Elective Affinities

Posted: July 21, 2018 in Artists, Karl-Ernst Sasse, Love
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Die Wahlverwandtschaften
Ask the average American who Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is, and you’ll either get: “He was a writer, wasn’t he?” Or: “I don’t know.” A well-read American might be familiar with Faust and The Sorrows of Young Werther, but that’s about it. In Germany, on the other hand, Goethe resides deep in the soul. He’s as important to German culture as Shakespeare is to English culture—perhaps even more so. Along with a healthy appreciation of good of beer and a fascination with all things American Indian, the love of Goethe is common to East and West Germans alike. His attitude that logic and reason, rather than tradition and religion, should govern one’s actions helped keep him popular on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

In 1974, East Germany’s film company DEFA had already made a historical fable (Wolz), an operetta (Orpheus in the Underworld), two fairytales (Three Hazelnuts for Cinderella, and Hans Roeckle and the Devil), a contemporary comedy, (The Naked Man on the Sports Field), and an Indian film (Ulzana). It was about time to tackle another costume drama, so why not Goethe? The book that director Siegfried Kühn chose to adapt was Elective Affinities (Die Wahlverwandtschaften), Goethe’s story of 19th Century aristocrats engaging in interpersonal relationships and extramarital affairs. East German television had made a couple TV movies based on his work (Urfaust starring Manfred Krug as Mephisto, and Iphigenie auf Tauris), but Elective Affinities was the first East German feature film based on one of the writer’s books. It was also—as it happens—the first time this book had been made into a film (although not the last).

Elective Affinities gets its title from an old chemistry term intended to explain why certain chemical combinations reacted with each other, while others did not. Goethe was a man of many interests in the arts and the sciences. He wrote poetry, plays, and novels, as well as literary critiques and scientific treatises. He filled books with drawings and thoughts, and corresponded voraciously. He saw relationships between everything from emotions and the color spectrum, to human behavior and chemistry. As far as Goethe was concerned, human relationships exhibited the same seemingly arbitrary attractions as chemical affinities, with people shedding one relationship in favor of another when the right catalyst is added to the mix.

Elective Affinities

The story takes place during the Napoleonic Wars and follows the exploits of Baron Eduard (Hilmar Thate) and his wife Charlotte (Beata Tyszkiewicz). Both are now in their second marriage. The marriage isn’t unhappy, but it isn’t particularly exciting either. To enliven things, Eduard invites his old friend Captain Otto (Gerry Wolff) to stay and Charlotte invites her niece Ottilie (Magda Vásáryová). Eduard and Ottilie are immediately attracted to each other, as are Charlotte and the Captain. As one might expect, things go to hell in a handcart after that.

Elective Affinities is a subtle book and not the most likely Goethe novel to be turned into a movie, (that honor would have to go to Faust, which has been adapted at least twenty-five times). The fact that director Kühn brought it in at less than two hours is impressive; Francis Ford Coppola once toyed with idea of making a ten-hour, 3D version of the story. Kühn strips the story down to its primary elements, and changes a few things for cinematic effect. He tempers the most shocking death in the book in the book by having it occur off-screen, and the maid is removed from the story entirely—presumably for socialist reasons—which also removes an important supernatural-seeming element from the story (whether Goethe meant it to be actually supernatural is a topic for debate).

Goethe considered Elective Affinities to be his best book. If there is a flaw in the book, it’s that Goethe wrote it in the third person; it should have been written from Eduard’s point of view. What we have here is the classic unreliable narrator, on a par with Humbert Humbert in Lolita, but here the unreliable narrator is Goethe. Ottilie comes off as almost too saintly to exist in the real world. No one is that good and pure. So who is the inspiration for the saintly Ottilie? The most likely candidate is Minna Herzlieb, the eighteen-year-old foster daughter of a book publisher in Jena. Goethe was gaga over the teenager and wrote sonnets to her. Several men vied for her attention, but she ended up marrying a law professor and settling into a miserable existence, eventually losing her mind and spending the last years of her life in a mental institution in Görlitz.

Goethe

Siegfried Kühn was one of the most talented directors to come out of Germany, but he didn’t get many opportunities to prove it. His films include Time of the Storks, The Second Life of F.W.G. Platow , and The Actress. In 1981, he began working on Schwarzweiß und Farbe (Black-and-White and Color), a film about a photographer who runs into conflicts between reporting the truth and doing what he’s told. Not surprisingly, the film was scuttled by the authorities before it began shooting. From 1963 until 1980, he was married to screenwriter Regine Kühn, who wrote or co-wrote many of his films. The Wende effectively put an end to his career as a director. His last film was The Liar (Die Lügnerin), which was also one of the last films made at the DEFA studios. Kühn’s wife Regine continued to work in television until 2003, primarily on documentaries.

Beata Tyszkiewicz and Magda Vásáryová play Charlotte and Ottilie respectively. It’s easy to see the attraction the two women hold for the men. Charlotte is a powerful woman, who can match any man in conversation, while Ottilie is less of an intellect, but makes up for it in cheerful beauty. Tyszkiewicz hails from Poland and started her career in films while still a teenager. She appeared in several classic Polish films, including The Sargossa Manuscript, The Ashes, The Doll, and the oddball science fiction comedy Sexmission. From 1967 until 1969 she was married to Polish director Andrzej Wajda, and their daughter Karolina went on to appear in several films but hasn’t been seen on the silver screen in several years. Tyszkiewicz is still active in films, but spends part of her time supporting the charitable organization, Fundacja Dzieciom “Zdążyć z Pomocą”—a children’s aid foundation dedicated to helping children in Poland who are at the most at trick of serious health issues.

Like Beata Tyszkiewicz, Magda Vásáryová started her career as a teenager, but things really took off for her when she starred in title role of František Vláčil’s Marketa Lazarová—considered by many critics to be the best Czech film ever made. She appeared in several more films, but after the Velvet Revolution, she switched from actress to political activist. She was the ambassador for Czechoslovakia in Austria from 1990 to 1993, and the ambassador for Slovakia in Poland from 2000 to 2005. She ran for the office of President of Slovakia in 1999, but lost. She was the Slovak State Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs from February 2005 to July 2006.

The voices of the two women are dubbed by Germans. Lissy Tempelhof was the voice for Charlotte, while Katharina Thalbach dubbed Ottilie. This isn’t unusual. Jutta Hoffmann did the voice for Krystyna Stypułkowska in Trace of Stones, and several different people handled the dubbing duties for Gojko Mitić over the years. What is unusual is that the two voice actresses are listed in the main credits right under the names of the stars they dubbed.

Elective Affinities

Hilmar Thate is excellent as Baron Eduard. It’s not an easy part to pull off. After all, Eduard is oblivious to the effects of his shallow, sometimes callous behavior, interested only his own desires. The other three, at least, show a measure of conflict about their feelings. Thate is up to the challenge. He plays Eduard with self-centered perfection, oblivious to how his embarrassing behavior is and that everyone else can see right through him (for more on Hilmar Thate, see Professor Mamlock).

The music is by Karl-Ernst Sasse, who scored dozens of DEFA films (for more information on Sasse, see Her Third). Sasse could adapt to any style, from psychedelic pop (In the Dust of the Stars) to space-age lounge music (Signals), to oddball renaissance folk music (Godfather Death). As a classically trained composer, Elective Affinities probably offered Sasse more enjoyment than many of the scores he wrote. He had a good ear for pop, but his classical scores seem to be made with more care. Elective Affinities takes place in the era of Ludwig van Beethoven and Carl Maria von Weber, and Sasse uses this to the score’s advantage, creating an effective and resonant score that feels right for the time.

While some critics complained that Kühn had compressed the story too much to capture the subtleties of Goethe’s novel, most of the reviews were favorable and Elective Affinities did decent box office. It’s an unusual film and there aren’t many East German movies like it. For fans of costume dramas or stories where relationships are tested after new people are added to the mix (which could be called elective affinity films), this movie is worth a viewing.

