THE FIANCÉE: ANTIFASCIST RESISTANCE FILM AND LOVE STORY

By Lutz Haucke

For Günter Reisch (11/24/1927–2/2/2014) and Günther Rücker (2/2/1924–2/24/2008) “Dear esteemed colleagues from the press, radio and television! We wholeheartedly hope that you deem this film worthy (...) of receiving your support. If this is the case, we ask you to view it as a feature film about a young woman who is forced to live at the lowest limit of human existence and who wants to survive, because life is, after all, the best of all good things and because the love she suffers, to the very depths of her heart, binds her with every thread to this world. Please don’t just file it away in that easily accessible and common compartment—the so-called ‘resistance film’ or ‘film in the antifascist tradition’—even though it clearly contains elements of this genre.”1 “A film story about a time that is now in history books. It is known through films, books, written and spoken information. That time has become part of our understanding of history; we have a stance on it. We are familiar with it. But do we truly know it? (...) The media have created stereotypes: the illegal rendezvous, arrest, interrogation, physical and psychological terror, detention, torturous imprisonment. Cinematic clichés emerged that can be retrieved at any time. What is different about The Fiancée? Does the film tell us about things that, for a long time, (...) were taboo and that until now attained artistic reality only peripherally, if at all? This too, certainly. The cruel underworld of fascist prisons has never appeared on screen in this way before. (...) And yet, this new subject matter is secondary. For me, what is primary and meaningful in the film is its human dimension, the way the time period becomes accessible through an unusual, individual fate.”2

The Antifascist Theme From the late 1970s into the early 1980s, public discussions among GDR filmmakers—especially the generation of directors who began working in the 1950s (Konrad Wolf, Günther Rücker, Günter Reisch, Ralf Kirsten, Frank Beyer)— sought to re-evaluate the political necessity and artistic productivity of the antifascist theme. Konrad Wolf started things off with his talk on “Art in the Fight against Fascism: Yesterday and Today,” presented at the plenary conference of the Academy of Arts on May 7, 1979. Wolf’s historicizing appraisal of the “arts as a weapon of active antifascism”3 located the tradition of antifascist themes within East German arts. When The Fiancée premiered on September 2, 1980, the GDR Association of Film and Television Professionals, along with the associations of other socialist countries, held an international colloquium on “Antifascism and Film: History, Present, Mission” in Weimar. One thing that became clear in the discussions about current trends in East German filmmaking was the efforts of GDR political leaders to promote The Fiancée as a positive example, countering the loss of continuity in the antifascist feature Film Library The Fiancée : Antifascist Resistance Film and Love Story • A 2018 DVD Release by the DEFA film tradition that had occurred in the 1970s. It was argued that The Fiancée connected the analysis of “ordinary fascism” in Germany to a character motif developed in DEFA films since the late 1940s—namely­ of communists as those opponents of Nazism who had been on the front lines, and had suffered and died, for example, in Stärker als die Nacht (Stronger than the Night, 1954, dir. Slatan Dudow); Sie nannten ihn Amigo (They Called Him Amigo, 1958, dir. Heiner Carow); Der Fall Gleiwitz (The Gleiwitz Case, 1961, dir. Gerhard Klein); and Nackt unter Wölfen (Naked Among Wolves, 1962, dir. Frank Beyer). Demonstrating an awareness of tradition, the argument continued, Rücker and Reisch drew upon dramaturgical solutions that had already been used by DEFA in the 1950s. The statement made by Chief Inspector Hensch to Hella Lindau’s fiancé, Hermann Reimers—“No kid gloves this time. You’ll pay for everything”(TC 01:35:14:23)—relates to the statement “That will cost you your head!” from Stronger than the Night. This last line was accompanied by repeated zooming in on the face of communist resistance fighter Löning (Wilhelm Koch-Hooge), which at the time was considered a dramaturgical innovation. Another example was the use of quotations from documentary films. Director Slatan Dudow had inserted such documentary footage into Stronger than the Night as a way to critique the worldview of the German petty bourgeois

