East German Cinema Blog

The Teleplays of Christa Kulosa

Posted: September 7, 2019 in Comedy, DFF, Feminism, Frauenfilm, Iris Gusner, Nachwuchsgeneration, Pop Culture
Tags: Angelika Ritter, Christa Kulosa, Christa Schmidt, Eva-Maria Hagen, Franziska Troegner, Herbert Köfer, nina hagen, Ursula Staack

A popular format on East German TV was the teleplay. These were videotaped on stage in front of a live audience. In America, you’ll see this most often with sitcoms such as Cheers or I Love Lucy. Similarly, these East German teleplays were mostly comedies, but were unique, one-hour to hour-and-a-half shows rather than series episodes. In form, they were closer to the live theater broadcasts shown on PBS. They called them Fernseh-schwänke. Examples of these shows include Ein Hahn im Korb, Heute Ruhetag, and Nicht kleinzukriegen.

Two good examples of this type of teleplay are Marriage/Female (Heiraten/Weiblich) from 1975 and Trabant for Sale (Trabant zu verkaufen) from 1981. Both were directed by Christa Kulosa, and they are also her first and last productions as an East German television director.

Christa got her start in 1966, working as an assistant director in the entertainment division of DFF (Deutscher Fernsehfunk—East Germany’s state television station). In 1968, she enrolled at the University of Film and Television in Babelsberg (now the Konrad Wolf Film University of Babelsberg), to study directing, receiving her degree in 1972. By this time, the DFF had changed its name to the Fernsehen der DDR (Television of the GDR). As is too often the case, it took the folks at DDR-FS a while to trust a production to a woman.¹ At first, she worked as an assistant director next to talented directors such as Wolfgang Luderer, Hans Knötsch, and Günter Stahnke. Stahnke was the most talented of the bunch. In 1965, he made the now-classic Spring Takes Time, but the 11th Plenum banned the film and Stahnke was relegated to directing Fernseh-schwänke for the rest of his career.

Then, in 1975, Christa finally got her chance to direct the comedy Marriage/Female.

Marriage/Female

All the action in this teleplay takes place in the apartment of three generations of women. The grandmother, Frau Wiedemann (Marianne Kiefer), the mother, Gisela Pohl, and her daughter Hannelore flit in an out of the apartment throughout the show. The teleplay is shot on a stage in what appears to be a traditional theater setting. Frau Wiedemann is being coyly courted by the building’s super Wollenschläger (Gerd E. Schäfer) and the daughter Hannelore has recently started dating a man name Splettstößer (Kaspar Eichel). That leaves mom Gisela without a beau, so the daughter decides to do something about it. She runs an ad in the personals section of the newspaper under the heading “Marriage/Female” and a man named Seidel (Paul Arenkens) shows up almost immediately. What none of the rest of them know is that Gisela’s co-worker Bechstein (Herbert Köfer) has long had a thing for Gisela, but has been too nervous to say anything.

Playing the mother and daughter are the real-life mother and daughter team of Eva-Maria and Nina Hagen. Eva-Maria Hagen was already a big star by this point (see Don’t Forget My Traudel), but Nina was just beginning to make a name for herself. She had appeared in an episode of her mother’s TV show ABC der Liebe (ABCs of Love), but this was her first role of any size. That same year, she would also appear in Today is Friday. Previously, Nina had had a radio hit in East Germany with “Du hast den Farbfilm vergessen” (“You Forgot the Color Film”), the story of a woman angry at her partner for forgetting to bring some color film on their vacation.² The song was a big hit, and you can hear an instrumental version of it over the end credits of the film.

While the story centers around the three women, they are, for the most part, “straight men” to the four males. The biggest laughs come from Herbert Köfer’s performance as the nervous Bechstein. Köfer’s physical comedy here is reminiscent of Don Knotts’ wound-too-tight style of physical humor. Köfer got his start working in theater during the War years, but his career was interrupted when he was drafted by the Wehrmacht. He started performing again as a prisoner in a British internment camp.

After the War, he resumed his acting career, appearing at theaters and Kabaretts around East Germany. He made his first feature film appearance in the 1951 film Die Sonnenbrucks (The Sonnenbrucks) and continued to appear in films and television throughout the GDR’s existence, including Naked Among Wolves, Just Don’t Think I’ll Cry, Hands Up, or I’ll Shoot!, The Man Who Replaced Grandma, and The Dove on the Roof.

This is a teleplay that is best enjoyed by native German speakers. There is some humor based on the accents and humor based on puns and popular expressions. Even so, Herbert Köfer’s physical comedy translates into any language and gets the biggest laughs.

Marriage/Female was a success and Christa went on to direct several more television productions, including Antons liebe Gäste (Anton’s Dear Guests), Wen der Hafer sticht (Slaphappy³), Zu zweit (k)ein Problem ((Not) A Problem for Two), Liebling, Du irrst (You’re Wrong, Darling), and Warum gerade Hubert! (Why Hubert, of All People!).

In 1980, Christa applied for permission to emigrate to France. She had married a French/German man and he wanted to return to his family home. She eventually received approval in 1982, but the authorities weren’t pleased. They saw her request as a threat. Had a lesser man been in charge of German television, who probably would have lost her job, but Heinz Adameck—a man Manfred Krug called a “good friend to all viable actors”—stood up for her. Nonetheless, jobs after her application was approved dried up. Trabant for Sale would be her last East German teleplay.

Trabant for Sale

Trabant for Sale is the story of three women who win a Trabant in a raffle at their workplace. Since none of them has a driver’s license, they decide to sell the car. Brigitte (Ursula Staack) is kind of the group’s leader, and Carola (Angelika Ritter) is her hip friend. Susi (Franziska Troegner) is the chubby comic of the group and the only one of the three who wants to keep the car. Brigitte’s plumber Oskar Zahl (Hans-Joachim Hanisch) is trying to convince her to sell the car to him by promising her cash and new bathroom fixtures, but she is also being wooed by Hyronimus Robbel (Peter Tepper), a dorky bicyclist who actually adores her; Carola wants her opera singing friend Anastasius Vogel (Paul Arenkens) to have it; and Susi wants it for her fiancé, the mild-mannered Ferdinand Kefer (Holm Gärtner).

The story of trying sell a Trabant in East Germany was a subject ripe for comedy. Waiting lists for Trabants were notoriously long, and even the East Germans knew that the car was, er, shall we say, less than perfect. Unfortunately, there was no way to do this justice at the time. A comedy that made fun of the Trabant wasn’t going to fly, and a comedy about how much everyone wanted one was also problematic. The only way to tackle to topic was with subtlety, which means a certain percentage of the audience will always be left behind, taking everything at face value. Sensitive to the reputation of the Trabant and the reported waiting times involved in getting one⁴, the DDR-FS chose to air the teleplay on channel 2 instead of channel 1.

Trabant for Sale is shot in more of a TV studio setting than Marriage/Female was. The seating is the kind of raked seating that one commonly sees in television talk shows and modern cinemas. As with the previous film, there are plenty of shots of the audience, which is always fun. Some people seem not to care, while others are keenly aware of the cameras. There are even a few people wearing sunglasses, which seems like a very odd thing to do in a theater.

As with theater, everything is played broadly, which seldom translates well to the screen. Nonetheless, the teleplay is well-directed and features a talented cast. The three female leads went on to have long film and television careers in post-Wende Germany. Franziska Troegner, who plays the lovable Susi, is best known to American audiences as the mother of Augustus Gloop in Tim Burton’s version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The male leads have done very little work in films and television since the Wende, with the exception of Kaspar Eichel (the policeman), who still appears regularly on television. Peter Tepper is working with the Leipziger Funzel Kabarett/Theater, and Hans-Joachim Hanisch works primarily dubbing voice for German film releases. Paul Arenkens died in 2016.

After leaving East Germany, Christa (now Christa Schmidt) worked on a children’s series for Berliner Filmladen and shot 42 PSAs about the environment entitled “Mach mit der Umwelt zu Liebe” (“Make Love to the Environment”). In 1986-87 she shot a TV profile of Eva Maria Hagen for ZDF. Christa didn’t care much for the West German method of film production, which used a factory-like approach to all the jobs outside of the director and cinematographer. At that point, she decided to leave directing and devote more time to her family.

Christa divides her time between Berlin and the South of France. She never lost her love of filmmaking and, three years ago, she started teaching herself to use the latest videography tools. She started making videos for her YouTube channel on whatever strikes her fancy, from a WWII liberation celebration in rural France, to a one-hour documentary about L’auberge de Valbonne—a facility for autistic people in Provence.

