The Films of Konrad Wolf: Archive of the Revolution [Illustrated] 1640140727, 9781640140721

Citation preview

The Films of Konrad Wolf

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Screen Cultures: German Film and the Visual Series Editors Gerd Gemünden (Dartmouth College) Johannes von Moltke (University of Michigan) Also in this series Screening War, edited by Paul Cooke and Marc Silberman (2010) A New History of German Cinema, edited by Jennifer M. Kapczynski and Michael D. Richardson (2012) The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School, by Marco Abel (2013) Generic Histories of German Cinema, edited by Jaimey Fisher (2013) The Autobiographical Turn in Germanophone Documentary and Experimental Film, edited by Robin Curtis and Angelica Fenner (2014) DEFA after East Germany, edited by Brigitta B. Wagner (2014) Last Features, by Reinhild Steingröver (2014) The Nazi Past in Contemporary German Film, by Axel Bangert (2014) Continuity and Crisis in German Cinema, 1928–1936, edited by Barbara Hales, Mihaela Petrescu, and Valerie Weinstein (2016) Forgotten Dreams, by Laurie Ruth Johnson (2016) Montage as Perceptual Experience, by Mario Slugan (2017) Gender and Sexuality in East German Film, edited by Kyle Frackman and Faye Stewart (2018) Film and Fashion amidst the Ruins of Berlin, by Mila Ganeva (2018) Austria Made in Hollywood, by Jacqueline Vansant (2019) Celluloid Revolt: German Screen Cultures and the Long 1968, edited by Christina Gerhardt and Marco Abel (2019) Moving Images on the Margins: Experimental Film in Late Socialist East Germany, by Seth Howes (2019)

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The Films of Konrad Wolf Archive of the Revolution

Larson Powell

Rochester, New York

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Copyright © 2020 Larson Powell All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. First published 2020 by Camden House Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA www.camden-house.com and of Boydell & Brewer Limited PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com ISBN-13: 978-1-64014-072-1 ISBN-10: 1-64014-072-X Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Powell, Larson, 1960– author. Title: The films of Konrad Wolf : archive of the revolution / Larson Powell. Description: Rochester, New York : Camden House, 2020. | Series: Screen cultures : German film and the visual | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019037031 | ISBN 9781640140721 (hardback) | ISBN 9781787446632 (pdf ) Subjects: LCSH: Wolf, Konrad, 1925–1982—Criticism and interpretation. | Motion pictures—Germany (East)—History. Classification: LCC PN1998.3.W64 P69 2020 | DDC 791.4302/33092—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019037031 This publication is printed on acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America.

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Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Shadowlines: Viewing Wolf’s Films

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1: Einmal ist keinmal (1955)

25

2: Genesung (1956)

34

3: Lissy (1957)

44

4: Sonnensucher (1958/1972)

57

5: Sterne (1959)

75

6: Professor Mamlock (1961)

89

7: The Minor Films: Leute mit Flügeln (1960), Der kleine Prinz (1966/1972), Busch singt (1982)

103

8: Der geteilte Himmel (1964)

118

9: Ich war neunzehn (1968)

133

10: Goya (1971)

156

11: Der nackte Mann auf dem Sportplatz (1974)

167

12: Mama, ich lebe (1977)

181

13: Solo Sunny (1980)

191

Notes

215

Bibliography

275

Index

309

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Acknowledgments

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was supported by grants from the European Union Center at Texas A&M University, the University of Missouri Research Board, and the American Philosophical Society. Thanks are due to Jim Walker for his editorial collaboration; the librarians and archivists of the Filmuniversität Konrad Wolf, the Bundesarchiv (Tim Storch and Michael Müller), and the Fehrbellinerplatz archive; Sabine Soehner at the DEFA Stiftung and Manja Meister at the Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv; Constanze Hauf, who helped with research on Solo Sunny; and many colleagues, mentors, and friends in film or GDR studies, including Oksana Bulgakowa and Dietmar Hochmuth, Karim Saab, Bob Shandley, Barton Byg, Seán Allan, Peter Wuss, Gunter Agde, John Davidson and Sabine Hake, and the DEFA Film Library staff. This book was written during the course of twenty years of teaching, lecturing on, and thinking about DEFA film, during which my views on Wolf continued to evolve. I have tried to keep a little of the essayistic and individual character the chapters had when first written, as an index of this ongoing evolution. The stylistic and generic variety of Wolf’s films demands a pluralism of method (ranging from sociology of film to media theory and aesthetics), and one cannot discuss these films without addressing larger methodological questions about DEFA film that still remain open. Since film, like any art, is in principle endlessly interpretable, this book will hopefully be an encouragement to and springboard for others to develop their own views of Wolf’s work. Some of the material in this book has been published previously in different form. An earlier version of chapter 8 was published as “Une socialiste est une socialiste: Der geteilte Himmel zwischen Bild und Stimme,” in Resonanz-Räume: Die Stimme und die Medien, ed. Oksana Bulgakowa (Berlin: Bertz + Fischer, 2012), 130–37, and an earlier version of that chapter’s section on music was published as “History and Subjectivity: The Evolution of DEFA Film Music,” in Re-Imagining DEFA, ed. Sean Allan and Sebastian Heiduschke (New York: Berghahn, 2016), 41–60. A previous version of chapter 9 was published as “Gattung, Geschichte, Nation: Konrad Wolfs Ich war 19,” in Konrad Wolf: Werk und Wirkung, ed. Michael Wedel and Elke Schieber (Berlin: VISTAS, 2009), 125–44. A forerunner of chapter 10 appeared as “Painting into Film: Konrad Wolf’s Goya” in Studies in European Cinema 5, no. 2 (2008): 131–41. An earlier form of chapter 12 was published as “Mama, ich Lebe: Konrad Wolf’s

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Intermedial Parable of Antifascism” in Edinburgh German Yearbook, vol. 3 (2009): 63–75; and a version of chapter 13 appeared as “The Desire to be Desired: Solo Sunny as Socialist Women’s Film, in Gender and Sexuality in East German Film, ed. Kyle Frackman and Faye Stewart (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2018), 146–65. I thank the editors for their permission to reuse this material. A final note: one of the sources of this book’s notions of media and archive is the work of literary scholar and media theorist Friedrich A. Kittler (1943–2011). This book’s chapter on Der geteilte Himmel, originally published in German, bears the stamp of Kittler not only in its content but also in its occasionally lapidary formulations. Some of this character has been left as an homage to its model, who wrote me kind words of encouragement about another publication.

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Introduction: Shadow Lines: Viewing Wolf’s Films

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ATE IN LIFE, Konrad Wolf remarked on the ability of even fiction films to acquire quasi-documentary value over time, and on human memory’s need to be kept alive with such documents:

Der Film hat—vorausgesetzt, es ist gelungen, darin etwas wirklich Wesentliches genau und künstlerisch komprimiert zu gestalten— mehr vielleicht als alle anderen Künste die Eigenart, nach einer gewissen Zeit zu einem Dokument zu werden.[. . .] Eben dieser Eigenart wegen empfinde ich das Filmemachen als eine so grosse Verpflichtung [. . .] Das Gedächtnis der Menschen kann aber nur wachgehalten werden, wenn es immer neue Nahrung erhält. Wir können uns darum nicht mit dem begnügen, was aus der Vergangenheit geliefert ist. Jede Generation sucht ihren Zugang zum Vergangenen.1 [Film has—assuming it has managed to create something truly essential in a precise and artistically compressed form—perhaps more than any other art the quality of becoming a document after a certain time. [. . .] It is precisely due to this quality that I feel filmmaking to be such a great obligation [. . .] People’s memory can only be kept awake if it receives ever new nourishment. We cannot therefore be satisfied with what has been bequeathed from the past. Every generation seeks its own approach to the past.]

We could read this statement as an understated criticism of the official GDR faith in das Erbe, the “inheritance” from the great bourgeois classics: for Wolf, that inheritance, although it is binding, must always be created anew. It is also Wolf’s own variant of Bazin’s mummy complex.2 This documentary status holds true in particular for the films of the state film studio of the GDR (DEFA), but not only due to the long dominance of a neorealist aesthetics within DEFA. Film was, in the GDR as in other Eastern European countries, the national keeper of History in a very particular and emphatic sense. For the GDR, film also has a peculiar status as the visual archive of a society or a nation (terms that will need to be explored more in the course of this book) that no longer exists. This strange documentary status thus invites one to speculate as to how it might best be described.

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The peculiar and palpable historical distance between us and the German Democratic Republic, almost an aura of a particularly spectral sort, invites one to seek for a figure with which to express it. One such figure would be the ruin. Ironically for a nation whose erstwhile national anthem began with the line Auferstanden aus Ruinen (Arisen from the Ruins), the GDR has left an unusual number of monumental ruins in its wake (despite the eagerness of today’s Germany to wipe away the traces, as with the replacement of Berlin’s Palast der Republik with a resuscitated Schloss).3 These range from Thälmann monuments to abandoned factories (made familiar as the background for post-Wende films like Andreas Kleinert’s Wege in die Nacht) and the immense environmental disaster of the Wismut uranium mining project. Even beyond these architectural ruins, however, Heiner Müller made the ruin into a central part of his theatrical aesthetic, as an ironic reflection on “what remained” of the experiments of modernism; less ironically, the literature of the GDR was attacked in toto during the Literaturstreit of 1990, as a Gesinnungsliteratur fatally compromised by collaboration with the state;4 if DEFA film was never subject to such a polemical controversy, it is only because GDR films never had the following Christa Wolf did in the West, nor the representative status that literature had in the GDR’s particular media landscape. Yet the collapse of the ideology underpinning these films can hardly avoid affecting their posterity. Andreas Huyssen comments on this: “As a form of secularized theology with rises and falls, declines and redemptions of cultures, the philosophy of history produced by the Enlightenment stands like a ruin itself in the twenty-first century.”5 The films of Konrad Wolf were centrally informed with the GDR’s chief variant of Geschichtsphilosophie, namely antifascism; the aging of this doctrine cannot but create a hollow at the films’ center. Rather than seeing this ruined quality as restricted to the GDR’s legacy, we should acknowledge it as a larger characteristic of modernity as a whole, in which GDR culture participates; this was already recognized in the first half of the twentieth century (as in key passages of Benjamin’s Origins of the German Tragic Drama). Wolf’s films have thus inevitably a ciphered quality to them, even an archaic feel. They are what Alexander Kluge titled his Marx film: reports from ideological Antiquity,6 from a mythical Egypt of the last century.7 One possible approach to take to Wolf’s films today would be to disembed them, as cinematic artworks, from this bedeviled context, through the familiar tactic of an auteurist reading. Thomas Elsaesser has already begun to evaluate the usefulness and limitations of such a reading. But one cannot avoid thinking of a very similar artistic and political “case” in modernism, namely that of Brecht. In a polemical essay on politicized art, Adorno argued against a purely aesthetic view of Brecht’s work, “Sein Werk hätte, mit seinen offen zutage liegenden Schwächen, nicht solche

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Gewalt, wäre es mit Politik nicht durchtränkt. [. . .] Vergeblich, die vorhandenen oder fiktiven Schönheiten seines Werkes von der politischen Intention abzuheben.”8 (His work would not have, with all its evident weaknesses, such force if it were not permeated through and through with politics. [. . .] It is futile to separate the present or fictive beauties of his work from their political intention.) Similarly, one cannot separate the visual virtuosity of Der geteilte Himmel (1964) from the film’s political intention of shaping a Utopian hope in the GDR’s future. There are admittedly also important differences from Brecht. For Konrad Wolf hardly chose his political position as freely as did Brecht; where the latter rebelled against his bourgeois father through Marxism, the former’s left politics were a form of unbroken obedience to Lacan’s Law of the Father. Moreover, Wolf had less freedom of movement as an artist than Brecht, who had established his international reputation before the foundation of the GDR, and was thus able to set something of his own terms when settling within its boundaries (terms that included his retaining an Austrian passport). While most of Brecht’s career was spent in resistance to or exile from bourgeois capitalism and then fascism, with less than ten years in the GDR, Wolf lived and worked in East Germany for his entire adult life. Konrad Wolf’s biography has been researched and told in painstaking detail in Rolf Aurich and Wolfgang Jacobsen’s Der Sonnensucher Konrad Wolf (to which interested readers are referred for more detail). The multiple connections between this individual life and the complicated context of Weimar Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union, and the GDR required that Aurich and Jacobsen use oral history as well as written and archival sources, for Wolf’s story is inseparable from that of many others. Wolf was the younger brother of GDR spymaster Markus Wolf (1923–2006), and son of the playwright Friedrich Wolf (1888–1953), who had written in 1923 an important historical play on the German Peasants’ Revolt of 1524–25 titled Der arme Konrad (Poor Konrad): this name would later be used by DEFA students and employees as an ironic name for the filmmaker.9 Konrad Wolf was born in 1923 in Hechingen in Swabia, where Wolf père had his doctor’s practice, and characteristically used his own family as an experiment for naturopathy. (Father Wolf’s belief in Nature was as firm as his political creed.) Friedrich Wolf was a significant figure in the German literary left before the war, but never managed to recapture that standing after 1945, when his relatively traditional and sometimes melodramatic plays were eclipsed by the more modernist work of Brecht. As an engaged Communist (and a Jew), Friedrich Wolf had to flee Germany in 1933, and his family followed him some months thereafter, first to France, then to Moscow, where Konrad spent his formative years, learning Russian and appearing as a child actor in antifascist films of the 1930s. His happiest moments were probably spent at the famous

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artists’ colony of Peredelkino, outside Moscow, where many cultural figures (such as Boris Pasternak) also had their summer dachas. He joined the Red Army at seventeen and returned to Germany with it in 1945, an experience described in his war diaries.10 After film school in Moscow, where his teachers included Mikhail Romm, Sergei Gerasimov, and Grigori Alexandrow, he settled in the GDR in the 1950s, making sixteen films in the space of twenty-eight years, before his early death of cancer in 1982. After a short first marriage to Annegret Reuter (from 1955 to 1960), he was married to DEFA star Christel Bodenstein from 1960 until 1978, and had several children with her; Bodenstein’s leaving him caused a severe depression toward the end of his life. He was also President of the GDR Academy of Arts in Berlin from 1965 until his death, and was elected to the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) in 1981. He thus had an important public function as a cultural administrator and was inescapably involved in many political and artistic controversies from the Eleventh Plenum in 1965 to the expatriation of dissident popular singer Wolf Biermann (b. 1936) in 1976. In general, he was known for helping artists who were in trouble with the regime, although he drew the line at Biermann, whom he saw as having become an enemy of the GDR. Like Brecht, Konrad Wolf thus had to perform a difficult balancing act between the demands of art and loyalty to his state. He is generally recognized as being, with Frank Beyer (1932–2006), the most significant director in DEFA, especially known for his antifascist films, and his work often has qualities that suggest the subjective and personal stamp of auteur cinema. However, film was not an autonomous art in the German Democratic Republic. Any attempt at understanding East German film that does not take account of this will distort its object. DEFA film had even less room to maneuver than film in other socialist countries such as Poland or Czechoslovakia, due not only to the greater stringency of GDR censorship but also to the inability of the GDR to define itself as a nation the way Poland could. These factors hold true even in the case of directors whose work resembles that of an auteur, Konrad Wolf preeminent among them, and they are one reason for the lack of reception of GDR film, relative to the recognition accorded Andrzei Wajda, Krzysztof Zanussi, and Krzysztof Kieślowski, or Ján Kadár and Miklós Jancsó. To attempt to read Wolf—or Frank Beyer, or others—against the grain, as an auteur comparable in stature to Wajda (only unfairly neglected) would be to miss the point, for reasons of more than aesthetic judgment alone.11 Read only in auteurist terms, even Wolf’s best film, Ich war neunzehn (1968), may still—for all its documentary “authenticity” and interesting formal qualities—seem less daring than comparable films of Wajda’s, whether Ashes and Diamonds (1957) or Everything for Sale (1967) or Man of Marble (1977). Yet what looks like timidity on Wolf’s part (and

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has been interpreted as such by his biographers) is not only an aesthetic or biographical question (although it is also that), but one of the entire function or location of film in society; a purely auteurist view would miss this. DEFA film has been marginal not only to the historiography of German film but to that of European film as a whole, because it understood itself as a functional art and not an autonomous one, even in its most ambitious projects. When directors such as Rainer Simon began in the 1970s to see themselves as auteurs like their other European colleagues, this was already the beginning of the end of DEFA as an institution— ironically coinciding with the simultaneous end of auteurism elsewhere. Moreover, the dissatisfaction of some of the last generation of DEFA directors, such as Dietmar Hochmuth, with Wolf’s later work—especially Solo Sunny (1980)—was tied to the loss of this functional status for film (and thus a final undermining of the implicit consensus between artists and state that underlay DEFA). Colin Grant has described a similar shift in GDR literature “from consensus to rupture,” setting his analysis in a sociological context akin to that of this book.12 This means that we cannot understand what DEFA film (including Wolf’s films) means without a sociological opening out of film studies into a broader context. Such a perspective must go beyond the older understanding of GDR culture as a mirror of its society, however; this view was typical of much work on GDR culture in the United States, and was in a sense only updated through emphasis on the subjective sincerity or authenticity of Christa or Konrad Wolf. We are thus confronted with a double imperative in this particular case of “working through the past”; on the one hand, one cannot merely continue the long tradition of viewing GDR artistic production, whether literary or filmic, as no more than a form of “realism,” for this would be to risk continuing the GDR’s own self-understanding in uncritical fashion (ironically, given the fondness of older scholarship for terms like “critical realism”).13 Recent studies linking up to Alltagsgeschichte (the “history of everyday life” pioneered by Alf Luedtke) and cultural studies end up only perpetrating this tradition, nolens volens. On the other hand, we cannot forcibly and posthumously attribute to it a full-fledged aesthetic sovereignty it never had. Merely to select the few films with autonomous aesthetic merit would give one a one-sided picture of DEFA’s function, even in the oeuvre of its most well-known director.14 We thus need a sociological approach to DEFA, but not one informed solely by the sociology of the 1960s. DEFA began by continuing the old ideological function of Germany’s earlier state film studio UFA as “dream factory”—not only in the monumental Thälmann biopics of the mid-1950s,15 but also in other formulaic antifascist conversion narratives, such as Wolf’s earliest films—and gradually mutated during the 1960s, through the course of several severe crises (the Wall in 1961, the Eleventh Plenum in 1965) into something like a chronicler of

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East Germany’s everyday life.16 Throughout all of this, however, DEFA’s position remained fundamentally split, due to the division of Germany and the non-coincidence of nation and state—and to the GDR’s status as a militarily (and culturally) occupied nation on the frontier of the Cold War. In its most complex films, such as Wolf’s Ich war neunzehn or Frank Beyer’s Spur der Steine (Trace of Stones, 1965/1989),17 DEFA did indeed attain an aesthetic richness beyond that of a merely functional art; yet grasping that complexity requires also an awareness of the political and social materials sedimented into filmic form. It is the peculiarity of Konrad Wolf to have represented (even embodied) this split perspective in exemplary fashion—a fashion cognate to, but nonetheless distinct from, Fassbinder’s representative position for West Germany.18 If Fassbinder’s Germanness was inflected by his homosexuality, Wolf’s was by his Russian childhood and his Jewishness, a matter that has still not been fully explored in work on him. Here, too, Wolf’s oblique relation to Jewishness was also a representative phenomenon, and one preconditioned by the political and cultural assimilation of his father Friedrich as well. For unlike the “fatherless society” of West German ’68ers to whom Fassbinder belonged, Wolf had a very powerful father (as Jacobsen and Aurich’s biography details) and lived in a society ruled by a generation of “mistrustful patriarchs,”19 whose mistrust of their subjects had been deeply ingrained during their years of wartime Soviet exile. Wolf, too, shared this mistrust of Germans, and his Russian-German-Jewish polyperspectivism cannot be overlooked in any analysis of his work.20 To state the present book’s methodology in its most succinct terms: what follows will view Wolf’s films neither only as a reflection of GDR society and history nor as an autonomous auteurist project. Thus this will not be simply a continuation of extant scholarship on Wolf, but in some ways an experimental extension of it. Older work on Wolf tended to work in biographical, institutional, and historicist modes, emphasizing his personal integrity (biography), his critical (neo)realism (the institutional mode preferred by DEFA), and his responses to the acknowledged periods of DEFA and GDR history. These periods are generally seen as: Stalinism until the mid-1950s; an only partial de-Stalinization after 1956 (which was less liberal than comparable developments in Poland); the building of the Wall; and the brief windows of cultural and political liberalization in the early 1960s and 1970s, both followed by clampdowns with the Eleventh Plenum in 1965 and the Biermann expatriation. (Even decades after the end of the GDR, much work on DEFA film still tends to reduce the films to a function of memory or historiography—while also referring to standard master signifiers of state and nation to boot.21) All of this, while certainly true, is only part of the story, and needs to be complemented for these films to live as films, and not merely as historical documents. Marc Silberman’s idea of “the authenticity of autobiography,”

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which gave more subjective nuance to the question of realism, was itself a deliberate rhetorical stance adopted by, among others, Christa Wolf, and it is one that has been subject to criticism since 1989 (not only in the polemics around the publication of Was bleibt [What Remains]). Authenticity was also a trademark of the French New Wave (as in Truffaut’s The 400 Blows [1959], a film Wolf admired) and thus a stylistic marker as much as an autobiographical one; it had also, via existentialism, a period signature and could be called, in Brecht’s terms, a Haltung or “attitude.” The notion of “critical realism,” while not entirely inaccurate, can resemble a way to have one’s socialist realist cake and eat it too; that the term goes back to Lukács suggests something of its attempt to balance between regime-fidelity and autonomy. Elsaesser’s and Michael Wedel’s reference to Wolf ’s generic allusions already pointed the way beyond the trope of realism. Most importantly: although Wolf’s work obviously requires knowledge of its social context to be fully understood, it is not entirely reducible to a chronicle of the GDR, nor is its meaning identical with the ostensible function of DEFA as an institution—which Wolf indeed belonged to, but within which he also, as a member of a privileged elite, had more freedom within than most. That the individual films here are not simply seen as mirrors of the larger standard narrative of GDR history is a deliberate choice, for which there are a number of good reasons. First, that history was a contingent one, which—as GDR historians themselves have repeatedly informed us—should not be seen in totalizing fashion (one thinks of the work of Martin Sabrow or Konrad Jarausch here; the larger point of cultural history has been to break up older historical ideas of social totality). Second, Wolf’s own development as a filmmaker was no linear or continuous process. Sterne (1959), an understated and subtle film, was followed by the more heavily didactic Professor Mamlock (1961) and the nearly pure socialist realist formula of Leute mit Flügeln (1960); Der geteilte Himmel (1964) was succeeded by the isolated fairy-tale film Der kleine Prinz (1966). Goya (1971) had been planned much earlier than its final realization in the early 1970s. This zigzagging can be explained by the vagaries of political history (or, in the case of Goya, of production and financing). But it also implies that Wolf’s own imperatives as an artist were neither purely auteurist nor solely those of his state. In some cases these two impulses seem to come together in films that are both personal and representative; these are arguably Wolf’s best films. Ich war neunzehn, his most personal and probably also most important film, was also a response to the crisis of the Eleventh Plenum (as Fassbinder’s extremely autobiographical sequence in Germany in Autumn was a response to the West German crisis of 1977), and to another crisis in Soviet filmmaking in the 1960s. (Solo Sunny, too, was both a response to a crisis in Wolf’s private life—his divorce from his wife—and to DEFA’s perceived loss of

