Film Alert 101: Sixty Years of International Art Cinema - Bruce Hodsdon continues his series - 6 (35) Eastern Europe - East Germany

The DEFA generation

The postwar formation of the sole production company in the East, the state-controlled DEFA, was officially founded as a Soviet company in1946. It was set-up at the ex-UFA studio at Potsdam-Babelsberg with a traditional studio structure modelled on pre-war UFA and Hollywood. The immediate postwar years saw the production of several enduring classics most notably Wolfgang Staudte's anti-Nazi thriller Dit Mörder sind unter uns / The Murderers are Among Us (1946) filmed prior to the setting up of the DEFA studio, made with the permission of the Soviet occupiers after the Americans and French had refused permission. Stylistically Staudte re-employs expressionist lighting in the tradition of pre-Nazi UFA . It was released in the GDR in 1955 and the Federal Republic in 1971.

A major DEFA success at this time was Ehe I’m Schatten / Marriage in the Shadows (1947) directed by Kurt Maetzig, his first feature tells the story of a couple, actors being driven to suicide by the Nazis because she is Jewish. It was shown to an audience of more than 10 million across the then all four military sectors of Germany. Erich Engel directed Affaire Blum (1948) based on an actual crime committed in the early 1930s when the state authorities covered up a murder by blaming it on an innocent Jew. Staudte’s Der Untertan / The Kaiser’s Lackey (1951) for years banned from screening in West Germany, is adapted from a novel by Heinrich Mann, a biting satire on the German petit bourgeoisie. The promise of these postwar years at DEFA “under rather liberal Soviet supervision” ended around 1950 when the Soviet film officials handed DEFA over to German Stalinists after the foundation of the GDR. Film production reached a low point in 1952. A Communist Party conference proclaimed a new doctrine to intensify the methods of ‘socialist realism’ using ‘positive socialist heroes’ and dealing more with the problems of the working class movement. Few such films were actually produced DEFA preferring to follow a policy of presenting the GDR as the inheritor of the German cultural tradition by adapting classic dramas and famous fairytales and also entering into a series of co-productions mainly with France (Bock 628).

Konrad Wolf

The Soviet Thaw of 1956 following Krushchev’s denunciation of Stalinism, encouraged an emerging generation of German directors to find new ways of dealing with contemporary and anti-Fascist topics. Bock identifies the most important of this postwar DEFA generation as Konrad Wolf (1925-82) whose Jewish father, a doctor and well-known author, Friedrich Wolf, was an outspoken Communist Party member in Germany from 1928. Konrad left for Moscow with the family in 1934 to live in exile where, as a naturalised Soviet citizen he served in the Red Army during the war and began studying film in Moscow in 1949. He started directing at DEFA in the 50s. Following the Soviet crackdowns in Hungary and Poland in 1956 Wolf was one of the critics of Ulbricht’s regime in East Germany, maintaining faith for more democratic developments (Liehm 260). That he managed to hold his position seems based on the intent of the authorities not to incur further loss of creative talent in the postwar years.

Wolf’s first popular success was Lissy (1957) based on a novel written in the 30s by F.C. Weiskopf, the portrait of a working class girl set in one of three main categories of subject put to the severe test of political correctness: a film set in the 30s and the rise of Nazism. Wolf’s screen adaptation remains close to the novel in conveying a psychologically convincing portrait of fascism’s appeal to the petty bourgeoisie in the careful treatment of milieu and atmosphere. His deployment of montage has its origins in his early training in the Soviet Union coupled with a documentary quality in compositions arising from his familiarity with Italian Neo-Realism (Silberman).

Lissy

In place of genres there were categories of subject based on the past: films about the 30s and the rise of fascism; films about the war and immediate postwar years; films about contemporary GDR society. DEFA also balanced heavy-handed ideological content by filming more suspense dramas and comedies.

Wolf’s fourth film, Sonnensucher/ Sun-seeker (1958), filmed during the post-Stalinist thaw, is a bleak portrayal of the lives of German and Russian uranium miners in the late 40s in a neo-realist inspired style. It was withdrawn just prior to its premiere and was not officially released until 1972. The reason for its banning had nothing to do with the style or content of the film but, typical of the GDR’s political subservience, at the time of the film’s opening the Soviet Union called for the banning of nuclear weapons (259).