1 Rücker, Günther and Günter Reisch. “Circular Addressed to Media Editorial Offices on the Occasion of the 1980 Premiere.” Kino ist mehr als Film. Die Jahre 1976-1990, Berlin: AG Verlag, 1999. 88. 2 Gehler, Fred. “Die Verlobte.” Sonntag, East Berlin, Vol. 37, 1980. 3 Neues Deutschland. East Berlin, May 9, 1979: 4. 1 THE FIANCÉE: ANTIFASCIST RESISTANCE FILM AND LOVE STORY and passive followers of Nazism. Rücker and Reisch were more successful than Dudow, however, in that they overcame his schematic, monolithic character typing, as exemplified by the contrast between Hans-Joachim Hegewald’s three- dimensional role as Chief Inspector Hensch in The Fiancée, and the strikingly typecast Gestapo commissioner in Stronger than the Night. It is worth pointing out that in The Fiancée the prison doctor’s monolog also has a precursor in DEFA history: that of the landscape architect in Konrad Wolf’s Ich war Neunzehn (I Was Nineteen, 1967). That latter monolog was an attempt by scriptwriter Wolfgang Kohlhaase to dissect the mental physiognomy of an educated German bourgeois, whose hopelessness and pessimism about history revealed psychological effects of fascism that had not yet been explored in DEFA’s antifascist feature films. Finally, with respect to lines of DEFA tradition, Rücker’s experiences in documentary film, working with Andrew and Annelie Thorndike on Du und mancher Kamerad (You and Some Comrade, 1956), should be kept in mind in regards to the dramaturgical use of documentary film quotations in The Fiancée. Other DEFA directors and scriptwriters who had previously distinguished themselves with work on antifascist themes distanced themselves from the communist hero of resistance films in the 1970s. For example, Konrad Wolf’s Mama, ich lebe (Mama, I’m Alive, 1976) no longer follows this central imperative of the antifascist film, even though the radio drama it was based upon, Wolfgang Kohlhaase’s Fragen an ein Foto (Memory of a Photo, 1969), still included this political dimension in its character construction. Reisch and Rücker likewise shifted the priority away from the political and towards a relatable human dimension: Hella Lindau’s suffering and her love. As a result, in the GDR this film with antifascist themes was frequently discussed as a love story.

A Literary Film Adaptation Rücker based the scenario on Eva Lippold’s novels Haus der schweren Tore (House of the Heavy Gates, 1971) and Leben, wo gestorben wird (Living Where There Is Death, 1974).4 The author spent a total of eleven years in German prisons during the Nazi period. Would this be another pragmatic literary adaptation by DEFA and GDR Television? Comparisons of feature films (and versions of their scripts) to the novels upon which they are based often prove unproductive if the film, its composition and its reception strategy are simply measured against the novel. In the period around 1980, DEFA produced literary adaptations in which the novels were treated solely as sources of subject matter, from which to extract a cinematic narrative. (This is especially true of Horst Seemann’s Levins Mühle [Levin’s Mill, 1980], based on the eponymous novel Film Library The Fiancée : Antifascist Resistance Film and Love Story • A 2018 DVD Release by the DEFA written in 1964 by Johannes Bobrowski.) Günther Rücker appreciated Eva Lippold’s reflective essayistic style; this allowed him to largely ignore the narrative structure of the novel, in developing a filmic story out of it. This process—which, in the case of Levin’s Mill, led to extensive oversimplification—could lead to the conclusion that narrative elements of a novel become the material for a film story, without therefore having to search for solutions in the composition of the feature film that would work for the novel. Eva Lippold’s series simply presented a fortunate case, however, in that narrative elements of the novel could be used as material without facing theoretical problems of genre or ensuing dramaturgical issues. The Fiancée was the product of a selection process. Rücker’s adaptation of episodes and characters follows a dramaturgical logic that no longer corresponds to the novels. Consequently, the difference between the film and the novels begins with a different medial relationship to the material and characters. The film is characterized by a stricter insistence on the main character and her effect on the audience than the novels. The character development emphasizes Hella Lindau’s experiential world by aiming for an arc of increasing drama and suspense. Collisions in this dramatic arc are delivered more directly in the film than in the novels’ epic narrative. This can be seen in the manner in which characters from the novel were adopted into the feature film story. House of the Heavy Gates5 recounts how Hella Lindau, Prisoner 47, has been suffering the torments of solitary confinement, without