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audience.) The implications or connections of Ich war neunzehn can thus be read in various directions: in terms of film aesthetics, of cultural policies toward youth, of memory, or of the foundation of the GDR. Treating the films individually—as parts of a constellation or a mobile, if one will— allows them more openness than would embedding them in a historical grand narrative. And that so many of Wolf’s films work with a similar narrative or generic template—that of the antifascist “conversion narrative,” often presented in the guise of melodrama—suggests that his films are not merely an “authentic” or “critically realistic” reflection (Abbild) of GDR history but also a way of staging the latter via generic templates, of making it affectively palpable. Wolf’s films, even when (as in Ich war neunzehn) they use documentary inserts, are not themselves documentaries, but are highly stylized. Treating his films as only another form of traditional historiography would not only risk being reductive. It would force us to see his films as no more than chronicles of a particular political experiment, and then subordinate our evaluation of them to a larger overall judgment of History on the GDR as a whole. Both older scholarship, which tended to view DEFA films as a mirror of the promise of socialist society, and Jacobsen and Aurich’s biography, do just this, albeit from opposing ideological perspectives. Where much older scholarship tried to see the GDR in sympathetic terms, as an alternative to Western capitalism (thus sometimes taking the Utopian “reform socialist” self-understanding of writers like Christa Wolf at face value), Jacobsen and Aurich see Wolf as a tragic figure, hindered by his authoritarian upbringing from facing the facts of the GDR’s inevitable failure. In this book, while I cannot simply bracket out Wolf’s representative status, I deliberately underplay this totalizing question by partly decoupling Wolf from Abbildtheorie, by attempting to do justice to his films as filmic artworks. If Elsaesser remarked that Fassbinder’s was “a work upstaged by life,” then Wolf’s may have been “a work upstaged by History.”22 In this respect, DEFA scholarship in English has still to catch up with recent work on Eastern European cinema,23 which is characterized by a radical departure from old Cold War orthodoxies and by a use of more recent methodologies. German scholarship, paradoxically, may sometimes seem freer from Ostalgia than that in English, and more willing to view GDR culture with a detached and not nostalgic or recuperative eye. Much DEFA scholarship in English is marked by Anglo-American cultural studies, with its polemical preference for pop culture and its tendency to underplay aesthetic autonomy; this is a model deliberately not followed here, for reasons that would require a separate essay. Cultural studies, with its frequently politicized aims, did not fundamentally challenge the Marxist idea of film’s reflecting relation to history, but only expanded or

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nuanced it, thus perhaps allowing DEFA scholarship to retain its older fellow-traveling loyalties to the GDR in updated or faintly ironized guise. In addition, although some of Wolf’s oeuvre may bear an auteurist fingerprint, the present look at his work does not take auteurism at face value, either. This book’s relation to auteurism might be compared to André Bazin’s, which is worth referring to in detail here (since, in addition, one suspects that Wolf himself shared some of Bazin’s caveats). Although Bazin was broadly sympathetic to the politique des auteurs, he stated clearly that he did not share the auteurist critics’ assumption that every work by an auteur had to be significant. This meant that he rejected the over-interpretation of minor works in which these critics sometimes indulged: “Many a time I have felt uneasy at the subtlety of an argument, which was completely unable to camouflage the naïvete of an assumption, whereby, for example, the intentions and the coherence of a deliberate and well-thought out film are read into some little ‘B’ feature.”24 Translated into the context of this book: in what follows I will not seek to read great subtleties into films such as Leute mit Flügeln that are clearly less important or successful than Wolf’s best work. Similarly, Bazin warns away from reading too much hermeneutical unity into a director’s work, when he adds that for auteurist critics, “the yardstick applied to a film is the aesthetic portrait of the film-maker deduced from his previous films” (256); we will not apply the same aesthetic “yardstick” to every film of Wolf’s either. Bazin’s larger rationale for his dissent with the auteurists was his belief that “the work transcends the director” (249)— precisely in being the result of a larger (and contingent) constellation than that of individual genius alone. We might restate Bazin’s slightly oldfashioned “transcendence” in more modern terms. Just as the GDR itself was a partly modern society, one which was partly “differentiated” in the terms of Niklas Luhmann’s sociology (and also partly de-differentiated in the name of Party and state control), so Wolf’s films must be seen as both coupled to their sociological context and also in part differentiated from that context.25 This theme of the differentiation of film from direct realist representation to a more obliquely mediated political function—one of the chief motors of which is genre—will be a constant and recurring topic throughout this book. Elsaesser, whose work emerged from the heady ’68 blend of social history and psychoanalysis, was already concerned to move beyond these older views of film’s relation to history, but he articulated this in terms of the “historical imaginary” (a notion which, although Elsaesser was far too canny to assign to his work any tidy labels or catchwords, had some affinities to postmodernism); the present book’s concept of archive (which will be explained shortly) is also an answer to this, with, perhaps, a greater stress on the Real than the Imaginary. If the historical imaginary is an

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attempt to mediate between history and the individual imagination or desire, the archive marks their split. Implicit in Elsaesser’s view is also that Fassbinder was one of the architects of a belated Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit (working through the past) in West Germany (wherein Germany in Autumn plays a central role). Fassbinder’s films show the kind of empathy and attention to private life that Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich had found missing in The Inability to Mourn. Thus Fassbinder’s films, for all their bleakness, represent something of a German success story: they helped to enable a new German normalization (for all the problematic aspects this latter entails) after his death. Wolf, by contrast—if we were to see him as representative of the GDR as Fassbinder was of the BRD—would have to be the chronicler of an ultimately failed state, one that did not capture the hearts of its citizens; the “pathos of failure” that Elsaesser sees in Wolf would be that of the GDR as well. (The overly totalizing view that that would imply might provide another reason for the aforementioned loosening of the links between film and history.) Yet this book, too, must suggest a kind of interpretative reversal, just as Elsaesser’s did; where Elsaesser found, in the paradox of Fassbinder’s uncovering authoritarian structures within the ’68 left, a sexual politics or politics of the private that would prove more insightful than the aporias of direct political action and terrorism, in the present book I seek, within Wolf’s work, a reflexive acknowledgment of the limits of the revolutionary project of socialism, a project that increasingly haunts us today (as an unworked-through “archive”). That acknowledgment takes the form of a tension between mourning and memory on the one hand and hope for a socialist future on the other; in the best of his films, such as Sterne or Ich war neunzehn, that balance is allowed to remain hanging, rather than tipped. Even earlier than Fassbinder, Wolf investigated the links between public politics and private life (in Lissy, Sonnensucher, Sterne, and Der geteilte Himmel), and he would return to this question, perhaps influenced by Fassbinder’s Hollywood-inflected melodramas, in Solo Sunny. Wolf’s early melodramas, unlike Fassbinder’s, could not be influenced by Douglas Sirk’s late films, since they were produced at the same time as the latter; the model for Wolf’s melodramas had rather to be UFA and the 1930s. As we will see, though, Wolf’s reworking of melodrama was quite different from Fassbinder’s. Unlike the latter, he did not so much relish the genre’s emotional excess and flamboyance, its dramatizing of pleasure in pain and power (thereby forcing the spectator to ask about his or her own perverse complicity with the drama). Rather, Wolf will often let his protagonists interrupt their role,26 and the spectacular drama of acting out and identification it entails, to pause in silent reflection or mute their behavior. Sunny does this several times, whether when on stage or in bed with Ralph; Gregor Hecker tones down his angry tirade at the SS at the

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end of Ich war neunzehn, his voice suddenly going off-loudspeaker to a quieter undertone; Rita’s entire flashback narrative, in Der geteilte Himmel, is made possible by an interruption of her potential melodramatic death on the train tracks at the film’s beginning. Where Fassbinder goes all the way to the end of melodrama, so that our understanding as spectators must emerge on its other side—an understanding that its actors, like Maria Braun, cannot attain—Wolf prefers to arrest his melodramas, allowing the protagonists to escape them, along with the viewer. Melodramatic excess, although it is present, is thus often undercut: the dizzying shots of West Berlin during Manfred and Rita’s leavetaking are muted by the voiceover and the melancholic music, as the Cabaret-like coloring of Sunny’s singing is undercut by her inability to reach her public.27 Melodrama, in Wolf, is not so much the vehicle for irony as the latter’s object.

Variants of the Archive To write about Wolf thus means confronting a historical archive, a word that has recently acquired more than its erstwhile neutral meanings. With this we have arrived at our second figure for historical distance, one that has the advantage over “ruin” of being more neutrally descriptive. The archive in question here is multiple, both collective and familial, at once that of GDR history and several generations of German and Jewish Communists in exile, and also of individual and private memory. Bringing these different aspects into focus will require a method as polyperspectival as its object, for the archives involved are those of a state, of a medium, of a religion or ethnic group, and of a person. There are a number of good reasons why the term archive can be useful: one is that the GDR, unlike other Cold War national formations, only exists now in archival form; another is that the disappearance of the GDR may itself be correlated to larger shifts in information technology beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, shifts that, as many argue, cannot help but affect the nature of historiography as well. Wolfgang Ernst, one of the chief theorists of the archive as medium, has suggested that the notion of national history as developed in the nineteenth century was linked to the development of specific media technology, most particularly photography. “In the early nineteenth century a xerographical idea of telling history, of a document-based, non-conjectural history, runs almost parallel with a technologically driven sense of realistic representation. The obsession with an unmediated representation of the past is itself a media effect; the apparent shift of emphasis in nineteenth-century historiography from describing to showing can be deciphered as an effect of the new optical media.”28 Ernst refers here to the work of the historian Stephen Bann, yet goes even further by arguing that the shift effected by digitalization from

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storage to transfer means the end of this state-centered and national model of historiography, which depended on a certain historicizing usage of the archive: “Die historistische Idee der Nation kann sich nur in einem geschichtlichen Rahmen halten; der Rahmen selbst heisst radikal unhistorisch die Präzens(haltung) von Speichern.”29 (The historicist idea of the nation can only be preserved in a historical frame; the frame itself is called, radically unhistorically, the (keeping-)present of storage.) This was especially true of the GDR (whose film archives were inherited from the Nazi Reichsfilmarchive set up in 1935): “Der Zentralstaat DDR war archivologisch begünstigt.”30 (The centralized state of the GDR was archivologically favored.) The current expansion—some would say “inflation”—of the term archive (in which Ernst’s work unabashedly participates) is itself connected to this same medial shift in technologies of storage, and was given significant impetus by Derrida’s Mal d’archive (Archive Fever), along with Foucault’s distinct use of the concept.31 Thus we now can read of film as an “archive of the revolution,” or of literature as an “archive of affect”; the term has made its way into DEFA studies as well, with all of DEFA itself being designated as an “archive.”32 Rarely, however, is the term archive itself ever defined—a vagueness that has inspired skeptical responses from practicing historians and archivists alike.33 One possible way out of the loose metaphoricity and reduction to rhetoric or semantics typical of so many so-called “turns” since the 1990s is offered by the media-theory variant of archive theory that has been pursued by Ernst and Cornelia Vismann, both of whom have been associated with the Berlin-centered variant of media theory founded by Friedrich Kittler.34 Ernst, in particular, has—like Kittler with his apodictic claim that “es gibt keine Software”—insisted on the Foucauldian discontinuities of the archive, on its incompatibility with historical narrative, and its ultimate residence in the hardware of information technology.35 Ernst deliberately and polemically sets this position not only against traditional historiography but also against the “poetics of the archive” proposed by New Historicism.36 In this variant, the term “archive” would refer to the materiality of celluloid, or to the hardware enabling digital storage: it would thus be, in other words, another form of Foucault’s “historical apriori.” GDR archives could then be seen as the inheritor of Prussian archives, one of Ernst’s favorite topics. Ernst is fond of referring to a passage from Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit on the historicity of material objects, one that needs to be quoted at length for its full significance to be grasped: Im Museum aufbewahrte “Altertümer,” Hausgerät zum Beispiel, gehören einer “vergangenen Zeit” an und sind gleichwohl noch in der “Gegenwart« vorhanden. Inwiefern ist dieses Zeug

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geschichtlich, wo es doch noch nicht vergangen ist? Etwa nur deshalb, weil es Gegenstand historischen Interesses, der Altertumspflege und Landeskunde wurde? Ein historischer Gegenstand aber kann dergleichen Zeug doch nur sein, weil es an ihm selbst irgendwie geschichtlich ist. Die Frage wiederholt sich: mit welchem Recht nennen wir dieses Seiende geschichtlich, wo es doch nicht vergangen ist? Oder haben diese “Dinge,” obzwar sie heute noch vorhanden sind, doch “etwas Vergangenes” “an sich”? Sind sie, die vorhandenen, denn noch, was sie waren? Offenbar haben sich die “Dinge” verändert. Das Gerät ist “im Lauf der Zeit” brüchig und wurmstichig geworden. Aber in dieser Vergänglichkeit, die auch während des Vorhandenseins im Museum fortgeht, liegt doch nicht der spezifische Vergangenheitscharakter, der es zu etwas Geschichtlichem macht. Was ist aber dann an dem Zeug vergangen? Was waren die “Dinge,” das sie heute nicht mehr sind? Sie sind doch noch das bestimmte Gebrauchszeug—aber außer Gebrauch. Allein gesetzt, sie stünden, wie viele Erbstücke im Hausrat, noch heute im Gebrauch, wären sie dann noch nicht geschichtlich? Ob im Gebrauch oder außer Gebrauch, sind sie gleichwohl nicht mehr, was sie waren. Was ist “vergangen”? Nichts anderes als die Welt, innerhalb deren sie, zu einem Zeugzusammenhang gehörig, als Zuhandenes begegneten und von einem besorgenden, in-der-Welt-seienden Dasein gebraucht wurden. Die Welt ist nicht mehr. Das vormals Innerweltliche jener Welt aber ist noch vorhanden. Als weltzugehöriges Zeug kann das jetzt noch Vorhandene trotzdem der “Vergangenheit” angehören. Was bedeutet aber das Nicht-mehr-sein von Welt? Welt ist nur in der Weise des existierenden Daseins, das als In-der-Welt-sein faktisch ist.37 [The “antiquities” preserved in museums (household gear, for example) belong to a “time that is past”; yet they are still present-athand in the “Present.” How far is such equipment historical, when it is not yet past? Is it historical, let us say, only because it has become an object of historiological interest, of antiquarian study or national lore? But such equipment can be a historiological object only because it is in itself somehow historical. We repeat the question: by what right do we call this entity “historical,” when it is not yet past? Or do these “Things” have “in themselves” “something past,” even though they are still present-at-hand today? Then are these, which are present-at-hand, still what they were? Manifestly these “Things” have altered. The gear has become fragile or worm-eaten “in the course of time.” But that specific character of the past that makes it something historical does not lie in this transience, which continues even during the Being-present-at-hand of the equipment in the museum. What, then, is past in this equipment? What were these “Things” that today they are no longer? They are still definite items of equipment for use; but they are out of use. Suppose, however,

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that they were still in use today, like many a household heirloom; would they then be not yet historical? All the same, whether they are in use or out of use, they are no longer what they were. What is “past”? Nothing else than that world within which they belonged to a context of equipment and were encountered as ready-to-hand and used by a concernful Dasein who was-in-the-world. That world is no longer. But what was formerly within-the-world with respect to that world is still present-at-hand. As equipment belonging to a world, that which is now still present-at-hand can belong nevertheless to the “past.” But what do we signify by saying of a world that it is no longer? A world is only in the manner of existing Dasein, which in actuality is as Being-in-the-world.]

Films, to be sure, are not mere Zeug or Hausgerät; yet signaling the question of their “use” is a healthy antidote to transforming them solely into auteurist products après la lettre (or belatedly) for our dehistoricized, “textual” viewing pleasure; moreover, the attention to their materiality would fit with a retooling of film history as media history for which Joachim Paech has argued.38 The sense that the “world” in which DEFA films were “used” and to which they testify is gone is especially acute at a moment when that pastness is itself so recent. The archive thus becomes, in works like Ernst’s, a term of specifically philosophical or at least theoretical import, therefore a challenge to historiography. In the work of another Berlin theorist of archives, Knut Ebeling, archives are raised to an even more grandiose level, becoming the conditio sine qua non of that now familiar and well-worn whipping boy of deconstruction—Occidental metaphysics. Ebeling’s claims may seem too huge to substantiate, to put it mildly;39 in another of his recent books, Wilde Archäologien, he has explicitly contrasted what he calls metaphorical disciplines such as media archaeology with more traditional ones.40 But there are also, however, significant philosophical objections even to Ernst’s hardware-centered “cold look” (as Ernst and his populizer Jussi Parikka like to style it).41 The idea that the function of computers can be localized in their mechanical hardware has been severely criticized by philosophers in precisely the camp where one might expect most sympathy with “hard” or “cold” functionalism, namely that of analytic philosophy. As Saul Kripke, one of the most forceful critics of this kind of functionalism (often associated with the work of Jerry Fodor), put it: “The machine as physical object is of value only if the intended function”—in our case, archival storage of history—“can somehow be read off from the physical object alone.”42 This position of Kripke’s implies, according to one of his commentators, that “what program state a given physical state realizes or embodies depends on what program the physical device is construed or interpreted as realizing or embodying.”43 Hardware, pace Ernst, offers no guaranteed way out of the inescapability of hermeneutical software.

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We have thus two main currents of thinking about the archive: Ernst’s Foucauldian perspective, insisting, against the narrative understanding of historiography, on the discontinuities of material media technology, which has—like Kittler—rhetoric and language as its blind spot;44 and archival speculation derived from Derrida’s Mal d’archive, which (like Luhmann) tends to marginalize materialities of communication.45 (Derrida does insist on the need for external means to support memory—what he calls hypomnemata—but his mentions of email and the Internet seem oddly unconnected to his main argument,46 which in typical fashion simply maps the standard deconstructive double bind onto the archive.) Herman Rapaport neatly sums up the difference between these two perspectives: “Where there is regularity and efficiency in Foucault’s archive, there is trauma in Derrida’s.”47 If Foucault’s archive is a suprapersonal dispositive, Derrida’s is inseparable from psychoanalysis; both these dimensions are relevant to understanding Wolf and DEFA. The two aspects of the archive may in fact be linked to each other.48 On the one hand, Wolf’s films are caught at a time of historical media transition that Ernst has pinpointed, from older archival technologies of storage (Speicherung), with which the GDR state was inexorably linked, to those of transmission (Übertragung)—meaning television and after it, digitalization and the Internet. The films thematize this explicitly at several key moments: Manfred’s cold, alienating apartment in Der geteilte Himmel’s West Berlin prominently features a television set, and the loss of memory noted in Der nackte Mann auf dem Sportplatz is also linked to television. The shift in DEFA film from older, highly dramatized narratives of antifascism to the looser stories of “documentary fiction films” of Alltag and Gegenwart in the late 1960s and early 1970s—such as Lothar Warnecke’s Dr. med. Sommer II (1970) and Egon Günther’s Der Dritte (Her Third, 1972)—was inseparable from television. Foucault himself noted the medial discrepancy between East and West Germany in an interview subsequent to his Berlin visit in 1977: for him, the West was tied to “discourse production,” the East to “discourse repression”49— which we may respectively correlate to Elsaesser’s historical imaginary and the archive. On the other hand, these films must be linked to a traumatic “archive” in Derrida’s sense, that of a specific historical trauma, and a particular paternity and family narrative. “. . . every archive, we will draw some inferences from this, is at once institutive and conservative. [. . .] It has the force of law, of a law which is the law of the house (oikos), of the house as place, domicile, family, lineage, or institution.”50 Derrida is referring to the house of Freud, with its wars of succession (Anna versus the heretics), but this idea of a law of the house could apply just as well to the house of Wolf, of Friedrich, Markus, and Konrad, a story partly told in the unfilmed script of Die Troika. Central to this law and this

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succession is the relation of Konrad Wolf to his father, filmed in the enigmatic form of Professor Mamlock, but much larger in its implications: one need only recall that the filmmaker was “named after” the protagonist of his father’s play about Germany’s Reformation Peasant Wars, Der arme Konrad; even late in life, other DEFA associates continued to refer to him by this moniker.51 Friedrich Wolf was, as a father, at once powerful (Jacobsen and Aurich refer to him at one point as “omnipresent” due to his strict regulation of family life),52 yet also frequently physically absent, and also frighteningly threatened at the time of Stalin’s Terror, when he had to flee to Western Europe to escape arrest. That the father of Konrad Wolf’s best friend Lothar Wloch was arrested and executed during the Terror could only have sharpened this sense of fear and vulnerability. Yet Wolf seems not to have worked through this trauma, at least not until near the end of his life, with the unfilmed autobiographical project of Die Troika. It is not hard to imagine the formation of what Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok referred to as a “crypt” within the younger man. (The crypt is a buried trauma, inaccessible to conscious thought, passed on from one generation to another, and not worked through by anything like Freud’s mourning process.)53 We may even speculate that the complexity of the father relation in Wolf led to a kind of splitting of the ego in defense—between Stalin and Moses, as it were, or between the heroic Soviet figure of Chapaev, adored by the young Wolf, and a father who was in reality extremely vulnerable, and whose literary career went into eclipse after 1945. Lacking memoirs by Wolf himself, we can only construe what Wolf’s childhood was like via sideways glances at the memoirs of close associates from his childhood, such as George, Markuscha, and Victor Fischer.54 The pattern, common to many on the Left in the 1930s, of “I know, but all the same . . .” is in fact the psychoanalytic formula of the fetishist, transposed from the denial of castration to “I know Stalin is a murderer, but all the same we must stand with him against Fascism.”55 Is it possible that the heroism of Chapaev was cathected as a kind of screen memory (Deckerinnerung) to block off the intolerable fear experienced by those who lived through the period of Stalin’s Great Terror? In this complex inner position, Wolf is kin to Freud’s most famous patient, the Wolf-Man Sergei Pankeieff, a person also linguistically split between Russian and German. Without presuming to determine which variant of the archive—the material basis or the traumatic experience—came first or had causal priority, we could see these two aspects as linked to each other via a Möbius strip where inside and outside (Imaginary and Symbolic) run into each other. (The figure was one of Lacan’s preferred intuitive illustrations of the structure of subjectivity, and was then taken up by Thomas Elsaesser as a model for how social history and psychoanalysis informed each other in Weimar film.) Seen through this double bind, Wolf’s films appear as both

