Legal Tender Series editor: Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Cornell University Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought publishes new English- language books in literary studies, criticism, cultural studies, and intellectual history pertaining to the German-speaking world, as well as translations of im- portant German-language works. Signale construes “modern” in the broad- est terms: the series covers topics ranging from the early modern period to the present. Signale books are published under a joint imprint of Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library in electronic and print formats. Please see http://signale.cornell.edu/. Legal Tender Love and Legitimacy in the East German Cultural Imagination John Griffi th Urang A Signale Book Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library Ithaca, New York Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library gratefully acknowledge the support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the publication of this volume. Copyright © 2010 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2010 by Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Urang, John Griffi th, 1975– Legal tender : love and legitimacy in the East German cultural imagination / John Griffi th Urang. p. cm. — (Signale : modern German letters, cultures, and thought) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8014-7653-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Love stories, German—Germany (East)—History and criticism. 2. German fi ction—Germany (East)—History and criticism. 3. Romance fi lms—Germany (East)—History. 4. Love in literature. 5. Love in motion pictures. 6. Love—Social aspects—Germany (East) 7. Germany (East)—Civilization. I. Title. II. Series: Signale (Ithaca, N.Y.) PT3723.5.L6U73 2010 843'.085090914—dc22 2010009971 Paperback printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Jenn and Griffi th Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Eros and Exchange 1 1. Wares of Love: Socialist Romance and the Commodity 23 2. Love, Labor, Loss: Modes of Romance in the East German Novel of Arrival 61 3. Corrective Affi nities: Love, Class, and the Propagation of Socialism 94 4. W(h)ither Eros? Gender Trouble in the GDR, 1975–1989 130 5. Eye Contact: Surveillance, Perversion, and the Last Days of the GDR 164 Coda: A Chameleon Wedding 193 Works Cited 203 Index 217 Acknowledgments Research for this book was made possible by the generous fi nancial support of the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), the Franke Institute for the Humanities, the University of Chicago, and Reed College. Parts of chapter 1 appeared as “Realism and Romance in the East German Cinema, 1952–1962” in Film History 18.1 (2006). I have presented portions of other chapters at the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Oregon, Eu- gene; Reed College; and the Midwest MLA convention in Chicago. I am grateful for the productive comments and suggestions I received on those occasions. Many thanks to Ute Klawitter at the Bundesarchiv Filmarchiv, Manja Meister at defa-spektrum, Elke Jung-Wolff at Fotografi e Jung-Wolff, and Bettina Erlen- kamp at Deutsche Fotothek Dresden for their assistance in acquiring images for this book. Stills and photographs are reproduced with the kind permission of defa- spektrum and the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden. I owe a debt of gratitude to readers of chapters and drafts, including Hunter Biv- ens, Matt Hunter, Jennifer Schuberth, Rob Slifkin, Gunnar Urang, and the Franke Fellows. Thanks are due to Marc Silberman, who put together the DEFA issue of Film History, for his keen editorial eye. My thanks as well to Kizer Walker, Peter Ho- hendahl, the Signale editorial board, and the two thoughtful, exacting, and generous anonymous readers for Cornell University Press. I am extremely grateful to Marian Rogers, who edited the manuscript with astonishing discernment and thoroughness. x Acknowledgments I’m particularly indebted to several members of the faculty in the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago for their guidance, support, and encouragement of the ideas and research that culminated in this book. Many thanks to Katie Trumpener, whose work as a scholar and a teacher has always been an inspiration; to David Levin, for his careful readings, incisive comments, and delightful conversation; and to Eric Santner, for the depth of his questions and the breadth of his vision. Thanks to all the friends, teachers, students, and colleagues who have accom- panied me on my academic journey. Particular thanks to Catherine Baumann, Andreas Gailus, John Humler, Loren Kruger, Leslie Morris, Moishe Postone, Ma- lynne Sternstein, and David Wellbery for their inspiring