Katie Trumpener ‘When Do We Get Our Cinema?’ Stalinist Populism and East German Media Critique

Two arts needed development Zone and GDR cinema officials did succeed, at under socialism: the art of acting and least intermittently, in radically reconfiguring the art of spectating. cinematic life and in implementing interwar —Bertolt Brecht quotation on the façade of political and avant-garde dreams. The DEFA Leipzig’s main art cinema films of the early 1950s are often didactic, politi- cally unnuanced, and formally flat—yet they ‘When do we get our cinema?’ a woman de- announced and inaugurated major cinematic mands in Milo Harbich’s A Free Country transformations. (Freies Land, 1946), speaking from the crowd Since 1989, a substantial new body of of refugees and dispossessed farm workers try- scholarship has focused extensively on the re- ing to launch a communist agricultural collec- pressive aspects of GDR film life: official and tive in Germany’s Soviet Occupation Zone. An internalized censorship mechanisms; Stasi official voice explains that film must wait: tools surveillance of films-in-progress; petty and not- and feed take priority, economic reconstruction so-petty forms of coercion in the cinema itself; preceding cultural renewal. The second feature the Stasi-orchestrated 1966 cinema riots which film shot in postwar Germany, A Free Country furnished the excuse to ban a particularly tren- was also the second feature produced by DEFA chant anti-Stalinist film (Agde 1991 and Geiss (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft), the new 1997). This research has been vital in compli- Soviet-German film studio, later to become the cating Communist tradition of celebratory offi- East German state film studio. With its lay act- cial cinema history. Yet what it threatens to ef- ing, and experimental blend of neorealism and face, in turn, is the radical character of Stalinist Brechtian parable, Harbich’s film is also a man- political culture, and early postwar attempts to ifesto for a radical postwar cinema. Yet precisely re-imagine film culture, to remake not only cin- for this reason, it flopped completely. Audiences ematic experience but spectators themselves. found it too didactic and too avant-garde; of- Despite all this research, moreover, GDR ficials criticized its refusal to develop socialist cinema remains a ‘lost cinema’, still virtually realist characters (Mückenberger, Jordan 1994: unknown by viewers beyond Germany. From the 52–59). early 1950s to the early 1990s, East German ‘When do we get our cinema?’ With its film largely vanished from Western cinematic expectation that the cinema now will belong to consciousness, one of the Cold War’s many cul- its audience in some new way, Harbich’s ques- tural consequences. Since 1989, in turn, it has tion echoes 1930s German manifestos calling largely vanished from Eastern cinematic con- for a new leftist, anti-fascist cinema, from Willi sciousness, having been retroactively (some- Münzenberg’s 1935 ‘Conquer the Cinema’ how) reunified with West German cinema or at (‘Erobert den Film!’, Münzenberg 1972) to least a longer German cinematic tradition (see, Hans Richter’s 1937 The Struggle for the Film for instance, Iordanova 2005). (Kampf um den Film, Richter 1986). During Already by the last half of the Cold War, in the same era in the , the political fact, had become peripheral to ascendancy of Stalinism, the aesthetic ascen- East European narratives of cinema history and dancy of socialist realism led to the increasingly indeed of regional history, despite its persistent, violent repression of high modernism. And this unprecedented, attempts to move Germany aspect of Stalinism deeply shaped aesthetic life eastward. GDR’s philo-Slavism was in some in the postwar German Democratic Republic ways strategic (an officially sponsored cultural (GDR). Many early DEFA films are stylistically attempt to justify the Oder-Neiße line and Sovi- innovative, drawing on neorealism, Expression- et military presence), but to a significant extent ism, and cabaret. By the late 1940s and early also expiatory, anti-fascist, and post-colonial. 1950s, however, the studio’s socialist mandate For it involved a renunciation not only the blan- was taken to preclude such formal experiments. dishments of Western European and American Yet despite socialist realist prohibitions culture but of Germany’s historic sense of itself against any return to modernist form, Soviet as the dominant cultural force in Central and