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pulled backward toward the authority of the GDR’s archive—its ponderous apparatus of statism and surveillance, which functioned (like the archive in Ernst’s view) as a Schmittian katechon56 to postpone the threat of chaos unleashed by television and by the crumbling of state authority—and also pushing forward toward a loosening of those bonds. The dimension of archival materiality so central to Ernst may in fact prove less crucial here than that of trauma. More research needs to be done on the way film archives, as material repositories of memory, have functioned in national film cultures.57 In the meantime, we need to keep in mind what “cultural technologies” help us construe material archives as significant. Ernst acknowledges as much himself: after insisting on the need to investigate the hardware that stores archives, he adds: “Umgekehrt bedürfen Magazine, Regale und Speicher ganz offenbar des Begriffs der Kultur als Ausrichtung (Vektor, Sinn), um diskursiv mobilisiert—oder überhaupt erst mobilgemacht—werden zu können.”58 (Conversely, storehouses, shelves, and magazines evidently need the concept of culture as direction [vector, meaning] in order to be discursively mobilized—or made mobile at all.) This linkage of hard- with software he calls either a “Bruchstelle” or a “Schnittstelle,” the German term for interface, “Die vorliegende Arbeit kreist daher um die Schnittstellen zwischen der symbolischen, d. h. alphanumerisch strukturierten Gedächtnisinfrastruktur und dem imaginären Diskurs des Nationalen, und um die Momente, in denen das Imaginäre von Denkmälern auf das Symbolische des Archivs als Begründung ihrer Referenz verweist.”59 (The present work thus circles around interfaces between the symbolic, that is alphanumerically structured infrastructure of memory, and the imaginary discourse of the national, and around the moments in which the Imaginary of monuments points to the Symbolic of the archive as the foundation of their reference.) The master narrative of antifascism, for instance, would be a good example of such an “imaginary discourse,” with its “monuments,” and also of a Foucauldian “archive” (a condition of enunciation). The generic template of conversion narrative discussed in my analysis in chapter 3 of Lissy is a good example of this; so are the key DEFA genres of antifascism and Gegenwartsfilm that will be discussed here. Genre as narrative program is thus the “vector” that “discursively mobilizes” (to refer back to Ernst’s terms) the archive as latent storage technology. For Foucault, the archive consisted of a “system of discursivity, in the enunciative possibilities and impossibilities that it lays down”; thus Jameson sees genre criticism as “a reconstruction of the conditions of possibility of a given work or formal practice.”60 Here, too, at Ernst’s Schnittstelle, or interface, is where one might link up to Elsaesser’s familiar notion of a “historical imaginary,” which he himself has begun to apply to DEFA and to Wolf.61 However, caution is in order here. Elsaesser’s model—of a “cultural model of production”62 encouraging the formation of a “historical

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imaginary”—is in fact not entirely transferable to the GDR. For it is inseparable from the specific medial coupling with television that was so characteristic of the FRG and of New German Cinema, of a late-modern, information-driven society where the state played much less of a central function than earlier. Elsaesser’s idea of the “historical imaginary” is itself a notion typical of his generation, who were born in the 1940s (other instances would be Theweleit’s male fantasies, Huyssen’s reading of postmodernism, or Susanne Zantop’s colonial fantasies), and related to the 1968 slogan of “l’imagination au pouvoir”; all of this was itself inseparable from the growing power of television.63 This is why Elsaesser, in one of his earliest uses of the term “historical imaginary,” argued that both Fassbinder and Syberberg, in their working through the Nazi past: have, on the immoderate scale characteristic of the New German Cinema, found in the [Nazi] regime’s use of radio as technology and as machine of social control a way of locating the present situation of the commercial film industry and state-sponsored German culture; and they have found in it a metaphor for the medium that would in time displace radio as well as the cinema, namely television. They agree that the cinema can deal with history only when and where history itself has acquired an imaginary dimension, where the disjunction between sign and referent is so radical that history turns on a problem of representation, and fascism emerges as a question of subjectivity within image and discourse (of power, of desire, of fetish objects and commodities) rather than one of causality and determinants for a period, a subject, a nation.64

By contrast, GDR television was, in Henning Wrage’s phrase, “the medium of the fathers”65—of the “mistrustful generation” of the elders that retained power until the GDR’s demise, and remained bound to the conservative, norm- and value-driven idea of “culture” typical of the Kulturbund. A cultural model of production in Elsaesser’s sense, and a freefloating or circulating historical imaginary, were not possible in a society dominated rather by a political (statist) model of production, and where historical films had to satisfy a notion of historical “truthfulness” determined by Party and academics (Lacan’s “discourse of the university”). This went hand in hand with another crucial difference, that between West Germany’s “fatherless society” (Mitscherlich) and the East’s heavy paternal dominance. The medial equivalent for this model was an aesthetic driven—in contrast to Elsaesser’s reading of Fassbinder as centered on seeing and being seen66—by voice more than gaze. Where Fassbinder’s heroines and heroes insist voyeuristically on seeing, or exhibitionistically on being seen, Wolf’s figures consistently downplay the gaze in favor of speech. This may ultimately be traced back to the importance of radio in his

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childhood and youth. But music is important for Einmal ist keinmal, Genesung (Beethoven’s Appassionata), Lissy (the repetitions of “Donna Clara”), and Professor Mamlock (Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony), or in the final montage sequence in Goya; voice-over as tutor-instance67 plays a key role in Lissy, Sonnensucher, Professor Mamlock, and Der geteilte Himmel, as for Ich war neunzehn; Genesung and Mama, ich lebe began as Hörspiele. Vision repeatedly fails to take place in Wolf, whether when Lutz strips for Baier in Sonnensucher and is told to put her blouse back on, or when Sunny fails to hold the attention of her audience, or even of Ralph. At one point Sunny says to Ralph, “You look through me as if through a window.” Over and over in Ich war neunzehn, Gregor’s self-definition happens through sound, not through sight: he plays the role of a loudspeaker voice at the front, hums the Russian war song Katyusha to himself in the van, and hears his mother’s voice reproaching him when he is drunk. By contrast, scenes dominated by vision are characterized by disbelief or misunderstanding: Gregor cannot recognize his father’s old comrade at Sanssouci, and is misrecognized by a blind German soldier as a comrade in arms; when, still buttoning up his collar, he is confronted by a German girl in Bernau seeking shelter in the Kommandatura, the scene (of seeing and being seen) conveys a sense of awkward embarrassment, not of Fassbinder’s voyeuristic or exhibitionistic power. The Imaginary, in Wolf, is most often subordinated to an aurally and orally mediated Symbolic of the Word, mediator less of present power than of absent memory and of a memorized text of history. (Even more characteristic, for Wolf, are the silences of the voice, whether his own as a director—often remarked upon by his actors—or that of the protagonists themselves; these telling silences are the polar opposite of Fassbinder’s melodramatic excess, and could be the subject of a whole separate essay.68) This is why in several discussions of films in this book—including Professor Mamlock and Der geteilte Himmel—we will need to pay special attention to their soundtracks, which can be as important in articulating spectator (or listener) positions as are the images. Thus also the relation of Wolf’s films to the viewer is different from that of Fassbinder’s: where, in the latter, visual identification dominates—along the lines of Mulvey’s classic model—in Wolf, identification may be less important than introjection or incorporation (in Abraham and Torok’s sense). Wolf’s own subjectivity was a literally “cryptic” one, due to the hidden crypt of Stalinist trauma at its center; so, too, we may surmise, was that of GDR viewers, due to the official state ideology that they were the victors of history. Wolf cannot therefore “represent” the GDR in the same way that—for Elsaesser—Fassbinder could, with all ambivalence, represent the FRG. His films tend rather to “represent” (ex negativo) a hollow central absence than a flamboyantly staged visual presence. They do so through the mode of allegory, which is the representational form taken here by the paternal crypt.

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Allegories of History From Benjamin’s melancholy allegories of natural history to De Man’s allegories of unreadable instability of meaning, allegory has become so central to modernism as to be virtually identical with it; recognizing an allegorical dimension to an artwork becomes thus a condition of the latter’s modernity. Both these variants of allegory may be relevant to Wolf’s films. Like Murnau, he was “ein Melancholiker des Films.”69 Early and late photographs of him, whether as a young soldier during the war, or in his last years, show him with head in hand, gaze lowered or off in the distance, in the gesture Benjamin saw as typical of Kafka.70 In the films, allegory may take either a narrative form—that of the parable, in Goya, Der nackte Mann auf dem Sportplatz, or Solo Sunny—or a visual one—that of the natural landscape in Ich war neunzehn and Mama, ich lebe. In the landscape allegory of Ich war neunzehn, in particular, emblematic natural images comment on and are commented on by the narrator’s remembering voice: the ominous, lowering facelessness of the Oder River, on which a hanged deserter floats, or the tree-lined chaussees so typical of the Central and Eastern European landscape, after which Peter Huchel titled a similarly allegorical poem of wartime remembrance: Erwürgete Abendrote Stürzender Zeit! Chausseen. Chausseen. Kreuzwege der Flucht. Wagenspuren über den Acker, Der mit den Augen Erschlagener Pferde Den brennenden Himmel sah.71 [Strangled dusks Of falling time! Alleys. Alleys. Crossroads of flight. Wagon traces over the field, Which with the eyes Of murdered horses Saw the burning sky.]

Johannes Bobrowski, too, saw similar landscapes as a soldier in the East; Trakl’s poems of the First World War are an obvious ancestor. But the ultimate predecessor for such allegorical landscapes is the poetry of Hölderlin. In the latter’s late poems, Anselm Haverkamp, drawing on the aforementioned traditions of modernist allegorical interpretation, found a “destroyed eschatology” which “is found archivized” within their ruined

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metaphors.72 Haverkamp, too, links this allegory to a split and a crypt within the subject’s ego, referring to Abraham and Torok (20), and he specifies Hölderlin’s allegory as a failure of mythopoiesis, of epic (48–49). In Wolf’s case, the allegorical brokenness would be linked to the inability to tell the triumphal narrative of antifascism, despite the imperative to do so. One might even think of specific lines of “Mnemosyne,” in relation to Gregor Hecker’s speechless disbelief and shock at what he sees: Lang ist Die Zeit, es ereignet sich aber Das Wahre. Wie aber Liebes? [. . .] Ein Zeichen sind wir, deutungslos, Schmerzlos sind wir und haben fast Die Sprache in der Fremde verloren.73 [Long is The time, there happens however The true. But how something dear? We are a sign, without interpretation, We are painless and have nearly Lost our tongue in exile.]

Faced with this strange emptiness of the flat, swampy Oder basin, Gregor Hecker becomes kin to the protagonists of Deleuze’s postwar time-images: In Europe, the post-war period has greatly increased the situations which we no longer know how to react to, in spaces which we no longer know how to describe. There were “any spaces whatever,” deserted but inhabited, disused warehouses, waste ground, cities in the course of demolition or reconstruction. And in these any-spaceswhatever a new race of characters was stirring, a kind of mutant: they saw rather than acted; they were seers.74

The ultimate allegory, however, would be Wolf’s unfilmed final project Die Troika, a film that, like Mama, ich lebe, was meant to take a historical photograph of three men as its point of departure.75 But not only are the three men in the photograph—Wolf himself and his two best childhood friends, Lothar Wloch and Victor Fischer—allegories for three nations involved in the Second World War (the USSR, Germany, and the

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United States), but these representations are also multiply (metonymically) displaced, making the image into something of a Vexierbild or picture puzzle. The autobiographical figure whom Wolf, in his notes for a script, called “der Russe,” meaning himself, referred to a half-Jewish German. The German, Lothar Wloch, would himself be multiply displaced, from a Communist family in Moscow to a Luftwaffe pilot on the other side, and then to a West Berliner on the other side of the Wall from Wolf. The “American,” Fischer, was the son of leftist fellow travelers or Soviet sympathizers. When Wolf and Wloch reunited for another photo opportunity in the 1970s in New York, Victor Fischer’s place was taken by his brother George, who had moved from his early Stalinism, via 1950s antiCommunism, to a New Left position in the 1960s, a Left position distinct from that of the USSR. Finally, Wloch, as a German, also represented a part of Wolf as well. In his notes Wolf constantly referred to Wloch as the Mittelmann, the Zugpferd, without whom the “troika” would come apart.76 Yet it was Wolf who was most often in the role of “mediator” in his own life, whether between Russian and German cultures, or between individual artists and the State. Arguably, his close friendship with the other two men took up some of the affect he could attach less easily to his often-absent and imposing father. It was the sudden and early death of Lothar Wloch in 1975 that reopened the question of Wolf’s own childhood for him—as if this death repeated the disappearance of Wloch’s father on July 27, 1937, when Stalin’s terror came frighteningly close to Wolf’s own family. The difficulty of unraveling the various strands of Wolf’s formative memories is conditioned by more than his own biography. In the latter, National Socialism and Stalinism interweave and interfere in far stranger loops than Elsaesser’s (or Lacan’s) Mobius strip, for the memories of the two have taken very different forms; the mourning process for victims of Stalin is not only incomplete but also less clearly articulated than that for the Holocaust.77 This gives the memory of Stalinism a quality of latency or spectrality, leaving Eastern European and Russian culture “haunted by its unburied past,” as Alexander Etkind has written. Etkind elaborates further, “The very concept of postmemory is not easily applicable to this situation because, strictly speaking, this is not yet a postmemory. Transforming time in a way that is typical for the posttraumatic condition, the mourned and dreadful loss, the subject of remembrance, continues into the present and shapes the future.”78 Put otherwise: the ongoing division of East and West—made only sharper by the return after 1989 of authoritarian regimes in the former, and now in the latter as well—means also a split in how to remember the catastrophic past of the twentieth century, “We may say that the same shadow line that today divides the landscape of European memory also divided the memory of the two German states.”79 The metaphor of the

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shadow line brings one back to an early modernist novel written (by an author born in Poland, but writing in English) during the First World War, in which the figure refers not to a spatial but to a temporal division, between boyhood and manhood. Conrad’s narrator is looking back from a position later in life at his early years: One goes on recognizing the landmarks of the predecessors, excited, amused, taking the hard luck and the good luck together—the kicks and the half-pence, as the saying is—the picturesque common lot that holds so many possibilities for the deserving or perhaps for the lucky. Yes. One goes on. And the time, too, goes on—till one perceives ahead a shadow-line warning one that the region of early youth, too, must be left behind.80

Konrad Wolf crossed this shadow line at the latest as a teenager during the war, and perhaps even earlier, during the Terror, when he was only twelve. Transposed onto the geographic and linguistic difference between Russia and Germany, and onto the difference of socialism and fascism, it is the subject of Ich war neunzehn, and informs much of his other work as well, since the experience of meeting it is not restricted to youth: Walter can cross it as a fully grown man in Sterne, and Professor Mamlock encounters it too late in his life to make the crossing; the hopeful close of Der geteilte Himmel shows Rita crossing the line from mourning for Manfred, the personification of Germany’s tormented past, into an as-yet-unspecified future. The shadow line thus emerges as the central chronotope of Wolf’s entire work: it is the allegorical cipher by which an unnameable crypt is expressed. The questions—interpretative, ethical, or political—posed by this encounter, which Wolf himself could never entirely answer, although he had the artistic and ethical integrity to give oblique, ciphered form to them in his films, remain still uncomfortably open today, as we move into a shadowy territory haunted not only by the specters of Marx, but also those of capital. In 1977, discussing the generational differences among the viewers of Mama, ich lebe, Wolf insisted that the younger generation be allowed to form its own views and not be treated like a child by know-it-all elders— by the state and its “mistrustful patriarchs,” “Auch käme es einer Bevormundung gleich, wenn der Jugend politisch-ideologische Informationen immer gleich mitgeliefert werden müssten, weil sie sonst angeblich nicht in der Lage sei, einen Film richtig zu bewerten oder zu begreifen. Das ist ein Zeichen für die mangelndes Vertrauen in die Wirkungsmöglichkeit des Films. [. . .]” (it would be patronizing if young people always had to have political-ideological information immediately delivered to them [with films], because they supposedly wouldn’t be capable of understanding or evaluating a film correctly otherwise. That is a sign of inadequate confidence in the effective possibilities of film).

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He went on to quote approvingly the comments of a young girl who had talked back to those elders during a public discussion of one of his own films, “Sie müssen uns doch zubilligen, dass wir aus einem Film, wenn er wahrhaftig ist, wenn wir ihn als ehrlich empfinden, wenn er für jeden etwas persönlich bedeutet, Antworten finden, die nicht vorgekaut werden. Insofern ist meine Aufnahme eines solchen Films anders als die Ihre.”81 (You must allow that if a film is truthful, if we feel it to be honest, if it means something personal for everyone, that we find answers from it that are not pre-digested. Thus my reception of such a film is different from yours.) Not only was Wolf’s advice not heeded by GDR or DEFA authorities, but to this day there is still a tendency among some to act as the keepers of a certain DEFA orthodoxy, that is, of its correct (“pre-digested”) interpretation.82 In this book I will take courage from Wolf’s own belief in the openness of filmic meaning, even when I must sometimes criticize him.

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1: Einmal ist keinmal (1955)

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INMAL IST KEINMAL,

one of the few Heimatfilme ever made in the GDR, was not only Konrad Wolf’s first film but also his diploma film for the State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow. Wolf had not originally planned to film this script, which is admittedly in a genre and a style one would not associate with this director, best known for antifascist films such as Ich war neunzehn and Sterne. His original idea for a screenplay, titled “Weg in die Heimat,” and based on a sketch written originally in Russian, dealt with a main character who, like both Wolf himself and his later protagonist Gregor Hecker, is caught between the Soviet Union and Germany. This proposal was rejected by the Hauptverwaltung Film of the Kulturministerium der DDR, and Wolf ended up with the scenario we now know. Yet the thematics of a return to Heimat remain, if displaced from the original difference USSR-Germany to that of FRG and GDR. Einmal ist keinmal tells the story of composer Peter Wesely, who is on a visit to his East German uncle in the Saxon town Klingenthal (known for its production of musical instruments), and falls in love with Anna, a worker in an accordion factory and an amateur musician herself. Peter is tired of having to play mechanical, Americanized commercial “Boogie-Woogie” to earn his bread in the West, and thus the traditional folk musical culture of the East (coded as authentic, natural, and healthy) is a relief to him. He stays at first with his uncle Edeltanne in Klingenthal, where he is soon asked to compose a variety of different pieces: one for the accordion factory, for orchestra and accordion, one for his uncle’s folk ensemble, and one for a youthful Schlager group. At first he resists the offer to write a Schlager, incurring Anna’s displeasure; that his accordion piece is written for another woman, a virtuoso named Marie Alvert, also makes Anna jealous. Finally, however, all these stock-comic obstacles to his love are overcome, and Peter’s composition for accordion, solo voice, and orchestra, incorporating local folk music, is sung by Anna herself, who is reconciled with Peter at the end. The film is not only a Heimatfilm, full of lush natural scenery shot in Agfacolor—the GDR film plant at Wolfen had not yet lost its trademark to the West and rebaptized itself as ORWO—but also a musical comedy with fairy-tale elements. Johannes von Moltke has remarked on the “pragmatic permeability” of the Heimatfilm genre to other neighboring genres, including the musical;1 I will return to this question of generic mixing again later.

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As several commentators have briefly noted, the East German Heimat is, however, seen here through a very Soviet lens, namely through generic formulae Wolf borrowed wholesale from Grigorii Alexandrov’s popular Stalinist musicals of the 1930s, Happy Fellows and Volga-Volga. Wolf’s biographers Jacobsen and Aurich feel obliged to say of this film that the stereotypy of its genre and its image of Germany “very much recalls UFA film,”2 but this explains only part of the film’s lineage. (The director had spent the years 1933 to 1945 in Moscow, and none of his coworkers, neither cameraman Werner Bergman, nor composer Kochan, nor set designer Alfred Tolle, nor scriptwriter Paul Wiene, had ever worked for UFA.) The homage to Alexandrov may be traced even in the name of the main character, Peter Wesely, whose last name, which means “happy” in Russian, may be a punning reference to the Russian title of Happy Fellows, Vesyolaya Rebyata. As Peter Hoff commented, the folk song Einmal ist keinmal, from which the film takes its title, sounds rather more Russian than German in its two-part harmonization. But there are much more detailed correspondences as well. Like Alexandrov’s musicals, Wolf’s film features a complete operetta overture by Günter Kochan, one of Hanns Eisler’s Meisterstudenten; Kochan does not, however, parody and pastiche other established composers as did Alexandrov’s composer Isak Dunayevskii. Like Alexandrov’s heroine Lyubov Orlova, Wolf’s main character talks directly to the camera and the audience. In the works of both Wolf and his predecessor, one of the theme songs is “stolen” from its composer and badly played by a rival—who is in Wolf’s case Peter’s uncle Edeltanne, a classic senex iratus (or alazon, angry father) in the terms of comedy. In both also, the female singing lead refuses at a dramatically crucial point to sing, only to give in at the end. Wolf’s beginning and ending his film with a kiss can also be found in his Soviet predecessor and teacher. Alexandrov’s films, too, had centrally featured long shots of the Russian landscape, encouraging a Heimat-like popular identification on the part of the spectators, in accordance with Stalin’s catchword of “socialism in one country.” All these films also build their narratives around a central tension between popular and classical music traditions, something already found in the American musical, and that Alexandrov had simply transplanted into a Soviet context. In Alexandrov and Wolf, the man is associated with the cultural authority of classical music, the woman with the popular—unlike American musicals, where women like Jeannette MacDonald are often the repositories of high musical tastes. Thus the second irony of Wolf’s Russified East German Heimat is that the synthetic conventions of the Soviet musical were themselves borrowed from New Deal America, which Alexandrov, together with Eisenstein, had visited before making his musicals. Heimat, in Wolf’s GDR, is viewed through a double mirror or lens of two rival cinematic superpowers.

