East German Cinema

DEFA and Film History

S. Heiduschke

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137322319, 9781137322302
• eBook ISBN: 9781137322326
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Art General

East Germany's film monopoly, Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft, produced a films ranging beyond simple propaganda to westerns, musicals, and children's films, among others. This book equips scholars with the historical background to understand East German cinema and guides the readers through the DEFA archive via examinations of twelve films.

Part I

EAST GERMAN CINEMA

1

EAST GERMAN CINEMA AS STATE INSTITUTION

The history of East German cinema is convoluted and complicated, full of paradoxes and contradictions, fascinating and sobering at the same time. It begins in 1946, before East Germany even existed, and ends in 1992, two years after East Germany’s demise. To be more precise, these dates mark the beginning and end of the film company Deutsche Filmaktiengesellschaft (DEFA). This DEFA, however, has become the countenance of East German “national cinema”—and rightly so, as the political entity East Germany was inextricably linked with the company. Politics influenced East Germany’s film production throughout its entire existence, so that the key dates of East German film history closely relate to dates in East Germany’s political history. This should not be surprising, as East German cinema was born as a reaction to address the legacy of national socialism by way of making films conveying messages of peace, democracy, and antifascist ideals. The onset of the Cold War and the influence of the Soviet Union then shaped DEFA into a socialist film company and East Germany’s film monopoly, a role it would play until July 1, 1990, when the restructuring of East Germany’s economy became necessary to prepare it for unification on October 3 of the same year.

East Germany technically did not exist until October 7, 1949, when the Soviet occupation zone became an “independent” nation called German Democratic Republic (GDR) (“East Germany” to English speakers, a convention I will follow from hereon) to distinguish it from the Federal Republic of Germany (“West Germany”), which was a merger of 11 states created from of the British, French, and American zones that took place on May 23, 1949. The history of East German cinema, however, had already begun during the final days of World War II, on April 28, 1945, the day some movie theaters in already-liberated parts of Berlin started screening Soviet films that had been dubbed into German.¹ After the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945 and Germany’s division into four occupation zones (and its capital Berlin’s division into four sectors), the allied forces took control of the film industry. Each zone followed the political lead of its occupying military governments respectively, and because each occupying power followed slightly different politics, the reconstruction of cultural life differed from zone to zone. Common to all zones was the refusal of the occupiers to allow an immediate restart of German filmmaking. For one, the occupying powers were looking to eradicate traces of Nazi Germany. Since cinema in Hitler’s regime had been centralized and over time had turned into a political tool to promote the Nazi philosophy of anti-Semitism, it seemed necessary to put a complete stop not only to the production but also the distribution and screening of German films. The occupying powers had a second reason to ban German cinema. In order to fill the movie screens, each zone (and sector) now used films from its own national cinemas to appease the hunger of Germans for entertainment and distraction from dismal reality. For a while, postwar Germany turned into another lucrative market for the film industries of the allied nations.

In the Soviet zone, German productions returned to cinemas rather quickly in the form of newsreels, assisted and approved by the leadership of the Soviet colonel Sergei Tulpanov and Major Alexander Dymschitz, who deemed them useful denazification and reeducation tools. These newsreels were the work of the Filmaktiv, a group of formerly exiled communist filmmakers who founded the group in October 1945 with the goal to revive German cinema. Joined by artists interested in making film—including Gerhard Lamprecht, Wolfgang Staudte, and Peter Pewas—the Filmaktiv proposed a new form of critical cinema in order to aid the reeducation efforts. Officially deemed a cinema to “promote a sense of respect for other people and other nations,” the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAD) likely approved this group because of their amicable disposition toward communist ideals.² With the approval of SMAD, members of the Filmaktiv began shooting in the rubble of Berlin on January 1, 1946: Wolfgang Staudte filmed in a railway tunnel for the never-completed film Kolonne Strupp (The Strupp Convoy), and Kurt Maetzig started producing the first newsreel, Der Augenzeuge (The Eyewitness), in the middle of January. The newsreels became a monthly institution in movie theaters located in the Soviet zone and usually opened the screening of Soviet films. With film production already underway, the Filmaktiv applied for a license to officially produce German films. The SMAD agreed, and on May 17, 1946, Tulpanov officially licensed DEFA as film production company with the mandate to “restore democracy in Germany and to remove all traces of fascist and militaristic ideology from the minds of every German, the struggle to re-educate the German people—especially the young—to a true understanding of genuine democracy and humanism, and in doing so to promote a sense of respect for other people and other nations.”³ A few months later, on August 13, 1946, DEFA was officially registered as a stock company in Berlin (with parts of the stock held by the SMAD), a rather curious choice of company structure in a country without a stock market that indicated how DEFA was perceived as company created in reference to the pre–World War II structures of a German free market economy. By the end of the year, it had produced numerous newsreels and completed three feature films, Staudte’s Die Mörder sind unter uns (The Murderers Are among Us) on October 15, Milo Harbich’s Freies Land (A Free Country) on October 18, and Gerhard Lamprecht’s Irgendwo in Berlin (Somewhere in Berlin) on December 18.⁴