Special thanks to Jörg Foth for his diligent work in helping me track down Christa (Kulosa) Schmidt (for more on Jörg Foth, see The Latest from the DaDaeR), and a very special thanks to Christa Schmidt for generously providing her biographical information for this article and for making sure I got my facts straight.

IMDB page for Heiraten/Weiblich.

IMDB page for Trabant zu verkaufen.

Buy Heiraten/Weiblich.

Buy Trabant zu verkaufen.

YouTube stream of Heiraten/Weiblich.

YouTube stream of Trabant zu verkaufen.

1. At that point, fewer than ten DEFA feature films had been made by women. Iris Gusner’s first film, The Dove on the Roof, was a year away, and even then, the movie was shelved before it was released. Gusner wouldn’t get another chance to direct a feature film until The Blue Light in 1976. Christa Kulosa was the only woman directing Fernseh-schwänke.

2. The song is a commentary on the drab grayness of everything in East Germany and most people got it. Somehow, amazingly, it went over the heads of the censors though. Hagen still performs it in her live shows, although in a very different fashion from the original.

3. The title of this film is a very old idiomatic expression that doesn’t have any exact translation in English. Literally the title means “Whom the Oats stab” and refers to erratic behavior. Since this movie will probably never have an English translation, I get to choose my own English title. This is the best I could come up with.

4. There are numerous jokes about both the Trabant and the long waiting times required to receive one. Probably the best-known example is:

Q. What does the ‘601’ in Trabant 601 stand for?

A. 600 people will order one, but only one will get it delivered.

© 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.

5+1 Films That Look Back at the GDR

Posted: August 25, 2019 in Berlin Wall, Cold War, Love, Nazis, Spies, Teenagers, Wende

My next article on the East Germany Cinema Blog is going to take at least another week of work, so, in the meantime, here’s a listicle to keep things moving. These are five (plus one bonus film) of the best post-Wende films on the subject of life in East Germany that I have seen. I’ve only included the ones I could find with English subtitles, but there are others worth checking out. I suspect that most of my readers have already seen these films, but if you missed any they are all worth a viewing.

The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen)

If you ask most people what their favorite film about East Germany is, more often than not it will be this film—that is, if you ask people who did not grow up in East Germany. This story of a Stasi officer who is so moved by a piece of music that he decides to help a playwright who is being hounded by the Stasi was a big hit and won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. People from the west loved it. People from East Germany were less enthusiastic. Some felt it didn’t reflect the average East Germans daily life, while others found the concept of a Stasi officer capable of being emotionally moved by music absurd to the point of fantasy. Not surprisingly, it was made by a West German (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck).¹
Available for streaming on Netflix

Sun Alley (Sonnenallee)

So what’s a film that East Germans like? One answer is this one. Sun Alley is a light comedy about being a teenager in East Germany. It doesn’t deny the problems inherent in living in East Germany, but it shows that teens are still teens, no matter where they are from. It’s a funny movie that is definitely worth seeing. Also, if you are capable of making the leap (no pun intended), you might see the end as secretly very grim. Made by an East German director (Leander Haußmann).
Available on DVD

Good Bye Lenin!

Ask people what their second favorite film about the GDR is, and the answer is usually Good Bye Lenin! It’s much more lighthearted than The Lives of Others, but still has the earmarks of a film made by a West German. It tells the story of a man’s mother, who goes into a coma before the Wall comes down and doesn’t wake up until the country is reunified. Doctors tell the man that sudden shocks might kill her, so he does everything in his power to make her think that East Germany is still going strong, in spite of the enormous Coca-Cola sign going up outside her window. It’s a funny film, with some subtle use of CGI.
Available for streaming on various service.

Barbara

Striking a balance between the oppression of The Lives of Others and the lightheartedness of Sun Alley, Barbara is the story of a female doctor in East Germany who is planning to leave the country. The problem is there’s a Stasi agent on her tail who knows what she’s up to. Directed by Christian Petzold and starring his favorite actress, Nina Hoss. All the films these two made together are worth seeing. Although Christian Petzold is a West German, his film has a more nuanced look at East Germany than those of other West German filmmakers.
Available for streaming on Kanopy

The Legend of Rita (Die Stille nach dem Schuß)

Not so much about life in East Germany as the life of one member of the Red Army Faction after she escapes to the GDR. Directed by Volker Schlöndorff, it’s a clever film about the differences between East and West, and the realities of both. Another grim one that’s obviously made by a West German.
Available on DVD

Special Mention: Go, Trabi, Go

The film that singlehandedly started the Ostalgie craze of the 1990s, Go, Trabi, Go tells the story of an East German family who decides to drive to Italy in their Trabant. It’s filled with “Trabi” jokes but also a grudging respect for East Germany’s “little cardboard car.” Made by an East German who knows his subject. I don’t know if Go, Trabi, Go is commercially available with English subtitles, but you can find it on YouTube with them. The quality leaves something to be desired, but there’s a better copy available without subtitles. If you know how, you can download the better copy and the subtitles srt file, then marry them with the DVD burning program of your choice or watch the movie using an app such as VLC Media Player. See my article on Subtitling for more information on this process.

So that’s it. Let me know what you think. There are other films worth mentioning, such as Kleinruppin forever, Berlin is in Germany, and Beloved Berlin Wall, but they are not currently available with English subtitles.

1. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck takes things a step further with his next movie Never Look Away. This time he postulates an SS doctor hiding his identity in East Germany after the war. If you needed any more proof that von Donnersmarck was a West German, this is it. This movie is based on Gerhard Richter’s life. In reality, the former SS doctor was actually Gerhard Richter’s father-in-law and lived, of course, in West Germany. Remember that many of the higher-ups in East Germany had spent most of WWII imprisoned or exiled for their communist beliefs. They were far less likely to turn a blind eye to former Nazis than the FRG. Western audiences loved this film. Gerhard Richter wasn’t too crazy about it.

The Blue Light

Posted: July 13, 2019 in fairytale, Fantasy, Iris Gusner
Tags: Blanche Kommerell, Gerhard Rosenfeld, Katharina Thalbach, Viktor Semyonov

As I’ve discussed on this blog before, East Germany had an above-average track record on female equality and films about women’s issues, yet there were only a few female directors at DEFA. First and foremost among these was Iris Gusner. She wasn’t the first women to direct feature films at DEFA. That honor goes to Bärbl Bergmann, who made several short films for DEFA and the feature film Rüpel in 1963.¹ But Gusner was the most prolific with seven DEFA films to her name (Hannelore Unterberg comes in a close second with six DEFA films). From 1961 to 1967, Gusner studied cinematography at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography in Russia. After that, she worked as an assistant director for Konrad Wolf on Goya before making her first feature film, The Dove on the Roof, which was promptly shelved and remained unscreened until after the Wall came down. The first of her feature films to make it into cinemas was this one, The Blue Light (Das blaue Licht).

The Blue Light is loosely based on a Grimms fairytale, although it’s really a complete reboot of the original fairytale. It takes the story and stands it on its head, changing the message and the priorities of the characters to better suit a socialist perspective. Both the original and the film tell the tale of Hans, a young soldier who is discharged from the service without pay because he’s been wounded. In both versions, the young soldier meets a witch who tries to trick him into fetching a blue light from her well and when he won’t cooperate, she leaves him stranded in the well. Feeling despondent, the soldier lights his pipe with the blue light and a “Mannlein” (little man) appears who can grant the soldier anything he wishes.

From here on out, though, the film and the fairytale diverge radically. Hans doesn’t seek the harsh retribution against the witch that she gets in the story, and the soldier’s multiple kidnappings of the princess are reduced to one. In the original story, the soldier eventually marries the princess, but no one would want to marry the princess in this movie, she’s a spoiled child-woman who pouts and sucks her thumb, and is dumb as a bag of hammers. Romantic interest is provided, instead, by Anne, who works at the local inn. This is, after all, an East German film, and being born in a royal family doesn’t make a person better; only more likely to be corrupt.

Playing Hans is Viktor Semyonov, a Russian actor who primarily works on stage, but has appeared in several films. Semyonov is well-suited to the part. He is dashingly handsome (more handsome than most of the lead actors in East Germany, truth be told) and plays the part well. As was always the case with non-German actors in the lead roles, his voice was dubbed by a German actor—in this case, Jaecki Schwarz, who also appears here as the simple-minded guard Knut.

