DEFA at the Crossroads of East German and International Film Culture

Marc Silberman, Henning Wrage, Marc Silberman, Henning Wrage

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9783110368055
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Motion picture production, distribution, exhibition and reception has always been a transnational phenomenon, yet East Germany, situated at the edge of the post-war Iron Curtain, separated by a boundary that became materialized in the Berlin Wall in 1961, resembles nothing if not an island, a protected space where film production developed under the protection of government subsidy and ideological purity. This volume proposes on the contrary that the GDR cinema was never just a monologue. Rather, its media landscape was characterized by constant dialogue, if not competition, with both the capitalist West and socialist East. These thirteen essays reshape DEFA cinema studies by exploring international networks, identifying lines of influence beyond national boundaries and recognizing genre qualities that surpass the temporal and spatial confines. The international team of film specialists present detailed analyses of over fifty films, including fiction features, adaptations of literary classics, children's films, documentaries, and examples from genres such as music, sci-fi, Westerns and crime films.

With contributions by Seán Allan, Hunter Bivens, Benita Blessing, Barton Byg, Jaimey Fisher, Sabine Hake, Nick Hodgin, Manuel Köppen, Anke Pinkert, Larson Powell, Brad Prager, Marc Silberman, Stefan Soldovieri, and Henning Wrage.

Part I

Extending the Socialist Collective

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Hunter Bivens

Chapter 1

Cinema and Socialist Modernity

This chapter addresses the status of modernism and modernity in the cinema of the German Democratic Republic, reading three features, Slatan Dudow’s 1952 Frauenschicksale [Destinies of Women], Frank Beyer’s 1966 Spur der Steine [Trace of Stones] and Egon Günther’s 1972 [Her Third] as paradigmatic films for their respective contexts of East German culture, politics and cinema production. The problematic informing the chapter is the question of modernity in the GDR and the representational forms it takes in the cinema. How do the transformations in post-war East German everyday life become visible on the screen through iconic aspects of modernity like consumerism, sports, fashion and machinery? How are new modes of interpersonal interactions and new ways of shaping social relationships depicted, from class dynamics and gender roles to the role of media itself in modern socialist society, including the role of the party and the planned economy? The chapter asks how DEFA films negotiate the problem of the particularly socialist character of East Germany’s modernity. How do these films link the quotidian to this other political discourse? Through a complex negotiation of class and gender codes, I argue, East German cinema attempts to bring to light the socialist quality of East German life. Seeking to reveal the deeper meaning of the everyday in relation to the construction of a socialist society, these films address many of the same issues and mobilize filmic techniques similar to post-war West German and American melodramas and women’s films, but they do so in the light of very different political agendas and social imaginaries. Examined in this way, the cinema of the GDR allows us to think about other modes of coming to terms with the threats and challenges posed by the modern. This chapter will therefore precede through an affective periodization of the DEFA productions of the 1950s to the early 1970s, when East German film was still centrally preoccupied with registering the social transformations underway in the GDR, asking what kinds of structures of feeling or affective constellations would point to a particularly socialist modern at a given moment in post-war history.

Some remarks on what modern or modernity might mean in a GDR context helps frame the film analysis. Various arguments gained traction after the Wende in 1989, in particular about the premodern character of GDR society. These arguments have been widespread in historical and sociological accounts, which –driven by a re-animated totalitarianism theory – focus on the dictatorial aspects of the SED regime and the presumptive lack of functional differentiation within the GDR’s institutional structures and civil society. In her influential work Sigrid Meuschel draws attention to the ambivalent character of modernity, granting that the GDR and other state socialist societies were in fact modern and ‘understood themselves as answers to the problems of modernity’, but at the same time lacking the kind of institutional rationality and ‘necessary basis in the observation of rules of rational governance’ that would allow for properly modern social differentiation. ²⁵ While Meuschel is sensitive to counter trends in East German society and casts what she calls the ‘thoroughly dominated society’ [durchherrschte Gesellschaft ] within the modern, the GDR is finally not of the modern in this account. Of course, in recent years historians and cultural critics have argued for the essential modernity of the GDR’s cultural, political and sociological landscape, based largely on the enumeration of features like bureaucratic administration, mass mobilizations, industrialization, social mobility, ruptures in gender relations and the medicalization of society.²⁶ More interesting is perhaps how we understand the difference of a socialist modern. Here we are in the territory of another modernity, or as Pence and Betts term it, a Gegenmoderne or counter modernity that dispensed with much of the ‘eighteenth-century political vocabulary of the liberal state’. Nevertheless, they write, ‘the structural features of the economy, social life and gender relations, as well as the look and styling of East German material culture, may be seen as aspects of the GDR’s distinctive alternative modernity’.²⁷ Indeed, from the point of view of GDR public discourse, East Germany’s socialist modernity was essentially a corrective to the exploitative, class-based character of capitalist modernity and democratization of its promises.