teaching and academic work. I am thankful for the friendship and encouragement of my colleagues at Reed College, especially Mark Burford, Katja Garloff, Ülker Gökberk, Ben La- zier, Jan Mieszkowski, Tahir Naqvi, Joel Revill, Paul Silverstein, and Rob Slifkin. I would also like to thank my students at Reed for their invigorating curiosity, insightfulness, and enthusiasm. Much love to family and friends here and far away. Love and gratitude to my parents, Sarah and Gunnar, for their constant support. This book is dedicated to Jenn, my partner in everything, and to Gus: cat fan- cier, cornfl ake fanatic, bird spotter, pumpkin enthusiast. Legal Tender Introduction Eros and Exchange At the end of Leander Haußmann’s 1999 fi lm, Sonnenallee, a light romantic comedy set in East Germany in the 1970s, the camera pulls back through the open border to the West, and the color fades to black and white. On the sound track, Nina Hagen sings: “Du hast den Farbfi lm vergessen, mein Michael” (You forgot the color fi lm, my Michael). In suddenly—and polemically—remembering to forget its own “color fi lm,” Sonnenallee anticipates and satirizes the reactions of a Western audience. As in the scene where the hero and his best friend sarcastically pantomime “oppression” for a West German tour bus, Sonnenallee here assumes it knows what is expected of it, and adjusts accordingly. As Christiane Kuehl re- marks in a review of the fi lm for Berlin’s Tageszeitung, Whoever came back from there [the GDR] reported one thing above all, and it was the same thing that dominated every report made by curious newly united Germans after ’89: that it was damned gray over there. The GDR was gray. Gray walls, gray streets, gray air, ashen faces. Always the same sentence, sometimes an additional one: over there you felt like you were driving through a black-and-white movie from the ’50s. With mock astonishment, Kuehl describes the overturning of this image in Son- nenallee: “Leander Haußmann made a color fi lm. About the GDR. The GDR gleams.” 2 Legal Tender As many of its reviewers were quick to point out, Sonnenallee’s colors were ren- dered particularly bright by the lens of Ostalgie, or “nostalgia for the former East Germany.” In the words of a review of Sonnenallee in Der Spiegel, Nostalgia is shorthand for “how lovely it was back then,” and Ostalgia for “we really had it good in the GDR,” even if, yeah, yeah, under further consideration a few things were not so nice back then. Ten years after the fall of the Wall, former East Germans (Ossis) remember above all the pleasant things. Sadness sinks into the depths of memory, details blur. (Wellershoff) Reveling in its gleeful forgetfulness, Sonnenallee caused a minor scandal—even be- fore its release. In their review of Haußmann’s fi lm, Kerstin and Gunnar Decker make note of some of this negative press: The fi lm wasn’t even in cinemas yet, and already it met with antipathy. A Berlin city magazine worked itself up to the absurd and intentionally malicious opinion that Sonnenallee reminded one of “Nazi comedies” and of the “West German school- room- and barracks-comedies of the ’50s and ’60s.” Overall assessment: “a lack of po- litical instinct.” (277) In January 2000 the organization HELP, which advocates for the victims of po- litical persecution, sued Haußmann on the basis of Germany’s Paragraph 194, which forbids the insulting of victims of state persecution. HELP objected to Haußmann’s creation of a GDR where people “dance in front of the murderous Wall—but not after the fall of the Wall, but rather at a time when this wall was a bloody everyday reality.” Even worse, in the fi lm an “escapee who has been shot down” cries, “but not because of the attempted murder, not because of the pain, not on account of fear in the face of upcoming Stasi-imprisonment, but rather be- cause the bullets shattered his Rolling Stones records” (“Strafanzeige gegen Film Sonnenallee”).1 As if anticipating such negative reactions, Sonnenallee unloads its most biting satire on the tourists who peer over the Wall from a platform on the Western side. For these caricatured “Wessis,” the existence of joy or pleasure on the other side of the Wall is unthinkable: “We’re doing great,” one sneers down at Michael, the fi lm’s hero, near the beginning of the fi lm. “And you?” The others laugh. In an- other scene the tourists watch Michael dancing on an outdoor ping-pong table. “Hey, a happy commie!” scoffs one of the spectators. Thus, as much as Sonnenallee represents an exercise in nostalgic re-membering for the citizens of the former 1. All translations of German texts are mine unless otherwise indicated. Actually, Wuschel is not trying to escape when he gets shot down; he is running to avoid confi scation of his newly bought copy of Exile on Main Street.