At that time, it had become obvious that despite its structure as stock company DEFA was by no means going to be a film company like others before the war. Not only did the SMAD not license other film companies it also took measures to link DEFA with a newly created political party, the Socialist Unity Party (SED), formed in April 1946 from the fusion of the Social Democratic Party and the Communist Party in the Soviet occupation zone, copying the Soviet system of leadership by the communist party only. One of the measures on the path to such a one-party system was the alignment of the mass media with the party goals.⁵ For that reason, the SED provided the film company with start-up money in the amount of 21,000 Reichsmarks and purchased stocks in DEFA via a holding company called Zentrag.⁶ In November 1947, the SED created a film commission—internally known as “DEFA Commission”—to regulate the film production and staffing choices within the studio. Gradually, the upper ranks at DEFA filled with loyal party members interested in aligning the goals of the company with those of SED. Similar situations happened in the infrastructure in the Soviet occupation zone. The SMAD initially retained ownership of the production facilities via their company Linsa and only leased these facilities to DEFA. The distribution rights to films in the Soviet occupation zone remained with other Soviet companies, first Sojusintorgkino and later Sovexport, to assure compliance of DEFA with the political goals. After the Soviet occupation zone had become East Germany, the SMAD relinquished power, and then DEFA was entirely in the hands of the SED—via stock held by Zentrag and other SED-related institutions.⁷ In 1952, the SED reorganized the cinema and created five separate studios that would remain until 1990: DEFA Feature Film Studio (DEFA-Studio für Spielfilme), DEFA Studio for Animation (DEFA-Studio für Trickfilme), DEFA Studio for Popular Scientific Films (DEFA-Studio für populärwissenschaftliche Filme), DEFA Studio for Newsreel and Documentary Films (DEFA-Studio für Wochenschau und Dokumentarfilme), and DEFA Studio for Film Dubbing (DEFA-Studio für Synchronisation). They also created a duplication factory (DEFA Kopierwerke) and a company for the distribution of films internationally (DEFA Außenhandel). In 1952, Sovexport handed over its domestic distribution to Progress Filmverleih (which, like DEFA, had been a joint Soviet-German company), and on January 1, 1953, DEFA was nationalized, turning from a stock company into a Volkseigener Betrieb (people-owned company).⁸

Soon after the conversion of DEFA in 1953, politics began to truly impact reality at the studio. First, the studio no longer renewed contracts with employees, directors, and actors who resided in West Germany as a way of sending a signal that filmmaking at DEFA now also required political persuasion in addition to professional expertise.⁹ This shift toward an East German cinema serving the ideals of socialism had already been in the making: In the years before, more and more productions had already integrated the ideas of socialist realist filmmaking and shifted the focus of DEFA from entertainment films shot in the style of the prewar years toward more political subject matters. By 1953, the East German film industry had developed into a hierarchically structured monopoly largely under SED control, with the politics of the day determining the productions within the studio.¹⁰ And indeed, any change of the political path in East Germany required DEFA to adapt its direction as well. Many films were banned for falling out of lockstep with the current artistic guidelines set by the SED, and for some artists, opposition was costly, ending their careers in East German cinema for good. Being blacklisted with the monopoly studio DEFA often meant unemployment—or the hope to receive a one-way visa to West Germany.¹¹ At this point, DEFA had already seen its first film ban for ideological reasons. Soviet General Igor Tschekin, an advisor to DEFA, campaigned against Falk Harnack’s film Das Beil von Wandsbek (The Axe of Wandsbek, 1951), a story about a butcher who moonlights as executioner for the Nazis, noting “the film will have a detrimental effect on East Germany’s population, as it does not create hatred against fascism, but pity for the murderers.”¹² Despite the initial success of the film when it played for a month and attracted about 800 thousand viewers, Tschekin’s pressure on the SED caused the party to order the ban of the film. It would take DEFA until 1962 to allow an edited version (20 minutes shorter) to be played in movie theaters; only in 1981 the ban was lifted and the entire film restored.¹³

