Teenagers | East German Cinema Blog

Archive for the ‘Teenagers’ Category

A Girl of 16½

Posted: October 13, 2019 in Berlin, Love, post-war years, Teenagers
Tags: Carl Balhaus, Fred Delmare, Götz Neumann, Hartmut Reck, Helga Emmrich, juvenile delinquency, Nana Osten, Uwe-Jens Pape

A popular wall poster for the young people who opposed the Vietnam War read: “War is unhealthy for children and other living things.” After World War II, Germany saw the full effect of this. German fathers were either killed or imprisoned, and the mothers waiting at home fell prey to the Allied bombs. Parents would send their children to the country for their protection, resulting in thousands of orphans at the end of the war. It wasn’t just a German problem and it wasn’t limited to WWII. The problem continues to this day. There are excellent films about war orphans. Some are about the orphans of Nazis (Playing Soldier, Lore) and some are about their victims (Come and See, Forbidden Games); many are about the Jewish orphans (Au Revoir les Enfants, Run Boy, Run, The Island on Bird Street, A Bag of Marbles, Edges of the Lord); and some use fantasy to get the point across (The Tin Drum, The Boy with Green Hair).

The East German film A Girl of 16½ (Ein Mädchen von 16½) is about one such orphan although it doesn’t fit into the usual war orphan film mold. The action takes ten years after the war. Helga Wendler (Nana Osten) lost her parents during the war and was raised by her aunt. At the beginning of the film, we see how Helga ends up in a youth work camp after an attempted border crossing. With most of the action taking place in the work camp, the film is told in flashback form. Tired of the restrictions imposed on her by her aunt, Helga wanders the streets of Berlin at night, looking for a good time. There she meets Egon (Uwe-Jens Pape), a smooth operator with the morals of a tarantula.

Also vying for Helga’s heart is Rolf Krüger (Hartmut Reck), the young man who was caught with her at the border. His is also at the work camp and sees himself as her protector. He’s obviously the good guy, so, of course, Helga is more interested in the dangerous Egon, whose louche, amorality is clearly meant as a reflection of capitalist values. Egon does everything for himself and the idea of working for the “collective” is absurd to him. Helga goes along with him for a while, but eventually realizes that Egon doesn’t care for her any more than he does for anyone else.

A Girl of 16½ could also qualify as an early example of an East German juvenile delinquent film. Like Berlin – Schönhauser Corner, this film attributes the problem of juvenile delinquency to the West. Egon prefers the nightlife of West Berlin, and everything that comes with it. His number one concern is making money. His character does not grow or develop. He is reprehensible at the start and only gets more reprehensible as the movie goes on. From the film’s perspective, it is clear that his choice is destroying his soul.

The film was directed by Carl Balhaus (sometimes spelled Ballhaus), who directed several movies for DEFA but was better known as an actor. Prior to Hitler’s takeover, he appeared in dozens of films, including The Blue Angel, M, Spoiling the Game, and Crown of Thorns. His socialist politics kept him from working much during the Third Reich. After the War, he worked at Munich radio, then as a director at various theaters around Germany. After working as an assistant director at DEFA, working on Der Ochse von Kulm and Der Fall Dr. Wagner, he moved to the director’s chair with his first feature film, The Vicious Circle (Der Teufelskreis). The film was an adaptation of Hedda Zinner’s play about the trial following the 1933 Reichstag Fire. Ballhaus also directed the film adaptation of Zinner’s Nur eine Frau (Only a Woman).

Balhaus brings to the filmmaking process a wealth of knowledge. The scenes of Berlin at night are clearly influenced by the old Ufa style and film noir, while the scenes of happy kids at the work camp come from the Soviet socialist realist school of filmmaking. He understands the importance of editing to build suspense. He is helped considerably by the work of cameraman Götz Neumann and editor Helga Emmrich.¹

From 1956 until 1962, Balhaus directed six movies for DEFA and one for television. He continued to act during that time, but less often than before the War. In 1964, he played Antonio in the DEFA production of William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (Viel Lärm um nichts). While Carl Balhaus worked in East Germany, his brother Oskar continued a career as a theater actor in West Germany. Oskar’s son Michael (Carl’s nephew) went on to become one of the most respected cinematographers in the world. Carl Balhaus died in 1968.

Nana Osten was born Renate Schwebs in the Wilmersdorf district of Berlin. She studied acting and ballet, and worked briefly as a dancer in the Circus Barlay (see also, Alarm at the Circus). A Girl of 16½ was her first film and she appears in it under the name Nana Schwebs. That same year, she’d make the West German film Blitzmädels an die Front (Soldier Girls on the Front) and use the name Nana Osten, a name she’d use for the rest of her career. A resident of the British sector of Berlin, Osten moved back and forth between East German and West German television and film productions. She became famous for her role as the title character in the West German film Der Engel, der seine Harfe versetzte (The Angel who Stole her Harp). Osten got into a war of words with SED mouthpiece Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler. He called her a weak actress (exact words: schauspielerisch impotent), and she called him a Stalinist idiot (exact phrase: Idiot von Format). Osten was always torn between the East and the West. While she appreciated the freedoms afforded to her in West Germany, she found the film industry uninspiring. Most of the movies West Germany was making in the fifties were formulaic without much depth. In 1961, she appeared with Manfred Krug in the East German TV movie Bei Anruf Mord (Call for Murder), but the Berlin Wall, built that same year, put an end to her ability to travel back and forth between Berlins. The following year, she appeared in Piero Vivarelli’s East Zone, West Zone (Oggi a Berlino), a film about the tensions between the two Germanys. Although the story takes place in Berlin, it was filmed in Rome. After that, she appeared in one more short film on West Germany television (Das Mädchen aus Guayaquil — The Girl from Guayaquil), then left the business entirely and fell off the face of the map. Where she is living (or if she’s even still alive) is unknown.

A Girl of 16½ has a strong socialist message that doesn’t entirely work, but the performances by Nana Osten and Fred Delmare keep the movie interesting. Carl Balhaus throws everything he’d learned over the years into this film, movie from pre-war Ufa-style expressionism to Soviet-style socialist realism, to generic German Heimatfilm schmaltziness, which keeps it interesting, but doesn’t help the movie project a strong sense of purpose or visual continuity.

IMDB page for the film.

Watch this film (no subtitles).

1. This would be the only time he’d work with these two. Unlike most directors who find one cinematographer and one editor that help them realize their visions, Balhaus never worked with the same technical crew twice. I’m not sure if this meant he was never satisfied, the technical people didn’t like working with him, or he was just at the mercy of the DEFA higher-ups.

© Jim Morton and East German Cinema Blog, 2018. 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.

5+1 Films That Look Back at the GDR

Posted: August 25, 2019 in Berlin Wall, Cold War, Love, Nazis, Spies, Teenagers, Wende

My next article on the East Germany Cinema Blog is going to take at least another week of work, so, in the meantime, here’s a listicle to keep things moving. These are five (plus one bonus film) of the best post-Wende films on the subject of life in East Germany that I have seen. I’ve only included the ones I could find with English subtitles, but there are others worth checking out. I suspect that most of my readers have already seen these films, but if you missed any they are all worth a viewing.

The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen)

If you ask most people what their favorite film about East Germany is, more often than not it will be this film—that is, if you ask people who did not grow up in East Germany. This story of a Stasi officer who is so moved by a piece of music that he decides to help a playwright who is being hounded by the Stasi was a big hit and won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. People from the west loved it. People from East Germany were less enthusiastic. Some felt it didn’t reflect the average East Germans daily life, while others found the concept of a Stasi officer capable of being emotionally moved by music absurd to the point of fantasy. Not surprisingly, it was made by a West German (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck).¹
Available for streaming on Netflix

Sun Alley (Sonnenallee)

So what’s a film that East Germans like? One answer is this one. Sun Alley is a light comedy about being a teenager in East Germany. It doesn’t deny the problems inherent in living in East Germany, but it shows that teens are still teens, no matter where they are from. It’s a funny movie that is definitely worth seeing. Also, if you are capable of making the leap (no pun intended), you might see the end as secretly very grim. Made by an East German director (Leander Haußmann).
Available on DVD

Good Bye Lenin!

