After the Wall came down and West Germany, for all intents and purposes, took over East Germany, there came the inevitable retrospection. What the hell happened? How did we get from there to here? There were plenty of people who still believed in socialism, and thought it could lead to a better world than unbridled capitalism, but nobody was listening in 1991. East German industries were dismantled for salvage and sold to the highest bidders. The Treuhandanstalt was set up to facilitate the privatization with disastrous results. Over half the workforce in East Germany was laid off, plunging the entire eastern half of Germany into poverty without the safety net previously provided by the State. Anger and resentment took hold. Right-wing extremist groups started arriving from Bavaria and the USA to recruit new members from the youths in cities such as Jena and Cottbus. Unfortunately, for these kids, East German schools didn’t spend that much time on the holocaust; preferring to cast the Nazis as primarily anti-communist. This left them particularly susceptible to the simplistic solutions offered by these extrememist groups. By the time the Treuhandanstalt ceased its operations in 1994, the trust agency was $160 billion in debt, and the fascist right had established deep and tenacious roots in former GDR territories.
Maybe the only way to process what happened was with absurdist comedy. If that’s the case, then director Herwig Kipping’s The Land Beyond the Rainbow (Das Land hinter dem Regenbogen) may be the best examination of what went wrong in East Germany. The story takes place in an imaginary town called Stalina. The year is 1953, and Stalin had died a few months earlier, but that doesn’t keep the hardcore Stalinists in the town from revering him. Much of the film, in fact, deals with the issue of what happens when you treat an ideology as a religion, which is what Stalin did, and was what the leaders of the SED did, treating their decisions as proclamations from on high.
As a result, the people in the town have gone slightly mad, trying to be good socialists while butting heads with the various officials who come to town and cause trouble for them. The town’s SED headquarters is an outhouse with a picture of Walter Ulbricht tacked to the wall. The film is narrated by Marie (Stefanie Janke), a local girl, who observes the madness around her and manages to rise above it. The story unfolds across the events of June 17th, 1953, when Soviet troops came into East Germany to help quell the protests that occurred after the government announced pay cuts for workers who couldn’t meet the increasingly impossible quotas (for more on this, see Castles and Cottages)
Besides Marie, the town’s residents include Rainbowmaker (Sebastian Reznicek), a young man who searches for the good in things; Hans (Thomas Ewert), a particularly rotten kid who likes death and destruction; Franz-Werner, (Winfried Glatzeder), Rainbowmaker’s father, who, after breaking his arm at the beginning of the film, spends the entire film with his arm in a cast that is propped up in the position of a Nazi salute; Heinrich (Axel Werner), the local dirty old man who can’t keep his pants zipped; and Opa (Franciszek Pieczka), who worships Stalin, and is willing to be crucified in his name. Add to this, local nymphomaniac Liesbeth (Franziska Arnold), an undersized SED official (Fred Delmare, not surprisingly), a pale white wraith, a boa constrictor, and various locals who come in and out of the story.
The Land Beyond the Rainbow belongs to an unusual and essentially undocumented micro-genre of films that take place in stark, burned-out landscapes with people talking at each other more than with each other. These are often surreal allegories about the absurdity of modern life, even when the action take place in a distant past or the far future. They are episodic, and their humor is dark and sardonic. We could call this Cinema of the Absurd, since these films most resemble this form’s theatrical counterpart. Examples of this type of movie would include Richard Lester’s The Bed Sitting Room, Roy Andersson’s Songs from the Second Floor, and Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man! East German films with similar styles would include Egon Günther’s Ursula, and Jörg Foth’s Latest from the Da-Da-R.
The similarity between Jörg Foth’s film and The Land Beyond the Rainbow is not coincidental. Both films were made by the Da-Da-eR artistic production group (Künstlerischer Arbeitsgruppe), a group that only just managed to get itself established during the final days of the East German republic before the whole thing came crashing down.
Born in 1948, Herwig Kipping was part of the Nachwuchsgeneration—a whole raft of talented young people who were only just getting started as directors when the Wall came down. Partly due to the abundance of good directors already working at DEFA, and partly due to the inherently sclerotic nature of everything in the East Germany at that point, these filmmakers weren’t afforded many opportunities to show their talent until the mid-eighties. A few of them, such as Peter Kahane, Karola Hattop, and Peter Welz, continue directing (although, primarily in TV), while others, such as Evelyn Schmidt, Ulrich Weiß, and Kipping, found it much harder to get their projects off the ground, and stopped making films altogether. Kipping has the distinction of having directed the last film released by DEFA: Novalis: The Blue Flower (Novalis – Die blaue Blume), a biographical film about the poet/philosopher Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg.
Playing the father is Winfried Glatzeder in his last role in a DEFA film. Glatzeder had left the GDR in 1982, He had been fed up with the way things were in East Germany for quite some time, and wasn’t afraid to let people know. When he was finally allowed to leave, he was also expatriated, a dishonor the SED reserved for people that really irritated them. In 1991, he returned to DEFA for Jürgen Brauer’s Dancing at the Dump (Tanz auf der Kippe), effectively thumbing his nose at the former East German government. Glatzeder regularly appears in films, on television, and on stage to this day.
As it should be, there are several jokes and references intended for stricly East German audiences. When people in the town vote or not a person should be exiled or censured, everyone raises their hand, including the person being censured. It would be more farcical if it wasn’t based on reality. Old school communists put a lot of value in unanimity of opinion. Because of this, votes in the politburo rarely resulted in split decisions. The most famous example of this occurred on October 17, 1989, when the politburo voted to remove Erich Honecker as General Secretary. When the vote came, Honecker also raised his hand along with everybody else. The collective had spoken, so who was he to disagree? In another scene, we finally find out the name of Rainbowmaker’s mother, and it’s an amusing little in-joke on Glatzeder’s most famous movie.
The Land Beyond the Rainbow wasn’t a box office smash, but it wasn’t intended to be one either. This is a film for people with an understanding of history, and who like their humor sardonic. Fans of unusual and transgressive cinema will definitely want to check this film out. It was an official selection at the 1992 Berlinale, although it did not win.1 It did win the Deutscher Filmpreis that year, however. I consider it a “must-see.” Since I know a few of my readers are squeamish about scenes depicting animal death, I’ll warn you that there are couple scenes involving the skinning of a rabbit (dead) and the beheading of a chicken (which also looks like its already dead).
1. There’s no shame in this. Several excellent films were up for nomination , including Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear, David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, Gillian Armstrong’s The Last Days of Chez Nous, and Alison Anders’ Gas Food Lodging. The film that won Lawrence Kasdan’s Grand Canyon, a film that has not stood the test of time.
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