In the realm of culture Wolfgang Emmerich makes the argument about the vexed relationship to modernity most famously in an article published shortly before the Wende. The GDR, he tells us, was ‘a premodern country into the 1960s’, with a ‘likewise decreed, premodern literature’.²⁸ He sees GDR culture as cut off from the main streams of post-war high modernism, with culture reduced to the mechanical reproduction of ideology and wedded to a crude form of reflection theory and a narrowly construed vocation of social pedagogy.²⁹ There is for Emmerich an East German modern, but it will come later, in the 1960s, and even then it will be an endangered one, only to break into the postmodern in the wake of the Biermann expulsion in 1976.³⁰ There are of course serious problems with this periodization, not the least of which is a conflation of modernity as a historical moment and modernism as an aesthetic, but no less serious is the conflation of modernism with a particularly Western and post-war iteration of high modernism. Thus, Emmerich cast modernity as an epoch of crisis produced by a growing ‘asymmetry between experience and expectation’ under the pressures of industrialization, urbanization and rationalization.³¹ The aesthetic modern is construed as ‘the adaptation, executed through artistic means, of the modern in general in a state of crisis’.³² This implies the dissolution of the ties between individual subjects and objective social forces and a break with mimetic, figural representation.³³ Even if post-war GDR culture could be considered premodern in these terms, it is a premodern culture that has passed through modernism, since 1950s East German cultural idioms are largely rooted in the 1930s aesthetics of socialist realism and the Popular Front, which, as critics as diverse as Boris Groys and Michael Denning have compellingly argued, are both determined responses to the various impasses and crises of classical modernity.³⁴ Furthermore, both can be seen as what Miriam Hansen has termed ‘vernacular modernisms’, complicated responses to the transformations of everyday life and sociality, giving rise to ‘different forms of mimetic experience and expression, of affectivity, temporality, and reflexivity’. A capacious definition of modernism, then, must not only account for modernist aesthetics, but also those ‘cultural practices that both articulated and mediated the experience of modernity, such as the mass produced and mass consumed phenomena of fashion, design, advertising, architecture and urban environment, of photography, radio, and cinema’.³⁵ Both socialist realism and the aesthetics of the Popular Front were deeply concerned with precisely this vernacular function of culture, with appropriating in productive political fashion the new media and intervening in the mass modes of cultural reception that were developing in the mid-twentieth century.

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Rather than recount an empirical case for the GDR’s modernity, however, I return to Emmerich’s own definition. In a later essay he is yet more specific about his understanding of modernism. Following Foucault, he writes that both literary criticism and literature itself is adequate to the modern when it takes up less the construction of meaning than the work of ‘carving out crises in meaning’.³⁶ For Emmerich, of course, these are the great crises of language and representation articulated by high modernism.³⁷ Relating this thesis to East German literature, he writes, ‘GDR literature becomes modern in the sense that it reflects the total social process of modernization (here in its specific real socialist, exponential deformation) in a state of crisis and, answering back, makes conscious its immanent pathology’.³⁸ The positive, that is, critical modernism in GDR culture becomes those works that can be integrated into a ‘context of international modernism’, which is to say, a largely Western canon.