The lazy, idiot princess is played by Katharina Thalbach in the broadest performance possible—way too broad, honestly. Thalbach is the daughter of Swiss theater director Benno Besson and the Berlin-born actress Sabine Thalbach. Benno and Sabine were working at Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble when they met. From an early age, daughter Katharina starting performing, first on television and later in films. At age fifteen, she made her stage debut , playing a background whore in The Threepenny Opera, eventually working her way up to the lead role of Polly Peachum. In 1976, Thalbach and her husband Thomas Brasch joined the list of people that signed the protest letter against the expatriation of Wolf Biermann, and like many of the others, left East Germany shortly thereafter.² Perhaps because of her age, Thalbach didn’t have the same problems getting work that plagued many of the other East German actors who emigrated to the West. In 1979, she impressed people with her performance in Volker Schlöndorff’s The Tin Drum. Since then, she has appeared in dozens of feature films and television movies, including Welcome to Germany, Good Evening, Mr. Wallenberg, Silent Night, Strike, and the TV-movie Der Minister, in which she plays a parody of Angela Merkel named “Angela Murkel.”

Playing counterpoint to Thalbach’s princess is Blanche Kommerell as Anne. Like Thalmann, Kommerell is the daughter of a professional actress. Also like Thalbach, she got her start in acting at a young age. Unlike Thalbach, she stayed in East Germany until the fall of the Wall. After that, she did very little acting on either the big screen or on television, but she continued to act in theater productions and to give lectures on acting and diction (I’ll be discussing Kommerell in more detail when I get to Little Red Riding Hood).

Most of Iris Gusner’s casting in The Blue Light is surprising. Using a Russian actor as the lead was rarely done; there were so many good East German actors out there. Thalbach and Kommerell weren’t the usual choices either (although, by this time, the usual choices—Christel Bodenstein, Cox Habbema, and Karin Ugowski—were getting too old to play these parts). There was one person, however, who was custom made for his part, and casting anyone else would have made little sense. That was Fred Delmare, East Germany’s most diminutive leading actor, who plays the Little Man (for more on Delmare, see Black Velvet). Delmare has fun in the part and makes an engaging Mannlein.

The music is by Gerhard Rosenfeld, and, if the online reviews are any indication, this is the most controversial aspect of the film. A lot of people didn’t like it. Rather than follow a standard formula for a movie soundtrack, Rosenfeld has composed a soundtrack using Renaissance instruments, primarily, the hurdy-gurdy. It is an odd, slightly subdued soundtrack, perfectly in keeping with the times, but not something you’d usually find in a movie like this. Like Karl-Ernst Sasse, Helmut Nier, Reiner Bredemeyer, and Wilhelm Neef, Rosenfeld was a classically-trained musician. His movie scores include The Rabbit is Me (with Reiner Bredemeyer), The Dove on the Roof, The Banner of Kriwoj Rog (Die Fahne von Kriwoj Rog), Unser stiller Mann (Our Silent Man), Addio, piccola mia, Our Short Life, and Bailing Out.

When he wasn’t working on films, he composed orchestral works, chamber music, and music for operas and ballets. After the Wende, he was no longer hired to write feature film soundtracks, but continued to write scores for TV-movies and documentaries. In 1997, his opera Kniefall in Warschau was staged in Dortmund. The Independent went on to call it “one of the most important operas composed in Germany since 1945.” Rosenfeld died in 2003.

Like most of the fairytale films, The Blue Light did well at the box office, and it was well received by critics on both sides of the border. The fact that it states right up front that it is a loose adaptation of the fairytale probably helped avoid the usual cavils about not following the story verbatim. It’s an entertaining film that avoids pandering to children, which makes it an enjoyable film for both kids and adults.

IMDB page for the film.

Buy or stream the film

1. Arguably, Wanda Jakubowska was the first woman to direct a feature film at DEFA with her 1960 film Begegnung im Zwielicht (Encounters in the Dark); but Jakubowska was Polish and the film was a co-production with Film Polski and was in Polish. I hope at some point I can write more about her. She was an interesting woman with an interesting life. If you can, check out The Last Stage (Ostatni etap), the first feature film to portray the holocaust. Based on her own experiences in Auschwitz.

2. If it seems like East Germany was suddenly allowing a lot more people to leave the country, there’s a reason. The Biermann protest was a black-eye for the government in the GDR, and it came less than a year before a Conference on European Security and Cooperation that was slated for October 1977 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, the GDR wanted to remove as many talking points as possible from the table by quietly releasing political prisoners and letting them emigrate to West Germany. Likewise, many of the signatories of the Biermann protest letter. They were probably hoping no one would notice, but the New York Times did.

Those East German Barge Films

Posted: June 21, 2019 in DEFA, Love, post-war years
Tags: Alfred Maack, ötGustav Püttjer, barge film, GHorst Naumann, Hans Heinrich, Maria Häussler, Petra Peters, z George

Living on a boat is not easy. You’re in a constant fight against the elements and there’s no end to the maintenance. Boat owners will tell you that, if you want to know what it’s like to own a boat, “stand in the shower and tear up twenty dollar bills.” Yet, the idea of living on a boat is appealing. That combination of the freedom to travel around in a place you call your own is hard to beat. Small wonder that those same boat owners who’ll tell you a boat is a “hole in the ocean you throw money into” continue to own boats and continue to love it, warts and all. There are several movies about life on a boat. The films about sailing are usually adventures (White Squall, All is Lost, Kon Tiki), and the ones with houseboats are usually comedies (Houseboat, The Horse’s Mouth, Sleepless in Seattle). Then there are the barge films (Binnenschifferfilme).

While sailing films are about striking out into the unknown and houseboat films are about living somewhere that just happens to be on the water, barge films fall somewhere in between. They are often aquatic road movies, with the characters slowly traveling from place to place, entering the lives of people then departing. Barge films are exclusively European.¹ Films such as L’Atalante, Beauty and the Barge, Unter den Brücken (Under the Bridges), The Hornet’s Nest (which is more of a houseboat film), and Young Adam explore the details of life on a barge. They are often comedies but even the funny ones have moments of drama—barge life is no bed of roses. DEFA made two such films—The Barge of the Happy People (Der Kahn der fröhlichen Leute), and Old Barge, Young Love (Alter Kahn und junge Liebe).

The Barge of Happy People

The Barge of Happy People follows the misadventures of Marianne (Petra Peters), who inherited a barge from her father and is trying to make a go of it in spite of advice to sell it from other barge owners. When Marianne goes to apply for a Befähigungszeugnis (a license needed for different trades in Germany), she is denied because of her age, so she hires her uncle August (Alfred Maack) to captain the ship until she turns twenty-one. The problem is, August has only ever piloted sailing ships and knows nothing about engines. August hires Michel (Fritz Wagner) as the machinist, unaware that Michel has long had a crush on Marianne, but Marianne doesn’t feel the same way. Things get more complicated when a trio of musicians joins the crew and romantic rivalry develops between Michel and musician Hans (Joachim Brennecke).

The Barge of Happy People is based on a book by Jochen Klepper, a writer best known today for his Christian hymns. Klepper was the son of a Lutheran minister and was studying theology the University of Breslau when he dropped out to become a radio announcer. He lost that job when Hitler came to power because Klepper had made committed the unforgivable sin of marrying a Jewish woman, and a Jewish who already had two daughters to boot. As Hitler’s war effort heated up, Klepper realized the danger his wife and her three daughters were in. He managed to get one of the girls out of the country before Adolf Eichmann refused to grant a visa to the daughter still in Germany. Like the popular actor Joachim Gottschalk (see Marriage in the Shadows), Klepper, his wife and his step-daughter decided that suicide was preferable to what was likely to happen to them next. They turned on the gas and commuted suicide on December 11, 1942. After his death, a selection of entries from his diaries was published under the title In the Shadow of Your Wings (Unter dem Schatten deiner Flügel).

Petra Peters got her start playing the lead in Arthur Maria Rabenalt‘s 1949 DEFA film Christina (Das Mädchen Christine). Rabenalt must have been impressed because he cast her in his next film as well, Anonymous Letters (Anonyme Briefe), this time a West German production (for more on Rabenalt, see Chemistry and Love). She followed this with two more West German films—Girls Behind Bars (Mädchen hinter Gittern) and You Don’t Play Around with Love (Man spielt nicht mit der Liebe)—before returning to DEFA to star in The Barge of Happy People. This would be her last role in an East German film. From here on out, she would appear in West German films until her move to Britain with her husband Albert Lieven. During this time, she stopped acting in movies, working instead as a playwright. After Lieven’s death in 1971, Peters returned to film in smaller roles and appeared in the 1976 Hammer film To The Devil a Daughter. She died in Munich in 2004.