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© Jim Morton and East German Cinema Blog, 2018. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Jim Morton and East German Cinema Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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Osceola

Posted: July 5, 2018 in Gojko Mitic, Indianerfilme, Konrad Petzold
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Osceola
The shocking history of actions by the United States against Native Americans and blacks was a source of great delight to East Germany’s leaders. Here was a country that boasted about its freedom and opportunities, yet continued to shut out anyone who skin tone drifted too far from Pantone 473. With Osceola, DEFA managed to kill two birds with one stone, combining an Indian uprising with a slave revolt. The story takes place in Florida and represents the first time a DEFA Indian film chronicled the life of a real person, an approach they would follow over the next three Indian films. Osceola was a joint effort by DEFA, Bulgaria’s Kino-Zentrum, and Cuba’s Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industrias Cinematográficos (ICAIC).

The film explores the beginnings of the Second Seminole War, which took place in Florida and lasted from 1835 to 1842. The heavy in the story (besides the U.S. cavalry) is a plantation owner named William Raynes and his overseer Joe Hammer. Raynes is pissed because his black slaves keep escaping and finding refuge in the Seminole community. As far as Raynes is concerned those slaves are property, and this amounts to theft in his book. Raynes decides to take action against the Seminoles, at first on his own, then later with a little help from the U.S. government. As was often the case with the DEFA Indian films, the story ends on a triumphant note but can’t escape the fact that, in the end, the Seminoles were run out of Florida and forced to live on reservations in Oklahoma. The film tries to spin this with an end credit discussing the number of losses by American troops in that war. There would be one more war with the Seminoles before all was said and done, but it is this second war that is considered to be the main conflict and the most costly both in terms of troops used and human life lost.

Although the film is titled Osceola, that character is absent from much of the action. Most of the film is devoted to Richard Moore, a local sawmill owner who stands against Raynes, hides or employs runaway slaves, and helps the Indians defeat the plantation owner’s plans. The story of the Seminoles doesn’t start kicking in until the final third of the film.

Osceola

Not surprisingly, Gojko Mitić plays the title role. The fact that Mitić isn’t Native American is less important here. The real Osceola was not a pure-blood Indian. His father was Scots-Irish and his mother was a Creek Indian. He wasn’t even a Seminole, although he fought alongside them since the Creek lands had already been taken over by white settlers. Mitić should be well-known by the readers of this blog by now, but you can find out more about him here.

Playing the heroic Richard Moore is the Romanian actor Iurie Darie, who appeared in several DEFA westerns under the name “Jurie Darie.” Darie was a popular actor in Romania and a talented man. He had one degree in art from the Institutul de Arte Plastice (now the National University of Arts in Bucharest) and another in theater from the Artă Teatrală și Cinematografică (now the National University of Theatre and Film “I.L.Caragiale” Bucharest). He got his start in films in 1953 in Nepotii gornistului (The Bugler’s Grandsons) and continued working after the Romanian Revolution. He died in 2012. Two years before his death, Darie caused a scandal when pictures of the, then, 81-year-old Darie and his 64-year-old wife Anca Pandrea appeared nude together in a pictorial spread in which they are pretending to have sex.

The evil Joe Hammer is played by Gerhard Rachold, a character more recognized for his face than his name. Although trained as a stage actor, Rachold appeared in dozens of DEFA films, playing everything from a Nazi to a newspaper reporter. He might have had a career after reunification as well, but shortly after his wife died, Rachold, who had long had a problem with depression, committed suicide by jumping out of a ninth-story window.

Gojko Mitic

ICAIC’s assistance gave DEFA access to some very Floridian environments that would have been harder to duplicate in Bulgaria and Germany. Still, there are a few scenes with suspiciously out-of-place looking palm trees. The story is helped along by Günter Schmidt’s attractive costumes. Schmidt did the costumes for ten of DEFA’s sixteen westerns and usually strove for historical accuracy, although here there are plenty of mistakes in military uniforms, weapons, and Seminole clothing.

The Seminole Wars were one of the most shameful episodes in American history. The Seminoles had signed a treaty to allow them to continue to live in central Florida, but new president Andrew Jackson had other plans, signing the Indian Removal Act, which rendered previous agreements null and void, and led to the deaths of thousands of Native Americans on the Trail of Tears. Some resisted. One of these was Osceola, who did such a good job of evading the U.S. cavalry that General Thomas Jesup eventually resorted to deceit, arranging a meeting with Osceola at Fort Peyton under a flag of truce, then promptly arresting him anyway.

osceola

You’d think that Hollywood stay far away from a story like this, but Budd Boetticher used it as the setting for Seminole with Anthony Quinn playing a sympathetic Osceola and Richard Carlson, who usually played the hero in those days, getting a chance to chew up the scenery as the evil fort commander. Rock Hudson and Barbara Hale received top billing, but the film really belongs to Quinn and Carlson. Considering the American state of mind in 1953, Seminole is surprisingly sympathetic to the Indians. The same can’t be said for Raoul Walsh’s Distant Drums. The Seminoles as portrayed here have more in common with the cannibals in Make Them Die Slowly than any American Indian. Walsh was one of the best filmmakers in Hollywood at the time so the film is entertaining but it’s egregiously bad history. Today Distant Drums is best known for being the first movie to feature the “Wilhelm Scream.”

One more attempt was made in 1957 to tell the “true” story of Osceola by a small, no-budget production company in Florida called Empire Studios. The film was called, rather luridly, Naked in the Sun, but its lack of funds or talent left the film assigned to a footnote in cinema history. Konrad Petzold’s Osceola is far from perfect—he directs the film with less flair usual—but it’s still one of the best films to tell the story and worth a look for anyone interested in America’s past.

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© Jim Morton and East German Cinema Blog, 2018. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Jim Morton and East German Cinema Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Too Young for Love?

Posted: June 17, 2018 in Comedy, Feminism, Love, The Seventies
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Für die Liebe noch zu mager?
Too Young for Love? (Für die Liebe noch zu mager?) is a portrait of a girl on the cusp of womanhood. At the start of the film, our heroine Susanne (Simone von Zglinicki) is wide-eyed and still wet behind the ears. She works at a textile plant and is a model worker. Susanne has a crush on Lutz, the town hipster, but he stills sees her a little girl. The German title of this film translates literally to “Still Too Skinny for Love.” It appears in IMDB under the title Too Skinny for Love1, but the DEFA Library at Amherst chose to translate the title based on its meaning rather than a literal translation.

From Delmer Daves’ A Summer Place to Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, filmmakers have explored the subject of coming of age for both comedy and drama. In the United States, filmmaker John Hughes practically made it a brand with films such as Pretty in Pink, Sixteen Candles, and Some Kind of Wonderful. In Too Young for Love, Susanne is no longer a teenager, but she’s not quite a woman either. The film follows that journey carefully, step by step. It is never salacious or prurient, and there is, as one might expect from a DEFA film, plenty of interludes where the merits of socialism are discussed.

In a style similar to The Legend of Paul and Paula, the film has some nice musical interludes including the Klaus Renft Combo performing “Als ich wie ein Vogel war” (“When I Was a Bird”). The Klaus Renft Combo, like Wolf Biermann, was a thorn in the side of the East German government. The were banned from the radio in 1962 for their obviously Western-influenced rock music. The ban was eventually lifted in 1967, and the group become extremely popular, but with their songs of social criticism it didn’t take long for them to get on the wrong side of the authorities again, and the band was banned from even existing in 1975. Lyricists Gerulf Pannach and songwriter Christian Kunert were thrown in prison for nine months and then officially “expatriated,” even though both men had been born in East Germany.

Too Young for Love?

Too Young for Love was Bernhard Stephan’s first feature film. Before that he had worked in television, directing an episode of Polizeiruf 110 (Police Emergency Call)2 and the miniseries Täter unbekannt (Offender Unknown). His second feature film, Aus meiner Kindheit (From My Childhood), was the story of the Ernst Thalmann’s youth, recreating pre-WWI Hamburg in Schwerin. Stephan went on to make several more films for DEFA. They usually focused on the lives of ordinary people in the GDR. One notable exception is Jörg Ratgeb, Painter (Jörg Ratgeb, Maler), which explores the life of the Swabian contemporary of Albrecht Dürer at the time of the German Peasants’ War (1524–1525). With the fall of the Wall, feature film opportunities dried up and Stephan returned to television. He has made a name for himself there, primarily for his work on comedies and crime shows.

