmungen in Dokumentarfilmen über die DDR, November 1989 bis zur Vereinigung,” in Mauer Show: Das Ende der DDR, die deutsche Einheit und die Medien, ed. Rainer Bohn, Knut Hickethier, and Eggo Müller (Berlin: Edition Sigma, 1992), 139–56; Heidemarie Hecht, “Der letzte Akt, 1989–1992,” in Schwarzweiß und in Farbe: DEFA Dokumentarfilme, 1946–1992, ed. Günter Jordan and Ralf Schenk (Berlin: Archiv Film Museum Potsdam/Jovis, 1996), 234–69. 7

Hughes, “Documenting the Wende”; Elke Schieber, “Im Dämmerlicht der Perestroika, 1980–1989,” in Jordan and Schenk, Schwarzweiß und in Farbe. 1996. 8

For a concise overview of Voigt’s artistic biography see Ingrid Poss, Christiane Mückenberger, and Anne Richter, eds., Das Prinzip Neugier: DEFA Dokumentarfilmer erzählen (Berlin: Neues Leben, 2012), 557–92. 9

“kann ich schon ausradieren,” “als Studierende gibt es keinen eigenen Arbeitsraum,” “Ihre Tochter steht nicht im Plan. Mein Plan ist Gesetz und dann kommt alles andere.” 10

Voigt, Mann mit Krokodil. 1984.

11

“entwickelten aus dieser Verantwortung heraus eine besondere Sensibilität für Situationen, die sich im Moment der Aufnahme verändern und Grundsätzliches offenbaren konnten.” Schieber, “Im Dämmerlicht der Perestroika,” 186. 12

Hughes, “Documenting the Wende,” 296.

13

“Es ist nicht die Sache eines Dokumentarfilmes Unterricht zu erteilen, welches Bild der Welt das richtige Bild der Welt ist. Das muss jeder selbst wissen, oder zumindest zu erfahren suchen. Es ist aber vielleicht seine Sache, die Existenz einer wirklichen Wirklichkeit gelegentlich zu vergegenwärtigen.” Thomas Heise, “Positionen zum Film ‘Beruf Neonazi,’” Film und Fernsehen 6/1 (1993/94): 112. 14

“In Anbetracht der jetzigen gesellschaftspolitischen Entwicklungen in der DDR ist es unsere Pflicht als Dokumentaristen, diesen Prozeß zu begleiten. Zum

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einen, um mit Filmen in diesen umfassenden Dialog einzugreifen, zum anderen, um Material zu sammeln, Ereignisse festzuhalten, die später als Dokumente dieser Wochen und Monate von großer Bedeutung sein werden . . . Es muß jetzt gedreht werden.” Letter by Andreas Voigt et al. to DEFA studio director, Oct. 15, 1989. Copy provided to the author by Voigt. 15

“Kollege A. Voigt ist beauftragt, im Rahmen von Dokumentationsaufgaben Dreharbeiten durchzuführen.” Letter to Andres Voigt by DEFA studio, Oct. 16, 1989. Copy provided by Voigt. 16

Interview with Andreas Voigt by the author, December 2009.

17

“Wer keine Politik macht, mit dem wird sie gemacht.” Andreas Voigt, Alfred, HFF Diplomfilm, 1986. Quoted from the film.

18

“Träume hat man bestimmt bis zu einem gewissen Alter. Und wenn man dann Familie hat, und einen Leistungsberuf, kommt man dann in ein gewisses Alter, wo man aufhört zu träumen.” 19

“Denken an damals. Die Welt schnell verändern zu wollen. Die Hoffnung, es selbst noch zu erleben. Das revolutionäre Ideal und die Wirklichkeit.” 20

“Filme, die Grunderfahrungen und Konflikte unserer Generation zum Gegenstand haben, haben wir nicht gemacht, auch nicht machen können.” Hannes Schmidt, “Film muss auch Widerrede sein” Sonntag, Oct. 22, 1989. 21

“Wenn du nicht glaubst, dass es im Leben mal besser wird, brauchst du gar nicht erst anfangen.” 22

Personal communication with Andreas Voigt, Feb. 21, 2011.

23

Telephone interview with Andreas Voigt, Dec. 13, 2009.

24

“Machen Sie weiter solche Filme, junger Mann.” Voigt, telephone interview with the author, Dec. 13, 2009. 25

Voigt, telephone interview with the author, Dec. 13, 2009.

26

“Mit dem Volk und für das Volk realisieren wir die Generallinie der Partei vorwärts zum 40. Jahrestag der DDR!” 27

Just as the scene with garbage workers discussed earlier evokes previous prominent GDR documentaries about garbage workers (Kroske, Kipping) the train is an important metaphor in films by Böttcher, Kipping, and Misselwitz. 28

“[Der Arbeiter] redet immer davon, dass er weggehen will, und er ist bis heute nicht weggegangen. Er wollte nicht mehr dabei sein, weil er sich sonst mit seinen Illusionen von damals hätte auseinandersetzen müssen und das hätte weh getan.” Erika Richter, “Filmische Erfahrungen mit einer veränderten Realität,” Film und Fernsehen 1 (1998): 11. 29

“Film wird erst im Kino zum Ereignis.”

30

“Deshalb ist das, was in der DDR geschehen ist, niemals eine Revolution gewesen. Es ist uns nicht gelungen, die Strukturen zu zerschlagen.” Interview with Andreas Voigt, Tageszeitung, Feb. 25, 1991. 31

“Ab wann hätten wir denn alle klüger sein können als wir es damals gewesen sind? Mein Ideal von Gesellschaft schien mir in der DDR verwirklichbar sein zu können.”

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Voigt, interview with the author, December 2009.

33

“Voigt dokumentiert eine allgegenwärtige Müdigkeit und Erschöpfung, eine zunehmende Vereinzelung, eine Flucht ins Private, eine fast völlige Entpolitisierung der Ideale.” Martin Mund, “Rückzug nach Innen,” in Neues Deutschland, 12 March 1998. 34

“Der nunmehr fünfte und vorerst abschliessende Film des Berliner Regisseurs über Menschen in Leipzig gehört zu jenen wichtigen Lichtbildern der deutschen Gegenwart, die viel finden, weil sie nichts behaupten wollen.” Hans-Jörg Rother, “Ach so, Sie sind Leipziger, das ist etwas anderes,” in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Mar. 16, 1998. 35

Interview with Andreas Voigt, Tageszeitung, Feb. 25, 1991.

36

“Die Neonazis erscheinen als Opfer einer Gesellschaft, die sie nicht braucht. Die eigentlichen Täter, so suggeriert der Filmemacher, sind Typen wie der westdeutsche Unternehmer Herr Schneider, der mit seiner Frau regelmässig zwischen Frankfurt und Leipzig hin und herpendelt und da und dort ein Haus kauft—was Voigt angewidert beobachtet.” Detlef Kuhlbrodt, “Keine Sonne in Leipzig,” Tageszeitung, Feb. 17, 1994. 37

“pädagogisch,” “im einfühlsamen Sozialarbeiterton.” Manfred Riepe, “Korrekt aber Steril,” in Tageszeitung, Mar. 13, 1994. 38

“Marschausrüstung, die nicht beliebig sein kann beim Gang durch die Welt, zu den Menschen, in die Kunst.” Günter Jordan, “Statt eines Vorworts,” in Jordan and Schenk, Schwarzweiß und in Farbe, 12. 39

See Hughes, “Documenting the Wende,” for Voigt’s description of his difficulty with West German TV producers for the broadcasting of Titanic. 40

“Der Zwang sich anders ausdrücken zu wollen, damit die Zensur oder der Apparat nicht die politisch brisanten Dinge darin entdeckt, aber die Realität zu erzählen, trotzdem, das ist ein Ergebnis der Zensur. In dem Moment, wo die weg ist, ist die Funktion entfallen, ein Ersatzmedium zu sein für nichtgeleistete journalistische Arbeit beim Fernsehen oder in den Printmedien.” Cited in Jordan, “Statt eines Vorworts,” 12.

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6: Asynchronicity in DEFA’s Last Feature: Architects, Goats, and Godot

I

N 1988 DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKER Jochen Kraußer directed a short contribution to the Kinobox films, a series of short films that ran before feature films in GDR movie theaters between 1982 and 1989, about the mass production of plaster busts, in this case of Karl Marx. The five-minute film, entitled Der Auftrag (The Task), documents in straightforward fashion how plaster heads are serially produced, polished, and painted. In a deadpan voice-over, the filmmaker comments dryly on the manufacturing process: “The heads must become hard and sturdy.”1 It is difficult not to grasp the bitterly satirical subtext of this comment in regard to life in the late GDR in general and the DEFA studio in particular. Jochen Kraußer had already delivered a polemical farce that expressed his deeply felt alienation regarding the conditions in the studio with his memorable short film Die Leuchtkraft der Ziege, which he described as a summative good-bye to all illusions about realizing the dream of freely making films in the DEFA studio. By 1987 he had abandoned any hope of some day gaining the freedom from petty censorship and bureaucratic obstacles to make films that contributed to an open discourse about current social and political issues. In a 1993 interview Kraußer suggested that the imminent collapse of the GDR was already obvious in 1987. It would have been interesting, he mused, to make a film in the DEFA cafeteria at that time.2 Kraußer was referring to the fact that censorship was tightening its grip during the 1980s and to the lack of opportunity for its youngest generation of artists, which has been discussed in this book. The laconic quote regarding the need for “sturdier and harder heads” characterizes the technocratic rigidity with which the party, the studio direction, and the Ministry of Culture responded to constructive criticism by DEFA studio workers. Censorship, as we have seen in the individual case studies in this book, took on many different forms and was often exercised in indirect, petty forms. The unpredictability of censorship, together with the absence of alternatives to the DEFA studio for working in film, often led to self-censorship, caution, and a pragmatic willingness to compromise. DEFA dramaturge Anne Richter referred to the banality of censorship and stated: “It was so petty. And we were no heroes—not even the film directors.”3 She remembered, for example, having to edit the sound of an airplane into a documentary about army recruits to drown

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out an unwanted statement in the film, an episode reminiscent of Helke Misselwitz’s experience of having to add a train noise to censor a quote in Winter Adé. Jochen Kraußer’s response to such small-minded censorship was to articulate his frustration in Dadaist absurdity. The asynchronicity between reality and ideology, between what filmmakers knew and what they were asked to say and show, paired with the experience of prolonged stagnation, is expressed succinctly and hilariously in Die Leuchtkraft der Ziege. The opening voice-over is reminiscent of the core theme of the discrepancy between being and appearance in Helke Misselwitz’s films: “Is it or is it not? Is it deception, will it remain, can it hold me, I can’t hold it. Is it after all, is it not?” (1:15).4 Such musing is echoed in one of the loose subplots, which revolves around a film director’s attempt to make a film about a goat. A curious young boy with a super-8 camera films the director’s work and inquires innocently what the film is actually about. The director replies in earnest frustration: “Well, this is now my fourth film and I cannot explain what it is about” (8:25).5 The film was made two years before Dietmar Hochmuth directed his last DEFA feature film, Motivsuche (Search for Motives, 1990), about a director’s inability to find meaningful material for new films, and Peter Kahane filmed Die Architekten (1990), a story about the price of compromise and disillusion. The most poignant image in Kraußer’s film is a train that is out of sync with its timetable. In a manner reminiscent of Christian Morgenstern’s poetry, the timetable adjusts itself to the train’s speed, righting the situation to get time, train, and delay back on track: On this day, the train delay was earlier than the train. So the locomotive drove without its wagons after the delay to catch up with it, because a locomotive drives faster without its wagons. It even drove faster than time, which caused Franz to move the big hand of the clock ahead, which in turn delighted the travelers, because they saw how punctual time, train, and delay had become (2:05).6

In an opposite gesture to Walter Benjamin’s observation that revolutionary moments are marked by shooting at clock towers,7 the collapse of utopianism in late socialist society is marked here by simply adjusting the clocks to sync the slower moving reality with time, which passes faster. Analogously, the locomotive in this simile simply detaches from its train, prioritizing its own goals, in a parallel to the split between GDR leadership and its populace. The film visualizes literally the often schizophrenic situation artists found themselves in when attempting to walk the tightrope between what they wished to express and what was possible, by splitting the screen image of a player piano in a Vertovlike manner, with the two halves of the instrument being pulled in

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Fig. 6.1. An earnest young super-8 film enthusiast interviews a hapless professional film director in the farcical Leuchtkraft der Ziege. Courtesy of DEFA Stiftung.

different directions (12:53). Stupefying socialist language meanwhile is parodied with Dadaist word monstrosities such as “Propellovelozität” (propeller velocity) or absurdist genitive constructions like “The illumination power of the front wheel spokes is in direct reverse proportional relationship to the obligation to silence of the seat, albeit only during travel” (11:37).8 Censorship and self-censorship finally is ridiculed in a brief exchange between two actors: “Do you think this interview could be dangerous for us both?—Yes, very” (5:36).9 Jochen Kraußer’s now cult-classic short film, in which the goat is honored for its acting accomplishments with the “Goldener Ernst” (“golden seriousness”) medal (16:56)10 may have been created out of the director’s bitter frustration over being continuously shackled in his work, but it also points to the absurdity of late GDR censorship, where bureaucrats at the highest level concerned themselves with the slightest details of a film while refusing to address the bigger problems in the studio openly. Finally, Kraußer also parodies the paralyzing effect of self-censorship among artists, who found it increasingly difficult to pursue creative endeavors without immediately editing their projects down to realizable scale. The long-standing levels of control and interference together with a tightening of free expression over the final decade of the GDR caused filmmakers to search for creative ways to be able to work at all, as we have seen throughout

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this book. Directors accepted scripts that they would not have chosen (for example Jörg Foth in the case of Biologie!), agreed to censoring cuts (for example Helke Misselwitz in TangoTraum) or, despite serious reservations, attempted to work in the ideologically rigid television studio (like Herwig Kipping). Directors with a full contract, such as Peter Kahane and Ulrich Weiß, were strung along with new writing projects and encouragement for projects that had little prospect of realization, for example Weiß’s film about the Volkshaus or Kahane’s film project Jules. Director Dietmar Hochmuth raised the question of whether filmmakers of the last generation were even capable of remembering their original creative vision after years of dutifully filming historical documentaries. Sounding like characters in Kahanes films, Hochmuth’s protagonist in Motivsuche, Rüdiger, complains to his supervisor in the studio: “I am 37 years old now and still have not made a real film.”11 As many of these directors have said, they were forced to compromise if they wished to work in film in the GDR. Even so, artists such as Misselwitz, Foth, and Kipping all quit their profession and opted for menial labor over unacceptable compromise. While Kipping and Misselwitz returned to film as post-graduate students at the Academy of the Arts under the protection of director Heiner Carow, Foth joined Ulrich Weiß as assistant director for Blauvogel and thus found a way back into the studio. In this situation, the members of the last generation were aware of the difficulty of balancing their willingness to compromise against the loss of their aesthetic vision, their own voice and stories. Jörg Foth has since made it clear how much of their creative energy was instead invested in fighting the windmills of bureaucracy between 1982 and 1988, propelled by the hope of soon achieving a greater degree of independence (see chapter 1). Peter Kahane suggested in 2004 that in fact the intended goal of the studio leadership was to use the formal organization of the Nachwuchsgruppe as a tool to control the youngest generation.12 The degree to which the efforts of the last generation were slated to fail has been documented throughout this book but was once more asserted in the memoirs of a key figure in this process, the GDR’s Deputy-Minister of Culture, Horst Pehnert, in charge of the film division. Pehnert was personally involved in discussions about scripts that were deemed particularly sensitive, including Peter Kahane’s Die Architekten. In 2009 he suggested that the films of the last generation remained largely unrealized because the young directors’ ideas about cinema were simply misguided. Using Evelyn Schmidt’s film Das Fahrrad (The Bicycle, 1982) as an example, Pehnert writes: It is a dull film. This is not narrative cinema, but as I would call it, descriptive cinema, which demands that its audience take notice

