Second only to the Indianerfilme, East German spy films offer a view of the world so antipodal to Hollywood’s version that sometimes it feels like you’ve entered (or escaped from) Bizarro World. Russians and East Germans are the good guys trying to protect the world—free and otherwise—from the nuclear threat posed by West Germans and …
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
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. …
The Naked Man on the Sports Field
Three of Konrad Wolf’s feature films—Goya, The Naked Man on the Sports Field (Der nackte Mann auf dem Sportplatz), and Solo Sunny—form a loose trilogy. On the face of things, the three films are as different as can be, musically, stylistically, and cinematically. On closer inspection, we notice that all three films are explorations of artistic …
The Man Who Replaced Grandma
The Man Who Replaced Grandma (Der Mann, der nach der Oma kam) belongs to the comedy of errors genre—specifically the sub-genre that finds comedy in the mistaken belief that someone is being unfaithful.1 Some classic Hollywood films have mined this vein for comedy, most notably Preston Sturges in his hilarious 1948 film, Unfaithfully Yours, as …
Godfather Death
[Note: I received a request to do a review of this film from a reader. If there is any East German film out there that you think I should take a look at, feel free to let me know and if I can find a copy I’ll check it out.] Godfather Death (Gevatter Tod) is …
The Persons Involved
The Persons Involved (Die Beteiligten) was released in June 1989. It was the last Kriminalfilm (Krimi) released by DEFA before the fall of the Berlin Wall. It's based on an actual crime that occurred back in the early sixties. The film follows the story of two police inspectors investigating the drowning death of a young …
Track in the Night
In America, we tend to parse out films about crime into specific categories, such as heist films, detective films, film noir, mysteries, and so on. In both East and West Germany, these films are lumped into one big group: Kriminalfilme, or “crime films,” usually referred to as “Krimis.” Many West German Krimis center around a …
White Wolves
As discussed in previous posts, the Western genre, so popular in America, provided the folks at DEFA an excellent opportunity to explore the dangers of capitalism without having to shoehorn its politics into an ill-fitting boot. If you've ever wanted to see the evils of capitalism at work, you need look no further than the …
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 …
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