Originally, Katharina Thalbach was slated to appear in the role of Susanne, but when she became pregnant, the role was turned over to Simone von Zglinicki, who was still a student at the theater school in Leipzig at the time. Von Zglinicki was a good replacement. Both women are excellent actresses, and both have faces that are particularly good at expressing wide-eyed wonder. Von Zglinicki went on to appear in several more East German films, including Hans Roeckle and the Devil (Hans Röckle und der Teufel), Love at 16, (Liebe mit 16), The Flight, and Sabine Kleist, Age 7. Thanks to her relative youth, the Wende had less impact on her career than it did on most of the older East German actors. She has gone on to appear in numerous films and television shows since that time.

Playing the self-absorbed and irresponsible Lutz is Christian Steyer. Steyer practically made a career in East Germany out of playing irresponsible jerks. A year earlier, he had made a splash in The Legend of Paul and Paula playing just such a character. He’s a little more sympathetic here, but still not exactly a role model. He is also a talented composer, creating the music for several movies including Jan on the Barge (Jan auf der Zille), Sabine Kleist, Age 7, Forbidden Love (Verbotene Liebe), and Jana and Jan (for more on Christian Steyer, see Sabine Kleist, Age 7).

Christian Steyer

The film takes some gentle jabs at East German socialism and its restrictions on goods and travel, but the one that resonated the most was the line, “Mensch Opa, das sind echte Levi′s!” (“Man, Grandpa, those are real Levi’s!”). Until the early seventies, blue jeans were frowned upon by the establishment on both sides of the Berlin Wall. In the West, they weren’t allowed in most workplaces, and in the GDR they were seen as a symbol of the invidious influence of western culture and part of the subculture of juvenile delinquency and rock’n’roll. As a result, East German teens coveted jeans, and in particular, Levi’s. Levi’s figure prominently in both the play and novel of Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. (The New Sorrows of Young Werther) by In Ulrich Plentzdorf with one character saying that jeans were the finest trousers in the world (“Jeans sind die edelsten Hosen der Welt”). The East German government railed for years against the garment, but, like so many of the SED’s decisions, it was a lost cause. By 1970, most young people in the West were wearing jeans on a regular basis, including those pro-communist revolutionaries that were causing trouble for the U.S. government. Eventually, East German garment factories started making jeans, they called “Doppelkappnahthose” under names such as “Goldfuchs,” “Wisent,” and “Boxer.” At first, they were brown corduroy knock-offs. The state-owned factories wouldn’t get around to making actual denim jeans until 1978. The East German jeans really didn’t measure up as far as teens were concerned. They wanted Levi’s, not Doppelkappnahthose.

In 1978, the Levi Strauss & Company made a deal with the East German government to ship 800,000 pairs of the popular jeans to the GDR. In spite of the steep price—costing more than twice the price of the East German jeans—and the limit of one pair per person, people lined up to buy them and they sold out quickly. Of course, owning a pair of real Levi’s brought its own perils. It pegged you as a potential troublemaker, which could lead to a Stasi file on you.

The film did well, thanks to its realistic portrayal of everyday life in East Germany. It is worth noting that on IMDB, the film rates much higher with women than it does with men, which, I suppose, would make it qualify as a “chick flick” or a “Frauenfilm.” It is a well-made film with some exceptional performances from its leads.

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1. The German word mager means lean, and comes from the Latin macer; the same root as our words “meager” and “emaciated.”

2. Later episodes of this series are being shown on MHZ under the title Bukow and König, which is a bit like renaming Law & Order “Lupo and Bernard.” Bukow and König have only appeared in 18 of the Polizeiruf 110 episodes. Compared to other characters such as Leutnant Vera Arndt (48 episodes), Hauptkommissar Herbert Schneider (58 episodes), and Hauptmann Fuchs (85 episodes!) this is a drop in the bucket.

© Jim Morton and East German Cinema Blog, 2018. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Jim Morton and East German Cinema Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Snow White

Posted: June 2, 2018 in Erwin Geschonneck, fairytale, Fantasy, Gottfried Kolditz, Märchenfilm
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Snow White
As discussed elsewhere on this blog, fairytale films were the closest thing to a cash cow the East German film industry had to offer. Beloved by East and West Germans alike and often featuring stories in which the poor and generous triumph over the rich and greedy, the fairytale film faced fewer hurdles when they were exported to the West. After all, didn’t Walt Disney—a man who hated socialism with an passion—also make films of these stories? It didn’t hurt that, with a few notable exceptions (Rumpelstiltskin and Sleeping Beauty come to mind) the DEFA film tended to follow the original fairytales much more closely than their Hollywood counterparts.

DEFA’s Snow White (Schneewittchen) is much more faithful to the original Grimms’ fairytale than Disney’s film. Right off the bat, the DEFA film starts the same way as the fairytale: A young queen is shown sewing next to an open window on a snowy day. The woman accidentally pricks her finger, and seeing the red blood on the white snow in the ebony window frame, thinks she would love to have a child with skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood and, hair as black as ebony. Soon after, Snow White is born, but the the queen dies and the evil stepmother enters the picture.

At this point, both the Disney version of the story and the DEFA version follow the fairytale closely, with the evil queen telling the huntsman to take Snow White into the forest and kill her, the huntsman having pity on the girl, and Snow White discovering the home of the seven dwarfs. Perhaps influenced by Disney, the dwarfs in the DEFA film also have a happy little song they sing whenever they’re marching to and from work. In the DEFA film, as in the original fairytale, it takes the evil queen three tries to kill Snow White. Disney’s evil queen, a model of efficiency, skips the tightening bodice and poisoned comb, and goes straight for the apple. In a way, this change by Disney is an improvement. After all, fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me; but fool me three times, well, then I’m just an idiot.

Schneewittchen

In the DEFA version, as in the original story, Snow White revives after the dwarfs stumble with her coffin and the piece of the apple is dislodged from her throat. Their is nothing magical about the prince’s kiss. Both films differ significantly from the original story at the end, but that’s understandable. In the Disney version, the evil queen doesn’t even make it off the mountain, falling to her death while being chased by the dwarfs. In the DEFA version the queen comes to the Prince and Snow White’s wedding, and, upon seeing that her stepdaughter has survived, flees the country. In the original story, the queen also comes to the wedding but is met there with a pair of red-hot iron shoes that she is forced to wear and dance in to her death. This gruesome detail is omitted from later editions of the fairytale, so DEFA can be forgiven for also omitting it. Plus, it doesn’t do much to encourage continued sympathy for Snow White and her prince.

Snow White is directed by Gottfried Kolditz, one of East Germany’s foremost directors. If Kolditz’s output is any indication, the man loved genre movies. No other East German director has such a catalog of genre-specific movies. It includes musicals (Midnight Revue, Beloved White Mouse), westerns (The Falcon’s Trail, Apaches), science fiction films (Signals, In the Dust of the Stars), and, of course, fairytales (Mother Holly and Snow White). Kolditz graduated with a doctorate from the University of Music and Theater in Leipzig, which was founded as a music conservatory in 1843 by the composer Felix Mendelssohn. With this school in his background, it’s understandable that Kolditz stared working at DEFA as a music adviser. After directing a few short films for the “Das Stacheltier” group at DEFA, he stepped into the role of director, and quickly demonstrated his talent. Most of his early films were musicals, and nearly all of his films contain musical sequences, even the science fiction films. I spite of his tendency to avoid heavy message films and concentrate on films that, by anyone else, would be considered light fare, Kolditz’s film always carry a strong socialist message about the corrupting influence of power and greed, and the importance of teamwork. Kolditz died in 1982 in Yugoslavia.

The screenplay for the film is by Günter Kaltofen, who was just coming off a seven year stint as the chief dramaturge at the DFF (East Germany’s television station). Kaltofen practically made a career out of converting fairytales into screenplays. Along with Snow White, he provided screenplays for Rumpelstiltskin, Mother Holly, The Golden Goose, King Thrushbeard, and several other children’s films. Born in Erfurt in 1927, Kaltofen served in WWII as a Luftwaffenhelfer (a young person enlisted to help German soldiers keep their anti-aircraft guns loaded). He was captured and sent to a P.O.W. camp. After the War, he studied various subjects at schools in Jena and Leipzig, eventually working as dramaturge at theaters in Meisen and Leipzig. At that time, he wrote a few fairytale plays, including the theatrical version of Das Zaubermännchen—a socialist reinterpretation of Rumpelstiltskin—which was later made into a movie by Frank Beyer (and don’t worry, we’ll be discussing that one soon enough). Kaltofen died in 1977 in East Berlin.

seven dwarfs

Snow White stars the stunning Doris Weikow. Weikow began her career as a gymnast, winning the 1957 German Youth Champion in 1957. From there, she went into television as an announcer—a role she continued throughout her life. At the time Snow White was being filmed, she was married to Erwin Geschonneck, and they had one daughter, the journalist and writer Fina Geschonneck. Weikow only appeared in four films (Snow White was her first). She might have had more of a career in films but she chose to continue working as a television announcer instead.