4 Editor’s note: Lippold had originally planned a trilogy; however, the third volume, Die Fremde (The Stranger), was never completed. 5 Lippold, Eva. Haus der schweren Tore. Berlin: Der Morgen, 1971. 123–131.

2 THE FIANCÉE: ANTIFASCIST RESISTANCE FILM AND LOVE STORY book or work, for almost two years: “Oh, Hella, these first months, these abysmal ravines of abandonment. Whoever can withstand them, can withstand much.” Although references to time mark the narrative (New Year’s Eve 1936; the first months of solitary; despair on one night and morning), it is two other things that are meaningful. The contrast between the loneliness of the cell and the intensity of the mental struggle that blows the space open are the determining factors of the literary representation, such that the mental struggle actually becomes the setting. Interestingly, the novel refrains from providing a description of the scenic space. Eva Lippold concentrates on the inner struggles of her protagonist. In the novel, this is linked to the bestial torture of fellow prisoner Bertram, who is going insane, which enables a dramatic culminating episode. Whereas the novel creates this compositional link to the Bertram episodes via Hella Lindau’s memories, the film largely forgoes the scenes with Bertram. Lippold’s compositional technique accommodated the scriptwriter in dealing with space and time, however. Rücker simplified; in the film, Hella Lindau meets Bertram in the prison corridor, at the start of her imprisonment, and he warns her about the prison doctor. This single Bertram episode has a special status in the linearly increasing drama of the first half of the film (until the detention cell)6 and for the encounter with Reimers.7 It creates an initial climax. The scene in which Hella Lindau stands up for the humiliated nuns8 will create another climax. The novel’s freedom with the temporal dimension offers the screenwriter the possibility of leaving out scenes, simplifying the protagonist’s course of action and renouncing the reflections of the literary character in favor of dialog. In many episodes, Eva Lippold offers points of connection for dramatic structures, for the protagonist’s inner conflicts, for their escalation and resolution in scenes. It is worth considering, however, that the novels, taken together, do not follow a cohesive dramatic concept. Rather, the cohesive dramatic structure of the screenplay contrasts with the fanned-out epic structure of the novels, whose plot segments might have served as the basis for a variety of possible filmic plotlines. Rücker limits himself primarily to the prison washhouse (plus the drying room, knitting room and ironing room), where he locates the most important storyline in the second half of the film. Lippold demonstrated, through her own story and Hella Lindau’s experiences, the consequences that German fascist justice had for those affected. Rücker left out other things that appear in the novel, such as the prison director’s biography; instead of such biographical digressions, he focused on scene sequences and documentary-style film montage with commentary. It would be worth exploring why Rücker largely bracketed out the confrontations in the novels between Hella Lindau, the political prisoner, and those figures who help profile her worldview, political standpoint and process of self-understanding. Film Library The Fiancée : Antifascist Resistance Film and Love Story • A 2018 DVD Release by the DEFA Examples of such characters in the novel include: 33-year-old Ruth, from a well-to-do Jewish family and sentenced as a member of the illegal Socialist Workers’ Party; the abbess, sentenced to seven years in prison, through whom a dispute about power, God, and utopias is carried out; Mother Kohlhaupt, the Anabaptist; and episodes based on the real communist resistance fighter Lilo Herrmann. Another key question would be: how does the relationship between Hella Lindau and her environment change over the course of the film? How does the dramaturgical logic of events in the film differ from the compositional logical of the novel? Lippold hardly ever offers detailed descriptions of the interior of the prison, instead allowing Lindau’s inner world to speak for itself. In contrast, in the film everything from Hella Lindau’s expressions to the interior setting is of central importance— the prison walls with cell door hatches that look like catacombs at night; the prison staircase, its width amplified by a wide-angle lens, in which Lindau’s scream multiplies; the back-lit shots. It seems likely that Lippold’s “immaterial” narrative style and her description of both outer and inner events actually offered Rücker an advantageous starting point. The novel made no demands on the film’s dramaturgical logic. Furthermore, Lippold made no use of literary leitmotifs in composing her novel. Instead, she stressed discursive elements, stringing together numerous episodes of prison life from 1934-35 to 1944-45. Among these, the screenwriter could thus relatively freely select dramatic situations according to his own dramaturgical logic.

