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The Adventures of Werner Holt

Posted: July 7, 2012 in Joachim Kunert, Nazis, WWII
Tags: Arno Wyzniewski, Christa Helwig, Dieter Noll, Gerhard Helwig, Klaus-Peter Thiele, Manfred Karge, Rolf Sohre, school, students

Germans have such a complicated relationship with their history. They understand well the atrocities of WWII and the kind of thinking that led to it, but, at the same time, they were the bad guys in that fight and they know it. Beyond the inescapable evil of the top officials and “just doing my job” excuses of military brass, how does the Average Joe reconcile his part in the war? Over the years, both the GDR and the FRG made films that tackled this question. In West Germany, films like The Bridge (Die Brücke), Stalingrad (Hunde, wollt ihr ewig leben), and Das Boot examined the issue from a strongly anti-war perspective. East Germany took it further, with films such as Stars, The Gleiwitz Case, and I Was Nineteen, looking at the war from nearly every angle. The Adventures of Werner Holt (Die Abenteuer des Werner Holt), like Wolfgang Staudte’s Rotation, and Bernhard Wicki’s The Bridge, examines the war from the perspective of young people who are ignorant of the facts, filled with patriotic enthusiasm, and ready to fight. The film is based on book one of a two part series by Dieter Noll. The book was required reading in East German schools and remains well-respected in unified Germany. Both the film and the book follow the exploits of the title character and his best friends as they go from enthusiastic army recruits, ready to fight for das Vaterland, to disillusioned soldiers, aware that they are fighting for the wrong side.

The story primarily centers around Werner Holt and his buddy, Gilbert Wolzow. Wolzow is a big lummox who comes from a military family and is anxious to prove himself in combat. He is intensely nationalistic and ready to die for Germany. Holt, on the other, hand is a thoughtful and rebellious young man, already prone to challenging authority in school. These two have little in common. It is only through an incident involving a smashed aquarium that they become friends at all, so it’s only a matter of time before the two part ways. The film follows the duo as they go from school to basic training to the Eastern Front. Joining them on this journey are other schoolmates including Holt’s thoughtful friend Sepp, who acts as the voice of reason in the film, and the frail and sensitive Peter, a talented pianist who is initially rejected from the army but later drafted as the Nazis started throwing everybody they could find into the fight towards the end of the war.

In the book, it’s the Americans that Holt is fighting against, and it is the Americans that eventually capture him. The movie shifts the story to the east, with the Russians as the opposing force. Holt’s capture is not shown, nor is it addressed, but it matters little; the story is complete and the film stands on its own as a masterpiece in DEFA’s catalog. The most startling difference between the book and the film is in its structure. The book maintains a fairly linear timeline. We follow Holt from his student days to his eventual desertion and capture. Kunert felt that this wasn’t really working in the film, and chose instead to give his movie a nonlinear structure, relying on flashbacks to tell the story (for more about Joachim Kunert, see The Second Track).

The book’s author, Dieter Noll, was one of the best and most respected writers in East Germany. He was a strong adherent to the ideals of East Germany’s brand of communism. He joined the Communist Party of Germany after the war and was a member of the SED and the East German Writers’ Guild (Schriftstellerverband), for which he served as acting chairman for several years. In 1979, a group of writers confronted the East German authorities after the expatriation of Wolf Biermann. In a moment of supreme irony, Noll denounced them publicly and helped get nine of them expelled from the Writers’ Guild. Noll ended up looking more like the rabidly authoritarian Wolzow, than the protagonist of his novels. In 1984, his son followed Werner Holt’s lead and refused to fight for the GDR, immigrating, instead, to West Berlin, and eventually becoming a citizen of Israel, where he lives to this day.

As mentioned elsewhere on this blog, the auteur theory falls to pieces when it comes to East German movies. The idea of one mighty leader, controlling every aspect of a film is useless here (I think it’s useless when it comes to Hollywood films too, but that’s another story for another time). Everyone who worked on a film for DEFA had some say in their areas of expertise. On this film that was certainly true, and no one more than Rolf Sohre, the film’s cinematographer. Sohre and Kunert first collaborated on The Second Track, one the most visually striking movies DEFA ever produced. Werner Holt was their second film together and the results are no less spectacular, although markedly different. While The Second Track was all chiaroscuro and rich black night photography, this film is brighter, with much of the drama taking place in broad daylight. Sohre, nonetheless, is given moments to shine. In one scene, the camera focuses on a framed photograph sitting on a table, the focus shifts and we see Werner Holt’s face juxtaposed over the frame. In another scene, the camera spins around two dancers while the other dancers appear only as shadows on the wall. For that sequence, a rotating platform was constructed, with cut-outs used as stand-ins for the other dancers.

Production Managers and Art Directors are seldom given their due in film criticism. Writers might point out their contributions to set design, but rarely more than that. Gerhard Helwig’s input on Werner Holt was invaluable. Helwig made of habit of sketching his out ideas for a production in storyboard form. It was these same sketches that Kunert and Sohre used to construct many of the best shots in the film. The sequence of the jump cuts with the anti-aircraft guns, for example, was sketched out in exactly this fashion in Helwig’s notebook. Perhaps, if his sketchbooks still exist, it would be worth going back over the films he worked on and seeing how often his sketches were used to compose scenes. He may emerge as the secret director of many DEFA films.

The editor was an attractive young woman named Christa Schnitt, who ended up marrying Gerhard Helwig. As Christa Helwig, she went on to a productive career at DEFA, editing many popular East German films, such as Lot’s Wife (Lots Weiß), Apaches, and In the Dust of the Stars.

For almost everyone working behind the camera on this film, the Wende spelled the end of their careers, Kunert, Sohre, the Helwigs, et al, found it difficult to find work in unified Germany. For the actors, it was another story, Klaus-Peter Thiele, who played Werner Holt, had a long and successful career after wall fell. He worked primarily in television, both before and after the Wende, appearing the popular East German TV mini-series about WWII, Archiv des Todes (Archives of Death), and its sequel, Front Ohne Gnade (Merciless Front), and in popular post-wall German shows such as Unser Lehrer Doktor Specht (Our Teacher, Doctor Specht) and Hallo Robbie. He died October 2011. Likewise, Arno Wyzniewski, who played the conscious-stricken Sepp, continued working—also mostly in television—right up until his death in 1997. He was last seen in the daffy Canadian/German science fiction series, Lexx.

Manfred Karge, who played the dim-witted and authoritarian Wolzow, was primarily a theater actor. he made a few films, but his first love was always the stage. He got his start at the Berliner Ensemble, where he was discovered by Bertolt Brecht’s wife and muse, Helene Weigel. In 1993 he became a director at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts. More recently, he returned to the Berliner Ensemble. Today he is best known in the west as a playwright. His plays include Mauer Stücke, Lieber Niembsch, and Jacke wie Hose, which was translated into English as Man to Man and performed by Tilda Swinton. Karge’s The Conquest of the South Pole (Die Eroberung des Südpols) was also translated into English and first staged in Scotland before the wall fell starring a young Alan Cummings. Earlier this year it was staged at the Arcola Theatre in London.

Upon its release The Adventures of Werner Holt was a huge hit. In spite of its long running time (almost three hours) the film packed theaters. It sold over three million tickets in East Germany alone and was also popular in West Germany in spite of its East German origin. It remains one of the most respected films from the GDR.

IMDB page for this film.

Buy this film.

Manfred Karge article in The Independent (U.K.)

The Ernst Thälmann Films

Posted: June 17, 2012 in Kurt Maetzig, Nazis, WWII
Tags: Ernst Thälmann, Günther Simon, Hans-Peter Minetti, Karl Liebknecht, Karla Runkehl, KPD, Rosa Luxemburg, Spartacus League, weimar republic, Wilhelm Neef, Willy Schiller, WWI

Although he died five years before the country was created, Ernst Thälmann was East Germany’s greatest hero. He was to the GDR what George Washington is to America: an icon and a founding father, preternaturally moral and incapable of mistakes. Both men fought for freedom from oppression. In Washington’s case, that oppression came in the form of English taxes that were cutting into the profits of the American businessmen. In Thälmann’s case, much of the oppression came from the businessmen, who seemed to be the only people not affected by the staggering inflation that was strangling Germany’s working class.
DEFA made two Ernst Thälmann films: Ernst Thälmann – Sohn seiner Klasse (Ernst Thälmann – Son of the Working Class), and its sequel, Ernst Thälmann – Führer seiner Klasse (Ernst Thälmann – Leader of the Working Class). Although they premiered a year apart, they are, essentially, two halves of the same film. Both are directed by Kurt Maetzig with the same cast, crew, and visual style. Nonetheless, most people, including the director, consider the first film to be the better of the two. As is often the case with historical dramas intended for a home country crowd, the film assumes a certain level of familiarity with Ernst Thälmann and events in Germany‘s past, so some background is in order.

Ernst Thälmann (“Teddy” to his friends) was the son of a Hamburg businessman. At an early age, he found himself repulsed by the capitalist business model, favoring the hard-working world of the proletariat instead. He got a job as a stoker on a freighter and joined the SPD—Germany’s leading socialist party. During WWI, he was drafted to fight on the Western Front. Thälmann wasn’t crazy about the life of an infantryman, and often found himself at odds with his superiors. After the war he returned home to a country deep in throes of change. The SPD had splintered, with its more left-wing members abandoning the party to found the USPD (Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands), joining Rosa Luxemburg’s and Karl Liebknecht’s Spartacus League. But this agreement was not long lived. Fights broke out over whether the group should join the Comintern—the Soviet Union’s International Communist organization dedicated to spreading Russia’s version of communism. Eventually the USPD was absorbed back into the SPD and the Spartacus League members went on to found the KPD—a very pro-Soviet Communist party (I realize that I’ve abbreviated the facts here, but a fuller description would look like alphabet soup).