Ask people what their second favorite film about the GDR is, and the answer is usually Good Bye Lenin! It’s much more lighthearted than The Lives of Others, but still has the earmarks of a film made by a West German. It tells the story of a man’s mother, who goes into a coma before the Wall comes down and doesn’t wake up until the country is reunified. Doctors tell the man that sudden shocks might kill her, so he does everything in his power to make her think that East Germany is still going strong, in spite of the enormous Coca-Cola sign going up outside her window. It’s a funny film, with some subtle use of CGI.
Available for streaming on various service.

Barbara

Striking a balance between the oppression of The Lives of Others and the lightheartedness of Sun Alley, Barbara is the story of a female doctor in East Germany who is planning to leave the country. The problem is there’s a Stasi agent on her tail who knows what she’s up to. Directed by Christian Petzold and starring his favorite actress, Nina Hoss. All the films these two made together are worth seeing. Although Christian Petzold is a West German, his film has a more nuanced look at East Germany than those of other West German filmmakers.
Available for streaming on Kanopy

The Legend of Rita (Die Stille nach dem Schuß)

Not so much about life in East Germany as the life of one member of the Red Army Faction after she escapes to the GDR. Directed by Volker Schlöndorff, it’s a clever film about the differences between East and West, and the realities of both. Another grim one that’s obviously made by a West German.
Available on DVD

Special Mention: Go, Trabi, Go

The film that singlehandedly started the Ostalgie craze of the 1990s, Go, Trabi, Go tells the story of an East German family who decides to drive to Italy in their Trabant. It’s filled with “Trabi” jokes but also a grudging respect for East Germany’s “little cardboard car.” Made by an East German who knows his subject. I don’t know if Go, Trabi, Go is commercially available with English subtitles, but you can find it on YouTube with them. The quality leaves something to be desired, but there’s a better copy available without subtitles. If you know how, you can download the better copy and the subtitles srt file, then marry them with the DVD burning program of your choice or watch the movie using an app such as VLC Media Player. See my article on Subtitling for more information on this process.

So that’s it. Let me know what you think. There are other films worth mentioning, such as Kleinruppin forever, Berlin is in Germany, and Beloved Berlin Wall, but they are not currently available with English subtitles.

1. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck takes things a step further with his next movie Never Look Away. This time he postulates an SS doctor hiding his identity in East Germany after the war. If you needed any more proof that von Donnersmarck was a West German, this is it. This movie is based on Gerhard Richter’s life. In reality, the former SS doctor was actually Gerhard Richter’s father-in-law and lived, of course, in West Germany. Remember that many of the higher-ups in East Germany had spent most of WWII imprisoned or exiled for their communist beliefs. They were far less likely to turn a blind eye to former Nazis than the FRG. Western audiences loved this film. Gerhard Richter wasn’t too crazy about it.

When Martin was Fourteen

Posted: May 19, 2019 in Anti-Semitism, Teenagers, Walter Beck, weimar republic, WWI
Tags: children in war, Kapp Putsch, Walther von Lüttwitz, weimar republic, Wolfgang Kapp

When Martin Was Fourteen (Als Martin vierzehn war) is the story of a teenage boy who finds himself in the middle of the fighting that followed the “Kapp Putsch” in March of 1920. As with many German movies—East, West, and Unified—the films assumes a level of familiarity with German history that we in America know little about. To truly appreciate this film, a little background is in order.¹

World War I officially ended on the 28th of June 1919, but, by then, it was all over but the screaming. The Central Powers (the German Empire, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria) hadn’t lost as many soldiers as the Allied Powers (too many countries to name, but primarily France, Britain, Belgium, Russia, and, eventually, the United States), but they didn’t have as many to lose. Germany was roundly defeated and reluctantly signed the Treaty of Versailles. The treaty was draconian, blaming the war on Germany, reducing the size of the German state, and forcing that country to make reparations to the victors. People on both sides of the conflict thought the treaty went too far, but none more than the Germans. Especially galling was the clause stating that the war was entirely the fault of Germany. Philipp Scheidemann, the Chancellor in the newly established Weimar Republic, refused to sign it and resigned rather than sign this treaty. President Ebert didn’t see any choice but to sign it, and found a replacement for Scheidemann (Gustav Bauer) who was more willing to do as he was told.

The response to the treaty was immediate. Germans on the left and the right protested the signing. Most vocal were the Freikorps—right-wing groups of ex-soldiers who had put it on themselves to try and restore Germany to the military power it once had been. They saw the signing of the treaty as a vast left-wing conspiracy and blamed the communists and the Jews for Germany’s defeat. The only solution, as far as they were concerned, was to overthrow the Weimar government and rebuild the German Empire.

Leading this movement was a German general named Walther von Lüttwitz, who fought in World War I, and a journalist named Wolfgang Kapp, who didn’t. Kapp was a journalist who never let facts get in the way of his agenda. He was a strong proponent of the Dolchstoßlegende (stab-in-the-back myth), which maintained that the Germans were winning the war, but were betrayed by leftists and Jews back home. This anti-Semitism wasn’t a new. Even while the war was still raging, the Supreme Army Command (Oberste Heeresleitung) conducted a census (the infamous Judenzählung) to prove that Jews were not on the battlefields during the war, but hiding behind desk jobs. When the survey proved the exact opposite, the Oberste Heeresleitung buried the results. Ignoring all this, Kapp continued to spread the myth and called for former German soldiers to get rid of the new government.

While Kapp was the mouthpiece for this movement, Lüttwitz was the muscle. He was in charge of the Berlin Freikorps—paramilitary groups of former soldiers who had taken it on themselves to police the country in whatever fashion they saw fit. This included breaking up left-wing protests and killing anyone who resisted. They weren’t officially part of the government, but the government did nothing to stop them. On March 13, 1920, Lüttwitz’s troops—many sporting swastikas painted on their helmet, a fact that impressed a youthful coup supporter named Adolf Hitler—took over the Reich Chancellery and Kapp declared himself Chancellor. Reactions were strong and immediate. Workers went on strike all over Germany and the economy shut down. Five days later, the Kapp Putsch was over. Kapp and Lüttwitz fled the country and the Weimar government was back in power, but the damage was done. With the left emboldened by the effectiveness of the strikes, and the right emboldened by the putsch, the two factions continued fighting all over Germany, and the cowardly cut-and-run approach to the crisis by the leaders further deteriorated the already low opinion the public had of its government.

When Martin Was Fourteen takes place during those tumultuous five days. The events in the film appear to be based on the Ruhr uprising that took place in the west of Germany, but they’ve moved the action to rural Mecklenburg, presumably to make the story more East German. The film belongs to a subgenre of war films that follow the misadventures of young people on the cusp of adulthood who are thrown into violent conflicts and forced to grow up too fast. Other films in this subgenre include Ivan’s Childhood, Empire of the Sun, Hope and Glory, and Elem Klimov’s Come and See. While nowhere near as brutal as Klimov’s film, the message is still clear that war can kill a childhood.

Fourteen-year-old Martin (Ulrich Balko) is in love with his neighbor’s daughter Kathrin (Elfie Mann). While horsing around with her, he accidentally breaks her doll and promises to repair it. This minor event starts the ball rolling as Martin discovers that a local landowner is supplying arms to putschists. By the end of the film, that doll doesn’t seem so important to either Martin or Kathrin.

