Bridging Contradictions: Socialist Actresses and Star Culture in East Germany
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses October 2018 Bridging Contradictions: Socialist Actresses and Star Culture in East Germany Victoria Rizo Lenshyn University of Massachusetts - Amherst Victoria Isabelle Rizo Lenshyn Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2 Part of the Film and Media Studies Commons, German Language and Literature Commons, Performance Studies Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Recommended Citation Rizo Lenshyn, Victoria and Rizo Lenshyn, Victoria Isabelle, "Bridging Contradictions: Socialist Actresses and Star Culture in East Germany" (2018). Doctoral Dissertations. 1384. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/1384 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Bridging Contradictions: Socialist Actresses and Star Culture in East Germany A Dissertation Presented By VICTORIA I. RIZO LENSHYN Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY September 2018 German and Scandinavian Studies Languages, Literatures and Cultures © Copyright by Victoria I. Rizo Lenshyn 2018 All Rights Reserved 2 Bridging Contradictions: Socialist Actresses and Star Culture in East Germany A Dissertation Presented By VICTORIA I. RIZO LENSHYN Approved as to style and content by: ________________________________________________ Barton Byg, Chair ________________________________________________ Skyler Arndt-Briggs, Member ________________________________________________ Jon Berndt Olsen, Member ______________________________________________ William Moebius, Department Head Languages, Literatures, & Cultures 3 DEDICATION To Gary, for endless patience and support, and to Ralphie and Daisy, my loyal canine companions, my “co-authors” (they put in just as many hours as I did), and especially Daisy, my muse. 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A project such as this spans years from beginning to end, and I have benefitted from the help of many people and institutions along the way. I am happy to have the opportunity to thank them here because their support made it all possible. First, I would like to thank my dissertation committee chair, Barton Byg, who encouraged me to pursue the topic, asked many critical questions, met with me often (even once a week during intensive writing periods!), and read numerous drafts of the manuscript. I would also like to thank my committee members, Skyler Arndt-Briggs and Jon Berndt Olsen, for their generosity of time and support, their careful reading of the manuscript, and the immensely helpful feedback they gave me as I made revisions and refined my arguments. I would also like to thank faculty and staff members in several programs at the University of Massachusetts Amherst: German and Scandinavian Studies, Film Studies, and Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies. Many people have supported the project in numerous ways, from the scholarly, to the emotional, to the administrative aspects of researching and writing a dissertation: Susan Cocalis, Sara Lennox, Andy Donson, Jonathan Skolnik, Robert Sullivan, Anne Ciecko, Banu Subramaniam, Susan Shapiro, and Dolkar Gyaltsen. I am also deeply thankful to my fellow graduate students, who have read drafts and given me both feedback and encouragement, especially Delene Case White, Rachael Salyer, Konstanze Schiller, Katrin Bahr, Tim Dail, and Evan Torner. They have all gone on to do wonderful things, but our shared time as a graduate student cohort and writing group was invaluable to me. Finally, I would also like to thank my DEFA colleagues, who have guided and assisted me at conferences and workshops. Thank you! v Additionally, I would like to thank the institutions that made this project possible. I pursued graduate study at the University of Massachusetts Amherst because I wanted to do my graduate work with Barton Byg, Founding Director of the DEFA Film Library (DFL), and to work with DFL itself. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to do both. The experiences I had as a student, researcher, and employee of the library have had a deep and lasting impact on who I am as a professional. For this project, my research began at DFL, and the institution offered me support I have relied on for the duration. Thank you to Skyler Arndt-Briggs, Executive Director of DFL, for being my boss, my mentor, and my friend. I would especially like to thank Hiltrud Schultz, Production Manager, for her endless knowledge of DEFA and the generosity of her time over the years as a person of contact, an expert in this field, a colleague, and a friend. I owe a debt of gratitude to several other institutions as well. Thank you to the DAAD (German Academic Exchange) for the financial support that allowed me to do invaluable archival research in Berlin and Potsdam, Germany as a DAAD Research Fellow. Thanks also goes to the Max Kade Foundation and the Graduate School at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for further financial support that made follow-up trips to the archives possible, and which helped me carve out some very precious writing time from what is always a demanding and sometimes fragmented schedule in academia. Thank you also to the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center (FCWSRC) in South Hadley, Massachusetts, where I spent two years as a Research Fellow, benefitting from having an office and private writing space, and the support and feedback of two groups of amazing feminist scholars from across the disciplines. Thank you especially to vi Nayiree Roubinian for her administrative assistance, which made my two years at the FCWSRC so enjoyable. In Germany I benefitted from doing research in several archives. I would like to thank the Filmuniversität Babelsberg “Konrad Wolf” for offering me a home base as I spent my time in Berlin and Potsdam doing research, especially to Michael Wedel, who oversaw my work there. I would particularly like to thank the librarians at the Pressedokumentation at the Filmuniversität Babelsberg “Konrad Wolf” for the heaps of press materials covering three decades of East German film and television productions and the many actors I was researching for this project. I read thousands of film reviews, artist portraits, distribution materials, and more, all of which was systematically and efficiently organized and made available to me while I was doing research there. At the Bundesarchiv Berlin, I would like to thank Barbara Barlet and Tim Storch for helping me with the pre-research before I even arrived in Berlin, and for sharing their knowledge of the archive, which made my research there more productive than I had hoped to imagine. I am also deeply grateful for the assistance of the librarians and archivists at the Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv in Potsdam, where I spent months viewing their archived television productions and going through the related documents. Thanks also goes to the Filmmuseum Potsdam for letting me view their wonderful DEFA poster collection. Finally, I also want to thank the DEFA-Stiftung in Berlin for welcoming me as a researcher and a colleague, and for making their collections available to me whenever I asked. I absolutely could not have made it through this process without the support of my loved ones. In memoriam of my mother and father, Violet Mastin and Miguel Roberto vii Rizo, both of whom I had to say good-bye to during my time as a PhD student. They were my unwavering support, and they always took time to ask questions, to help in any way they could, and to support my decisions, even when I made the confounding decision to pursue graduate study in (East) German culture. I miss them every day and I hope I have made them very proud. I am grateful to my step-mom, Maria Luisa Rizo, for her love and support, and to my mother-in-law, Claudia Grace, who spent this last academic year with us to help alleviate everyday responsibilities while I wrapped this project up. I am so glad to share my joy and success with my husband, Gary Lenshyn, who interrupted his own career to first move with me to Freiburg, Germany, and then to Massachusetts to start this adventure. He always knew if I needed a protein shake, a bar of chocolate, or just a pot of coffee to get through the day. But mostly, I am grateful to him for always believing I could do it and encouraging me to keep going and to get it done. Finally, I have had two very faithful canine companions during all of this, Ralphie and Daisy. They have stayed up nights with me, watched over me adoringly, and in a way nobody else could, forced me to step away regularly to go for a walk, stretch my legs (and theirs), and clear my head. They helped with stress, self-doubt, and anxiety, and in the way dogs depend on their humans, always reminded me I needed to take care of those around me, too. But they have always, always brought me the utmost joy. I cannot express the depth of my gratitude for all the love, help, support, and friendship I have had throughout this process. Though sitting down and writing a dissertation can be lonely and solitary work, it is actually the work