99 Eastern Europe. Instead, the GDR imagined with the general population; until the building of itself as a coeval, sharing the struggles of other the Berlin Wall in 1961, thousands of East Ber- fledgling socialist societies. liners thus crossed every night to West Berlin In some ways, of course, East Germany to see Western movies—and many frequented itself was an anomaly within Eastern Europe. In the special ‘border cinemas’ the West German other parts of the Communist bloc, influential government had established exclusively for East intellectuals remained staunch anti-Commu- German spectators. East German films were nists, and the film communities, too, were full conceived in the full knowledge that part of their of renegades and dissidents. GDR filmmakers, intended audience had easy, regular access to in contrast, welcomed the postwar arrival of So- the West German competition—and were being viet films as an epochal event, displacing fascist lured into capitalist film culture. This awareness cinema, and enabling the recovery and continu- pushed them not only to refute, but at mo- ation of the Weimar Republic’s Soviet-inspired ments, also to imitate Western media. The Party revolutionary workers’ films. Most GDR intel- would eventually justify the erection of the Ber- lectuals, moreover, were convinced social- lin Wall as an ‘Anti-Fascist Protective Wall’ pre- ists, who viewed West Germany as a militarist venting cross-sector movie-going and shielding inheritor of —and revered the the East German public from toxic Western Soviet Union not only as a utopian experiment media influences; the Party subsequently con- but as a historic refuge for the German left. In sidered building an additional ‘electronic Wall’ East Germany, public discussion of the Stalin- to jam all West German radio and television ist purges began only in the 1980s. In fact, as signals as well. The critique of Western media post-1989 studies have documented, the large forms—cast as successors to fascist media— group of German anti-fascists who took refuge was thus a central aspect of official ideology. Yet in the Soviet Union were deliberately decimated it also spurred filmmakers to renewed medita- during the late 1930s and early 1940s. So many tion on the nature of media itself—and hence key figures were killed, in fact, that it was not helped catalyze East Germany’s particular it- literally possible for the GDR to reassemble eration of New Wave aesthetics. the Communist workers’ film milieu of the late Despite GDR cinema’s intense initial 1920s and early 1930s (see Agde 2001 and engagement with Soviet cinema, and its ongo- Agde 2002). ing attempts at collaboration with other East Yet many anti-fascist émigrés did return European state studios, it increasingly fell out from Soviet and from Western exile to settle in of step, during the late 1950s and early 1960s, the GDR, with incalculable, if sometimes indi- with cinematic developments elsewhere in East- rect, effects on film culture. Bertolt Brecht, for ern Europe, eclipsed by the visual pyrotechnics instance, disliked most East German films— and greater political nuance in other New Wave and his repeated attempts to collaborate directly cinemas. DEFA’s two main periods of New with DEFA all failed (Brecht 1993 and Gersch Wave sensibility—from 1956 to 1958 and again 1975). His Berliner Ensemble nonetheless from 1962 to 1966, were tentative and brief, and exerted a lasting influence on acting styles, in both cases ended with large-scale political dramaturgy, and conceptions of cinematic life. reprisals.2 Throughout the Stalinist period, indeed, East After 1956, for various political reasons German cinema was marked not only, as one (including the ‘premature’ nature of the 1953 might expect, by the cult of personality—news- workers’ uprising), East Germany’s reel adulation of Stalin, histrionic biopics about de-Stalinization process was foreshortened. Communist martyrs—but also by the revival of Stalin’s picture was retroactively edited out of interwar, radical, and in some ways essentially many GDR newsreels, but there was virtually no modernist attempts to transform the nature of public or cinematic discussion of what Stalin- cinematic experience.1 ism had entailed. While Soviet and Polish New Yet Communist efforts to orient cultural Wave cinema revised official narratives of World life to Soviet models remained deeply unpopular War II, or debunked Stalinist show-trials, while