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There are also marked dissimilarities between Alexandrov and his former student. Whereas Alexandrov’s musicals fall into Rick Altman’s category of the backstage or show musical,3 culminating in a grand onstage spectacle of singing and dancing wherein the entire community, including the viewing public, is united, Wolf ’s fits more into that of the folk musical. Wolf ’s film also lacks the anti-bureaucratic satire of Alexandrov, who made fun of pompous state functionaries such as Volga-Volga’s Byvalov. Nor is there, in Wolf, the kind of social mobility implied by Alexandrov’s musicals, where the provincial talent of self-made men and women may—just as in depression-era American films—achieve recognition in the cultured metropolis.4 In Einmal ist keinmal, much as in Slatan Dudow’s musical entertainment film Verwirrung der Liebe of a few years later, class differences are reinforced, not transcended, and the guiding power of intellectuals and high culture never really put in question. Similarly, the possible connection of musical performance and labor is elided in Wolf ’s film. Peter Wesely has no interest in the tour that is offered to him of the Volkseigener Betrieb (state-owned company) the Klingenthal accordion factory, and we never see any industrial production of instruments taking place there. This is related to the depiction of Klingenthal as a picturesquely idyllic village, when the real Klingenthal had in fact been an industrial center since the takeoff of factory mass-production of musical instruments there in the mid-nineteenth century, exporting to a global market that would only be closed off by the Soviets after 1945. (The accordion, so central to Wolf ’s film, is also a modern invention, despite its acquired folksy aura.) Ironically, it was the Wende, when the Treuhand privatization5 closed its factories and its population fell, that finally made Klingenthal revert to the touristic provincial idyll depicted in Einmal ist keinmal. The most significant difference from Alexandrov and his Hollywood models lies in the musical politics of Wolf’s film. Whereas Alexandrov’s music ultimately synthesizes catchy folk or popular melodies with the high-culture apparatus of the symphonic orchestra, the narrative of Einmal ist keinmal takes a more circuitous route, navigating erratically between folk, pop, and classical music. Near the opening of the film, Peter Wesely addresses the camera straight-on to tell the viewer that he has come to the East to escape the nightmare of endless boogie-woogie playing in the West. In this, he is a straight mouthpiece for official GDR musical politics. Einmal ist keinmal documents quite accurately the musical-political position of the state in the years between the suppressed workers’ uprising of June 17, 1953 and the youth riots of 1956. As we can read in Uta Poiger, the FDJ’s magazine Junge Generation pleaded, in the wake of June 1953, for the development of a GDR-specific Unterhaltungskultur (entertainment culture). Against the threat of rock ’n’ roll

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Figure 1.1. Composer Peter Weselin (Horst Drinda) performs for Anna. ©DEFA-Stiftung/Herbert Kroiss.

and boogie-woogie, folk dances, the waltz, and even the foxtrot would be mobilized in defense of national Kultur.6 Accordingly, although Peter initially resists the request of Anna and her friends—a group of “happy fellows” led by a very young Hilmar Thate—for a popular song, he finally acquiesces and pens a foxtrot to the words “Anna, Anna, Dein Charakter,” to which he swing-dances with Anna on the town square before the performance of his folk-based, but still classical, Rhapsodie for voice and full orchestra. This dance is very much led by Peter the man, so that there are none of the gender-destabilizing undertones Poiger detected in popular-music dance styles of the 1950s. It is also Peter’s answer to Anna’s earlier attempt to teach him how to dance a folksy polka, about which he as an urban intellectual Wessi is less than enthusiastic. The foxtrot is, by the way, an interesting transitional dance: in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, foxtrot-mania of foxtrotschina was still suspect, yet after 1945 there were attempts at classifying new rock forms of dancing as a foxtrot. Along with Peter’s foxtrot, however, he also composes a rather sentimental waltz, also about Anna, including the words Ich seh’ Dich nur im Traum. He also includes a symphonic rhapsody, which tries to have its popular cake and eat it classically too, blending a vocal solo for Anna based on the local folksong Einmal ist keinmal with tongue-in-cheek references to Anna’s foxtrot, and a miniature accordion concerto for a glamorous visiting Frenchwoman who is Anna’s unsuspecting rival. The result

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is a curious form of modern musical Biedermeier, the potpourri or medley, which Adorno saw as kin to the “genre postcards” and “miniature landscapes” of the 1820s, assembling stock motifs and themes in what he called a Zusammenlegspiel or “picture puzzle.”7 Clearly, one of the reasons why this film never had the box-office success of Alexandrov is the complexity of its musical narrative. Another is that the musical climax of the film does not, as mentioned, consist in a grand song-and-dance number uniting Peter, Anna, and the happy utopian Gemeinschaft (community) of socialism in one country (or socialism in one Provinznest). Dance and music split apart in Wolf’s film: dance remains popular, and musical performance classical. The climax of the film, where Peter’s Rhapsodie is performed on Klingenthal’s Marktplatz, is a very conventional classical concert, with a hushed audience listening in reverent silence, not participating or singing along. Although the sociology of the symphony under socialism has not been written, I would speculate that the orchestra in the GDR was very much an organ of statism. Adorno’s Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie had already suggested that “das schlagende Prinzip der Symphonik, jene Macht der Integration, die im Wiener Klassizismus die Menschheit meinte, wird zum Vorbild des integralen Staats” (the forceful principle of symphonism, that power of integration that, for Viennese classicism, meant humanity, becomes the model of the integral state).8 In this he had been anticipated by an important and still neglected musicsociological predecessor, Paul Bekker. We can quote now from Bekker’s The Story of the Orchestra, published in 1936 in exile from the Nazis in New York: “The story of the orchestra resembles an old family chronicle, or, more exactly, the story of the rivalry among a large number of old families. Eventually they unite for a common aim and the establishment of regular affairs of state.”9 Bekker, who anticipated by nearly half a century Adorno’s linkage of Mahler to socialist politics, here sees the orchestra as something like the end of the ancien régime. In the GDR, however, it would also have to be the embodiment of the humanistisches Erbe (humanistic legacy), that blend of the high and middle that was officially encouraged by GDR music politics right up until the end, as music sociologies written by Christian Kaden and Peter Spahn in the mid-1980s testify. In the 1950s the GDR state’s musical politics included Eisler’s failed project of a new modernist Faust opera, or Dessau and Brecht’s censored Lukullus oratorio. Yet as Toby Thacker has recently written, “by 1955, the GDR’s attempts to construct a distinctive, German, socialist musical culture had largely failed”;10 only later, in the 1960s and 1970s, would a freer and less officially regulated GDR musical subculture emerge. Coincidentally, the simultaneous effort to create a GDR-specific touristic Heimat culture also petered out by the end of the 1950s.11 Einmal ist keinmal may be seen as part of these state-sponsored initiatives at fostering a GDR music culture and a culture of tourism. Even the neoclassical

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moderate modernity of the film’s music is part and parcel of this project. In Jost Hermand’s words, the film’s composer Günter Kochan was, with Siegfried Matthus, one of the composers who [quote] “enjoyed the highest esteem of the SED.”12 In Konrad Wolf’s film, however, Peter Wesely does not seem to share this high esteem, even though he is the ostensible composer of the Rhapsodie. After staying for a while in the audience, he notices that Anna has left the stage after her solo and runs off in hot pursuit of her, finding her in the idyllic natural surroundings where he had received his first kiss from her at the beginning of the film. Now he is no longer a passive male Sleeping Beauty kissed by the bold Heimatmädchen and can make good on the promise implied in their first kiss, undoing the ephemerality of Einmal ist keinmal with a definitive repetition of the opening, taking proper manly charge of the kiss at last. The very last shot of the film, after the couple’s kiss, is a dreamy cloud formation in the heavens above Klingenthal, a cinematic transposition of a Romantic image familiar from Eichendorff. The idea of the couple’s absence from the final apotheosis is found in Alexandrov as well, yet in the Soviet films the couple reunites with the collective for a concluding song. Not so in Wolf, whose filmic conclusion splits the Utopian socialist community of singing and dancing apart, into the intimacy and Innerlichkeit (inwardness) of traditional German Naturlyrik and romantic love on the one hand, and the ideological state apparatus of the official symphony orchestra on the other. This opposition, as we know since Friedrich Kittler’s Aufschreibesysteme, was one of secret complementarity. “The exclusion of women from state power and its bureaucratic discourses”—including in our case symphonic and monumental public discourse—“[. . .] summons women . . . to elicit discourses generally and magically to transmute them into Nature.”13 Thus Anna paradoxically realizes Peter’s dream of music-as-nature (and as love) by leaving the public space of the symphony, where romantic intimacy cannot be possible. If, as Kittler notes with regard to E. T. A. Hoffmann, “what a state servant does as a writer is not done as a bureaucrat, but is sanctioned by universal freedom” (106), this also holds true of Peter the state-servant composer, for whom the ultimate sanction of freedom must be found in Nature. All of which goes to show once again that the traditional humanistic GDR notions of culture and Bildung circa 1955 were still very much rooted in the discourse network of 1800. We may also read the film’s odd conclusion in terms of the GDR’s ambivalent relation to Heimat. As Jan Palmowski has recently argued in his book on Heimat in the GDR, the East German state at first resisted the idea, which not only evoked a suspicious Nazi past but also directly contradicted the principle of democratic centralism and the centrality of class and antifascism.14 This would explain why Einmal ist keinmal is unusual in DEFA productions of the 1950s. Yet by the 1960s the regime

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found that it needed the concept of a socialist Heimat to sustain its popular legitimacy. DEFA only managed to articulate this concept in filmic form in the 1960s, once the Berlin Wall had finally closed off the border to the West. Without closed borders, there could be no Heimat: as Palmowski puts it, “beneath every representation of Heimat in relation to the GDR lurked one crucial issue, the division of Germany.”15 The difficulty Wolf’s film has in defining itself generically, between musical, Heimatfilm, and fairy tale, which Johannes von Moltke has already noted, and its difficulties with musical politics may all be related to this larger historical context of the 1950s. So may the film’s absence of regional Volk traditions, which is most evident in a central sequence where a group of young locals haunts Peter’s aging uncle, in the form of a legendary poltergeist called the Tin Goat. This episode, with its odd mix of epic ballad references and forced slapstick, shows the limits of a state-sponsored “invention of tradition” in the 1950s GDR. Only with Ralf Kirsten’s Auf der Sonnenseite of 1961, starring Manfred Krug, was DEFA able to articulate its own particular sense of Heimat as a site of transformation and not only nostalgia. One would want to contrast the scene with Krug, sitting under a solitary tree and singing Johannes Werlin’s 1648 folksong “Es geht eine dunkle Wolk’ herein” as the camera pans over an industrial construction site, with the much more conventional scene in Einmal ist keinmal where Peter seeks inspiration for his symphonic composition in plein air, following an iconography we may trace back to the eighteenth century, as in Fragonard’s 1769 paintings of writerly inspiration or of Diderot at work.16 In Auf der Sonnenseite, Heimat is literally “assembled” from the metonymic combination of an older German lyric tradition with contemporary scenery of industrial labor: the viewer must also do the imaginative “work” of unifying the two. In Einmal ist keinmal, the intended identification with Peter as amorous bard is less sophisticated and more conventional: Peter as an intellectual with a heart represents an official cultural ideal of Bildung plus melodrama’s “natural man.” Auf der Sonnenseite also provided the social mobility Einmal ist keinmal could not, embodied moreover in a genuine star, just as Alexandrov’s musicals had. In a nutshell: Heimat DDR could not, unlike Heimat BRD, be depicted in a traditional Heimatfilm. Even in this first film though, Konrad Wolf may have been canny and self-reflexive enough to recognize this. For Einmal ist keinmal makes frequent and knowing references to Heimat as a fairy tale, almost in the spirit of Ernst Bloch. At one point Peter says of a folksong: “Das Ganze klingt so märchenhaft und doch so . . . modern.” We might be reminded of the ancestor of modern media phantasmagoria, Wagner, whose Hans Sachs says in act 2 of Die Meistersinger: “Es klang so alt und war doch so neu.” The narrative of Einmal ist keinmal makes repeated references to dreaming. At the beginning, Peter awakens from the nightmare of a

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boogie-woogie overdose only to fall out of the train into the idyll of Klingenthal, in a gag Wolf probably borrowed from a Moscow film-school viewing of Buster Keaton’s Out West (1919). There he takes a happy nap, and is awakened by Anna’s kiss. While chasing her, he is unsure if she is a dream or a reality until he hits his head on a branch, wakes up and sees the panorama of Klingenthal. Anna repeats this attempt to knock some sense into the dreaming Peter when she says, “I’ll teach you rhythm!” and tries to educate him in the polka. When Peter discovers the rhythmic foxtrot melody of “Anna, Anna, Dein Charakter,” he makes the same perfect-fourth gesture with thumb and little finger he had made when playing boogie-woogie. Anna thus allows him to have Heimat folk and international pop all in one. Later, his piano practicing will awaken Anna from a nightmare trick sequence of Peter with the French accordionist, to hear Peter in reality playing the very dance music she had earlier begged him in vain to compose (about 1ʹ06ʺ–1ʹ10ʺ in the film). Anna’s dream is here symmetrical to Peter’s opening nightmare of the West, from which he only “awakes” to fall into the dream-like idyll of Klingenthal. It is clear that Peter is playing not only to himself, but also to communicate through the wall with Anna, his muse, and perhaps also his musical unconscious. His expressions while playing tip us off to this. Thus within Peter’s improvised musical potpourri we can distinguish between first the lullaby-like folk-song of “Einmal ist keinmal,” which might put Anna gently to sleep in fantasies of nature and local security, and which is accompanied by a respectfully sublimated, dreamy expression on Peter’s face; second, the old-fashioned, paternalistic nineteenth-century waltz of “Ich seh’ Dich nur im Traum,” also inspiring to fantasy; and third, the foxtrot, “Anna, Anna, Dein Charakter,” which raps sharply through the wall to its subject like a Morse-code signal to wake her up. Again, Peter’s intent look here—as if he were following the passage of his piano sound right through the wall to his beloved—tells us how to read his music. Anna’s dream comments on Peter’s medley even more clearly. To the strains of “Ich seh’ Dich nur im Traum,” she imagines the French accordionist’s affair with Peter, then her rebelling against the rainbow and the accordion. She wakes up to the jangling, barroom sounds of her musical “character” through the wall next door. Has her request that Peter compose a dance tune for her only inadvertently opened a Pandora’s box of Westernizing pop? This might be implied by the way she uses a radio broadcast of serious orchestral music to block out Peter’s rollicking and let her go back to sleep. Finally, when Anna is shocked to see the name of the French accordionist written on Peter’s score, we hear three fateful and sonorous timpani strokes, which according to the composer were inserted at Wolf’s own request. These rhythmic blows can be correlated to the knocking of sense

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into Peter, or the rhythms of his own popular foxtrot. Dream and fairy tale run through this film like an Ariadne’s thread. We need not try to imbue Einmal ist keinmal with the integral subjectivity of an auteurist film. Part of the discursive instability and inner contradictions of this film were due to the historical conditions of its production, as noted. Thus the film as a whole is just as much of a Zusammenlegspiel or composite picture-puzzle as is its musical score. Yet we should not forget that the film’s director was thirty when he made it, a film-school graduate who had already been Maetzig’s assistant for the Thälmann films. The idea that Heimat can only be a dream and not a reality has a certain poignancy about it, especially when the director is Konrad Wolf. A little over a decade later, in Ich war neunzehn, a film that returned to the autobiographical experiences Wolf was not able to use for his cinematic debut, and that also made extensive use of landscape shots, Gregor Hecker’s friend Vadim quotes a line from Heine: Ich hatte einst ein schönes Vaterland (I once had a beautiful fatherland), which is then angrily completed by Gregor with the words: Es war ein Traum (it was a dream). As Jost Hermand has recently reminded us, “the inheritance of Heine” was very much a part of “official GDR ideology.”17 In Einmal ist keinmal, the dream is less a lost past than what Ernst Bloch (the unofficial patron saint of reform socialism) would call the Noch-Nicht (not-yet). Yet the poetics of exile are, even if more naively, already written into Wolf’s first film, even though the dream in question may be a superimposed one of a lost Russian motherland with a still-ambivalent German Heimat.

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2: Genesung (1956)

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(RECOVERY, 1956) Wolf’s second film, was based on a Hörspiel (radio play). It tells an antifascist conversion narrative, that of the happy-go-lucky Friedel Walter, a popular entertainment musician during the Third Reich, who is gradually drawn in to the anti-Nazi resistance, in part through his love for Irene Schorn (played by Karla Runkehl, who had already had an important role in Kurt Maetzig’s Schlösser und Katen [Castles and Cottages, 1957]). However, when Friedel finally finds Irene again after the war, she is already married to an older (and handicapped) antifascist, Max Kerster (Wilhelm Koch-Hooge), and Friedel must renounce his love, having only a bright professional future under socialism: he can become the doctor he only falsely claimed to be during the war, under an assumed name. The end of the film gives him amnesty for this deception and sends him off to his future prospects. Genesung thus reverses the roles often given to male and female protagonists in Wolf: the role of self-sacrificing idealist, who must renounce love in return for a happier or truer future, will be the lot of Lissy at the close of her film, Lutz at the end of Sonnensucher, and Rita at that of Der geteilte Himmel (and perhaps Sunny in the last scene of her film, although there the future is no longer political). This melodramatic close is familiar from Hollywood models such as Stella Dallas (dir. King Vidor, 1937, with Barbara Stanwyck) or Now, Voyager (dir. Irving Rapper, 1942, with Bette Davis); here, however, the sacrificial role is for a man. Friedel is, in his softness and passivity, hardly a traditional male lead in any case. The plot idea of a doctor working without proper qualifications had been tried out in West Germany in Rolf Hansen’s Die grosse Versuchung (The Great Temptation, 1952), starring Dieter Borsche and Ruth Leuwerik, as one GDR reviewer noted (Leipziger Volkszeitung, March 23 1956).1 Wolf himself was quoted in another GDR paper as saying his film did not belong to the doctors’ genre (“kein Kittelfilm,” Lausitzer Rundschau, February 25, 1956). The film is still rather formulaic, and not yet as individual a work as Wolf’s next film, Lissy, will be; to subject it to the same sort of hermeneutical interpretation one might deploy for a more developed film would thus be inappropriate. Where Genesung is interesting is precisely in its generic qualities, and it may serve as an introduction to a discussion of genre in Wolf, and in DEFA as a whole (which will also be helpful when we turn to Lissy and Sonnensucher). A fresh perspective on Wolf, and on DEFA film, will not be possible without a systematic reconsideration of ENESUNG

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Figure 2.1. Melodramatic lighting of Friedel (Wolfgang Kieling). ©DEFA-Stiftung/Rudolf Meister.

its genre system, in particular of its twin master genres, the antifascist film and film of the present (Gegenwartsfilm). In the process, Wolf’s peculiar use of melodrama—a recurring trait in his work—can be analyzed via comparison with better-known American prototypes, thereby working out suggestions made by Thomas Elsaesser and Michael Wedel in their essay on Ich war neunzehn. DEFA was not only “Hollywood behind the Wall” (as Daniela Berghahn’s title has it), and it was in dialogue as much with Soviet film traditions as with American ones, but in the case of Wolf’s early work, there are clear terms of comparison with the latter.