The Barge of Happy People was a hit in both East and West Germany, and remains one of the fifty top box office films from the GDR. Reviews were positive, with the East German newspaper Neue Zeit claiming the film was in the tradition of the “Soviet comedies” (trust me, it wasn’t), presumably because saying it was in the tradition of the Ufa films would have caused no end of trouble for both Heinrich and the folks at DEFA.

As the tensions between East and West grew, DEFA decided that it was time to move away from lighter fare like this and concentrate on films that more obviously endorsed socialism.² DEFA still made a few light comedies, as well as musicals and fairytale films, but most of the films, once they stopped allowing West Germans to direct, had strong socialist messages—films such as The Council of the Gods, The Axe of Weilbeck, and The Invincibles. If a film was funny, it was funny with a socialist message (The Kaiser’s Lackey), and if a film was romantic, it was romantic with a socialist message (The Story of a Young Couple). This would be the pattern from here on out. It was okay to be a little silly—just make sure the audience knew where you stood politically.

By 1957, DEFA was getting flak for making excessively didactic films. It seemed like every film had some expository dialogue that related the events in the film to Marxist philosophy. This wouldn’t have bothered the powers that be at all, but even in a non-capitalist country such as East Germany, it was important to get butts in seats, and audiences on both sides of the border were avoiding DEFA films in favor of their more frivolous and more entertaining West German counterparts. DEFA decided to tone down the preaching. As it was made clear that capitalism leads to bad decisions and corruption, the filmmakers could do what they liked. This was demonstrated in 1957 with Old Barge, Young Love.

Old Barge, Young Love

Like The Barge of Happy People, Old Barge, Young Love deals with a romantic triangle. This time, the story concerns two barges and a tug that are operating on the Havel river in north-eastern Germany. One barge is owned by Hein (Alfred Maack), who is trying to get the mortgage on his barge paid off so he can turn it over to his son Kalle (Götz George) debt-free. To do this, Hein has taken on a huge shipment of cement that overloads the barge and threatens it with stranding if the channel gets too shallow. It’s easy enough to figure out what’s going to happen then.

Kalle has the hots for Anne (Maria Häussler), the daughter of another barge owner named Hermann Vollbeck (Gustav Püttjer). Anne’s been studying shipbuilding in Berlin and is home for the holidays to help her dad on the barge. Also attracted to Anne is Horst (Horst Naumann), the captain of a tugboat, but Horst is a bit of a cad and full of himself. Anne seems to fluctuate between Kalle and Horst, which pisses off Hein to no end.

Storywise, Old Barge, Young Love is pretty much by the book. There are know real surprises here. We know that Hein’s barge will run aground at some point, we know that Anne will choose the Ernest Kalle over the playboy Horst.

As with The Barge of the Happy People, the cast Old Barge, Young Love had a cast featuring many West German actors. It was Götz George’s third film, but his first starring role. It would be one of his only East German efforts. Horst Naumann, on the other hand got his start at DEFA, but Old Barge, Young Love would be his last feature film for the East German film company. He moved to the West in 1958. Maria Häussler (who spelled her name then with an ß, but whose name is usually spelled now with two esses) This is one of the only films to star her. She mostly worked in theater and voiced several West German radio plays.

Old Barge, Young Love wasn’t the hit that The Barge of Happy People was, but West Germany had become more restrictive about what East German films could play there. It didn’t help that critical response to the film was lackluster, with critics calling the film clumsy and dull. Then in 1973, the West German production company Terra Film made a musical by the same same name that was a hit. Coincidentally, perhaps, Horst Naumann appears in both movies.

Both DEFA films were directed by Hans Heinrich. Heinrich’s films had more in common with the films of West Germany than those made by his fellow directors in East Germany. Like Gerhard Lamprecht, Werner Klingler, Georg C. Klaren, Arthur Maria Rabenalt, Erich Engel, and Paul Verhoeven, who went to East Germany in the early fifties to get their films made, Heinrich’s style was heavily influenced by the old Ufa studios. His films are more romantic and traditional, and aside from the occasional lip service to socialist values and the casting of successful entrepreneurs in a bad light, there’s not much about Heinrich’s films that peg them as products of East Germany.

Heinrich was born in Berlin-Charlottenburg. He started working with film early on when he dropped out of technical school and got a job in a film lab. He started making short films for Hitler’s Deutsche Arbeitsfront (German Labor Front) and working as a film editor on several feature films until he was drafted into the Wehrmacht. After the war, he was hired by Wolfgang Staudte to work on The Murderers Are Among Us. He must have impressed Staudte, because he was hired to work as an assistant director on Staudte’s next two films, The Adventures of Fridolin (Die seltsamen Abenteuer des Herrn Fridolin B.) and Rotation. Heinrich finally stepped into the director’s shoes with The Barge of the Happy People.

Heinrich made a few more films in East Germany, most notably My Wife Wants to Sing, but Heinrich and DEFA were never a very good fit. He lived in West Berlin and was constantly fighting with the authorities about the lighthearted nature of his films. I imagine the term “formalism” got thrown a bit—a term often used in the Eastern Bloc anytime someone didn’t like something but couldn’t give you a concrete example why. After the problems he encountered getting My Wife Wants to Sing made, Heinrich threw up his hands and left DEFA, resuming his career in the West. He worked on several movies and TV shows in West Germany. Heinrich died in 2003 in Berlin.

Heinrich’s barge films are not masterpieces. They are light and silly, and Heinrich’s style is so rooted in the old Ufa style that they could have been West German films. The fact that they aren’t has more to do with the times than the films themselves.

IMDB page for the The Barge of Happy People.

IMDB page for Old Barge, Young Love.

Buy Der Kahn der fröhlichen Leute (The Barge of Happy People).

Buy Alter Kahn und junge Liebe (Old Barge, Young Love).

1. There has been the occasional U.S. film that features a barge (Moontide comes to mind), but America’s riverways aren’t that conducive to barges. You’re more likely to see a film about life on a raft (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) or a riverboat (Steamboat Bill, Jr., Show Boat) than a barge.

2. This wasn’t a unilateral choice. By 1950, Hollywood was already busy making virulent anti-communist films, and all of the left-leaning talent had been sidelined or neutered thanks to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

When Martin was Fourteen

Posted: May 19, 2019 in Anti-Semitism, Teenagers, Walter Beck, weimar republic, WWI
Tags: children in war, Kapp Putsch, Walther von Lüttwitz, weimar republic, Wolfgang Kapp

When Martin Was Fourteen (Als Martin vierzehn war) is the story of a teenage boy who finds himself in the middle of the fighting that followed the “Kapp Putsch” in March of 1920. As with many German movies—East, West, and Unified—the films assumes a level of familiarity with German history that we in America know little about. To truly appreciate this film, a little background is in order.¹

World War I officially ended on the 28th of June 1919, but, by then, it was all over but the screaming. The Central Powers (the German Empire, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria) hadn’t lost as many soldiers as the Allied Powers (too many countries to name, but primarily France, Britain, Belgium, Russia, and, eventually, the United States), but they didn’t have as many to lose. Germany was roundly defeated and reluctantly signed the Treaty of Versailles. The treaty was draconian, blaming the war on Germany, reducing the size of the German state, and forcing that country to make reparations to the victors. People on both sides of the conflict thought the treaty went too far, but none more than the Germans. Especially galling was the clause stating that the war was entirely the fault of Germany. Philipp Scheidemann, the Chancellor in the newly established Weimar Republic, refused to sign it and resigned rather than sign this treaty. President Ebert didn’t see any choice but to sign it, and found a replacement for Scheidemann (Gustav Bauer) who was more willing to do as he was told.

The response to the treaty was immediate. Germans on the left and the right protested the signing. Most vocal were the Freikorps—right-wing groups of ex-soldiers who had put it on themselves to try and restore Germany to the military power it once had been. They saw the signing of the treaty as a vast left-wing conspiracy and blamed the communists and the Jews for Germany’s defeat. The only solution, as far as they were concerned, was to overthrow the Weimar government and rebuild the German Empire.

Leading this movement was a German general named Walther von Lüttwitz, who fought in World War I, and a journalist named Wolfgang Kapp, who didn’t. Kapp was a journalist who never let facts get in the way of his agenda. He was a strong proponent of the Dolchstoßlegende (stab-in-the-back myth), which maintained that the Germans were winning the war, but were betrayed by leftists and Jews back home. This anti-Semitism wasn’t a new. Even while the war was still raging, the Supreme Army Command (Oberste Heeresleitung) conducted a census (the infamous Judenzählung) to prove that Jews were not on the battlefields during the war, but hiding behind desk jobs. When the survey proved the exact opposite, the Oberste Heeresleitung buried the results. Ignoring all this, Kapp continued to spread the myth and called for former German soldiers to get rid of the new government.