Unwilling to acknowledge their defeat, some of the military leaders, most notably Erich Ludendorff—the German general who famously considered Hitler “too moderate”—put forth the “stab-in-the-back” theory (Dolchstoßlegende), which maintained that Germany’s efforts to win the war were thwarted by traitors at home, specifically Jews and Communists. For some ex-soldiers returning from the front, this theory was compelling. It justified their sacrifices and denied their actual defeat. Many of these men joined the Friekorps—private militias made up of returning soldiers who took upon themselves to enforce whatever laws and positions they agreed with. It was members of one of these Freikorps that killed Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, dumping his body in the Tiergarten and hers in the Landwehr Canal.

After the murders of Luxemburg and Liebknecht, Thälmann took over the reins of the party, making it even more pro-Soviet and less compromising than before. Meanwhile the Freikorps got too big for their britches, eventually collapsing during the Kapp Putsch—a failed attempt to takeover the German government. After that, ex-Freikorps members looked for a new outlet for their rage and found it in Hitler’s newly-formed Nazi party.

Ernst Thälmann – Son of the Working Class

The first movie starts with a bang—literally—opening in the middle of a battle on the Western Front in 1918. Ernst Thälmann and a group of like-minded soldiers are in the thick of it when they hear the news of the German Revolution back home, the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II, and the release of Karl Liebknecht from prison. Thälmann and crew decide they’re tired of fighting for all the wrong reasons. They declare their alignment with the Bolsheviks in Russia and raise the red flag over their trenches. Right off the bat, we are introduced to four of the main characters in the story. On the side of good and righteousness are Thälmann (of course), and his close friend, Fiete Jansen. In the opposite corner are the evil Zinker and his stooge, Quadde—played by Werner Peters in a kind of extension of his character in The Kaiser’s Lackey.

After the mutiny in the trenches, the film moves away from the action on the front and goes to the political intrigues that were tearing Germany apart at that time. Zinker comes back into the picture as the leader of the Freikorps responsible for the deaths of Luxemburg and Liebknecht. Kurt Maetzig understood that for a film to be emotionally satisfying there has to be dramatic tension and some sort of resolution; tragic or otherwise. Unfortunately, history in this case rarely affords such opportunities. Historically, the men most responsible for the deaths of the two revolutionaries were Freikorps captain Waldemar Pabst and his lieutenant, Horst von Pflugk-Harttung, neither of whom faced any charges for the murders, and went on to long and successful careers in West Germany (Von Pflugk-Harttung worked as a Nazi spy during WWII, and faced charges for it, but the U.S. government decided that he was more anti-communist than fascist and that was okay by them). In Zinker we have a perfect villain and we are allowed a resolution to the story that history denies us.

Kurt Maetzig also recognized that, by himself, Thälmann was not that emotionally engaging a character. He could be stiff, didactic, and so devoted to the cause of communism as to render any romantic possibilities inconceivable. To help the story along, the films follow the romance of two of his co-conspirators, Fiete Jansen and Änne Harms. Jansen acts as sort of an apostle Paul to Thälmann’s Jesus. We see him travel from Spain to Russia, spreading the gospel according to Thälmann, turning his old buddy into a martyr for the cause. Jansen is in love with Änne Harms, whose father we met briefly at the beginning of the film. It is Änne that is the most compelling and the most tragic character. She is the only one with conflicted attitudes, so when she finally decides to join the party it’s not an empty gesture. We may admire Thälmann, but it is Änne that we care about.

Thälmann returns to Hamburg in time to hear the news of the deaths of Luxemburg and Liebknecht and immediately steps into his role as the leader of the KPD. He helps organize the Hamburg Uprising and organizes people to put down the Kapp Putsch (in truth, Thälmann’s part in the defeat of the Kapp Putsch was minor if anything).

As with Maetzig’s previous film, The Council of the Gods, much of the blame for the situation that led to the Nazis taking over Germany is laid not at the feet of the Germans themselves, but on the doorstep of American corporations, who manipulate the situation in Germany to line their pockets; a kind of communist version of Dolchstoßlegende.

Ernst Thälmann – Leader of the Working Class

The second film doesn’t have the luxury of a nice, dramatically satisfying resolution. After all, history tells us that the Nazis imprisoned Thälmann after the Reichstag fire, keeping him in solitary confinement for eleven years, eventually assassinating him in 1944 at Buchenwald and blaming it on an Allied bombing attack.

The film starts in Berlin in 1930, thus scrupulously avoiding some of the most scandalous years in Thälmann’s political career. The Nazis have not yet come to power, and Thälmann is now a member of the Reichstag and chief of the KPD. He is as resolutely communist as ever. Tensions have grown worse between the SPD and the KPD, and (according to the movie anyway) it is the failure of the members of the SPD to realize their folly that leads to Hitler’s ascendancy.

If Thälmann is treated with kid gloves in the first film, he is treated with downright reverence in the second. Understandably, then, the film does not show his eventual murder, preferring to end, instead, upon his transfer from Bautzen prison to Buchenwald in blaze of heroic sacrifice as the red flag of Soviet-style communism waves behinds him. It’s a bit much and Maetzig knew it, but anything else most likely would have been rejected by the SED authorities at that point.

Upon its initial release, the second film included scenes with Josef Stalin, showing his strong support for Thälmann. These scenes were added at the express request of party officials. When the film was released in October of 1955, Stalin was still being championed in East Germany and the Soviet Union as the greatest communist leader who ever lived. Five months later, at a speech in a closed session of the Twentieth Party Congress of the CPSU, Khrushchev delivered his On the Personality Cult and its Consequences speech, denouncing Stalin’s dictatorial rule, and heralding the beginning of the Soviet Union’s “De-Stalinization” program. Copies of the film were pulled and re-edited to remove the now-offending scenes, although the role of Josef Stalin still appears in the opening credits.

Director Maetzig was at the top of his form here. His work is crisp and satisfying, especially in the first film. In one memorably comic sequence, the action shifts from a parade of workers marching in the streets to a decadent cabaret where a man in a tux cheerfully sings “Yes We Have No Bananas.” Considering the difficulty East Germans had in acquiring this particular fruit, thanks the United Fruit Company’s near-stranglehold on production back then, this scene must have caused some chuckles. Maetzig would go on to make better films, but the fact that these films are still worth watching is a testament to his skill as a filmmaker.

Playing Thälmann is Günther Simon, the star of such East German classics such as Vergesst mir meine Traudel nicht! (Don’t Forget My Little Traudel), Meine Frau Macht Musik (My Wife Wants to Sing), The Sailor’s Song (Das Lied der Matrosen), and The Silent Star. Simon’s turn as Ernst Thälmann, was so believable that it actually threatened to hamper his career. When Hans Heinrich chose to cast him as the lead in his musical comedy, Meine Frau macht Musik, there was some push back from the authorities, who didn’t think the man who portrayed the great Ernst Thälmann should appear in something so light-hearted. Simon got the role anyway, however, and proved that he was as good at light comedy as he was he was at drama. Simon died in 1972, and is buried in the Dorotheenstadt cemetery in Berlin’s Mitte district.

As Fiete Jansen, Hans-Peter Minetti is an interesting combination of Mr. Nice Guy and iron-willed revolutionary. With Thälmann in prison for most of the second film, it is up to the Jansen character to provide most of the action. This is not an easy part to make interesting. In the first film, at least we get some opportunities to see Jansen interact with his future wife, Änne, but those are taken from us in the second film. He is a man alone, and most of his interactions are with people he sees only once. Minetti does a good job in the part, as well he should, coming from an acting family as he does. His father, Bernhard Minetti, was a successful actor in the Weimar days, and later during the Third Reich, when he appeared in Leni Riefenstahl’s Lowlands (Tiefland), and The Rothschilds, one of the most notoriously anti-Semitic films of the Third Reich. Hans-Peter, like many sons throughout history, rebelled against his father’s fascist philosophy and took up the communist cause. After WWII, Hans-Peter went on to a career in East Germany, while his father and his sister Jennifer worked in the west; primarily in theater. Because of his strong communist beliefs, Hans-Peter went on to become an important figure in the East Germany theatrical community, a fact that hindered his film career after the Wende. His son, Daniel Minetti, has gone on to a successful career in German television.

But it is Minetti’s counterpart, Karla Runkehl that really steals the show. As the strong yet vulnerable Änne Harms, Runkehl turns in a performance that she would never equal in her career. It became the model for the good socialist woman. For her work in the Thälmann films, she was awarded the Art Prize of the GDR in 1959. Runkehl got her start in acting at DEFA’s young people’s studio, and appeared in many films, mostly in supporting roles. She also had a successful career on the East German stage, making guest appearances in production throughout East Germany. Runkehl died on Christmas Eve, 1986 in Kleinmachnow.

It’s unfortunate that these films probably won’t see a theater screen in America any time soon, because their use of color is spectacular (my screenshots from a weak DVD copy don’t really do them justice). As others have noted, the cinematography rivals Jack Cardiff’s work in the Powell/Pressburger films. While most of the visual information in these films is painted in broad strokes of army green and sienna brown, the red flags, bandannas, and armbands of the communists pop out of the screen like fireworks. The battle sequences are as good as anything Hollywood ever came up with. DEFA had not yet discovered the joys of widescreen filmmaking, which is too bad because these sequences were practically made for that format.

Willy Schiller’s and Otto Erdman’s production design is almost perfect, from the battlegrounds on the Western Front to the labyrinthine catacombs of the Hamburg sewer system. The only weak spot in the production occurs in the second film during the bombing of the women’s prison, where the problems of scale are apparent. Having the Brandenburg Gate on their side of the border certainly helped give power to the KPD march scenes in the first film, but I couldn’t help but wonder what the American military folks a couple blocks away thought of all that marching and flag-waving.