100 Hungarian and Czech auteurs experimented spectators’ self-perception, political conscious- with radically new content and film form, many ness and sense of self-worth. DEFA was partic- East German films continued to focus on ularly interested in working-class subjects and anti-Western polemics, and often retained pre- audiences. Yet it also attempted to integrate existing dramaturgical, narrative, and visual viewers across classes and generations into a strategies. Yet what is interesting, in retrospect, new, egalitarian public. Every DEFA film thus is precisely the narrowness of the gap between tried to appeal simultaneously to sophisticated everyday Stalinist filmmaking in East Germany, and uneducated, male and female viewers. One and what there was of a New Wave. reviewer thus criticized the ‘abrupt ending’ of Erich Engel’s social comedy The Beaver Coat FROM THE STARS TO (Der Biberpelz, 1949); although this might THE MASSES? make sense to the ‘intellectual, literary’ portion STALINIST FILM CULTURE of the audience, it left ‘simple’ viewers puzzled 4 IN LIGHT OF ‘THE CLEANING and frustrated (Müller 1970: 28). WOMAN SYSTEM’ DEFA’s mandate to reach and unify the en- tire audience made formal experiment difficult: GDR cinema understood itself as a counter- its dramaturgy, as one West German critic put cinema on two fronts, trying to break deci- it, was to catalyze insight ‘not through the unex- sively with the Third Reich cinema, and with pected or provocative, but through the already- its implicit restoration or continuation in West known’. Better to ‘imprison’ viewers by over- Germany. DEFA films, indeed, look particularly explaining every detail than leave any possibility avant-garde when compared to contemporary of ambiguity or doubt (Roth 1969: 535–536). West German studio productions. Throughout Within the limits of realism, however, the studio the 1950s, West German critics lampooned the worked to produce films of the highest aesthetic provincialism, banality and sentimentality of caliber, often sparing no expense: the detective their own films, conceived ‘as if the German film story, the romantic melodrama, the anti-impe- public consisted of young girls, high school stu- rialist Western should be as carefully conceived, dents, and chambermaids’ (Schnurre 1950: 9). as memorably executed, as able to transform One of West Germany’s most successful dis- viewer sensibilities and consciousness, as the tributors, Ilse Kubaschewski, was known to rely epic history of German communism. heavily on the opinion of her cleaning woman Especially during the late 1940s and early in deciding what to distribute. Producers thus 1950s, publicists portrayed DEFA as exemplify- treated this cleaning woman as ‘an important ing the country’s new collectively-owned and personality’, holding special previews for her, operated businesses (volkseigene Betriebe). and handling her with extreme deference, tell- DEFA film credits, accordingly, underscored ing ‘jokes before the screening to loosen her up’ and anxiously studying her face to anticipate 1 Socialist realism is itself arguably a form of modern- her verdict. This ‘cleaning woman system’ had ism; see, for instance, Trumpener 1994 and Hell, Kruger, some virtues, one producer remembers, in that Trumpener 1994. some of the star-vehicles she liked went on 2 Ralf Schenk’s revelatory 2002 retrospective Zwischen to become hits. But she was an inappropriate Tauwetter und Eiszeit, at Berlin’s Filmkunsthaus Babylon, judge, he felt, for more artistically ambitious showcased the experimental films made between 1956 and 3 1958. On the mid-1960s New Wave and the 1965 clamp- productions (Brauner 1976: 201). down, see Agde 1991, Mückenberger 1990 and Trumpener When the West German studio system 2001. solicited the feedback of a single, ‘representa- 3 Her famously profit-obsessed employer, meanwhile, tive’ working-class viewer, it did so to gauge was particularly fond of genre pictures, sequels and series, and correspondingly determined to avoid ‘flashbacks’, probable popularity and profitability. East Ger- ‘unsympathetic’ protagonists and anything save a ‘happy man studio heads were animated not by finan- ending’ (Reichart 2002: 152). cial but by political considerations, by the gen- 4 On the use of ‘accessibility’ arguments as grounds for uine wish to reach and move millions, changing censorship, see Miltschitzky 1996.

