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1 A New Train on Old Tracks: Director Kurt Maetzig on Founding the DEFA Studio • Marriage in the Shadows • A DVD Release by the DEFA Film Library A New Train on Old Tracks_Marriage in the Shadows 23.08.13 08:06 Seite 2 y I would like to illustrate this with an example. I soon became aware that the camera work in Marriage in the r a r b i

Shadows was idealized. The traditional lighting that an experienced cinematographer like Friedl Behn-Grund L

m l used for people—he was known as a very good photographer of women, because he beautified the women i F

A

with light—had the effect of smoothing and beautifying the image. In this case, it merely smoothed over con - F E D

tradictions and got in the way of a realistic style of filmmaking. We gradually realized that what we called e h t

y

the „Ufa syle“ always had to do with idealizing, touching-up, corrupting reality. These were the sylistic b

e s

devices used to create the illusion of a perfect, healthy world. a e l e R

D V D

A

•

s w o d a h S

e h t

n i

e g a i r r a M

•

o i d u t S

A F E D

e h t

g n i d n u o F

n o

g i z t e a M

t r u K

r o t c e r i D

: s k c a r T

d l O

n o

n i a r T During the shooting of Marriage in the Shadows : director Kurt Maetzig, cinematographer Friedl Behn-Grund and actress Ilse Steppat. w e N

A I approved this approach at the time—partly out of insecurity, partly to cater to the habits of the viewers I wanted to reach. But already in my second film, Die Buntkarierten (Girls in Gingham ), I tried to develop my own expressive language. It is hard to free onself from such traditions, even if you don’t like them. At the studio, I fought against sugarcoating things—by means of costuming, make-up, powder and wigs—for decades. It is known that with the first DEFA film, Die Mörder sind unter uns (The Murderers Are among Us ), Wolfgang Staudte tried to find a way out of this conundrum by going back to expressionist traditions in film and pain - ting. Those in theater also tried to change performance styles, because in this domain too there was some - thing called the Ufa style. It was a certain spoken modulation, a kind of „exaggerated“ chanting sound, often mixed with an overtone of Viennese schools of performance. Those who studied at Hilde Körber’s performing arts school also had something artfully artificial in their language and gestures, which I would also include among the stylistic means used in Ufa films. Directors like Erich Engel and Slatan Dudow put a lot of effort into overcoming this style.

2 A New Train on Old Tracks_Marriage in the Shadows 23.08.13 08:06 Seite 3 y The Ufa tradition also appeared in another arena, and from a very different angle—namely, basic economic r a r b i

and organisational structures. Ufa—here I am intentionally talking about only the production sector—was a L

m l huge film production company with its own vast grounds, workshops and complete technical apparatus, and i F

A

with full-time employees who, over time, had formed stable crews and in this way were able to develop and F E D

nurture different artistic signatures. We sought to emulate all this, without always being aware of the roots e h t

y

of this tradition. b

e s a e

Ultimately, there were also production groups at DEFA, just like at Ufa. We felt this organisational structure l e R

was useful, good and worth keeping. That’s why I was angry and upset when, under the influence of Stalinist D V D cultural policies, they started to overdo centralizing the DEFA Studio. In a 1956 essay, I advocated for a A

•

decentralized structure with production groups; included was the following sentence: “In socialism we don’t s w

have the right to organize ourselves in a less sophisticated way than was already the case under capita - o d a

lism.” If you read the article today, you are aware that this applied not only to DEFA and the film industry. h S

e h

This article basically criticizes the over-centralized form of a primitive planned economy and attempts, at least t

n i

in the domain in which we had some influence, to advocate for structures that Ufa had already developed. e g a i r r

All in all, I believe that the organisational structure of German film as it existed at the end of the 1920s was a M

• very functional. It lasted throughout and beyond the Nazi period. DEFA then followed this route, more or less. o i d

In particular, I mean the principle of building up a technical basis for production consisting of workshops, u t S

equipment and highly qualified experts, who over the course of decades worked in one of the more than A F E D fifty film professions represented in the same workshop. Of course, the efficacy of film production cannot e h t

exclusively, or even primarily be judged based on economics; because we are talking about mass production g n i

in an artistic arena, intellectual and artistic quality and productivity come first. That’s why the production d n u o F

stuctures of big companies like Ufa—which could also be found at Tobis, Terra and Bavaria—are very useful. n o