Matching the film’s visual hyperbole, Wilhelm Neef’s score is epic and anthemic. This was the fifties, after all, and huge triumphant scores were the order of the day. Matching the pompous grandeur of the scores of Miklós Rózsa and Dimitri Tiomkin, Neef turns in a score that is simultaneously rousing and overblown. Primarily a classical composer, Neef’s score functions well enough on its own. In fact, if taken out of context and played by an orchestra, I suspect the score would work even better.

The Ernst Thälmann films were some of the most viewed films in the DEFA library, but those statistics are a little misleading. The Thälmann films were virtually required viewing in the GDR. Students and factory workers were bussed on field trips to movie houses to watch them. Almost everyone growing up in the GDR remembers watching these films at some point during their school days.

History has not been kind to Ernst Thälmann. It was he, after all, who was most responsible for splintering the German left wing into virulently opposing factions. His refusal to back Wilhelm Marx in the 1925 run-off election is largely blamed for siphoning just enough votes away from Marx to ensure Paul von Hindenburg’s election, paving the way for Hitler’s rise to power. The fact that Thälmann courted the Nazi vote during that party’s early years and worked with them in an attempt to overthrow the socialist government in Prussia is unmentioned in the films. Also glossed over the movies is the Wittorf Affair, an embezzlement scandal in the KPD that got Thälmann kicked out of party duties until Stalin stepped in and used the situation to seal Soviet control over the KPD. A control that haunted East Germany to its very end. Since the Wende, many of the schools, streets, and parks named in his honor in the eastern states of Germany have been renamed. More recently, researcher Klaus Schroeder wrote a piece for Der Tagesspiegel suggesting that any remembrance of Thälmann is unwarranted.

IMDB pages for these films:
Ernst Thälmann – Sohn seiner Klasse
Ernst Thälmann – Führer seiner Klasse

Buy these films.

The Kaiser’s Lackey

Posted: March 11, 2012 in DEFA, Nazis, Wolfgang Staudte, WWII
Tags: Bertholt Brecht, Der Untertan, Dreikaiserjahr, German Empire, Heinrich Mann, Helene Weigel, Horst Hans Sieber, Kaiser, Mother Courage, Robert Baberske, Simone Signoret, Werner Peters

The Kaiser’s Lackey is based on a book by Heinrich Mann. The actual title, Der Untertan, doesn’t translate well into English. As a consequence, it has been rendered variously as The Patrioteer, The Loyal Subject, The Man of Straw, and The Underdog. IMDB calls it The Man of Straw, which does have a poetic quality to it, but the film is currently available from the DEFA Library at UMass Amherst as The Kaiser’s Lackey, which is closer to the mark. [Note: For anyone curious about my website’s title formatting style, see “About the Titles” on the About page.]

As the titles Der Untertan and The Kaiser’s Lackey suggest, the film is the story of a man who subjugates himself to the whims of his superiors. The story takes place during the German Empire (Deutsches Kaiserreich), which lasted from 1871 to 1918. Most of the story revolves around, 1888, the so-called “Year of the Three Kaisers” (Dreikaiserjahr), when the country went through three rulers in quick succession, ending up with Wilhelm II, the man responsible for leading Germany into World War I. The film is the story of a man named Diederich Heßling—the Untertan of the title. With his blond twist of hair and chubby countenance, Heßling looks a bit like Tintin gone to pot. He is pompous and chauvinistic, and as full of himself as a man can be. The story starts with his birth and follows him to his crowning achievement: the installation of a gigantic bronze statue of the Kaiser in his town square.

What none of the various titles adequately reveal is the fact that, while Heßling willingly subjects his very soul to the Kaiser, he expects those beneath him to similarly devote themselves to him and his business. Heßling’s business is making toilet paper, and his crowning achievement is the production of toilet paper with nationalistic slogans printed on each sheet. As you’ve probably guessed by now, The Kaiser’s Lackey is a political comedy, and a mordant one at that.

The film was directed by Wolfgang Staudte, the premiere director during the early days of DEFA. Staudte got his start as an actor in the late twenties. He was, among other things, one of the students in The Blue Angel. At the beginning of his career, he worked primarily on stage, but because of his penchant for appearing in avant-garde plays, he found himself on the wrong side of the Nazis and was banned from the theater. He continued to work in radio and film, and often played in smaller roles, including one in the notoriously anti-Semitic, Jud Süß. During the thirties, he began directing short films and made his feature film debut in 1943 with Akrobat Schööön! (Acrobat Oooooh!). His second film, Der Mann, dem man den Namen stahl (The Man Whose Name was Stolen), was immediately banned by the Goebbels and Staudte’s career as a director was brought to a premature halt. He later remade the film for DEFA under the title Die seltsamen Abenteuer des Herrn Fridolin B. (The Strange Adventures of Fridolin B.).

Staudte was responsible for some of the best films to come out of East Germany during its early years. He directed the first DEFA film, The Murderers are Among Us, and other early classics including, Rotation and The Story of Little Mook. In 1955, a combination of a quarrel with Bertolt Brecht during the filming of Mother Courage (Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder)* and the restrictions imposed on him by DEFA were too much for him to take and he headed west; first to Holland, directing the popular kid’s film Ciske the Rat and its sequel, then later to West Germany, where he made several films, including the 1962 version of his former collaborator Bertolt Brecht ’s The Three Penny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper). From 1970 on, he worked primarily in television, directing episodes for the popular TV shows, Tatort and Der Kommisar, among others. He died in 1984 while working on Der eiserne Weg (The Iron Way), a five-part miniseries for ZDF television in West Germany.

The author of Der Untertan, Heinrich Mann, was Thomas Mann’s older brother. Mann was a successful writer prior to World War I, and had made a name for himself with his book Professor Unrat, which was later turned into the movie, The Blue Angel (Der blaue Engel), starring Marlene Dietrich in her career-making role. Der Untertan was scheduled for release in 1914, but the war put its publication on hold until 1918. Still stinging from World War I, the German public took to Mann’s caustic examination of how nationalism can lead men down dangerous and idiotic paths. The book was huge hit, but, as you can imagine, the Nazis didn’t think much of it. In 1933, after Hitler came to power, Heinrich Mann was one of the first 33 people that the Nazis declared personae non gratae (alongside author Lion Feuchtwanger and future President of the GDR, Wilhelm Pieck). Mann fled the country, eventually ending up in Santa Monica, California, where he and Lion Feuchtwanger worked as script editors. By 1950, Mann was broke and alone, his wife having committed suicide a few years earlier. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s red-baiting was gaining traction, and Mann was feeling very unwelcome in his new home. He was getting ready to leave the States and move to East Germany, where he had been elected as president of the German Academy of Arts, when he died.

The obnoxious lackey of the title is played by Werner Peters. Peters had worked in theater during the Third Reich, but his career as a movie actor didn’t begin until 1947, when he appeared in Zwischen gestern und morgen (Between Yesterday and Tomorrow), the first post-war, western sector film made by a German film company (Neue Deutsche Filmgesellschaft). His next few films were made at DEFA though, including The Blum Affair (Affaire Blum), Die Buntkarierten (The Girls in Gingham), Rotation, and Der Biberpelz (The Beaver Coat). After The Kaiser’s Lackey, he appeared in a few more East German films, including The Story of Little Mook, and the Ernst Thälmann movies, but, like directors Wolfgang Staudte and Falk Harnack, Peters decided to head west. He went on to appear in dozens of West German movies, as well as a few American ones, usually playing either a villain or a buffoon. He appeared in several of the Dr. Mabuse and Edgar Wallace films that were so popular in West Germany during the 1960s. Other films he was in include: The Devil Strikes at Night (Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam), Rosemary (Das Mädchen Rosemarie), 36 Hours, A Fine Madness, The Secret War of Harry Frigg, and The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. He was also a well-respected voice actor. It was his voice that people heard for Orson Welles in the German version of The Third Man.

The cinematography is by Robert Baberske, and it is impressive. Distorted images are used to heighten the absurdity of situations: After Heßling’s duel, we see the faces of his comrades twisted comically through their beer steins as they celebrate with him. When he is confronted by a superior on the academy grounds, the perspective is exaggerated, with Heßling appearing greatly foreshortened, as if being addressed by God. At the start of the film the images of Heßling’s parents are blurred around the edges, suggesting the distant and unclear memories that helped make him the man he became. [Note: for more information on Robert Baberske, see The Ax of Wandsbek.]

The music is by Horst Hans Sieber, who composed music for several shorts, propaganda films, and documentaries during the Third Reich. After WWII, he began composing music for feature films, starting with Der Kahn der fröhlichen Leute (The Happy Barge Crew), the first of the DEFA barge films by Hans Heinrich. He wrote at least one play (Ich heirate nur aus Liebe, 1950, published by Drei Masken Verlag), which suggests a theatrical background. That would make perfect sense given the highly theatrical nature of the music in this film. It is through the music that we first realize that we are dealing with a comedy. The film begins with nostalgic dance hall piano music, which suddenly switches to a lively fife and drum march, then a lullaby for harp and musical saw, ending with a full orchestra parade march. During the storm scene, when the statue of the Kaiser is being unveiled, the music swirls like the wind on the screen, as if several tunes are stirred up together. We hear the primary themes from the movie interspersed with the music of the Third Reich.

