Director Heiner Carow hated Career. He only made it to salvage his footage from The Russians are Coming after that film was banned by the East German authorities. Along with footage from his own film, Carow adds newsreel footage from other sources1 to fashion a film about a businessman in West Germany named Günter Walcher who tries to stay politically neutral, but finds his morals challenged by the decisions of others. Walcher is being pressured by his higher-ups to fire a man because of his left-leaning politics. To make matters worse, Walcher’s son has joined the National Democratic Party of Germany (NDP), an ultra-right-wing political party that treads dangerously close to Nazism. Through the use of flashbacks (the footage from The Russians Are Coming) we learn that Walcher’s reticence to fire the employee comes from an incident in his youth, where his actions led to the death of a Russian boy.
The film features folk songs by West German satirist Dietrich Kittner. Whether by accident or intentionally, the use of Kittner’s songs make one think of another folksinger who could have provided songs for this film: Wolf Biermann. Both were politically to the left, and both men were good at composing sarcastic songs about the hypocrisy and elitism of the people in charge. But in 1970, when this film was made, Biermann was being blacklisted by the East German government. Unlike Kittner, who restricted his attacks to the West, Biermann was an equal opportunity mocker, allergic to pompousness regardless of his target’s position on the political spectrum. That’s not to say Kittner didn’t have run-ins with the authorities. He was kicked out of the SPD because of his politics, and he protested vociferously against the German Emergency Acts (Notstandsgesetze) that were passed in 1968, legislation that was seen by some as an attempt to reinstate some of the laws that helped Hitler comes to power.
Career is laced with newsreel footage of people demonstrating against the German Emergency Acts, giving the strong impression that the laws were passed thanks to the ex-Nazis that were allowed to return to political offices in West Germany. West Germans cried foul, saying the film did not paint a true representation of things in the West, but a 2016 study found that 77% of senior ministry officials in 1957 were former members of the Nazi party. “We didn’t expect the figure to be this high,” said Christoph Safferling, a law professor at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg. Safferling’s statement betrays his West German roots—no East German would be surprised by this number at all.
Because Career was made for a German audience, it assumes a knowledge of the events in Germany at that time, and some familiarity with people such as Franz Josef Strauss and Georg Ziegler.2 Made in 1971, the film came at the tail-end of the German student movement protests that swept West Germany in the late sixties—the so-called 68er-Bewegung movement that led the way to the development of the Red Army Faction. Much of the newsreel footage is shown without explanation. This assumption that the viewers know about the student protests movements of 1968, or the rise of the NPD party keeps the plot moving forward, but might leave young viewers and audiences from other countries slightly confused about some of the comments and actions in the film.
The older Walcher is played by Horst Hiemer, a popular character actor in East Germany. Trained as a theater actor (as were most of the better DEFA actors), he worked for many years at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. On film, Hiemer tended to play honest officials and workers when he was younger, and dishonest officials and policeman as he got older. He was one of the many actors who signed the protest letter against the expatriation of Wolf Biermann. For some, signing this letter spelled the end of their careers, but the only effect it seemed to have on Hiemer was he tended to play bad guys more often after that. Hiemer continued to perform at the Deutsches Theater until 2001, and continued to appear in films and on television until 2005.
Career was the first film for Rüdiger Joswig, who played Walcher’s son. Unlike some East German actors, Joswig’s career as an actor continued after the Wende with barley a hiccup. He continued to appear in dozens of television shows. More recently, he’s been doing readings with his wife and fellow actor Claudia Wenzel.
Besides the songs of Dietrich Kittner, Career also features a score by Peter Gotthardt, who is best known for writing the music for The Legend of Paula and Paula. Unlike the pop tunes in that film, here he seems to be channeling Ennio Morricone, with soaring trumpet melodies backed by a full orchestra. Since reunification, Gotthardt has worked freelance, founding his own music publishing house, and providing music for everything from feature films to educational reels.
A director brings their own baggage to every project. For Carow, Career was a dilution of a story he wanted to tell. It doesn’t help that most of the new footage consists of Walcher simply staring into space while a voiceover narration lets us know his inner thoughts, or two shots of people arguing. Nonetheless—and regardless of Carow’s opinion—Career is a remarkable film; equal to, and in some respects superior to The Russians Are Coming. It deserves more attention, but it has been largely ignored. IMDB, for instance, treats the film as the second half of The Russians Are Coming, and does not even list the film on their site. As one might expect, West Germans didn’t care much for the film, calling it a gross exaggeration of life in West Germany—a criticism now leveled by East Germans at films such as The Lives of Others and Goodbye Lenin!
There is no IMDB page for this film. Its details are listed under The Russians Are Coming.
Buy this film (included with The Russians Are Coming DVD).
1. Most of the footage is taken from the East German documentary Absolution, and the Soviet documentary Triumph Over Violence (Обыкновенный фашизм).
2. This tendency to assume knowledge of the news and historical events in a film’s country of origin is true everywhere, but the Germans take it to another level. This is not unique to the films of DEFA.
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