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without offering the possibility for identification. Cinema cannot tolerate that. If the youngest generation of the 49ers, as Foth calls them, wishes to exclusively make such films, then the fault is theirs.13

Film historian Elke Schieber has documented how Schmidt’s film, like several others discussed in this book, was indirectly censored by being released only in very few copies and for a short run, preventing most viewers from having a chance to see it. Schmidt herself commented: “My view was not regarded as an alternative one, but as the wrong one.”14 At the same time, her film was panned in scathing reviews in the official GDR papers and declared a complete failure. While Schmidt’s fellow directors praised the film for delivering a realistic, highly nuanced portrait of everyday struggles in GDR society, the officials actively sabotaged the film and used its “failure” to categorize the youngest generation as either misguided or lacking talent. Evelyn Schmidt’s experience of being thus de facto forced out of the studio exemplifies the duplicitous treatment that her classmates in the last directing generations have all critically articulated. Peter Kahane, who by some measure was one of the most successful directors of this group, both at DEFA and later in unified Germany, expressed it as follows in a 2004 interview with Ralf Schenk: “We were unwanted. Our generation was unwanted.”15 In this conversation Kahane explains in detail how the generation born after 1949 did not connect in general with the founding generation at DEFA. Because they did not share the experience of the war, they were regarded with mistrust, endlessly tested regarding their loyalty to the ideals of the state and party ideology, and kept in a perpetual state of dependent immaturity. Kahane concludes: “We were always the students.”16 Kahane echoes here the same assessment of his generation’s situation that Jörg Foth has offered on numerous occasions (see chapter 1). Considering the very different aesthetic and thematic interests Kahane and Foth brought to the studio, the congruence of their retrospective assessments of their experiences is remarkable and supports the notion that the mistrust against the youngest generation was not caused by concerns against an individual artistic vision but was more fundamentally a generational mistrust. Kahane suggested further: “On the one hand we were too unusual for the older generation. On the other hand we were too ordinary.”17 It is in this context that DEFA’s last film, Die Architekten by Peter Kahane, should be understood. Kahane tells the story of a young collective of architects, who after a decade of idleness or alternative careers (a shepherd, a photographer, a barkeeper) are finally given a chance to build an alternative vision of a modern city. Predictably, the team’s efforts are continuously undermined and its members quit one by one while the all-consuming work costs protagonist and group leader Daniel his

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marriage and his youthful idealism. After many struggles, the group falls apart, Daniel’s wife and daughter have left for the West, and Daniel, now dispirited and cynical, is promoted within the governmental planning and building agency. Like most of the other Wendefilme, Die Architekten was released into oblivion in the summer of 1990, a time when East Germans were adjusting to the currency reform. Unlike many of the other Wendefilme, however, Kahane’s film has attracted scholarly attention as DEFA’s last film, which moreover was made by a director who has enjoyed a comparatively successful career in film and television in unified Germany. Bettina Mathes reads the film as a “deconstruction of the term Heimat in the GDR,” while Seán Allan criticizes the simplicity of its narrative technique, which “seems ill suited to grasping the complexity of the events leading up to the Wende.”18 Laura McGee assesses the film as “straightforward in its message”19 while Mary Elizabeth O’Brien describes it as a work that “spent over an hour portraying despair and hopelessness and then concluded with less than five minutes of familiar clichés.”20 Claus Löser, himself a former East German filmmaker active in the super-8 film scene, considered the film an aesthetic failure, caught in the traps of the very DEFA tradition that it set out to critique. In his retrospective assessment of the studio’s last film twenty years after the fall of the wall, Löser wrote: “As a membrane for the changes taking place around it The Architects failed: it was not able to find lasting images for the disappearing GDR because it utilized precisely the tired aesthetic methods of this former system.”21 For me, one of the most poignant images of Architekten, which sums up not the disappearing GDR but what I consider to be the actual topic of the film, namely the defiant struggles of the last generation which nevertheless was doomed from the start, appears early in the film: the seven young architects survey the future building site for their planned city. Standing with their backs to the rim of a crater, the camera filming them from below, they are framed against the backdrop of a sea of high-rise apartment buildings. Wishing to create a livable, human-scaled alternative to the overwhelming towers of concrete, the young team is facing its formidable opponents directly, represented by those manifestations of GDR building policy. They begin idealistically and joyfully, but not naively, as their position on the edge of the abyss, where their creative dreams will soon be buried, symbolizes. While it is correct that the film narrative is dominantly conventional melodrama, another critical look at the film more than twenty years later seems warranted, to ask why a director who was known for his spirited buddy films and road movies chose this very direct and rather wordy approach to making his last DEFA film. I read the film not as a chronicle of the disappearing GDR, as Löser put it, but

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rather as a precise and direct dissection of the generational struggle, a struggle that Kahane had addressed in all his previous films, as I will show in the following. Architekten, although it was filmed during the dismantling of the GDR, is not a film about the end but a film that explains why the end came so late. It dissects the stuggles of his own generation in clinical detail and makes no attempt to hide the inevitable bitterness that resulted from his own frustrating experiences in the studio. For Kahane, who had seen many of his friends and some colleagues make the decision to leave the studio and/or the GDR, the film was a watershed moment before the fall of the wall could be anticipated: “I no longer wanted to speak in metaphors but directly . . . without too many aesthetic means, pure camera . . . it was meant to provoke a decision: DEFA (or GDR), yes or no.”22 Like many of the Wendefilme, Architekten has gained in importance since its release. The film does indeed cast a critical look at the all-important building policies in the GDR and thus symbolically declares the former utopian aspirations for building a better German state bankrupt,23 as the above-cited scholars have amply documented. But it is also a deeply personal depiction of the situation of the last generation of film directors at DEFA. Particularly noteworthy is the nuanced characterization of the members of the architectural group, which like the last director’s group in the studio consisted of individuals who came together not with a unified vision but rather in joint opposition to the existing structures in which they were attempting to work. Peter Kahane has described the film shoot as surreal because it coincided with the opening of the wall. History happened faster than a feature-film production could react, causing him to wish he were making a documentary film instead of a fiction film. In an odd reversal of the asynchronic experience of time passing slower in the GDR than history that Jochen Kraußer playfully satirized in Die Leuchtkraft der Ziege, history was suddenly surpassing art. For some time the film crew did attempt to adapt the script to the changing reality, and Kahane shot footage at the mass demonstration on Alexanderplatz on November 4, 1989, among others, but opted later to exclude all such attempts to update the original script.24 Although he had planned to make a Gegenwartsfilm, that is, a film about current social issues, he concluded upon the film’s release in 1990 that it had unwittingly become a historical film. In retrospect however, the film is uncannily documentary in character in its nuanced depiction of the situation of the last generation of DEFA directors. Kahane was known for his comedies in the DEFA studio, having successfully directed the youthful buddy film Ete und Ali (1985) as well as the short comedy Weiberwirtschaft (Women’s Business, 1984) and the story of young love Vorspiel. After unification he continued to write and direct

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genre films, including the dramatic road comedy Bis zum Horizont und weiter (To the Horizon and Further, 1998) as well as numerous thrillers for television. Among the last generation of directors, it is his work that displays the greatest variety of works in different genres. Die Architekten is a melodrama that utilizes music (composed and arranged, as in many of his films, by his son, Tamás Kahane) effectively to convey the deep sense of frustration, new hope, and finally devastating disillusion of the characters. The film’s direct criticism was intended as a provocation, as Kahane acknowledged: “The time of being indirect was over for us. We wanted to call things what they were, we wanted to see the wall on film, to show a departure and experience the whole misery of people who were cheated out of one of the most important things—their hope . . . and the absurdity of a political system which did not let its own people become active and because of that had to collapse.”25 The direct tone and linear plot of Architekten was not a result of the opening of the wall but was already contained in the script, an early draft of which had already been approved in the fall of 1988, and its final version in March 1989. But production was delayed by the studio until October 3, 1989. In a notable departure from his previous preference for comedies, Kahane utilizes melodramatic conventions for his swan song on his generation’s hopes for being able to work autonomously and creatively within the apparatus. Mary Elizabeth O’Brien links the melodrama genre to the director’s indictment of the ossified state system: “With its standard figure constellation of economically, politically, and socially dominant villains exploiting weaker but morally superior prey, ordinary citizens come across as victims rather than complicit in the system” (102). In the case of Architekten, however, Kahane does not limit his critique to SED functionaries and Stasi spies, even though there are those characters as well, but also delivers a complex exploration of how and why the system was able to function as long and as well as it did without constantly using oppressive force. By exploiting the basic idealism and commitment to the egalitarian principles of socialism among the youngest generation, the studio leadership and party hierarchy skillfully employed strategies of bait and switch, carrots and sticks, and selective promotion and persecution. At the same time, the young directors had to make choices about how far they were willing to go in compromising their work, allowing themselves to be co-opted into the system—or whether they were willing to leave it altogether. Kahane’s depiction of the various positions of his characters vis-à-vis the system mirrors with great subtlety the actual experiences of directors of the last generation as described in this book. Unlike some retrospective assessments of the young directors’ creative goals as ambitions “to function as a workable cog in the wheels of power,”26 the individual analyses of various directors’ works and careers has shown the breadth of actions

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within the system, of forms of accommodation, and of reactions against the system that the last generation employed in order to try to make films that were true to their original vision, which, to use the language of Die Architekten, were “decidedly not square” (9:51). The young collective of architects under the leadership of Daniel Brenner symbolically represents the many facets of the last generation of DEFA directors’ diverse experiences. Far from being either naive or a unified group, the individual members of the group are introduced as distinctly different characters with a broad range of backgrounds and goals. In the film, Daniel, for example, elaborates his vision for an architectural style that will allow people to feel at home and connected in their city. One of his colleagues questions such a presumptive approach by asking: “Are you going to decide now what people like?” (17:19).27 When Martin faults the initial conception as too tame and exclaims in exasperation: “Where is the freedom to think differently for once? What about imagination?” his less adventurous fellow architect retorts: “Only what is doable will be built” (18:37).28 Kahane himself has rejected the notion that the Nachwuchsgeneration were ever a tight group with a common agenda.29 Nor did he have the illusion that the group could operate outside the control mechanisms of the state: “The Nachwuchsgruppe was a tool of the DEFA . . . it was simply the plan of the leadership to control these people [the youngest generation]. I think the group was a means of control. I cannot imagine it differently. I do not mean in a sense of surveillance, and Stasi and so on but simply to give the situation some structure.”30 But the architects in the film, like the young directors in the studio, at times bonded under one common goal and were energized by their communal purpose: in the DEFA studio, the common goal expressed itself in the (unread) manifesto prepared for the 1988 congress of film and television workers (see introduction). In the film, the group is shown as united by their excitement about the new architecture, which also draws them together as a group, working communally in one large room and cooking together after work, despite many differences of professional opinion and temperament. Claus Löser has emphasized the importance of this kind of communal experience of filmmaking, which brought artists from various art forms together and out of their respective isolation into the GDR’s underground super-8 film scene (see chapter 2). In direct allusion to the situation of young DEFA directors, Daniel’s first demand upon being offered to lead the new project is that he may pick his own team for the collective, even from outside the building agency. As the production histories of the last films document, these struggles even occurred in preparation for the last features produced in the new production group DaDaeR (see chapter 3), as the studio sought to temper the young directors’ approach by, for example, assigning them seasoned cinematographers from older generations.

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While Daniel Brenner is introduced as the talented but frustrated architect, who despite having won competitions now mechanically designs prefabricated shopping malls and bus stops, his former classmate Martin represents the cynical albeit realistic position that the group’s efforts will be in vain, sighing that he loves hopeless projects (12:21) as a way of agreeing to join the group. Later in the film, Martin rails against some of the other members of the young collective’s willingness to compromise, claiming that self-censorship has long since taken hold of their creative impulses: “Nobody has to forbid us anything. We do that all by ourselves” (16:17).31 For good measure, the party delegates one of their own into the young collective, in a transparent message that the group’s work is not only always controlled from above but also openly observed by placing a Stasi informant right in the team. But the film’s critical gaze is not primarily directed at the rather obvious forms of state control and manipulation. After being systematically cut down from their idealistic conception for the future city, a member of the team voices her frustration not just over the stonewalling of their superiors but at their own lack of adequate response, complaining they acted like junior assistants (55:25). As quoted above, Kahane himself has described the situation of the last generation of directors as eternal students. After their initial surge of optimism and the inevitable dashing of all hope that new ideas will be realized, Martin is the first to leave, before he can be affected by what he calls the: “level of political uniformity” (57:58).32 Refusing to “chew the ideological cud” (58:26) he maintains sadly: “At 39 I finally want to be an adult” (58:48).33 This frustration with the unbearable paternalism toward the youngest generation has been voiced earlier, if much less bitterly, in Kahane’s work. Four years earlier, Ete complains about the well-intentioned but stifling attempt by his father-in-law to bestow his small trucking company, as well as a house, on him: “At 22 I don’t know who I am any more.”34 This frustration voiced by the young against the ongoing petit-bourgeois emphasis on material safety by their parents demonstrates the continuity of Kahane’s interest in the generational struggle for independence. At the same time, the jump from twenty-two to thirty-nine as the age cited for such independence points to the significant aging of this generational struggle from the normal twenty-something realm to that of middle age. In Architekten Martin’s position expresses Jörg Foth’s laconic comment about the futility of entering the apparatus as well as refusing to do so: “He who enters the apparatus gets lost; he who does not loses.”35 In this catch-22 situation, Martin is frustrated, but he maintains his dignity by deciding when to leave the system, and returning to his passion for still photography, which captures buildings in the process of decay, structures, relationships, and people, as the film demonstrates by frequently inserting

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still images of his snapshots into the narrative. These images interrupt the sense of inevitability that the melodrama creates and grants the viewer moments of reflection. The film thus allows the viewer to pause and gain distance from the affective qualities of the film while studying Martin’s close-up portraits. Two years before, in Vorspiel (1987), the protagonist, Tom, humorously explains the mechanics of Brecht’s alienation effect to the object of his affection, but in Architekten Kahane utilizes the distancing technique to allow the audience to perceive, through the study of the inserted still photographs, the alienating effect of passing time on the characters. The pointlessness of hoping and waiting for change is summed up in the film when Wanda stares at her face in the mirror and replies to Daniel’s question of what she sees: “time” (10:40). The insertion of the still pictures of crumbling facades and depressed citizens arrests the flow of the film repeatedly and contrasts starkly with the upbeat early stages of the collective’s work, in which a cassette tape of Handel’s Messiah provides source music that signals the dynamic hopefulness the group experiences. Offering ironic commentary, Kahane selects “For unto us a child is born,” with its symbolism of renewal and salvation, to accompany the project’s utopian beginnings. His ironic use of Handel’s music in this film appears in stark contrast to Egon Günther’s choice of Purcell’s: “We have sacrificed” in Stein, also produced in 1990. The last image of Architekten shows a drunken and utterly broken Daniel on the ground of his future building site, ironically again accompanied by the same chorus by Handel. Just as Helke Misselwitz’s use of music conveys the mood of a particular scene in typical melodrama fashion on the one hand, but is heard through the low-fidelity source of a cheap tape recorder in Herzsprung and thus contained in its full emotional effect, the Messiah chorus delivered thus already forebodes that the hopeful energy will be short-lived. Similarly, when Daniel first informs his family of the new assignment, Kahane stages the scene as a joyous bike excursion to the new construction site. Energized with renewed optimism, Daniel imagines for his daughter and wife how the new neighborhood will be designed. Sharing in his happiness, his family asks for a Vietnamese restaurant and an icecream parlor to be included—but not a rectangular one, his daughter enthuses. Daniel retorts in mock outrage: “For heaven’s sake. I build only round, or pentagonal, or octagonal houses” (9:51).36 As he speaks, the camera changes from a medium close-up of the family to a birdseye view down onto the construction site. The humans appear miniscule, but strikingly, a triangular road demarcates the future building site and signals in its angular lines that the prospect for a round or hexagonal ice cream parlor are slim. At the end of the film, when Daniel returns to the site, drunk, lonely, and utterly dispirited, the same bird’s-eye view is once