DEFA’s Master Genres Scholarship has long contented itself with simply reproducing the GDR’s own self-understanding through its master genres, thus blocking recognition of their internal fragility and instability. In Rick Altman’s terms, the one-sided emphasis on antifascist or present content has meant a stress on semantics at the expense of syntax; in systems-theoretical terms, a stress on hetero- rather than self-reference. The genres of antifascism and film of the present have thus continued to be viewed as mere “reflections” (Lenin’s Abbild or “copy”)2 of real existing GDR society rather than as forms and as motors or motivators of that society. Approaches informed by Alltagsgeschichte, such as Joshua Feinstein’s, have only exacerbated this

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blindness, by continuing to insist on film’s hetero-referentiality rather than its formal generic articulation. Worse still: the unquestioned assumption of these master genres’ consistency has tended to confuse what Altman called (following Todorov) “theoretical genres” with real ones.3 For the antifascist film was, just as much as official antifascism itself, a state postulate, as many historians have by now shown at length. As a state genre, antifascism formed part of the GDR’s normative self-description (what used to be called its “ideology”). Societies first develop self-descriptions with the introduction of writing.4 They then “produzieren Erzählungen für wiederholten Gebrauch und setzen bei der Erzählung voraus, dass die Erzählung bekannt ist und nur das Beiwerk, die Ausschmückung, das Geschick des Erzâhlers überraschen. So können auch Mythen über das Menschengeschlecht, den Stamm, den ersten Ahnen usw. fixiert werden, in denen die Gesellschaft in der Gesellschaft repräsentiert wird.”5 (produce narratives for repeated use and assume in the narration, that the latter is known and only the ornament or skill of the narrator will surprise. Thus myths about the human race, the tribe, the first ancestors, etc., in which society is represented in society, can be fixed) We may bring this idea up to date by adding that “seit dem Ende des 18 Jahrhundertes besetzt der Begriff der Kultur den Platz, an dem Selbstbeschreibungen reflektiert werden” (since the end of the eighteenth century, the concept of culture has occupied the place where self-descriptions [of society] are reflected)6—a formulation of especial relevance to the GDR, for whose self-understanding the “Kultur” of the Kulturbund (Cultural Association of the GDR, a mass organization created in 1945) was a founding component.7 Film would become one of the major vehicles of this cultural self-description,8 and antifascism prominent within film. But if the antifascist genre was a form of self-description, then it would follow that one should beware of taking it at face value—which would include viewing it solely in terms of its content or reference. Ed Buscombe’s cautionary comments on the Western (a genre that is close kin to antifascism, both in terms of theme and social function) are very pertinent here: “the worst way to make a western is to think of a theme and then try to transpose it into western form.” One might add: the worst way to understand it as well. Buscombe goes on: “We are not bound to make any very close connections between the western genre and historical reality. Of course there are connections. But too many discussions of these problems fall down over this point because it is usually assumed the relationship must be a direct one; that since in fact there was a West, westerns must be essentially connected with it.”9 To apply Buscombe’s criticism to DEFA film may seem a scandalous suggestion, given the referent of antifascism; yet antifascist film, too, had to seek, precisely as genre, to “mythify” its content as much as did the Western. (Alan Nothnagle’s notion of “the antifascist myth” can thus become a

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descriptive and not condemnatory term.)10 Contrary to earlier arguments that the evolution of DEFA could only lead out of the straitjacket of socialist realism to the “truthfulness” of “critical realism” (a notion defined only by its hetero-referentiality) or neorealism, Wolf was also seeking what Altman calls generification, the development of recognizable genres that could become popular. This aspect of DEFA is familiar enough to us from the Indianerfilme, and there is no reason not to see it at work in antifascist film as well. These films sought not merely to lecture the audience but to work on their emotions as well, and for this, genre formulae were necessary. Thus a pamphlet from Progress-Filmverleih11 for Genesung lists the following suggested “Werbezeilen” (advertising lines, or hooks): “Ein DEFA-Film aus unseren Tagen, der zu Herzen geht. Die fesselnde Geschichte eines jungen Medizinstudenten” (a DEFA film from our times, that goes to the heart. The gripping story of a young medical student). Like melodrama (which has been seen more as a mode than a genre), and in contradistinction to the Western, however, the antifascist film arguably never completely closed itself off as self-referential genre. (Again, this need not be taken as a pejorative judgment; as we will see with Ich war neunzehn, the complexities of antifascism can be turned to a film’s benefit.) Given the oft-noted relation between genre and nation, it is not surprising that this unwilling openness corresponds to that of the GDR as a nation.12 As a state-theoretical genre imposed from above, the antifascist film could not develop through the feedback loop of marketing and boxoffice popularity, thus could not fully assume commodity form, as film did in capitalist countries. At the same time, studios and directors were indeed concerned about the success of their films with the public, and carefully watched their audience numbers; this wish for popular success (in tension with the imperative of artistic integrity) is a topic that turns up again and again in Wolf’s interviews and statements. Altman’s description of the historical emergence of genres helps clarify this peculiarity. “As a working hypothesis, I suggest that genres arise in one of two fundamental ways: either a relatively stable set of semantic givens is developed through syntactic experimentation into a coherent and durable syntax, or an already existing syntax adopts a new set of semantic elements.”13 DEFA’s genres arguably developed via the second of Altman’s routes, using an existing syntax—chiefly those of the Western or the melodrama14—to articulate a new semantics. We can see this pattern in Die Genesung, which borrows many plot patterns from Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) or To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks, 1944) while putting them in an antifascist context (in Altman’s terms, semantics). (However, it could also be argued that DEFA developed in both of Altman’s ways; nothing in his logic forbids the simultaneity of both lines of development.) Altman goes on to specify a correlation between semantics and syntax on the one hand, and studio and audience on the other:

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Far from postulating a uniquely internal, formal progression, I would propose that the relationship between the semantic and the syntactic constitutes the very site of negotiations between Hollywood and its audience, and thus between ritual and ideological used of genre. [. . .] Whenever a lasting fit is obtained—which it is whenever a semantic genre becomes a syntactic one—it is because a common ground has been found, a region where the audience’s ritual values coincide with Hollywood’s ideological ones. (222–23)

Even the most cursory look at the wide variety of films classified as antifascist, ranging from melodramas (Genesung, Lissy, Sterne) to Westerns (Fünf Patronenhülsen [Five Cartridge Shells, Frank Beyer, 1960], Ich war neunzehn) and generic hybrids (Sonnensucher), shows the syntactic pluralism that characterized the genre. It could thus be argued that the antifascist film remained at what Altman calls the adjectival stage, without becoming substantified as a noun;15 we would thus have antifascist melodrama, antifascist Western or antifascist adventure film, rather than antifascist film tout court. (We must also consider our own historical viewing position as constitutive of genre, which corresponds to Altman’s pragmatic dimension: genres, for Altman, exist because they are viewed and understood as such, and GDR audiences would have viewed these films in a different generic fashion than we can now.) Moreover, the difficulty of making antifascist films appears to have increased over time, as is evident in a film like Mama, ich lebe, the lukewarm reception of which was a hard lesson to its director. The best of Wolf’s films were those that, like Ich war neunzehn, turned the very instability of antifascism as genre into a complex and reflexive medium, thus suggesting the individuality of auteurism.

Hollywood Precedents Genesung (1956) is very much a formulaic product. Its central antifascist conversion narrative suggests a mixture of Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942), To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks, 1944), and Magnificent Obsession (Douglas Sirk, 1954).16 Like Bogart’s Rick Blaine, Friedel Walter (played by Wolfgang Kieling, who slightly resembles Paul Henreid, Casablanca’s Victor Laszlo) must renounce his love for a woman in favor of newly found civic responsibility, although here his choice takes the form not of antifascist resistance but of studying medicine in the new GDR, which will give him greater career prospects than could the old Germany. Like Rock Hudson’s Bob Merrick in Magnificent Obsession, Friedel is at first an irresponsible playboy and dandy, only learning to become a serious and responsible man through giving medical aid to the older Max Kerster (played by Wilhelm Koch-Hooge)—as Bogart’s Harry Morgan also does for refugees in To Have and Have Not. The direct naming of

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the “magnificent obsession” in Sirk’s film by the painter Edward Randolph (Otto Kruger), obviously based on the real life figure of Norman Rockwell, is echoed by the piano-playing doctor Professor Behaim’s evocation of “die schöpferische Neugierde! Die stärkere Leidenschaft!” (the creative curiosity! The stronger passion!) to Friedel. (Behaim is played by Eduard von Winterstein, a gruffly gravel-voiced father figure not unlike those of Harry Hindemith or Hans Hardt-Harftloff in later DEFA films.) Genesung’s musical score (by Joachim Werzlau, with whom Wolf often worked) incorporates popular songs performed by Friedel, just as Max Steiner had to work non-diegetic references to “As Time Goes By” performed diegetically by Sam. Werner Bergmann’s photography gives a romantic hue to Friedel and Irene’s love not far from Arthur Edeson’s expressive chiaroscuro in Casablanca. And as in Casablanca, Genesung’s plot seems driven more by “the overall melodramatic set-up . . . than any clearly developed line of psychological reasoning.”17 That the film was developed from a successful Hörspiel (radio play) by the same authors18 may account for the rhetorical character of much of its speech, as well as for the prominent role given to music. A major difference between Genesung and its better-known American generic counterparts is the prominent role given to classical music in Friedel’s reeducation to socialist citizenship. Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 23 in F minor, Op. 57 (1804– 5), colloquially known as the Appassionata, is the embodiment of what Professor Behaim, who performs it, calls “die schöpferische Leidenschaft” (creative passion). (We will find the link between Beethoven and humanism made again in Professor Mamlock.) The film script repeatedly characterizes the appearance of this music with the words: “Gewaltig brandet die Appassionata auf” (powerfully, the Appassionata surges up),19 thereby linking the music to the heavy symbolism of repeated interpolated shots of surf crashing on a rocky shore; these sea-sounds were used as a sonic bridge between scenes in the radio play. Interestingly, a reviewer for the Sächsische Zeitung (Dresden) of February 25, 1956 (Hans Buchmayer) found the scenes with Doctor Behaim at the piano “à la 1930 melodramatisch.”20 As with Ehe im Schatten (Kurt Maetzig, 1947), UFA still cast its shadow on postwar melodrama. The role given to Professor Behaim as humanist (not Communist) father figure, and the connection between his authority and that of Beethoven, the musical embodiment of the GDR’s “humanist inheritance,” means that Friedel does not renounce his beloved for the same reasons as Rick Blaine in Casablanca. Where Rick is able to give up Ilsa once he knows she still loves him, Friedel is converted through the authority of humanistic Kultur, one that is, moreover, gender-coded. If Friedel as the young singer with guitar is feminine—prompting Behaim’s contemptuous characterization of him as “ein Arzt mit Klampfe!” (a doctor with a gee-tar!)—then manliness is linked to classical music. (This

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is a gendered connection we saw already in Einmal ist keinmal, and it is also more typical of Soviet than American musicals.) The love interest, so central to Casablanca’s enduring popularity, is here clearly subordinated to male authority and the prospects of a better career in the GDR. (That this was deliberate is made explicit in the “Stellungnahme zum Szenarium” dated March 23, 1954, and signed by “Brückner.”)21 As Joachim Werzlau put it in his reflections about composing for the film, “die Mittel der grossen musikalischen Formen” had to be used to depict “grosse Gefühle” (the means of great musical forms . . . great feelings).22 Werzlau’s recourse to orchestral sound was also technologically conditioned, because according to him, the optical sound procedure (Lichttonverfahren) used for Genesung altered the sound of the human voice, making the direct use of songs difficult.23 The score thus harks back to the grand old age of symphonic movie scores (exemplified by composers like Max Steiner and Dimitri Tiomkin), rather than the pared-down film music that would become more typical for the 1950s, and found already in Wolf’s next film, Lissy. The formulaic nature of Genesung is most evident in its main character’s lack of motivation or complexity. Unlike Wolf’s later films, such as Lissy, Genesung does not really investigate the attractiveness of Nazism. Friedel is no Nazi—in fact, he makes fun of the Nazis as “braune Mistkäfer” (brown dung-beetles) in one of his appearances as a nightclub singer. Moreover, the war hardly seems to affect him at all, so he has no real trauma to “work through” after 1945; the war scenes are quickly run through in a montage sequence (as they are also in the Hörspiel), so that Friedel seems to be just as much of a happy-go-lucky Sonntagskind (Sunday’s child) at war’s end as he was beforehand. We could see him, in this respect, as the prototype of Wolf’s many deliberately “ordinary heroes,” from Lissy to Walter to Rita to Gregor Hecker, the men in Mama, ich lebe, or even Sunny. Friedel’s passivity (usually associated with female melodrama heroines) is thus both generic and also a strategic attempt to appeal to the GDR Everyman. As with the heroes of the Bildungsroman, his ordinariness makes him exemplary. Given that the form of melodrama tends to depoliticize its contents, transposing the political and public into the private sphere—as happens in exemplary fashion in Casablanca24—how does Wolf seek to repurpose melodrama for his educatory aims? The mixture of borrowed American genres with political messages was not unknown to Soviet cinema,25 for which the “historical-revolutionary film” played a similar role to DEFA’s antifascist film.26 Accordingly, Thomas Elsaesser’s influential model of family melodrama has been stretched to apply to other film cultures as well.27 Yet just as many film scholars forgot that Propp’s similarly influential model of narrative analysis was designed specifically for the Russian folk tale (and not all stories as such),28 so a generalization of Elsaesser

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would miss the specificity of his reference to family melodrama, which is only one subclass of the genre. Unlike Soviet films of the 1950s,29 or Sirk, or, later, Fassbinder, Wolf’s films rarely center on the family even when they are melodramas. Genesung has no nuclear family; nor do Sterne or Solo Sunny; Lissy and Der geteilte Himmel do have dysfunctional bourgeois families, although the main characters’ relation to them differs from that of Sirk or Fassbinder: rather than “reconstitute the nuclear family,” as in Soviet Thaw films,30 Wolf’s heroines walk out of them, like Ibsen’s Nora at the end of A Doll’s House. The standard or received theory of the melodrama has come in for interesting criticism by Agustin Zarzosa in a recent book.31 Zarzosa is particularly sharp in his rejection of Peter Brooks’s hypothesis of a “moral occult” or “melodramatic imagination,” on which Elsaesser’s model heavily draws. As Zarzosa points out, Brooks’s argument is circular and nonfallibilistic (like many “culturalist” arguments). Brooks must postulate a lost moral order, from before the French Revolution, which then becomes almost a collective subject or actor in film and literature. Brooks’s conception is thus, as Zarzosa points out, itself melodramatic, imitating what it tries to describe: “If the melodramatist believes in the power of moral ideas, Brooks believes in an equally transcendent concept—the melodramatic imagination—that is nothing but the force of these ideas after their demise. It is as though ideas such as virtue, evil, sin and redemption could acquire power from their own impotence.” (38) Through blurring the melodramatic form of expression with causality, “Brooks collapses a manner of expression into a manner of conception” (3), and “confuses means and end. Virtue does not prove its existence by resorting to suffering; on the contrary, the suffering self identifies with virtue as a means to validate its suffering, demanding reparation for the wrongs suffered” (52). Zarzosa concludes from this both that melodrama is a mode, not a genre, and that it is one derived from “acts of exchange” (67) between characters, and from “the struggle between two conflicting systems of exchange” (70). He thus decouples melodrama from the broad notion of a “cultural imaginary” (which, for Elsaesser, would become “Germany’s historical imaginary”), and also criticizes melodrama criticism’s excessive (sic!) reliance on symptomatic mise-en-scène analysis (60). Zarzosa’s criticism is very pertinent to an attempt to grasp Wolf’s particular approach to melodrama. For clearly the kind of emotional overload offered by Sirk’s brilliantly colored and orchestrated melodramas, which were contemporary with this film (and which were then later taken up by Fassbinder), is not present here, or at least not in the same form. Nor could one say that all Wolf’s characters are innocent victims, and neither is all of the society he depicts alienated, as in Elsaesser’s reading of the family melodrama, so that actors can function as mere props. Instead of the family melodrama of the 1950s, we might look for another possible

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melodramatic cognate in Stanley Cavell’s melodrama of the unknown woman, based on the black-and-white films of the 1940s, which are closer kin to Wolf’s early films. Cavell, like Zarzosa, criticizes Brooks for making his theory of melodrama itself melodramatic. Contesting Tears seeks “the placement of the melodramatic as the hyperbolic effort to recuperate or call back a hyperbolic reliance on the familiarity or banality of the world”32—an approach that resonates better with DEFA’s larger neorealist interest in the everyday than the glamorous opulence of Sirk’s wealthy family settings. Most importantly, Cavell’s model allows for an openness of melodramatic actors’ behavior that is explicitly political. In his discussion of the renunciation of Charlotte Vale (Bette Davis) at the end of Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942), he concludes that Charlotte’s refusal to consent to Jerry’s marriage proposal is linked to the specific social conditions of marriage, and adds: “That she would consent under altered conditions is unknowable. A good enough or just enough society—one that recognizes her say in it—will recognize this fact of, this threat in, or measure by, the woman’s unknownness.” (142) Might this not also apply to Rita at the end of Der geteilte Himmel, Lissy and Sunny at the end of their films, Walter at the end of Sterne, and Friedel at the conclusion of Genesung? Genesung ends precisely with the beginning of the GDR’s new world, one that will allow Friedel a new life as a doctor, thereby realizing his true nature and making him no longer an unknown man. Cavell’s characterization of the end of Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937) is even more resonant here: Her walk toward us, as if the screen becomes her gaze, is allegorized as the presenting or creating of a star, or as the interpretation of stardom. It is the negation, in advance so to speak, of a theory of the star as fetish. This star, call her Barbara Stanwyck, is without obvious beauty or glamour, first parodying them by excessive ornamentation, then taking over the screen stripped of ornament, in a nondescript hat and cloth overcoat. But she has a future. (219)

Here, too, it is hard not to think or Rita, Sunny, or Lissy—stars without fetishism, or Publikumslieblinge (“public favorites,” DEFA’s euphemism for stars) whose deliberate ordinariness is very different from the high polish of Lana Turner or Hanna Schygulla. If we align ourselves with Cavell rather than Elsaesser, we arrive at a view of Wolf’s films as melodramas of the unknown antifascist, whether female or male. As in Cavell’s model, the unknown male or female antifascist seeks to become known, to be recognized. Lissy, Rita, and Walter are known to us, as viewers, before they can be to their surrounding world; our proleptic knowledge of their future, which cannot yet be represented, is the message of antifascism. Friedel, too, has a basic decency or goodness that can be harnessed to antifascism. And if Cavell proposes that the melodrama of the

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unknown woman is derived from the comedy of remarriage (as its complement or opposite), one wonders whether the antifascist melodrama might not be similarly related to the Gegenwartsfilm (film of the present), which is often not without its comic moments. Sunny, after all, though the heroine of a Gegenwartsfilm, must still navigate melodramatic confines familiar from Wolf’s earlier antifascist films. Viewing antifascist films and Gegenwartsfilme rather as modes than as syntactically well-defined genres would allow us to intuit their hidden relation more flexibly. The two together were the pillars of DEFA’s generic system, staking out the temporal domain of filmic narrative; to borrow from a famous Brecht poem, the antifascist film chronicled the “Mühen der Gebirge” (labors of the mountains) and the film of the everyday the “Mühen der Ebenen” (labors of the plains).33 Their common melodramatic inflection would suggest that there were also in the GDR, between mountain and plain, some hills and valleys requiring no less effort. The understated manner of Konrad Wolf was well-suited to those less dramatic inflections of the social landscape; and Genesung, while no masterpiece, already introduces many crucial aspects of Wolf’s aesthetic: the repurposing of genre (especially melodrama); the imaginative use of sound and soundtrack; and a parabolic narrative, which often leaves out large chunks of the fabula (as, here, the war) to concentrate on key moments of the syuzhet.34

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3: Lissy (1957)

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EFA FILMS ARE (as noted in the introduction) characterized by a peculiar and uncanny historical quality unlike that of other films because of the disappearance of the nation that produced them. This “pastness,” this historical index or datedness—DEFA’s “spectral” quality1—is particularly evident in Lissy, which—like Fassbinder’s later films on the early history of the BRD—tries to uncover an archaeology of fascism in the Weimar past. In doing so, the film not only recreates a fiction of Weimar, of its working-class and petty-bourgeois milieu, but also refers back to the filmic inheritance of Weimar (its left film traditions, its didactic or “propadeutic” narratives of conversion to political consciousness). The film is thus an archive in multiple senses, both historiographically (of the Weimar working-class past) and in medial terms (of generic narrative templates).

Generic Memories Lissy (1957) has been seen as Konrad Wolf’s first mature film,2 yet in some ways it is still a transitional work; its protagonist’s exit from the ritualized world of Nazism at the film’s end could be seen as an allegory for the director’s own departure from the aesthetic practice of Stalinism that had crippled DEFA production in the first half of the 1950s. The film tells the exemplary story of a working woman in depression-era late Weimar whose unemployed husband joins the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers Party), but who herself learns, through the death of her brother at the hands of the Nazis, to become an antifascist resistance fighter. In this process she is aided by her friendship with the loyal Communist fighters Max and Toni Franke, as by her own working-class parents’ experience with Nazi thugs who destroy their home in a search. The screenplay derived from an exile novel by a now-forgotten socialist author, Franz Carl Weiskopf (1900–1955), who had been (with Willi Bredel) one of the editors of Neue Deutsche Literatur in the early ’50s, a publication known for its fidelity to Party demands.3 Weiskopf’s novel was praised for its adherence to social realism, especially in contrast to his earlier Das Slawenlied (The Song of the Slavs) of 1931, in which he had still experimented with documentary elements.4 Reread today, the novel is interesting chiefly in its extensive use of Berlin slang of the period, a last trace

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of earlier modernism that faintly links Weiskopf to Doeblin. Its parabolic and didactic aspects were highlighted in the original title of 1937—Die Versuchung. Geschichte einer jungen Deutschen (Temptation—The Story of A Young German)—even more than in the 1955 republication as Lissy oder die Versuchung (Lissy or the Temptation, Dietz Verlag). These instructive titles may anachronistically remind one of much later titles from the New German Cinema—The Lost Honor of Katerina Blum (Schlöndorff, 1975), or The Second Awakening of Christa Klages (Von Trotta, 1977)— on which Elsaesser has commented: “The tendency of joining names to fates gives such titles the pathos of moral value, but it also alludes to the simplicity and crude artistry of a sung ballad or a recited Moritat, briefly revived by Brecht in the 1920s and associated with the Left.”5 The similarity of titles points to an interesting relationship across the German-German divide, and across a distance of some twenty years. Lissy is already working with that peculiar constellation of melodrama and historical investigation of the origins of fascism that would later become the specialty of Fassbinder. (The difference is that in Wolf’s case, the outcome of the story—Nazism—is known; with Fassbinder, the “outcome” is the present, still partly mired in an authoritarian past, but perhaps changeable through understanding of the latter.) Wolf’s film has thus several historical layers: its story was authored by a member of the GDR’s founding generation of patriarchs, and its setting is a meticulous re-creation of Weimar Berlin, both indoors and out. The references to the iconography and filmography of Berlin are multiple, ranging from bird’s-eye panoramas of the working-class district of Wedding that immediately recall the work of the late-nineteenth-century illustrator Heinrich Zille, to topoi from Weimar film: revolving doors, as in Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh [Murnau, 1924]); reflections in shopwindows redolent of Die Dreigroschenoper or M; the characteristic Berlin Hinterhof (back courtyard) populated by organ-grinders (Kuhle Wampe [Dudow, 1932]); or crowds in the street that might evoke the films of Piel Jutzi. In one sequence when Lissy is waiting at home for her delayed husband, the camera picks out metonymic elements of a lower-middle-class domestic interior as if in homage to a similar sequence in M (Lang, 1931), when Elsie Beckmann’s mother is waiting for her daughter’s return from school: the wall-clock, a kettle on the stove, the table set for a meal. Lissy’s father is played by Gerhard Bienert, who had been both in Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins Glück (Jutzi, 1929) and Berlin Alexanderplatz (Jutzi, 1931). Stylistically, too, Lissy is an eclectic mix of borrowings; it incorporates both a montage sequence on Lissy’s husband Fredi’s futile search for work that is a clear homage to Kuhle Wampe, complete with an accelerating dissonant piano accompaniment in the New Objectivity manner of Hanns Eisler, and melodramatic sequences more reminiscent of UFA aesthetics (the dramatic lighting contrasts and music when Lissy’s Jewish neighbors the Danzigers are