When Martin Was Fourteen was directed by Walter Beck, who mainly made films for children. A West German by birth, Beck spent most of his formative years in Berlin. In 1948, he enrolled in DEFA’s film program for young people (DEFA-Nachwuchsstudio) and received a degree in directing. From 1951 until 1958, he worked primarily as an assistant director on documentaries and newsreels. In 1958 he joined DEFA’s list of regular directors. In 1959, he directed his first feature film, Claudia, which set him on his path as a director of films for children. Over the years, he made several more movies for kids, including the popular fairytale films King Thrushbeard, Pinocchio, Sleeping Beauty, The Prince Beyond the Seven Seas (Der Prinz hinter den sieben Meeren), The Bear-Skinned Man (Der Bärenhäuter), and The Frog Prince (Der Froschkönig). Like many other directors, actors and technicians from DEFA, his film career ended with the fall of the Wall,

The young stars of this film did not go on to do much in movies. For Elfie Mann, this was her only film, which is a shame—the girl has a good screen presence. Ulrich Balko appeared in three other films, all directed by Beck, but never did any others. The rest of the cast consisted of DEFA regulars such as Hans Hardt-Hardtloff, Lotte Loebinger, Manfred Heine, and Helmut Schreiber, most of whom found very little film work available after the Wende (not including Hardt-Hardtloff, who died in 1974).

This was the first film for cinematographer Eberhard Borkmann. Borkmann would go on to film several more well-known feature films and TV-movies. He was a talented cinematographer, whose work includes White Wolves, Fatal Error, and Isabel on the Stairs. Like Beck and the other actors in this film, Like Beck, Borkmann’s film career ended when the Wall came down.

When Martin Was Fourteen is a film worth seeing. Although a subgenre of war movies, the stories of the effects of war and violence on children are stories that need to be told. The film also serves as an interesting if flawed history lesson about the Kapp Putsch and its immediate aftermath.

IMDB page for this film.

Stream movie with English subtitles on Kanopy.

1. For a deeper dive on the subject, check out Versailles 1919: A Centennial Perspective, by Alan Sharp; Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy, by Eric D. Weitz; and The Weimar Republic Sourcebook edited by Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg.

whisper & SHOUT

Posted: August 11, 2018 in Musical, Pop Culture, Teenagers, Wende
Tags: André Greiner-Pol, Chicorée, Dirk Zöllner, Feeling B, redskins, Sandow, Silly, skinheads, Tamara Danz, Werner Karma

For anyone whose preconceptions about life in East Germany is informed by what was taught in American schools, whisper & SHOUT (flüstern & SCHREIEN) is the film to see. Made in 1988, it follows the exploits of several East German rock bands as they travel from venue to venue. In between, the film stops to interview the locals about their attitudes toward, life, the universe, and everything. Given East Germany’s reputation for being repressive, it is interesting to see how freely the people in the film discuss their lives, their jobs and their opinions. We do catch occasional glimpses of people pausing to assess whether or not they should be talking about these things, but they carry on blithely anyway. These are mostly young people, so this might simply be the East German equivalent of college students posting videos of their Cabo vacations on Facebook. Youth knows no discretion—one of the advantages of an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex.

The film covers a broad range of styles from Punk to Glam, to No Wave. Some of the bands are good and some of the bands are dreadful. The best of the lot is Feeling B, whose post-punk style is raucous fun. This isn’t too surprising considering two of the band’s members, Paul Landers and Christian “Flake” Lorenz, are also in Rammstein—one of the best heavy metal bands to come out of Germany. Feeling B’s appearance in the film came about almost by accident. The camera crew intended to film a rock concert scheduled to occur in conjunction with an annual bathtub regatta in Schwerin. They were there to film another band, but when the authorities cancelled the event, only Feeling B was already there, so they set up and played anyway, much to the delight of the kids on the beach.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is Chicorée, a band that manages to represent all of the worst aspects of eighties pop. Imagine Kajagoogoo as a Pablo Cruise cover band and you’ll get some idea of what it’s like to watch Chicorée. The band’s leader Dirk Zöllner thinks highly of his skill as a composer and singer, and travels through the film with a cheery lack of self-awareness. At the beginning of the film, we see the band performing at large venues. A few interviews suggest that the band had its fans. As the film progresses, you can see the band members become more and more tired of Zöllner’s ego, so that, by the end of the film, he is singing on stage in a rec hall, with only a recorded backing track and keyboard player André Gensicke while a few bored teenagers look on. No longer Chicorée, Zöllner’s new, two-man band is simply dubbed “Die Zöllner.” It’s both funny and sad, but the situation doesn’t seem to affect Zöllner much. He seems unfazed, swearing that “last night’s audience” was better. It reminds me of nothing so much as This is Spinal Tap. Amazingly, Zöllner is still going, and still performing with Gensicke. No longer the vapid pretty boy his was as a youth, he looks like a well-dressed homeless person, which is an improvement. His singing has matured, giving it more resonance than it had in 1988, and he’s working with a better lyricist (more on this later), but his music stays close to its Yacht Rock roots.

Between these two extremes is a band called Silly—one of the most popular bands in the GDR. Silly was fronted by Tamara Danz, who looked like Lita Ford and sang like no one else. In appearance, you might be tempted to call the band an East German version of the California new wave band Berlin, but Danz is a gutsier singer than Terry Nunn. Danz’s charisma is palpable and it’s easy to see why the band was popular. Silly is shown in performance a few times, as well as in backstage interviews with the band. Silly continued to have its followers after the Wall came down. While working on the album Paradies, which was recorded in their own studio, Tamara Danz was diagnosed with breast cancer. She died on July 22, 1996 shortly after the album came out. She was 43 years old. The band then went on a ten year hiatus before reforming with guest member Anna Loos as the lead singer.

Until Tamara Danz’s death, most of the lyrics for Silly songs were written by a man named Werner Karma. Although Karma wrote lyrics for other bands, he was best known as Silly’s lyricist, and for penning the phrase that would be forever associated with Silly and the ultimate statement on the fall of the Wall: “Alles wird besser, aber nichts wird gut” (“Everything will be better, but nothing will be good”). After the band reformed with Anna Loos in the top spot, Karma contributed the lyrics to one more album. The album was hit, but Loos decided she would rather sing her own compositions instead. By the third album, Wutfänger (Ragecathcer), most of the songs were written by Loos. The album did very well, but fans of Karma weren’t happy. One of these fans was our old friend Dirk Zöllner. Zöllner says he was so disgusted with Wutfänger that he threw the CD out his car window. Zöllner met up with Karma and discovered that the lyricist had already written an album’s worth of songs that Loos had rejected. Zöllner had a brainstorm and started a crowd-funded campaign to make an album of these songs. The campaign raised the money in no time, and Dirk und das Glück: Zöllner trifft Karma (Dirk and Good Fortune: Zöllner meets Karma) was the result. This album also did well and help revitalize Zöllner’s ever-flagging career. Say what you will about Zöllner, the man knows how to bounce back. Dirk und das Glück also gives Zöllner’s longtime keyboard player André Gensicke a chance to sing lead.

The film spends as much time interviewing the fans as it does focusing on the bands. Coming out as it did in the late eighties, there are a lot of unfortunate outfits and hairstyles in evidence. If you held a drinking game where you had a drink every time you saw a mullet, you’d pass out before the film was over. Some of the fans look like escapees from Human League, while others, especially the fans of Silly adopt the look of the band. We follow the daily routine of one of Silly’s fans as she hangs posters over her bed, prepares for a show, and argues with her stodgy father about the lion-with-a-perm hairstyle Tamara Danz and her young admirers share. The saddest moment in the film occurs when this young woman discusses her upcoming life change as she moves into the workplace. Aware that her days of following Silly’s every move are coming to an end, she speaks frankly about it, but there is a sadness in her voice. You can tell she feels like her life is over.