6 Rücker, Günther. Die Verlobte: Texte zu sieben Spielfilmen. Berlin: Henschelverlag Kunst und Gesellschaft, 1988. 379–381. 7 Ibid. 385. 8 Ibid. 379.

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Temporal Layers, Documentary Film Material, Sound Reisch and Rücker developed different levels of space and time in their montages, in order to portray the world of Hella Lindau’s thoughts and feelings in a richly nuanced way. Rücker’s experience in creating radio dramas was of special importance in this regard. The film contains a variety of sound takes and montages in which the capacity of sound to represent space becomes important for holistic perception. For example, in the opening sequence of the film, the viewer sees the prison, but hears the unlocking of cells, steps on metal stairs, the clatter of spoons in the echo of a dining hall; thanks to this montage of sound and image takes, the viewer sees the prison and is simultaneously, on the auditory level, inside it. A further example: the viewer sees Hella Lindau in her cell and at the same time hears her responding to the state prosecutor’s accusation. Especially in the beginning, the film makes use of such sequences, in which sound has the ability to portray space, to depict the prisoner’s memories. These possibilities intensify the atmosphere and the situation of the characters. An example is the use of noise stimulations to simultaneously indicate Lindau’s inner turmoil and her objective situation, as when she is driven out of the dark detention cell or receives news of the Nonaggression Pact between Hitler and Stalin in 1939. The temporal dimension of the plot is partly influenced by the chronology of the war; but in relation to the engaged couple, it is the difference between the temporal dimensions in prison and the temporal dimensions of events connected to Reimers that takes on dramaturgical meaning. The character of Reimers is involved in the period before prison, which is told in Hella Lindau’s memory-time. The dominant plotline with respect to Reimers, however, is communicated through sparsely developed two-person scenes, which bring the outside world of Nazi Germany into relationship with the inside world of the prison. The Reimers plotline emphasizes the peaceful river of time: the boat being punted forward in the quiet seclusion of the Spreewald; the repetition and familiarization with the ritual of conversations between Reimers and Gestapo commissioner Hensch; the measured tempo of Reimers’ and Lindau’s gestures when they meet. The temporal structure of Reimers’ conspiratorial meetings have no distinctive characteristics; they proceed continuously. While these scenes are a part of the plot and move dramatically towards the finale, they are also epic elements with an informational function. In contrast to the continuity associated with Reimers, the temporal dimension of the plotline tracing Hella Lindau’s prison experiences is decidedly discontinuous. The directors wanted to make their point through montages of documentary film