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arrested, or when she finds out from Kaczmierczyk that her brother Paul had been killed by the Nazis and not by Communists). As Madina Spoden has noted, Lissy is literally made of quotes from other films, unified only by its desire for a specific effect (Wirkung) on the public. This eclecticism was criticized by Klaus Wischnewski at the time of the film’s premiere—in particular, the tension beween (neo)realist elements and (melo)dramatic ones. Is Lissy only yet another demonstration that DEFA had no coherent style (as Detlef Kannapin has claimed)?6 The strongest debt owed by Wolf’s film is, however, to one particular precedent, namely Wolfgang Staudte’s Rotation (1949). Rotation, too, makes extensive use of quotation from Weimar culture, including an amateur performance of a number from Die Dreigroschenoper (The ThreePenny Opera) early on. Both Rotation and Lissy have a double plot structure linking the public sphere of political events—the rise of National Socialism—with the private one of love and family; lack of political consciousness, in both films, is tied to an excessive attention to private aspirations, in particular to material or economic security and hopes for social advancement. If one maps the family and plot structure of Rotation onto Lissy, the differences become clear: where Staudte’s film centers on a male protagonist, Wolf’s is concerned with a woman; whereas the chief victim of the “temptation” of Nazism in Wolf is Lissy’ s husband, the hapless Fredi Fromeyer (played by Horst Drinda, the bumbling and bespectacled composer from Einmal ist keinmal), in Rotation, it is Behnke’s son who betrays him to the authorities and causes him to be imprisoned. Compared with Rotation, Lissy may seem less subtle. Staudte is much more restrained in his use of music than Wolf, who underlines key moments such as the Danzigers’ arrest with a dramatic score (whereas the same event in Rotation takes place without music). Where Staudte’s main Nazi character, a schoolteacher played by Werner Peters (most famous for his role as Diederich Hessling in Der Untertan [Man of Straw, Staudte, 1951]), is, although a clumsy bluffer, a young and energetic man whose authority over his students is not hard to imagine, Wolf’s Kaczmierczyk, played by Kurt Oligmüller, is a roaring beer-hall vulgarian from the start, sinking into drunkenly mawkish self-pity near the end when alone with Lissy. Caricature is more present in Wolf than in Staudte, whether in the martial wind music commenting on Fromeyer’s undeserved promotion, the spinning match cut of Fromeyer in the mirror from civilian clothes to uniform, or the tipsy and out of tune performance of “O Tannenbaum” at Christmas. Fromeyer’s best moments are those of unintentional comedy, as when he awkwardly straightens up his rumpled collar upon finding a dapper Paul in his apartment (ca. 40ʹ); at other moments his whiny selfpity and pompous self-assertion are unsympathetic. Werner Bergmann’s camera does not shrink from frequent closeups of swastika armbands at key moments, and Fromeyer’s gradual conversion to anti-Semitism is

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emphasized by the face of one of his former bosses superimposed on a kiosk ad for Der ewige Jude. All of this points to a heightened melodramatic aspect to Wolf’s film, relative to its model in Staudte—something not entirely surprising given Wolf’s female protagonist. The devices just listed indicate an urge to psychologize, to enter the characters’ inner world, and to work on spectators’ affects, an urge that is more pronounced than in Staudte. The film announces a central concern with emotion right from its opening titles, which dub the story “die Geschichte eines Herzens” (the story of a heart), a title evoking nothing so much as sentimental popular literature. Its antifascist thematics are thus blended with melodramatic aspects, something not usual in DEFA, where antifascist films tended (like Rotation) to center on male characters.7 The extensive use of non-diegetic music in Lissy fits this melodramatic pattern, since that music is frequently used to “signal crucial and decisive failures of communication or misalignments of character recognition.”8 Lissy could herself be said to be an “unknown woman” in Stanley Cavell’s sense, thereby fitting a pattern we have already found in Genesung:9 she is understood or recognized neither by her Nazi husband, nor by her leftist friends Max and Toni, nor by her worker father. Increasingly, her moments of disappointment or shock are accompanied by tears. The relentless use throughout the film of the popular song Donna Clara—a 1928 hit composed by a Pole, Jerzy Petersburski—anticipates not only Solo Sunny but also Fassbinder’s Lili Marleen (1981), and is also a melodramatic irony. For Lissy is herself anything but a representation of Nazism as femme fatale; she has nothing of Dietrich in A Foreign Affair (Billy Wilder, 1948) or Schygulla in Lola (R. W. Fassbinder, 1981) about her. Rather, her innate goodness and Nordic blonde naturalness, meant as a demonstration of the moral potential of ordinary Germans, ironically contrasts with the exotic seductiveness of the song’s Spanish dancer, which is to be understood as one of the mass culture industry’s consumer “dreams” to which the film’s (and the novel’s) prologue refer. In her ordinariness and simplicity, she already points toward Sunny, who will also break in some ways with melodramatic patterns. The aural spectre or siren-song of Donna Clara is in fact the (petit-)bourgeois seduction—or “temptation,” as the title has it—that Lissy must eventually learn to resist and reject, for it is her wish for creature comfort and fashionable elegance that misleads her into going along with her weak husband’s Nazi careerism. Already our analytic picture of Lissy is beginning to become more complicated. For noting the generic interferences of melodrama and antifascism opens up rather than closes off questions about the film’s consistency. Just as it has been argued that melodrama is a mode rather than a genre, the same might be said of the so-called antifascist genre, defined— like melodrama—rather by its intended effect and audience than by

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internal rules, and assumed as a genre by a particular critical community (film scholars and historians of the GDR, who thus play a role analogous to that of the feminist film scholars who defined the melodrama or women’s film). Antifascism is rather a thematic than a genre (as Anne Barnert’s recent book on the topic acknowledges);10 in Rick Altman’s terms, it is defined more semantically and pragmatically, in terms of content and use, than syntactically, in terms of form.11 Christiane Mückenberger’s essay on antifascism lists a range of films so wide as to defy any generic definition, ranging from the melodramatic Ehe im Schatten to the Westernindebted Mörder sind unter uns, the Thälmann biopics, and several of the forbidden “Rabbit films” (the group of films censored by the infamous 1965 Eleventh Plenum) of the mid-1960s.12 Thus Sabine Hake precedes her recent discussion of antifascism with the caveat that “the antifascist genre, if it can be called that, was anything but stable or uncontested.”13 The fact that antifascism was an official state doctrine of the GDR and enshrined in history books and school textbooks does not mean that we can automatically assume its unity in film as well, which did not always follow state dictates.14 The variant of antifascism represented in DEFA film could diverge starkly from the official version presented in statesponsored history textbooks. A programmatic statement from the beginning of the Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung makes this clear: In den einzelnen Bänden wird die grosse historische Leistung der deutschen Arbeiterklasse sichtbar. Damit werden die Auffassungen all derer widerlegt, die die deutsche Geschichte als Misere und die Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung als eine Kette von Fehlern und Irrtümern sehen.15 [In the individual volumes, the great historical accomplishment of the German working class becomes visible. Thus are refuted the notions of all those who see German history as a calamity, and the history of the German workers’ movement as a chain of errors and falsities.]

This triumphalist perspective may fit the Thälmann films, or Roman einer jungen Ehe, but it hardly tallies with Lissy, which is very much about “deutsche Misere” and the errors and mistakes of a working class—or, in the case of Lissy’s husband Fromeyer, a white collar worker (Angestellter)—seduced by Hitler. Therefore, Hake goes on to conclude from her look at Beyer and Wolf that “. . . the DEFA antifascist films bring into sharp relief the slippages between political and filmic imagination, and they reveal the difficulties of harnessing aesthetic means to ideological projects” (118). Without disputing Hake’s contention that the later antifascist films she analyzes point to an increasingly reflexive use of the mode, it may

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be argued with Lissy as example that these “slippages” and “difficulties” were part of antifascist film from early on, at least in Wolf’s variant of it. For the “hesitation, doubt, detachment” (Hake, 113) found in Wolf’s later antifascist heroes, in Ich war neunzehn and Mama, ich lebe, are also already present in Lissy. These qualities are manifest first in the behavior of the film’s protagonist. Although the film is centered on Lissy’s perceptions, she does not act much herself until the end, behaving rather as a kind of unknown variable x pulled in different directions by her workingclass SPD parents, her Communist friends Max and Toni, and her Nazi husband. Lissy herself is apolitical and does not go to meetings (which may in fact be an accurate representation of many Weimar women);16 she is not a New Woman, has no bob, does not dress fashionably, but is rather more traditionally feminine, despite her pluck in standing up to her boss and to Kaczmierczyk. All this is meant to indicate her averageness or ordinariness; like the hero of a Bildungsroman, she is an Everywoman. That she is nonetheless so completely the center of the film’s narrative—the men around her are weak or mere foils, and her long-suffering mother is something of a stock figure as well—makes one wonder about the gender of the film’s address, its intended spectator, a difficult question to document. DEFA women’s films are traditionally seen as beginning much later.17 One wonders if Lissy’s isolation amidst so many immobile male roles might be an unwitting reflection of the limits of Left gender politics (in the GDR as much as in Weimar).18 Secondly, “hesitation, doubt, detachment” are also implied in the generic and narrative mixtures of the film itself. Neorealism is present in Wolf’s film, not only in the fictitious-documentary opening—with its long travelling shot accompanied by an almost ethnographic voiceover detailing the various distractions available to working people in Berlin anno 1932, with a sociological irony kin to Siegfried Kracauer’s journalism of the time—but also in deliberately anecdotal details like the cat scurrying away as Fredi enters a doorway in search of an abortion doctor, or the aforementioned organ-grinders, or a group of card players on a windy autumnal square as Fredi sits aimlessly on a bench. Yet neorealism always had melodrama as its not so secret structural complement, both in order to link up its episodic narratives with at least some minimal causality, and also because the reality of working-class poverty had itself a potential for identificatory and rhetorical pathos.19 It has even been argued that the master plot of Marxism itself contains melodramatic elements, and that representations of German division did as well.20 These suggestions need to be handled with care; it might be recalled that for Hayden White, Marx’s master trope was metonymy and not metaphor. If we want to specify the antifascist narrative in more syntactic and formal terms, and not only semantic or thematic ones, one way to do so is to see the form of the conversion narrative as key to antifascism.21 If there

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is anything structurally shared by antifascist films, it is this narrative pattern. In most cases, the protagonist must begin in a state of indifference or blindness, progressing toward higher political consciousness—that socialist Bewusstsein (consciousness) so important to Communist organizers, and so oddly idealistic in the context of an otherwise purportedly materialist creed. To recognize the structure of the conversion narrative at work is not simply to fall into the old saw of Marxism as religion, for conversion narratives have been implicated in other forms of modernization as well, in particular in the form of the autobiography, where—as in Rousseau—“the turn to God or religious conversion has now become a turn inward or a turn to an intellectual or literary vocation.”22 In the case of many of Wolf’s protagonists, whether Lissy or Goya or the four deserters of Mama, ich lebe, that turn is to a political vocation; in Ich war neunzehn’s Gregor Hecker, it is the recognition of his own Germanness. The advantage of seeing antifascist films as conversion narratives—even if their biographies are fictive—is that this also allows one to account for the essentially appellatory nature of antifascism, its eighteenth-century Wirkungsästhetik or “aesthetics of effect,” an aesthetic that will turn out to be one of affect as well. Antifascism is hard to define as a genre precisely because its definition depends on its effect on a public, an effect that has now become harder to grasp in the absence of the surrounding social context that helped make it possible. On the relation of modern autobiography and conversion, it has been suggested that “the basis of autobiography now seems not to reside in a certain set of formal features or thematic concerns but rather in a way of reading in which the reading subject aligns himself in [. . .] ‘mutual reflective substitution’ with the subject of a text—in which, in other words, a reader sees himself troped in a text.”23 This strategy is of course familiar from the eighteenth-century Bildungsroman, where—for instance—we are never given a physical description of Wilhelm Meister precisely so that we may identify with him.24 Such anonymity becomes difficult in the case of a filmic hero or heroine, however; in its place, we have Lissy as “average woman”—an eponymous “German woman,” in Weiskopf’s original title, or a “heart,” in the opening titles of Wolf’s film: a femme moyenne sensuelle, who “loves love” and who “doesn’t think,” but just “lives.”25 Yet antifascist film was meant to induce a certain Bewusstsein in its viewers, through exemplary stories of conversion. That the model nature of these stories was not limited to art is evident in the way in which Communist autobiographies themselves were structured. Igal Halfin has studied these former at length in the Soviet context, as a form of “Communist self-fashioning.”26 Applicants to the Party in the Soviet Union were required to write their own autobiography as part of the application process, and these autobiographies modeled themselves on formulaic patterns: an early apolitical ignorance

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followed by a cathartic moment of conversion or insight, leading to faith in the mission of the Party. Wolf would have been himself familiar with these patterns of discipline, whether as a Communist child in pre-Nazi Germany or during later years in Moscow; he would later depict the process of training for antifascist agitation in Mama, ich lebe. In Halfin’s reading of Communist autobiography, patterns of confession and conversion play central roles in structuring otherwise often random biographies, which were written not as mere chronicles but rather according to a narrative system of “figurative rules of Communist poetics” (215), wherein the “realist tropes” of the period before conversion would be followed by “romantic” ones afterward (215–16). Another standard narrative device of these autobiographies was the “poetic ploy of juxtaposing personal development with the course of the Revolution” (234), something we have seen also in the Hollywood-like double-plot structure of antifascist films such as Rotation or Lissy. The purpose of this was for the individual course of development to manifest universals, “to show that the applicant was a particular, universal manifestation of the Communist universality in the making” (235).27 The end of a conversion narrative is thus paradoxically that “the self moves toward its own demise as self,”28 becoming absorbed in a larger collective validity beyond its subjective limits, and must therefore surrender self-knowledge to knowledge by an exterior instance—in this case, the Party. This, too, like the Bildungsroman, is a pattern going back to eighteenth-century problems of modern individuation. Niklas Luhmann analyzed the paradox of this as the impossibility of the mere empirical individual’s grounding itself in its own particularity. One solution was the temporalization of an individual life in the form of a career (as, for instance, an antifascist resistance fighter). Another was Stendhal’s idea that one had to be an homme-copie (a copy of a person) to be accepted in society; Luhmann has commented on this as follows, “Ein Ausweg scheint zu sein: sich Ziele, Anspruchsniveaus und Lebensart durch Copie zu beschaffen, also eine kopierte Existenz zu führen. [. . .] Andersseinkönnen heisst dann eben: so sein können wie ein anderer.”29 (One way out seems to be: to create goals, levels of entitlement and way of life from copying, thus to lead a copied existence . . . To be able to be other means then: to be like another.) Lissy’s conclusion stages just this paradox, when the omniscient maternal voiceover directs her new post-Nazi future to solidarity with other antifascists, quoting the lines of Weiskopf’s novel on the path of honor: “Jeder geht ihn für sich, und doch geht keiner allein” (everyone takes this path for oneself, and yet no one takes it alone). We should thus beware of simplistic finger-pointing with regard to this conclusion: its contradictions have deep roots in the sociology of the Western European individual, and are not merely a function of “Communism as religion.”

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Moreover, a comparative look beyond the confines of DEFA, or German, film shows that Wolf’s blend of neorealism and melodramatic elements was not an isolated case. The film critic Klaus Wischnewski saw this link to the “traditions of international cinema” (Byg) better than some German film scholars have since; the narrow focus on the antifascist genre in scholarship may thus be a disciplinary effect. Not long after Lissy, Andrzej Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds (1958) would also work between neorealism and heroic or melodramatic elements, and thus, as András Bálint Kovács puts it, “vacillates between two stylistic patterns,” trying “to keep a balance between everyday banality and heroic behavior.”30 Bálint Kovács puts this in the context of the larger tendency of Soviet and Eastern European cinema of the late 1950s: “For Soviet and Polish cinema of the late 1950s and for Czech cinema of the early 1960s, a return to neorealism meant the transition toward modern cinema. Consequently, at the same time when modernism broke through in Western Europe, in the Soviet Union and Poland neorealism was used to interpret the heroic tradition.”31 In the case of Wajda, the wish to be the “cinematic representative of Polish national consciousness” inhibited the move toward modernism found in other Polish directors such as Kawalerowicz (Mother Joan of the Angels [Kawalerowicz, 1961]) or later in Krzysztof Zanussi and Krzysztof Kieślowski.32 We may see the same inhibiting function of a preoccupation with the Nation and with the master signifier of History in Wolf’s work; it was not until Der geteilte Himmel and Ich war neunzehn that Wolf would reach his own particular brand of cinematic modernity. But we can also find similar patterns outside of socialist film, in particular in Italy, where the move from neorealism to modernism frequently took the form of a passage through melodrama, especially in Fellini, but also in Rossellini. Bálint Kovács sees melodrama as not only the midwife of cinematic modernism but also implicated in the latter itself, and argues that key modernist films from the late 1950s on can be seen as melodramas of the “alienation of the abstract individual” (65), or of “anxiety” (87).33 Among the aspects he finds in these films is a “complex situation” that “becomes ambiguous or impossible to resolve” (63), and thus must “withhold closure from the plot” (77). Paradoxically, however, certain key Italian films go beyond this refusal of closure via a final coup de théâtre or “miracle,” as in the melodramatic end of Rossellini’s Stromboli (1950), which is very much a conversion of its main character Karin, or the happy ends of De Sica and Zavatini’s Miracle in Milan (1951) or Umberto D. (1952). Fellini, too, added a coda to Le Notte di Cabiria (The Nights of Cabiria, 1957), in which Cabiria is resuscitated from her near-death and begins to walk toward the camera, surrounded by street musicians, her gaze even grazing that of the camera’s, as if in a knowing aside to the spectator. André Bazin was one of the

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Figure 3.1. Lissy’s (Sonja Sutter) final walk alone. ©DEFA-Stiftung/Rudolf Meister.

earliest defenders of this film and of its conclusion, despite “what seems to be an almost melodramatic naiveté.”34 Bazin sees the film as “a story of ascesis, of renunciation, and (however you choose to interpret the term) of salvation” (96)—in other words, as kin to the conversion narrative we have already mentioned here, a pattern that has also been found in Rossellini.35 In Rossellini, too, conversion can take various forms, political and poetic as well as religious. Bazin claims that Fellini avoids individual psychology, showing Cabiria’s transformation only on a material (or “ontological”) level: “Let us avoid the vague terms of a ‘spiritualizing’ vocabulary. Let us not say that the transformation of the characters takes place at the level of the ‘soul.’” (97). Similarly, Bazin believes his beloved loose neorealistic plot structure is still operative here, and not traditional dramatic causality (95). How is all this relevant to Lissy? The conclusion of Wolf’s film departs from Weiskopf’s novel. In the novel, Lissy is visited by the indefatigable antifascist resistance fighter Max, and helps him; it is clear that she has changed sides and turned against Nazism. Wolf’s film elides this, and has Lissy instead walk out of a funeral service for her brother Paul, going out into a bleak natural environment and toward the camera. Her eventual conversion to antifascism is thus implicit rather than stated. But Lissy’s concluding conversion may be seen as a “miracle” similar to Cabiria’s resurrection; in Lissy’s case, it is the death of Paul that has forced her

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to abandon her false loyalties and take the road of honorable resistance. Where Cabiria is converted to a paradoxically ascetic affirmation of life against death, and where Rossellini’s Karin has a religious experience amid the “bare life” of the volcano’s summit at the end of Stromboli (1950), Lissy is converted to—antifascism. Wolf has not made her into a modernist “alienated individual” as he will do with Rita in Der geteilte Himmel (thanks to extremely canted angles and dramatic close-ups), or with Gregor in Ich war neunzehn (thanks to a complex audiovisual montage), and yet there are still moments in Lissy’s story, despite her embedding in the sociological context of working-class and lower-middle-class Berlin life circa 1932–34, where the mise en scène dramatically isolates her too. One instance would be the moment when she sees her friend Toni’s coffin being taken out of a doorway, and she is then shown alone with the hearse on a grey Berlin street (a shot that reminds one of the hearse taking away Boenicke fils in Kuhle Wampe); another would be the funeral for Paul, with its high angle shots, dramatic lighting, and isolation of Lissy’s figure in the church. Wolf is here treading a thin line between social realism and the dramaturgy of Bálint Kovács’s “abstract individual” (something that, according to GDR ideologues, ought not to exist in socialism, and perhaps not even in the Weimar working classes); the “authenticity” he is seeking in Lissy’s story is not—pace Jacobsen and Aurich—only a documentary one, but also one of existential decision, just as it will be for Rita, Gregor, and Sunny. The melodramatic moments of the film are meant precisely to heighten this authenticity of decision. Again and again Lissy pauses and stares off-screen, or lowers her gaze, in moments of reflection that take her outside her immediate context. It is these moments that prepare for the film’s end. One such crucial moment is when Paul comes to visit her, and at the end of the scene, after he has admitted, “Ich habe alles verpfuscht” (I’ve botched everything), the camera moves to isolate her at front right, looking off-screen to a space behind the camera, as she says “so kann es doch nicht weitergehen” (things can’t go on like this; ca. 17ʹ53ʺ into the film). Shortly after this, and after Frohmeyer has been fired, we see Lissy alone with her baby in the apartment, commented on by the voiceover and by a non-diegetic music anticipating Rita’s mourning music in Der geteilte Himmel (characterized by bell-like piano and vibraphone sounds with long resonance). We hear from the voiceover that Lissy “loved love” (sie liebte die Liebe) and was happy even in poverty; this idyll will shortly end with Paul’s return. This scene is answered near the end of the film by another scene inside Lissy’s head, as she lies in bed thinking how she has fallen out of love with her husband. Where the earlier scene had her thoughtful gaze contemplating her past loves and her contentment with life, this one has her looking off into space, facing a void (Leere) left by her husband’s failure. Lissy’s development could be said to be articulated by the relation between diegetic and non-diegetic

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Figure 3.2. Lissy (Sonja Sutter) wakes up from her illusions of prosperity. ©DEFA-Stiftung/Rudolf Meister.

sound and between on-screen and off-screen space: when she is briefly, but mistakenly, contented with her material prosperity near the end, she sings “Donna Clara” to herself, becoming the voice of her earlier fantasies; but after she has seen through the lies of Kaczmierczyk, we hear a voice call out Mörder! (Murderers!) in the church at Paul’s service, while Lissy’s mouth is closed: she is keeping her thoughts now to herself. Yet just as—according to Bazin—Le Notte di Cabiria is not strictly speaking a melodrama, since Cabiria’s “desire to ‘get out’ is not motivated by the ideals of bourgeois morality or by a strictly bourgeois sociology,” whatever this last might be (96), so Lissy’s final exodus from the church and from Nazism is also an exodus from melodrama: it is, in its own way, also something of a miracle. This is why Wolf does not conclude with Lissy’s exodus but rather with a shot of Berlin, symmetrically recalling that of the opening sequence, and accompanied by the familiar maternal voiceover offering Lissy the consolation of Party solidarity in resistance, and anticipating the voiceover at the end of Der geteilte Himmel. What was, for Rossellini, the revelation of the Divine is here a political metanoia. The difference is that, in Rossellini or Fellini, the final exodus is diegetically motivated, and placed in natural surroundings (in Rossellini, the bare sublimity of the volcano, of Nature, and in Fellini, a more friendly and humanized forest); in Wolf, it is not. Berlin itself is not meant to be perceived as the same city for an antifascist resister as it was

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at the beginning for someone seeking only the distractions of petit-bourgeois entertainment culture. Lissy does not “go out” of society to nature to discover her individual essence (following a long pattern of such departures, from Petrarch on Mount Ventoux to Schiller’s “Der Spaziergang”); she returns to human and urban society as a kind of second nature. It is the city and not nature that answers and confirms her moral decision. The historical correctness of that decision lies beyond the confines of her own story, and can only be shown allegorically by the proleptical voice-over. We find the same structure at the end of Der geteilte Himmel. In a sense, Lissy walks out of her everyday world with its everyday seductions and into the off-screen space that has accompanied her reflective gaze since early on in the film.36 The film ends with the same shot of Berlin with which it began, but Lissy’s, and implicitly our own, position relative to it has changed.