While Kapp was the mouthpiece for this movement, Lüttwitz was the muscle. He was in charge of the Berlin Freikorps—paramilitary groups of former soldiers who had taken it on themselves to police the country in whatever fashion they saw fit. This included breaking up left-wing protests and killing anyone who resisted. They weren’t officially part of the government, but the government did nothing to stop them. On March 13, 1920, Lüttwitz’s troops—many sporting swastikas painted on their helmet, a fact that impressed a youthful coup supporter named Adolf Hitler—took over the Reich Chancellery and Kapp declared himself Chancellor. Reactions were strong and immediate. Workers went on strike all over Germany and the economy shut down. Five days later, the Kapp Putsch was over. Kapp and Lüttwitz fled the country and the Weimar government was back in power, but the damage was done. With the left emboldened by the effectiveness of the strikes, and the right emboldened by the putsch, the two factions continued fighting all over Germany, and the cowardly cut-and-run approach to the crisis by the leaders further deteriorated the already low opinion the public had of its government.

When Martin Was Fourteen takes place during those tumultuous five days. The events in the film appear to be based on the Ruhr uprising that took place in the west of Germany, but they’ve moved the action to rural Mecklenburg, presumably to make the story more East German. The film belongs to a subgenre of war films that follow the misadventures of young people on the cusp of adulthood who are thrown into violent conflicts and forced to grow up too fast. Other films in this subgenre include Ivan’s Childhood, Empire of the Sun, Hope and Glory, and Elem Klimov’s Come and See. While nowhere near as brutal as Klimov’s film, the message is still clear that war can kill a childhood.

Fourteen-year-old Martin (Ulrich Balko) is in love with his neighbor’s daughter Kathrin (Elfie Mann). While horsing around with her, he accidentally breaks her doll and promises to repair it. This minor event starts the ball rolling as Martin discovers that a local landowner is supplying arms to putschists. By the end of the film, that doll doesn’t seem so important to either Martin or Kathrin.

When Martin Was Fourteen was directed by Walter Beck, who mainly made films for children. A West German by birth, Beck spent most of his formative years in Berlin. In 1948, he enrolled in DEFA’s film program for young people (DEFA-Nachwuchsstudio) and received a degree in directing. From 1951 until 1958, he worked primarily as an assistant director on documentaries and newsreels. In 1958 he joined DEFA’s list of regular directors. In 1959, he directed his first feature film, Claudia, which set him on his path as a director of films for children. Over the years, he made several more movies for kids, including the popular fairytale films King Thrushbeard, Pinocchio, Sleeping Beauty, The Prince Beyond the Seven Seas (Der Prinz hinter den sieben Meeren), The Bear-Skinned Man (Der Bärenhäuter), and The Frog Prince (Der Froschkönig). Like many other directors, actors and technicians from DEFA, his film career ended with the fall of the Wall,

The young stars of this film did not go on to do much in movies. For Elfie Mann, this was her only film, which is a shame—the girl has a good screen presence. Ulrich Balko appeared in three other films, all directed by Beck, but never did any others. The rest of the cast consisted of DEFA regulars such as Hans Hardt-Hardtloff, Lotte Loebinger, Manfred Heine, and Helmut Schreiber, most of whom found very little film work available after the Wende (not including Hardt-Hardtloff, who died in 1974).

This was the first film for cinematographer Eberhard Borkmann. Borkmann would go on to film several more well-known feature films and TV-movies. He was a talented cinematographer, whose work includes White Wolves, Fatal Error, and Isabel on the Stairs. Like Beck and the other actors in this film, Like Beck, Borkmann’s film career ended when the Wall came down.

When Martin Was Fourteen is a film worth seeing. Although a subgenre of war movies, the stories of the effects of war and violence on children are stories that need to be told. The film also serves as an interesting if flawed history lesson about the Kapp Putsch and its immediate aftermath.

IMDB page for this film.

Stream movie with English subtitles on Kanopy.

1. For a deeper dive on the subject, check out Versailles 1919: A Centennial Perspective, by Alan Sharp; Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy, by Eric D. Weitz; and The Weimar Republic Sourcebook edited by Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg.

Set a Fire, the Fire Brigade Is Coming

Posted: April 20, 2019 in Comedy, Rainer Simon, Winfried Glatzeder
Tags: firemen, Gudrun Ritter, Karl May, Katrin Martin, Kurt Böwe, Manfred Wolter, prostitute, Renate Krößner

What happens to a fire department when the town there in never has any fires? That’s the idea behind the TruTV’s new comedy Tacoma FD. But it isn’t the first time someone thought of this. It’s also the concept behind Set a Fire, the Fire Brigade Is Coming (Zünd an, es kommt die Feuerwehr), the 1979 East German comedy by Rainer Simon.

Set a Fire (which is what I’m going to call it for the rest of this article to save typing) takes place around 1900 in the town of Siebenthal in the foothills of the Ore Mountains along the Czech border. One of the firemen, a man named Zetsche (Kurt Böwe) also owns the local inn, which is danger of collapsing. The fountain that his wife (Gudrun Ritter) had installed in the courtyard is siphoning off water from under the structure, leaving it on shaky ground. A plan is hatched to burn down Zetsche’s inn, which would serve the dual purpose of eliminating the rickety building before it collapses and giving the fire department something to do. Of course, things never go to plan in stories like this. Most of the action centers around fireman Franz (Winfried Glatzeder). Franz is betrothed to the pretty but dull Marie (Katrin Martin), but he is in love with a local prostitute name Lene (Renate Krößner) and she loves him as well. Everything comes to a head after a local celebration to mark a visit to the town by the writer Karl May (Hannes Fischer).

Using firemen for comedy isn’t new Charlie Chaplin did it (The Fireman), so did the Little Rascals (Hook and Ladder), and the Three Stooges returned to the idea more than once (Flat Foot Stooges, False Alarms, and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World); but Set a Fire is a long ways from the humor of these slapstick comedies. Its humor is closer to the British comedies of the fifties and sixties. It’s broad and a little bawdy.

This could have been just another light comedy, but it was directed by Rainer Simon. Simon also wrote the script with some help from Wolfgang Kohlhaase, who helped polish the dialogue. Although it takes place at the turn of the last century, it does a good job of lampooning the idiocy of unscrupulous leaders and government cover-ups. Although no official complaints against the film were made, it is clear that the authorities saw subversion in it. A film about the shenanigans of public officials during Kaiser Wilhelm II’s reign still had bite in 1979, and it probably didn’t help that the young lovers in the film resolve their difficulties by moving to America. Why else would they have bothered to set the honey trap they did with Simon’s next film, Jadup and Boel?

The original scenario was by Manfred Wolter, a successful writer in East Germany who also worked as a dramaturge and script doctor. Wolter co-wrote or polished the scripts for several DEFA films, including Fire Below Deck and Next Year at Lake Balaton, and served as the dramaturge for Simon’s Till Eulenspiegel. His last work for DEFA was in 1990, when he wrote the scenario for I Can Also Run Backwards (Rückwärtslaufen kann ich auch), a film about children with disabilities. Wolter’s own daughter was disabled and Wolter and his daughter appear briefly in the film. After the Wende, Wolter wrote and directed a couple documentaries (Von der Normandie in den Bundestag and Aktion Ungeziefer). He died in 1999 in Woltersdorf. Also worth noting is that Wolter is listed as appearing in the film as the Kunstpfeifer, which is just a fancy way of saying the guy can really whistle.

Renate Krößner had already appeared in several TV-movies and a few movies in smaller roles by the time she made this film, but this was the first film to really show what she could do. Although her signature role in Solo Sunny was still a two years away, it’s apparent here that she would be a star. She enlivens this movie up every time she appears on screen. Winfried Glatzeder was a known quantity by this point, having starred in Time of the Storks, The Legend of Paul and Paula, and Till Eulenspiegel. The film also features the reliable talents of Kurt Böwe and Gudrun Ritter, as well as the lovely Katrin Martin, who, only a few years earlier in The Man Who Replaced Grandma, played not Glatzeder’s love interest but a teenager under his care. Of the actors in this film, Renate Krößner has had the most active post-Wende career and is probably as well known today for her post-reunification movies (e.g., Go for Zucker, Vergiss dein Ende, and the TV-movie Küss mich, Genosse!) as she is for those made in the GDR (Solo Sunny, notwithstanding).