Sterne/Stars (1959), co-directed by Wolf with Rangel Vulchanov, is the story of a Nazi officer who falls in love with a Greek Jewish girl while escorting prisoners to a prison camp in Bulgaria. It was “exceptional for its poetic depiction of a small Bulgarian town in wartime […] For the first time in an East German film, feelings take precedence over the prejudices of the time.” (Liehm 263). Stars won a Special Jury prize at Cannes and was widely distributed internationally.

“A paradigmatic DEFA treatment” of Jews by the Nazis, the remake of a 1938 Soviet film, Professor Mamlock (1961), based on a play written by Wolf's father while in exile in France in 1933, the story of an apolitical professor who takes up the anti-Nazi cause too late. In the Liehm's view Mamlock is well below Wolf's best work, to which he seemed to concur, although it was a modest box office success. When asked why he remade the film Wolf said he thought the central focus was not the persecution of the Jews but the destiny of a liberal intellectual forsaken by his class.

Der geteilte Himmel/Divided Sky (1964) from a ‘new novel’ by Christa Wolf (not related to the director) was rewritten for the screen by Konrad Wolf working with the author in the culmination of his earlier efforts to find a new narrative form in telling the novel’s story of lovers separated by the border of the two Germanys. Using flashbacks interwoven with images of the present, Wolf put together fragments of the heroine’s conversations, memories, and introspections in which the psychology of a divided country the fundamental theme in the book, “yields primacy on the screen to social argumentation” (Liehm 267). Wolf’s treatment aroused controversy about the acceptability of formalism versus a more conservative classical style of storytelling.

Frank Beyer

Bock notes that “some of the most interesting stylistic approaches were to be found in films that dealt with the Fascist past, a field that was politically correct” (629). Frank Beyer (1932-2006), a graduate of the Prague Film Academy, took “a more human approach” to his fictional filmmaking by concentrating on sentimental aspects of stories in which human destinies were melodramatically presented while political aspects were at times even relinquished altogether from the script as in Beyer’s debut Zwei Mutter/Two Mothers (1957). He followed this theatrical style with a Spanish Civil War story, Five Cartridge Cases (1960), tracing the theme through the lives of five people. He used expressionistic techniques to evoke the atmosphere of pre-and post war Germany in Koningskinder / Invincible Love (1961). The influence of the new Polish and Czech cinemas was evident in Beyer’s Konigskinder /Royal Children (1962). He then made several anti-fascist films, the stylistically experimental Star Crossed Loves (1962) and Naked Among Wolves (1963), a classic anti-Nazi DEFA drama set in Buchenwald concentration camp, a story of prisoners risking their lives to hide a Jewish boy.

The closing of the East-West border in August 1961 marked by the construction of the Berlin Wall, resulted in a short-lived hope amongst artists and intellectuals in the GDR - especially those favourable to socialist ideals - for more freedom to criticise internal social and economic problems (ibid). Frank Beyer hinted at economic difficulties in a comedy Karbid und sauerampfer/ Carbide and Sorrel (1963). Other directors were working on new critical films in November 1965 when the crackdown came initiated by Party Secretary Walter Ulbricht’s letter to Kurt Maetzig criticising his film,The Rabbit is Me (1965), and calling for opposition to deviations from the party’s ideological orthodoxy. The attack was concentrated against voices calling for a more liberal cultural policy. A number of new films were criticised by the Plenary Session of the Central Committee that ostensibly “sullied the first German state of workers and farmers.” As the Liehms put it, “none of [the ‘rabbit’ films] found their way into movie theatres, and all that was left of the DEFA’s 1965-66 season was a pile of rubble.”

The Rabbit is Me

Almost the whole of DEFA’s production team was accused and indicted for ‘scepticism’ and ‘subjectivism’. The top executives at DEFA were removed and some directors careers were destroyed. Konrad Wolf resisted, formulating notes for discussion raising the question : “What now?…If all our films dealing with contemporary topics are wrong- then something must be wrong with the ideology - clear logic!” DEFA retreated into making Indianerfilme’ (‘Red Indian films’) “showing how native Indians were suppressed by greedy white Americans - some even containing allusions to the Vietnam war” (Bock 630).

Beyer was obliged to take up a new career in tv production and theatre after Spur fer Steine/ Track of Stones (1966) because he failed to conform to the myths surrounding the “heroes of socialist labor.’’ Even though Beyer played down the hypocritical character of a careerist Party secretary as it was portrayed in the best selling novel, after a successful opening the film was withdrawn “for distorting the image of our socialist reality” (Liehm 361). He returned to feature filmmaking in 1975 with his greatest critical and popular success, Jakob der Lugner / Jakob the Liar. “Because of its subject (a poetic tale of life in a Jewish ghetto during the Nazi era) the film was turned down by the Moscow Film Festival but became East German entry in the Berlin Festival, the first ever to compete in the West (Liehm 361).

