As is often the case, even in so-called free countries, restrictions on what one can describe in print are 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 also examples of this. …
Not to Me, Madam!
Not to Me, Madam! (Mit mir nicht, Madam!) is what is referred to in German as a Verwechslungskomödie, and in English as a comedy of errors. The English term dates back to Shakespeare and is taken from his play of the same name. Although originally a theatrical term, there are plenty of movies that fall …
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 …
Kit & Co
From time to time, East German filmmakers looked to America for source material. Bellboy Ed Martin was based on Albert Maltz’s play, Merry-Go-Round, and Chingachgook, the Great Snake took most of its story from James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking book, The Deerslayer. Jack London was a natural choice for DEFA. He was an ardent socialist, writing …
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 …
Hostess
Rolf Römer is better known as an actor than a director. He played the psychopathic Johle in The Bald-Headed Gang, the restless Al in Born in ‘45, and the noble Deerslayer in Chingachgook, The Great Snake. What is less well known is that he was also a director. He only directed two feature films, but …
Karla
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 …
The Devil’s Three Golden Hairs
Märchenfilme, or fairytale films, were an important staple of the DEFA library. They were usually less susceptible to political interpretation, which made them palatable to Western audiences as well as the people of East Germany, which, in turn, meant money from the West. The Märchenfilme allowed the GDR to take advantage of the free market …
Beloved White Mouse
The musical comedy is not a genre anyone would associate with East Germany. It was born in Hollywood and reached its acme under Arthur Freed at MGM. Musical comedies are happy affairs, light as meringues, colorful, and carefree—not qualities that immediately spring to mind when one thinks of the GDR. But DEFA made several musicals, and …
East German Cinema Blog 