Playing opposite her as the evil queen is Marianne Christina Schilling in what would be her most career-defining role. Schilling mostly appeared in roles as supporting characters. She moved with her husband to Bremen in 1984. Suffering from a particularly severe form of arthritis, she retired from acting and died in 2012.

Marianne Christina Schilling

Schilling came to the role thanks to Albert Wilkening, the head honcho at the Babelsberg Film Studio. Although his name only appeared in the credits for one film, Wilkening’s influence on the film industry in East Germany was monumental. He started working in the film industry after WWII, when he was assigned to be the acting director of Tobis-Filmkunst in Johannisthal. Because of his degree in engineering, and a background in law and patents, he was hired as the technical director at DEFA. Soon he becomes the man in charge of nearly aspect of studio operations, eventually becoming the head of productions at DEFA. In 1954, he helps found the Film School in Potsdam-Babelsberg and is appointed Head of the Faculty of Cinematography. In 1956, Wilkening took over the role of director of feature films at DEFA from Hans Rodenberg, a job he occupied until 1961, when the job is taken over by Jochen Mückenberger with Wilkening’s blessings. Mückenberger was even more interested in art than Wilkening, and under him DEFA flourished. That all came to an end in 1966 with the 11th Plenum decisions. A party wonk named Franz Bruk took over, but Bruk was inept and ill-suited for the job. Eventually Wilkening was asked to return to DEFA, where he worked from 1973 until his retirement in 1976. Wilkening lived just long enough to see the Wall come down, but not longer enough to see Germany reunited. He died on the 24th of July, 1990.

This film has all the things one comes to expect from a DEFA fairytale film: the strange but appealing staginess, the catchy tunes, and eye-bleeding color. The films remains one of the most popular fairytale films to ever come out of East Germany. After Heart of Stone and The Story of Little Mook, Snow White was DEFA’s most successful fairytale film. Those two movies were made and distributed back when the West was more accepting of East German films, but Snow White came out a few months after the Berlin Wall had been built and relations between the two Germanys were at their worst. The fact that the film was so popular is a testament to its quality. It is a good fairytale film, rich in details and beautifully photographed. The songs are catchy (annoyingly so) and there’s nothing here that a West German parent wouldn’t want their kids to watch.

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© Jim Morton and East German Cinema Blog, 2018. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Jim Morton and East German Cinema Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Our Daily Bread

Posted: May 18, 2018 in communism, post-war years, WWII
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Our Daily Bread
There is a stereotype in the West about the films from communist countries: That they’re all about the struggles of the working class against oppression; that they’re shot in the style of socialist realism popularized by Russian directors; that they’re full of hokum about the importance of agriculture and tractors. Any regular reader of this blog knows that nothing could be further from the truth, but if you wanted to show one film that reinforced this stereotype, Our Daily Bread (Unser täglich Brot) would be the one to show. It is the perfect example of the communist film, right down to the parade of tractors at the end. That’s not to say it’s a bad film—director Slatan Dudow knows his craft—but it isn’t a valid representation of the films of East Germany, or the later films of Dudow for that matter. It’s an odd man out, made at a time when the GDR’s autonomy as a state was tenuous at best. The country was only a month old at that point.

Before East Germany ever became a country, the director Slatan Dudow was a hero of socialist cinema. His 1932 film Kuhle Wampe, oder Wem gehört die Welt? (Kuhle Wampe, or Who Owns the World?) looked at the effects of the great depression on the average German, and championed the rights of workers. With its strong pro-socialist message (written by Bertolt Brecht) the film earned the enmity of the Nazis, who promptly banned it and arrested Dudow when they came to power. The film ends with a rousing rendition of “Solidaritätslied” (“Solidarity Song”)—written by Brecht with music by Hanns Eisler—which went on to become a popular song during the Spanish Civil War.

tractors!

Our Daily Bread is very much in the same vein as Kuhle Wampe, and might even be viewed as a sequel. It tells the story of the struggles of the Webers family to make ends meet after World War II. Father Karl (Paul Bildt) worked as a treasurer for the Renner & Co. Machine Works, and continues to put his faith in the capitalist system. His Ernst (Harry Hindemith), on the other hand, is a commited socialist is trying to help the workers rebuild Renner’s closed machine factory. Karl’s other son Harry (Paul Edwin Roth) wants to have nothing to do socialism, and prefers to make money by participating in the Black Market that thrived in Berlin after the War. Meanwhile, daughter Inge (Inge Landgut) tries to hold down a job, but keeps finding her honesty and compassion getting in the way. Like an English morality play, the people who make sacrifices and work hard are rewarded, while the ones looking for a life of ease are doomed to tragedy.

Our Daily Bread was Slatan Dudow’s first feature film since Kuhle Wampe, but it wouldn’t be his last. He made six more films for DEFA, and probably would have made more if he hadn’t died in a car accident while filming his last movie, Christine. Dudow’s DEFA films include Destinies of Women, The Captain of Cologne (Der Hauptmann von Köln), and Love’s Confusion. Watching his films in sequence,you can see Dudow’s shift away from the old stylized aesthetics of Ufa and Mosfilm to DEFA’s more objective style of filmmaking.

Landgut

Amusingly, most of the stars of this, the most socialist of East German films, are West Germans. There was still no West German film industry to speak of at that point so West German actors and directors sought work across the border. Paul Bildt and Siegmar Schneider made a few films for DEFA, but for Paul Edwin Roth and Inge Landgut, this was their only East German movie. Inge Landgut started appearing in films when she was three years old. She’s the girl we see threatened by Peter Lorre in Fritz Lang’s M. She also played Pony in the 1931 version of Emil und die Detektive.1 Viktoria von Ballasko hailed from Vienna. A leading lady during the thirties, by the fifties, she was playing mothers, with one of her last film roles playing Horst Buchholz’s mother in Die Halbstraken (released in the U.S. under the much better title Teenage Wolfpack). Schneider, Roth, Landgut, and von Ballasko all found work in the West dubbing American movies into German.

Harry Hindemith, like his character, was devoted to the socialist cause and had no intention of leaving East Germany. He had been a member of the German Communist party (KPD) before Hitler took over. Although he joined the Nazi Party during World War II, this was mostly a move to ensure he could continue to perform on stage. After the War he rejoined the KPD, and then East Germany’s Socialist Unity Party (SED). He often appeared in supporting roles in DEFA films and East German television shows as well as performing on stage and in radio plays. He died in East Berlin in 1973.

Our Daily Bread

The score for the film is by Hanns Eisler, who’d been kicked out of the United States a year earlier by the nitwits on the House Un-American Activities Committee. Upon arriving in East Germany, he composed the country’s national anthem “Auferstanden aus Ruinen” (“Risen from the Ruins”), a better anthem than the one used by West Germany: Hitler’s beloved “Deutschlandlied” (better known to Americans as “Deutschland über alles”—the music that is played whenever a Nazi arrives in a movie). While in Hollywood, Eisler had written the scores for a few movies, most notably Hangmen Also Die, None But the Lonely Heart, and Deadline at Dawn. In East Germany, Eisler went on to write the scores for several movies, including The Council of the Gods, Destinies of Women, and The Crucible. Eisler had written the music for several of Bertolt Brecht’s plays and two men were close. They both left Germany and worked in Hollywood, and they were both drummed out of America by the HUAC (although Eisler, was forcibly ejected, while Brecht chose to leave). Then they moved to East Germany with high hopes for that republic. Brecht died in 1956, when many good socialists were still rooting for the GDR. Eisler died in 1962. By then it was clear that the socialist republic Brecht and Eisler had striven for was inexorably headed toward failure. Without his pal Brecht, Eisler found very few people with whom he could commiserate. He grew more sullen, and withdrew from the public, dying of a heart attack in 1962.