The most surprising thing to see is the appearance of skinheads, doing that same goofy bounce-kick hop they loved so much in the West, and slamming into each other with abandon. The politics of the skinheads in the film is never overtly stated. One interviewee suggests that many of the skinheads in the GDR were “redskins” (left-wing skinheads). When the skinheads are interviewed, they don’t talk politics, preferring instead to discuss the effectiveness of mosh pits for relieving aggression.

Other bands appear more briefly, including This Pop Generation and André + Die Firma, which features André Greiner-Pol. Greiner-Pol was the leader of Freygang—a notorious East German band that was banned at various times throughout the seventies and eighties due to André’s inflammatory lyrics. Also making an appearance are two members of Sandow, a post-punk band out of Cottbus. Sandow is best known for their song “Born in the GDR”—a take-off on Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA.” Like Springsteen’s song, Sandow’s song was intended as criticism but was interpreted by many people as an anthem, much to the band’s dismay. For years, the band refused to play the song at concerts. Later, they added it back to their repertoire, but with modified lyrics to make its point more obvious.

whisper & SHOUT was made in response to a report by the Zentralinstitut für Jugendforschung (Central Institute for Youth Research). The report found that adolescents between the ages of 14 and 18 listened to three to four hours of rock music daily. Perhaps worried about what this might mean, or simply curious, DEFA OKed the production of this documentary, which is subtitled “Ein Rockreport” (a rock report). The film was shot with handheld cameras by a mostly young crew of cinematographers. The one exception is Christian Lehmann, who was born in 1934. Lehmann had a long career in East Germany, filming dozens of documentaries and documentary shorts. The Wende appears to have had little effect on his career. He continues to film documentaries to this day.

In 1994, the German TV channel MDR broadcast flüstern & SCHREIEN 2, a semi-sequel that follows up with two of the bands from the first film, along with some interviews with their fans. In this documentary, we see Rammstein in its formation phase along with some later concerts by Feeling B. A third part was also filmed as an attempt to examine the East German bands that didn’t make it into the first film. These include Freygang, The Santa Clan, The Blind Passengers , and The Skeptics. Due to various disputes with the bands, this third part has gone through many changes over the years. Neither of these is available for distribution at this time.

IMDB page for the film.

Buy or stream this film.

Jana and Jan

Posted: November 23, 2017 in Berlin Wall, Herrmann Zschoche, Love, Nachwuchsgeneration, post-war years, Republikflucht, Teenagers, Wende
Tags: Helmut Bergmann, Helmut Dziuba, Julia Brendler, Karin Gregorek, Kristin Scheffer, René Guß

With the notable exception of horror movies, the East German film industry (that is to say, DEFA) made films of nearly every genre from westerns to science fiction; from thrillers to romantic comedies. If it were a Hollywood film, Jana and Jan (Jana und Jan) would be categorized as a women-in-prison film, but without the usual salaciousness and exploitation attached to that genre. It has the usual tropes for these films: the prison social hierarchy, girl fights, and shower scenes, but nothing is Jana and Jan is played for leers or laughs. It is a grim and gray film, with cinematography to match.

The film starts in 1989, when 15-year-old Jan (René Guß) is brought to a juvenile detention center after getting caught trying to flee to West Germany. There he meets Jana (Kristin Scheffer), a tough 17-year-old who sleeps with Jan on a dare. Jana gets pregnant, and then decides at the last minute to have the child. During their incarceration, the Wall opens, and the teens at the detention center are optimistic that this will improve things for them. Jana’s emotionally fragile prisonmate Julia (Julia Brendler) dreams of being reunited with the mother in the West. Jan and Jana decide to strike out on their own in search of a better place to live, but the future for them doesn’t look any better now than it did before the Wall came down.

Director Helmut Dziuba had started working on the script for this film before the Wall came down, but the events at the time led him to rewrite the story to include the Wende, making the narrative even bleaker. He seems to be saying here that when the Wall was up, at least there was a promise of a better life on the other side of the border, but now there is nothing to look forward to except bleakness and death. Not exactly feel-good material.

It is questionable that the script would have seen the light of day before the Wall fell. Even in the final days of the foundering republic, discussion of the topic of trying to cross the border was a touchy one. The Flight managed to get away with it because it showed the fatal futility of trying to do so, and the evil avariciousness of the gangs that arrange these escape efforts.¹

Director Helmut Dziuba hails from Dresden and got started as a high-voltage electrician before moving to Moscow to study film at the Moscow Film Academy (VGIK). He worked in radio and television in Moscow before returning to East Germany and joining DEFA. He served as an assistant director to Frank Beyer and Günter Reisch before taking on his own film productions. Like Herrmann Zschoche, Dziuba is known for his clear-eyed films about young people, but while Zschoche continued his career in television, Jana and Jan was Dziuba’s last film as a director. He did continue to write, and his script for Bernd Sahling’s Die Blindgänger (The Blind Flyers) won several awards around the world. Dziuba died in 2012.

It was also the last film for cinematographer Helmut Bergmann. Bergmann’s older brother was Werner Bergmann, who helped Helmut get his first job as a cameraman at DEFA back in the fifties. Helmut didn’t disappoint. Unlike some cinematographers who have a specific style, Bergmann could make the look fit the subject matter, whether it was the vivid colors of Love’s Confusion, or the drabness of Jana and Jan. In Bergmann’s case, the end of career had less to do with the fall of the Wall than it did with his age. He was already 66 when Jana and Jan came out. He died in 1998 in Potsdam. Bergmann was married to Bärbl Bergmann, DEFA’s first female director.

Also like Herrmann Zschoche (see Seven Freckles), Helmut Dziuba liked to use untested young people in lead roles. Kristin Scheffer and René Guß were both new to acting, and they never made another film. Jana and Jan wasn’t the first film for Julia Brendler, though, or even her first Helmut Dziuba film. She had starred in his previous film Forbidden Love, in which Brendler plays a 13-year-old girl who is in love with an 18-year-old boy. Brendler is a strong screen presence, and the only thing wrong with that is that it threatens to pull attention away from the main characters. Unlike the two leads in the film, Brendler has gone on to have a highly successful career in films and television in unified Germany. Nor was Jana and Jan the first film for Karin Gregorek, who plays one of the prison administrators. Gregorek started in films in 1963, and continued acting after the Wende, primarily in television. With her unique looks and acting talent, I have no doubt she would have been part of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s troupe of regulars had she been born in the West.

Jana and Jan went on to win the Special Youth Award at the San Remo Film Festival, with Dziuba winning the Bavarian Film Award for Best Director in 1993. It’s an excellent film, but it’s gray-green color palette and unrelenting pessimism make it a difficult film to watch, and not one that will be everybody’s—or even most people’s—taste.

IMDB page for this film.

Buy this film.

1. I should point out here that no East German official would ever categorize the attempts to leave East Germany as “escaping.” Escape attempts were characterized as desertions and border violations, and the people who helped others escape were “human traffickers” (Menschenhändleren).

© 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.

Next Year at Lake Balaton

Posted: October 22, 2017 in Herrmann Zschoche, Love, Pop Culture, Teenagers
Tags: Black Sea, Fred Delmare, Ines Geipel, Joachim Walther, Kareen Schröter, Odette Bereska, René Rudolph, road movie, travel Bulgaria

Road movies are common enough to warrant their own category. Whether the characters in a film are trying to get from point A to point B (The Straight Story, Vanishing Point), or simply enjoying the passing parade of life on the road (Easy Rider, Il Sorpasso), road movies have a special appeal. Although sometimes they end in tragedy, road movies are often about the experiential learning a journey can bring. They tend to be episodic, with the main characters encountering different people with different beliefs and values during their journeys.

Road movies are especially popular in United States, where miles and miles of highways allow a story to spool out over several weeks and in different environments. For East Germans, the idea of the road movie was a little more complicated. You could travel, but it was usually restricted to communist bloc countries, and your papers better be in order or you might not make it over the border, or even back home for that matter.

