THE FIANCÉE: ANTIFASCIST RESISTANCE FILM AND LOVE STORY By Lutz Haucke For Günter Reisch (11/24/1927–2/2/2014) and Günther Rücker (2/2/1924–2/24/2008) “Dear esteemed colleagues from the press, radio and television! We wholeheartedly hope that you deem this film worthy (...) of receiving your support. If this is the case, we ask you to view it as a feature film about a young woman who is forced to live at the lowest limit of human existence and who wants to survive, because life is, after all, the best of all good things and because the love she suffers, to the very depths of her heart, binds her with every thread to this world. Please don’t just file it away in that easily accessible and common compartment—the so-called ‘resistance film’ or ‘film in the antifascist tradition’—even though it clearly contains elements of this genre.”1 “A film story about a time that is now in history books. It is known through films, books, written and spoken information. That time has become part of our understanding of history; we have a stance on it. We are familiar with it. But do we truly know it? (...) The media have created stereotypes: the illegal rendezvous, arrest, interrogation, physical and psychological Film Library • A 2018 DVD Release by the DEFA terror, detention, torturous imprisonment. Cinematic clichés emerged that can be retrieved at any time. What is different about The Fiancée? Does the film tell us about things that, for a long time, (...) were taboo and that until now attained artistic reality only peripherally, if at all? This too, certainly. The cruel underworld of fascist prisons has never appeared on screen in this way before. (...) And yet, this new subject matter is secondary. For me, what is primary and meaningful in the The Fiancée film is its human dimension, the way the time period becomes accessible through an unusual, individual fate.”2 The Antifascist Theme From the late 1970s into the early 1980s, public discussions among GDR filmmakers—especially the generation of directors who began working in the 1950s (Konrad Wolf, Günther Rücker, Günter Reisch, Ralf Kirsten, Frank Beyer)— sought to re-evaluate the political necessity and artistic productivity of the antifascist theme. Konrad Wolf started things off with his talk on “Art in the Fight against Fascism: Yesterday and Today,” presented at the plenary conference of the Academy of Arts on May 7, 1979. Wolf’s historicizing appraisal of the “arts as a weapon of active antifascism”3 located the tradition of antifascist themes within East German arts. When The Fiancée premiered on September 2, 1980, the GDR Association of Film and Television Professionals, along with the associations of other socialist countries, held an : Antifascist Resistance Film and Love Story • international colloquium on “Antifascism and Film: History, Present, Mission” in Weimar. One thing that became clear in the discussions about current trends in East German filmmaking was the efforts of GDR political leaders to promote The Fiancée as a positive example, countering the loss of continuity in the antifascist feature The Fiancée film tradition that had occurred in the 1970s. It was argued that The Fiancée connected the analysis of “ordinary fascism” in Germany to a character motif developed in DEFA films since the late 1940s—namely of communists as those opponents of Nazism who had been on the front lines, and had suffered and died, for example, in Stärker als die Nacht (Stronger than the Night, 1954, dir. Slatan Dudow); Sie nannten ihn Amigo (They Called Him Amigo, 1958, dir. Heiner Carow); Der Fall Gleiwitz (The Gleiwitz Case, 1961, dir. Gerhard Klein); and Nackt unter Wölfen (Naked Among Wolves, 1962, dir. Frank Beyer). Demonstrating an awareness of tradition, the argument continued, Rücker and Reisch drew upon dramaturgical solutions that had already been used by DEFA in the 1950s. The statement made by Chief Inspector Hensch to Hella Lindau’s fiancé, Hermann Reimers—“No kid gloves this time. You’ll pay for everything”(TC 01:35:14:23)—relates to the statement “That will cost you your head!” from Stronger than the Night. This last line was accompanied by repeated zooming in on the face of communist resistance fighter Löning (Wilhelm Koch-Hooge), which at the time was considered a dramaturgical innovation. Another example was the use of quotations from documentary films. Director Slatan Dudow had inserted such documentary footage into Stronger than the Night as a way to critique the worldview of the German petty bourgeois 1 Rücker, Günther and Günter Reisch. “Circular Addressed to Media Editorial Offices on the Occasion of the 1980 Premiere.” Kino ist mehr als Film. Die Jahre 1976-1990, Berlin: AG Verlag, 1999. 88. 2 Gehler, Fred. “Die Verlobte.” Sonntag, East Berlin, Vol. 37, 1980. 3 Neues Deutschland. East Berlin, May 9, 1979: 4. 