The cinematography is by Roland Dressel, which is to say, it’s very good. DEFA had some exceptionally talented cinematographers, including Günter Haubold, Werner Bergmann, Günter Marczinkowsky, and Erich Gusko. Dressel wasn’t afraid of experimenting with the image, which occasionally got him into trouble. His work on The Second Life of F.W.G. Platow was criticized for this reason. On Jadup and Boel, he took things even further, with its blurred-edged flashback sequences. It was this willingness to experiment that endeared him to Rainer Simon and why Simon continue to use him for the rest of his DEFA films. Since the Wende, Dressel has continued to work on various films and TV shows on a freelance basis.

Set a Fire receive mixed reviews. Renate Holland-Moritz of the satire magazine Eulenspiegel liked it, but Fred Gehler in the weekly magazine Sonntag found the film too episodic for its own good. It’s a fun little film, but is not currently available with English subtitles.¹

IMDB page for this film.

Buy this movie.

1. As those of you who know me know, my interest in movies extends well past the East German films. Something I see occurring in other film fan communities is the phenomenon of fan-made subtitles. If you like Hong Kong action films or Italian gialli, you can find sites that offer subtitles to dozens of films that never received English language releases. Sadly, the same can’t be said for East German movies. Apparently, they lack the DNA needed to encourage that sort of fanboy overdrive (sex and violence, I suspect).

Sleeping Beauty

Posted: March 22, 2019 in fairytale, Love, Märchenfilm
Tags: Juliane Korén, Vera Oelschlegel, Walter Beck

The story of Sleeping Beauty (Dornröschen) is old enough that it’s origins are a point of debate. The Grimm Brothers felt the story had enough Germanic elements to identify it as German in origin. The French, quite rightfully, would point out that the story was already well-known in France as it appeared in Charles Perrault’s Histoires ou contes du temps passé published in 1697. Meanwhile the Italians will tell you that Perrault got the story from Giambattista Basile’s Sun, Moon, and Talia. The story has been traced back to the 1300s, but is thought to be even older than that. These days, it’s best known in the form of the Walt Disney animated feature. Given the manhandling the original story received over the years from the likes of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Charles Perrault, and Giambattista Basile, one can forgive Walt Disney for tweaking the story to suit his needs.

The basic setup of the story is always the same. After a queen has a daughter, the king holds a banquet and invites all the local fairies to bestow gifts on the infant. Unfortunately, he forgets one fairy who’s not as sociable as the others and, in the classic version, is also evil. After the other fairies bestow their gifts on the child (beauty, charm, virtue, and so forth), the evil fairy curses the child: On her fifteenth birthday, the girl will prick her finger on a spinning wheel and die. It turns out that one fairy hadn’t given her gift yet, so she deflects the curse slightly, saying the girl will not die but will sleep for one hundred years, when she will be awakened by a prince. In an attempt to prevent the curse from happening, the king orders all the spinning wheels in the kingdom destroyed. Of course, this has no effect. The young princess meets up with the evil fairy pretending to be an old woman working a spinning wheel. She lets the girl try her hand at the spinning wheel with the expected result.

While Disney’s film takes its cues from Perrault’s tale, the DEFA version follows the Brothers Grimm’s version the closest, with thirteen fairies and missing dinnerware as the reason the thirteenth fairy isn’t invited to the baby’s christening. It also does a better job of addressing the inevitable economic problems that would befall a community that was forced to give up its major income source (wool spinning and cloth production). This is Sleeping Beauty as seen through the eyes of Karl Marx.

In a manner similar to DEFA’s version of Rumpelstiltskin, where the evil dwarf becomes a dispenser of socialist instruction, the evil old fairy of the previous versions is now a beautiful young woman. Her angry spell is in reaction to the king’s self-importance and lack of empathy for the common folk. When the last fairy comes forward to temper the death spell, the reason she doesn’t simply lift the curse altogether is because she too feels the king needs to be taught a lesson. In DEFA’s version, the king is the real villain, and he is the one who is ultimately overthrown in favor of a system more equitable to the people. The fairy that curses the baby is known as the fairy of hard work (Fee des Fleißes), and it’s the castle’s industry that suffers.

Like most of the DEFA fairytale films, Sleeping Beauty is a bright and colorful movie, with simplified environments used to represent the various places. Backgrounds are devoid of details, occasionally consisting of featureless, light blue cycloramas. It was directed by Walter Beck, who made a career of fairytale films at DEFA, including King Thrushbeard (König Drosselbart), Pinocchio, The Prince Beyond the Seven Seas (Der Prinz hinter den sieben Meeren), The Bear-Skinned Man (Der Bärenhäuter), and The Frog Prince (Froschkönig). Beck’s career ended with the Fall of the Wall. He was sixty at that point, and the job opportunities for sixty-year-old, East German directors was nearly nil in the new, capitalist Germany.

Sleeping Beauty was a hit. The most popular DEFA fairytale film since Little Red Riding Hood (Rotkäppchen). The modern touches in the music and costume design helped make the film stand out from the previous fairytale films. It did not receive distribution in America, perhaps because of its strong socialist message, or perhaps because the time of the popularity of fairytale films in the U.S. was on the wane in 1971.

The slumbering princess is played by Juliane Korén. With parents who were also actors, Korén was born to perform. Her father, Hans Klering, was one of the founding members of DEFA. Her mother, Elsa Korén, appeared in several DEFA films, but worked more on stage, primarily with the Theater der Freundschaft (Friendship Theater)—now called the Theater an der Parkaue (Parkaue Theater) next to Lichtenberg Park. Aside from a few feature films roles, including In Spite of Everything! and The Second Life of F.W.G. Platow, Juliane Korén primarily appeared on television in the GDR. After the Wende, she moved to stage, working an as a member of the ensembles in Bochum and Stuttgart. She died in Berlin in 2018.

Playing the thirteenth fairy is Vera Oelschlegel. Oelschlegel hails from Leipzig, where her mother was head of the district commission for entertainment art, Oelschlegel studied at the the Film Academy in Potsdam-Babelsberg and worked at the theater in Putbus before getting a job at DFF—the GDR’s state-owned television station. She appeared in several films and television in East Germany. In 1961, she married playwright Günther Rücker, they were divorced six years later. Her next husband was Hermann Kant, one of the most important writers to come out of East Germany. The divorced in 1976.

But it was Oelschlegel’s next husband that got tongues wagging. Shortly after divorcing Kant she married Konrad Naumann, an SED politburo member. Some accused her of being a golddigger (or whatever you’d call a golddigger in a socialist country), but Oelschlegel didn’t care, she liked the guy and his cheery simplicity was a welcome change from the dour intellectualism of Kant. Naumann and Oelschlegel divorced in 1987, a couple years earlier, Naumann had been kicked out of the politburo, ostensibly for a speech he gave at the Academy of Social Sciences. In fact, it probably had more to do with Naumann’s efforts to relax trade restrictions with the West, a move that the rapidly dying old Soviet leaders opposed. A Soviet Untertan¹ like Honecker wasn’t about to do anything to upset these fossils, so his old buddy Naumann had to be let go.

After the Wende, Oelschlegel—along with her long-time partner, dramaturge Gregor Edelmann, and journalist André Plath—founded the Theater des Ostens, a touring theater troupe that performed throughout the Eastern states of Germany. The troupe ceased operation in 2012.

Sleeping Beauty is good film. In many respects, it’s better than the Disney film and the other movie versions of the fairytale. In some respects, it is better than the original fairytale as well. It scratches below the surface of the original story, then asks and answers the difficult questions that the story poses—something that no other version of the tale ever bothered to do. But the most interesting aspect of the film is the idea of a castle completely surrounded by a wall of thorns. Surely, the comparison to the Berlin Wall was not lost on the authorities at DEFA. In 1961, Konrad Petzold and Egon Günther got into hot water for making The Robe (Das Kleid), a fairytale film about a walled castle simply because the officials thought it mimicked the recent building of the Berlin Wall, even though the film was in the can before the Wall went up. Ten years later, there were no such complaints when the wall of thorns (looking very much like barbed wire) grows around the castle in Sleeping Beauty. What a difference a decade makes.

IMDB page for this film.

Buy or stream this movie.

1. I’ve used the German word Untertan here because there really is no exact English equivalent. For a deeper dive on this subject, check out The Kaiser’s Lackey.