Next Year at Lake Balaton (Und nächstes Jahr am Balaton) takes a humorous look at the problems an East German tourist might encounter when traveling. The film centers around Jonas and Ines, young lovers who plan to spend their summer vacation camping on the Baltic Coast. Ines’s parents, however, have other plans, and decide that the two kids should join them on a trip to the Black Sea. Once aboard the train, it becomes clear that the parents are already thinking about marriage, which freaks out Jonas. He decides hop off the train and finish the journey alone by hitchhiking to Bulgaria. After Ines’s mom misses the train while buying a magazine, Ines’s father gets pulled off the train at the border crossing for suspicious luggage leaving Ines to complete the train journey alone. From here on out, the movie jumps between the separated travelers to show their progress toward the vacation destination.

Most of the story centers around Jonas, who hooks up with Shireen, a hippie-dippie Dutch woman on her way to India. Being an appropriately cynical East German, Jonas doesn’t have much use for Shireen’s mystical mumbo-jumbo, but he finds her attractive. Meanwhile, Ines’ mother, Irene Moldenschütt, has gotten a ride from a very peculiar old man, played by the always dependable Fred Delmare (see Black Velvet).

Jonas is played by René Rudolph, who looks like the perfect stereotype of an East German hipster: long, blond hair, parted in the middle, unkempt mustache, round glasses, a cheap denim jacket, and flared jeans. It’s a look that went out of fashion in America in 1972, but was apparently still going strong in East Germany eight years later. Shireen is played by Kareen Schröter, who is also decked out in appropriately hippie fashion when she’s wearing anything at all. Both of these actors got their starts in director Herrmann Zschoche’s coming-of-age love story Seven Freckles, and both actors quit films before the Berlin Wall came down. Schröter appeared in a couple more films before giving it all up to study psychology. Rudolph appeared uncredited in one more of Zschoche’s films (Swan Island), but that was it.

Playing Ines is Odette Bereska, who looks a bit like Anna Brüggemann here. Bereska was primarily a stage actress. She had appeared in an episode of the popular East German courtroom series Der Staatsanwalt hat das Wort (The Prosecutor Has the Floor) before this, but Next Year at Lake Balaton was her first feature film. She made a few more films with DEFA prior to the Wende, but since reunification, she’s worked almost exclusively in theater, both on stage and behind the curtains. From 1991-2005 she was the chief dramaturge at the Carousel Theater at the Parkaue (now known as Theater an der Parkaue. In 2006, she starred in the short film …es wird jemand kommen, der ja zu mir sagt (English title: Ruth).

Next Year at Lake Balaton is based on the book Ich bin nun mal kein Yogi (But Then, I’m No Yogi) by Joachim Walther. Born in 1943 in Chemnitz, Walther is a prolific writer of books, short stories, essays and radio plays. He grew up in Chemnitz, which was renamed Karl Marx City (Karl-Marx-Stadt) in 1953 (it returned to its original name after the Wende). In 2001, he and fellow East German Ines Geipel created the Archiv unterdrückter Literatur in der DDR (Archive of Suppressed Literature in the GDR). Geipel began her writing career after the Wende. Born in Dresden, Geipel had been an athlete and was a victim of East Germany’s Staatsplanthema 14.25 (State Plan 14.25.)—a covert plan to feed around 12,000 athletes stimulants, hormones, and anabolic steroids to improve sports results. Both Geipel and Walther were honored in 2011 with the Antiquaria-Preis (Antiquaria Prize) awarded every year in Ludwigsburg.

The film wasn’t the hit that Seven Freckles was, but it was popular, and won the youth magazine Neues Leben’s prize for the best DEFA film that year.¹

IMDB page for the film.

Buy this film.

1. It wasn’t the best DEFA film of 1980. That honor would have to go to Solo Sunny, but 1980 was a good year, with films such as All My Girls, The Fiancée (Die Verlobte), and Godfather Death being released.

Alarm at the Circus

Posted: June 7, 2015 in Berlin, Cold War, Crime, Erwin Geschonneck, Gerhard Klein, Krimi, post-war years, Teenagers, Wolfgang Kohlhaase
Tags: black market, circus, Ernst-Georg Schwill, Hans Winter, horses, U.S. soldiers, veterinarian

In 1954, a young director named Gerhard Klein teamed up with an even younger screenwriter named Wolfgang Kohlhaase, and the world of East German cinema would never be the same. The duo would go on do several films together over the years, but Alarm at the Circus (Alarm im Zirkus) was their first. At a time when most DEFA films were concentrating on putting forth a strong pro-socialist message, sometimes to the detriment of the story, Klein and Kohlhaase’s film puts the story first. That’s not to say the film is apolitical. It makes a point of showing how a capitalist system’s lack of career opportunities for the underprivileged can lead to crime, but that message never interferes with the action, and helps provide motivation for some of the film’s shadier characters.

The film follows the adventures of Max and Klaus, two poor kids in West Berlin who dream of becoming boxers. To get money to buy boxing gloves, the boys sell things they find, and do odd jobs for Klott, a bar owner in West Berlin who uses the bar as his base of operations for illegal activities. After a trip to the Barlay Circus in East Berlin, the boys stumble on a plot concocted by Klott and a U.S. soldier to steal horses from the Circus. When one of the boys tries to warn the West German police about the plot, they essentially tell him to get lost, so he goes to the Volkspolizei (literally “people’s police”—East Germany’s police force) who spring into action.

This wasn’t the first film from DEFA to examine the criminal underworld in Berlin. That honor belongs to Razzia. But Razzia was made by a West German director (Werner Klingler) who was only working for DEFA because the the U.S. military authority (OMGUS) was still restricting West German film production. In nearly every respect, Razzia is indistinguishable from the dozens of other “Krimi” films that Klingler would go on to make in the West. Alarm at the Circus, on the other hand, is East German right down to its roots. Kohlhaase and Klein were East Germans and proud of it. The heavies in this film are West Germans the and American soldiers who are orchestrating the crime.

Alarm at the Circus offered the realism that DEFA films demanded, but without the heroics normally associated with socialist realism. It is closer in style to Italian neo-realism, a fact that bothered the authorities at that time and would continue to bother them right up until the 1965, when the 11th Plenum put an end to that particular style of filmmaking at DEFA (truth be told, however, that style had already run its course in Italy years before). The fact that it is based on an actual event probably helped it get made.

Alarm at the Circus was the first of a trio of films—along with A Berlin Romance and Berlin Schönhauser Corner—that is usually referred to as the Berlin trilogy. In truth, it is part of a continuum. Klein and Kohlhaase’s later film, Berlin um die Ecke (Berlin Around the Corner), certainly fits in with the first three films the pair made, and would have made it a tetralogy had it not been banned after the 11th Plenum. Since Klein died in 1970 (see A Berlin Romance for more on Klein), we never got a chance to see more Berlin films by the duo, but Kohlhaase continued his explorations of the lives of the less privileged in Berlin with other directors, including Konrad Wolf (Solo Sunny) and Andreas Dresen (Summer in Berlin—Sommer vorm Balkon).

Wolfgang Kohlhaase was only twenty-two when he started writing scripts for DEFA. He wrote a few for the “Das Stacheltier” group that made short films to accompany the features, and a script for the children’s film Die Störenfriede (The Troublemakers). The following year, he joined forces with Gerhard Klein. Klein was a born and bred Berliner and was looking to make a film that reflected the reality of life in the city. He wanted to capture the rhythms and cadences of Berlin speech and actions. He found the perfect partner in Kohlhasse. Kohlhasse’s ear for Berlinerisch—that peculiar style of German used in Berlin—is especially acute, and he used it often (to best effect in Solo Sunny). Kohlhasse continues to write screenplays, most recently for Andreas Dresen’s As We Were Dreaming (Als wir träumten), based on Clemens Meyer’s controversial novel.