When the film was released in East Germany, it immediately generated negative comments in the western press. The film’s use of Nazi music, and its attacks on the upper-class and businessmen were not well received in West Germany. The film was banned outright and wouldn’t reach West German cinemas for another five-and-a-half years. Even then, the final scene was cut, along with the scene where a worker is shot for resisting a policeman. West Germany was much more sensitive to the subject of Nazis. Unlike East Germany, the Bundesrepublik quietly swept the Nazi trials under the rug and allowed some pretty heinous people to go back to work. People like Hans Globke, who served as the chief legal advisor in the Office for Jewish Affairs in the Ministry of Interior under Adolf Eichmann, but nonetheless was named by West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer as Director of the Federal Chancellory of West Germany; or Theodor Oberländer, a Nazi officer in charge of ethnic cleansing during WWII, and then—in a gesture of supreme irony—was named as Federal Minister for Displaced Persons, Refugees and Victims of War by Adenauer. The conservatives were in charge, and, like the United States, anyone whose philosophy leaned to the left was being marginalized. The Kaiser’s Lackey was too much for them to take. It would be years before people in the west would come to realize that they were looking at one of the greatest film to come out of either side of Germany during the 1950s.

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* Reportedly, this film version of Mother Courage was eventually released in a highly abbreviated version. The film starred Helene Weigel, Bertolt Brecht ’s second wife, and the woman most famously associated with the role of Mother Courage. It also features Simone Signoret in the role of Yvette Pottier, the camp prostitute. The film was assembled from what footage Staudte had shot and was released as one of four DEFA-made films distributed by the short-lived Pandora-Film Company in Stockholm. As of this writing the film appears to be lost.

Marriage in the Shadows

Posted: February 17, 2012 in Concentration Camps, DEFA, Kurt Maetzig, Love, Nazis, post-war years, WWII
Tags: actors, Anti-Semitism, Brigitte Horney, Eugen Klagemann, Friedl Behn-Grund, Goebbels, Ilse Steppat, Joachim Gottschalk, Meta Wolff, Paul Klinger, Wolfgang Zeller

Like Stars and Jakob the Liar, Marriage in the Shadows (Ehe im Schatten) deals with the subject of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany. Unlike those films, however, this one came out in 1947 when the Nuremberg Trials were still going on and new revelations about atrocities at the concentration camps were arriving every day. The people of Germany were still in shock and denial, and the Allies and the Soviets were actively engaged in policies of “denazification.” Part of this involved the banning and destruction of hundreds of books that were favorable to Nazis and militaristic thinking, reenacting Hitler’s book burnings from the opposing end of the political spectrum. Another part of the policy involved the distribution of films and literature designed to make Germans acknowledge their collective guilt; a kind of national finger-wagging. The most famous example of this was the documentary, Nürnberg und seine Lehre (Nuremberg – Its Lesson for Today), which was released in Germany in 1948, but didn’t reach American movie screens until 2010. Many of the policies put in place—especially those instituted by the Office of Military Government, United States (OMGUS)—seemed to be intentionally designed to humiliate the German people. In the U.S. sector, Hollywood films that were openly hostile to Germans were shown at theaters, often without subtitles. Not surprisingly, this approach wasn’t popular with either the local townspeople, or the theater owners who were conscripted to show the films.

While the western sectors intentionally dragged their feet on the process of re-establishing film production in Germany, the Soviets had DEFA up and running by May of 1946. The western allies, and in particular, the United States, which had a vested interest in promoting their Hollywood films in Europe, were not too happy about DEFA. Many of the early DEFA films were either banned or edited for release in the western sectors. Marriage in the Shadows was the first post-war German film to be screened uncensored in all four sectors. It was also the first one to address the subject of Jewish persecution, and is still one of the most unflinching films on the subject.

The film begins during the Weimar years. Hans Wieland and Elisabeth Maurer are lovers and popular stage actors. The audience especially adores Elisabeth, and the fact that she’s Jewish doesn’t affect their enthusiasm. When the Nazis comes to power, things begin to change. The first signs of this occur when they are on vacation and come across a man posting an sign on the beach banning Jews. Things keep getting worse until eventually Elisabeth is no longer allowed to perform on stage. As Hans’ career continues to rise, Elisabeth’s life gets harder and harder. After taking Elisabeth to a premiere of his new film, the couple runs into a Nazi official who is at first charmed by Elisabeth and later horrified to find out that she is a Jew. He orders her sent to a concentration camp, but the couple decides to commit suicide instead.

The story is dramatization of the events in the life of the German film and stage actor Joachim Gottschalk. Gottschalk was one of Germany’s most popular leading men; a screen idol who often played the debonair heartthrob. Gottschalk’s wife was Meta Wolff, a Jewish actress who had been highly successful on stage, but found her career abruptly halted with Hitler’s rise to power. Because of Gottschalk’s popularity with the public, the fact that his wife was Jewish was quietly overlooked—at least at first. In some versions of the story (including the one in the movie), Gottschalk made the mistake of taking his wife to a premiere where she charmed some Nazi officials. When Goebbels found out about this he was livid, partly because he hated—really hated—Jews, and partly because it was on his instigation that Gottschalk moved from the stage to the screen and became a movie star. After attempts to get Gottschalk to divorce his wife failed, Goebbels ordered Meta Wolff and their son shipped off to the concentration camp in Theresienstadt, and ordered Gottschalk to report to the Wehrmacht for service. Rather than comply, Gottschalk and his wife gave their son a sedative and then turned on the gas. All three were found dead, and were buried without ceremony at the Southwest Stahnsdorf cemetery near Potsdam. Only a few of their closest friends attended, including Brigitte Horney, who starred opposite Gottschalk in four of his films. News stories and obituaries about what happened to Gottschalk were strictly forbidden and no further mention was made of them while the Nazis were in power.

For most Germans, the end credit that the film was based on the story of Joachim Gottschalk was the first they learned of what had happened to the actor and his family. Although the film follows the facts of the story closely, it gets much of its power from Kurt Maetzig’s own experiences. Maetzig was born in Berlin, January 26, 1911. His mother was Jewish, and, like Meta Wolff, killed herself rather than face deportation to a concentration camp. Maetzig himself was born in 1911, and had just begun a successful career in film when the Nazis came to power. Following the Nuremberg laws, Maetzig was forbidden from working in the film industry. He joined the Communist Party and went underground. After the war, Maetzig was one of the founders of Filmaktiv, a group dedicated to restarting the film industry in Germany. It is from this group that DEFA was eventually established.

Marriage in the Shadows was Kurt Maetzig’s first feature film, and he clearly wanted to make a strong first impression. The film features more razzle-dazzle than any of his later films. Slow fades back and forth between scenes, cross-cutting, emotionally charged internal P.O.V. shots, and clever transitions are used throughout the movie. It is also, rather ironically, one of his more traditional films in other respects. The use of glamour-shot lighting and emotion-laden music hearken back to the melodramas of the 1930s.

That music was composed by Wolfgang Zeller. Zeller was a well-known film composer who made his first big splash in 1926 with his score for the animated film, The Adventures of Prince Achmed (Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed), the oldest existing feature-length animated film. Zeller wrote film scores for many silent films, including Carl Theodor Dreyer’s classic Vampyr. After the Nazis came to power, Zeller continued to work for them, providing the music for every variety of film, including several propaganda films. Most notoriously, he wrote the film score for the virulently anti-Semitic Jud Süß. Perhaps in an attempt to atone for his work during the Third Reich, Zeller imbues the score for Marriage in the Shadows with an intense emotionalism that occasionally overwhelms the visuals. Zeller did a few more films for DEFA, but his traditional, romantic musical style was better suited to the nostalgic films of West Germany. During the early days of DEFA he provided a few scores, but within a few years he was working exclusively in the west.

The cinematographers for Marriage in the Shadows were Friedl Behn-Grund and Eugen Klagemann, both of whom had worked for Tobis Filmkunst—Germany’s second largest film company after UFA—during the Nazi years. Like Wolfgang Zeller, Friedl Behn-Grund’s career began during the silent era. During the Third Reich, he was the cinematographer for Titanic, one of the few German films from the Nazi period that is still regularly shown throughout the world. During the early days of DEFA, Behn-Grund shot some of the most well-respected films to come out of that film company, including The Murderers Are Among Us (which he co-filmed with Klagemann), Die seltsamen Abenteuer des Herrn Fridolin B. (The Strange Adventures of Fridolin B.), Die Buntkarierten (The Girls in Gingham), The Blum Affair (Affaire Blum), and The Council of the Gods.

Eugen Klagemann, on the other hand, got his start as a still photographer in early 1930s, and moved to cinematography in 1943 with Kurt Hoffmann’s Ich werde dich auf Händen tragen (I’ll Carry You on My Hands). Unlike Behn-Grund, Klagemann continued to work in East Germany, even though he lived in a western sector of Berlin. After the wall went up on August 10, 1961, Klagemann’s access to DEFA was cut off. By that time, attitudes in West Germany towards the GDR were running hot and Klagemann was unable to continue his career as a cinematographer because of his perceived “collaboration with the enemy.”

The migration to West Germany was a common occurrence in the early days of the GDR in all fields, but especially in the movies. Many of the film technicians working for DEFA during the first few years were actually Wessis, but couldn’t find any work in the western sectors due to the Allied forces’ restrictive policies toward filmmaking. Once the West German film industry was back up and running, they were perfectly content to continue their careers closer to home. In some cases, film people who were actually from the Soviet sector decided to join the Republiksflucht and head west to the promise of better money. For Paul Klinger, who played Hans Wieland and was a West German (born in Essen), Marriage in the Shadows would be his only East Germany film. He would continue with a successful film and television career in the west, right up until his death in 1971, and in 2007, Germany had a postage stamp made in his honor. His co-star Ilse Steppat, who played Elisabeth Maurer, made a few more films for DEFA but by the mid-fifties also was working exclusively in the west. Most of the rest of the film crew ended up in the west as well, including, the editors (Alice and Herman Ludwig), the art director (Kurt Herith), and the Costume Designer (Gertraud Recke).

