One of the goals of DEFA films, stated at the very start of the production company, was to present stories from as objective a viewpoint as possible. When Kurt Maetzig made The Council of the Gods, his intention was to avoid both the romanticism of Hollywood and the socialist realism of Soviet films. He wanted to make a film that, first and foremost, told the truth about how international corporations (most notably Standard Oil) fed and supported Hitler’s war machine. It was still a feature film, but with a higher level of factual accuracy than most of the films at the time.
Over time, DEFA drifted away from this approach, but director Lothar Warneke wanted to return to the idea of documentary fiction and see how far he could push it. In Apprehension (Die Beunruhigung) he pushes it right to edge. Warneke has given us a film that is just barely a feature film in the traditional sense of the word. In nearly every aspect it resembles a documentary. It’s shot in grainy black-and-white with hand-held cameras in the academy standard aspect ratio, which was unusual for a film made in 1981 (for more on the thorny topic of aspect ratios, see The Flying Dutchman). Sometimes people on screen look self-consciously at the camera, as if they weren’t expecting to be filmed, and maybe they weren’t. At times, the cameras seems to be hiding from the subject, peeking out from behind corners to catch the action. Several of the actors weren’t even actors at all. The doctor who performs the breast examination was an actual doctor. He was fed no lines, but simply instructed to tell the lead actress exactly what he would tell a patient in the same situation.
At the center of the story in the film is Inge Herold, a successful psychologist, who spends her days listening to the problems of others, and spends her nights hopping into the sack with a married man named Joachim. After a doctor’s examination, Inge is told by her doctor that they have found a lump in her breast. She must come in the next day to the hospital, for surgery. If the lump is benign, they’ll simply remove it. If it is malignant, she’ll have to undergo a radical mastectomy. For the rest of the movie, the camera follows Inge as she comes to terms with this possibility. She cries, searches out old friends, confronts people, and eventually comes to terms with things.
Apprehension isn’t the first film to blur the line between reality and fiction. Films such as Robert Flaherty’s Louisiana Story and Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool had already mixed actual events with fictional stories, while “found footage” horror films such as Cannibal Holocaust, The Blair Witch Project, and Paranormal Activities rely almost entirely on this conceit to deliver their chills, but Apprehension is different. Nothing here feels fake or forced. This could have been a documentary, except that it isn’t. Barbara Loden’s Wanda comes close to capturing the same spirit, but even here the inherent fiction of the story feels more like storytelling that Warneke’s film (for more on Lothar Warneke, see Bear Ye One Another’s Burdens).
Inge is played by Christine Schorn. Born in Kiel to parents who were also actors, Schorn, appeared many times on television in East Germany before finally appearing in Her Third, her first feature film role. Schorn had a successful career in East Germany, not only on film and in television, but on the stage as well. After the Wende, feature film roles dried up for a while, and she went back to television and the stage, but soon she was appearing in films again, most notably Grill Point (Halbe Treppe), Goodbye Lenin!, and Franziska Meletzky’s According to Plan (Frei nach Plan), for which she one a best actress statuette at the German Film Awards. In that film, Schorn played the mother of fellow East German Dagmar Manzel, even though she is only 14 years older than Manzel.
The man behind the camera on Apprehension was a young cinematographer named Thomas Plenert. Trained as a documentary filmmaker, Plenert brought a unique look and feel to the film. Warneke was so impressed with his work, that he had him shoot his next two films as well. Meanwhile, Plenert continue to work primarily in the documentary field, including Helke Misselwitz’s classic Winter Adé, and The Wall (Die Mauer), Jürgen Böttcher’s short documentary on the deconstruction of the Berlin Wall (for more on Jürgen Böttcher, see Born in ’45).
Apprehension also falls squarely into that category of films known as Frauenfilme. This translates to “women’s films,” and is a very different creature from the “Chick-Flicks” of Hollywood. Unlike the Chick-Flicks, which are devoted almost exclusively to love and romance told from a female perspective, the Frauenfilme tend to deal more with the social issues that affect women—issues such as sexism in the workplace, pregnancy, and the difficulties involved in balancing a career and a family. As discussed elsewhere on this blog, East Germany was way out in the lead when it came to making this type of movie. Films such as Hey You!, The Legend of Paula and Paula, and Her Third had tackled these issues back in the early seventies, but the term wasn’t coined until The Lost Honor of Katarina Blum in 1975. The GDR continued to make films dealing with women’s issue throughout the seventies and eighties with films such as Solo Sunny, Hostess, Solo Sailor, The Bicycle, Today is Friday, Our Short Life, and All My Girls. In the West, the Frauenfilme were still outliers, primarily the work of female directors such as Margarethe von Trotta, Ula Stöckl, and Helma Sanders-Brahms. In East Germany, Frauenfilme were much more common, and were made by both male (Konrad Wolf, Heiner Carow) and female (Iris Gusner, Evelyn Schmidt) filmmakers.
Nobody expected much from Apprehension, but it hit a chord with the public. It played to full houses, and went on to become the most popular adult-oriented film to come out of DEFA since since The Legend of Paul and Paula. In any history of German film, Apprehension represents an important milestone.
© Jim Morton and East German Cinema Blog, 2017. 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.
East German Cinema Blog 