The actors who played Max and Klaus, were not picked from the usual acting roster, but chosen from a home for troubled youths. Klein gets remarkably good performances out of these novice actors. For Hans Winter, who played Klaus, this would be his only film, but Ernst-Georg Schwill, who played Max, decided that he liked working in the movies, and began training as a cameraman, later returning to acting and appearing in all three of Klein’s Berlin trilogy films, as well as roles in Five Cartridges, Close to the Wind, Motoring Tales, and many others. After the Wende, he experienced less neglect than some other East German actors. Film and television companies were always looking for people to play supporting roles, and Schwill was quick to admit that he was character actor, not a star. It wasn’t long before he was busy acting again, appearing on TV and in films regularly, most recently in Andreas Schap’s Das letzte Abteil (The Last Department).

The Barlay Circus (Zirkus Barlay) was a real circus, located at Friedrichstraße 107, the current site of the Friedrichstadt Palast. The circus was founded in 1935, when Reinhold Kwasnik, who used the stage name Harry Barlay, bought a bankrupt circus and made it his own. When Kwasnik fled to West Germany, the circus was taken over by the state. After a couple name changes, it was eventually consolidated with other East German circuses as the Staatszirkus der DDR (State Circus of the GDR). With reunification of Germany, the State Circus was broken up, and the circus that was once the Barlay Circus ended life the same way it began: with bankruptcy.

IMDB page for the film.

Buy the film (German, no subtitles).

Swan Island

Posted: June 14, 2013 in 11th Plenum, Herrmann Zschoche, Teenagers
Tags: Axel Sommerfeld, Benno Pludra, Marzahn, plattenbau, Sven Martinek, Ulrich Plenzdorf

As is often the case, even in so-called free countries, restrictions on what one can describe in print is less restrictive than what one can show on film. Films such as Naked Lunch and Last Exit to Brooklyn seem bowdlerized when compared to their original texts. In East Germany, there are some perfect examples of this. Manfred Bieler’s Maria Morzeck oder Das Kaninchen bin ich was a popular book that didn’t meet any resistance until Kurt Maetzig turned it into a movie (The Rabbit is Me), and Horst Bastian’s Die Moral der Banditen (Outlaw Morality) was a successful novel, but was rejected as a movie premise when Rainer Simon presented the idea to DEFA back in the sixties. It would take another ten years before it was put on film. Likewise, Paul Kanut Schäfer’s Jadup did not merit much scrutiny as a book, but was immediately banned when the story was put on film as Jadup und Boel.

Benno Pludra’s Insel der Schwäne (Island of the Swans) was a popular teen novel in East Germany, and was often assigned as reading in schools. But when director Herrmann Zschoche went to film it, he immediately ran into problems. The story was seen as an attack on the way the people in charge were handling the needs and requests of the children in the housing complex, and by proxy, the needs and requests of the general public. Zschoche had to rewrite several scenes and inserts a few others to keep the film board happy. The resultant film is still strong, but varies in many key areas from both the book and the original screenplay.

Swan Island is the story of a young man who moves from an idyllic location beside a rural lake to one of the new Plattenbauen that were being built in the Berlin suburb of Marzahn in the early eighties. These Plattenbauen were intended to represent pinnacles of socialist community planning and forward thinking, but, as was so often the case in the later years in East Germany, the system’s ever-growing bureaucracy became its own worst enemy. Compromises to the ideas of the Marzahn communities were made every day until the final result was a pale shadow of the ideas and ideals of the original planners (for a great examination of this process see Peter Kahane’s The Architects).

The story centers around the teens living in the housing complex and their attempts to have some influence over the features of the complex’s playground. In this respect, the film is slightly reminiscent of Jonathan Kaplan’s Over the Edge, in which teens in a U.S. planned community go on a rampage because of the lack of recreational facilities available to them. That film is based on actual events in Foster City, California. Clearly, adults not listening to the needs of children is, by no means, exclusive to any one country.

Swan Island is directed by Herrmann Zschoche. Zschoche had already demonstrated his knack for working with teens in his classic Seven Freckles, but while that film dealt with the simple dynamics of young love, Swan Island has bigger fish to fry. For this film, Zschoche turned to his old screenwriting partner, Ulrich Plenzdorf. Zschoche and Plenzdorf first worked together on Karla, one of the DEFA films that was infamously banned after the 11th Plenum. It would be a few years before Plenzdorf was invited back to work at DEFA after that, eventually scoring a big hit with his work on The Legend of Paul and Paula. Likewise, Zschoche found his career momentarily stalled after the Plenum, returning to the director’s chair in 1968 with Leben zu zweit, a safely inoffensive comedy. Zschoche joined forces with Plenzdorf again in 1974 with Liebe mit 16.

The main character, Stefan, is, to put it bluntly, a bit of a pill. He spends most the film with a glum expression, longing for his previous existence at his grandmother’s house at Swan Island. Not even the perky enthusiasm and budding sexuality of Rita and Anja, two girls in his class, can do much to lighten his gloomy demeanor. Besides his desire to see a good playground built at the construction site, the only other subject he shows any enthusiasm for is the defense of Hubert, a nerdy sad sack who is constantly under attack by a bullying older boy referred to only as “Windjacke,” so named for the windbreaker he always wears, which features an embroidered dragon on the back.

Like Seven Freckles, the film also explores psychological conflicts of coming-of-age that rage inside pubescent brain. As a metaphor for this turmoil the film uses a costumed jazz-rock trio called “Knight, Death and Devil” (Ritter, Tod und Teufel) that appears whenever Stefan is confronted with conflict or, in some cases, budding sexuality. Their music is manic and jazzy, reminiscent of Goblin’s Roller LP.¹

Most of the kids in this film did not go on to have careers as film actors. Axel Bunke, who plays Stefan, went on to become a successful sound engineer at Deutschlandradio, and now goes by the name Axel Sommerfeld, having taken the unusual step of adopting his wife’s last name when he married. Mathias Müller had appeared in two TV movies prior to Swan Island, but this film appears to have been his last. Similarly, Britt Baumann, who plays the sultry Rita did one TV movie after Zschoche’s film, but nothing further, and Kerstin Reiseck, who plays the perky Anja did not pursue a career in film.

The notable exception is Sven Martinek, who plays Windjacke. Martinek continues to appear in films and television shows to this day. He is best known for starring in the popular TV spy show, Der Clown (The Clown), in which he played a vigilante who wore a cheap plastic clown mask when he attacked the bad guys. He has appeared in nearly every popular series on German TV, from Tatort to Der letzte Bulle (The Last Cop). He is one of the hardest working men in German television. He currently appears as a recurring character on Tierärztin Dr. Mertens (Zoo Doctor: My Mom the Vet) and stars in the Heiter bis tödlich series, Morden im Norden (Murders in the North).²

Swan Island was met with criticism from the establishment and mainstream critics. One of the film’s biggest opponents was film critic, Horst Knietzsch, who railed against the film as an unfair portrayal of Marzahn as a concrete wasteland. Others felt that the compromises made to the novel, like the compromises made by the adults in the film, ruined the story.

After the Wende, Marzahn gained a reputation as a place to be avoided, filled with neo-Nazis and thugs. In fact, Marzahn’s demographics still skew more to the left than most of Berlin’s other districts, and the buildings, in spite of all the compromises have certain beauty to them that combines the aesthetics of Modernism and Russian Constructivism. The picture I use for this blog’s logo is of the old Soyuz cinema in Marzahn.

IMDB page for this film.

Buy this film.

1. My attempts to find out more about this band yielded no results and nothing shows up in the Amiga catalog. If anyone has information about this group, please either contact me or add a comment to this post.