101 filmmaking as a collaborative process.5 Early critique of Nazi illusionism, inside and outside DEFA films also celebrated lay acting and mass the cinema. participation, staging a fusion of actors and Georg Klaren’s The Sonnenbrucks (Die audience. Late 1940s activist films like And Sonnenbrucks, 1951), for instance, centers ’48 Again (Und wieder 48, 1948) and Sour partly on an apolitical musician who gradu- Weeks, Happy Holidays (Saure Wochen, frohe ally becomes critical of Nazi cruelties, harbors Feste, 1950) show a veritable cultural revolu- a friend who escapes from a concentration tion in progress, as teams of young socialist camp, and is herself finally shot by the Gestapo. students and workers transform aesthetic along The actress cast in this role bore a marked with economic production, boycotting or inter- resemblance to Third Reich movie diva Zarah rupting the production of costume films or op- Leander, and the resemblance was heightened erettas, to create new, more critical, and more by dress, make-up and acting style. So when topical forms of entertainment. Even extras, her character confronts the mass execution of And ’48 Again insists, can catalyze political hostages, the casual cruelty of Nazi leaders, it discussion on the set, resulting in the picture’s is as if Zarah Leander herself has been pulled complete political reorientation. out of the sheltered world of patriotic homefront Spectators, meanwhile, were asked to melodrama, and forced to see the consequences identify not with the glamour but with the ordi- of her alliances and blind-spots. The Sonnen- nariness of film characters, as of the actors who brucks, tellingly, was released a year after the embodied them. Particularly in its early years, real Zarah Leander had made her comeback film DEFA self-consciously resisted a Third Reich in West Germany—and suggests an alterna- or Hollywood-style star system, to implement a tive, more expiatory path this movie star might different philosophy of acting. As Kurt Maetzig have taken. demonstrates in his backstage drama, The In the late 1940s and early 1950s, West Story of a Young Couple (Roman einer jungen German studios re-engaged most of the Third Ehe, 1952), actors were introduced to a new Reich’s stars, then worked to recreate the aura socialist repertoire, and coached to understand which had surrounded Third Reich cinema. In their character’s socio-historical dimensions. West Germany, as in Hollywood, stars attempt- After their filming day ended, moreover, they ed to influence major artistic decisions about might find themselves performing at workers’ the films they appeared in; on some sets, co- cultural events or even performing manual stars vied to determine the choice of camera- labor with a volunteer street crew, alongside man, and thus the most flattering style for their their proletarian audiences. Like the Hollywood own close-ups (Hembus 1961: 73–74). Third cinema it partly modeled itself on, Third Reich Reich ‘premieres in the big Berlin cinemas were cinema had repeatedly paid tribute to itself in always terrific, pomp-filled shows’, attracting backstage musicals. DEFA films recast this plot autograph-seeking crowds who stopped traffic to showcase the coming-into-being of new col- for blocks (Leander 1983: 151). West German lectives and new forms of entertainment. film premieres and film festivals followed suit GDR intellectuals remained constitu- (see Jacobsen 1990: 24–26, 51–52, 57–58; tionally suspicious of movie stars, whose fan Grünewald 1992: 139–143). Early DEFA cults seemed uncomfortably reminiscent of the premieres, in contrast, show-cased a kind of Nazi cult of genius and the racialist-eugenicist anti- or counter-glamour; the GDR celebri- celebration of Aryan beauty. Joseph Goebbels, ties in attendances tended to be work activists, moreover, had cultivated a charismatic, star- union officials, politicians and artists (Lüdecke centered cinema culture to divert attention 1970: 31). from increasingly harsh political realities: Third Yet by the mid-1950s, DEFA’s feature Reich ‘entertainment films’ were thus as much films register some exhaustion with its own cin- part of Nazi strategy as explicitly ‘propagan- ematic revolution. One backstage comedy Star distic’ films. Any postwar attempt to wean the with Borrowed Feathers (Star mit fremden German people from had to include a Federn, 1955) thus shows the studio canteen