When the film was first shown it hit German moviegoers like a punch in the gut. Audiences attending the screenings are reported to have responded with somber silence; still sitting in their seats when the lights came on. Marriage in the Shadows signaled not only a new attitude for the German people, but a new kind of filmmaking. One that would flourish in the east, while the west was content to expend most of their effort making sentimental Heimatfilme.

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This film is not available commercially in the United States.

I Was Nineteen

Posted: July 22, 2011 in 11th Plenum, Berlin, DEFA, Feminism, Nazis, WWII
Tags: circus truck, communists, pelmeni, pillaging, rape, red army, Russians, sachsenhausen

Whether it’s Spielberg exploring the social dynamics of suburban children in E.T., or Paul Verhoeven recreating the horrors of war in Starship Troopers, a director inevitably brings some of his or her own past to a picture. Every so often, a filmmaker makes a movie that is completely personal. These run the gamut, from George Huang’s film à clef, Swimming with Sharks—about his time working as an intern for Joel Silver—to Oliver Stone’s Platoon, in which Charlie Sheen stands in for Stone as a young soldier in Vietnam, to Cameron Crowe’s recreation of his early years as a reporter for Rolling Stone magazine in Almost Famous. One of the best of these comes from East Germany. It is Konrad Wolf’s I Was Nineteen (Ich war neunzehn), which is based on his diaries from World War II.

Born near Stuttgart in 1925, Konrad Wolf’s father, Friedrich Wolf, was a well-known doctor, writer, and playwright. He was a champion of workers’ rights, and founded the Spieltrupp Südwest—a theater troupe that specialized in agitprop plays. He was a member of the Communist Party, and of Jewish descent, so naturally, when the Nazis came to power, the Wolf family had to leave the country to survive. They eventually settled in Russia when Konrad was eight. There, young Konrad came into contact with the film community when his father started working with Soviet filmmakers. The boy became fascinated with the medium and set himself to learning all aspects of film production. At the age of seventeen, he joined the Red Army and soon found himself fighting for Mother Russia against his Fatherland. He was nineteen when the Russians broke through the German line. Suddenly Konrad found himself in the odd position of a German acting as the Russian liaison in Germany.

Using Wolf’s diaries, Wolfgang Kohlhaase wrote the screenplay. Kohlhaase is best known for his Berlin-based stories of modern youths, but his ear for dialog, and the regional differences in Germany, made him a good choice for the job. He knows how people speak, and, more importantly, he knows how people keep silent. Kohlhaase’s script does a good job of framing the strange, almost inenarrable emotions Wolf must have felt arriving as he did as a stranger in his homeland; ashamed of his heritage, but unable to escape it.

The film begins in mid-April, 1945; shortly before the Russians reach the Oder river in their push toward Berlin. The war is virtually over, but nobody has bothered to tell Hitler, who is holed up in the Führerbunker beneath the New Reich Chancellery in Berlin. Gregor Hecker is a young lieutenant in the Russian army, and has been assigned to travel with the troops in an old VAZ circus truck equipped with a P.A. and a record player. It’s Gregor’s job to act as translator and to broadcast surrender requests to the German soldiers still fighting along the front. In a kind of Red Army road movie, he travels across the German countryside, meeting every type of person, learning new things, and examining what it means to be German as he goes. With him on his travels are Wadim, a Russian teacher-turned-soldier who is a student of all things German; the music-loving Sascha, Hecker’s easy-going superior; and a taciturn Mongolian named Dshingis, who drives the truck. At Bernau, Hecker is made commandant, and has to deal directly for the first time with other Germans. Until now, his oft-broadcast statement that he is a German has no deeper meaning to him. It is simply a statement of fact. As he meets other Germans, his heritage becomes as much a source of shame as an asset. At a May Day feast held by the Russians for a group of freed concentration camp prisoners, Wadim asks one of these men how he is supposed to explain how the Nazis came to power to his students when he gets back to Kiev. “Goethe and Auschwitz. Two German names. Two German names in every language.” But this is an East German film and the answer—that it was the manipulation by industrialists and corporations—seems facile. At the end of the film neither Gregor nor we are any closer to understanding the mindset of the Nazis, but when he again says he is a German, it now means something.

Criticism has been leveled at the film for its soft-pedaling of the touchy subject of the thousands—perhaps millions—of rapes committed by Russian soldiers at the end of the war. With the atrocities committed against their families by the German soldiers still fresh in their minds, the Soviets wanted the German civilians—who not only seemed oblivious to what the German army did in Russia, but actively denied that it happened at all—to experience the same pain. Women and children were repeatedly raped, men were beaten and killed, homes were trashed, and belongings were stolen as the Red Army cut a swath of destruction and terror through eastern Germany that made Sherman’s March to the Sea look like an afternoon stroll. [Note: For a more thorough treatment of the subject, see Max Färberböck’s A Woman in Berlin (Anonyma – Eine Frau in Berlin), starring Nina Hoss.]

Wolf was no dummy, though. He recognized that only way he would get this movie made was if he avoided talking too candidly about this subject. Two years earlier, the government had scrapped a years worth of movies because they didn’t like what they said, so Wolf treads carefully through this minefield. When a young German woman (Jenny Gröllmann) seeks asylum with Gregor, we understand that it’s because she feels safer with him, a German, than with the Russian invaders. And when he is shipped out, we see the fear in her eyes as he leaves. This was as close as Wolf could get to tackling the subject in a film that was made with a great deal of help from the USSR—and on the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution to boot. One should never underestimate an East German audience’s ability to read between the lines. You can bet they understood what he was tip-toeing around.

Wolf often shifts his visual style to match whatever story he is telling. It is one of the reasons that, although he considered by many to be the best director to come out of East Germany, he is rarely discussed in auteur terms. In I Was Nineteen, he moves away from the dazzling camerawork that punctuated Divided Heaven (Der geteilte Himmel) to a more natural style. Still, there are many scenes that betray a skilled and controlling hand behind the camera. In the opening moments of the film, while Gregor speaks via loudspeaker to the Germans along the Oder, we see a raft drift by. On it, a gallows is constructed, and on the gallows a hangs a man with a sign around his neck that reads: “Deserter! I am a Russian lackey” (“DESERTEUR Ich bin ein russen knecht,” the last part liberally translated in the First Run Features edition of the film as “I licked Russian boots.”). In another scene, as Gregor’s truck pulls away from Bernau, the camera keeps its lens trained on Jenny Gröllmann’s character until she disappears when the truck turns, reappearing a moment later, further away now, and eventually fading into the mist.

When the troops reach Sachsenhausen, the film suddenly includes scenes from an actual documentary in which a former guard at the death camp explains how the poison gas was administered. This footage is interspersed with scenes of Hecker taking a shower. The juxtaposition is simultaneously jarring and logical; the gas chamber showers and the real shower. The impression is that Hecker is trying to wash away what he has seen, perhaps even his own German identity. In the next scene, we see Gregor and his pals interviewing a German intellectual who brings Hecker back to his German roots with one sentence. Here the film seems to mimic the documentary footage’s look. We know we are watching a dramatic recreation of events, but the effect is disorienting.

To play the lead, Wolf chose Jaecki Schwarz, a young actor fresh out of drama school. It was an inspired choice. Thrust so suddenly into a starring role, the young Mr. Schwarz could easily identify with the confused state of Gregor when he is handed responsibility for an entire town.
after I was Nineteen, Schwarz went on to appear in several more films. He has continued working since the Wende, primarily in television, playing Hauptkommissar Herbert Schmücke on the popular crime show, Polizeiruf 110 (Police Call 110), and the comic relief character Sputnik in Ein starkes Team (A Strong Team). He is an ardent supporter of gay rights, and is a member of the board of trustees for the German branch of Queer Nation.

The technical crew for this movie reads like a DEFA dream team. Besides scriptwriter Kohlhaase, Werner Bergmann, Konrad Wolf’s longtime collaborator, handled the cinematography. Bergmann had worked as a war correspondent and cameraman for the German war effort on various fronts. During the war, he lost an arm, but didn’t let this stop him from pursuing a career as a cinematographer. He made fourteen films with Wolf, and received several awards for his work. The editing was by Evelyn Carow, who would eventually become the best-known editor in East Germany, cutting such classics as The Legend of Paul and Paula, Solo Sunny, and Coming Out. This was the first film she did with Wolf, but it wouldn’t be the last.

The production design was by Alfred Hirschmeier whose importance to the development of art direction and production design in East Germany is impossible to over-estimate. Hirschmeier’s work was flawless and rarely repetitious. He was the inventor of the optisches Drehbuch (visual screenplay), a type of storyboard in script form that he used to create a film’s look and settings. A list of the films he worked on includes some of the best films to come out of the GDR, including, Five Cartridges, The Silent Star, Naked Among Wolves, Divided Heaven, Jacob the Liar, and Solo Sunny.

In 1977, Wolf would return to the subject of World War II one more time. In the film Mama, I’m Alive. Here, Wolf follows the exploits of four German P.O.W.s who decide to join the Red Army and fight against Hitler’s war machine. He assembled essentially the same technical crew as I was Nineteen (Kohlhaase, Bergmann, Carow, and Hirschmeier). It would be his last film about the war. Wolf would only make one more feature film (Solo Sunny, 1980). In 1982, he died while working on a documentary about Ernst Busch, the communist singer-songwriter.

