Abortion as a hot-button topic is nothing new. Witness the German playwright Friedrich Wolf's play Cyanide (Cyankali). It debuted in 1929 and was made into a movie the following year. The play was first performed at the Lessing Theater and became the biggest hit of the theater’s season. When it was made into a movie …
Category: DFF
Red Fox
The Red Fox (Rotfuchs) of the title is Eve Kolinauke (Angelika Waller), a postal worker in the small river town of Müritz (filmed in Tangermünde and at the Wesenberg Lock). Eve earned her nickname thanks to her bright red hair. She tootles around the town on an underpowered moped, delivering the mail and attempting to …
The Hunting Party
This made-for-TV teleplay concerns a German party right before the Russians arrived.
The Man From Canada
The 1960s were the decade of spy films. That’s not to say there weren’t spy films before and after that decade. Spy films go all the way back to the silent era with films such as The General (1926) and Spione (1928). Hitchcock put the genre to good use throughout his career (The 39 Steps, …
Camping-Camping
In 1991, less than two years after the Berlin Wall came down, a film called Go Trabi Go hit the cinemas in Germany. It’s the story of a man, his wife, and their bored teenage daughter who—taking advantage of the newly available European West—drive to Italy in their trusty old Trabant. While the husband is …
The Female Director of East Germany, Pt. 2: The DFF Directors
In my last article, I looked at the women who made feature films for DEFA. Even more overlooked—but no less worthy of attention—are the women who directed films for Deutscher Fernsehfunk (DFF), the GDR’s state-run television station broadcaster.1 For DEFA directors, especially after the 11th Plenum, television was sometimes used as a form of punishment …
Continue reading The Female Director of East Germany, Pt. 2: The DFF Directors
The Teleplays of Christa Kulosa
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 …
Radio Killer
It’s no secret that the East Germans and the West Germans spied on each other. Like the characters in Antonio Prohías’ Spy vs. Spy cartoon strip, each side continually sought new ways to find out what the other side was up to. The listening post on the Teufelsberg in Berlin is an example of this. …
Today is Friday
By 1989, Nina Hagen was well-known in West Germany, but few people there knew anything about her past. She was the operatic, punk demon lady from the far side of the moon spouting mystic mumbo-jumbo and singing like nobody else. Then the Wall fell (Mauerfall) and we Westerners saw a whole other side of her—the …
East German Cinema Blog 