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Fig. 6.2. Architect Daniel and daughter Johanna inspect the site of the future housing project in Architekten. DEFA Stiftung, photograph by Christa Köfer.

more shown, again highlighting the angular road as a symbol for dashed creativity and hope—while nothing at the site itself has changed. Furthermore, Kahane anticipates this inevitable downfall visually by staging the architects’ initial happiness about the promised new beginning as a balancing act near the abyss. When the family arrives jubilantly on their bikes at the future building site, they balance themselves precariously on the edge of a small hill, close to crashing down into the abyss from where the camera is filming upward in a tight, low angle. Kahane thus carefully constructs visual layers of brief but intense optimistic surges, only to bury them quickly by doubt and paralysis. While the overall situation may be doomed from the start, and the architects know this well, they choose a variety of different responses to the situation, indicating that Kahane’s melodrama is not interested in simplistic dichotomies of victims and villains. While most of the available choices are less than desirable, ranging from applying for an exit visa to finding a niche in independent contracting, joining the peace movement, or herding sheep, the most destructive choice in the end is clearly to remain within the system in hopes of finding small windows of opportunity. It is also the only choice that allows the protagonist to work in his chosen field and not lose all hope of building anything at all. Daniel’s systematic destruction is depicted as a result of his enduring hope and willingness to compromise, and his greatest defeat comes when he is decorated

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with an official citation and invited to take over his planning department. Adjusting to the system is synonymous with the utter deformation of all creativity and individuality. The final parting shot of his mentor, Professor Vesely, is thus a bitter last insult: “You have gained experience. Now you can change things” (1:34:28)37—ignoring the ironic recognition that in order to achieve a position of power to make changes, the individual had to be deformed to fit the requirements of the system, thus rendering the need or desire for change superfluous. Daniel’s remaining colleague sees this clearly and has applied for an exit visa, tired of being “pissed on, lied to, and screwed” (1:35:09).38 Peter Kahane’s film mirrors precisely his own conclusion regarding the last generation of directors’ experiences at DEFA: “The price for hope and patience is also shared responsibility and shared guilt.”39 Die Architekten remains an important film today because it refuses to abdicate this responsibility for sustaining the system, as well as showing the multifaceted motivations that fueled individuals’ choices to remain in the system in the hope of reform and opportunity. It explains not why the Wende occurred (Seán Allan) but rather how the system was able to survive as long as it did. While the film does contain elements of melodrama, it also interrupts the flow of the drama repeatedly by inserting still photographs and resists showing the typical dichotomy of good and evil through its characters. Rather, the nuanced depiction of the young architects not as a group but as individuals with differing worldviews and personal conduct complicates the film and rejects an easy assignment of responsibility and victimization regarding the larger social processes. As in the film, in Kahane’s view the work of the Nachwuchsgruppe appeared doomed from the start: “The goal from the beginning was: everything remains the way it is.”40 For this reason the film was of little interest to audiences consumed by the excitement of the Wende in 1990, but it has gained significance since then, because it represents a critical and self-critical examination of the internal dynamics within the now vanished GDR, and specifically the DEFA studio as a micro-system within the larger apparatus. To paraphrase the actor Ernst Stein at the end of Egon Günther’s film: to participate is to become guilty. Architekten outlines the available alternatives: compromise, full participation and promotion, exit visa, or withdrawal into the private sphere. In this complex recognition, the film also has broad validity regarding other systems where individuals have to choose between working from within an organization, or remaining on the outside: for example, the dilemma of filmmakers in unified Germany, who depend on collaborative relations with television broadcasters at the price of interference from editors and administrators. In fact, Kahane’s own decision to work mainly for television was a difficult compromise, one that directors like Peter

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Fig. 6.3. A young architects’ collective in Architekten. Courtesy of DEFA Stiftung; photograph by Christa Köfer.

Welz ultimately rejected. Kahane explained that his willingness to adapt his cinematic visions to the bureaucratic mindset and small scale of television was one of resignation: “My motto that allowed me to reenter the TV world is: resignation” (179:13).41 Like the DEFA studio, the cumbersome film-funding situation in unified Germany forced a similar kind of compromise, if directors wanted to work at all in their profession. Scholars have repeatedly expressed surprise that Kahane’s film was approved for shooting even before the fall of the wall could be anticipated, in March of 1989. Peter Kahane and Ralf Schenk speculated by contrast that the party hierarchy, including film minister Pehnert, must have known that major changes in the country were imminent and were preparing to rearrange their own image in the historical narrative.42 In my reading of the production history, the continued adherence to certain taboos, despite repeated assurances of the need for free and open discourse, appears more surprising than the green light for the script. In the minutes of the script approval of May 5, 1989 that permitted shooting, for example, one concession had to be made by the director. Film minister Pehnert demanded: “The second question has to do with the issue of the exit visa. We have discussed this again and again. The delicate point here is Wanda’s reasoning, her motivation to leave, culminating in the sentence: ‘It is a game of lies and everybody participates.’”43 The minutes conclude by authorizing the shooting but only on condition that Wanda’s sentence: “It is a game of lies” be cut.

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The regime’s deep discomfort with open criticism, even at this late stage, and the resulting detailed interference in film scripts that articulate what increasing numbers of citizens were expressing in peace vigils and demonstrations on the streets, highlight the asynchronic relationship of the machinery of government to reality till the very end. Kahane’s response to this condition is humorous: the sentence was eliminated from the script but reappears in the film in a different way. Wanda’s decisive moment of no return is reached while watching the popular GDR entertainment show “Ein Kessel Buntes,” where two singers in folk attire sing the pop tune: “Nobody knows what’s going on but everybody participates,” instead of the cut “It is a game of lies and everybody participates” (32:35).44 At this cheesy rendition of what she cannot say herself, Wanda breaks down in hysterical sobs and decides to change her life from now on. The dominant motif of the destructive power of waiting in vain for change in Architekten is a decisive change in tone from Kahane’s previous film, Vorspiel (1987). In the earlier comedy about young love, carefree protagonist Tom optimistically enthuses: “Happiness comes by itself. One just has to wait long enough” (3:23).45 However, the film’s title has a double meaning—audition or deception. Consequently, Tom’s naive approach to life is quickly adjusted by the adult mentor figure in the film to: “Life is no tavern. You have to fight for everything” (83:15).46 This comment is not just intended to instill more ambition in the younger generation, however, but is the expression of midlife frustrations about petty struggles regarding the availability of basic opportunities and supplies in a malfunctioning GDR society. Vorspiel thus leaves no doubt that the middle generation in the film, while still paternalistic toward the young, are themselves becoming aware of the failure of their own dreams. While the older, more cynical perspective dampens the happy-golucky innocence of the youth, some optimism that even lofty goals are attainable is left intact among them. When protagonist Tom wants to give up halfway through his audition for acting school, which would liberate him from the deadly boredom of provincial small-town life, his friend Floh tells him that it will work out if he only tries hard (85:32). She is proved right at the end, when Tom is accepted into the school. But despite this happy ending for Tom, the film’s dominant visual mood is one of limitation and frustration, as the tightly framed images convey a sense of a forlorn, provincial, and forgotten place. If Architekten expresses the resigned frustration of the last generation over fighting windmills and wasting precious life time and energy, Vorspiel equally clearly depicts the earnest determination of a generation that is neither naive regarding the real challenges of realizing its own aspirations nor yet entirely disillusioned, as Daniel is at the end of Architekten. Indeed, Vorspiel also stages the generational conflict in ways that function

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both on the general GDR macro-level and within the specific filmic context at DEFA. Kahane stages a key moment in the conflict between the museum director and his rebellious daughter in a movie theater, where the soundtrack of the DEFA classic Berlin—Ecke Schönhauser (1957) is clearly audible over the dialogue of Vorspiel. In Gerhard Klein’s famous Berlin film the generational conflict targets the hypocrisy of the older generation in postwar Germany regarding moral values, rock music, and freedom of expression and indicts the hard-line ideology of both East and West during the cold war, without, however, questioning the superior status of the young GDR as the better Germany. In Vorspiel, by contrast, the older generation reflects critically on its own former hard-line thinking, for example, when the museum director muses: “One cannot fight in jeans for socialism, I used to say back then” (63:47),47 but this seemingly self-critical but ultimately selfsatisfied attitude does not impress their children; his daughter Corinna comments: “Just look at yourself—you’ve become a civil servant, not a scientist!” (58:23).48 Unlike the young rebels who dance rock ’n’ roll at the street corner in Berlin—Ecke Schönhauser, the youth in Vorspiel are introduced in their daily routine as apprentices who dress mannequins for shopping windows. The activity of window-dressing symbolically reinforces the double meaning of the film’s title (deception or audition) and is reminiscent of a camera sequence depicting dusty mannequins wearing artificial flowers in Jörg Foth’s diploma film Blumenland (1976). Their boredom contradicts the assurances of the older generation that—in theory—they can achieve anything as long as they try hard. In fact, most lack even the confidence to try in the first place, as suggested by the resigned commentary by one youngster regarding the unlikelihood of attracting the attention of the newly arrived Corinna from Berlin: “One should not reach too high. That one is not for us” (63:11).49 This presumed unattainability of the Berlin girl symbolizes the resigned attitude among the provincial youth, who approach life with few expectations. As it turns out, Corinna herself succumbs in the end to the expectations of her petit-bourgeois father and abandons her plan to become an actress on Berlin’s stages. Tom, the spunky main character, on the other hand, who invents creative lies in order to win the heart of the beautiful Corinna is immediately cut down from his flights of fancy when Corinna’s father dashes his enthusiasm by painstakingly detailing the long and tedious path to success. Read as a symbolic depiction of the young DEFA directors’ experiences, Vorspiel could easily function as a prequel to Architekten. Kahane’s nuanced dramaturgy points directly at the GDR’s film history, thereby questioning what has become of youthful hopes for a lively film culture. The criticized father figure is, not coincidentally, a museum director, a preserver of dusty objects kept in anachronistic dioramas in a

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provincial institution. As the father reflects on the eternal repetition of generational rebellion, he ponders, while gesturing at the aging movie theater: “Nothing has changed. Only the cinema has aged” (61:31).50 Clearly Kahane is not just pointing to aging infrastructure but is utilizing the GDR’s cinematic malaise to address the generational question. The lush soundtrack of Klein’s film reminds viewers of the energetic power of early DEFA films, which took inspiration from international aesthetic models (such as in Klein’s case Italian neorealism) in order to translate them to their own domestic concerns. As the GDR aged, DEFA films appeared to move further and further away from their bold beginnings. By the late 1980s the overly protective and risk-averse middle generation not only lived out the failure of their own dreams but also actively stifled the still-youthful exuberance of the next generation. Like Klein and his postwar generation at DEFA, Kahane’s generation was reared on international film culture that excited them—the Czech New Wave, the French Nouvelle Vague, Russian, Hungarian, and even classic American films—that served as models for a new and fresh aesthetic appropriate for expressing the Zeitgeist for this young generation. Kahane’s own early work was representative, not in the sense of a shared aesthetic but in terms of the fresh energy the last generation wanted to bring to the screen, including the nuanced use of popular genre models. Kahane had been able to direct Vorspiel quickly after the great success of his debut feature film, Ete und Ali (1985), but the more somber tone and less flattering visual representation of the GDR raised eyebrows in the studio. Kahane quotes the studio director’s response to some of the early film material this way: “We should drop this backyard gaze on the GDR.”51 But Kahane was aware how far he could go before his film might suffer more destructive interference and tried to embed his critique of the generational conflict in stories that appeared less directly challenging to the studio direction.52 However, his next project of adapting a story by writer Friedrich Wolf had to be aborted, as I will detail later. The generational conflict is taken on more humorously in Ete und Ali (1985) than in Vorspiel, where Kahane experiments with his first buddy/ road film, pairing the small, shy, and sweet Ete with the large, loud, and funny Ali, who finds solutions to most problems in the power of his muscular physique. Ete’s approach to life’s difficulties is more passive: “If I have a problem, I lie down and take a nap for half an hour. When I wake up, I have gotten used to the problem” (27:30).53 The unequal pair are dismissed from their military service at the opening of the film but have nowhere they wish to go. With effectively pointed humor, the film alludes to the limited options for the young, as the GDR’s borders curtail their desire to hit the road and see the world. When the parting friends invite each other to visit their respective villages, they give directions as follows: “Ok, I repeat, Bahnhofstrasse,

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Karl Marx Strasse, Friedrich Engels Strasse, Rosa Luxemburg Strasse, Ernst Thälmann Strasse” (3:10). The brief line, which parodies the limits of the ideological landscape, is mirrored in the physical barriers that delineate the possible realm for exploration for the young as somewhere between Zwickau and the Baltic Sea. The opening comical directions along streets named after the GDR’s ideological heroes suffices to convey in a lighthearted manner the sense of the multiple prescriptive limitations that are the overall theme of the film. The film is not antisocialist in the least but pokes lighthearted fun at the ever-present constrictions of the ideological apparatus. Indeed, Ete’s recurrent reaction to his domestic problems is to head out of town, preferably to Prague, in order to gain a new perspective, get a little distance, and have time to reflect, as he states (10:16). Sadly, Prague remains unreachable, as he lacks the proper papers, landing him, for lack of other options, back in his sleepy rural town. But tellingly, while his options are limited, Ete also abandons the wishful fantasy without even trying to realize it. As in Architekten, Kahane’s depiction of young people is not uncritical. Ete’s longing for being on the road, for example, is also hindered by his own timidity, giving up before really trying to break through external limitations, as signified by his frustrated: “Whenever I really want something, it doesn’t work out anyway” (14:33).54 The plot revolves around Ete’s difficulties with his wife, who in his absence has taken another suitor. Ali invents a series of unconventional plot twists to help his hapless friend win her back, including a car chase and a hijacking, inevitably resulting in complicating the mess and further driving her away. Ete’s repeated attempts to impress Marita fail comically, for example when he lets the air out of the tires of his opponent’s car. Sadly, he gets the wrong car, resulting in his being beaten up by the village’s strongman. Nevertheless, his cumulative efforts suitably impress her and by serendipitous luck, his prospects suddenly seem to change. Much like a bumbling Romantic novella hero, Ete finds himself back with Marita, owning a house, and, somewhat unusual for the GDR, his fatherin-law’s trucking company. As Ali comments appreciatively, “Ete, you are so lucky. At 22 your own company, your own house, you have it made” (1:27). But Ete is not so sure as he retorts: “At 22 I don’t know who I am anymore” (1:28).55 Fleeing the stifling effects of all material safety and especially the constant advice from his well-meaning but relentless friend Ali, Ete decides to escape from such choking domesticity during the open-house that is to celebrate his good fortune, leaving house, wife, and company to his friend, who appears better suited for such petit-bourgeois happiness. For the first time in the film, he acts of his own accord and follows his initial desire to “gain distance and perspective” by becoming a driver for a trucking company. In a surprise twist, Ali joins him on the road and