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Stars

Posted: April 4, 2011 in Concentration Camps, DEFA, Kurt Maetzig, Nazis, WWII
Tags: Bulgaria, Cannes Film Festival, Eli Eli, Es Brennt, Greek, Jews, Konrad Wolf, love, Macedonia, pogrom, Thrace, Wagenstein

For its first 25 years, two things kept the rest of the world from learning that East Germany was producing some of the best films in Europe. First was the country’s unfortunate tendency to ban its directors’ best efforts. Films such as The Axe of Wandsbek, Sun Seekers, Born in ‘45, and The Rabbit is Me would have certainly put East Germany on the movie map if not for the fact that they were all shelved by the authorities. The second factor was the West’s refusal to accept that East Germany was a country at all. East Germany wasn’t recognized by the United Nations until 1973, and even then it was only because the GDR and the FRG had finally agreed to accept each other as sovereign states.

It was a consequence of this “East Germany-is-not-a-country” policy that the DEFA film Stars (Sterne) was submitted to the Cannes Film Festival as the official entry from Bulgaria instead of the GDR. But it is really an East German film, and it was the first—and is still the only—German film to ever win the Prix du Jury at Cannes. To add irony to the insult, the film, which was popular in East Germany, was banned in Bulgaria.

Stars is a classic doomed love story about a German soldier who falls in love with a Jewish prisoner. The soldier, who is known only as Walter, is a would-be painter who has been drafted into the war effort and finds himself in a small Bulgarian village, guarding Jewish prisoners from Greece. The prisoners are on their way to Auschwitz. There, they are told, they will work on vegetable farms. Of course, we all know this isn’t true. So do most of them, but no one wants to acknowledge it. Walter is trying to do his duty as a good German soldier, but his conscience keeps getting in the way.

At the time it was made, there weren’t many films that portrayed German soldiers in a favorable light. There were a few, such as The Murderers are Among Us, Rotation, and Sun Seekers, in which former German soldiers expressed remorse for their actions during the war (or, in some cases, their inaction), but there had never been a movie in which the hero was a German soldier who was abetting the enemy. German soldiers were always portrayed as loyal to the death to the Third Reich, and therefore always the bad guys. Stars gives us a much more nuanced picture. Even the amoral Kurt—Walter’s immediate superior—is portrayed as a vivacious and ebullient character, who, in other circumstances, might be a great deal of fun to go bar-hopping with. Kurt has been to Auschwitz and there is some evidence that he knows what is happening there is wrong. He refers to Auschwitz as a “mill for human flesh” (Menschenfleisch). He notably does not say “Jewish flesh” (Jüdenfleisch), indicating that he recognizes the humanity of the Jews. But Kurt prefers not to think to hard about the situation and alleviates any qualms he may have by staying drunk as often as possible.

As Ruth, the headstrong Jewish prisoner, Sasha Krusharska turns in as close to a perfect performance as one could hope for. She is strong and vulnerable, tender and hard, and, unlike most of the actresses that were chosen to play similar roles in Hollywood (e.g., Millie Perkins in The Diary of Anne Frank), Krusharska looks Jewish. She is also stunning, and it is easy to see why a young soldier would fall for her. Sadly, Krusharska only starred in one more film (The Last Round, or Posledniyat rund) before marrying and settling down with Bulgarian film director Rangel Vulchanov. Vulchanov had worked as a consultant director on Stars. Their daughter, Ani Vulchanova, has gone on to become a successful actress in Bulgaria.

In 1959, feature films that dealt directly with the holocaust were still relatively rare. In the United States, the true horror of Auschwitz was still an abstract concept. It wouldn’t be until the release of Stanley Kramer’s Judgement at Nuremberg that most Americans would see actual film footage from the concentration camps for the first time.* Germans, of course, were closer to the subject, but most of the films prior to Stars kept talk of the concentration camps as general as possible. Even in the GDR, which was far less averse to examining its Nazi past than the west was, the talk in films of concentration camps was mostly about the experiences of the political prisoners rather than the extermination the Jews (The Council of the Gods came the closest, with its discussion of the manufacturing ot Zyklon B).

Stars was written by the Bulgarian author Angel Wagenstein. Wagenstein, a Sephardic Jew, was arrested and condemned to death for anti-fascist sabotage during the war, but was liberated when the Soviet Army invaded the country. After the war, Wagenstein enrolled at the S. A. Gerasimov All-Union State Institute for Cinematography in Moscow, where he earned a degree in screenwriting. Upon returning to Bulgaria, he started writing scripts for Boyana Film, the state-owned film company. Wagenstein wrote the script for Stars in seven days, although he said he thought about it for 77 days before that and had already lived through the events depicted. When he finished it, he took it to Kurt Maetzig at DEFA, but Maetzig, perhaps tired of making films about WWII, wasn’t interested (Maetzig’s next film would be the sci-fi feature The Silent Star). Konrad Wolf, however, was interested. Wolf has just finished making Sun Seekers, only to see it shelved for political reasons. Perhaps Stars would fare better with the authorities.

Wagenstein would write many more films for DEFA over the years, including scripts for Joachim Hasler’s The Story of a Murder, Konrad Wolf’s Goya, and Herman Zschosche’s oddball science fiction film, Eolomea. More recently, he has turned to book writing. His novels—Isaac’s Torah, Farewell Shanghai, and Far from Toledo—comprise a trilogy that examines the Jewish experience in different regions during WWII. His books have been published in eleven languages.

After the film was made it was submitted to the East German authorities, who approved it for public showing. Back in Bulgaria, however, things were different. The exportation of Jews to concentration camps was a touchy subject. Although they were a member of the Axis powers, Bulgarians saw themselves as resistant to the Nazi war machine. They had begged out of Operation Barbarossa, and had repeatedly postponed the deportation of their ethnic Jews (Jews from Thrace and Macedonia, however, were not afforded the same consideration). Although it was banned on the grounds of being an “abstract humanist” film, certainly the idea of a film about the deportation of Jews from Bulgaria was a factor in their decision to not show it. In spite of the ban, the film was submitted to Cannes as a Bulgarian film because East Germany was still not recognized as a real country (in fairness, neither was West Germany). The film ended up winning the Prix du Jury that year (the Palme d’Or went to Black Orpheus). Thanks to the success of the film at Cannes, the film was also shown in West Germany. There, however, the ending was edited to remove the Casablanca-like scene where Walter decides to help the resistance.

As with Sun Seekers, Konrad demonstrates a keen facility for the use of film techniques to propel the narrative. After Walter meets Ruth, he looks back at her, and the camera angle is sharply skewed, showing that Walter’s world is about to tumble out of control. And when things are at their worst, the images are dark and grim. Occasionally, Wolf’s technique approaches the experimental with strange juxtapositions. In the scene when the baby is born in the Jewish encampment, Ruth’s face is superimposed over scenes of grassy fields and a babbling brook (a literal interpretation of the lyrics to the Jewish folk song “Eli, Eli”) while the baby cries in the background. it is a sad scene of hope in a world where hope has no right to exist.

The music in this film is by the Bulgarian composer, Simeon Pironkov, whose score comes primarily from two sources: the aforementioned “Eli, Eli” (“My God, My God”) and Mordechai Gebirtig’s “Es brennt” (“It is Burning”). Gebirtig was a Yiddish poet and songwriter who died in the Kraków Ghetto in 1942. The song was written in response to the pogrom of 1936 in Przytyk, Poland, two-and-a-half years before Kristallnacht. “Es brennt” went on to become the anthem of the Jewish resistance movement during the war and it is still sung on Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah) in many parts of the world. It is the combination of “Es brennt” and Sasha Krusharska’s performance that creates a final scene that will hit you right in the gut.

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*In the west, Germans were shown this footage in 1948 in Nürnberg und seine Lehre, a film made by the U.S. Military as part of their “de-Nazification” program. By the time this films was released, however, tensions between the United States and the Soviet union were strained to the breaking point, so it is doubtful that this film ever was shown in the east. The film did not receive an official release in the United States until 2010.

Sun Seekers

Posted: March 25, 2011 in Berlin, Concentration Camps, Nazis, Rubble Film, WWII
Tags: ex-Nazis, mining, nuclear bomb, Russians, Schlema, uranium

In 1947, the Soviets began mining operations in the Schlema Valley in the southeastern region of Saxony. They called their mining company “Wismut,” the German word for bismuth, because they didn’t want the U.S. to know what they were really mining: uranium. After what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Russians wanted to make sure that they wouldn’t suffer the same fate as the Japanese and they stepped up their efforts to develop a bomb of their own. Whether the fact that the Soviets had the bomb deterred its use or increased its threat is still a matter of debate. At the time, the Americans went collectively insane over the idea that anyone else would have this weapon and cheerfully executed Julius Rosenberg for the crime of sharing the technology with the Russians. For good measure, they executed his wife Ethel too, even though it appears she did little more than type up her husband’s notes.

The choice of the name Wismut for the mining company is indicative of the level of paranoia that existed on both sides of the Iron Curtain. It’s doubtful that anyone was fooled by this ruse though. The spa at Oberschlema was already well know by then to be sitting on top of a vast lode of radioactive material. During the 1920s the place was a popular destination for people looking to bask in the radium springs and drink its radioactive water.

By the early fifties, the Soviets had changed the once verdant Schlema valley into a muddy, barren mess that looked more like a concentration camp than a mining company. Security at the mine was tight. People working there were essentially cordoned off from the rest of society, existing in a cocoon of their own. They had their own community, and communication with the outside world was carefully monitored. Geiger counters were installed at the gates to make sure that no one walked out with any of the ore lest they sell it to the Yanks. Health problems, as one can imagine, were legion and still linger today. The size of the mine was immense. By the time it shut down in 1990, it comprised 54 mine shafts spaced 30 meters apart.