2. Heiter bis tödlich is similar to Tatort, CSI and Law and Order franchises, where the different shows takes place in different cities or different departments. The term Heiter bis tödlich isn’t easily translated, It is a play on the meteorological phrase “Heiter bis Wolkig” (fair to cloudy), with the word “cloudy” being replaced by “deadly.”

Karla

Posted: January 19, 2013 in 11th Plenum, Banned, Herrmann Zschoche, Karl-Ernst Sasse, Teenagers
Tags: Baltic Sea, Hans Hardt-Hardtloff, Inge Keller, Jutta Hoffmann, teachers

1966 was a rough year for film in East Germany. The 11th Plenum of the previous December pulled the rug out from under some of the most intelligent and creative film talent to come out of any country at any time. East German cinema was on the verge of matching the French New Wave in creativity while their colleagues in West Germany were still making schmaltzy Heimatfilme and Edgar Wallace Krimis.

Karla (unnecessarily retitled Carla for the U.S. release) was based on a news report about a teacher that screenwriter Ulrich Plenzdorf read. He contacted the teacher, and from there the story evolved. Karla is a young, idealistic teacher, fresh out of school in Berlin. Her first teaching assignment takes her to a small town near the Baltic Sea. She believes that one must be honest above all else, and she hopes to put this into practice in her classroom. As one might imagine, the real world has a lesson in store for her.

An idealistic teacher running up against the harsh realities of the world isn’t a new idea. We’ve seen it before and since, in everything from Blackboard Jungle to The Forest for the Trees (Der Wald vor lauter Bäumen). Karla of the title is closer to Eva Lobau’s starry-eyed fish-out-of-water in the latter film than Glenn Ford’s man on the cusp of a societal quantum shift in the first, but Karla has her finger on the pulse of the nation, which makes her dangerous to her superiors, Unfortunately it also made the film dangerous to Walter Ulbricht and his cronies. Before the movie ever saw the light of day, it was shelved and wouldn’t arrive in theaters until 1990.

The film starts with Karla’s graduation ceremony in Berlin and follows her exploits through her first year of teaching. As with other films of this sub-genre, there is the problem kid in class, although in Karla he is portrayed more sympathetically than usual for this type of story. He, like Karla, values truth and honesty above all else. True to its characters, the film confronts controversial subjects head on. When a student questions the honesty of East German television reports about the space race, Principal Alfred Hirte uses peer pressure to negate the students concerns. A tactic Karla finds reprehensible. But even Principal Hirte is portrayed sympathetically. He, too, is an idealist, but one who understands better than Karla and her charges how the world works.

Karla stars Jutta Hoffmann, one of East Germany’s most talented actors and a woman who had a remarkable knack for choosing controversial material. She appeared in or worked on five of the twelve films banned by the 11th Plenum (Karla, The Rabbit is Me, Just Don’t Think I’ll Cry, Wenn du groß bist, lieber Adam, and The Trace of Stones), another film that was almost banned (Her Third), and an East German TV movie that managed to get itself banned in Switzerland (Ursula). In 1978, Ms. Hoffmann was one of the many DEFA stars and technicians that signed the petition protesting the expatriation of singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann. Everyone who signed the petition found it much harder to get work, and many of them eventually emigrated to the west, including Ms. Hoffmann, who moved to West Berlin in 1982. She continued to act in movies and television, and taught acting at the Hamburg School of Music and Theater from 1993 to 2006.

Acting as sort of Greek chorus, the film cuts from time to time to the conversations between the school district’s administrator and the principal, played by Inge Keller and Hans Hardt-Hardtloff respectively. Inge Keller was a popular actress who was described by Deutsches Theater director Thomas Langhoff as the “only vamp in the GDR.” During the early fifties, she was married to the infamous host of Der schwarze Kanal, Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler. Their daughter, Barbara Schnitzler, went on to become a successful actor in her own right (see All My Girls). After the Wende, she continued to work on stage and in film, and notably played the older Lilly Wust in Max Färberböck’s excellent film, Aimee & Jaguar. Hans Hardt-Hardtloff got his start in acting much earlier than Ms. Keller. He left home at the age of sixteen to join the theater. He studied acting at the Volkstheater Millowitsch in Cologne, and spent the Nazi years performing in plays outside of Germany. He appeared in several DEFA films and even more TV productions. A character actor, he appears in small roles in several classic East German films, including, Divided Heaven, The Rabbit is Me, Sons of the Great Bear, and The Legend of Paul and Paula. He died in 1974.

Karla’s author, Ulrich Plenzdorf, was one of the most well-respected and successful screenwriters in East Germany, but he was also its most controversial. The son of communists, Plenzdorf was a believer in the cause of the GDR, and thought that the building of the wall would help stem the economic problems intentionally provoked by the Bundesrepublik (see Look at This City!). Like folksinger Wolf Biermann, his strongly pro-communist views counted for little with the devolving SED leadership. After the 11th Plenum, Plenzdorf’s work was not welcome at DEFA again until 1969, when he rejoined Karla’s director, Herrmann Zschoche, to make Weite Straßen – stille Liebe (Wide Streets – Silent Love). In 1973, he co-wrote the screenplay with director Heiner Carow for The Legend of Paul and Paula as well as the lyrics to the hit songs from the film, “Geh zu ihr,” and “Wenn ein Mensch lebt.” When his screenplay titled The New Sorrows of Young W. (Die neuen Leiden des jungen W), was rejected by DEFA, he turned it into a novel and then into a play. The play was a huge hit on both sides of the Iron Curtain and was made into a movie in West Germany. A fact that did not endear him to the East German powers that be. Today, the book is recognized as a classic of modern German literature. After the Wende, Plenzdorf continued to write screenplays, and joined Jurek Becker (Jacob the Liar) to help write screenplays for the fourth season of the popular law series, Liebling Kreuzberg, which starred his friend Manfred Krug. He also wrote the screenplay for Abgehauen (Ran Off), which is based on Krug’s account of his final days in East Germany. Plenzdorf died in 2007 after a protracted illness.

Herrmann Zschoche is best known in the Eastern Bloc countries for directing the 1978 coming-of-age movie, Seven Freckles, and in the west for his languorous and kitschy science-fiction film, Eolomea. Zschoche got his start as a cameraman on the East German news program, Aktuelle Kamera. He studied filmmaking at the Babelsberg film school and worked as an assistant director on Frank Beyer’s classic, Königskinder (Star-Crossed Lovers). He made his directorial debut in 1961 with the kid’s film, Das Märchenschloß (The Fairytale Castle). Over the next few years, he would make more movies, but with the 11th Plenum’s ruling on Karla, he suddenly found himself effectively blacklisted and had to rebuild his career. It would be three years before he would get to make another movie, starting with Leben zu zweit in 1968. From there he proceeded more cautiously, but controversy still managed to find him. His 1977 film, Feuer unter Deck (Fire Below Deck), was prevented from being shown in theaters for no better reason than it starred Manfred Krug, who had decided to defect to the west right before the film was to be released. In 1983, he ran up against the authorities again with Insel der Schwäne (Island of the Swans), which was also scripted by Ulrich Plenzdorf. Zschoche was forced to cut several scenes, insert a scene where the protagonist talks about the advantages of the new apartment buildings, and—like Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner from the previous year—replace the ambiguous open ending with a more positive one. After the Wende, Zschoche made one more DEFA film (Das Mädchen aus dem Fahrstuhl), but otherwise worked exclusively in television. He directed episodes of the popular West Germany TV shows, Drei Damen vom Grill, Tatort, and others. He retired from directing in 1997.

The film is scored by the ubiquitous Karl-Ernst Sasse. Here he gets to demonstrate his classical chops, taking his cues from Mozart with one of the loveliest themes from any East German film ever made. Some films are driven by their scores, while others use music as a form of punctuation. Karla falls firmly into the latter category. Music is used to segue between scenes and does not follow the characters around. Nonetheless, the theme has managed to show up on a few compilations of film themes although, shockingly, it is sometimes listed as “Serenade Für Klara” (sic).