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the two buddies drive into the sunset. While their final dialogue again alludes to the limits of their freedom (Zwickau at the southern border of the GDR) they have managed to free themselves from the predictable comfort of continuing the dreams of their parents’ generation and finding their own way instead. The dimensions of the rebellion depicted here are perhaps tame in form and content compared, for example, to the more radical early films of Peter Welz and others, but the film nevertheless skillfully uses the mainstream genre of the buddy film for its enormous popular appeal to convey Kahane’s frustration over the constant paternalism directed at the youngest generation in all areas of life in the GDR. Kahane has continued to utilize the concept of genre throughout his career in East and unified Germany to reach broad audiences with his entertaining yet critical films. Examples from his later works, mainly for television, include the popular mystery series Polizeiruf 110 (Emergency Call 911) and Stubbe—Von Fall zu Fall (Detective Stubbe—Case by Case), one episode of which dealt, for example, with the rise in racism in unified Germany (Sonnenwende, Summer Solstice, 2009). The aesthetically often conventional but thematically insistent voicing of critical discontent regarding a variety of social issues in Kahane’s oeuvre reaches back to his student days and his “Hauptprüfungsfilm,” Des Lebens Überfluss (The Abundance of Life, 1979), a literary adaptation of a Ludwig Tieck novella. In the story, a young bourgeois writer elopes with the daughter of a wealthy aristocrat and the pair hides in the attic of an inn, living off the food a faithful former nursemaid of the bride delivers to them. As the severe winter lingers, the young man begins to use the staircase for heating their oven, until all the stairs have been burned and the attic is cut off from the world. The couple’s decisive but shortsighted departure from the world is satirized in the film, culminating in the final rescue, deus ex machina style, when a friend arrives with money and returns them swiftly to their accustomed life of comfort and status: “The couple eagerly dropped their philosophy of poverty and continued to live once more properly, prosperously, and comfortably” (34:15).56 On the one hand, the film pokes fun at the young writer’s lack of commitment to the anti-bourgeois values he espouses so eloquently, but it also questions the efficacy of a radical break with society. While the writer pens his revolutionary thoughts in a tiny notebook, he literally cuts himself off from society by burning the stairs to his dwelling. Parallel to such ironic criticism of the intellectual’s retreat into, if not the ivory tower, then the isolated attic, Kahane has opted to use film’s popular appeal as a form of social engagement with pressing political, historical, and generational topics throughout his career in East and unified Germany. Kahane’s choice of the buddy-film genre for Ete und Ali lent his debut a fast-paced, youthful quality that entertained his audience with

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its irreverence, car chases, slang language, and classic odd-pair slapstick humor. While the film clearly satirizes the border constrictions and petitbourgeois expectations that frustrated the young generation, it does so by offering an energetic but contained alternative to the tired genre of the problem film of the director’s mentoring generation. In Vorspiel the generational conflict has sharpened in tone, as the attitude of the older generation has become more prescriptive. Ironically, Kahane’s artistic interests were not at odds with DEFA’s focus on the importance of raising historical consciousness, as his diploma film, Trompete, Glocke, letzte Briefe (Trumpet, Bell, Last Letters, 1978), about the fate of Ernst Knaack, who was executed as a resistance fighter by the Nazis, demonstrates. But like Ulrich Weiß’s Dein unbekannter Bruder, Kahane’s short and simple documentary makes an important point about the youngest generation’s distinct approach to depicting the celebrated antifascist history the GDR’s founding fathers had shaped. It portrays the courageous but unspectacular nature of resistance by workers in the Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg during the Nazi regime: for example, their refusal to take down a small Christmas tree in a pub, and the repeated replacement of a small bell used to call to order a gathering of socialist workers, when a police raid had yet again confiscated the previous bell. Such stories, told in Berliner dialect by the surviving brother of the executed Ernst Knaack, convey the great dignity and courage of such acts of resistance, without stylizing the resisters as superhuman heroes. Kahane was the son of Jewish parents who fought in the resistance in France, and whose grandparents survived the war by hiding in Berlin, and who lost many immediate relatives in concentration camps. He knew first-hand of the discrepancy between official GDR celebrations of the glorious deeds of its Communist resistance fighters and the more complicated reality of why and how people resisted the fascist regime. More importantly, he sensed the futility of constructing distant Communist superheroes in order to interest the next generation in the study of the past. Kahane’s intimate student film thus offered a different form of reconstructing historical narratives. After the completion of Vorspiel in 1987, Kahane began work on Jules, which was based on a semi-autobiographical 1940s text by Friedrich Wolf. The story is set in a concentration camp and revolves around the encounter between an assimilated Jew, who is a physician, and a less well educated Jew from the East, who dreams of emigrating to New York and opening a music store. After a preliminary script had been produced, Kahane was called in to discuss it with studio director Mäde, who made it clear that the studio director’s views of Jews tended to the folkloristic, while the devoted-Communist figure of the physician was lacking the appropriately heroic features DEFA films should project. In arguments reminiscent of the objections against Ulrich Weiß’s Dein unbekannter

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Fig. 6.4. Historical witnesses recount everyday acts of resistance against Nazi regime in Trompete, Glocke, letzte Briefe. HFF Konrad Wolf.

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Bruder, the studio director demanded significant alterations to the script before granting Kahane permission to develop the project further. Kahane’s unwillingness to cave in to Mäde’s wishes meant the end of the project and further fueled the lingering frustration that infused the production of Architekten. Ten years after the bitter melodrama of Architekten, Kahane returned to the provincial East German countryside to tell a story about people who were among the losers of the new capitalist system. In Bis zum Horizont und weiter (1999) a terminally ill, unemployed, and homeless former East German musician-turned-construction worker and his girlfriend are on the run from the police after kidnapping a judge in a desperate last effort to enjoy his remaining few months together. However, their amateurish hijacking and escape attempt fails, and, surrounded by overwhelming police forces, they conclude: “The game is over. It is what it is. It will be what it will be” (71:00).57 The climactic showdown is set in the midst of the above-ground coalmining wasteland of the Lausitz, the same setting that was used as the backdrop for Kipping’s Land hinter dem Regenbogen, Weiß’s Miraculi, Peter Welz’s Burning Life, and Misselwitz’s Leben, ein Traum. The overturned earth symbolizes powerfully the exhaustion, exploitation, and destruction experienced by the environment and its inhabitants in the former East Germany. In Welz’s and Kahane’s films the landscape also evokes the Western aesthetic, where unpredictable circumstances force ordinary people to take the law into their own desperate hands, resulting in their inevitable demise. In Burning Life the two young women drive Thelma-and-Louise-style off the cliff, while the only act of agency left to the likeable outlaws Henning and Katja in Kahane’s film is a double suicide. Choosing to die together rather than being separated by the police, they step in front of a moving train. From Ete und Ali, Vorspiel, and Architekten to Horizont the protagonists’ life struggles evolve from playful foreplay and a game of lies— the “Lügenspiel” as Wanda calls it—to a deadly game of cat and mouse. Over the course of the decade from the collapse of the GDR to the postunification hangover, Kahane’s films have moved from youthful lovers’ optimism, through the chronicling of a divorce, and finally to a lovers’ suicide. The allegorical backdrop of these private tragicomedies evolves from the realms of a dusty, provincial museum to a construction project in Berlin, and finally the destroyed landscape of the Lausitz region. Kahane finds effective aesthetic forms for these changing foci by utilizing the youthful buddy-film genre for his energetic and still optimistic earlier films, while switching to melodrama for his bitter watershed moment in Architekten and infusing his later Horizont with gallows humor. This seemingly negative trajectory is significantly buffered by Kahane’s ability to lighten the historical subject matter within the chosen

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genre conventions and by taking a clearly partisan point of view. Thus, while the ending of the tragicomedy/road movie Bis zum Horizont is fatal for the two former East German protagonists Henning and Katja, the film is told from their point of view, which lends significant agency to their position. While they are continually victimized by practically everyone they encounter (including even a fellow jail-mate) and labeled as loser Ossis (“Too dumb even for a vacation” [Bis zum Horizont und weiter, 25:33],58 as a policeman puts it, after their wallets were stolen during a vacation), the two protagonists again and again take matters into their own hands and find unconventional solutions to delicate problems. This reading contrasts with critics’ often-repeated descriptions of East Germans as mere victims, defined by their victimhood in post-wall films: “East Germans emerge as losers rather than beneficiaries of the new Germany. For example, unification is presented as a health hazard in Bis zum Horizont und weiter. There Henning develops an unspecified form of cancer, one may presume because of the radiation emitted from the huge electricity towers that have been built in the immediate vicinity of the family homestead after unification.”59 In fact, the film offers no clue for the cause of the cancer, which functions as a dramaturgical device to soften the impact of the final double suicide, since Henning has little to lose, thus maintaining the light-hearted tone and avoiding a sudden descent into tragic pathos. Unlike the melodramatic suicide of a guilt-ridden Christa-Maria Sieland in The Lives of Others which serves as the tragic but inevitable climax in the film and paves the way for the full conversion of the former Stasi officer into a “Good Human,” as well as the rapprochement between him and Christa’s surviving partner Georg, Kahane stages the double suicide distinctly as an act of agency. Henning, who is near death from cancer holds hands with Katja, who applies lipstick in the face of the approaching train. The film thus grants dignity and choice to the cornered couple, while depicting the crowds of police in full combat gear as the out-of-control force of the state. Critics like Naughton correctly point to the frequent focus on the exploitation of East Germans, frequently resulting in suicide, insanity, or criminal behavior that is depicted in films by former GDR directors, in sharp contrast to films by West German directors, which tend to depict former East Germans as cluelessly ill-suited to the competitive new system. But within such a dichotomy, it remains important to differentiate: in both Kahane’s Bis zum Horizont and Peter Welz’s Burning Life, the East Germans in fact outsmart the West Germans and prove all stereotypes wrong, until they are forced to capitulate in the face of the sheer overwhelming force of unequal resources, which further aligns the viewers’ sympathies with the thus unfairly cornered outlaws. Instead of highlighting the seemingly hapless former East Germans as mere victims, both films might be considered life-affirming celebrations of the ingenuity of

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ostensible losers of unification, who instead of adapting the cutthroat ways of the new system maintain their dignity and fight the Goliath-like strength of their opponent with simple humanity, which is also directed toward their oppressors. Rather than reducing the films made by East German directors after the Wende to laments about the exploitation and colonization of their former fellow citizens, we can read these films as celebrations of the rebellious spirit of the underdogs, who opt to fight against an unjust system rather than being silenced into acquiescence. Skillfully using the comedic and dramatic potential of the buddy/road movie, Bis zum Horizont harnesses the audience’s sympathies by deploying the familiar tropes of true love and betrayed innocence. Like its famous models, such as Bonnie and Clyde, or even the contemporaneous Thelma and Louise, these films allow the viewer to differentiate between the law of the land, as represented by the force of the state, and justice, as experienced from the perspective of the ordinary citizen. Indeed, the films question conventional definitions of normalcy and insanity. Far from viewing Henning’s mother Stanke in Horizont, for example, as eccentrically insane because she insists on her solitary life with Rolf, the giant German shepherd dog whom she encourages to chase after every intruding visitor, the audience takes her side against the actual insanity of an out of control, power-hungry district attorney and a technocratic judge. Accordingly, it is the presumably insane mother who awakens a sense of humanity in the judge after her kidnapping. In Kahane’s first buddy film, Ete und Ali, the underlying conflict is generational, but in Bis zum Horizont it has become an existential one. Ironically, the protagonists’ troubles in the latter film began when they were robbed while traveling abroad. Ete’s unattainable goal of wishing to travel has turned into the beginning of the end for Henning and Katja. While critics have read the later film as an indictment of Western materialism and a celebration of Eastern adherence to more meaningful relationships, thus assigning stereotypical dichotomies between presumed socialist and capitalist values, analysis of Kahane’s earlier films has shown that similar conflicts were already central to Kahane’s DEFA films, set entirely in the GDR: for example, in Ete’s rejection of house and business, or Tom’s choice for a life in theater as opposed to the social prestige of an academic career. In initial assessments of East German contributions to cinematic stories about the Wende, critics helpfully emphasized their differing perspective as an important contrast to the dominant version of “victor’s history.” By doing so, however, East German directors’ work was unintentionally pigeonholed as narrowly focused on the East German victim’s perspective that inevitably resulted in criminality, suicide, or insanity. While these stories did indeed often not end well, their final outcomes do

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not tell the full story. As the analysis of Kahane’s earlier work has shown, the director has always woven larger social or historical themes into his films, while remaining dedicated to finding mainstream genre formats that could reach broad audiences. Vorspiel, for example, as I have shown, can be read as a comedic film about youthful maturation, as Tom evolves from mannequin dresser in the provinces to acting student in Berlin, and thus becomes a tale of coming-of-age struggles. For viewers familiar with the situation of DEFA filmmakers at the time, as well as in retrospect, the film is also a symbolic depiction of the relationship between the hopeful young filmmakers of the last generation and their controlling, paternalistic elders. Likewise, Architekten may be seen as a continuation of the allegory of the situation in the DEFA studio or understood as a philosophical exploration of the price of compromise and the challenge of reforming systems from within, while Horizont might entertain audiences unfamiliar with geopolitical changes in Germany and therefore oblivious to the implied critical take on specific German events, as an updated Bonnie and Clyde caper movie. Given that he was interested in and capable of making films for mainstream audiences, it is not surprising that Peter Kahane was the only member of the last generation of trained directors who had obtained a contract as a director at DEFA shortly before the studio’s end and also the most successful in having continuously worked in unified Germany as a writer and director for television and some cinematic features. Less radical aesthetically or thematically both before and after the end of the DEFA than colleagues such as Foth, Welz, Kipping, or Misselwitz, Kahane nevertheless represented the same dedication to socially engaged cinema and claim to the generational right to finding his own voice. He was not afraid of genre cinema and did not hesitate to mold genre conventions to his own needs. His films, produced under two different systems, struggled first against the mistrust of the elders in the DEFA studio and then again against the prejudice against directors from the East that he encountered in unified Germany.60 Particularly in the post-wall media landscape, this is a noteworthy position to assume, squarely between the many silenced voices of former DEFA colleagues who for different reasons could not or would not continue to work after unification, and the dominant voices of mainly West but also East German directors who utilize genre conventions for revisionist or ostalgic depictions of life in the former East. As Ralf Schenk wrote, citing Thomas Brussig in an assessment of twenty years of depicting the GDR on film in unified Germany: Thomas Brussig strongly advocates that filmmakers should not depict the vanished half nation “as it really was” but should utilize the peculiarities, uniqueness, and absurdities of the GDR as an

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occasion for glossy genre films. Cinema’s job, according to Brussig, is to present not a differentiated, historically fair view but tales of laughter and tears.61