However, we cannot overlook the fact that this organizational form also makes it easier for a centralized g i z t

authority—be it on the part of the state or other powerful groups—to take over. This was probably the main e a M

reason why the DEFA production structures were destroyed after 1990, although it was done in the name of t r u K

industrial inefficiency. r o t c e r i D

Whatever the reason, today film production at the former Ufa-DEFA grounds in Babelsberg is much harder : s k

to get going than after 1945. I remember a conversation that I had shortly after the war, in 1946, with the c a r T

former Ufa production manager, Erich Pommer, who had come back from the US as cultural officer in charge d l O

of film. He told me that he envied us in the Soviet zone, because we had already started making films. He n o

n also had plans to produce films in Germany again himself, but thought it would take a long time, because the i a r T Americans had thousands of their own films to distribute, which they planned to show before thinking about w e N producing films here. A Things turned out quite differently, however. In order to catch up with the rapid upswing of film production in the Soviet zone, the western Allies soon awarded production licenses. But at the time I spoke with Pommer, this was unforeseeable. In 1945, the destruction of all large, important concerns in Germany, including in the film industry, was the declared intention of the Allies. Pommer also spoke about the problems that this would bring for the film industry. In the early years, this policy was taken more seriously in the west than in the east. Maybe the contradiction can be explained as follows: while the priority of the western countries was to destroy the forms of production, the priority of the east was to intellectually destroy fascism and overcome militarism, racism, imperialistic modes of thought and the Nazi dictatorship. But here too it probably soon became important that a big company would work better in developing a centralized authoritarian state.

3 A New Train on Old Tracks_Marriage in the Shadows 23.08.13 08:06 Seite 4 y For me, the conversation with Pommer was very informative and insightful. I got a clearer sense of what it r a r b i

meant that even the chief of production at Ufa had had to flee the Nazis in 1933 and emigrate to the USA ... L

m l that he too represented an Ufa tradition that was in sharp contrast with the films produced at the studio after i F

A

1933. It was clear we had a lot in common with this antifascist. He himself had no aversion to us and he was F E D

a welcome guest at the premiere of the first DEFA film, The Murderers Are among Us. e h t

y b

My feature film debut, Marriage in the Shadows , not only built on Ufa traditions stylistically, although e s a e

unconsciously. I also produced the film with film artists, technicians and craftsmen who had worked in l e R

former film companies including Ufa. Where else would they have come from? A huge number of actors, D V D directors, cinematographers, technicians and craftsmen flocked to the young DEFA Studio, because it was A

•

the first production company to start work after the destruction of the war. So you had your choice. When it s w

came to weeding out those who had fetched and carried for the Nazis, we only excluded a few people, o d a

mainly authors and directors. h S

e h t

This also corresponded to the general mood in Germany at the time. I remember when Veit Harlan, the n i

e

director of Jud Süss (Jew Suess) , showed up at the premiere of Marriage in the Shadows at the Waterloo g a i r r

Cinemas in Hamburg, indignant viewers asked him to leave the cinema. We would not have worked with him, a M

• that’s for sure. o i d u t S

There was also no catalog of criteria of political guilt available. We decided on a case by case basis whether A F

we could work with somebody; most of the time we said yes with an open heart. It went so far, for example, E D

e

that for Marriage in the Shadows I worked with the composer Wolfgang Zeller, who had also written scores h t

g n

for outright Nazi films. But he too was looking for a new beginning, and we made it possible for him. i d n u o F

Like most of Ufa’s real estate, buildings, files and equipment, its administrative offices were in the Soviet n o

sector, on Krausen Strasse in Berlin. The office building stood right on the border between the zones, so you g i z t

could enter it from both sides. In addition to administrative offices, the technical departments, editing rooms, e a M

etc., were also there. In the first months after the war—when things were still unclear and the building had t r u K

not yet been assigned to DEFA—Ufa people moved everything they could out of the largely destroyed buil - r o t c

ding, so that there was very little left. e r i D

: s k

Once DEFA had moved in, these people came back and said there was a vault in the basement. It was a c a r T

space the size of several rooms, where there were Ufa files that they wanted to take back to the west. Their d l O

identification was that they had the key to the vault. We let them in and they took the files. That was possible n o

n at the time, because Berlin was still undivided. The confrontation came later. i a r T

w e N

A ______

This text is based on a conversation that took place between director Kurt Maetzig and film historians Rolf Aurich and Hans-Michael Bock; this summary version was drafted in German by Aurich and Bock and authorized for publication by Kurt Maetzig.

It was first published in German in Das Ufa-Buch: Kunst und Krisen, Stars und Regisseure, Wirtschaft und Politik (transl. The Ufa Book: Art and Crisis, Stars and Directors, Economics and Politics ); edited by Hans-Michael Bock and Michael Töteberg in collabora - tion with CineGraph – the Center for Film Research in Hamburg – and published by Zweitausendeins (Frankfurt/Main, 1992).

We thank Hans-Michael Bock for his permission to translate and publish this text in English.

Translated by Hiltrud Schulz and Skyler Arndt-Briggs, DEFA Film Library at UMass Amherst.

4