Our Daily Bread is a good movie in the same way that Herbert J. Biberman’s Salt of the Earth is a good movie. Both films promote ideas that were being intentionally suppressed in the United States and both films wear their politics on their sleeves. Both films are intended to rouse the people against the exploitation of the labor force by the rich, but are a bit too earnest for their own good. The lesson in Our Daily Bread is a good one, but the GDR’s failure to live up to its own rhetoric helped capitalists such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher neutralize the message and bury the ideals.

IMDB page for the film.

Buy or stream this film.

1. Based on the popular children’s book by Erich Kästner, Emil and the Detectives was directed by Gerhard Lamprecht, who

© Jim Morton and East German Cinema Blog, 2018. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Jim Morton and East German Cinema Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Bailing Out

Posted: May 6, 2018 in Feminism, Frauenfilm, Iris Gusner
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Kaskade Ruckwarts
The title of Bailing Out (Kaskade rückwärts) refers to a particularly tricky equestrian move where the rider, rather than performing an emergency dismount by a normal method, does a backwards somersault off the rear of the horse. The move is ably demonstrated in the film and is impressive, but it’s really a stunt move that no horse rider is likely to use unless they like to show off and don’t mind a few broken bones in the learning process. In the context of the film, the move also refers to the sudden decision of a dispatcher named Maja (Marion Wiegmann) to “bail out” of her placid small town existence and start things anew in the city. Her husband had died and Maja is having trouble moving on, much to the consternation of her teenage daughter, who sees her mother settling into a rut. Maja eventually decides to go for it. She moves to the city and starts learning to become a train conductor. Teaching her the ropes is Gerd (Siegfried Höchst), a crusty, lifelong bachelor who manages, somehow, to be both stodgy and eccentric. Playing matchmaker for Maja is Carola (Johanna Schall), a frustrated wife who is living the single life vicariously through Maja.

While DEFA prided itself (with some justification) on films told from a female perspective, the fact is, most of these films were made by men. It is interesting to compare this film, which was directed by Iris Gusner—the only female film director working at DEFA at the time—with Egon Günther’s Her Third, which covers similar territory, but was written and directed by men. Curiously, Her Third is harsher in its criticism of male behavior than Gusner’s film. Bailing Out offers a more nuanced picture of things. The men here are still problematic, but not simply because they are pigs. Some are just oddballs who probably will never meet a woman—or any other person, for that matter—that they can relate to; and the women have their own problems. For a while, it looks like Maja might start a relationship with the music teacher Toni (Jaecki Schwarz), who praises her singing, but who is more interested in her voice than being a boyfriend. We know where this film is heading, and it eventually gets there in its sweet, oddball way.

Iris Gusner’s film credentials are impressive. She studied under Mikhail Romm at the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK, now known as the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography), and worked as assistant director to Konrad Wolf on Goya. Her first feature film, The Dove on the Roof, was banned, so she did what most directors faced with this situation chose to do: she played it safe next time by making a fairytale film (The Blue Light). She scored her biggest hit with All My Girls. A few months before the Wall came down, Gusner moved to Cologne, where she worked in television. In 2009, Fantasie und Arbeit: Biografische Zwiesprache (Fantasy and Work: A Biographical Dialog) was published; a book she co-wrote with West German filmmaker Helke Sander.

marion Wiegmann

Maja is played by Marion Wiegmann, a theater actress who worked primarily at the Brandenburger Theater. Bailing Out was her only feature film, but it was enough to garner her the award for Best Actress at the 1984 National Feature Film Festival of the GDR (Nationales Spielfilmfestival der DDR). In 2014, she received an award from the Brandenburger Theater for her work there.

Like Wiegmann, co-star Siegfried Höchst was also a theater actor. Unlike Wiegmann, however, Höchst never recovered from the fall of the Wall. Born into an impoverished situation, Höchst was an ardent believer in the ideals of communism and worked to support the SED. He was an excellent actor and appeared in several films and TV movies as well as appearing on stage. Unfortunately, he was also a heavy drinker, a problem that got progressively worse during the seventies. Coming out of rehab in the early eighties, he started to work again, and even managed to direct a couple TV movies before the Wall came down. But when the republic began to falter, Höchst returned to the bottle. After the Wende, Höchst withdrew from public appearances, preferring to stay home and drink. His exact date of death is unknown. His body was found on December 13, 1991, but he had apparently been dead a few days already at that point.

The real star of the film is Johanna Schall. Whenever she’s on the screen, it’s hard to watch anyone else. Schall comes as close to royalty as the GDR had to offer. Her father was Ekkehard Schall, one of the foremost interpreters of the works of Bertolt Brecht, and her mother was Barbara Brecht-Schall, the daughter of Helene Weigel and Bertolt Brecht. After reunification, Schall worked as a director for various theaters across Germany, while, at the same time, appearing in television shows and giving guest lectures. In 1992, she starred in Apfelbäume (Apple Trees), which was screened in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival. These days, she prefers to work behind the scenes as a theater director. She also writes on a number of topics on her blog (in German, of course).

Johanna Schall

At the start of Bailing Out, we hear Maja sing a song over the dispatch radio to one of the truckers. The song was written by Christian Kožik, a composer living in Potsdam. The lyrics are based on Ballade de la belle heaumière aux filles de joie (Ballad of the beautiful helmetmaker’s wife to the ladies of the night) by François Villon. Villon’s poem is a warning to pretty young women that someday their beauty would fade, so they’d better get all they can while men are still putty in the their hands. The poem was also the inspiration for Auguste Rodin’s La Belle qui fut heaulmière, a sculpture of a withered old woman, sitting on a rock.

Bailing Out is an odd film with middle-aged leads, quirky behavior, and unusual career choices. Perhaps this was too odd for the East German audience because the film didn’t stay in theaters long and actually got better reviews in West Germany than in the GDR. For anyone interested in the East German Frauenfilme (Women’s films), this is a good follow-up to Gusner’s All My Girls, which also looks at working women, but at a different point in their careers.

IMDB page for the film.

Buy or stream the film.

© Jim Morton and East German Cinema Blog, 2018. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Jim Morton and East German Cinema Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Time of the Storks

Posted: April 16, 2018 in Frauenfilm, The Seventies
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Time of the Storks
In 1971, East Germans started lining up outside the cinemas to see a film called Time of the Storks (Zeit der Störche). It might have been in part because of its story of love affair between two strangers, one of whom was about to get married, but it was more likely because the film also featured the first nude scene in a DEFA film. Nudity had less of a stigma in Europe than it did (or does) in the United States. In fact, U.S.-made films occasionally had nudity added when they went overseas. East Germans, because of their country’s secular philosophy, had even fewer hang-ups about nudity than their West German counterparts. They called it Freikörperkultur (FKK), and it wasn’t uncommon to see people enjoying the beaches along the Baltic Sea in the altogether. In Time of the Storks, the nude scenes are short and presented without prurience.

Teacher Susanne Krug (Heidemarie Wenzel) is taking one last solo vacation before her marriage. Susanne is a straight-arrow woman and a prospective candidate for the SED. For the past two years, she’d been a harmonious if somewhat tame relationship with her boyfriend Wolfgang (Jürgen Hentsch). While on holiday, she meets Christian (Winfried Glatzeder), or, more accurately, Christian stalks her. Christian is the complete opposite of Susanne. He doesn’t take anything seriously, including his relationships, and is more interested in living life to its fullest than being politically and emotionally responsible. We’ve seen this angle in rom-coms a hundred times before, from Ninotchka, The Lady Eve, and Desk Set to Working Girl, and You’ve Got Mail.

Zeit der Störche

The film is based on a book by Herbert Otto, a popular East German fiction writer. Otto had been a member of the Nazi party as a teenager, and was a member of the Wehrmacht when he was captured and sent to a Soviet P.O.W. camp. The camp must have made an impression on the young Otto because after the War he chose to live in the GDR where he became a functionary in the Society for German-Soviet Friendship (Gesellschaft für Deutsch-Sowjetische Freundschaft) and was a member of the Writers’ Association of the GDR (Deutscher Schriftstellerverband der DDR). He wrote several popular books, including Die Lüge (The Lie)—an autobiographical novel about his wartime experiences—and Zum Beispiel Josef (For Example, Joseph) and Der Traum vom Elch (The Dream of the Elk), both of which were also made into movies. After the Wende, like many other East German writers, Otto suddenly found his ability to get things published drop precipitously. None of his books are currently in print. Otto died in 2003.