David Harvey ascribes these crises to the breaking up of traditional life worlds under the onslaught of spatial and temporal compression driven by capitalist accumulation through its various stages.³⁹ For him, capital is the key to understanding modernity as a tremendous and uneven process of creative destruction in which older communities, ways of life and ideologies are torn apart and rearranged in new and often chaotic, fragmentary fashion.⁴⁰ But is not creative destruction an apt term for the tremendous social transformations taking place in post-war East Germany? After all, they did not confine themselves only to building the new – new cities, new factories, new ways of living together – but also to tearing down the old – land reform, the renegotiation of gender roles, the breaking up of all sorts of cultural, political and educational hierarchies. This is the very stuff of East German socialist realism, which often, just as Emmerich claims modernism ought to, breaks through the limits of its own doctrines of closed form and realist representation to grasp the crises of the vernacular modern. If, as Fredric Jameson insists, modernity is less a concept than a narrative category, one that marks a more or less violent break with a past that it constructs itself, can we not see post-war East German culture as doing just that, attempting to imagine the new by abjecting its own various images of the old?⁴¹ But in East German culture these crises are not events per se; rather, as Georg Lukács puts it in The Historical Novel, they are properly epochal, and the task of socialist realism would be to discern the systemic transformations of a massive social transformation of everyday life: ‘show how the direction of a social tendency becomes visible in the small, imperceptible capillary movements of individual life’.⁴²

Henning Wrage has argued that a core problem of East German culture is the very social imaginary of historical periodization and its socialist realist precepts:

All of the demands for the typical and the truthful, for positive portrayal and so forth […] represent a claim on art and through art to motivate ‘in a kind of jubilatory bustle’ the present for the benefit of a distant goal and in a certain sense to formulate this goal (art as prescription and pre-written [Vor-Schrift]) for the first time.⁴³

From this perspective socialist realism is directed towards a kind of ‘world creation’, attempting to evoke the anticipated future as much as the prescriptive break with Germany’s capitalist and fascist pasts through the description of the present.⁴⁴ The difficulty of this task of cognitively mapping the emergence of the future is apparent when one examines the most orthodox of East German literature, the Aufbau or industrial novels of the 1950s. The disarticulation of the mediated relationship between everyday life and more abstract social categories such as the mode of production expresses itself in their remarkable inability to achieve narrative closure. One need only mention the confusing and meandering character of such massive yet formally helpless novels as Maria Langner’s Stahl [Steel] or Hans Marchwitza’s Stalinstadt chronicle, Roheisen [Pig Iron]. In this sense socialist realism is modernist in spite of itself, as the construction of meaning is revealed to be nothing less than the formal failure to grasp the crisis of social meaning that marks modernity as such. Similarly attempts to write the great social novel of the GDR by writers such as Werner Bräunig, Brigitte Reimann and Franz Fühmann in the 1960s and 1970s all remained fragmentary and incomplete.

If many East German novels are characterized by a mode of narrative failure, and this is a generalization, I argue that East German films strain at the boundaries of cinema conventions in order to come to terms with the problem of affective periodization described above. The DEFA cinema found itself caught between German, Soviet and American filmic conventions on the one hand and the need to develop specifically socialist visual vernaculars and narrative conventions on the other. In an article asking whether or not there is a specific DEFA film aesthetic, Detlef Kannapin answers no, but isolates six ‘principle aesthetic currents’: expressionism, melodrama, socialist realism, critical realism, poetic realism and pathos.⁴⁵ He tends to arrange these currents in terms of a periodization, as DEFA’s emphasis moves from one to the next, but it might be productive to think of these currents as force fields that exert pressure to varying degrees within each moment of DEFA’s history as well as within individual films themselves. Formally and thematically varied as DEFA film production was, a thematic kernel amongst a number of films attempts to confront the problem of reading the present for traces of the socialist horizon. One might argue, as Anke Pinkert has, that the status of women was a major index for representing the capillary movements of individual life that Lukács mentions. Discussing Konrad Wolf ’s 1958 film Sonnensucher [Sun Seekers], she writes,

Wolf ’s Sun Seekers attests to how much the cinematic imagination of social stability and future progress hinged on women’s successful integration into the public realm as active and responsible citizens. According to these films, not only did a socialist society provide the crucial precondition for e...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Table of Figures
• Acronyms
• Introduction DEFA at the Crossroads: Remapping the Terrain
• Part I - Extending the Socialist Collective
• Part II - Expanding the Reach of Entertainment
• Part III - Enlarging the Map
• Bibliography
• Selected Filmography
• Contributors
• Index