102 worker and janitor voicing their opinions after unleashed. Over the 1950s, the GDR’s initial the film shoot, pushing the beleaguered movie ‘mass-cultural activism’ thus ‘disappeared’ actor to lose his temper and walk off the set. The behind a ‘bureaucratic screen of ‘mass organi- film focuses mainly on the opposite danger— zations’’, even as the campaigns against mod- that those treated as stars will get swelled ernism and cosmopolitanism doomed an earlier heads, or forget their responsibility to the pub- coalition between socialists and humanists lic. Yet this moment of contretemps also sug- (Jarausch, Geyer 2003: 299). gests new distance from the aesthetic populism What this account emphasizes is the the studio previously embraced. influential GDR rhetoric of self-emancipation By the early 1960s, the pressure to com- and self-empowerment which accompanied— pete with Western cinema culture finally led and in crucial ways contradicted—the onset DEFA to begin orchestrating fan-cults around of Stalinist authoritarianism. During the early some lead actors. Yet more explicitly socialist postwar years, Communist cultural officials had conceptions of the actor still persisted inside tried to rebuild the German cinema along new the studio. In the late 1970s, when DEFA lead lines, and to address audiences in new ways. Arnim Mueller-Stahl emigrated to the West, he These efforts—and their implicit empowerment realized in retrospect (and somewhat bitterly) of the audience as a critical mass—continued the fundamental differences between this studio to resonate long after such initiatives were culture and that of West Germany or Holly- discontinued. wood. For at DEFA BORDER CINEMAS the tone is usually set by the stage work- ers. His majesty, the primary worker! Throughout the 1950s, GDR studio officials [---] Even the lighting crew made their tried at once to differentiate their vision of film- comments about the actors. The actors making from that on offer in West Berlin and to weren’t the stars. When the actors ap- make films that would attract domestic viewers. peared, everyone didn’t fall silent, the way For if the GDR continued to ‘hemorrhage’ pop- they do in America. Everyone made com- ulation every month, East Berlin ‘hemorrhaged’ ments about whether one was good or not. movie audiences every night, as they crossed (Mueller-Stahl 1990: 63.) the city to spend the evening in West Berlin cinemas. GDR films therefore addressed spec- On one level, then, the participatory social- tators as sophisticated, ‘bilingual’ consumers. ism extolled by GDR films was partly realized And particularly during the brief thaw of 1956– within the studio itself. Yet on another level, 1957, DEFA filmmakers openly acknowledged the gradual centralization of the cinema (like the competing attractions of Western cinema. other cultural, political, and economic institu- In 1950, The Sonnenbrucks implicitly tions) had brought virtually every aspect of film put a key Third Reich movie star through a life—from planning and casting, to distribution, course of consciousness-raising. Mid-1950s publicity, and reviewing—under direct Party DEFA films used related tactics to try to cure scrutiny. GDR audiences of their addiction to Hollywood As Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer cinema. Some offered critical variations on have argued, the early GDR ‘deliberately set out favorite genres or favorite film moments. Kurt to remake and create a nation on the principle Maetzig’s comedy Don’t Forget My Traudel of mass mobilization in industry, in defense, 5 The resulting penchant for lengthy credit sequences and in culture.’ Yet ‘the mobility of desires and was eventually mocked in the satirical Rainer Lakomy song wants it unleashed’ frightened Communist accompanying the opening credits of Günter Reisch’s Carnations in Aspic (Nelken in Aspik, 1977): the misplaced leaders into ‘paralysis’; until the collapse of the democratic desire that everyone ‘belonging to the Collective’ GDR, they spent ‘ever greater efforts’ control- be included, down to those who ‘sewed on a button’ leads to credits so extensive that they make ‘the telephone book look ling, containing and trying to fathom what their like a page-turner’, dampening audience interest in the film own campaigns for mass empowerment had to come.