Time of the Storks is directed by Siegfried Kühn with a script by his wife Regine Kühn. This was the first time the Kühns worked together on a film. They would go on to work together on several more films, even after they divorced. While Siegfried’s career ended with the Wende, Regine went on to write and direct several more features and TV films after reunification (for more on the Kühns, see The Second Life of Friedrich Wilhelm Georg Platow and The Actress). Siegfried Kühn’s directorial style on Time of the Storks is unusual. Many scenes in Time of the Storks are filmed with objects partially blocking the views of the actors. Sometimes it’s a bedpost, that stands resolutely in the way of Susanne’s conversation with Christian, perhaps indicating Susanne’s internal prison. In other scenes, we look up at them from hiding places behind trees and tall grass, as if we are spying on the couple. The spying aspect is interesting and may have been intentionally referencing the Stasi, but if it was, it’s handled so subtlety that it didn’t appear to raise suspicions.

Heidemarie Wenzel had already appeared in several films and television shows before starring in Time of the Storks. She appeared briefly as a bride in The Lost Angel and was the main love interest in Farewell, but it was Time of the Storks that put her on people’s radar. Born at the end of WWII, Wenzel appeared in children’s theater as a child, and sang in the stage chorus for the German State Opera. From 1963 to 1966 she studied at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin. She scored again as the gold-digging wife of Paul in The Legend of Paul and Paula. However, her next film—The Dove on the Roof—wouldn’t see movie screens until after the Wende, having the dubious distinction of being the first film banned after Honecker took over the top spot in East Germany.

Heidemarie Wenzel

Wenzel appeared in several more films for DEFA, but after a business trip her husband didn’t return from West Germany. She applied for an exit visa to join him, but was refused. After that, she was labeled as politically unreliable and acting opportunities dried up. She continued to apply for an exit visa and worked as a church secretary in the meantime. She was finally allowed to leave the GDR in 1988. Since the Wende, her on-screen appearances have been restricted to television.

Winfried Glatzeder is most famous for his role as Paul in The Legend of Paul and Paula, but he appeared in many other films, including The Man Who Replaced Grandma, Till Eulenspiegel, and The Land beyond the Rainbow. Unlike his leading ladies, Glatzeder’s career continued without pause after the Wende, although he showed up on television more often. In 2017, he appeared as Harry, a former Romeo Agent1 for the Stasi alongside fellow East German actors Henry Hübchen, Antje Traue, and Michael Gwisdek in Robert Thalheim’s comedy Kundschafter des Friedens (Spy for Peace).

Winfried Glatzeder

Coming out, as it did, after Honecker replaced Ulbricht as the top dog in East Germany, Time of the Storks was seen as a sign of the changing times. Although he was even more of a hardliner than Ulbricht was, Honecker was anxious to prove that the government in East Germany was not the ogre it was portrayed as in the western press. Having once said that “if one starts from a strong position of socialism in the field of art and literature, in my opinion there can be no taboos” (“Wenn man von den festen Positionen des Sozialismus ausgeht, kann es meines Erachtens auf dem Gebiet von Kunst und Literatur keine Tabus geben”), he then had to prove this, which led to a slight loosening of the restrictions on what you could and couldn’t show in film.

IMDB page for this film.

Buy or stream this film.

1. A concept invented by Stasi masterspy Markus Wolf, the Romeo Agent was an East German spy tasked with becoming romantically involved with a person from the West and then convincing them to help him (or her) obtain state secrets. The concept was most recently seen in the German television series The Same Sky (available on Netflix).

© Jim Morton and East German Cinema Blog, 2018. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Jim Morton and East German Cinema Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

The Karl Liebknecht Films

Posted: March 31, 2018 in communism, Günter Reisch, weimar republic, WWI
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Karl Liebknecht
In 1954 and 1955, director Kurt Maetzig made two films devoted to the life of communist pioneer Ernst Thälmann. Later, Maetzig would say he was embarrassed by the films and consider them his weakest work. Unlike most of his films, these two were not of his choosing. The authorities simply decided that it was time for DEFA to make films that championed the forefathers of their country. DEFA had planned to follow up the Thälmann films with films about about Karl Liebknecht, who founded the Spartacus League with Rosa Luxemburg, the group that would eventually become the Communist Party of Germany (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands—KPD). The old master Slatan Dudow was slated to direct it when he died in a car crash in the summer of 1963 (for more on Dudow, see Destinies of Women). Eventually, Günter Reisch was chosen to make the picture.

Reisch was a logical choice, he had worked as an assistant director on the Thälmann films, and had co-directed The Sailors’ Song in 1958, which also dealt with the formative years of the KPD. Reisch was an excellent director, and, more importantly, he believed in socialism (for more on Reisch see Jakob the Liar). Reisch would make the film, and do a good job of it as well. Of course, it didn’t hurt that in Liebknecht he had a genuinely heroic figure who stood up for what he believed in and wasn’t beholden to Stalin the way Thälmann was.

As Long as There Is Life in Me

For the first film—As Long as There Is Life in Me (Solange Leben in mir ist)—Reisch would be working from a script by Michael Tschesno-Hell, who had also written the screenplays for the Ernst Thälmann films. Tschesno-Hell was more party wonk than writer. It’s not surprising that none of the films that list him as the screenwriter list him alone. He did understand the power of the written word, and it was he who created Verlag Volk und Welt—an important publishing house in East Germany. He has been described by acquaintances as on “old Bolshevik.” Nonetheless, he was paid more money for writing As Long as There is Life in Me than any previous DEFA screenwriter had ever been paid, and he lived in the Berlin-Schönholz district, an area exclusively intended for the East German intelligentsia.

As Long as There Is Life in Me opens up in 1914, after Liebknecht has already been elected to the Reichstag as a Social-Democratic Party (SPD) member. Liebknecht receives papers showing that Germany is secretly getting ready for war. The film follows Liebknecht’s efforts to get Germany out of the war and galvanize the people against the monarchy in favor of a socialist system. As one might imagine, this didn’t go over very well with the fat cats at the top, who did everything in their power to first marginalize and then neutralize Liebknecht. Eventually throwing him in prison, which is where this film’s story ends. The title of the film comes from a quote from Liebknecht: “Solange Leben in mir ist, werde ich gegen den Militarismus kämpfen!” (“As long as there is life in me, I will fight against militarism!”).

Horst Schulze

Liebknecht is played with conviction and believability by Horst Schulze. Schulze got his start as an opera singer; a career that was briefly interrupted by World War II. After the war, he returned to the opera, then started appearing in films in 1958. Over the next three decades, Schulze continued to appear in films and sing in operas. Unlike many DEFA actors, especially older ones like him, Schulze did not suffer the job lag with the fall of the Wall, although his roles after the Wende were primarily on television.

Reisch had a knack for adding subtle sub-texts to his stories, and this one’s no exception. We see how, at the start of World War I, the general populace fell prey to mindless flag-waving and the politicians resorted to jingoism to get their way. Liebknecht and his family was subjected to every type of harassment for challenging the need to go to war and for not toeing the line. Liebknecht was right, of course. History has proven the war was stupid. It brought Germany to ruin, opening the path for Hitler and his thugs to stroll into the Reichstag and take over. In this respect the film is as relevant today as it was in 1965.

Karl liebknecht

The film was popular, coming second only to The Adventures of Werner Holt at the box office that year. Reisch, Schulze, and cameraman Horst E. Brandt were all awarded National Prizes for their work. Nonetheless, it would be six years before DEFA would attempt to finish telling the story the story of Karl Liebknecht.

In Spite of Everything!

