‘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
DEFA: East German Cinema, 1946-1992
"...the lucid style of all contributions ...makes this volume an accessible read to students ...this volume has also the bonus of offering an excellent appendix on sources for future research ...this collection of essays illustrates precisely why the quality of DEFA film-making should not be confined to the archives of history." - Journal of European Areas Studies "A useful appendix provides research sources. Written in clear prose, these essays should interest undergraduates and generalists as well as scholars and faculty." - Humanities Western scholars have not lost any of their fascination for East German culture. Cinema in particular continues to attract interest. This volume, the first one in English, traces the development of the main institution, the state-sponsored Deutsche Film Anstalt (DEFA), which was primarily responsible for film production in the former GDR from 1946, ceasing to exist in 1992. Although largely ignored outside the former GDR, the DEFA produced anumber of excellent films and scriptwriters that are examined here for the first time. This volume analyzes the representation of fascism and anti-fascism in the cinema of the 1940s and 1950s, the conflicts between the state and the film-makers of the 1960s, and the social-political criticism in the 1970s and early 1980s. Other key issues that arise from this comprehensive look at DEFA include its representation of women, the concept of "Heimat," the reception of the classical heritage, and the relation of DEFA cinema to other European film traditions.The comprehensive bibliography and a list of research sources on East German cinema make this volume an indispensable tool for students and scholars of the media. Sean Allan is senior Lecturer in German Studies at the University of Warwick. John Sandford is Professor of German Studies at the University of Reading.