103 (Vergeßt mir meine Traudel nicht, 1957), for reminiscent of Italian neorealism. In many instance, reprises Marilyn Monroe’s famous respects, their stories were quite orthodox, subway-grating scene from The Seven Year cautionary tales about the dangers of Western- Itch (1955). Yet here, the moment is not so style consumption and spectatorship. In Klein’s much an homage to Hollywood glamour as a A Berlin Romance (Einer Berliner Romanze, critique of American-style sexiness, for com- 1956) for instance, an East Berlin apprentice modifying vulnerability. What underlies both and aspiring fashion model is taken in by West Monroe’s and Traudel’s flirtatious allure, the German media culture, but gradually comes to film argues, is actually neediness, vulnerability, appreciate the GDR alternative. At the film’s bereftness. In Traudel’s case, this has histori- outset, Uschi undertakes a journey familiar cal roots: her father, an East European forced to most of the film’s actual GDR viewers: she laborer, was executed by the Nazis, while her crosses to West Berlin with a friend eager to German mother died in Ravensbrück concen- see a movie. Yet when they stand outside of the tration camp. Traudel’s dawning understanding theater, looking at the posters for Enticing Sin, of herself as the fruit of a forbidden, doomed, Uschi declines to accompany her in: she already utopian love readies her to abandon the sadistic knows what the film will be like. So while her allures of Western youth culture for a mature friend is in the cinema being enticed, Uschi attraction, to a protective socialist policeman. goes windowshopping along the Kurfürsten- After Nazism left Germans orphaned, the film damm, inadvertently assuming a similar specta- argues, capitalism commodifies their neediness; torial stance as she projects her desires onto the socialism, in contrast, works to alleviate it. exhibited goods. Other GDR films tried Trojan horse tac- Eventually, she is intercepted by a West tics, offering viewers faux-Western genre films. Berlin flâneur, whose large transistor radio, In their first quarter or half hour, these films hung around his neck, attracts her unwilling seemed indistinguishable from their Western admiration. As we later learn, Lord’s radio, counterparts. Then, just when the viewer was bought on the installment plan, is not yet paid lulled, they shifted decisively into a more ana- off, part of the pervasive financial anxiety that lytic mode, offering an ideological critique of pressures Lord into nineteenth-century-style the particular genre being aped. In 1958, in colonial fantasies of emigration to Australia for the renewed chill which followed the GDR’s a fresh beginning on the frontier. What looks brief cultural thaw, these films were attacked like the latest consumer accessory—a means of with particular vehemence. Some were reedited piping Western-style ‘hits’ into every urban lo- or remade, one banned outright. Casino Af- cale, stimulating teenage fan culture and record fair (Spielbank-AЮäre, 1957) met a particu- sales—quite literally represents the shackle of larly strange fate. GDR officials worried that capitalist desires and financing. Although dis- its highly critical account of West Germany’s comforted by Lord’s anxious self-importance, mercenary spirit, credit-based economy, and Uschi agrees to accompany him and his friend political corruption might prove inadvertently Hans to see Enticing Sin after all: even to seductive, that its ‘opulent’ location shots of the this skeptical East Berlin filmgoer the erotic Riviera and West Germany might encourage enticements of Western mass media prove too viewers to flee the GDR. At screenings abroad, powerful to resist. Even we see why Enticing the film was shown in its original, gorgeous Sin transfixes its audience: onscreen, a woman Technicolor. But at home, to reduce its pictures’ wearing only a negligee talks of fleeing with visual allure, it was allowed only to be screened Mike to Mexico. Then, she is ambushed by in ‘terrible-looking black and white copies’ gunfire. At this exciting juncture, unfortunately, (Schenk 1994: 140). an untoward occurrence in the movie theater At the same moment, ironically, shatters the cinematic illusion: in a clumsy at- Gerhard Klein’s films were attacked on the tempt at chivalry, Hans has bought ice cream opposite grounds, that both their black and for Uschi to eat in her seat, trips while bringing white photography and their dramaturgy were it and spills it down her dress.