In Spite of Everything! (Trotz alledem!) was the follow up to As Long as There Is Life in Me. As with that film, the title comes from a quote by Liebknecht about how the communist cause would eventually succeed “in spite of everything.” This time Michael Tschesno-Hell did not write the screenplay. He only provided the basic scenario. Reisch provided his own screenplay for the second film, with input—some might say meddling—from Günter Karl, who served as the dramaturge.1

The film picks up on October 23, 1918, when Liebknecht is released from prison. Germany, is in a state of upheaval, and the war is almost over. Things don’t look good for the German army, but the leaders are too stubborn to admit it. Then a little over two weeks after Liebknecht was released from prison, the sailors in Kiel mutinied and set into motion the November Revolution, signaling the end of the German Empire (for more on that incident, see The Sailors’ Song). The movie follows Liebknecht’s role in the founding of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), the publishing of the KPD’s party organ Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag), ending with his and Rosa Luxemburg’s murders and the funeral that followed.

Karl Liebknecht

Unlike the first film, which focuses exclusively on Liebknecht, In Spite of Everything shifts occasionally away from Liebknecht to observe the turmoil occurring in one working family as they grapple with the changes happening in their country.2 We had been introduced to that family, the Schreiners, in the first film, but this time their story takes up more of the narrative, making the film more relatable and relevant to the average person. As with the first film, Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) leaders Gustav Noske and Friedrich Ebert are portrayed as the bad guys, and attitude that helped clear the path for Hitler, but that fact isn’t remotely broached or hinted at here. This time we have a new villain: Von Preuss, a creepy military man in a fur collar, played with gusto by Rolf Ludwig. We saw this character briefly in the first film, but this time we get to watch him in all his viciousness. Von Preuss is presumably based on right-wing militia leader Waldemar Pabst, the man who freely admitted to ordering the executions of Liebknecht and Luxemburg. Why Reisch chose to omit Pabst in favor of a fictional character is hard to say. Maybe because Pabst never saw retribution for his actions, and, in fact, led a pretty full life as a businessman in West Germany, Austria and Switzerland before finally dying in Düsseldorf at the ripe-old age of 89.

In Spite of Everything!

This fudging of the facts dilutes the effectiveness of both films. Liebknecht’s family is reconstructed with the sons Robert and Wilhelm eliminated from the story with only daughter Vera remaining. Perhaps this was to simplify the familial issues, or perhaps it was because Wilhelm and Robert were still around and were doing nothing to support the SED, while Vera had the good graces to die in 1934. Reisch also falls down when it comes to the deaths of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, which were viciously brutal. Both were captured and tortured before they were killed, but you won’t see any of it in this film. Luxemburg’s body was thrown into the Landwehr Canal, while Liebknecht was shot while being forced from a moving car. For screenings of the film outside of the GDR, even the funeral was omitted, the film ending instead with shots of youths carrying pictures of Liebknecht at the 10th Youth World Festival in East Berlin (X. Weltfestspiele 1973).3

Although the government supported the making of this film, their reaction to it was tempered. After all, this film was all about overthrowing the government in charge. Like the Soviets, the East German communists were finding that their rhetoric about revolution was in danger of biting them in the ass. Revolution is fine as long as you’re not the one being revolted against.

Crowd scene

Perhaps in deference to Dudow, Reisch directed the first film in a similar to that director, whose style was heavily influenced by the films that came out of Ufa during the twenties. Not so with the second film. While the first film was black-and-white, this time everything is in color. Where the first film mimicked the style of Ufa films, the second film is pure DEFA, using that objective, almost documentary style for which they are so famous. In both films, Reisch gets to demonstrate his spectacular skill at manage crowd scenes. No one directed a crowd scene better than Reisch.

As is often the case with historical films made in countries where the events occurred, some things in these movies are left unexplained. In Spite of Everything was made for an East German audience and there were things they would have known about that are relatively unfamiliar to us in the West, and especially to those of us in America—like the Paris Commune, the Kiel Mutiny, or the fact that Karl Liebknecht’s father was one of the founders of the SPD. They are given only cursory mentions The audience was expected to know these things already.

As with Ernst Thälmann, history hasn’t been kind to Karl Liebknecht. While he still commands respect for his devotion to his principles, his refusal to compromise—while noble in its intentions—helped open the door for Hitler. If anything can really be learned from history, this is one lesson that would be well heeded.

IMDB page for As Long as There Is Life in Me

IMDB page for In Spite of Everything!

Buy or stream As Long as There Is Life in Me

Buy or Stream In Spite of Everything!

1. The role of the dramaturge in East German films is an interesting one that has no comparable counterpart in Hollywood films. The term is comes from theater and is the title given to the person whose job it is to fact check historical productions and also make sure that each production adheres to the theater company’s mission statement.

2. This isn’t the first DEFA to use this approach. Both The Sailors’ Song and The Invincibles use the technique as well. Other DEFA films such as Rotation, The Council of the Gods, and Professor Mamlock similarly follow the lives of individuals who are not central to the events of the times.

3. There is some irony in this choice of alternate ending. The World Youth Festival was an important annual event, especially—though not exclusively—in the communist countries. For the first time since 1951, the festival was being held in East Berlin in 1973. In an effort to ensure there wouldn’t be any of the unwanted protests seen in Helsinki when the festival was held there, the Stasi made sure anyone they suspected might have cause to disrupt the proceedings was arrested and either thrown in jail or institutionalized. More on this here, and here.

© Jim Morton and East German Cinema Blog, 2018. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Jim Morton and East German Cinema Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Miraculi

Posted: March 12, 2018 in DEFA, Wende
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Miraculi
Throughout its existence, the DEFA studio in East Germany released films that pushed the boundaries. Some of these, such as Divided Heaven, Farewell, In the Dust of the Stars, and The Airship would make it onto movie screens. A few were shelved, but it was was usually for political reasons rather than the film’s style. It would take the fall of the Wall for stylistic exploration to really open up at DEFA. Freed from the topical restraints imposed by the SED, East German directors briefly found themselves able to make the films they had always wanted to make. From 1990 until the film production company shuttered its doors, directors at DEFA had a freedom to stretch the boundaries of filmmaking in ways that they’d never had before and wouldn’t have again once the profit-before-art philosophy took over. These films didn’t follow the rules and weren’t afraid to challenge the viewer. We saw something similar in the West during the late sixties when Hollywood was no longer sure what would work at the box office and started letting directors push the boundaries; sometimes successfully (The Swimmer, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Bonnie and Clyde), and sometimes, er, interestingly (Skidoo, Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?).

One of the last films to come out of DEFA was Miraculi, but by that time the studio was foundering, and would only release a few more films before closing its doors. Like Latest from the Da-Da-R, and The Land Beyond the Rainbow, Miraculi is an amusing experimental film that shifts through time and space as it follows the misadventures of Sebastian Müller, who starts the film as part of a gang of kids, hanging around in the local pub and goes through some wacky changes, including a stint as a Jesus lookalike, in disguise to catch streetcar fare evaders. The story climaxes on the banks of a lake that has disappeared overnight, leaving a group of jaded party-goers wondering what happened.

The part about the lake is true. As the intertitle at the beginning of the film explains, on June 15, 1978, the Schwarzer See (Black Lake) near Sagsdorf, Germany vanished during the night. Locals reported hearing a rumbling sound, and the next morning the lake was gone. Years later, they figured out that a backhoe piling up gravel on one side of the lake caused the lake’s disappearance. The gravel pile created a displacement of the shaky clay layers under the lake, which then pushed the water in the lake into a nearby swamp, swallowing up the backhoe and beaching a boat. Eventually the lake returned, larger and shallower than before. Now trees eerily rise from under the water, and a road dips into the water, reappearing on the opposite bank.

MIraculi

There’s a natural tendency to compare East German films to well-known films from the West. Such comparisons are, by their nature, facile and inapt, but they do provide a way to quickly categorize films to either entice or repulse potential viewers. Thus we get In the Dust of the Stars compared to Barbarella, and Hot Summer compared to Beach Party. If one were to compare Miraculi to anything, it would have to be Last Year in Marienbad, with its band of decadent party-goers wandering around, talking without listening, all acting as if they are in a dream. As to this last aspect, Miraculi is less circumspect than Last Year in Marienbad.