In 1958, director Konrad Wolf, along with writers Karl-Georg Egel and Paul Wiens, created Sun Seekers (Sonnensucher), a paean to the workers of the Wismut mine. The story takes place in 1947, and follows the exploits of Lotte Lutz, an attractive young woman who had lost her mother during the war. Tired of the sexual abuse on the farm where she was living, she flees to Berlin where she hooks up with her aunt Emmi, a boisterous woman who looks like Rosemary Clooney and acts like Joan Blondell. After a barroom brawl, Emmi and Lotte are sent by the soviet authorities to work at the Wismut mine. Although it is never explicitly stated, there is a suggestion here that the reason the women are sent to this mine is because they had been fraternizing with the Wismut miners and the authorities were still trying to contain knowledge of the mine’s existence. At the mine we see that the peace between the Russians and the Germans is still on tenuous ground. The Russians are in charge, and are still smarting from what the German army did to their country during WWII. The Germans are trying to prove their loyalty to the communist way of life, although some are obviously not on board.

In many respects, Sun Seekers resembles the Rubble Films of the late-forties. Lotte is a burned-out husk of a woman,, who has come to distrust all men, and is incapable of smiling. Likewise, the one-armed Beier, who had been a German soldier on the Russian Front is filled with remorse and self-loathing for what he had seen and done. Together, these two wounded birds eventually find, if not happiness, then at least some small comfort together. As the emotionally crippled Lutz, Ulrike Germer effectively conveys the frailty masked by frigidity and the artless sensuality of the character. Likewise, Günther Simon, best known for his portrayal of the German Communist Party leader Ernst Thälmann, is better used here as Beier, the one-armed German with a secret past, who wants to find whatever happiness might be left in Lutz’s soul.

Unfortunately for this film, it was made at exactly the wrong time. In August of 1957, the United States announced a two-year suspension on nuclear testing (although they would renege on this plan exactly one year later), and in September of the same year, a huge explosion at the Mayak nuclear facility in Russia released tons of radioactive material into the atmosphere (although this was carefully hushed up by the authorities at the time). After years of fear-mongering and forcing children hide under their school desks, people—in both the east and the west—were growing weary of atomic fear-mongering. The Soviets wanted to show that they too were worried about the potential dangers of atomic weapons and were willing to slow down the arms race. The idea of a film that championed the Soviet efforts to mine the vast uranium deposits in the Schlema Valley was deemed too provocative to release at that time, and the movie was shelved until 1972. Of course, a old black-and-white propaganda movie on the importance of uranium mining to the communist way of life went over rather badly in 1972 and the film did not do well at the box office.

Director Konrad Wolf was as close to royalty was one could get in a communist country. His father, Friedrich Wolf, was a well-respected doctor, playwright, and communist provocateur. In 1932, Friedrich Wolf founded the Southwest Theater Troop (Spieltrupp Südwest) in Stuttgart, and began writing plays that championed the communist cause. Two of his plays, Professor Mamlock and Cyankali, were made twice into films. During WWII, Friedrich Wolf also worked as a doctor in Spain and was briefly interred in a concentration camp in France before being allowed to emigrate to Russia. Konrad’s brother, Markus, was the head of the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (HVA), East Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, and is now considered one of the greatest spymasters that ever lived. It is widely believed that the character of Karla in John Le Carré’s Karla Trilogy is based on Markus Wolf, although Le Carré always denied this (a closer match is the character of Fiedler in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold). Konrad Wolf himself fought with the Soviet Army during World War II, and his story was made into the movie, I Was Nineteen (Ich war neunzehn) in 1968, which he also directed.

As a director, Wolf had a powerful, if sometimes melodramatic, style. Shots in his films are carefully framed, and he isn’t afraid of using unusual angles and novelty wipes when the scene calls for it. For most of his early career, Wolf seemed content to tow the party line. His early films are didactic and very pro-communist. Later in his career, he began to push the envelope with films like Goya (Goya – oder Der arge Weg der Erkenntnis), The Naked Man at the Stadium (Der nackte Mann auf dem Sportplatz), and Solo Sunny.

Erwin Geschonneck shines here as the ex-circus strongman turned ardent Bolshevik, Jupp König. Geschonneck would later go on to become the most popular actor in East Germany, but in the fifties, two of his most important roles—that of Jupp König in this film and Teetjen the butcher in The Axe of Wandsbek (Das Beil von Wandsbek)—were suppressed, postponing his fame (see Carbide and Sorrel).

Manja Behrens as Emmi also deserves special mention here. She, along with Geschonneck, give this movie its vitality. Behrens started her career in Dresden prior to WWII. During the war, she made two films for the Third Reich before running afoul of Joseph Goebbels. After the war, she moved from Dresden to Berlin to continue her career in theater. There she began working in films and quickly became a popular character actress. In the 1960s, British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper uncovered the fact that Behrens had been the mistress of Martin Bormann during the war. Upon this revelation, she was blacklisted, appearing only occasionally on television in small roles after that. Throughout her life, she continued to appear on stage both before and after the reunification of Germany. Ms. Behrens died in Berlin in 2003.

Today, the Schlema Valley is home to the rebuilt Bad Schlema health spa. You can go there once again to soak in the radon springs. Parts of the mine are left intact as part of the Saxon-Thuringian Uranium Mining Museum, but the muddy landscape of the fifties is gone.

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Rotation

Posted: March 7, 2011 in Nazis, Wolfgang Staudte, WWII
Tags: carousel, depression, Nazis, newspaper, prison, weimar republic

As its title suggests, a recurring image throughout Rotation is the wheel. The wheel in this case appears in various forms, from the cylinders of the printing press that acts as the film’s Greek chorus, to the carousel at a fair where Hans Behneke, the film’s protagonist, is forced to work during the Weimar Republic’s economic collapse. When we first see it, the printing press is running news of the battle for Berlin. The war is almost over, and we are treated to some remarkably effective battle sequences. Hans Behneke is standing in a prison cell, listening to the guns and bombs outside. Why he is there, we do not yet know. From here, the story flashes back to the end of World War I, when Hans, young and still unmarried, is returning from the Western Front. The film follows his story through his marriage, and the birth of his son, to the economic travails of the Weimar Republic and the ensuing paranoia of the Third Reich, to the end of World War II. While the film is mostly about Hans, it is also about his son, Hellmuth, who reaches school age just as the Nazis comes to power. Hellmuth is properly indoctrinated into the Nazi way of thinking and soon finds himself at odds with his more liberal parents. It doesn’t help that his uncle is fighting with the resistance.

Rotation examines a subject that is rarely discussed: the Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend). Inculcated with Nazi doctrine at an early age, Hitler Youth members were the most virulently pro-Nazi people in Germany. On many occasions they were known to have turned in their own parents when mom or dad would say something derogatory about der Führer. Betraying one’s own family for the Reich was seen as an act of the highest honor. It demonstrated that the child understood that nothing—not even blood—was more important than the fight for the Fatherland. At the end of the war, it was the Hitler Youths who fought the hardest, even after Hitler had killed himself rather than face the music. Rotation follows Hellmuth—unfortunately born just in time to get both barrels of Nazi doctrine—from his early indoctrination, through his eventual realization that everything he learned was wrong (ah, we’ve all been there, haven’t we?). To the film’s credit, it does not place all the blame on Hellmuth for the travails he visited on his parent. It recognizes that he too was a victim of the Nazis.

Director Wolfgang Staudte is better than the average filmmaker at using the camera to create a symbolic narrative. He had already proved this with his use of the ruins of Berlin to show the internal desolation of the tormented protagonist in The Murderers are Among Us (Die Mörder sind unter uns). In Rotation, his use of the aforementioned wheel motif is only one example of this. Again and again in the film, people are blocked by bars and lattices, suggesting that everyone in the Third Reich is trapped in one way or another. The wooden slats on Hellmuth’s crib morph to the ornate iron gates that keep the rich separated from the working class, to the poles holding the protest banners of striking workers, and finally to the bars of a holding cell. In a pivotal scene, victims of a flooded subway shelter are shown trapped behind a a steel grate as the water rises to drown them. The scene cuts to a bird trapped in a cage that is slowly sinking into the same murky water. The message is clear: the restrictions we place on our freedom will first constrain us and eventually kill us. [Note: The fact that this message was delivered by a film studio that was under the thumb of the Soviet Union is more than a little ironic, but this is just one example of that fount of paradoxes that is East German cinema.]

Early scenes between Hans and his wife are repeated later with Hellmuth and his fiancée, suggesting that the rotation in the title is that of life itself. Staudte got his start as an actor at UFA during the Weimar Republic. He appeared as an extra in the classic, The Blue Angel (Der blaue Engel), and did the German voice-over for one of the lead characters in All Quiet of the Western Front. He was already starring in films when the Nazis came to power. Coming, as he did, from an acting background, Staudte understands the relationship between the performance and the camera better than most directors of the time (although he did tend to err on the side of melodrama).

Staudte started his directing career during the Third Reich. His first feature film, Akrobat Schööön!, was a big hit in Germany when it came out. Thanks to its lack of political perspective, it continued to be shown on TV in Germany after the war. His next film, Der Mann, dem man den Namen stahl (The Man, Who Had His Name Stolen), did not fare as well. As with Akrobat Schööön!, Der Mann, dem man den Namen stahl was a comedy. In it, two men who are given the same identity, which causes all sorts of problems and funny situations. Goebbels had it banned, probably due to its central conceit that the state was capable of making such a mistake. Staudte must have had strong feelings about this movie because he ended up remaking after the war as Die seltsamen Abenteuer des Herrn Fridolin B. (The Adventures of Fridolin), using footage from the original film.

In the early years of the German Democratic Republic, it looked like Staudte was slated to be the most prominent filmmaker on the East German filmmaking scene. He got the ball rolling with The Murderers are Among Us (Die Mörder sind unter uns), the first post-war German film; and a few years later would direct The Story of Little Mook (Die Geschichte vom kleinen Muck), still the best selling film to come out of the GDR. But disagreements between him, the East German officials and Bertolt Brecht led to his defection to the west (for more on this, see The Story of Little Mook).