104 A Berlin Romance imports Italian neo- of French New Wave aesthetics, Klein presents realist aesthetics to Cold War Berlin in order this history as an icily clinical case study, show- to combat Western illusionism and escapism. ing how the cool gaze of the Nazi newsreel When Hans beats out Lord as an erotic rival, camera is taken up by its spectators. For Klein, when Uschi and Hans pair up, against all odds, fascist cinema catalyzes a kind of moral frozen- the film shows neither violent retribution nor ness, paralyzing or even hypnotizing viewers, steamy passion, neither blazing guns nor neg- rendering them unable to resist or to act. What ligees. Instead, there is social embarrassment GDR cinema must represent instead, A Berlin and crossed signals, the quotidian misunder- Romance insists, is an ice-cream cone dropped standings of ordinary life. Klein’s film offers a directly down the spectator’s dress: incisive, manifesto for a socially-engaged, anti-illusion- interventionist, a wake up call. ist cinema. Yet cultural officials found his adap- East Germany’s New Waves maintain tation of neorealism inflammatory: an aesthetic a strong thematic proximity to the politically designed for critiquing life under capitalism was orthodox filmmaking of the 1950s, in its si- unsuitable for depicting life under socialism. multaneous repudiation of fascist and Western The cinematic New Waves which began cine ma, as in its attempt to develop a different elsewhere in Eastern Europe around 1956 were kind of cinematic experience. What this immer- centrally concerned with recent history, with re- sion in Cold War media politics shapes is un- narrating World War II, with the transgressions usually intense self-reflexivity about the nature of Stalinism. In East Germany, New Wave films of media itself. like A Berlin Romance share much of their po- litical critique with much orthodox film projects. Yet they are also newly open to Western film styles. By the early 1960s, ironically, key New Wave films would plead for the necessity of the Berlin Wall as a barrier against Western media culture—in modernist film language derived directly from the critique of capitalist life devel- oped in West German experimental films. Yet the GDR New Wave was also shaped by a renewed engagement with Weimar and fascist film culture, thanks to a ‘huge fund of ... film material from ... the Third Reich and from the 1920s’6 which the Soviet Army handed over to DEFA in the late 1950s. DEFA had repre- sented and repudiated Nazi aesthetics since the late 1940s. Breakthrough New Wave films like Konrad Wolf’s Lissy (1957) and Klein’s The Gleiwitz AЮair (Der Fall Gleiwitz, 1961) were novel in their stylized, analytic reconstruction of Third Reich cinema as an institution, a set of apparatuses, social technologies and trained responses. Lissy opens with a meditation on how Weimar-era mass culture and consump- tion habits aided the rise of fascism. The Glei- witz AЮair shows Third Reich media preparing German audiences for war—in the tone and content of the newsreels, the alternation be- 6 For scriptwriter Günther Rücker as for others, this first tween official hate-propaganda and blandly exposure to earlier German film catalyzed ‘a time of discover- ies, a shock, a very powerful impulse to work’ (Rücker 1980: lulling diversion. In a controversial adaptation 196).

