Engendering the GDR: DEFA Cinema 1956-1966
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Engendering the GDR: DEFA Cinema 1956-1966 By Julie Gregson, BA Hons Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, February 2002 Table of Contents Abstract i Acknowledgements ii Introduction.... .... ... ..... .... .......................................................... 1 Chapter One: Film and Politics in East Germany 1946-1966 17 Chapter Two: Berlin - Ecke Schonhauser .41 Introduction 41 Constructing Male Models , 51 East or West: A Straight Choice? 70 A Bright Future in East Berlin 82 Chapter Three: Der geteilte Himmel 91 Introduction 91 From Lover to Substitute Father 99 No Place like Home 120 After the Wall: Moving out of the Past and into the Future? 130 Chapter Four Denk blofi nicht ich, heule 142 Introduction 142 Dealing with Difference 149 Freedom or Belonging? 169 Revisiting the GDR Past: Buchenwald and the Goethehaus 185 Chapter Five: Spur der Steine 199 Introduction 199 Love, Labour and the Law: An Attempt at Reconciliation 209 The Inner Frontier 224 Stalinism on Trial 233 Conclusion 242 Appendix: Plot summaries 254 Abbreviations 258 Filmography 259 Primary film sources 259 Secondary film sources 259 Bibliography 263 Unpublished film scripts 263 Newspaper reviews and interviews 263 Other published sources and theses 267 Abstract This thesis examines four films made during two key phases in East German film history in the mid-l 950s and the mid-l 960s which have earned critical acclaim for their challenge to cultural-political orthodoxy and which I read as national narratives offering political, social, cultural and historical constructions of GDR identity. I argue that narrative representations of gender and sexuality serve in the films as a means towards negotiating between affirmation and critique. My analyses are informed by a wide range of other DEFA films. Chapter One sketches broader political and film-historical contexts. Chapter Two examines the role that gender discourse plays in differentiating East from West in the depiction of the frontier city of Berlin in Gerhard Klein's Berlin- Ecke Schonhauser. Chapter Three focuses on Konrad Wolf s adaptation of Christa Wolfs novel Der geteilte Himmel. It shows how the film articulates competing views of the GDR, but instrumentalizes the female character ultimately to endorse socialist society in a divided Germany, and expresses her attachment to this new society in terms of a family-type relationship. Chapter Four examines how Frank Vogel's Denk blo} nicht, ich heule seeks to mediate between the 'national' past and present, using a triangular family plot. In Chapter Five, the analysis of Frank Beyer's Spur tier Steine centres upon the role of a lone female in the film's reforming exploration of the overwhelmingly male collective, but shows how it leaves the status of sexuality - whether for pleasure or for reproductive ends - unresolved. There has been little in-depth study of the way gender representation relates to constructions of the GDR in films of this period. This study remedies this omission, showing how the film-makers frequently rely upon conservative gender paradigms to manage the contradictions implicit in their project and how the endings of the films increasingly come under strain. Acknowledgements There are many people whom I would like to thank for helping me in the course of my writing this thesis. First of all, I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor Professor Elizabeth Boa, of the University of Nottingham, who has commented on so many drafts of these chapters and given me support and encouragement along the way. I would also like to express my thanks to Professor lH. Reid, of the University of Nottingham, and to Raymond Hargreaves, formerly of the University of Leeds, for earlier feedback. To Ray, I'd also like to say thanks for getting me interested in the GDR in the first place when I was an undergraduate at Leeds. I am grateful to the University of Nottingham for providing me with a three- year graduate teaching award. In addition, vital periods of study in Berlin and Babelsberg were facilitated by a six-month award from the DAAD and by several smaller awards from the University's Renate Gunn Travelling Scholarship. For their assistance during my research trips, I would like to express my thanks to library staff at the Hochschule for Film und Fernsehen in Babelsberg and to the Freie Universitat in Berlin, in particular to Herr Thau of the media archive. I would also like to acknowledge the help of the Bundesfilmarchiv in Berlin. Thanks to Nicola Morris and Dr Sean Allan for their DEF A research tips. In Berlin, I am very grateful to Silvia Ulitzsch for providing me with a home from home during my study trips and for her unstinting support and friendship once I was in situ. Thanks also to Birgit Maal3 and Andrea Pechovsky. From my time in Nottingham, I would like to thank Veronika Zangl, in particular, for stimulating discussions and her editing help. I also enjoyed many hours of lively conversation - intellectual and non-intellectual - with Wiebke Sievers, Dr Alejandro Coroleu, Dr Stephanie Burrows, and Laura Ovenden. Thanks, also, to Helen Colledge and Rachel Kirkwood for being there, and to Rachel for her lay-outing lessons. For his friendship and his help in both Nottingham and Berlin, I am indebted to Dr Jeff Chase. Finally, I'd like to say a very big thank-you to my family for their love and their support. 