Kahane’s films and their popular success question the either/or implications of this position. He was not at all opposed to making audiences laugh or cry, but he had his own definition of comedy: “Comedy for me means realizing a story with social implications, not something separate from reality where the characters mutate into clowns.”62 This desire to remain close to reality occasionally led to his engagement in causes such as anti-racism beyond the television screen: he participated, for example, in a public forum on the rise of right-wing violence against minorities on the eve of the broadcast of a television mystery that dealt with this topic.63 Kahane has acknowledged that the complex film-funding situation in unified Germany poses serious challenges to filmmakers wishing to remain independent from state broadcasting stations today. But unlike Daniel Brenner, Kahane has managed to work within this system and even within the constraints of television formats to direct intelligent and socially engaged films. An example of the compromises and opportunities that this situation can create is Kahane’s 2006 made-for-TV film Eine Liebe in Königsberg (Love in Königsberg), starring popular TV actor Wolfgang Stumph. The film in many ways caters to measured German television tastes, offering an easily digestible blend of love stories, mystery, family conflicts, and road trips that allow viewers to shed a few tears, laugh a bit, and enjoy a fairly predictable evening of entertainment. At the same time, however, the film is set in Königsberg, once a German, then a Russian city, and was in fact the first German movie to be shot there since German troops committed war atrocities there during the Second World War. The script tackles this history directly in many interactions between Russians and Germans, as the main character, Walter, returns the ashes of his deceased mother to Königsberg and in the course of his travels is challenged in his assumptions about who committed what crime against whom during the war. The script sensitively and intelligently weaves this complex German-Russian history into the plot, thus challenging TV audiences with a serious subtext in the otherwise light touch of genre film. How effective such an approach is, one that is far less challenging than the more radical aesthetic of Kipping’s or Weiß’s cinema on the one hand, but reaches a much larger audience on the other, remains an open question. But perhaps it is the wrong question to ask. The demands of the 1988 manifesto for independent production conditions and a studio for experimental film may not have been realized in the West either, but as examination of Kahane’s oeuvre shows, it is unlikely that experimental films or challenging aesthetics were ever Kahane’s interest. While Herwig

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Kipping insisted on the poetic autonomy of his visual imagination, Jörg Foth wished to explore countercultural movements on film, and Peter Welz suspended laws of time and space in his early narratives, Kahane has been consistent in his interest in genre film for broad audiences. While some critics charge that such films “hurt nobody”64 Kahane has managed to find a workable niche within the German media landscape, one that allows him to raise important topics, often about marginalized social groups, for broad television audiences. Nevertheless, the balancing act between one’s desired projects and what TV funding agencies are willing to support has continued to challenge Kahane and his fellow former DEFA directors. In 2012, for example, Andreas Voigt and Barbara Etz proposed to reassemble members of the last DEFA generation to produce a compilation film in preparation for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the wall. The film was to collect memories from the participating directors of the GDR and reflections on the decades since unification. The film would have offered many artists who have found it difficult to realize their projects in the new filmfunding situation an opportunity to voice their experiences. As such, the film would have counterbalanced the overwhelming presence of West German directors’ versions of unification and even of life in the former GDR. The project was swiftly turned down by television editors with the explanation that the broadcasting station was more interested in “journalistic” approaches to documenting the first 25 years of post-wall Germany than the views by those former DEFA directors. Andreas Dresen, undoubtedly one of Germany’s currently most successful directors, has vehemently criticized the suppression of East German views in the post-wall media landscape, in which the merging of two former film cultures largely meant the elimination of the East German one in favor of the expansion of the West German system. Referring to the last generation of DEFA directors, Dresen wrote: “Their career had just begun when the wall fell. They had barely had a chance to make a name for themselves through film till then. Now the smell of DEFA suddenly became a burden.”65 Given this situation, Kahane’s continued presence as writer and director of TV films gains added importance, while his approach to filmmaking exhibits strong parallels to that of the younger Andreas Dresen. Dresen has frequently articulated his commitment to directing socially relevant films that must not be boring: Film is a social responsibility. We must give the country its images, its people their stories . . . which must not be boring. Art is entertaining! That is the only way to regain the audience’s interest and fill our cinemas once more. We must learn not to speak from a position of a know-it-all to the people but to speak from our hearts.66

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This desire to express his audience’s inner conflicts reflects Dresen’s education at Babelsberg, where directors were trained to reflect the reality of ordinary citizens’ lives (“ihnen aus dem Herzen sprechen”) instead of encouraged to pursue their individual aesthetic vision. The basic humanist conviction that art in general and film in particular can function as a tool for stimulating critical discourse or cultivating emotional sensitivities remained a guiding principle for all the directors of the last DEFA generation discussed in this book. Dresen also pointed to a less positive side of this training as a potential obstacle for former East German directors as they tried to find new footing in the West: We GDR children, who have learned our trade so thoroughly in Babelsberg, are probably hampered by our own education. We grew up in a country of few extremes. Everything in life was leveled in mediocrity. Instead of hot or cold, everything seemed rather lukewarm. Instead of black or white, gray was the dominant color. The entire world was half-way decent, or so it seemed, and many GDR films reflected it like that.67

That this was not true for all DEFA directors, some of whom had spent years actively fighting against such lukewarm mediocrity, has been demonstrated by the films of Weiß, Forth, Kipping, Misselwitz, and Welz, among others. Nevertheless, it seems fitting to end this book with Dresen’s own first feature film, which reflects on these concerns directly. His diploma film, Stilles Land (Silent Country), has been lauded as offering a unique perspective from the East German provinces on the events of 198968 and marked the beginning of a remarkably successful career in feature film for the director, who graduated from the Babelsberg film school in 1992. But Stilles Land is not just a meditation about the changes in East Germany; it is also a reflection on the role of art and the artist in such changing times. Originally entitled Provinztheater (Provincial Theater), Dresen’s film speaks directly to the themes that are central in Kahane’s oeuvre as discussed in this chapter, beginning with his student film Des Lebens Überfluss and its focus on the relationship between the artist, revolution, and the state. In Stilles Land the young theater director Kai arrives at a provincial theater on the eve of the fall of the wall to direct his first play, Waiting for Godot, because, as the theater’s opportunistic chief declares, the play demonstrates the worldliness of even the provincial towns in the GDR. Kai agrees enthusiastically and commits to directing an accessible Godot: “Theater has to be comprehensible, otherwise it cannot be effective, right?” (9:25).69 But despite the obvious parallels between the political situation in the country, characterized by the eternal wait for change, and the play, Kai, in his exclusive passion for staging his personal vision,

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remains blind to such connections to his surroundings. During discussions about the meaning of “waiting” with his actors, the director rejects the impact of larger social structures on the individual and argues idealistically: “It is because of the two of them that they don’t move along. Hopelessness is nonsense that does not exist. Only in their heads” (45:10).70 Kai takes no notice of the differing opinions among his actors, some of whom have become cynical after a career of waiting for change in their provincial theater or distracted by the momentous political events in the country, of which news reaches them only in fragments because of the insufficient reach of their TV antenna. Instead of joining his assistant, Claudia, who hitchhikes to Berlin to participate in the upheaval, Kai argues that he has to stay put in order to make the rehearsal the next day. When news of the abdication of Erich Honecker does reach them, and one of the actors has been detained by police for purchasing a larger TV antenna, Kai decides to radically alter his staging, as the old conception is no longer appropriate for the times: instead of having props such as tree, car, and ladder, white, he now wishes them all painted black (1:01:28). Throughout the film the mood in the theater is characterized by petty jealousies, power struggles, cynicism, and apathy. The theatre company joins the upheaval in the country only slowly and hesitantly, and they easily abandon their plan to visit Berlin after their bus breaks down after going only a few feet. The individual members, however, react very differently to the unfolding events of 1989: some bravely write petitions, others, more cowardly, make them disappear, some leave to march in the streets of Berlin or participate in peace vigils, while others block out the world to lose themselves in their art. The film offers an answer to the relationship between the play, the situation of the desolate theater in the provincial town, and the incomprehensibility of the speed of the political events in the country in a climactic staging of a dialogue between Vladimir and Estragon, when Beckett’s words finally ring meaningfully for all in the dress rehearsal: VLADIMIR: What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in this immense confusion, only one thing is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come—. . . Or for night to fall. We have kept our appointment, and that’s an end to that. . . . All I know is that hours are long under these conditions and constrain us to beguile them with proceedings which—how shall I say— which at first sight may seem reasonable, until they become a habit. You may say it is to prevent our reason from floundering. No doubt. But has it not long been straying in the night without end of the abyssal depths? That is what I sometimes wonder. ESTRAGON: We are all born mad. Some remain so.71

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In this moment, at the end of weeks of mutual misunderstandings, deception, and unwillingness to communicate between theater chief, the director, the actors, and the staff, Beckett’s text suddenly summarizes the asynchronic experience of living in an incomprehensible world and pursuing seemingly meaningless activities in an attempt to fill out the time. The theater neither offers an escape from the conflicts of the real world nor provides answers to the questions of how to act in the revolutionary moment. The film thus shows the varying actions of its protagonists— some courageous, some opportunistic, some activist, some cynical—during the times of upheaval, and thus creates a microcosm of GDR life in the small theater. But on occasion the theater functions as a unifying place where all those in the film articulate the disconnect and confusion they feel. The poignant moment is likely interpreted differently by the various characters in the film, but it derives its impact also from being communally experienced. With Estragon’s suggestion that all are born insane, and some remain so, I return to the beginning of this book, and the exploration of Egon Günther’s and Jörg Foth’s fools and clowns. Ernst Stein, Meh and Weh, and Vladimir and Estragon use the fools’ mask to question assumed definitions of sanity and insanity, justice and innocence, responsibility and guilt, appearance and being, truth and deception. As aging actor Otto Kullberg in Andreas Dresen’s 2009 Whiskey mit Wodka (Whiskey with Vodka) states philosophically: We all love the truth and everybody lies.”72 In a media landscape in unified Germany that is geared toward reassuring entertainment, the films of the last generation of DEFA directors challenge their viewers with their different perspectives, born of the complex negotiation of contradictory systems and realities at DEFA and the GDR. Their challenge has rarely been heard or understood, but it remains as an important reminder that art in general, and film art in particular, can, as Ulrich Weiß has suggested prophetically, cause audiences to fidget.

Notes 1

“die Köpfe müssen fest und hart werden.” Jochen Kraußer, Der Auftrag, Kinobox, 1988. 2

Beate Schönfeld, DEFA Komplex 9—Experimentelles, Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk, 1993. 3

“Es war so klein. Wir waren auch keine Helden, auch die Regisseure nicht.” Anne Richter in Martin Hübner, DEFA Komplex-Zensur, Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk, 1993. 4

“Ist es oder ist es nicht? Ist es Täuschung, bleibt es, hält es mich, ich halt es nicht. Ist es doch, ist es nicht?” 5

“Ja, das ist jetzt mein vierter Film und es gelingt mir nicht, zu erklären, worum es geht”

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6

“An diesem Morgen war die Zugverspätung früher als der Zug. Da fuhr die Lok, um die Verspätung einzuholen, ohne Wagen hinterher, weil eine Lok ohne ihre Wagen schneller fährt. Sie fuhr sogar der Zeit davon, weshalb der Franz um sieben Uhr den grossen Zeiger weiterrückte, was die Reisenden entzückte, weil sie sahen, wie pünktlich jetzt Zeit, Zug, und Verspätung waren.” 7

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 262. 8

“Die Leuchtkraft der Vorderradspeichen steht im genau umgekehrten Verhältnis zur Schweigepflicht des Sattels, allerdings nur während der Fahrt.” 9

“Glaubst du, dass dieses Interview für uns beide gefährlich werden könnte?—Ja, sehr.” 10

See Ralf Schenk, “Metamorphosen des Unscheinbaren,” Film-Dienst 3 (1999): 34–36.

11

“Ich bin jetzt 37 und habe noch keinen richtigen Film gemacht.” Dietmar Hochmuth, Motivsuche, DEFA Film, 1990. Hochmuth’s film finished shooting a few days before Honecker resigned as party secretary of the GDR in 1989. While there are a number of parallels to Kahane’s Architekten, Hochmuth’s film offers more of a satire of the protagonist, who wishes to document “real life” while having lost touch with the reality of the ordinary young workers he wishes to “direct.” 12

Peter Kahane and Ralf Schenk, Zeitzeugengespräch, Mar. 24, 2004 (Berlin: DEFA Stiftung, DVD, 190 min). 13

“Es ist ein trister Film. Das ist kein Erzählkino, sondern wie ich es nenne, Beschreibungskino, das dem Publikum Kenntnisnahme abverlangt, ihm aber Möglichkeiten der Identifizierung weitgehend vorenthält. Das verträgt Kino nun einmal nicht. Wenn die Nachwuchsgruppe der 49er wie Foth es sagte, sich ausschließlich auf Filme dieser Machart orientierte, dann lag der Irrtum bei ihnen.” Horst Pehnert, Kino, Künstler und Konflikte: Filmproduktion und Filmpolitik in der DDR (Berlin: Das Neue Berlin, 2009), 132. 14

“Meine Sicht wurde nicht als andere, sondern als falsche betrachtet.” Elke Schieber, “Anfang vom Ende,” 270. 15

“Wir waren unerwünscht. Unsere Generation war unerwünscht” (Kahane and Schenk, Zeitzeugengespräch, 89:30). 16

“Wir waren immer die Schüler” (ibid., 91:05).

17

“Einerseits waren wir der älteren Generation zu ungewöhnlich, andererseits zu gewöhnlich” (ibid., 137:17). 18

“Demontage des Heimatbegriffes der DDR.” Bettina Mathes, “Mit der Heimat verheiratet? ‘Die Architekten’ von Peter Kahane,” in Die imaginierte Nation: Identität, Körper und Geschlecht in DEFA Filmen, ed. Mathes (Berlin: DEFA Stiftung, 2007), 68; Seán Allan, “1989 and the Wende in East German Cinema,” in 1949/1989 Cultural Perspectives on Division and Unity in East and West, ed. Clare Flanagan and Stuart Taberner (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 242. 19

McGee, “End Phase of the GDR in Films by DEFA Nachwuchsregisseure,” 329.

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O’Brien, Post-Wall German Cinema and National History, 120.

21

“Als Membran für die sich ringsum vollziehenden Veränderungen versagte ‘Die Architekten’: Dem Verschwinden der DDR vermochte er keine adäquaten Bilder, d.h. bleibenden Bilder abzutrotzen, da er sich der überholten äesthetischen Methoden genau dieses verschwindenden Systems bediente.” Claus Löser, “Blick zurück im Zorn? Bemerkungen zum finalen Zustand der DEFA zwischen 1989 und 1992,” FilmDienst 2 (1999): 38. 22

“Ich wollte keine Metaphern sondern direkt reden . . . unter Verzicht auf viele Gestaltungsmittel. Pure Kamera. . . . Es sollte die Entscheidung herbeiführen: DEFA bzw. DDR ja oder nein” (Kahane and Schenk, Zeitzeugengespräch, 118:09). 23

The story was based on an actual group of architects whom Kahane knew. One of the members of the group acted as advisor to the film. 24

See McGee, “End Phase of the GDR in Films by DEFA Nachwuchsregisseure,” as well as an extended excerpt from an interview with Ralf Schenk and Peter Kahane, which can be found on the German DVD release of Architekten, special feature, for an excellent overview of the film-production process. 25

Kahane, cited in O’Brien, Post-Wall German Cinema and National History, 111.

26

Ibid., 121.

27

“Willst du jetzt bestimmen, was die Leute mögen?”

28

“Wo ist die Freiheit, mal anders zu denken? Wo bleibt die Phantasie?”; “Gebaut wird nur das Machbare.” 29

Peter Kahane in conversation with the author on May 1, 2012 in Berlin.

30

“Die Nachwuchsgruppe war ein Arbeitsmittel der DEFA. . . . Es ist einfach das Program der Direktion gewesen, diese Leute [den Nachwuchs] ein bisschen zu kontrollieren . . . Ich meine, die Gruppe war ein Kontrollinstrument. Das kann ich mir nicht anders vorstellen. Nicht im Sinne von Stasi und Abhören und so was nicht. Aber um dem eine Form zu geben” (Kahane and Schenk, Zeitzeugengespräch, 108:24). 31

“Uns muß man gar nichts verbieten. Wir verbieten uns das schon selbst.”