Held for Questioning

Posted: March 5, 2019 in 11th Plenum, Angelica Domröse, Concentration Camps, DEFA, Frank Beyer, Wende, Wolf Biermann, Wolfgang Kohlhaase, WWII
Tags: Berlinale, Nazis, Poland, Sylvester Groth

The backstory of Held for Questioning (Der Aufenthalt) is the story of a film that was made against all odds, by a director that DEFA had, essentially, written off the books. Frank Beyer was one of the best filmmakers in East Germany. He proved this time and again, with movies such as Five Cartridges, Naked Among Wolves, and Star-Crossed Lovers; all of which were critically acclaimed on both sides of the Iron Curtain, He was also responsible for delivering East Germany’s only Oscar-nominated feature (Jakob the Liar); a film so good that Hollywood was quick to remake it (badly) in their own image. Watch Beyer’s films and you’ll see why. Here’s a director who understands the film medium better than most other directors—West and East.

You’d think this would have made him the darling of DEFA, but that was not how the GDR worked. In 1966, he got in trouble after the 11th Plenum, when the authorities decided that his film Trace of Stones was anti-socialist. Beyer was relegated to TV, and wasn’t allowed to make another feature film until 1974, when he made Jakob the Liar. The film was such a hit that he was allowed to return to feature filmmaking once more.

After Jakob the Liar, he made The Hiding Place (Das Versteck), a romantic comedy inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage. It starred the always popular Manfred Krug and Jutta Hoffmann and had nothing particularly controversial in it, but right before the film was slated for release, the East German authorities decided it would be a good idea to expatriate Wolf Biermann while the folksinger was on tour in Cologne. Over one hundred writers, actors, directors, poets and other artists signed a letter of protest against the move. Four of those who signed the letter included Manfred Krug and Jutta Hoffmann—the stars of The Hiding Place—as well as the film’s screenwriter Jurek Becker and director Frank Beyer. The film was given an extremely limited release and quickly shelved. All four people were essentially blacklisted, with Krug, Hoffmann, and Becker moving to West Germany to get away from the work restrictions and constant surveillance. Beyer stayed behind, but once again found himself relegated to the world of television. Perhaps as an act of defiance, he went to West Germany and made a film starring Angelica Domröse and her husband Hilmar Thate, who, like Krug and Hoffmann, had signed the Biermann protest letter, and then left East Germany because of the punitive measures taken against all the signatories. At this point, it looked like Beyer would never be allowed to make another feature film in East Germany.

One night, while talking to screenwriter Wolfgang Kohlhaase, Beyer mentioned that he would love to make a movie out of Hermann Kant’s semi-autobiographical novel, Der Aufenthalt (literally, The Stay), but he felt that the book’s interweaving stories would be too unwieldy for a film. Kohlhaase had a solution. “Just focus on the story of Mark Niebuhr, the nineteen-year-old German soldier who, at the end of WWII, is mistakenly identified as an SS officer and thrown into prison.” Beyer liked the idea, but DEFA wasn’t ready to let him back into the fold. They only relented after author Hermann Kant gave DEFA the ultimatum that either Beyer directed the film or no one would. And so, Held for Questioning was made.

As you might guess from the subject matter, Held for Questioning is a grim affair. The story starts in a railway yard, when a women identifies Niebuhr as the SS officer responsible for the murder of her daughter at Lublin. Things go quickly downhill for Niebuhr after that. Nobody will tell him what it is he’s supposed to have done. From his perspective, events are playing out like Franz Kafka’s The Trial. At first he is kept in solitary confinement, then released into the main prison with Polish prisoners who hate him. Later he is moved to the cell containing other German officers, and it is here that he learns of the heinous crimes his fellow inmates committed. He begins to understand that, while not guilty of the charge with which he’s accused, he is, at least, guilty of not bothering to pay attention to what was happening around him, and of helping their actions.

A story like this could be easily ruined by a less talented filmmaker, but Wolfgang Kohlhaase and Frank Beyer are far too good at their craft to fall into that trap. As usual, Kohlhaase leaves enough space between events to let you fill in blanks, and Beyer knows just how to direct it. In one scene, two Polish girls flirt with the handsome young Niebuhr, until they learn what he’s accused of. They look on him in horror. It is also the first time Niebuhr hears just what it is he’s charged with.

Playing Mark Niebuhr is Sylvester Groth in his first feature film. Groth’s career in East German films was short. He made his last film for DEFA in 1986 (Das Haus am Fluß—The House on the River). While visiting Austria as a guest actor, he decided not to return to the GDR, and began his career in the West. With his expressive and striking features, it didn’t take long for him to find work in West Germany, and then later in Hollywood. He has appeared in numerous films, including Inglourious Basterds, The Reader, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Whisky with Vodka (Whisky mit Wodka) and many more. Recently, he’s become familiar to American television viewers as Walter Schweppenstette in the popular TV series Deutschland 83, and for portraying Walter Ahler in NSU: German History X.

Held for Questioning was a critical success, and won several prizes. It was scheduled to be shown at the 1983 Berlinale, but it was pulled from the film festival and banned from any international distribution after a Polish military attaché denounced the film as anti-Polish. It was nothing of the kind, of course, but the attaché spoke very little German, and objected to the fact that the Germans made a movie in which the protagonist was imprisoned by Polish soldiers. It didn’t help that the Polish military officers were still wearing the same outfits in 1983 that they wore in 1946. With the recent clashes between the Polish government and the Solidarity movement, the film took on an entirely new subtext that neither Beyer nor Kohlhaase had meant or anticipated. After that, it was only allowed to be shown in the the state-owned theaters in East Germany.

In spite of the Polish objections to it, Held for Questioning was a popular film with audiences and critics, and it helped Beyer get back in DEFA’s good graces. Unfortunately, his return to feature films didn’t last long. Six years later, the end of the GDR also meant the end of the careers of many fine East German filmmakers and technicians. Beyer found himself once again relegated to the world of television, this time thanks to the forces of West German exclusivity rather than East German retribution.

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Isabel on the Stairs

Posted: February 3, 2019 in Chileans in East Germany, The Seventies
Tags: Allende, Barbara Dittus, Chile, Eberhard Geick, Hannelore Unterberg, immigration, Irina Gallardo, Jaecki Schwarz, Jenny Gröllmann, Pinochet, refugees, Teresa Polle

In 1970, Chile—the most democratic of South American nations—held a presidential election that would change the course of things in that country for the next twenty years and still affects it to this day. The election was a close one. No candidate achieved a majority, but one candidate came out slightly ahead of the others in the popular vote: Salvadore Allende. Allende was a passionate man who believed strongly in socialism and wanted to prove that a country could be both socialist and free. Unfortunately for him, there was one global power that wanted to prove above all else that this was not possible and it would do everything in its power to make sure that this was true. That country was the United States. Even before he was finally elected, the CIA spent millions backing Allende’s opponents in earlier campaigns. When Allende did become president, the U.S. began to systematically disrupt the Argentinian economy. Although that campaign was successful, the rejection of Allende wasn’t forthcoming, so the boys at the CIA helped back a coup to take over Chile and turn that former democracy into a military dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet. Nice work Uncle Sam.

Once Pinochet started eradicating everyone who disagreed with him, political activists began fleeing the country. Many countries accepted these refugees, including countries that would usually have sided with the U.S. but not this time. Given the fascist nature of Pinochet’s regime and the fact that it was backed by the U.S., it’s not hard to figure out which side the GDR supported. The East German government accepted hundreds of refugees from Chile.¹ Isabel on the Stairs (Isabel auf der Treppe) is the story of one of those families and the inevitable culture shock that one faces when exiled in a foreign land.

The film follows the story of Isabel (Irina Gallardo), the daughter of a singer named Rosita Pérez (Teresa Polle). Perez was a famous political singer back in her homeland, but here she’s just another immigrant. She’s as Chilean as can be, and finds it very hard to adapt to life in Germany. When she is asked to perform at a local school, the affair ends badly because the audience of pubescent teens has trouble sitting quietly while listening to a woman sing songs in a language they don’t understand. The songs are deeply emotional and meaningful for Perez, but to the kids they’re just music, and not even the kind of pop they prefer. It’s an honest portrayal of a realistic situation.

Isabel isn’t faring much better. She sits on the stairs every day waiting for a letter from her father back in Chile. We usually see her staring through the metal balustrade, which looks like a jail from that perspective, watching the postal worker slowly climb the stairs to deliver letters to each floor. But is the jail of her own making? The movie leaves that up to the viewer to decide.

Isabel does have one friend though: Philipp (Mario Krüger), the son of the Kunze’s, the family that sponsored Isabel and her mother. When the two families first met, everyone was excited and happy, but over time the Kunze’s and Mrs. Pérez have become virtual strangers. The Kunzes are good people, but their initial joy at meeting Rosa and Isabel has faded. The two cultures are so different that long term friendships require more effort than anyone is willing to put into the relationship. Mrs. Pérez shuts herself off from the outside world and waits to hear from her husband. Knowing what we know about the Pinochet regime, we already know that the odds of him surviving are slim.

