On December 8, 1950, DEFA, East Germany’s state-run movie studio, released its first color film. The film was shot in Agfacolor, which was developed for the Nazis to compete with Technicolor. After the War, there was enough color film stock at the AGFA plant in Wolfen to make a few movies, but the Soviets claimed …
Category: post-war years
The Story of a Murder
The Story of a Murder (Chronik eines Mordes) begins during an event in Würzburg, where an attractive young woman meets with the newly elected mayor and promptly shoots him. Through a series of flashbacks, we learn that the woman is named Ruth Bodenheim and that she is Jewish. The man she shoots, named Zwischenzahl, was …
Chemistry and Love
The Silent Star is sometimes cited as the first East German science fiction film, but that's not entirely correct. Before the state was officially founded, when it was still known as the Soviet Sector, DEFA put out its first science fiction film—Chemistry and Love (Chemie und Liebe). It’s a breezy comedy that takes place in …
Castles and Cottages
Castles and Cottages (Schlösser und Katen) is a three-and-a-half hour, two-part film that covers the events in a small Mecklenburg village from the end of WWII to the protests on June 17th in 1953. It could be considered an epic if the details of the story weren’t kept so localized and the scale so small. …
Razzia (Police Raid)
DEFA, East Germany’s state-owned film production company, was formed in 1946—three years before post-war Germany’s Soviet sector would become its own country. Immediately after the war, the Office of Military Government, United States (OMGUS) was doing everything it could to hobble German film production in the Western sectors, largely at the behest of the Hollywood …
Bear Ye One Another’s Burdens
Of all the aspect of life in East Germany, the one that we Americans (and many West Germans) are the most ill-informed about is the subject of religion. Images of preachers being hunted down like dogs and tortured for believing in God were popular concepts in U.S. films and television, especially during the fifties. Anti-religion …
Destinies of Women
Feminism, as a common topic of conversation, didn’t take off in the United States until the late sixties, so it may come as a surprise to some that DEFA tackled the subject in 1952, with Destinies of Women (Frauenschicksale). Communists were early adopters of the principle that everyone should have the same rights, be they …
Marriage in the Shadows
Like Stars and Jakob the Liar, Marriage in the Shadows (Ehe im Schatten) deals with the subject of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany. Unlike those films, however, this one came out in 1947, when the Nuremberg Trials were still going on and new revelations about atrocities at the concentration camps were arriving every day. The people …
Somewhere in Berlin
The East German film studio, DEFA, was founded in May 1946. During the first few years in post-war Germany, it was literally the only game in town. While the Office of Military Government, United States (OMGUS) in the west dragged its feet on film production (mostly at the behest of Hollywood), the east got the …
The Baldheaded Gang
The Baldheaded Gang (Die Glatzkopfbande) is East Germany’s only biker film, and a possible precursor to the skinhead movement. Made in 1963—a full three years before Roger Corman kick-started the biker genre with The Wild Angels—the film follows the story of a gang of bikers who cause trouble at a vacation spot on the Baltic …
East German Cinema Blog 