32

“Wasserwaage der politischen Gleichförmigkeit.”

33

“ideologischer Widerkäuer”; “Mit 39 möchte ich endlich erwachsen sein.”

34

“Mit 22 weiss ich nicht mehr wer ich bin” (Kahane, Ete und Ali, 1:28:13).

35

“Wer in die Apparate geht, geht verloren; wer nicht, verliert.” Jörg Foth, “Orangenmond im Niemandsland,” in Orangenmond im Niemandsland, ed. Torsten Schulz (Berlin: VISTAS, 2004), 25. 36

“Um Gottes Willen, ich baue doch nur runde, oder fünfeckige, oder achteckige Häuser” 37

“Du hast Erfahrungen gemacht. Jetzt kannst du was verändern.”

38

“verarscht, belogen und beschissen.”

39

“Der Preis für die Hoffnung und die Geduld ist auch die Mitverantwortung und die Mitschuld.” Peter Kahane, “Der Preis für die Hoffnung,” interview with Elke Schieber, Film und Fernsehen 10 (1990): 20.

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40

“Die Prämissen waren von vorneherein: es bleibt alles wie es ist” (Kahane and Schenk, Zeitzeugengespräch 122:05). 41

“Das Motto mit dem ich den Wiedereinstieg in die Fernsehlandschaft geschafft habe, heißt: Resignation.” 42

See Kahane,”Interview with Ralf Schenk.

43

“Die 2. Frage hängt mit der Ausreiseproblematik zusammen. Seit langem sprechen wir nun dieses Thema immer wieder an. Als neuralgischer Punkt erweist sich hier die Begründung Wandas, ihrer Motivation, die in dem Satz gipfelt: ‘Es ist ein Lügenspiel und alle machen es mit.’” Horst Pehnert in “Protokoll über die Diskussion des Rohdrehbuches “Architekten’ (Fassung 10.3.89) am 5.5.1989,” 3, in BA(III)DR117; 3391 Bundesarchiv Berlin. 44

“Keiner weiß was los ist aber alle machen mit!”; “Es ist ein Lügenspiel und alle machen mit.” 45

“Das Glück kommt von allein. Man muss nur lange genug warten.”

46

“Das Leben ist keine Kneipe. Um alles muss man kämpfen.”

47

“Mit Nietenhosen kann man nicht für den Sozialismus kämpfen, hab’ ich damals gesagt!” 48

“Sieh dich doch mal an, du bist Beamter und nicht Wissenschaftler geworden.”

49

“Man soll nicht so hochgreifen. Die ist nichts für uns.”

50

“Es hat sich nichts geändert. Nur das Kino ist älter geworden.”

51

“Wir sollten doch den Hinterhofblick auf die DDR lassen” (Kahane and Schenk, Zeitzeugengespräch, 103:02). 52

Kahane recalled the fate of Maxim Dessau, whose film Schnauzer was unceremoniously terminated, and Thomas Brasch, whose unwillingness to compromise left him no other choice but to move to the West. See Kahane and Schenk, Zeitzeugengespräch, 2004. 53

“Wenn ich ein Problem habe, leg ich mich erst mal hin und schlaf eine halbe Stunde. Und wenn ich aufwache, habe ich mich an das Problem gewöhnt.” 54

“Immer wenn ich mal was will, klappt es sowieso nicht.”

55

“Mensch Ete, du bist ein Glückspilz. Mit 22 eigene Firma, eigenes Haus, du hast es geschafft”; “Mit 22 weiss ich nicht mal mehr, wer ich bin.” 56

“Gern ließ das Paar die Philosophie der Armut fahren und lebte fortan wieder anständig, wohlhabend und behaglich.” 57

“Wir sind raus aus dem Spiel. Was ist, das ist, was kommt, das kommt.”

58

“Zu doof zum Urlaub machen.”

59

Leonie Naughton, That Was the Wild East, 226.

60

Kahane talks openly about the level of distrust leveled against him as an “Ostregisseur” in (Kahane and Schenk, Zeitzeugengespräch), 184:26, and describes his experience after completing Cosima’s Lexicon in 1992. Self-doubts and the lack of opportunity paralyzed him for a year before he began writing mysteries for television.

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61

“Thomas Brussig plädiert vehement dafür, das verschwundene Halbland für die Leinwand nicht so zu erzählen, ‘wie es wirklich war’, sondern die Besonderheiten, Einmaligkeiten und Absurditäten der DDR als Anlass für pralle Genrefilme zu nutzen. Kino, so Brussig, sei weniger für eine differenzierte, historisch gerechte Sicht zuständig, als für Tränen des Lachens und des Weinens.” Ralf Schenk, “Das verschwundene Halbland: Die DDR im deutschen Kino nach 1989; Eine Bestandsaufnahme,” FilmDienst 22 (2009): 6. 62

“Komödie heißt für mich, eine Geschichte mit sozialem Bezug zu realisieren und nicht abgehoben von der Wirklichkeit, wo die Figuren zu Clowns mutieren.” Margit Köhler and Peter Kahane, “Der Bruch der Wende: Gespräch mit dem Regisseur Peter Kahane,” FilmDienst 2 (1999). 63

After the completion of the TV mystery series episode Sonnenwende for the popular Stubbe series, Kahane participated in a podium discussion on this subject with journalists, the Federal Minister of the Interior, and actor Wolfgang Stumph at the ZDF Hauptstadtstudio in Berlin in November 2009. 64

“tun keinem weh” (Kahane and Schenk, Zeitzeugengespräch, 182:30).

65

“Ihr Berufsweg hatte gerade erst begonnen, als die Mauer fiel. Bis dahin, hatten sie kaum eine Chance gehabt, sich mit Filmen einen Namen zu machen, nun waren sie durch den Geruch der DEFA plötzlich belastet.” Andreas Dresen, “Die Bilder der Anderen: Das Filmerbe der DDR wird vergessen oder verspottet und ihre Geschichte häufig vereinfacht,” FilmDienst 22 (2009): 33. 66

“Film bedeutet soziale Verantwortung. Wir müssen dem Land seine Bilder geben, den Menschen ihre Geschichten . . . die nicht langweilig sein dürfen. Kunst ist unterhaltsam! Nur so werden wir das Interesse der Zuschauer zurückgewinnen und die Säle wieder füllen. Wir müssen lernen, nicht von einem besserwisserischem Standpunkt zu den Leuten zu sprechen, sondern ihnen aus dem Herzen.” Dresen has used this statement several times, including in his acceptance speech for the German Filmpreis, but it first appeared in his diploma thesis in 1993: Andreas Dresen, Einige Aspekte der Arbeit als Autor und Regisseur am Diplom und Debutspielfilm ‘Stilles Land’ (diploma thesis, Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen, Babelsberg, 1993), 49. 67 “Wahrscheinlich steht uns DDR Kindern, die in Babelsberg ihr Handwerk so gründlich gelernt haben, ihre eigene Erziehung im Wege. Wir sind in einem Land aufgewachsen, in dem es kaum Extreme gab. Das ganze Leben hatte sich auf ein merkwürdiges Mittelmass eingepegelt. Statt kalt oder heiß schien alles eher lau, statt schwarz oder weiß dominierten die Grautöne. Die ganze Welt war für uns so halbwegs in Ordnung, so schien es zumindest und so spiegelten es auch viele in der DDR entstandenen Filme wieder” (ibid., 25). 68 See David Lode, Abenteuer und Wirklichkeit: Die Filme von Andreas Dresen (Marburg: Schüren, 2009). 69

“Theater muss verständlich sein, sonst ist es ja nicht wirksam, oder?”

70

“Es liegt an den beiden, dass sie einfach nicht von der Stelle kommen. Ausweglosigkeit ist doch Quatsch, die gibt es nicht. Nur in ihren Köpfen.” 71

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klar: wir warten darauf dass Godot kommt.  .  .  . Oder die Nacht. Aber wir sind hier, wie verabredet. . . . Sicher ist, dass die Zeit unter solchen Umständen lange dauert und uns dazu bringt sie mit Tätigkeiten auszufüllen, die, wie soll man sagen, auf den ersten Blick vernünftig erscheinen könnten, an die wir uns aber gewöhnt haben. Du wirst mir sagen, dass es geschieht, um unseren Verstand vor dem Untergang zu bewahren, aber irrt er nicht schon in den unergründlichen Tiefen ewiger Nacht? Das frage ich mich manchmal. ESTRAGON: Wir werden alle verrückt geboren, einige bleiben es (ibid., 1:20:35). Original cited from Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove, 1954), 91. 72

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“Alle lieben die Wahrheit und jeder lügt.”

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Filmography Becker, Wolfgang. Good Bye, Lenin! Film. 2003. Beyer, Frank. Der Verdacht. Film. 1991. Böttcher, Jürgen. Drei von Vielen. Film. 1961. ———. Kurzer Besuch bei Hermann Glöckner. Film. 1985. ———. Martha. Film. 1978. ———. Die Mauer. Film. 1990. ———. Ofenbauer. Film. 1972. ———. Rangierer. Film. 1984. ———. Stars. Film. 1963. Carow, Heiner. Die Verfehlung. Film. 1992. Dovzhenko, Alexander. Earth. Film. 1930. Dresen, Andreas. Stilles Land. Film. 1990. ———. Whiskey mit Wodka. Film. 2009. Dudow, Slatan. Frauenschicksale. Film. 1952. Dzuiba, Helmut. Jan und Jana. Film. 1992. Fassbinder, Rainer Werner. Angst essen Seele auf. Film. 1974. ———. BRD Trilogie. Film. 1979–82. Forman, Miloš. Loves of a Blonde. Film. 1965. Foth, Jörg. Ach Du Jeh. Film. 1988. ———. Biologie! Film. 1990. ———. Blumenland. Film. 1975. ———. Das Eismeer ruft. Film. 1983. ———. Letztes aus der DaDaeR. Film. 1991. ———. Prenzlauer Berg: Walzer. Film. 1994. ———. Rock ’n’ Roll. Film. 1987. ———. Tuba wa duo. Film. 1989. ———. Die Verweigerung. TV documentary. 1996. Gräf, Roland. Der Tangospieler. Film. 1991. Günther, Egon. Wenn Du Groß Bist, Lieber Adam, 1965. ———. Abschied, 1968. ———. Der Dritte. 1971. ———. Die Schlüssel, 1972. ———. Stein. Film. 1991. Haussmann, Leander. Sonnenallee. Film. 1999. Henckel von Donnersmarck, Florian. Das Leben der Anderen. Film. 2006. Herzog, Werner. Encounters at the End of the World. Film. 2007. Hochmuth, Dietmar. Motivsuche. DEFA Film. 1991. Hübner, Martin. Der DEFA Komplex Zensur. TV documentary. 1993.

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240

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Kahane, Peter. Die Architekten. Film. 1990. ———. Bis zum Horizont und weiter. Film. 1998. ———. Ete und Ali. Film. 1985. ———. Des Lebens Überfluss. Film. 1978. ———. Eine Liebe in Königsberg. Film. 2006. ———. Trompete Glocke letzte Briefe. Film. 1979. ———. Vorspiel. Film. 1987. Kipping, Herwig. Bahnpostfahrer. 1980. ———. Hommage à Hölderlin. Film. 1982. ———. Das Land hinter dem Regenbogen. Film. 1991. ———. Novalis. Film. 1995. Kolditz, Gottfried. Das Stacheltier—der junge Engländer. TV film. DEFA, 1958. Kraußer, Jochen. Der Auftrag. DEFA Studio für Dokumentarfilme. Film. 1988. ———. Die Leuchtkraft der Ziege. Film. 1987. Läpple, Christian. Einfühlsame Einblicke in Private Ansichten—Regisseurin Helke Misselwitz im Porträt. ZDF TV documentary. 2009. Menzel, Jirí. Closely Watched Trains. Film. 1966. Misselwitz, Helke. Aktfotografie Gundula Schulz. Film. 1983. ———. Engelchen. Film. 1996. ———. Die fidele Bäckerin. Film. 1982. ———. Fremde Oder. Film. 2001. ———. Haus.Frauen. Film. 1982. ———. Herzsprung. Film. 1992. ———. Meine Liebe, Deine Liebe. TV documentary, 1995. ———. Quartier der Illusionen. Film. 2003. ———. Sperrmüll. Film. 1990. ———. Stillleben—Eine Reise zu den Dingen. Film. 1984. ———. Tango-Traum. Film. 1985. ———. Wer fürchtet sich vorm schwarzen Mann. Film. 1989. ———. Winter Adé. Film. 1988. Müller, Claudia. Verliebt in die DDR. TV documentary. Rundfunk BerlinBrandenburg, 2011. Nemec, Jan. A Report on the Party and the Guests. Film. 1966. Pudovkin, Vsevolod. The Mother. Film. 1926. Schönfeldt, Beate. Der DEFA Komplex 5. Frauen-Film-Träume: Regisseurinnen. TV documentary. 1993. Tschörtner, Petra. Berlin, Prenzlauer Berg. Documentary. 1990. ———. Herr Giwi oder die umgekehrte Emigration. TV documentary. 1997. Voigt, Andreas. Alfred. Film. 1987. ———. Glaube Liebe Hoffnung. Film. 1997. ———. Große Weite Welt. Film. 1994. ———. Mann mit Krokodil. Film. 1984. ———. Leipzig im Herbst. Film. 1990. ———. Letztes Jahr Titanic. Film. 1991.

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Weiß, Ulrich. Blauvogel. Film. 1979. ———. Dein unbekannter Bruder. Film. 1982. ———. Meine Waffen sind nicht gebrochen—nur mein Herze brach. GDR TV documentary. 1972. ———. Miraculi. Film. 1992. ———. Olle Henry. Film. 1983. ———. Tambari. Film. 1977. Welz, Peter. Banale Tage. Film. 1991. ———. Burning Life. Film. 1994. ———. Unsere Familie. Film. 1989. ———. Willkommen in der Kantine. Film. 1988. Zschoche, Hermann. Hälfte des Lebens. Film. 1984.