material, which leads to an intermittent discontinuity of temporal layers. Take, for example, the leaps from the historically Film Library The Fiancée : Antifascist Resistance Film and Love Story • A 2018 DVD Release by the DEFA authentic temporal layer (real political events), which is conveyed through documentary material, to the temporal dimension of prison life set during one morning and several nights. What stands out is that a political prisoner’s sensation and perception of time was not taken as an opportunity to translate the way in which a prisoner perceives prison, her way of seeing and hearing, into the narrative structure of the film. Instead, the protagonist’s perception of time is presented in a conventional way: through flashbacks to past events, for example, and the representation of memories. The film sticks to the plotline and does not push through to Hella Lindau’s subjective temporal dimension with any sort of artificial camera dramaturgy, invented for the purpose. As Andrej Tarkowski, Miklós Jancsó, Alain Resnais and other directors had elevated temporal structure to a key problem of modern cinematographic film language in the 1960s and 1970s, Reisch and Rücker were thus not seeking international discussion. Instead, in the dramaturgy of The Fiancée they relied on simplification. As the directors went about organizing political moments for the film story, questions of material and methodology must have arisen. The film includes images showing the elation of the masses for Hitler and the Wehrmacht. The attack on the Soviet Union is depicted with the help of pithy reports from the front taken from Nazi newsreels. These are later countered—parallel to the events in prison—by documentary film material showing the battle of Stalingrad, the columns of prisoners and the Red Army’s Oder Offensive. This documentary material not only gives information about the historic temporal axis of Hella Lindau’s ten years in prison; it also helps construct the perspectives of different characters, offering a way to clearly differentiate the ideological beliefs of individuals. The dramaturgical function of historical events likewise speaks to the directors’ intention to not only inform about events but also emphasize reactions to them. One such example is Hella Lindau’s reaction when she learns about the German-

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Soviet Nonaggression Pact. The use of documentary film material showing the crowds greet Hitler and the Wehrmacht is a dramaturgically interesting solution. Linking this to the character of Prison Warden Olser—who believes in Hitler (“He doesn’t want war!”), who was once a member of a workers’ purchasing cooperative, who never married and is afraid of being informed on—provokes the audience to analyze squandered life expectations and mob-psychology. The character herself becomes an argument against the “beautiful” images of the Nazi newsreels.

Starring Jutta Wachowiak What distinguishes the theater actress Jutta Wachowiak as a film actress? She has the ability to modulate the volume of her voice considerably. Rücker, who had developed a keen sense for the expressive possibilities of the voice in his work with radio plays, made use of this ability. Compare, for example, the melodiousness with which Wachowiak indicates Lindau’s inner steadfastness and conviction during her off-screen monolog in her own defense—“A judge of the Third Reich...” (TC 00:11:08:00)—to the montage of crying sounds during the first prison reunion scene; likewise, compare her dreamy, restrained gestures as she remembers—“I want to work with him” (TC 01:01:08:02)—to the form of her speech in the episode with the iron—“I don’t shake hands with murderers!” (TC 01:16:58:14) Wachowiak also characterizes the figure of Hella Lindau through a number of gestures. Spontaneous responses, expressions of emotion, pantomime—all of these arose from her sense of trust in the directors, for whom she offered her open reactions to the camera. She has the ability to capture the high point of scenic events with the melody of gestures, and both stylistic purity and psychological intensity are apparent in the process. Given her method of expression, Wachowiak required linguistic material and arrangements that challenged her. As the screenwriter, Rücker accommodated her in this. To create the character of Lindau, he used the lyrics of folk songs, sayings and lines from a Rilke poem, because emotional states (and affective reactions) could be shaped out of such linguistic material. Lines like “What will be, will be with Mother Bee. With Mother Hun it’s already become. But then Old Dufford, she sure suffered” (TC 00:07:16:08) illustrate this point. Lindau speaks these lines when she receives her fateful assignment from Reimers. It is significant that Wachowiak pronounces the sentence with slurring. Some words can’t be heard by the film viewer at all. Such sound sequences—like her crying during her reunion with Reimers—are means of identification that can go so far as to even forgo the concept of language.