105 FILMS B r a u n e r, ‘Atze’ [Artur] 1976. Mich Strukturen, Diskurse, Kontexte. Ed. gibt’s nur einmal. Rückblende eines Michael Schaudig. München: Diskurs- And ’48 Again (Und wieder 48), Lebens. München, Berlin: Herbig Film, Schaudig & Ledig, pp. 419–454 dir. Gustav von Wangenheim. East Germany, 1948 B r e c h t, Bertolt 1993. Bertolt Brecht M ü c k e n b e r g e r, Christiane (Ed.) Journals. Trans. Hugh Rorrison, ed. 1990. Prädikat. Besonders schädlich. The Beaver Coat (Der Biberpelz), John Willett. London: Methuen Filmtexte. Berlin: Henschel dir. Erich Engel. East Germany, 1949 G e i s s, Axel 1997. Repression und M ü c k e n b e r g e r, Christiane; A Berlin Romance (Eine Berliner Freiheit. DEFA-Regisseure zwischen J o r d a n, Günter 1994. “Sie sehen Romanze), dir. Gerhard Klein. East Fremd- und Selbstbestimmung. selbst, Sie hören selbst...”. Eine Germany, 1956 Brandenburgische historische Hefte, Geschichte der DEFA von ihren Carnations in Aspic (Nelken in Aspik), 7. Potsdam: Brandenburgische Anfängen bis 1949. Marburg: dir. Günter Reisch. East Germany, 1977 Landeszentrale für Politische Bildung Hitzeroth Casino AЮair (Spielbank-AЮäre), G e r s c h, Wolfgang 1975. Film bei M u e l l e r - S t a h l , Arnim 1990. dir. Arthur Pohl. East Germany, Brecht. Bertolt Brechts praktische und Aus Gesprächen der Herausgeber mit Sweden, 1957 theoretische Auseinandersetzung mit Arnim Mueller-Stahl.—Filmland dem Film. München: Carl Hanser DDR. Ein Reader zu Geschichte, Don’t Forget My Traudel (Vergeßt Funktion und Wirkung der DEFA. Eds. mir meine Traudel nicht), dir. Kurt G r ü n e w a l d, Rolf 1992. Der Titania- Harry Blunk, Dirk Jungnickel. Köln: Maetzig. East Germany, 1957 Palast. 1928–1966. Berliner Kino- Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, und Kulturgeschichte. Berlin: Edition pp. 59–70 A Free Country (Freies Land), dir. Milo Hentrich Harbich. Germany (Soviet Occupation M ü l l e r, Hermann 1970. Der Zone), 1946 H e l l, Julia; K r u g e r, Loren; Biberpelz [1949].—Spielfilme Tr u m p e n e r, Katie 1994. der DEFA im Urteil der Kritik. The Gleiwitz AЮair (Der Fall Gleiwitz), [Introduction to] Dossier: Socialist dir. Gerhard Klein. East Germany, 1961 Ausgewählte Rezensionen, mit einer realism and East German Bibliografie. Eds. Lissi Zilinski et al. Lissy, dir. Konrad Wolf. East Germany, modernism—another historians’ Berlin: Henschel, pp. 26–28 1957 debate.—Rethinking Marxism, Vol. 7 (3), pp. 37–44 M ü n z e n b e r g, Willi 1972. Erobert The Seven Year Itch, dir. Billy Wilder. den Film!—W. Münzenberg. USA, 1955 H e m b u s, Joe 1961. Der deutsche Propaganda als WaЮe. Ausgewählte Film kann gar nicht besser sein. Schriften 1919–1940. Ed. Til Schulz. The Sonnenbrucks (Die Bremen: Schünemann Frankfurt: März Verlag, pp. 46–66 Sonnenbrucks), dir. Georg Klaren. East Germany, 1951 I o r d a n o v a, Dina 2005. The cinema R e i c h a r t, Manuela 2002. Ilse of Eastern Europe: Strained loyalties, Kubaschewski. 18.8.1907(?)— Sour Weeks, Happy Holidays (Saure elusive clusters.—East European 30.10.2001.—Filmgeschichte, Wochen, frohe Feste), dir. Wolfgang Cinemas. Ed. Anikó Imre. New York, no. 16/17, pp. 151–152 Schleif. East Germany, 1950 London: Routledge, pp. 229–249 R i c h t e r, Hans 1986. The Struggle Star with Borrowed Feathers (Star mit J a c o b s e n, Wolfgang 1990. for the Film: Towards a Socially fremden Federn), dir. Harald Mannl. Berlinale: Berlin International Film Responsible Cinema. Ed. Jürgen East Germany, 1955 Festival. Berlin: Argon Römhild, trans. Ben Brewster. New York: St. Martin’s Press The Story of a Young Couple (Roman J a r a u s c h , Konrad H.; G e y e r , einer jungen Ehe), dir. Kurt Maetzig. Michael 2003. Shattered Past: R o t h, Wilhelm 1969. 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