Cinematographer Bruno Mondi was already a well-respected cameraman when the GDR came into existence. He had gotten his start back in 1921 with Fritz Lang as a camera assistant on Destiny. After the Nazi’s came to power, Mondi never stopped working, and was responsible for filming Kolberg, the most lavish color production of the Third Reich. After the war, he made films for DEFA, and then fled to the west, where his knowledge of color was put to good use in the stunningly photographed (and stunningly banal) Sissi films.

Wolfgang Staudte and his cinematographer, Bruno Mondi, had worked together before under the most unfortunate of circumstances. Mondi was the cinematographer for Jud Süß, considered the most virulently anti-Semitic film ever made. Wolfgang Staudte, still an actor in 1940, appeared in the film in a minor role. After the war, this film led to charges of “crimes against humanity” for the film’s director, Veit Harlan. Harlan successfully claimed he was just a pawn, hired to direct the film with no control over its content or perspective; perhaps the only occasion in history of a director denying the autuer theory. Mondi was not charged and seems to have managed to come through the Third Reich without the stigma that haunted directors such as Harlan and Riefenstahl. (For more on Veit Harlan, see the documentary, Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Süss.)

During his long career, Staudte directed nearly every type of film, from light comedies to heavy dramas. During the seventies, he worked largely in television, directing episodes of the popular crime dramas, Der Kommisar, and Tatort. He worked right up until his death. His last film, a TV-movie called Der Snob (The Snob), was released two months after his death.

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The Axe of Wandsbeck

Posted: February 14, 2011 in Nazis, post-war years, WWII
Tags: altona, butcher, executions, hamburg, Nazis, wandsbek

When reviewing the post-war films of East Germany (or West Germany, for that matter), there is a tendency to temper one’s reviews by limiting any comparisons to the other German films of the the same era. That is to say, you can write lots of nice things about these films, but just don’t compare them to the Universum Film AG (UFA) films made in Germany after World War I. This is because, the films that came out German during the 1920s and early 1930s are still some of the best movies that ever flickered onto movie screens. Hitler managed to drive nearly every talented filmmaker out of Germany and into the waiting arms of Hollywood; most—although not all—because they were either Jewish, or had “Jewish blood.” Germany’s loss was Hollywood’s gain. Ex-pat filmmakers such as Michael Curtiz, Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, and Frtiz Lang went on to direct many classics, including Casablanca, Scarlet Street, and Sunset Boulevard (for more on this, see Cinema’s Exiles).*

Nonetheless, there are a few post-war German movies (both east and west) that can hold their own with the best that UFA had to offer. One of these is The Axe of Wandsbek (Das Beil von Wandsbek), made in 1951, when the GDR was barely two years old. Based on Arnold Zweig’s book of the same name, The Ax of Wandsbek is a fictionalized account of the executions of four men who were wrongly accused or murder to cover up the actions of the SA and the police in the Altona borough of Hamburg. The event, which took place on the 17 of July, 1932, is now known as the Altona Bloody Sunday (Altonaer Blutsonntag), and the executions that followed it were the first official executions of the Third Reich.

Rather than write about the actual event, Zweig moved the story to Wandsbek, another borough of Hamburg, and turned his attention to the man who served as the executioner. In Zweig’s story, that man is a poor butcher named Albert Teetjen who is finding it hard to compete with the large, corporate butcher shops. To help modernize his business, Teetjen agrees to execute the convicts (the official executioner is, supposedly, sick). For Teetjen, the executions offer a chance to get out of debt and buy that new freezer he’s been wanting. For the local Nazis, the men are an embarrassment, and Hitler will not visit Hamburg until they are dead.

The moral center of the film is Dr. Neumeier, a well-respected female doctor who tends to the poor in Wandsbek. As a doctor, she is able to mingle freely with all classes of people, and it is through her eyes that we see most of the events unfold. She has scrupulously avoided taking sides in the disputes between the Nazis and the Communists, but is horrified when she learns the facts of the case against the four men. She makes some last minute attempts to win reprieves for them, but it is too little too late. The machinery of history is on the move, and any attempts to stop the Third Reich through the normal channels are doomed to fail.

Zweig, a pacifist and a Jew, wanted to show that blaming the man who wielded the ax was too facile; that he is merely the most visible symptom of a moral sickness and complacency that was eroding the German soul. Dr. Neumeier speaks for Zweig and the rest of us when she observes that we are all guilty. Zweig’s book was first published in Hebrew in 1943, with the German edition appearing in 1947 (not coincidentally, a few months after the conclusion of the Nuremberg Trials). By that time, he was already a well-respected author in Germany and the United States. His 1927 anti-war book, The Case of Sergeant Grischa, was a worldwide best-seller and is still in print in several languages. As a young man, Zweig became a fan of Sigmund Freud and his ideas on psychotherapy. For many years, the two men corresponded, and Freud’s theories pervaded all of Zweig’s later books.

Faced with the mounting anti-Semitism provoked by the Nazis, Zweig left Germany. A Zionist at the time, he decided to settle in Palestine. In 1948, he was invited by officials to return to the Soviet Zone, which would later become East Germany. By this time, he had lost faith in Zionism, preferring a more egalitarian, socialist solution, and saw the potential that East Germany had to offer in this regard. He moved to the GDR, where he spent the remainder of his life, no doubt disappointed at how badly the East Germany authorities botched the socialist ideal. He died in 1968 after years of ill health.

But it wasn’t simply Zweig’s original story that made the film so memorable. There were already several DEFA films with complex and interesting stories (e.g., The Murderers are Among Us, Rotation, and The Council of the Gods). Some of the credit belongs to Falk Harnack, whose dramatic use of lighting, music, and symbolism harked back to the UFA films of old. The Ax of Wandsbek was Harnack’s first motion picture. His background in theater certainly helped him here, but his use of close-ups and cross-cutting indicates that Harnack had been paying close attention to the narrative techniques of cinema as well.

Falk Harnack’s own story is no less interesting than that of his movie. He came from a uniquely talented family. His mother was a well-respected painter, and his father was a professor of literature; his brother Arvid worked as a resistance fighter within the Nazi party, and was executed, along with his American-born wife, on December 22, 1942. Falk was close friends with Lilo Ramdohr, a prominent member of the White Rose (Weiße Rose), the Munich-based resistance group of which Sophie Scholl and her brother were members. Ramdohr and Harnack were arrested and detained for a time, but eventually were let go due to lack of evidence. Harnack, still a member of the armed forces at this time, was shipped off to Greece. Upon hearing from one of his superiors that he was about to be re-arrested, Zweig deserted the army and joined the Greek resistance. After the war, Harnack became the artistic director for DEFA from 1949 until 1952.

When The Ax of Wandsbek opened in East German cinemas, it was a big hit, and people lined up to see it. It was on its way to becoming one of the most successful films in DEFA’s history when word of the film reached the Soviets, who were still calling the shots in East Germany. The Soviets weren’t happy about the film. They felt that it was too sympathetic to the Nazis—an absurd claim, considering this film’s pedigree. The Ax of Wandsbek was pulled from circulation, returning to the screens in 1962 in a heavily censored version.

After the officials banned it, Harnack lost faith in his ability to make the kind of movies he wanted to in East Germany. Although he moved to the West to continue his career, he maintained his socialist beliefs, and never spoke out against the GDR. He continued to make films that examined Germany’s Nazi past, including The Plot to Assassinate Hitler (Der 20. Juli), and The Restless Night (Unruhige Nacht). Sadly, almost all of the films he made from 1960 on were made-for-TV movies. Harnack retired from filmmaking in 1976. He died in 1991.

A big part of The Ax of Wandsbek’s effectiveness is the cinematography by the late Robert Baberske. Baberske was one of the best, most talented cinematographers on the DEFA payroll. He got his start as assistant to Karl Freund. One couldn’t ask for a better teacher. It is not an overstatement to say that Karl Freund shaped motion picture and television cinematography in the twentieth century. His work on classic UFA films, such as The Golem, Metropolis, and The Last Laugh is still considered some of the best in the history of film. When Freund left for Hollywood (wooed there by studio officials, ahead of Hitler’s rise to power), Baberske took his place. Baberske had already distinguished himself as a fine cinematographer by the time the Nazis came to power. His work on films such as Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt) and Kameradschaft, has stood the test of time. Most of his work during the Nazi era was restricted to light comedies and romance, although he does have the unfortunate distinction of being the man who filmed, The Rothschilds (Die Rothschilds), one of the more virulently anti-Semitic films of the time. After the war, he made one film for a West German production company before moving to the East. He continued to work until 1956 when he developed a brain tumor. After a protracted illness, he died in 1958 and was buried in a cemetery in the Neu-Kölln district of Berlin.

The Ax of Wandsbek was also Erwin Geschonneck’s first starring role. Geschonneck—a member of Bertolt Brecht’s theater troupe—would go on to make some of the best films to come out the GDR, including Naked Among Wolves, Carbide and Sorrel, The Sun Seekers, and Jacob the Liar. In 1981 Geschonneck was honored for his contributions to East German cinema. When asked which films he would like to have screened for the event, he requested the original, uncensored version of The Ax of Wandsbek, effectively ending the state’s ban on the film.

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*Ironically, the United States effectively duplicated this particular bit of Hitlerian insanity with Joseph McCarthy and the HUAC hearings. In an attempt to root out communists, McCarthy and his team of goons managed to drive many talented people out of Hollywood. Although hardly comparable to the enormity of events in Germany, there was a noticeable drop in the quality of the films coming out of Hollywood for the first few years after this purge.

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