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———. “Zum Oeuvre von Ulrich Weiß: Kommentierte Filmographie.” In Schenk and Richter, apropos: Film 2003; Das 4. Jahrbuch der DEFA Stiftung, 174–90. Richter, Rolf, ed. DEFA—Spielfilm-Regisseure und ihre Kritiker. Berlin: Henschel Verlag, 1983. Ritzenhoff, Karen. “The Dissolution of the GDR in DEFA Documentaries.” Seminar 33, no. 4 (1997). ———. “Helke Misselwitz’ Sperrmüll, oder eine Art unfreiwilliger Erinnerungsfilm.” In Ebbrecht, Hoffman, and Schweinitz, DDR—erinnern, vergessen: Das visuelle Gedächtnis des Dokumentarfilms, 271–85. Robb, David G. Clowns, Fools and Picaros: Popular Forms in Theatre, Fiction and Film. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. ———. “Wenzel & Mensching: A Carnivalesque Clowns’ Act Spanning the GDR and United Germany.” German Studies Review 23, no. 1 (2000): 53–68. ———. Zwei Clowns im Lande des verlorenen Lachens: Das Liedertheater Wenzel & Mensching. Berlin: Christoph Links, 1998. Rosenberg, Karen. “Looking for Spring: Karen Rosenberg interviews Helke Misselwitz.” Women’s Review of Books 7 (July 1990): 6–7. Ruben, Thomas, and Bernd Wagner, eds. Kulturhäuser in Brandenburg: Eine Bestandsaufnahme. Potsdam: Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, 1994. Rust, Roland. “Stein.” Filmdienst 44 (1991): 19. Sandford, John, and Sean Allan. DEFA: East German Cinema, 1946–1992. New York: Berghahn Books, 1999. Saunders, Anna. Honecker’s Children: Youth and Patriotism in East(ern) Germany, 1979–2002. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Schenk, Ralf. “Experimente: Ein unvollendeter Spielfilm des Theatermachers Jürgen Gosch.” FilmDienst 10 (2009): 11. ———. Eine kleine Geschichte der DEFA. Berlin: DEFA Stiftung, 2006. ———.“Metamorphosen des Unscheinbaren.” Film-Dienst 3 (1999): 34–36. ———. “Toleranz und Zärtlichkeit: Die Regisseurin Helke Misselwitz.” Filmdienst 20 (1996): 4–7. ———. “Ulrich Weiß.” In Richter, DEFA—Spielfilm-Regisseure und ihre Kritiker, 180–233. ———.“Das verschwundene Halbland: Die DDR im deutschen Kino nach 1989; Eine Bestandsaufnahme.” FilmDienst 22 (2009): 6–11. ———, ed. Das zweite Leben der Filmstadt Babelsberg: DEFA Spielfilme, 1946–1992. Berlin: Henschel Verlag, 1994. Schenk, Ralf, and Erika Richter, eds. apropos: Film 2003; Das 4. Jahrbuch der DEFA Stiftung. Berlin: Bertz Verlag, 2003. Schieber, Elke. “Anfang vom Ende oder Kontinuitäten des Argwohns, 1980– 1989.” In Schenk, Das zweite Leben der Filmstadt Babelsberg: DEFA Spielfilme, 1946–92, 264–327. ———. “Im Dämmerlicht der Perestroika, 1980–1989.” In Jordan and Schenk, Schwarzweiß und in Farbe: DEFA Dokumentarfilme, 1946–1992, 234–69.

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———. “Der Preis für die Hoffnung: Mit Regisseur Peter Kahane sprach Elke Schieber.” Film und Fernsehen 10 (1990): 16–20. Schittly, Dagmar. Zwischen Regie und Regime: Die Filmpolitik der SED im Spiegel der DEFA Produktionen. Berlin: Ch. Links, 2002. Schlegel, Friedrich. Kritische und theoretische Schriften. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1978. Schleime, Cornelia. “DEFA, die Sechste.” In Poss, DEFA 50: Gespräche aus acht Filmnächten, 135–66. Schönemann, Hannes. “Herzsprung.” Film und Fernsehen 6/1 (1992/93): 135–36. (Double issue.) Sieg, Katrin. Ethnic Drag: Performing Race, Nation, Sexuality in West Germany. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Silberman, Marc. “Postwall Documentaries: New Images for a New Germany?” Cinema Journal 33, no. 2 (Winter 1994): 22–41. “40jahrevideokunst.de: Digitales Erbe: Symposium, Ausstellung und Studienedition zur Videokunst in Deutschland von 1963 bis heute.” Accessed September 17, 2013. http://on1.zkm.de/zkm/stories/ storyReader$6074. Weiß, Ulrich. Blauvogel. Unpublished film script, 1979. ———. “Der dritte Weg oder zwischen den Stühlen ist auch ein Platz.” Film und Fernsehen 2 (1992): 18–21. ———. “Tanz im Volkshaus—eine Skizze: Entwurf zu einem Film, der nie realisiert wurde.” Film und Fernsehen 1/2 (1996): 36–43. ———. “Über die Gefährdung des sensiblen Gleichgewichts unseres Daseins.” In Schenk and Richter, apropos: Film 2003. Das 4. Jahrbuch der DEFA-Stiftung, 115. ———. Zur Beziehung zwischen handelnder Figur und Umgebung beim Arrangieren einer Grundsituation im Dokumentarfilm, dargestellt an Jürgen Böttchers Film ‘Der Sekretär.’ Diploma thesis, Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen, 1972. Welsford, Enid. The Fool: His Social and Literary History. New York: Anchor Books, 1961. Wenzel, Hans Eckart, “Interview with Jens Rosbach, Deutschland-Radio,” March 15, 1998. Cited in David Robb, Clowns, Fools and Picaros: Popular Forms in Theatre, Fiction and Film (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 176. Wetzel, Kraft. “Evil Germans? Rightwing Violence in Light of Recent German Films.” Herzsprung, DVD, special feature. Amherst, MA: Icestorm International, 2009. Wilkening, Thomas. “Produktionsgruppe DaDaeR.” Defa Blende 4–5 (1990): 3. ———. Wilkening Nachlass. Filmmuseum Film Archiv, Potsdam. Wolf, Christa. Stadt der Engel, oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2010.

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Index Abschied, 28, 33 Ach du jeh, 48, 58 Ahbe, Thomas, 15–17, 20 Alfred, 13, 172, 174, 177, 180–85, 187, 188, 194, 195, 199, 201 Ali, Fear Eats the Soul. See Angst essen Seele auf Allan, Sean, 208, 215 Altes aus der DaDaeR, 38 Angst essen Seele auf, 12, 164 Anti-fascist founding myth, 14, 77. 80, 81, 95, 156, 222 Architects, The. See Architekten, Die Die Architekten, 4, 10, 19, 28, 109, 113, 126, 127, 204, 207–17, 224, 227, 233–35 Aufbau Verlag, 22 Auftrag, Der, 203 Avant-garde film in GDR, 60, 81–85, 106–7 Avant-garde film in Russia. See Russian avant-garde film Babelsberg film school. See Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen (HFF, Babelsberg) Bakhtin, Mikhail, 27 Balász, Béla, 66, 68, 69, 78, 85, 89 Banale Tage, 3, 6, 27, 45, 107–32 Barthel, Lars-Peter, 62 Bathrick, David, 33 Baumgarten, Norbert, works by: Befreite Zone, 111 Becker, Wolfgang, works by: Good Bye Lenin!, 6, 97, 111 Beckett, Samuel, works by: Waiting for Godot, 39, 125, 203, 230–32 Befreite Zone, 111 Benjamin, Walter, 88, 204, 233 Berdahl, Daphne, 110

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Berghahn, Daniela, 71, 143 Berlin, Sinfonie der Grossstadt, 140, 183 Berlin, Symphony of a Great City. See Berlin, Sinfonie der Grossstadt Berlin Auguststrasse, 176 Berlin Prenzlauer Berg, 143 Berlin Wall, 12; fall of, 105, 173, 178– 80, 186–87, 209; 20th-anniversary celebration, 17, 179–80, 186; 25th-anniversary celebration, 229 Berlin-Ecke Schönhauser, 84, 218–19 Beruf Neonazi, 197 Beyer, Frank, works by: Nikolaikirche, 108; Der Verdacht, 1, 108; Das Versprechen, 126, 170 Biermann, Wolf, 22, 120, 161 Biologie!, 124, 127, 206 Bis zum Horizon und weiter, 210, 224–27 Bisky, Lothar, 184 Blauvogel, 12, 23, 60, 71–77, 206 Blazejewski, Carmen, 28, 38 Blumenland, 23–24, 124–27, 218 Bonengel, Winfried, works by: Beruf Neonazi, 197 Bonnie and Clyde, 226, 227 Böttcher, Jürgen, 62, 65, 69, 70. 140–43, 174–75, 176, 181 Böttcher, Jürgen, works by: Drei von Vielen, 142, 143, 175; Jahrgang 45, 70, 140; Kurzer Besuch bei Hermann Glockner, 175; Martha, 176; Die Mauer, 142; Ofenbauer, 142, 175; Rangerier, 142, 143, 175; Der Sekretär, 65, 69–70; Stars, 142, 175, 181 Brasch, Thomas, 43 Braun, Volker, 33 BRD Trilogie, 4, 12, 51, 80

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Brecht, Bertolt, 27, 33, 35, 38, 82, 85, 113, 115, 116, 213 Brockmann, Stephen, 16 Brussig, Thomas, 110–12, 227–28 Brussig, Thomas, works by: Helden wie wir, 111–12; Sonnenallee, 111–12 Buñuel, Luis, works by: My Last Sigh, 89, 90, 128 Burning Life, 110, 131–32, 224 Carow, Heiner, 1, 12, 27, 90, 106, 126, 160, 177, 183, 206 Carow, Heiner, works by: Die Verfehlung, 1, 37 Castorf, Frank, 3, 12, 105, 127, 129 Catlin, George, 76–77 Celan, Paul, 151–52 censorship, 5, 21, 25–28, 36–37, 43, 46, 47, 62, 64, 70, 130, 142, 175, 199, 203–6, 212 Chaplin, Charlie, 66, 69 Claus, Horst, 2 Closely Observed Trains, 67–68 Czech New Wave, 10, 12, 63, 65, 67, 128, 149, 219 DaDaeR. See Production Group DaDaeR Dalichow, Bärbel, 43 DEFA documentary film, 1, 3, 13–14, 172, 174–78, 185–86, 199 DEFA Film Library, 2 Dein unbekannter Bruder, 14, 65, 66, 75, 76–80, 81, 82, 84, 126, 153, 222, 223–24 Déry, Tibor, works by: Fictive Report About an American Pop Festival, 107, 115, 118–19, 120–22 Des Lebens Überfluss, 221, 230 Dessau, Maxim, 6–7 document. See Production Group document DOGMA filmmakers, 11 Dovzhenko, Alexander, 4, 65, 85 Drei von Vielen, 142, 143, 175 Dresen, Andreas, 1, 16, 229–32

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Dresen, Andreas, works by: Stilles Land, 125, 127, 230–32; Whiskey mit Wodka, 232 Dritte, Der, 10, 28 Dylan, Bob, 46 Dzuiba, Helmut, works by: Jan und Jana, 1 East/West German historiography, 15–17, 95, 173 Ehe der Maria Braun, Die, 51, 52, 160 Eisler, Hanns, 27, 85 Emmerich, Wolfgang, 33 Encounters at the End of the World, 52 Engelchen, 142, 165, 166 Ete und Ali, 209, 212, 219–21, 224, 226 Etz, Barbara, 17, 229 experimentation, 3, 62–64, 177 Fahrrad, Das, 206–7 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 4, 8, 11, 12, 41, 51, 63, 65, 128 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, works by: Angst essen Seele auf, 12, 164; BRD Trilogie, 4, 12, 51, 80; Die Ehe der Maria Braun, 51, 52, 160; Martha, 51; Veronika Voss, 81 Fellini, Federico, 8, 65, 83 Fictive Report About an American Pop Festival, 107, 115, 118–19, 120–22 Fidele Bäckerin, Die, 12, 143, 144–45, 146, 153 Film and Television Workers Association. See Film- und Fernsehverband Film aus Papier, 22 Film- und Fernsehverband, 5, 6–7, 22, 107–8 Fitzcarraldo, 175 Forman, Miloš, 65 Forman, Miloš, works by: Loves of a Blonde, 67–69 Foth, Jörg, 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 12–13, 17, 21–23, 29, 33, 39, 46–48, 62, 87, 89, 105, 118, 124, 127, 131, 140, 151, 155, 156, 206, 207, 212, 227, 229, 232

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INDEX Foth, Jörg, works by: Ach du jeh, 48, 58; Biologie!, 124, 127, 206; Blumenland, 23–24, 124–27, 218; Das Eismeer ruft, 51–52; Filme aus Papier, 22; Letztes aus der DaDaeR, 6, 8, 22–28, 38–45, 48, 51, 52–53, 59, 63, 89, 105, 106, 160; Prenzlauer Berg Walzer, 143; Rock ’n’ Roll, 48; Tuba wa duo, 46–48; Die Verweigerung, 22, 26, 29, 49–51, 61 Fremde Oder, 144, 151 French New Vague, 128, 219 FRG Trilogy. See BRD Trilogie Frith, Fred, 83 Fulbrook, Mary, 173 GDR workers’ uprising, 67, 91 Gemünden, Gerd, 71 generational struggle, 4, 9–10, 17, 42, 43, 53, 95, 105–9, 128–30, 213–17 genre conventions, destruction of, 60, 63–65, 75, 76–77, 221 Glaube, Liebe, Hoffnung, 172, 178, 179, 195–99 Godard, Jean-Luc, 62, 65, 85, 113, 128 Good Bye, Lenin!, 6, 97, 111 Gosch, Jürgen, 62–63 Gräf, Roland, works by: Der Tangospieler, 1, 37, 106, 126 Grenzland-eine Reise, 175 Grierson, John, works by: Night Mail, 89–90 Große weite Welt, 174, 179, 192, 193–95 Grossmann, Timothy, 105, 115–16, 119 Gundula Schulz-Akt Fotographie, 145, 166 Günther, Egon, 8, 13, 21–38, 40, 41, 53, 187, 213, 215, 232 Günther, Egon, works by: Abschied, 28, 33; Der Dritte, 10, 28; Die Schlüssel, 28, 33; Stein, 23, 26–38, 213, 215, 232; Wenn Du gross bist, lieber Adam, 33

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Günther, Thomas, 8, 33 Hager, Kurt, 6–7, 80, 184 Hälfte des Lebens, 87–88 Handel, George Frideric, 213 Haus, Das, 152, 175 Haus und Hof, 175 Haus.Frauen, 142, 151–52, 166 Haussmann, Leander, 12, 105, 110, 129 Haussmann, Leander, works by: Sonnenallee, 112, 127 Hein, Christoph, 44, 62 Heine, Heinrich, 44, 53, 64–65, 70–71, 89, 93, 145 Heise, Thomas, 152, 157, 163, 175– 76, 178 Heise, Thomas, works by: Das Haus, 152, 175; Kinder, wie die Zeit vergeht, 197; Neustadt, 197; Stau, 178, 197 Helden wie wir, 111–12 Henckel von Donnersmarck, Florian, works by: Leben der Anderen, Die, 6, 16, 97, 108, 192, 225 Hermann, Irm, 8, 46, 51, 160 Heroes Like Us. See Helden wie wir Herzog, Werner, 11, 63 Herzog, Werner, works by: Encounters at the End of the World, 52; Fata Morgana, 94; Fitzcarraldo, 175 Herzsprung, 8, 12, 45, 139, 140, 142, 143, 156–65, 166, 213 Himmel über Berlin, 94 Hitchcock, Alfred, works by: Psycho, 4, 130 Hochmuth, Dietmar, works by: Motivsuche, 1, 204, 206 Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen (HFF, Babelsberg), 3, 43, 61, 88, 104, 105, 124, 126, 131, 172, 183, 201, 223 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 4, 11, 41, 53, 64, 65, 66, 87–90, 93, 96, 103, 145 Hommage á Hölderlin, 4, 11, 65–66, 87–90, 96 Honecker, Erich, 10, 120, 188, 231 Hughes, Helen, 178

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identity, German, 9, 15, 111, 149 identity politics, 73–76 Indianerfilme, 71–77 Jahrgang 45, 70, 140 Jan und Jana, 1 Jarausch, Konrad, 124, 173, 191 Jordan, Gunter, 199 Jordan, Gunter, works by: Berlin Auguststrasse, 176 Jules, 206, 222–24 Junge, Winfried, 174, 175, 176 Jürgen, Anna, 71–73 Kahane, Peter, 1, 4, 5, 9, 14, 19, 21, 28, 38, 108, 141, 151, 206, 207–35 Kahane, Peter, works by: Die Architekten, 4, 10, 19, 28, 109, 113, 126, 127, 204, 207–17, 224, 227, 233–35; Bis zum Horizon und weiter, 210, 224–27; Des Lebens Überfluss, 221, 230; Ete und Ali, 209, 212, 219–21, 224, 226; Jules, 206, 222–24; Eine Liebe in Konigsberg, 228; Polizeiruf 110, 221; Stubbe-Von Fall zu Fall, 221 224, 226; Trompete, Glocke, letzte Briefe, 222–23; Vorspiel, 4, 209, 213, 217–19, 222, 224, 227; Weiberwirtschaft, 209 Kinder, wie die Zeit vergeht, 197 King Lear, 26–28, 37–38 Kinobox, 3, 46, 48, 141–42, 151, 154, 165, 177, 203 Kipping, Herwig, 1, 3, 9, 11, 13, 17, 21, 53, 60, 62, 63–64, 85–98, 140, 184 Kipping, Herwig, works by: Hommage á Hölderlin, 4, 11, 65–66, 87–90, 96; Das Land hinter dem Regenbogen, 6, 11, 12, 42, 45, 56, 63, 80, 81, 82, 90–98, 105–6, 145, 181, 224; Novalis, 6, 87, 96 Klein, Gerhard, works by: Berlin-Ecke Schönhauser, 84, 218–19 Kleßmann, Christoph, 125 Kocka, Jürgen, 124