This case of censorship by the Soviet Union was not the first and by no means the last. To safeguard compliance with the political guidelines at DEFA, the SED instituted an elaborate system that allowed the party to exert control from the inception of a film all the way to its distribution in all of East Germany’s 5,700 movie theaters, film clubs, and even travelling cinemas on trucks and in train cars.¹⁴ Thus, from the very beginning, DEFA had to find ways to accommodate the requests of the occupying power. Already Wolfgang Staudte, the director of the first DEFA film, Die Mörder sind unter uns, learned he would only be granted a license to film if he rewrote the ending to feature the hero killing a former Nazi commander; this, then, illustrates the pressure for compliance DEFA cinema was exposed to from the beginning. Throughout the years, political events in East Germany began to affect more than just single films. On June 11, 1953, a couple of years after the ban of Das Beil von Wandsbek, the death of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin caused the SED Central Committee to ratify a plan for a “New Course,” intended to slow down the development of communism. Their New Course did not address the workers’ demands for higher salaries and better working conditions and led to the June 17 national strikes that were stopped by Soviet tanks, killing hundreds of workers in the process.

What followed in DEFA cinema was a rather interesting reaction to the strikes. While the studio gradually terminated contracts with its West German employees, it increased the involvement of guest actors and directors from West Berlin, West Germany, and Austria, and also aimed for more coproductions with studios from West Germany and France.¹⁵ Simultaneously, though, DEFA continued its development of political antifascist films that contradicted the coproductions with the West in a paradoxical manner. For that reason, DEFA cinema in the 1950s consisted of a smorgasbord of film genres that, put side by side, shows a breadth in styles ranging from productions like Kurt Maetzig’s communist biopics Ernst Thälmann-Sohn seiner Klasse (Ernst Thälmann—Son of His Class, 1954) and Ernst Thälmann-Führer seiner Klasse (Ernst Thälmann—Leader of His Class, 1955) to the other extreme, Ernesto Remani’s Die Schönste (The Most Beautiful, 1957), a drama intended for the export to Western countries.

Meanwhile, the SED decided at its 1957 cultural conference that East German art was to nurture and promote socialism even more than previously. In reaction to uprisings in Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1956 and to the youth riots in West Berlin and West Germany, the short period of “thaw” (a time when film censorship was handled more loosely, and filmmakers were granted more freedom to voice criticism in their films) that embraced liberalism and promoted diversity ended; this cultural conference and a July 1958 film conference turned back the clock and started a new period of a cultural “freeze,” (strict censorship and usually film bans to demonstrate the change).¹⁶ Konrad Schwalbe, a staunch SED member, replaced the more liberal DEFA head dramaturge, Rudolf Böhm, and socialist realism, a style of filmmaking that demanded proximity to and realistic depiction of life in a socialist society, was to become the leading idea in film production—at least for the time.¹⁷ As a consequence of the conference, films that were too Western were either completely banned, such as Die Schönste, or were only released in a black-and-white version, such as Die Spielbank-Affäre (The Casino-Affair, Arthur Pohl, 1957) to distort the colorful cinematography.¹⁸ DEFA also fired their directors Remani and Pohl, not coincidentally two of the last remaining non-East German directors at the studio. Another film, Konrad Wolf’s Sonnensucher (Sun Seekers, 1972) was also banned. After initial editing required for being it too critical about the SED in a first version, the Soviet embassy requested the film...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I  East German Cinema
• Part II  Freezes and Thaws: Canonizing DEFA
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index