By the mid-1970s, Jutta Wachowiak had played women who had to accept their fate: the daughter in Bankett für Achilles Film Library The Fiancée : Antifascist Resistance Film and Love Story • A 2018 DVD Release by the DEFA (Banquet for Achilles, 1975, dir. Roland Gräf); the youth welfare worker in P.S. (1978, dir. Roland Gräf); the wife Elisabeth in Glück im Hinterhaus (Rear House Bliss, 1979, dir. Herrmann Zschoche). In all these roles, she had the ability to represent contradictions—between stubbornness and the unconditional purity of the right to happiness; between severity and the desire to be tender; between desperate outbreak and patience—with a unique emotionality that was new for DEFA at the time. Combining her personality and her artistry, she defined a certain type of woman, a certain sociocultural image of women in East German cinema and culture. She developed a temporal type and her performed characters, including her portrayal of Hella Lindau, were known and accepted by GDR audiences. Her performance was devoid of the ritualized image of communist antifascist resistors that was officially sanctioned (and censored) in East German history books and public memorials. Her emotionality opened up new, universally human dimensions of the fundamental existential situation of a prisoner in Nazi Germany. In a sense, then, Wachowiak’s popularity worked against the state-sanctioned version of the role of communists. Such contradictions justify asking whether The Fiancée was, in fact, a high point of East German antifascist cinema, as state leadership stated during the film’s production. At the very least, Reisch and Rücker’s love story represented a break with many stereotypes; the directors themselves stressed that they did not want to continue the stereotype of communists as victims and sufferers. What mattered to them was an exploration of love under extreme circumstances, which threaten one’s very moral and physical existence.

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Conclusion With regard to the relationship between DEFA feature films that dealt with antifascism and transformations in East German mentalities and lifestyles around 1980, we can hypothesize that the acceptance by East German audiences of new approaches to antifascism were not primarily due to a general interest in the topic, or a new awareness leading people to abandon the ritualized representation of antifascist resistance shaped by the KPD (Communist Party of Germany). It is much more the case that the popularity of DEFA’s contemporary films (Alltagsfilme)—such as Konrad Wolf’s Solo Sunny (1979) and Erwin Stranka’s Sabine Wulff (1978)—contributed to the attention paid to The Fiancée and Jutta Wachowiak. Generally positive expectations towards DEFA feature films also influenced audience attendance. The attentiveness of the cinematic audience and many film critics to The Fiancée was indeed primarily determined by the popularity of Jutta Wachowiak and her time-type, rather than the role of German communists in the antifascist resistance as sanctioned by the state and the SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany). After The Fiancée, the interest of other, especially younger DEFA directors in antifascist themes tended in the direction of psychologizing complicated border situations. One such example is Dein unbekannter Bruder (Your Unknown Brother, 1981, dir. Ulrich Weiß), which deals with betrayal among communists. In contrast to the original novel by Willi Bredel, Weiß and his screenwriter, Wolfgang Trampe, made one of the comrades betray his antifascist resistance group, thereby existentially sharpening the situation, as well as the confrontation with the ritualized representation of communists in East Germany. This treatment was rebutted in the June 1984 edition of the Der antifaschistische Widerstandskämpfer (The Antifascist Resistance Fighter) magazine, where members of the older generation stated: “We weren’t like that.” And the Stasi initiated an investigation into Ulrich Weiß. Translated by Kate DeVane Brown

Lutz Haucke is a media scholar. He has taught at Humboldt Universität in Berlin (1978-1998), at the Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen in Potsdam-Babelsberg (1971-1975) and at the Theaterhochschule in Leipzig in the 1980s. He has worked on a wide range of research projects, including on: East German cinema; the phenomenon of mainstream culture; the history of performing arts; and the East European auteur film. He is the author of Nouvelle Vague in Osteuropa? (2010, Rhombos) and Film-Künste-TV-Shows. Film- und fernsehwissenschaftliche Studien. Auswahl 1978-2004 (2005, Rhombos) and has written numerous articles. • A 2018 DVD Release by the DEFA Film Library The Fiancée : Antifascist Resistance Film and Love Story • A 2018 DVD Release by the DEFA

We would like to thank the DEFA-Stiftung for their generous permission to translate and use this text for this DEFA Film Library DVD release; the original was published in German in a booklet accompanying the German DVD release of The Fiancée.

Editor’s Note: The quotes with time code information refer to English subtitles in the film on this DVD released by the DEFA Film Library.

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