Isabel on the Stairs is directed by Hannelore Unterberg, who, along with Ingrid Reschke, Iris Gusner, Evelyn Schmidt, and—towards the end of the GDR’s existence—Helke Misselwitz was one of the few women actively working as a director at DEFA. As discussed previously, although East Germany was better than the West about addressing women’s issues on film, they were still primarily a boys’ club when it came to hiring directors. During its final years, Unterberg was the most active of the female directors. She studied cinematography at the Film University in Babelsberg (Filmuniversität Babelsberg) and worked throughout the seventies as an assistant director. Most of her films at DEFA were aimed at children, with titles such as Concert for Frying Pan and Orchestra (Konzert für Bratpfanne und Orchester), The Boy with the Big Black Dog (Der Junge mit dem großen schwarzen Hund), and Darn Misfortune! (Verflixtes Mißgeschick!). With the Fall of the Wall, Unterberg’s career hit the usual West German roadblocks. Most of her work since then has been for television.

The script for the film was written by Waldtraut Lewin, who worked as a dramaturge at operas and in theater before becoming a successful writer. She specialized in books for young people that both promoted tolerance and were historically accurate. Isabel on the Stairs was originally a radio play and won a Golden Sparrow (Goldener Spatz) award at the annual German Children’s Media Festival in Gera. After the Wende, she continued to write. Many of her books, especially after the Wende, are historical tales about the struggles of Jews throughout history. Lewin died in Berlin in 2017 at the age of eighty.

The cinematography was handled by Eberhard Geick, whose career received a big boost when Konrad Wolf chose him as the cinematographer for Solo Sunny, marking the first time Wolf used a cinematographer other than Werner Bergmann to shoot a film. Wolf chose Geick because of his eye for the tenements of Berlin, an eye he gets to demonstrate again here. He also worked on Held for Questioning and Miraculi. During the GDR’s final years, Geick was one of the few who was able to work on both sides of the Wall. Perhaps for this reason, after the Wende, Geick was able to continue working on films, although, like most other East German talent, he mostly worked in television after this.

For most of the Chilean actors in the film, Isabel on the Stairs is the only feature film in which they appeared. Irina Gallardo made no more films for DEFA and moved back to Chile as soon as it was safe to do so. She continues to perform, but has made no more movies. Teresa Polle, who played Rosita Pérez appeared in smaller roles in a few more German TV films and shows. In the 2016 film Películas Escondidas (Hidden Films), some of the Chilean actors who worked on films for DEFA and the DFF are interviewed. Most remember their time in East Germany favorably, finding the GDR more secure and attentive to their needs than Chile.

The German actors in the film included Jenny Gröllmann, Jaecki Schwarz, and Barbara Dittus. Only Schwarz is still alive, and is better known these days for playing the former East German Volkspolizei turned hustler “Sputnik” on the crime show Ein starkes Team (which translates to “A Strong Team”—here’s a show that will definitely need a new name if it ever comes to the States). In an inverse of what happened to most East German actors after the Wall came down, Mario Krüger’s career as actor didn’t really take off until after 2001, when he started to appear on several popular television shows.

Given the current climate surrounding immigration, and the recent events in Venezuela, Isabel on the Stairs is as timely today as it was in 1984. It does a good job of showing the difficulties involved in being an immigrant without candy-coating it or making excuses. It also serves as a reminder of what can happen when the United States backs coup d’états.

Special thanks are in order here to Dr. Claudia Sandberg for her invaluable help with this article. Dr. Sandberg teaches at the University of Melbourne and is one of the world’s foremost authorities on German, Chilean and Argentine cinema and in transnational cinematic relations between Europe and Latin America. She was the co-director with Alejandro Areal Vélez of the 2016 documentary Películas Escondidas (Hidden Films), an investigation into German-Chilean visual material produced in East Germany in the seventies and eighties in collaboration with Chilean emigre artists.

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1. Exact figures were hard to find, but the number was probably in the thousands. One of these refugees was Michelle Bachelet, who later returned to Chile and went on to become the first female President of Chile. When asked about her time in East Germany, she speaks of it fondly of it and says “the time I spent in Potsdam and Leipzig was a very happy part of my life.”

Journey Into the Nuptial Bed

Posted: January 8, 2019 in 11th Plenum, Comedy, Joachim Hasler, Love, Musical, Pop Culture, Uncategorized
Tags: Anna Prucnal, Claus Jurichs, Eva-Maria Hagen, Frank Schöbel, Günther Simon, merchant Marines

East Germany had a difficult relationship with musicals. As with western audiences, the East German public enjoyed musicals and paid to go see them. The box office was good for nearly all the musicals DEFA made but the art form is so inherently frivolous that it drove the more stodgy politicians crazy. Making fairytale films for children was one thing, but making happy fantasies for adults, that was bourgeois formalism!¹

Nonetheless—and in spite of the East German government’s claims to the contrary—money could still dictate which films got made and musicals were a good investment. So it was that in 1965, director Joachim Hasler was hired to make Journey into the Nuptial Bed (Reise ins Ehebett), as formulaic a musical as East Germany would ever produce. The film is the story of a handsome young boatswain on a merchant marine ship (Claus Jurichs) who has a habit of bedding a different woman in every port, causing no end of troubles for the captain and affecting the morale of the rest of the crew. In classic movie musical fashion, the ship’s captain (Günther Simon) devises a plan to get the boatswain to fall in love, thus ending his romantic dalliances. To help him with this plan, he enlists Eva (Anna Prucnal) an attractive polish journalist who agrees to seduce the boatswain and then drop him. Secretly, the captain is hoping the two actually fall in love with each other, thus ending his problems. But fate has something else in store. When Mary Lou (Eva-Maria Hagen), a sexy redhead who sings at the Shark Bar, sneaks onto the ship in pursuit of the boatswain, things get complicated.

The film is directed by Joachim Hasler, who got his start as a cinematographer, working on such classic DEFA films as The Invincibles, The Sailors’ Song, and The Silent Star. Hasler got his first taste of directing when Arthur Pohl was severely injured while working on Spielbank-Affäre (Casino Affair) and couldn’t finish the movie. Hasler took over and found he had a knack for directing. He went on to direct several more films for DEFA, sometimes acting as both cinematographer and director. He scored his biggest hit in 1968 with Hot Summer. This led to a long career as a director of light comedy, but his 1964 film Story of a Murder proved that he was just as adept at drama. His career ended with the Fall of the Wall. He died in 1995.

Claus Jurichs as the handsome boatswain bears a strong resemblance to Jean-Claude Van Damme. Jurichs is unique among German actors at the time. He lived in West Berlin and continued to work on East German films after the Wall was built. He was better known in the GDR, where he appeared in lead roles in several TV-movies. In the FRG he mostly worked in TV and dubbing. He worked in various capacities on several German sexploitation films, including Females for Hire (voice only), Swingin’ Swappers, The Sinful Bed, Reflections from a Brass Bed, and Caged Women (voice only). He also worked extensively dubbing American TV shows into German. He was the voice of McGarrett on the original Hawaii Five-O series and the voice of Cliff Barnes on Dallas. Jurichs died in 2005.

Günther Simon, Anna Prucnal, and Eva-Maria Hagen—the other three members of the romantic quartet—have been discussed at length here in previous posts (Günther Simon in The Ernst Thälmann Films, Anna Prucnal in The Flying Dutchman, and Eva-Maria Hagen in Don’t Forget My Little Traudel). Playing the fifth wheel in this story of romantic coupling, is singer Frank Schöbel. Although Schöbel was already a well-known figure on East German television, his ability to act was untested. He pulled it off and Journey into the Nuptial Bed helped launch his career in movies. He appeared two years later in Wedding Night in the Rain (Hochzeitsnacht im Regen) and the year after that in the classic Hot Summer. Like many other East German stars, the Wende wasn’t kind to him but he eventually reconnected with his audience and now appears regularly on television, especially at Christmas time.

Journey into the Nuptial Bed did well at the box office, but it was 1966, the year that the 11th Plenum was responsible for shelving or cancelling most of the good films DEFA produced, Aside from a some children’s films and formulaic crime films, the only other film from the East Germany production company that made into theaters that year was their first Indianerfilm The Sons of the Great Bear.

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1. Formalism was a common complaint against films in East Germany. Politburo types threw the term around so often that it eventually lost any meaning. The term was often used to attack any movie whose entertainment value was greater than its social relevance.

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