11 Introduction The task of creating acceptance for the new state in East Germany was a difficult one. Established in October 1949 in the former Russian occupation zone, the German Democratic Republic's subordinate relationship with the Soviet Union undermined from the outset its claim to be a sovereign entity, and its ruling Sozialistische Einheitspartei (SED) lacked any kind of popular mandate. The borders of the GDR did not follow linguistic, ethnic, cultural or topographical boundaries; it was approximately one-third of the size of post- World War Two Germany. One of the more unusual and more problematic features of this new state, which sought to define itself simultaneously as socialist and as German, was that it had been brought into existence at the same time as another Germany. The act of foundation was both an act of national division and a reminder of national shame and defeat. The population of the GDR was encouraged to put its hope in the future. In this war-tom land, socialism and the collective work effort were depicted as a unifying social force, a means towards material prosperity and a utopian future. 1 The years to come would also, it was argued, bring a reunited Germany, as the success ofGDR socialism would convince the West German proletariat to rise up and overthrow capitalism in the Federal Republic. The party continued to portray itself as the advocate of German reunification until the early 1970s, although any concrete aspirations that the SED may have had I Clearly, Marxism-Leninism has a forward-looking trajectory. However. this tum to the future was not only ideologically motivated, but served practical and psychological needs, distracting the population from the troubled past and the shattered state of post-war Gcnnany and getting it to invest its energies in building up the new state. 1 in this regard faded from the mid-l 950s onwards.? Coupled with this forward- looking rhetoric was a strategy to legitimise the new state by constructing continuity with a suitable past. Culturally, the state declared itself to be the sole rightful heir to the humanistic values of German Classicism. The GDR canon was constructed around the works of Lessing, Goethe and Schiller, literature with a broader resonance in the population than, for example, the more politicised left-wing tradition of the Weimar Republic.' Historically, state propagandists presented the East German state as the outcome of a progressive German political tradition, one which did not stop at the working-class movement of the nineteenth century but stretched back into a more distant past. West Germany, by contrast, was linked with the militaristic-authoritarian strand." The anti-fascist resistance against Hitler was depicted as the uprising of this 'good' Germany. It served as a heroic, foundational fiction, legitimising the GDR's claim of moral superiority over West Germany.' In addition to these central cultural and historical narratives, a host of symbols and rituals were invented, such as a GDR state emblem, a national anthem, the annual national anniversary and 1 May celebrations, and a social and political initiation rite akin to a secular version of confirmation, the Jugendweihe. 6 In ways typical of 2 See Kurt Seliger, 'Die nationale Frage im Spiegel des SED-Marxismus', Deutschland Archiv, 7 (1974), 576-581, and Karl Romer, 'Was ist Deutschland?', Deutschland Archiv, 8 (1975), 856-866 (p. 864). 3 Manfred Jager makes this point, but also observes that the SED leadership had grown up with this literary tradition and that its valorization was not merely tactical. See Jager, Kultur und Politik in der DDR 1945-1990 (Cologne: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1994), pp. 20-21. 4 See Rudolf von Thadden, 'Das schwierige Vaterland', in Identitat der Deutschen: Fragen, Positionen, Perspektiven, ed. by Werner Weidenfeld (Munich: Hanser, 1983), pp. 49-61 (pp. 54-55), and Wilfried von Bredow, 'Geschichte als Element der deutschen Identitat', in ibid., pp. 100-116 (pp. 104-106). 5 See Peter C. Pfeiffer, 'The National Identity of the GDR: Antifascism, Historiography, Literature', in Cultural Transformations in the New Germany: American and German Perspectives, ed. by Friederike Eigler and Peter C. Pfeiffer (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1993), pp. 23-41. 6 State symbols, like the flag, and rituals, such as the oaths sworn at Jugendweihe, did not always remain the same throughout the GDR's history.