In 1966, director Ralf Kirsten made The Lost Angel, a film about a day in the life of sculptor Ernst Barlach. That film centers around Barlach’s sculpture Der Schwebende, which was destroyed by the Nazis for being “degenerate art.” The sculpture was inspired by Barlach’s fellow artist Käthe Kollwitz. So much so that the face …
Category: WWII
Career
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 …
The Russians Are Coming
During the final year of World War II, the war in Germany became a war of children. Hitler’s war effort had so depleted the ranks of adult males that teenagers were drafted to fight. Having grown up under the Third Reich, indoctrination for the Fatherland started at an early age. These young men were Hitler’s …
The Second Life of Friedrich Wilhelm Georg Platow
1973 was an interesting year in DEFA’s history. It’s not as historically important as 1966, when a dozen films were either pulled or shot down while in production, and it lacks the prodigious output of 1961, which saw the release of twenty-five films.1 But if you are looking for a year that is representative of …
Continue reading The Second Life of Friedrich Wilhelm Georg Platow
Mama, I’m Alive
Occasionally, East Germany’s film studio DEFA worked with production companies from other countries. This gave those countries access to the Babelsberg film studios, which were some of the best in Europe, and it allowed DEFA to provide a better variety of films to the East German public. With many of these films, the influence of …
The Actress
One might think that, by 1988, there was stone left unturned when it came to Nazi-era Germany in the movies. There were films about the Holocaust, the resistance, the start of the war, the end of the war, and the daily lives of soldiers and ordinary people on both sides; there were science fiction films, romances, …
Five Days, Five Nights
At the end of World War II, Russian soldiers went on a plunderfest across eastern Germany. Think Sherman’s March to the Sea, but with dividends. Houses were stripped of their valuables, stores were looted, and machinery was taken. Much of this looting was done on a personal level—soldiers helping themselves to the contents of the …
The Lost Angel
Ernst Barlach was a German artist well-known for his plays, paintings, and particularly his sculptures. which powerfully expressed his feelings against war and the suffering it brings. Barlach wasn’t always against war. Prior to the First World War, he, like most Europeans, saw war as a noble endeavor, fighting to uphold and protect the values …
Girls in Gingham
In the years after World War II, there was a lot of soul-searching in East German films. At first, this took the form of the Rubble Films, which used the destruction of Germany as a metaphor for the German soul—blown to pieces and ready for reconstruction. Rubble Films usually focused on a few people and …
Star-Crossed Lovers
As mentioned elsewhere on this blog, the period between the building of the Berlin Wall and the 11th Plenum was a golden age for film in East Germany. The authorities were determined to prove that building the Wall was not intended to repress the population, but was intended as an “anti-fascist protective barrier” (antifaschistischer Schutzwall) …
East German Cinema Blog 