Miraculi is directed by Ulrich Weiß, who started his career as an industrial photographer. After getting hired as an assistant cameraman for German television in 1964, Weiß went to the Film and Television Academy in Potsdam (Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen Potsdam, now the Filmuniversität Babelsberg). He began making short documentaries, but by the seventies he was making feature films. He scored his first big hit with Blue Bird (Blauvogel), the story of a white boy who is raised by the Indians and then returned to his family seven years later, but it was his film Your Unknown Brother that made the biggest splash. SED authorities weren’t crazy about this film. Ostensibly, it was a film about the Nazis, but with its tale of informants and personal betrayals, the story hit a little too close to home. As the Pogo cartoon strip once said: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” The authorities weren’t keen on his next film—Ole Henry (Olle Henry)—either. Although there was nothing in it that specifically attacked either socialism or the East German government, the authorities couldn’t help but feel threatened by this tale of a barmaid and a boxer struggling to get by in post-WWII Germany. Without any formal acknowledgement of it, Weiß was blacklisted by DEFA. Weiß had wanted to make Miraculi before the Wall came down, but like all of his ideas after Ole Henry, the proposal was rejected. With the fall of the Wall, Weiß saw an opportunity to finally make the film and he ran with it. Unfortunately for Weiß, the same thing that gave him the opportunity to make this film also put an end to his career as a feature film director. He made a few short documentaries after the Wende, and taught at the Film and Television Academy in Potsdam, but his directing career was effectively over.

The film’s main character Sebastian Müller is played by Volker Ranisch. Ranisch was born in 1966 in Karl-Mark-Stadt (now Chemnitz). He studied at the Theater Academy in Leipzig and joined a local theater shortly thereafter. His film career began right before the Wall came down, when he played the young policeman Julian in Frank Beyer’s The Break. He appeared on several of the final films put out by DEFA, and started working on formerly West German TV shows such as Tatort and The Old Fox. He continues to work in films and television.

Miraculi

The cast for Miraculi features some of East Germany’s best character actors, including Barbara Dittus, Arno Wyzniewski, and Karin Gregorek. Stefanie Stappenbeck also appears in a small role as a surveyor at the end of the film. Stappenbeck got her start on East German television, but would go on to a highly successful career in German films after the Wende. Also appearing in the film, albeit briefly, is Käthe Reichel. Reichel was best known for her work with Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel at their Berliner Ensemble. She continued to work in theater throughout her life, and became an outspoken critic against the misuses of power that plagued the SED during its later years in control of East Germany. She was one of the organizers of the demonstration for freedom and democracy on November 4, 1989 at Alexanderplatz.

Weiß had finished Miraculi in 1990, but it would be two years before the film found a distributor. Like most of the post-Wende films that came out of DEFA, the public reacted to the film with indifference. Miraculi played for five days before closing. It would be years before this film would receive the attention it deserved. Even today, the film is not nearly as well known as it should be. If your taste in movies runs toward the surreal, odd, and amusing, you’ll want to see this film.

IMDB page for the film.

Buy or stream this film.

© Jim Morton and East German Cinema Blog, 2018. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Jim Morton and East German Cinema Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

The Airship

Posted: February 27, 2018 in Fantasy, Nazis, Rainer Simon, WWII
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The Airship
In The Airship (Das Luftschiff), director Rainer Simon looks at the creative urge, how it drives a person forward, and how it can cloud their vision, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation. It is a wildly experimental film with a narrative that jumps back and forth in time and features direct-on-film animation. The film follows the adventures of Chico, a young boy who is trying to find his grandfather Franz Xavier Stannebein, an inventor who had tried to build a new type of aircraft before World War II. Stannebein wasn’t interested in war machines. He wanted to make a kind of flying hotel similar to the old zeppelins, but without the flammability problem. When he tried to get money for his project from Germany, he was duped into building a landing strip in Spain for the Condor Legion—a unit of the German airforce sent to help Francisco Franco win the Spanish Civil War. When Stannebein protested, he was thrown into a lunatic asylum. Chico sets off across the countryside to reunite with his grandfather at the asylum. Throughout the film the story jumps back and forth between Chico’s travels and Stannebein’s monomaniacal efforts to get his airship built. The film reaches its climax when Chico reaches the asylum and finds out what really happened to his grandfather.

The Airship is based on a book by Fritz Rudolf Fries—one of the most talented writers to come out of East Germany. Born in Bilbao, Spain, Fries moved to Leipzig when he was seven. There, he went to school at the Karl Marx University. He was fluent in four languages (German, French, Spanish and English), so he quickly found work as a translator. His first book, Der Weg nach Oobliadooh (The road to Oobliadooh) was denied publication in East Germany, but he was able to get it published in West Germany. The book was an immediate hit, and was translated into several other languages, including English. This didn’t endear him to the powers that be in East Germany. It cost him his job, but they recognized that they had a writer of immense talent whose work didn’t make any obvious statements about GDR politics. The books that followed were all printed in East Germany, including The Airship. The fall of the Wall did nothing to slow down Fries’ output, until 1996, when it was revealed that he had worked as an informer for the Stasi. Interest in his work cooled down rapidly after that, until 2010 with the publication of Last Exit to El Paso, which was well received by critics. Fries died in 2014, at which time, Sebastian Hammelehle wrote for Der Spiegel: “German-language literature not only loses a unique author, but also one whose work has not yet been discovered in its entirety.” (“Die deutschsprachige Literatur verliert mit ihm nicht nur einen einzigartigen Autor, sondern auch einen, dessen Werk in seiner ganzen Größe noch gar nicht entdeckt ist.”).

This was Rainer Simon’s first film since Jadup and Boel. Perhaps the folks at DEFA figured he would toe the line a little better after being slapped down for making that film. They were mistaken. If anything, this film is a stronger indictment of the GDR than Jadup and Boel was, especially given the fact that, like the Nazis in The Airship, the East German government sometimes used the charge of insanity to locked up people who were political nuisances. But because it was set in Germany during the War years, the folks at DEFA either didn’t see the connection, or didn’t want to acknowledge it.

Das Luftshiff

The film features a strong cast that includes Katrin Knappe, Kurt Böwe, Timo Jakob, and Gudrun Ritter, all of whom had appeared in Jadup and Boel as well. Additionally, the cast includes Johanna Schall, Arno Wyzniewski, and Hermann Beyer—some of the best actors who hadn’t left East Germany yet. The boy who plays Chico (Daniel Roth) made one for film with Rainer Simon (The Woman and the Stranger), but appears to have dropped out of acting after that.

In Der Freitag, film critic Heinz Kersten called The Airship, “The first full-length experimental film made by DEFA.” Technically, this isn’t completely true. Farewell is also experimental—especially given that it was made shortly after the 11th Plenum—and other films such as The Robe, The Gleiwitz Case, and Divided Heaven have strong experimental aspects in them as well. But it is the first to be made with the assistance of an actual experimental film artist: Lutz Dammbeck. At that time, Dammbeck was making a name for himself with his animations in which he scratched images directly onto the film à la Norman McLaren or Stan Brakhage. Born in Leipzig in 1948, Dammbeck trained as typesetter and studied graphic design at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig. He has created art in several disciplines including, film, painting, collage, and multimedia. He began creating direct-to-film animations in the early seventies, painstakingly scratching animations onto individual frames of film.

The Airship - Das Luftschiff

For the flashback scenes, cinematographer Roland Dressel uses the same technique he used in Jadup and Boel, blurring the edges of the image, as if the memory of events is starting to fade; but because that film wasn’t released in the GDR until 1988, The Airship was the first time audiences saw this effect. Dressel was trained as a photographer, and spent fifteen years as an assistant cameraman with the likes of Jan Čuřík, Werner Bergmann, Joachim Hasler, and Erich Gusko before stepping into the role of DP. He started in television, but he quickly gained a name for himself and became Rainer Simon’s cinematographer of choice. His work on The Airship garnered him the award for best cinematography at the 1984 Eberswalde Film Festival. Dressel continued to work on films, and won the Gold Prize for cinematography in 1994 for Michael Gwisdek’s Abschied von Agnes (Farewell to Agnes). After the Wende—like virtually ever other East German cinematographer—Dressel found it hard to find feature film jobs and returned to television, but he was too good to stay there for long as was soon making feature films again. He retired in 2000.

The Airship is a unique film, and although it may not be the first experimental DEFA film, it did signal a trend in that direction. A trend that would crest shortly after the Wall came down with films such as Latest from the Da-Da-R, Miraculi, and The Land Beyond the Rainbow.

IMDB page for the film.

Buy or stream this film.

© Jim Morton and East German Cinema Blog, 2018. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Jim Morton and East German Cinema Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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