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Koepp, Volker, 141, 174, 175, 176 Koepp, Volker, works by: Haus und Hof, 175; Mädchen aus Wittstock, 175, 181 Kolditz, Stefan, 109, 110, 132 Kraußer, Joachim, 62, 203–4 Kraußer, Joachim, works by: Der Auftrag, 203; Die Leuchtkraft der Ziege, 176–77, 203–5, 209 Kurzer Besuch bei Hermann Glöckner, 175 Land Behind the Rainbow, The. See Land hinter dem Regenbogen, Das Land hinter dem Regenbogen, Das, 6, 11, 12, 42, 45, 56, 63, 80, 81, 82, 90–98, 105–6, 145, 181, 224 Leben der Anderen, Die, 6, 16, 97, 108, 192, 225 Leben ein Traum, 151, 224 Lehmann, Christian, 178 Leipzig im Herbst, 178, 179, 183, 185–88 Letztes aus der DaDaeR, 6, 8, 22–28, 38–45, 48, 51, 52–53, 59, 63, 89, 105, 106, 160; cabaret version of, 38 Letztes Jahr Titanic, 173, 179, 185, 186, 187–93 Leuchtkraft der Ziege, Der, 176–77, 203–5, 209 Eine Liebe in Konigsberg, 228 Liebmann, Irina, 25 Lied von der Erde, Das, 95 Little Big Man, 72 Lives of Others, The. See Leben der Anderen, Das Loeser, Tony, 5, 108 Löser, Claus, 8, 61, 62, 208, 211 Love in Königsberg. See Liebe in Königsberg, Eine low-budget productions, 3, 5–6, 63 Lüdtke, Alf, 125 Maaz, Hans Joachim, 126 Mädchen aus Wittstock, 175, 181 Mäde, Hans Dieter, 28, 80, 222, 224 Mahler, Gustav, works by: Das Lied von der Erde, 95

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INDEX Mann mit Krokodil, 177 Marriage of Maria Braun, The. See Ehe der Maria Braun, Die Martha (Böttcher), 176 Martha (Fassbinder), 51 Marx, Karl, 11, 41, 43, 70, 85, 86, 92, 95, 96, 203 Mauer, Die, 142 McGee, Laura, 208 Meh und Weh, 27, 38, 39, 41, 44, 49, 63, 232 Meine Liebe, Deine Liebe, 151, 153 Meine Waffen sind nicht gebrochen-nur mein Herze brach, 99, 168 Die Meisenwürger proben, 38 melodrama, 2, 126, 161, 210 Mensching, Steffen, 6, 38, 47, 51. See also Meh und Weh; Wenzel und Mensching Mensching und Wenzel. See Meh und Weh; Wenzel und Mensching Menzel, Jiří, 65 Menzel, Jiří, works by: Closely Observed Trains, 67–68 Meves, Hans Dieter, 118, 120 Ministerium für Staatssicherheit. See Stasi Miraculi, 25, 63, 64, 65, 66, 77, 81–85, 94, 96, 99, 113, 224 Misselwitz, Helke, 1, 4, 6–7, 9, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 21, 22, 90, 105, 139–66, 176, 177, 184 Misselwitz, Helke, works by: Engelchen, 142, 165, 166; Die fidele Bäckerin, 12, 143, 144–45, 146, 153; Fremde Oder, 144, 151; Gundula Schulz-Akt Fotographie, 145, 166; Haus.Frauen, 142, 151–52, 166; Herzsprung, 8, 12, 45, 139, 140, 142, 143, 156–65, 166, 213; Leben ein Traum, 151, 224; Meine Liebe, Deine Liebe, 151, 153; Quartier der Illusionen, 139, 142, 144, 151, 153; Sperrmüll, 15, 139, 142, 143, 144, 149–50, 156, 157; Stillleben—eine Reise zu den Dingen, 165, 166; TangoTraum, 142, 153–55, 166, 206; Wer fürchet sich vorm schwarzen Mann, 15,

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142, 143, 146–49, 151, 157, 166; Winter Adé, 15, 139, 140–42, 144, 151, 152, 153, 161, 162, 165–66, 181, 204 Mitic, Gojko, 71, 72, 77 Mörder sind unter uns, Die, 80–81 Morgenstern, Christian, 204 Murderers Are Among us, The. See Mörder sind unter uns, Die My Last Sigh, 89, 90, 128 Nachwuchsgruppe, 1, 4, 9, 142, 206– 8, 211, 215; manifesto by, 5–7, 9, 11, 60 Naughton, Leonie, 225 Nemec, Jan, works by: The Party and the Guests, 84 Neues aus der DaDaeR, 38 Neustadt, 197 New German cinema, 8, 10–12, 13, 63, 128 Night Mail, 89–90 Nikolaikirche, 108 Novalis, 6, 87, 96 Oberhausen Film Festival, 184 Oberhausen manifesto, 3, 11 O’Brien, Mary Elizabeth, 208, 210 Ofenbauer, 142, 175 Olle Henry, 4, 66, 79–84, 90, 95 “Ostalgie,” 14, 15, 110 Ostpreussenland, 175 Party and the Guests, The, 84 Pehnert, Horst, 206–7, 216 penck, a. r., 61, 62 Penn, Arthur, works by: Bonnie and Clyde, 226, 227; Little Big Man, 72 Persiel, Marten, works by: This Ain’t California, 62 Plenert, Thomas, 25, 44–46, 51, 59, 131, 141, 169, 172 Polizeiruf 110, 221 Prager, Brad, 3 Prague Spring, 22, 24, 29, 33, 37, 50 Prenzlauer Berg, literary scene in, 25, 27, 32–33, 61 Prenzlauer Berg Walzer, 143

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258

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Production Group DaDaeR, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 13, 18, 22, 25, 26, 45, 64, 65, 90, 97, 105–6, 107, 110, 112, 115, 125, 127, 133, 155, 156, 211 Production Group document, 174–76 Psycho, 4, 130 Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 4, 63, 85, 86 Quartier der Illusionen, 139, 142, 144, 151, 153 racism, depiction of, 2, 52, 156, 160– 63, 189, 195–99, 221, 228 Rangerier, 142, 143, 175 Reitz, Edgar, 110 Richter, Erika, 36, 78, 84 Richter, Rolf, 91 Richter, Sebastian, 178, 182, 194 Riefenstahl, Leni, works by: Triumph des Willens, 79 Rock ’n’ Roll, 48 Robb, David, 27 Roehler, Oskar, works by: Die Unberührbare, 122 Romanticism, 4, 10, 37, 64, 69, 70, 86–88, 92–93, 96, 140, 157, 158– 59, 164, 166, 220 Rüsch, Heinz, 47, 179 Russian avant-garde film, 4, 10, 12, 63, 65, 66, 85–86, 89 Ruttmann, Walter, works by: Berlin, Sinfonie der Grossstadt, 140, 183 Sabrow, Martin, 16 Schenk, Ralf, 10, 29, 78, 85, 158, 207, 216, 227 Schernikau, Ronald M., 49, 121–22 Schieber, Elke, 177–78, 185, 207 Schlegel, Friedrich, 9 Schleime, Cornelia, 8, 61 Schlöndorff, Volker, 9 Schlüssel, Die, 28, 33 Schmidt, Evelyn, works by: Das Fahrrad, 206–7 Schnitzler, Karl Eduard von, 24 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 113–14 Schubert, Franz, works by: Winterreise, 87, 89, 139, 140

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Schultz, Rainer, 178 Schütz, Helga, 33 Scott, Ridley, works by: Thelma & Louise, 132, 224, 226 Seemann, Horst, works by: Zwischen Pankow und Zehlendorf, 37 Sekretär, Der, 65, 69–70 Shakespeare, William, works by: King Lear, 26–28, 37–38 socialism: early days, 80, 90; end of, 14–16, 44, 94–95, 109, 141, 186, 191; real existing, 41, 48, 49, 65, 77, 116, 120, 122, 124, 126, 129, 143, 191 Sollorz, Michael, 105, 113, 122 Sonnenallee, 111–12, 127 Sperrmüll, 15, 139, 142, 143, 144, 149–50, 156, 157 Stadt der Engel, oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud, 14, 165 Stars, 142, 175, 181 Stasi, 8, 16, 21, 28, 36, 37, 41, 49–51, 61, 62, 77, 79, 80, 108, 110, 115, 117, 124, 125, 126, 130, 179, 185, 189–92, 195, 210, 212, 225 Stau, 178, 197 Staudte, Wolfgang, works by: Die Mörder sind unter uns, 80–81 Stein, 23, 26–38, 213, 215, 232 Stilles Land, 125, 127, 230–32 Stillleben-eine Reise zu den Dingen, 165, 166 Stubbe-Von Fall zu Fall, 221, 224, 226 super-8 film, 8, 60–62, 204, 208, 211 Tambari, 66, 67 Tangospieler, Der, 1, 37, 106, 126 TangoTraum, 142, 153–55, 166, 206 Tanz im Volkshaus, 67–69, 81, 149, 206 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 8, 63, 86, 90 Thelma & Louise, 132, 224, 226 This Ain’t California, 62 Triumph des Willens, 79 Triumph of the Will. See Triumph des Willens Trompete, Glocke, letzte Briefe, 222–23 Tschörtner, Petra, 143, 151, 165, 176

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INDEX Tschörtner, Petra, works by; Berlin Prenzlauer Berg, 143 Tuba wa duo, 46–48 Ulbricht, Walter, 10, 131 Unberührbare, Die, 122 Unsere Familie, 105, 127–32 utopianism, loss of, 14–16, 21, 23, 26, 27, 33, 35, 41, 42, 46, 83, 91, 92, 94, 95, 98, 117, 122, 124, 129, 131, 150, 191, 192, 204, 209 Verdacht, Der, 1, 108 Vergangenheitsbewältigung, 14, 163, 191, 193 Versprechen, Das, 126, 170 Verweigerung, Die, 22, 26, 29, 49–51, 61 Voigt, Andreas, 1, 4, 9, 13, 14, 17, 21, 51, 141, 143, 151, 157, 163, 229; Leipzig films by, 13–14, 172, 178–80 Voigt, Andreas, works by: Alfred, 13, 172, 174, 177, 180–85, 187, 188, 194, 195, 199, 201; Glaube, Liebe, Hoffnung, 172, 178, 179, 195–99; Grenzland-eine Reise, 175; Große weite Welt, 174, 179, 192, 193–95; Leipzig im Herbst, 178, 179, 183, 185–88; Letztes Jahr Titanic, 173, 179, 185, 186, 187–93; Mann mit Krokodil, 177; Ostpreussenland, 175 Vorspiel, 4, 209, 213, 217–19, 222, 224, 227 Waiting for Godot, 39, 125, 203, 230–32 Weiß, Ulrich, 3, 12, 13, 14, 17, 43, 66–85, 125, 140, 149, 153, 159, 181, 206, 222, 224, 228, 230, 232 Weiß, Ulrich, works by: Blauvogel, 12, 23, 60, 71–77, 206; Dein unbekannter Bruder, 14, 65, 66, 75, 76–80, 81, 82, 84, 126, 153, 222, 223–24; Meine Waffen sind nicht gebrochen-nur mein Herze brach, 168; Miraculi, 25, 63, 64, 65, 66, 77, 81–85, 94, 96, 99, 113,

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224; Olle Henry, 4, 66, 79–84, 90, 95; Tambari, 66, 67; Tanz im Volkshaus, 67–69, 81, 149, 206 Welz, Peter, 1, 9, 11, 12, 17, 21, 105–38, 229 Welz, Peter, works by: Banale Tage, 3, 6, 27, 45, 107–32; Burning Life, 110, 131–32, 224; Unsere Familie, 105, 127–32; Willkommen in der Kantine, 3, 4, 127, 129–30 Wende, 2, 21, 26, 27, 46, 49, 51, 52, 64, 66, 97, 105, 107, 110–11, 125, 143, 145, 163, 165, 177, 188, 192, 199, 209, 215, 221, 226 Wendeflicks, 2, 4, 186 Wenders, Wim, works by: Himmel über Berlin, 94 Wenn Du gross bist, lieber Adam, 33 Wenzel, Hans-Eckardt. See Meh und Weh; Wenzel und Mensching Wenzel und Mensching, works by: Altes aus der DaDaer, 38; Letztes aus der DaDaeR (Cabaret version) 38; Die Meisenwürger proben, 38; Neues aus der DaDaeR, 38. See also Meh und Weh Wer fürchet sich vorm schwarzen Mann, 15, 142, 143, 146–49, 151, 157, 166 Whiskey mit Wodka, 232 Wilkening, Thomas, 4, 5–6, 8, 9, 22, 64, 97, 105–6, 108, 156 Willkommen in der Kantine, 3, 4, 127, 129–30 Winter Adé, 15, 139, 140–42, 144, 151, 152, 153, 161, 162, 165–66, 181, 204 Winterreise, 87, 89, 139, 140 Wolf, Christa, 33, 36 Wolf, Christa, works by: Stadt der Engel, oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud, 14, 165 Wolf, Gerhard, 61 women filmmakers at DEFA, 140–43 Zschoche, Hermann, works by: Hälfte des Lebens, 87–88 Zwischen Pankow und Zehlendorf, 37

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REINHILD STEINGRÖVER is Associate Professor of German and Film Studies in the Department of Humanities at the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester. Cover image: Architect Daniel and daughter Johanna inspect the site of the future housing project in Peter Kahane’s Die Architekten. Courtesy of DEFA Stiftung; photograph by Christa Köfer. Cover design by Lindsay Starr.

Last Features

LAST FEATU R ES

668 Mt. Hope Ave., Rochester, NY 14620-2731, USA P.O. Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.camden-house.com www.boydellandbrewer.com

conditions. Drawing on archival research and interviews with the directors, writers, and editors of the films in question, each chapter examines specific films from the last year of DEFA, contextualizing the analysis of these “last features” with a comprehensive discussion of the directors’ overall oeuvres, the historical changes in the studio and the country, and the lasting importance of these films today.

Steingröver

Last Features is the story of forgotten films made during the time of German unification. With leftover GDR funds and under chaotic conditions, a group of young East German filmmakers produced around thirty stylistically diverse films. Most of these films were lost in the political upheaval of the Wende, disappearing until the 2009 Wendeflicks festival in Los Angeles brought them back for an international audience. Now available on DVD, these films provide unique insights into the generational struggle in the DEFA studio, East German youth culture in the 1970s, women directors at DEFA, the relationship between the artist and the state, and the protests of 1989. Last Features focuses in particular on the production group “DaDaeR,” the creation of which in 1989 fulfilled a longstanding request by the last generation of DEFA directors for freer production

EAST GERMAN CINEMA’S LOST GENERATION

Reinhild Steingröver