Kurt Maetzig, German Film Director, Is Dead at 101 Michael Gottschalk/Associated Press Kurt Maetzig in 2010. In addition to directing, he also helped found a film studio. Kurt Maetzig, a pioneering East German director whose socialist films scrutinized anti-Semitism, explored corporate complicity in the rise of fascism and helped compel Germans to come to terms with their Nazi past, died on Aug. 8 at his home in Germany. He was 101. Gramercy Pictures, via Photofest From left, Ilse Steppat, Paul Klinger and Claus Holm in a scene from "Marriage in the Shadows," which was released in 1947. German news organizations, quoting a family member, said he had died in the village of Wildkuhl in the former East German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where he had lived for many years. Mr. Maetzig (pronounced MATE-zig) was a founder of East Germany's main film studio at the close of World War II and over three decades directed about 30 feature films and documentaries, most of them carefully observing the ideological boundaries set by the ruling Communist Party. But he pushed the censors" limits in 1965 with the film "The Rabbit Is Me," a portrayal of hypocrisy in the criminal justice system. Party leaders attacked it as counterrevolutionary and banned it, urging him to issue a humiliating public self-criticism. He did - out of fear of imprisonment, he later said - and came to regret his capitulation, calling it an act of "self-pollution." Mr. Maetzig's earliest work examined the fault lines in German society that had opened the way to Nazi rule. Stephen Brockmann, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and the author of "A Critical History of German Film" (2010), said the films were integral to East German cinema's most important contribution to postwar Germany: provoking its people to acknowledge what had happened under the Nazis. "Kurt Maetzig will be remembered as a creator of many excellent films, which at their best critically addressed the German past and present at a high level of artistic skill," Dr. Brockmann said in an interview. Mr. Maetzig was born on Jan. 25, 1911, in Berlin and studied chemistry, engineering and business administration in Munich, earning a Ph.D. in 1935. He got early experience in the motion picture industry by working during university holidays at his father's factory, which made copies of edited movies for distribution to theaters. After the Nazis revoked his work permit because his mother was Jewish, he joined the German Communist Party, which was then operating underground. At the war's end, with most of Germany in ruins, Mr. Maetzig joined an effort to get film production back up and running, a goal shared by the Soviet generals in control of Berlin's eastern sector. A collective he helped found - a state corporation known as DEFA - would oversee East German film production for the next four decades, and Mr. Maetzig would become one of its core filmmakers. His first feature film, "Marriage in the Shadows," released in 1947 and based on a true story, told of an actor and his Jewish wife who committed suicide rather than accept deportation to the Nazi death camps. According to DEFA, it was the only postwar German film shown simultaneously in all four sectors - Soviet, American, British and French - of occupied Berlin. Mr. Maetzig was clearly allowed creative freedom in some of his early work, like "Council of the Gods," which focused on a chemical conglomerate that produced poison gas for the death camps. But that freedom could also be denied. East Germany's leaders, including the party boss Walter Ulbricht, wanted films to show the inevitable victory of socialism and to feature worker heroes, and they were quick to interfere with film production to get their way. As Mr. Maetzig worked on "Ernst Thälmann: Son of His Class" and "Ernst Thälmann: Leader of His Class" - twin films portraying the life of the leader of the German Communist Party - the authorities repeatedly demanded screenplay rewrites. "Ulbricht and other party leaders sought to create an icon whose every thought, word and action promoted proletarian revolution," Russel Lemmons, a professor at Jacksonville State University, wrote in a 2007 study of the Thälmann films. Mr. Maetzig acknowledged the damage wrought by the official meddling. "It's terrible," he said of one of the films in a 1996 interview. When I saw it once again, I had red ears and was ashamed.