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4: Sonnensucher (1958/1972)

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an unusually rich plot, and on an epic scale. Lotte Lutz is a young orphan who runs away from an abusive employer to her older friend Emmi, who has been a woman of ill repute; the two women go to the Wismut mining complex, where Emmi meets up with an old flame, Jupp Koenig (played by Erwin Geschonneck), and Lutz, after a failed relation with a younger miner, is taken in by Franz Beier, a one-armed war veteran (played by Günter Simon). Beier dies in a mining accident near the end, leaving Lutz alone with their child; although Lutz really loves the Soviet officer Sergei (Viktor Avdyushko), whose life Beier helped save (thereby sacrificially atoning for his own Nazi war crimes), she must take leave from him at the film’s close. Sonnensucher offers one of the most complex generic mixes of all of Wolf’s films. It has a documentary aspect, since its scriptwriters, KarlGeorg Egel and Paul Wiens, spent time researching their topic among the Wismut miners, and parts of the film were shot on location, including sequences shot in an unused mineshaft. Several characters, including those of Jupp König and of Josef Stein, were based on real individuals; others, most notably that of Lutz, were invented for dramaturgical purposes. Sonnensucher may be seen as a Gegenwartsfilm (film of the present), yet its view of the present is also strongly colored by historical memory; moreover, it also has elements of Western, melodrama, and Socialist Realist “production film.” Its production and reception history are similarly complicated; despite the director’s agreeing to multiple revisions requested by the authorities, the film was Wolf’s only film to be censored and shelved, purportedly due to the sensitivity of the topic of the Wismut uranium mines during the Cold War. The Wismut also inspired one of the most interesting censored novels of the GDR, Werner Bräunig’s epic production story Rummelplatz, which was, like the Rabbit Films, a victim of the Eleventh Plenum of 1965 and could not be published until 2007.1 In this marginalized quality, as in its Western and production story elements, Sonnensucher bears some similarity to the most famous of DEFA’s forbidden films, Spur der Steine (1966/1989) Both films participate in a particular subgenre of socialist modernism, the production novel (called in German Aufbauroman or Betriebsroman), the ancestor of which is Fyodor Gladkow’s famous Soviet novel Cement of 1924. Like Eisenstein’s The Old and the New (The General Line) of 1929, Gladkow’s novel combined the heroic pathos of socialist realism with techniques derived

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from turn-of-the-century or early 1920s modernism. Gladkow’s novel became a much-imitated classic, yet its modernist features were removed with each re-edition as Soviet literature moved into increasing regimentation in the 1930s; similarly, Soviet film’s combination of modernism with heroic labor, in films such as Dziga Vertov’s Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbass (1931), would yield to more conventional patterns of continuity editing. Heiner Müller would try to revive the modernist aspects of this genre in works like Der Bau (1965), but in doing so would abandon many of its classic Marxist assumptions—such as technophilia and the faith in an anthropological renewal of man—in favor of skepticism.2 In the GDR, the production novel had already ended its first cycle by 1956, before Sonnensucher was made.3 The modernist elements of the production story form one of the film’s two major generic and stylistic poles or constituents. The film had been begun during a brief window of liberalization after Stalin’s death in 1953 and Nikita Khrushchev’s speech to the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU in 1956, but in the GDR—unlike Poland— this moment quickly passed; Walter Janka had been arrested in 1956 and sentenced in July 1957, and the Culture Conference of October 1957 had introduced the idea of a “socialist cultural revolution” to regulate cultural production.4 As later in 1965, film would be one of the casualties of this campaign. Wolf’s experience with Party discipline may help explain his willingness to make a formulaic film such as Leute mit Flügeln (1960) afterward, or the overtly rhetorical antifascist film that was Professor Mamlock. If Sonnensucher had been shown at the time of its completion, it might have changed the entire course of DEFA history, possibly inaugurating a DEFA “new wave,” which was, however, postponed until the mid-1960s, ending abruptly with the Eleventh Plenum; that it had to wait until 1972 before being publicly shown gives it a peculiar latent quality, deprived of its intended audience: its quality as an Eingriff or intervention in public political debates. Its emblematic and representative quality within Wolf’s oeuvre—shared with Der geteilte Himmel and Ich war neunzehn—is signaled by Jacobsen and Aurich’s titling their biography of the director after this film. What follows will begin with some larger considerations on the function of genre and of realism in DEFA (taking up some of the considerations already broached in chapter 2) and then move toward a closer look at the film, through the lens of Bakhtin’s idea of the chronotope. Since Sonnensucher participates in one of the GDR’s two major genres, the Gegenwartsfilm, and since the production story genre already mentioned is still in a complex relation to socialist realism—a generic form itself oddly modernist precisely in its treatment of individual artworks as examples of a larger “ism”—we cannot grasp Sonnensucher’s particularity without sketching in this larger context. Both popular genres (such as melodrama or the Western, both involved here)

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and modernist forms seek to create types; this aspect of the film is in an interesting tension with the film’s realist elements, which tend instead toward individualization of milieu and character.5

Genre in DEFA Since 1989 the increasing commercial pressure on the film industry has translated into a pressure toward genre films.6 This has, in turn, had a direct impact on the (belated) representation of history and nation, as also on the way film scholars retrospectively think about the cinematic past. The German past, as popular a topic as ever, has often been recast in the mold of soap opera or heritage film, after the first wave of frothy “Wendecomedies” from the 1990s.7 Even more artistically ambitious productions such as Christian Petzold’s GDR-themed Barbara (2012) cannot avoid melodrama.8 The global de-nationalization of cinema is thus linked to genre film. The displacement of East German history this entails is especially sharp, given that DEFA was not able to represent itself in the West through auteurist and arthouse versions of GDR history in the same way as its Eastern European cinematic neighbors could.9 The GDR has thus not been able to record its own history or tell it to others as effectively as could Poland or Hungary, whose national grands récits were translated into the grand dramas or ironic comedies of art films received on the international festival circuit. Between these alternatives—global, post-national genres and national artfilm—DEFA has been caught (and arguably excluded: Kovács does not mention it even once in Screening Modernism) as if between Scylla and Charybdis. For the instability of the GDR as a nation translated into one of generic form.10 Although there were some auteurist directors in the GDR, the self-understanding of most DEFA directors was not an auteurist one, so that auteurism and the art-film model are in fact not helpful in understanding much DEFA production. In place of the art-film model that enabled the Western reception of other Eastern European directors such as Wajda, Kieślowski, Jiri Menzel, or Miklós Jancsó, DEFA was characterized by a coexistence of popular genres such as the Indianerfilm, the children’s film, or the musical11 with specifically “socialist” genres such as the Gegenwartsfilm. These last were a “compromise formation” between art film and popular genres, which is one reason for the difficulty in defining them; like other modes of socialist art, they were generically defined as much by their relation to the spectator as by formal aspects—in Rick Altman’s terms, pragmatically as much as syntactically or semantically.12 It is the loss of this historical spectator that has made these films ciphered or even “spectral” to us now.13 We may link the problematics of GDR nationhood to this instability of DEFA genre. The status of nation in film has been much discussed

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recently, especially in the field of Eastern European and formerly socialist cinemas (Anikó Imre writes programmatically of “un-nationalizing cinemas”).14 Yet rather than simply dispense with the nation tout court, it is more productive to reformulate it, using genre as a specific focus;15 as we will see, the nation is split into two in Sonnensucher along fault lines of genre and address, as it will also be in Der geteilte Himmel and Ich war neunzehn, and this split has some similarities to the phenomenon of splitting found in postcolonial theory. What does the unstable nature of DEFA genres tell us about the status of the nation? How does it help us break open older, more monolithic models of GDR history to expose underlying contradictions, or help us guess at the intended audience of DEFA films? Sonnensucher—a crucial film both within Wolf’s work and also within DEFA history—exemplifies this problematic: most specifically in its generic mix, between melodramatic embodiment of the wounded nation in a female protagonist and male narrative stock types borrowed from socialist realism.16

The Gegenwartsfilm Genre and Realism Jaimey Fisher has recently noted “the almost complete lack of genre studies in German film studies,” adding that “German film studies [. . .] generally neglect the substantial scholarship on the theory and history of film genres.”17 This is, however, more true of work on BRD film than on DEFA film, where popular genres have indeed been studied. What Fisher does not mention, however, is a central difficulty that needs to be confronted here, and which lies behind the neglect of genre: how to define film genre apart from the capitalist market economy within which it has usually been situated. Altman is explicit on the link: “The constitution of film cycles and genres is a never-ceasing process, closely tied to the capitalist need for product differentiation.”18 A now rarely read book by Peter Bächlin, titled Film als Ware, specifies this process still further as a process of standardization, taking two main forms: “minimization of sales risk [by] achieving maximum use values” and “minimization of production risk through the most rationalized form of production possible.”19 Although the GDR was not a market economy, similar concerns were certainly at work at DEFA;20 a familiar case in point would be the marketing campaign preceding the abrupt withdrawal of Spur der Steine. The socialist countries were, in this respect, by no means monolithic; although there were popular genre films in the Soviet Union, they were underdeveloped in Poland after 1945;21 DEFA is here closer to Soviet cinema than others among its Eastern European neighbors. Oddly, however, the central DEFA genre of Gegenwartsfilm remains less well defined than popular genres like Indianerfilme or beach-blanket musicals (which borrowed much of their generic definition from

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Hollywood). Even recent scholarship is hesitant when describing its features or its floruit. For Sebastian Heiduschke, the Gegenwartsfilm seems to rise or die, phoenix-like, according to the vagaries of history or state patronage;22 what generic continuities there might be between Berlin— Ecke Schönhauser (Klein, 1957) and the Kaninchenfilme (rabbit films) remains an open question. One of the most ambitious approaches to the Gegenwartsfilm is Joshua Feinstein’s, which seeks to ground the genre in the historical approach known as Alltagsgeschichte (history of everyday life). In Feinstein’s argument, the earlier Gegenwartsfilm of the end of the 1950s, a genre still tied to Marxist historical teleology, is contrasted with the later Alltagsfilm of the 1970s, a genre that allows the everyday to “triumph” as its ordinary self. For all the wealth of historical documentation Feinstein offers, however, this argument has some problems. First, the opposition he claims to see (in typical culturalist fashion, based on circular hermeneutical arguments) is refuted by evidence from the historical reception of these films. As late as 1982, Hans-Rainer Mihan still referred to Solo Sunny as a Gegenwartsfilm and not an Alltagsfilm.23 Even more serious, however, is that Feinstein’s historicizing approach tends to continue an old habit of GDR studies, namely that of seeing GDR art and culture as a “reflection” (Lenin’s Abbild!) of GDR society. Since he defines the Gegenwartsfilm solely through its subject matter (that is, its hetero-reference) and not through its film form (or self-reference), he ends up by making his own genre impossibly broad. How could Die Legende von Paul und Paula (Carow, 1973), the fairy-tale fantasy of which is anything but a “triumph of the ordinary,” possibly belong to the same Alltag genre as the documentary fiction mode of Jahrgang ’45 (Born in ’45 [Böttcher, 1966/1990]). Feinstein’s narrative of DEFA, which tautologically repeats the self-understanding of cultural officials, also makes it impossible to ask important questions, such as that of the latency of DEFA’s New Wave, stifled both by the censorship of Sonnensucher and that of the Kaninchenfilme. Similar criticisms could be made of Ralf Harhausen’s Alltagsfilm in der DDR.24 Lothar Warneke’s later films, such as Die Beunruhigung (Apprehension [Warneke, 1982]), which Harhausen adduces as an example of Alltagsfilm, have distinctly melodramatic aspects about them—a feature that becomes even more overt in later films such as Der Tangospieler (1991) of Roland Gräf, who had begun his career with more documentary films.25 What Harhausen calls Alltagsfilm is Peter Wuss’s documentary fiction film: that is, a deliberately mixed anti-genre with some kinship to art film;26 in other words, not really a closed genre at all. In fairness to Feinstein and Harhausen, the trap into which they have fallen is one built into the contradictory definition of the Gegenwartsfilm as such. The very idea of a “film of the present” is an inherently odd one, as a simple thought experiment shows; if one tries to imagine the

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“film of the present” transplanted elsewhere, as for instance to Hollywood, it quickly becomes absurd. Almost all films except historical films would have to be considered “films of the present,” whether rom-com or thriller or documentary. In fact, the Gegenwartsfilm has some similarities to another very fluid and fluctuating genre, the social-problem film. Like the latter, it was tied closely to state encouragement or censorship.27 Most interesting from a comparativist point of view is the similarity to the Soviet bytovoi fil’m or “film of the everyday,” a genre that had its floruit first in the 1920s and then again—in this similar to DEFA—in the more liberal 1970s.28 Like the Gegenwartsfilm, the bytovoi fil’m is defined by its subject more than its form: it “could be anything from comedy to problem melodrama.”29 As Feinstein rightly notes, the genre is defined as a distinction from the historical film (whether Soviet war film or DEFA antifascist film). We may see this generic fluidity or openness, the lack of self-referential formal closure, as tied to socialist genre’s disconnect from the capitalist market. (Self-reference would be typical of genre as commodity form.)30 As a closer look at Sonnensucher shows, this fluidity needed to be supplemented by borrowings from more established and stable genres. Neorealism itself, that master mode of DEFA, had always been characterized by a similar fluidity.31

Historical Origins of Socialist Realism To focus our working hypothesis still more narrowly: we need, thus, to take the Gegenwartsfilm as genre—as form and not just as realism—more seriously than it has been in previous scholarship. Until now, most scholarship—including Feinstein—has taken the genre’s claim to “realism” at face value. But as Steve Neale has pointed out, with reference to Todorov, “There are two broad types of verisimilitude applicable to representations: generic verisimilitude and a broader social or cultural verisimilitude. Neither equates in any direct sense to ‘reality’ or ‘truth.’”32 With this in mind, we can no longer simply view the Gegenwartsfilm as “realistic” (or “more realistic” than its Stalinist predecessors). The earlier highlighting of the peculiarity of the term points to the very specific nature of “realism” in a GDR context, which inherited its notions of realism from Soviet aesthetics, in part via Lukács. What some commentators have called DEFA’s “social realism” (Byg) was still very much in relation to socialist realism;33 this is certainly true of Sonnensucher. We can see in Wolf’s film many recognizable features of socialist realism’s master plot as it was described by Katerina Clark. Among these would be the central conflict between workers’ undisciplined, quasi-natural “spontaneity” (represented in Sonnensucher by Jupp, as it would later be by Balla in Spur der Steine) and the higher “consciousness” of the Party (represented by the wisdom of Soviet managers, especially Sergei); the suggestion of an

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“epic, tribal world” around the Wismut, a place to become the stuff of legend; heroic “feats and challenges” set “against foes and nature,” meaning here the former Nazi as saboteur and the danger of uranium mining. Here, too, “the hero”—Beier—“is assisted in his quest by a . . . more ‘conscious’ figure,” namely Sergei.34 As Feinstein correctly noted, the Gegenwartsfilm was conceived of as part of a larger historical pattern or progression. Its “pathos of the concrete” was multiply overdetermined: at once the inheritor to Weimar urban sociology (and sociological films) and also influenced by the long Russian and Soviet debates about realism. Those debates have their roots in the literary criticism of Vissarion Belinsky (1811–48) and his idiosyncratically “organicist” reception of Hegel, which Victor Terras has described as follows: Just as a biological organism is, in relation to its constituent parts, both a universal (it determines that which the parts have in common) and a particular (it also determines that which differentiates these parts), so the work of art is, in Hegelian aesthetics, a concrete universal: concrete as an assemblage of individual entities (forms, devices, characters, descriptive detail, specific events), universal as the expression of an idea. The idea, in turn, is a concrete manifestation of the self-revealing Absolute Spirit. It is this conception that is before Belinsky’s eyes as he creates his seminal interpretations of Evgenij Onegin, A Hero of Our Time, and The Inspector-General.35

Belinsky would rephrase his borrowings from Hegel in terms of an aesthetics of the “concrete”: “Concreteness (konkretnost’) is derived from concrete, which in turn is formed from the Latin word concresco, ‘I grow together.’ This word belongs to the most recent philosophy and is of the highest importance. Here we are using it as an expression of the organic unity of idea and form.”36 Ironically, this organicist conception, which Belinsky had used to defend the new realism of Gogol, became part of conservative Soviet anti-modernism: the modernist, allegorical abstraction of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poetry was attacked by conservative critics for its lack of “organic” unity or “concreteness.”37 (This is why Régine Robin can write of a “betrayal of Belinsky” in her analysis of the genealogy of socialist realism.)38 For the Hegelianism of Belinsky and his Soviet continuers was—ironically again—an idealist aesthetics of content: a position that carried over into GDR official aesthetics as well. Hegel himself had grounded his preference for classical over romantic art through classicism’s necessary “Beschränktheit,” “diese Beschränktheit ist darin zu sehen, dass die Kunst überhaupt das seinem Begriff nach unendliche konkrete Allgemeine, den Geist, in sinnlich konkreter Form zum Gegenstande macht und im Klassischen die vollendete Ineinsbildung des geistigen und des sinnlichen Daseins als Entsprechen beider hinstellt”39 (this limitation may be seen in the fact that art in general makes that which

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is, according to its concept, the infinitely concrete general thing, namely spirit, into its object in a sensually concrete form and presents, in that which is classical, the perfected unity of spiritual and sensual existence as correspondence of the two). We can almost already hear Lukács’s anti-modernism in this. For Soviet aesthetics, the “concrete universal” that is Hegel’s Geist will become partiinost (party-mindedness), the voice of party and state.40 This is the specific place where Soviet socialist realism parts ways from modernism in its Adornian variant; for although Adorno, too, as also Hegelian, was concerned with the relation of concrete and universal (which he most often preferred to state as “particular,” das Besondere, and the universal), he insisted that their realized reconciliation, which Hegel, Belinsky, and Lukács all defended as an ideal against Romantic and modernist conflict, had become impossible.41 Similarly, too, the place of genre is different in these two modernisms: where Adorno the modernist insisted on aesthetic Nominalism manifest in the dissolution of genres and generic normativity, socialist realism tried to maintain generic normativity—in this again following Hegel, for whom genre is the subject’s “concrete universality.”42 Precisely these tensions are manifest in Sonnensucher’s language or style— in particular, its tension between a mode of rhetorical address derived from Soviet montage cinema of the 1920s and postwar realism, which favors longer shots and greater concentration on observed detail.

Genre and Chronotope What is driving Sonnensucher’s peculiar generic mixture—of socialist realism, neorealism, melodrama, Western, and even a touch of science fiction in its Utopian opening sequence—is thus not only a wish for “realistic” depiction, but also one for what Rick Altman called “generification.” Maxim Gorky, one of the chief architects of Soviet socialist aesthetics, underscored the generic aspect of verisimilitude earlier cited from Steve Neale in a statement that was not only meant ironically: “myth creation is au fond realistic.”43 The mythic “sun” evoked by the film’s hymnic prologue, and later also by Sergei’s calling wine “sun from the Caucasus,” is not only the historical uranium sought for in the Wismut mines for the Soviets; it is also intended as a “concrete universal,” and recurs as such throughout the film, in multiple symbolic forms: the song Brüder, zur Sonne, zur Freiheit often heard on the soundtrack, the frequent martial sound of the trumpet, or images of the trumpet itself, associated with Lutz’s wayward boyfriend. The signifying burden placed on these emblems of sun and trumpet however makes them tend toward an allegorical abstraction rather than concrete universality; we can find this allegorical element in the film’s Utopian prologue as well, the strange poetry of which hearkens back to the grandiose fantasies of conquering nature

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and cosmic transformation of man of the first decades of Soviet literature.44 In the larger context of European and Eastern European film of the late 1950s, the film’s deliberate turn backward to the heroic age of montage is somewhat isolated. Precisely at a time when, in some parts of Eastern Europe, cinema was turning to neorealism in the wake of de-Stalinization, and a breakthrough into modernist film was imminent (whether in the French New Wave or films such as Kawalerowicz’s Night Train [1959]), Wolf’s film begins by looking resolutely backward to the pre-Bazinian cinematic past, with its obtrusive narration (making extensive use of different wipes and of interior monologue) and highly rhetorical mode of address. It is this historical and stylistic peculiarity of the film that may be decoded in terms of generic tensions.45 One might specify how the film’s generic peculiarity works via Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, which he understood as one of the differentia specifica of genre.46 Wolfgang Emmerich has recently suggested in a programmatic essay that this concept might be useful as an analytic tool in GDR studies, referring specifically to the “Handlungsorte . . . der Industriearbeit” (scenes of action . . . of industrial work”) including “der Uranbergbau der Wismut” (the uranium mines of the Wismut).47 This approach is also supported by scholars’ definition of socialist realism via the chronotope. Katerina Clark describes socialist realism as marked by a difference of times held together by a chronotope: “ordinary characters represent the present-day time of the novel, and extraordinary ones simultaneously bear the imprint of the two Great Times of Stalinist culture, the earlier heroic era of Lenin’s time, and the future time of communism. It is the role of the positive hero (the central protagonist) to mediate between the two times of the novel . . .”48 Irina Gutkin, too, notes that attention to the chronotope of socialist realism brings out its internal split between Bakhtin’s two contrasted genres of epic and novel: “the socialist realist novel fulfilled cultural expectations of a monumental synthetic form in its chronotope, characterized by vacillation between the novel (which, in Bakhtin’s definition, is in a constant state of flux, renewing itself in ‘maximum contact with the present’) and the epic (whose actions unfold in an ideal time-space realm separated from the present by an unbridgeable gap).”49 These epic dimensions are palpable in Sonnensucher, both in its length and the size of its cast. Although Bakhtin himself did not write on film, it has been argued that the chronotope, with its strong visual component, is particularly suited to film analysis (perhaps more so than other Bakhtinian concepts such as discourse).50 Eva Näripea has referred to the chronotope in a series of recent articles on “nation-spaces and -scapes” in film in the Soviet and Eastern Europe context.51 A passage from Eric Rohmer’s Murnau book on the role of space in film reads like a catalogue of cinematic chronotopes:

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Songeons [. . .] au rôle actif, créateur que jouent dans le Dernier des hommes, la porte tournante, les lavabos, la façade lépreuse de l’immeuble des faubourgs; dans Tartuffe, le grand escalier où s’ouvrent et se referment les portes; dans l’Aurore, le marais, le lac, la ville et son Luna-Park; dans City Girl, le restaurant et les champs de blé; dans Tabou, la mer, le sable, les rochers, la cabane. Tous ces lieux ne se présentent pas seulement comme le cadre de l’action, son réceptacle. Ils pèsent sur les attitudes des personnages, infléchissent leur jeu, dictent leurs déplacements.52 [We may think . . . of the active and creative tole played in The Last Laugh by the revolving door, the bathrooms, the leprous façade of the suburban building; in Tartuffe, the great staircase where doors open and close; in Sunrise, the swamp, the lake, the city and its entertainment park; in City Girl, the restaurant and the wheat fields; in Tabu, the sea, the sand, the rocks, the hut. All these places are not merely presented as the frame of the action, as its receptacle. They weigh on the characters’ attitudes, inflect their acting, dictate their movements.]