Jacob the Liar

An autobiographical testimony Ich war neunzehn / I was Nineteen (1968), based on Wolf's wartime experiences as a German-born Soviet soldier in Germany during the last days of the war invites the construction of questions and answers on identity; Nineteen and Stars, established Wolf's international reputation. All his films in this decade plus Mama Ich lebe / Mama I'm Alive (1976) deal either with the Nazi past or the formative years of the GDR, made with Wolf's ability to dramatise great historical moments with social and political changes focused through individual subjectivity (Leonhard 61).

All the leading DEFA directors, including Wolf, ran into problems with contemporary subjects. They reacted by turning to the 'safe' topics of anti-fascism or disguising politically controversial contemporary themes by employing literary classics or the biographies of artists as a means of exploring the conflict between the individual and society. Wolf directed the historical epic Goya or the Hard Way to Enlightenment (1971) in fulfilment of a long standing intention on his part to film a parable of the artist’s destiny in society. Goya is adapted from a novel which focuses on the Spanish artist's personality as he asserts himself against opposing social forces – monarchy, church, revolution. It was given maximum funding in a co-production with the Soviet Union employing actors and technicians from eight countries to achieve 'artistic quality’.The tendency towards a Hollywood epic for international and box office success was far removed, aesthetically speaking, from Wolf's small scale films in historical settings. Silberman comments that Wolf took the opportunity in Goya to also “explore the historical and psychological limits of an artist in exile echoing the novelist Feuchwinger's own experience in political exile and Wolf's own practical knowledge of the effect of constraints on the imagination in the GDR.”

Wolf continued the theme of the artist in society with a Kohlhaase screenplay but in a very different mode in Der nackte Mann auf dem Sportsplatz / The Naked Man in the Sports Ground (1973), based on the life of one of East Germany's most important sculptors Werner Stötzer in an episodic satirical tragi-comedy free of stereotypes in alluding to the Nazi persecution on the Jews alongside the often unsuccessful daily struggle of the artist. The aesthetic differences between these two films and and also between them and Solo Sunny (1979) are striking. The latter is about the problem-driven life of a nightclub singer, focusing on the individual and what art means to her. Rather than serving society, she struggles for a balance between professional and personal needs, her art offering the possibility of self-realisation.

Solo Sunny

Silberman concludes that Wolf's sensitivity to the past in much of his previous work adapted to the needs of East Germany in the present, is further shaped by his collaboration with talented writer Wolfgang Kohlhaase beginning with I was Nineteen. Kohlhaase had already established a reputation for successful scenarios about the problems of youth. They controversially decided, if only superficially, to return to what Silberman refers to as the 'action mode' of Lissy, Wolf's first popular success. For Solo Sunny (1979) they chose a contemporary protagonist but with a dramatic but open-ended plot and characterisation involving the rhythms of performance, her unhappy love affair and attempted suicide. This “barely conceals the intrinsically episodic character of the dramaturgy developed by Wolf over the preceding twenty years.” On its release the Party immediately reacted, not by imposing censorship but by demanding in the official press a more positive view of 'socialist society'. This alarmed and convinced Wolf, in his words, “of the need for debate on immediate, real, everyday life in the present which is full of conflicts and questions.” Solo Sunny, a success with audiences in both East and West Germany, seemed to signify a turning point in Wolf's career in a more relaxed political environment only to be cut short by his premature death.

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Marc Silberman “Remembering History: The Filmmaker Konrad Wolf” New German Critique 49 Winter 1990

Sigrun D. Leonhard in Post New Wave Cinema in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union ed. D Goulding 1989

Mira & Antonin J Liehm The Most Important Art East European Film After 1945 1977 pp.259-71, 359-68

Hans-Michael Bock “The DEFA Story” The Oxford History of World Cinema ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith 1996

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Previous entries in this series can be found if you click the following links

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema: 1960-2020 - Tables and Directors Lists to Accompany Bruce Hodsdon's Series

Notes on canons, methods, national cinemas and more

Part One - Introduction

Part Two - Defining Art Cinema

Part Three - From Classicism to Modernism