1 THE FIANCÉE: ANTIFASCIST RESISTANCE FILM AND LOVE STORY and passive followers of Nazism. Rücker and Reisch were more successful than Dudow, however, in that they overcame his schematic, monolithic character typing, as exemplified by the contrast between Hans-Joachim Hegewald’s three- dimensional role as Chief Inspector Hensch in The Fiancée, and the strikingly typecast Gestapo commissioner in Stronger than the Night. It is worth pointing out that in The Fiancée the prison doctor’s monolog also has a precursor in DEFA history: that of the landscape architect in Konrad Wolf’s Ich war Neunzehn (I Was Nineteen, 1967). That latter monolog was an attempt by scriptwriter Wolfgang Kohlhaase to dissect the mental physiognomy of an educated German bourgeois, whose hopelessness and pessimism about history revealed psychological effects of fascism that had not yet been explored in DEFA’s antifascist feature films. Finally, with respect to lines of DEFA tradition, Rücker’s experiences in documentary film, working with Andrew and Annelie Thorndike on Du und mancher Kamerad (You and Some Comrade, 1956), should be kept in mind in regards to the dramaturgical use of documentary film quotations in The Fiancée. • A 2018 DVD Release by the DEFA Film Library • A 2018 DVD Release by the DEFA Other DEFA directors and scriptwriters who had previously distinguished themselves with work on antifascist themes distanced themselves from the communist hero of resistance films in the 1970s. For example, Konrad Wolf’s Mama, ich lebe (Mama, I’m Alive, 1976) no longer follows this central imperative of the antifascist film, even though the radio drama it was The Fiancée based upon, Wolfgang Kohlhaase’s Fragen an ein Foto (Memory of a Photo, 1969), still included this political dimension in its character construction. Reisch and Rücker likewise shifted the priority away from the political and towards a relatable human dimension: Hella Lindau’s suffering and her love. As a result, in the GDR this film with antifascist themes was frequently discussed as a love story. A Literary Film Adaptation Rücker based the scenario on Eva Lippold’s novels Haus der schweren Tore (House of the Heavy Gates, 1971) and Leben, wo gestorben wird (Living Where There Is Death, 1974).4 The author spent a total of eleven years in German prisons during the Nazi period. Would this be another pragmatic literary adaptation by DEFA and GDR Television? Comparisons of feature films (and versions of their scripts) to the novels upon which they are based often prove unproductive if the film, its : Antifascist Resistance Film and Love Story • composition and its reception strategy are simply measured against the novel. In the period around 1980, DEFA produced literary adaptations in which the novels were treated solely as sources of subject matter, from which to extract a cinematic narrative. (This is especially true of Horst Seemann’s Levins Mühle [Levin’s Mill, 1980], based on the eponymous novel The Fiancée written in 1964 by Johannes Bobrowski.) Günther Rücker appreciated Eva Lippold’s reflective essayistic style; this allowed him to largely ignore the narrative structure of the novel, in developing a filmic story out of it. This process—which, in the case of Levin’s Mill, led to extensive oversimplification—could lead to the conclusion that narrative elements of a novel become the material for a film story, without therefore having to search for solutions in the composition of the feature film that would work for the novel. Eva Lippold’s series simply presented a fortunate case, however, in that narrative elements of the novel could be used as material without facing theoretical problems of genre or ensuing dramaturgical issues. The Fiancée was the product of a selection process. Rücker’s adaptation of episodes and characters follows a dramaturgical logic that no longer corresponds to the novels. Consequently, the difference between the film and the novels begins with a different medial relationship to the material and characters. The film is characterized by a stricter insistence on the main character and her effect on the audience than the novels. The character development emphasizes Hella Lindau’s experiential world by aiming for an arc of increasing drama and suspense. Collisions in this dramatic arc are delivered more directly in the film than in the novels’ epic narrative. This can be seen in the manner in which characters from the novel were adopted into the feature film story. House of the Heavy Gates5 recounts how Hella Lindau, Prisoner 47, has been suffering the torments of solitary confinement, without 4 Editor’s note: Lippold had originally planned a trilogy; however, the third volume, Die Fremde (The Stranger), was never completed. 5 Lippold, Eva. Haus der schweren Tore. Berlin: Der Morgen, 1971. 123–131. 2 THE FIANCÉE: ANTIFASCIST RESISTANCE FILM AND LOVE STORY book or work, for almost two years: “Oh, Hella, these first months, these abysmal ravines of abandonment.