‘Sagt, wie soll man Stalin danken?’ Kurt Maetzig's Ehe im Schatten (1947), Roman einer Jungen Ehe (1952) and the Cultural Politics of Post-War Germany
In Ehe im Schatten and Roman einer jungen Ehe Kurt Maetzig analyses the role of the artist and the changing conceptualisation of aesthetics at two contrasting moments of political crisis. Set during the Third Reich, Ehe im Schatten criticises any attempt to separate art and politics, and exposes the limitations of bourgeois classical drama as a form of political resistance. But despite its radical subject-matter, the film's melodramatic format highlights the difficulties post-war directors working for DEFA faced in breaking with the traditions of cinematography established by Ufa during the 1940s. Five years later, and in a very different political context, Maetzig revisits these issues in Roman einer jungen Ehe. Although the later film mobilises concepts of socialist realism in order to redefine aesthetic agendas in the early 1950s, it too relies on moments of exaggerated pathos to achieve its aims. While the film's idealisation of working-class life in the GDR of the early 1950s was soon undermined by the political events of 1953 and 1956, its presentation of works by, among others, Lessing, Seghers, Zuckmayer, Simonov and Sartre offers a detailed and distinctive perspective on the changing dynamics of cultural politics during the immediate post-war period.
Realism and romance in the East German Cinema, 1952-1962
I n Gerhard Klein and Wolfgang Kohlhaase’s 1965 film Berlin um die Ecke (Berlin around the Corner) Horst, a young East Berliner, reminisces about his short stay in the West: ‘I went to the movies every day’, he says, ‘sometimes twice. And not like the flicks we have here: Lovers doing self-critique’ (‘Liebespaar macht Selbstkritik’). Horst’s sneering appraisal of the East German film studios’ inferiority rests on their inability to produce a convincing love story. DEFA’s couples, it seems, are interested more in principles than in passion. Indeed, Horst’s statement captures a sense felt by many audiences of early East German movies: there is something de facto unromantic about these productions. This is not to say there were no love plots during this period. As a March 1953 editorial in Neues Deutschland pointed out: ‘There is hardly a film made by DEFA in which love relationships do not play a thematic role’. Yet something feels amiss in these love stories: they seem uncomfortably suspended between genres, stranded halfway between realism and romance. The following investigation explores this intuition, examining the fraught ambivalence around the treatment of romantic plots in 1950s East German film culture. The changing fortunes of East German romance reveal the inconsistency of an uncharacteristically erratic party line. In the early part of the decade GDR cultural policy underwent an extensive revision, reversing the mandate of cultural producers overnight while insisting that the underlying principles remained the same. This drift – in fact a fairly precipitous slide – toward a romantic model associated more with Lubitsch than with Lenin did not just represent a capitulation to the West or a concession to the demands of GDR audiences, but rather it marked an internal rift in the ideological self-understanding of the socialist party (SED). If the cultural climate of the GDR’s socialist construction phase (the late 1940s and early 1950s) was inherently inhospitable to the flowering of romance, this seems most readily attributable to a contradiction between the traditions of romantic narrative and the demands of doctrinal socialist realism. Whereas the former insists on narrative and ideological autonomy, on what Piotr Fast in a short but evocative chapter on romantic conventions in Soviet socialist realism calls the ‘autotelicity’ of love, the latter by definition ‘evaluates the individual, particular experience of reality from the standpoint of the future [socialist] society’. In the early 1950s even love stories are subject to socialist realism’s characteristic politicisation of any and all intimate interpersonal ties; here, desire is cut to the measure of politics. Roman einer jungen Ehe (Story of a Young Couple, 1952), directed by Kurt Maetzig and written by Maetzig and Bodo Uhse, exemplified this dynamic. The ‘young couple’ in the title are Jochen (Hans-Peter Thielen) and Agnes (Yvonne Merin), struggling actors in post-war Berlin. While Jochen drifts into the not-so-successfully denazified West German theatre scene, Agnes inclines toward the East, working on a highly political – and in Jochen’s eyes shamelessly propagandistic – film project. Eventually the political divisions between Agnes and Film History, Volume 18, pp. 88–103, 2006. Copyright © John Libbey Publishing ISSN: 0892-2160. Printed in United States of America
The economics of the open university revisited
Revision of earlier cost calculations for the Open University and Conventional Universities in the U.K. for 1973 confirms the findings of a significant cost advantage to the Open University. An analysis of developments at the Open University since 1973 indicates, however, that there has been little reduction in average cost in real terms and no improvement is likely on known developments to 1979. This is surprising for it might be expected that as student numbers rise average costs would fall. A more detailed analysis of the structure of Open University costs indicates why this has not happened. A major determinant of costs is the number of courses and these have continued to grow rapidly since 1973. The rate of increase of new courses has been faster than the rate of increase of new students. In effect the University has been using the economies provided by increased student numbers to increase student choice through the provision of more courses rather than reduce average cost.Average cost could be reduced whilst keeping the same number of courses by changing the components of the teaching system such as broadcasting. If such fundamental changes were not acceptable then an alternative would be to change the mix of courses between the relatively expensive science and technology areas and the cheaper arts and social science areas. A further alternative is to keep the same mix but ensure a longer life for science and technology courses.