Bryn Mawr College Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College German Faculty Research and Scholarship German 2010 DEFA Märchenfilme as Brechtian Parables: Gerhard Klein’s Die Geschichte vom armen Hassan and Konrad Petzold’s Das Kleid Qinna Shen Bryn Mawr College,
[email protected] Let us know how access to this document benefits ouy . Follow this and additional works at: http://repository.brynmawr.edu/german_pubs Part of the German Language and Literature Commons Custom Citation Shen, Qinna 2010. DEFA Märchenfilme as Brechtian Parables: Gerhard Klein’s Die Geschichte vom armen Hassan and Konrad Petzold’s Das Kleid. The rB echt Yearbook 35: Brecht, Marxism, and Ethics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 112-31. This paper is posted at Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College. http://repository.brynmawr.edu/german_pubs/13 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. DEFA Märchenfilme as Brechtian Parables: Gerhard Klein’s Die Geschichte vom armen Hassan and Konrad Petzold’s Das Kleid As an iconic theorist and practitioner of revolutionary theater, Bertolt Brecht’s influence on film is uncontested and far-reaching. Yet the discussion of ‘Brechtian cinema’ is often focused on European New Wave and feminist filmmaking, marginalizing DEFA pictures. This is despite DEFA (die Deutsche Film-Aktien-gesellschaft) being the state-owned film company in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), where Brecht had lived and worked after returning from exile. Brecht’s relationship with DEFA has always been portrayed as brief (partly due to his untimely death in 1956) and rather strained. Although he shared the studio’s idea that media should be didactic and entertaining, Brecht cringed at DEFA’s ideological dogmatism as he did from Hollywood’s commercialism.