In 1934, Friedrich Wolf’s play, Professor Mamlock, ruffled feathers around the world. In it, a conservative Jewish doctor tries to keep politics out of the clinic he runs despite the growing presence of Nazis and Nazi support in Germany. As the doctor is incrementally stripped of power and control, he eventually realizes that his staunch …
Category: WWII
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 …
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. …
Five Cartridges
After World War II, Germans had an understandably uneasy relationship with war films. While Hollywood rolled out film after film about the heroics of our fighting men, neither East Germany nor West Germany had much taste for this kind of film, nor were they expected to. From the German perspective, war was not something to …
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 …
The Adventures of Werner Holt
Germans have such a complicated relationship with their history. They understand well the atrocities of WWII and the kind of thinking that led to it, but, at the same time, they were the bad guys in that fight and they know it. Beyond the inescapable evil of the top officials and “just doing my job” …
The Ernst Thälmann Films
Although he died five years before the country was created, Ernst Thälmann was East Germany’s greatest hero. He was to the GDR what George Washington is to America: an icon and a founding father, preternaturally moral and incapable of mistakes. Both men fought for freedom from oppression. In Washington’s case, that oppression came in the …
The Kaiser’s Lackey
The Kaiser’s Lackey is based on a book by Heinrich Mann. The actual title, Der Untertan, doesn’t translate well into English. As a consequence, it's been rendered variously as The Patrioteer, The Loyal Subject, The Man of Straw, and The Underdog. IMDB calls it The Man of Straw, which does have a poetic quality to …
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 …
Jakob the Liar
There are a few East German films that, in spite of the political differences, are acknowledged as classics on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Stars, The Murderers Are Among Us, and The Rabbit is Me have all entered that exclusive group, but—with the exception of Stars—these films did not receive much attention until after …
East German Cinema Blog 