The man who suffered the most at the hands of the 11th Plenum had to be cinematographer, Günter Ost. Ost was responsible for the innovative and striking cinematography on And Your Love Too, but even here he was stirring up controversy for his imaginative work. He first worked with Herrmann Zschoche on Engel im Fegefeuer (Angel in Purgatory). The two made a good team. Zschoche’s use of the wide-screen aspect ratio and Ost’s combinations and deep and shallow focus created some interesting scenes. When Karla is called into the principal’s office for a supposed indiscretion with a student, Karla is seated to the left in focus, with the school administrator slightly out of focus in the background and the back of the blurry nape of the principal’s neck in the foreground. In other scenes we see Karla lingering right at the edge of the frame. At the time this film was made, only Sergio Leone was making better use of the widescreen format (Leone, it must be said, would have managed to keep all three of these elements in focus, but he had the advantage of newer equipment).

Having been the cinematographer for some of the most visually imaginative films to come out of DEFA during the early sixties, Ost was an easy target for the people crying about the so-called “Rabbit films” (named after The Rabbit is Me, the shining example of the kind of films the folks at the 11th Plenum detested). Ost’s career at DEFA was over. Ost continued to work with film, but his name does not show up on anymore films from the East German film studio.

It was Ost who, after the film reels were recovered from DEFA’s archives, reconstructed the film. After its screening in 1990, Karla was given its proper place as one of the best films to come out of the DDR and demonstrated to everyone the real damage to the East German film industry caused by the 11th Plenum.

IMDB page for this film.

Buy this film.

The Baldheaded Gang

Posted: June 3, 2011 in Berlin, Crime, Krimi, Pop Culture, post-war years, Teenagers
Tags: bikers, building brigade, jazz, leather jackets, motorcycles

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 Sea. In this respect, it resembles Laslo Benedek’s classic The Wild One. Like The Wild One, it is based on an actual event; and also like The Wild One, the true story is far different than the one portrayed on screen.

The film was made shortly after the wall went up and was intended to demonstrate how the wall would protect the citizens of East Germany from West German carpetbaggers. This was a common theme in DEFA films at that time. The villain in the movie is a man called “King,” an ex-foreign legionnaire who hails from West Berlin (of course). King leads a motorcycle gang whose shoddy work at a construction site was responsible for the deaths of two people. A police lieutenant named Lothar Czernik is called onto the case. Czernik is an odd bird. He seems to have a strange three-way relationship with his pretty next door neighbor, Marianne, and his dog: an enormous German Shepherd that often steals the show. The dog hangs around with the woman during the day, and then returns home to Czernik for dinner. Rather than simply cross the yard to visit her, Czernik likes to call Marianne on the phone and stare at her through the window. He also likes to let the dog bark at her over the phone. This is one of those movie relationships that aims for cute but achieves disturbing instead.

The Baldheaded Gang gets off to a rollicking start with Helmut Nier’s percussive jazz score over artfully jagged titles, followed by a gang of motorcyclists tearing down a country road. Contrary to many descriptions of this film, the gang members are not riding mopeds, but their little bikes aren’t exactly Harleys either. At the beginning of the film, the gang members are hirsute, but later shave their heads in imitation of King’s personal hero, Yul Brynner.

At the seaside resort of Bansin on Usedom, an island in the Baltic Sea, the gang proceeds to piss off everyone in sight, kicking over children’s sand castles, interfering with various games, and generally acting like your standard biker bad boys. During an evening affair at the local rec hall, the gang’s behavior leads to a fracas that quickly gets out of hand. Later that evening, after assaulting two vacationers who have been dogging them since the beginning of the movie, the gang learns what happened at the construction site and tries to get out of the country, only to find the way blocked thanks to the valiant efforts of the GDR to protect their borders.

The film was a hit when it was released, and went on to become one of the most popular films in DEFA’s history. To the dismay of the authorities, some teens seemed to miss the cautionary point of the tale and identified with the troublemakers. As a result, the film was eventually pulled from theaters in spite of its popularity. Whether or not any young rebels were inspired by the film to shave their heads and act up is not documented, but could it be that this minor spate of GDR rebelliousness trickled through the underground, surfacing in England in the late sixties as the skinhead movement? It certainly seems plausible.

Although you can make a strong case for this film being the precursor to the entire biker genre, in style it is closer to the juvenile delinquent films of the fifties. For one thing, it is black-and-white with a bebop jazz score. It would take Roger Corman with Dave Allen and the Arrows to add electric guitars to the sounds of motorcycles. For another, the perspective is that of the authorities. Very little is done to build sympathy for the gang members. Only the spineless Piepel arouses any sympathy for he has paid the highest price of all.

As the evil “King,” Thomas Weisgerber is effectively menacing. Particularly interesting is Rolf Römer, playing Johle—one of the odder, more aggressive members of the gang. With hair, Rolf Römer resembles Cash Flagg (Ray Dennis Steckler) of Incredibly Strange Creatures fame, but without hair he looks like Michael Berryman in The Hills Have Eyes. Also worthy of note is Irene Fischer, who plays the peroxide blonde, Jackie to slatternly perfection. She would be right at home in any juvenile delinquent film from the United States.

Although the movie is based on an actual event, the true story is far different from the one portrayed on the screen. In reality, the event took place a few days before the wall was built. Seven young men were arrested for playing rock’n’roll, which was seen by the authorities as a threat to civilization (the word Unkultur gets bandied about here, but it doesn’t translate well). Five of the young men had shaved heads, but they did not know each other. After their arrest, the people at the Bansin campground marched to the police headquarters. Some were there to protest the arrest of the men, but most were there to complain about the lack of amenities. The authorities over-reacted (as authorities often do) and the men were charged with an attempted putsch—a word laden with sinister overtones thanks to Adolph Hitler. The fact that five of the men had shaved heads attracted the media’s attention and they become known as die Glatzkopfbande. The court was hard on them, sentencing them to 27 years altogether, with eight years for the main defendant. After being released from prison, some of the men did exactly what their characters in the film were trying to do: they went west.

In 1965, Richard Groschopp followed up the film with Entlassen auf Bewährung (Released on Probation), which continues with the story of Conny Schenk, a peripheral character in The Baldheaded Gang, who initially abets the gang but then later helps the police run them in. In 2001, the 45-minute documentary film about the actual incident—»Revolte« am Ostseestrand (“Revolt” at a Baltic Sea Beach) by Jürgen Ast and Inge Bennewitz—was shown on German television. In 2004, Vorpommern Theater produced Glatzkopfbande. Erinnerung an Rock ’n’ Roll (The Baldheaded Gang, a Memento of Rock’n’Roll), a theater piece based on the story.

By the time DEFA was founded, Richard Groschopp had already made a name for himself filming documentaries and training films for the Third Reich. As a cameraman, he worked with Leni Riefenstahl on her classic, Olympia. After the war, he started with DEFA by making short films. During the fifties he helped create the “Das Stacheltier” group, which specialized in producing short, humorous films that were shown along with newsreels before the main features at cinemas. Groschopp began directing feature films in the late fifties and had a big hit with the romantic comedy, Die Liebe und der Co-Pilot (Love and the Co-Pilot). But his biggest hit came in 1967 with the Indianer classic, Chingachgook, the Great Snake. This would be his last feature film. After a few TV movies, Groschopp retired in 1971 at the age of 65. He died in 1996.

Whether there are any plans to release this film in the United States, I do not know, but I certainly hope so. This film has been missing from the biker film narrative for too long.

IMDB page for the film.

East German Cinema Blog

EGC Archive

Blogroll

EGC Email Subscription

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Archive for the ‘Teenagers’ Category

A Girl of 16½

5+1 Films That Look Back at the GDR