For all the seductive concreteness of the term, there are considerable methodological problems that come with the chronotopic turf, as it were. As every commentator has noted, Bakhtin himself never clearly defined the term, and subsequent attempts to do so have remained contradictory, since merely descriptive and semantic in nature. Other than the distinction of major and minor chronotopes (itself not entirely clear) or a series of intuitive, empirical examples (threshold, road, castle, salon), the term has remained frustratingly general and vague. This is not simply because Bakhtin did not get around to specifying the term, either; the term itself is inherently idealistic and generalizing, therein betraying its author’s long preoccupation with Kantian and neo-Kantian thought. As Alastair Renfrew has argued in a pointedly critical examination of Bakhtin’s hesitation between materialist and idealist views of form, “the chronotope essay . . . emerges, almost despite itself, as an obdurate defense of his own own neoidealist origins,” and cannot help “falling back into a conventional modal terminology” of genre.53 To try to adapt Renfrew’s proposed “materialist” alternative to the chronotope—namely discourse—to film theory would however bring even more problems in its wake (not the least of which being the vagueness of Bakhtin’s Russian term for discourse, rech’ [речь], which can mean speech, discourse, conversation, word, enunciation or allocution).54 We may try to specify (and “operationalize”) the chronotope further by seeing it as a “form-in-a-medium” in the sense of Niklas Luhmann and Dirk Baecker.55 Such a form is always a distinction, thus differential, and not a mere label: this allows us to avoid the dead end of hopeless

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butterfly-catching taxonomies down which so many Bakhtinians have fatally gone, in this at one with the labeling mania of much traditional genre theory. Since Bakhtin is so often cited in the context of cultural theory, it may be apposite to cite a use of form in this technical sense in a cultural context: “Das Gesamtphänomen von Kultur lässt sich nicht anhand statischer Figuren erfassen, sondern es ‘kommt dabei auf die Differenz selbst an, und nicht auf die jeweils in der Operation verdichtete Form.’” (the whole phenomenon of culture may not be grasped by static figures, but “it is a matter of the difference itself, and not the respective form condensed in the operation”).56 In other words, we should pay attention to the chronotope as a syntactic (differential) form, within the medium of time or narrative, and not to its semantics (what it designates).57 In our concrete context of film genres, this means that the chronotope is also a difference: in socialist realism, between present and future; in melodrama, between nature and culture;58 in the Western, also between uncivilized wildness and civilizing culture (although bearing a different respective semantics, contrasting melodrama’s good natural man with the uncivilized man of the wild west needing to be tamed). Even Bakhtin’s own empirical minor chronotopes of road and threshold could be said to have a differential quality about them. In Sonnensucher, the threshold takes the form of the elevator down into the mine, which is the scene of many crucial moments, including Lutz’s decisive smile near the end. The factory itself, clearly a chronotope of GDR industrial literature or “literature of production,” should also be seen as a difference from nature (meant to be heroically “conquered” according to the old Marxist view, a conquest very much in evidence in Wolf’s film). Thus the chronotope, contrary to some received wisdom, does not correspond to any definite place, but only to the function places can take.59 The complexity of the film’s connotations is evident in many details: one instance is the painting of the birch forest in Sergei’s apartment, itself a cliché in Russian culture, which may be linked both to Sergei’s natural Russian goodness (also a cliché from the literary reception of Russian literature around 1900) and to Lutz’s painting of the goat in a landscape that she tries to hang on the wall of Günter’s apartment. The birch forest is linked to love (as it also is in Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood [1962], in the scenes with Masha and Galtsev), which is here unrealizable or unreachable for Lutz, except perhaps in her brief smile at Beier; it is thus part of the film’s melodramatic mode or generic component as well.

Some Conclusions Looking at Sonnensucher through the lens of this differential notion of chronotope suggests several points to make in conclusion. First, the Gegenwartsfilm turns out, perhaps unsurprisingly, to be a composite

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genre using several chronotypes—here the elevator or the road on which Lutz either flees (at the beginning) or sees her implicit future (at the end)—rather than possessing one of its own.60 (Even the rowdy pub scenes in the film, associated with the song “Der starke Mann,” could be treated as a chronotope of Weimar working class culture, to which the film is trying to link back.) The road stands for change in time, for (metonymic) displacement, while the elevator stands for an interior change, one linked to introspective descensus ad inferos and an overcoming of traumatic memories; as Beier tells Lutz in one scene in the film, “one has to go down before one can ascend”—meaning down into the Stygian darkness and up into the sunlight. (The overlap between Gegenwartsfilm and antifascist film, with its “shadow line” tropes of conversion and traversal, could be delineated in terms of these chronotopes.) The chronotope is often linked to genre; “however, not every dominant chronotope will generate a particular literary genre; there are dominant chronotopes that have not—yet—become generics.”61 Many of Wolf ’s films have striking visual chronotopes: in Der geteilte Himmel, the sharply canted shots of rising chimneys representing the Utopian future of technology, the alley of trees linked to Rita’s and Manfred’s love, or the aqueduct tied to Rita’s mourning; in Ich war neunzehn, the Oder River as a liminal space. Second, although there are melodramatic aspects or elements to the film,62 they are modal rather than generic. (More full-blown instances of melodrama can be found in Lissy or Sterne.) The opposition of home and public space does not hold here—most emblematically in Lutz’s failed attempt at setting up a home with Günter and hanging a rather sentimental landscape painting on the wall, which Günter, returning home drunk from flirting with another woman, rudely takes down to replace it with his heroically futuristic trumpet. But melodrama, as Anke Pinkert has shown, is tied to the need to work through wartime trauma, to the psychic “work” that Lutz needs to do before she can be reintegrated into society, and the plot around Lutz arguably sidelines the male story of labor, or Jupp and Beier and the difficulties of Soviet-German cooperation for Wismut uranium production, by the end. Along these multiple fault lines or splits of genre, style, and address, the film is broken or fractured into a non-identity—a feature we will find again in Der geteilte Himmel and Ich war neunzehn. Its central figures, such as its chronotopes, can be seen as trying to hold together these disparate or conflicting energies, between mourning and Utopian hope, between realism and mythic or typical generification.63 Yet these chronotopes are less metaphoric than metonymic (unlike the symbolic “concrete universals” of sun and trumpet):64 they mark less a unity than a split, a division in time, the still unrealized possibility of a present (Gegenwart) that has only a fragile chance, as in Lutz’s hesitant smile.

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We can however use our analytical tools even further. Socialist realism should be seen as a more than national genre, one linking the GDR to the USSR;65 the nation, by contrast, is linked to melodrama and suffering, whether that of Lutz or that of Beier. The production story was a transnational genre; the Gegenwartsfilm was not (it is not the same as the Soviet bytovoi fil’m). The “Western” opposition of wild nature and culture is multiply overcoded here: the wild German males of the Wismut are to be “tamed” both by the Russians and by Lutz, who in turn can first become feminine through her union with Beier. Sergei is both the hero of socialist realist epic—outside time, in the “epic time” of Bakhtin evoked earlier by Gutkind—and also melodrama’s “natural man” to Lutz (for whom he however remains finally unattainable). Like that of Luhmann’s form-ina-medium, the chronotope’s unity is paradoxical, and must be unfolded in time (that of history). The “unity” of Fascist past and Socialist present forms the paradox of the German nation here, one that will only be resolved in a Utopian future, on the perspective of which the film ends with Lutz and her child alone. The Germans are (paradoxically) both fascist and not: this is only resolved by history, which relegates fascism to the past and socialism to the future. German men are both “wild Easterners” and also feminized by fascism: as Sergei says at one point to Beier, “Seien Sie nicht hysterisch!” Beier, unlike Lutz, cannot solve his own paradoxical double identity as German except through a sacrificial (melodramatic?) death. Unlike the glorious sacrificial deaths of socialist realism, however, Beier’s is more expiatory—determined by his and Germany’s past—than turned toward a Utopian future in which he would be remembered as a martyr. The generic “governance” of the film is thus as complex as was that of the Wismut (which was run like a Soviet enclave, a state within a state). We might recall a helpful formulation of Rick Altman’s to make sense of this, “Genres are not just post facto categories, then, but part of the constant category-splitting/category-creating dialectic that constitutes the history of types and terminology. Instead of imaging this process in terms of static classification, we might want to see it in terms of a regular alternation between an expansive principle—the creation of a new cycle—and a principle of contraction—the consolidation of a genre.”66 Altman then goes on to graph his idea through a series of these alternations: noun GENRE  adjective CYCLE  noun GENRE (2), and so on (66). If we try to map Wolf and DEFA on to this pattern, we might get something like: (UFA) melodrama  antifascist melodrama (Genesung)  melodramatic Western (Sonnensucher). Unlike Altman’s neat lines of descent, however, the lineage of Sonnensucher would have to have multiple branches, some crossing national boundaries. To this splitting of genre corresponds a splitting in the film’s address as well. Anne Barnert has noted how, at the film’s dramatic climax, when Beier recalls his guilty non-intervention at the moment when Sergei’s

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wife was killed in the war, the film offers the viewer two possibilities of identification: one with Sergei, the historical victor in the war, and one with Beier, the culprit.67 We might see this splitting as typical of a colonial (East German) subject, who identifies both with the guilty position of the colonized and the superior position of the colonizer;68 we will find this splitting again and again in Wolf’s work, whether in Gregor Hecker’s Russo-German(-Jewish) division, or Professor Mamlock’s JewishGermanness, or the metonymic narratives of Mama, ich lebe. Here the split between Beier and Sergei can be compared with the split between the melodrama centered on Lutz (and on Beier as a wounded or vulnerable man, as contrasted with Sergei as melodrama’s strong “natural man”) and the heroic modernist production story. This split is found also in the film’s language, which alternates between the montage sequence of the beginning, with its Soviet-style rhetorical address, and its heavy symbolism of sun and trumpet, all instances of what Bordwell calls “overt narration,”69 and more deliberately paced segments The frequent use of wipes in the film, a device which Christian Metz called “trucage” (faking), are also an instance of this obtrusive, omniscient narration; as Metz noted, the wipe is a visual element, but it is not photographic, that is, not realistic (or referential).70 Wipes mark narrative breaks in the film and point up its discontinuities; they are, like the chronotope, figurative elements in the film, like the reliance on flashback or musical commentary at dramatic moments (as when Lutz angrily says “Männer sind Schweine!” to Emmy early on in the film, a musical outburst underlining her traumatic alienation from sexuality). Thus at the moment when Lutz’s relation to Günter fails—when he returns drunk one night, having spent time with another woman (a “bad girl” played by Brigitta Kraus), and assaults Lutz until she flees to Emmi again—the traumatic break in the narrative is marked by a clock wipe (at 61ʹ18ʺ); when Lutz had first seen Günter in the bar in Berlin, and had then left when the bar descended into a brawl, there had been a star wipe to mark off this segment of the story (at 13ʹ20ʺ). To these alternately Utopian or traumatic aspects—which are sometimes not entirely distinguishable71—we may oppose the moments when the film seems to dwell on Lutz’s sadness and mourning, which often use longer takes, placing Lutz (or sometimes Beier) dramatically in the foreground of the shot, with a recessive space behind her. The use of rack focus at such moments serves to reduce Lutz’s surroundings to a memory or a thought, placing her in a space of mourning and reflection slightly outside the present (somewhat as Lissy’s looks off-screen pointed to another space of freedom outside her entrapment in a failed marriage). At moments, the camera seems to linger over Lutz with longer shots that suggest an almost neorealist reflectiveness, as when she watches the sleeping Günter and thinks about his abrupt marriage proposal (48ʹ20ʺ–48ʹ57ʺ, a thirty-seven-second long shot). Here Lutz briefly

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Figure 4.1. Typical two shot of Lutz (Ulrike von Zerboni) and Beier (Günther Simon) in an interior space. ©DEFA-Stiftung/Herbert Kroiss.

almost becomes the “alienated individual” of postwar neorealism, thinking rather than acting (like Deleuze’s time-image protagonist). Again and again the camera pulls back reflectively from individual figures to show their surroundings, as if to allow “objects and settings [milieux] [to] take on an autonomous, material reality which gives them an importance in themselves.”72 These moments of spatial distension and slowing of the editing correspond to a dilation in the film’s time, backward into the past and into the traumatic memory that needs to be worked through before its hoped-for present can actually take place. Like this present, the GDR as nation has not yet fully arrived (as it will in the 1960s, the age of the Ankunftsroman or “novel of arrival,” in which Der geteilte Himmel will participate). The nation, like the present, cannot be designated except as difference from the past: this is what the chronotope as formin-a-medium, as unity of designation and distinction (in Luhmann’s and Baecker’s sense), refers to or calls up. The film’s generic complexities are familiar enough from other instances of the cinematic New Wave, including that of Eastern Europe (think of the contradicting roles and final death of Maciek in Ashes and Diamonds). Had the film been shown in the late 1950s, it could have contributed to a differentiation of cinematic culture73 in DEFA that had to be delayed until later, until the mid- to late-1960s, with Der geteilte Himmel and Ich war neunzehn (and was arguably never allowed complete

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freedom, if one recalls the Eleventh Plenum and censoring of Jadup und Boel). As it is, Sonnensucher now represents a kind of mixed “generic memory,” of a past that remained latent and unrealized—and thus also that does not exist apart from our delayed reception of it.74 As later in the case of the Rabbit Films or Simon’s Jadup und Boel, the GDR state could not allow the existence of a truly realist Gegenwartsfilm, and thus did not allow the nation to come to itself, to formulate its own reflective self-knowledge in filmic (generic) form. This is the truth named by Heiner Müller’s ironic assertion after 1989 that “the GDR never existed.” The GDR’s present thus remained in a state of permanent latency, which affects the way we see this films now.75 The Gegenwartsfilm might best be understood as a kind of intervention in the public sphere at a specific moment in time: all of Wolf’s most significant films, whether Sonnensucher, Der geteilte Himmel, Solo Sunny or Ich war neunzehn (not a Gegenwartsfilm, but still an intervention in the post-Rabbit crisis and in GDR youth culture), have this aspect. Because of its delayed release, the film has also become a kind of “archive” of the vanished GDR nation: archive of an appellative revolutionary pathos that no longer has a direct addressee, so that we can only “see” it, as it were, through a distorting lens or mirror of historical distance and displacement. If we compare Sonnensucher to other European New Wave films, one striking difference between it and them is the absence of any romantic glamor. Compared to the attractive love stories of Maciek and Krzystyna in Ashes and Diamonds, or that of Veronika and Boris in Cranes Are Flying, Lutz’s love life is anything but romantic. It was not until Der geteilte Himmel that Wolf would be able to create a romantic couple similar to those of other European New Wave films. In Sonnensucher, Lutz appears to be less an embodiment of the feminine mystique than a suffering creature longing for redemption: her naivete and directness are expressions of wounded innocence, not traditional feminine charms. In light of what we now know of the human and environmental costs of the Wismut project—an immense catastrophe even by GDR standards, generating over a hundred million tons of radioactive waste and killing or causing severe health problems for tens of thousands of workers—that historical distance must also be an ironic one. Both the subject matter of Sonnensucher and its filmic form—its reversion to montage in the prologue, its intrusive narration—may be said to be archives of GDR and cinematic history, and thus archives of specific social and technological contradictions. On the one hand, the modernist rhetoric of montage is, in Wolf, already paradoxically backward-looking, an homage to a cinematic form from which postwar film had turned away, thus an archive of a filmic and social revolution that had already happened elsewhere. Wolf’s historical consciousness, his urge to give epic form to an undertaking felt to be monumental and unprecedented, were in conflict with the modernist

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search for immediacy.76 As Benjamin Buchloh has put it, in a discussion of Weimar photomontage practices and their postwar afterlife: Es lässt sich mit einiger Gewissheit sagen, dass die Aufzeichnung komplexer historischer Prozesse, das Sammeln von Fakten und das Auflisten von chronologischen Abfolgen und zeitlichen Kontinuitäten [as in the “March of Time”-like numbers of years in the prologue, LP] der ursprünglichen Forderung der Avantgarde nach Unmittelbarkeit, Schock und Brechung zutiefst widerspricht, selbst wenn es sich bei diesen Aufzeichnungen nur um fictive Strukturen handelte.77 [It may be said with some certainty that the transcription of complex historical processes, the collection of facts and listing of chronological sequences and temporal continuities deeply contradicts the original avant-garde demand for immediacy, shock and rupture, even when it is a question of fictive structures.]

For Buchloh, post-1945 attempts at reviving the aesthetics of earlier modern montage end up producing an involuntary archive. Wolf’s prologue is an attempt to mediate this contradiction, and to give his narrative a more objective, epic tone; it is—to borrow the title of another famous forbidden work about the Wismut—the aesthetic of the Rummelplatz. Buchloh again: “So formuliert die Ästhetik der Montage als Archiv die historische Erkenntnis von den disparaten, wenngleich zusammenhängenden und unausgesetzt sich neu determinierenden Beziehungen und Funktionen, in denen sich Subjektivität zuallererst konstituiert (238; Thus the aesthetics of montage as archive formulates the historical knowledge of disparate, albeit connected and constantly newly determined relations and functions in which subjectivity is first constituted). Montage thus becomes a form of historical archive after 1945. Buchloh concludes his thoughts on the historical ageing of montage aesthetics with a look at the postwar documentary photography of Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose work sought to chronicle the vanishing heavy industry of West Germany since the late 1950s, starting with the Ruhr Valley and culminating in the series Anonyme Skulpturen (Anonymous Sculptures, 1963–75). According to Buchloh, the “archival structure of this oeuvre” remained unrecognized, along with its inevitable differences from the photography of 1920s New Objectivity (244). Just as Wolf sought to put his film in the lineage of cinematic montage techniques, the Bechers tried to put their work “in the line of New Objectivity” (245). Yet this “liaison between the photography of New Objectivity and industrial architecture as a medium of the heroic, new collective life of production had already become deeply problematic” (246) by then. What Wolf’s film, like the photography of the Bechers, ends up documenting is thus already a ruin.

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If in the case of the Bechers’ FRG, the end of heavy industry and its displacement by a newer, information-driven model of capitalism was already in sight, for Wolf, this development was to be postponed by the GDR state’s stubborn insistence on a national and heavy-industry-focussed economic model that was already out of date. To be sure: there is a marked medial difference between documentary photographs and a fiction film; yet images very similar to the Bechers’ cooling towers will become even more prominent in Wolf’s later filmic homage to industrialization, Der geteilte Himmel, with its emblematic smokestacks and factory panoramas. There may thus be something like an iconography (or chronotopy) of socialist construction to be gained from these films, one that might extend beyond film to other aspects of GDR visual culture.

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5: Sterne (1959)

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antifascist conversion narrative, this time of a German soldier stationed in a small Bulgarian town during the Second World War. Like Friedel in Die Genesung and Lissy, Walter (Jürgen Frohriep) is an apolitical soldier, more interested in his landscape-painting hobby than in his duties as a Wehrmacht occupation soldier. When he responds with an indifferent shrug to a request to send a doctor into the Jewish camp to help a woman in labor and is then called inhuman by a Jewish woman (Sascha Kruscharska), his conscience is pricked, and he gets to know the woman (symbolically named Ruth), eventually falling in love with her. Although he wants to help her escape the camp before its occupants are deported to Auschwitz, he arrives too late, tricked by one of his fellow soldiers (Kurt, played by Erik Klein). At the end, however, we know Walter will join the Bulgarian partisans resisting the Nazis, just as we know at the end of Lissy that the protagonist will oppose fascism. Sterne was a Bulgarian-East German co-production, shot in several different languages—German, Bulgarian and Ladino for the Jews—and the West German government tried (unsuccessfully) to block its being shown at film festivals; its script was written by the Bulgarian Angel Wagenstein (b.1922), himself also a director as well as an author.1 Wolf was not able to obtain the actors he had originally wanted for the roles of Walter and Ruth; both Jürgen Frohriep and Sascha Kruscharska (then a student) were relatively inexperienced and needed much coaching from the director. Others in the cast were veterans: Erik S. Klein, as Walter’s friend Kurt, gives a much more subtle and nuanced portrayal of a German soldier than, for instance, the Nazi Kaczmierczik in Lissy. The film’s low-key lighting and restrained use of music contributed to an overall poetics of understatement that makes it one of the most successful of early Holocaust dramas. The film’s reception is unusual within Wolf’s oeuvre, first because it had international resonance at the time of its release, and second for having been recently analyzed by Elsaesser. (Elsaesser’s essay is concerned not only with Sterne, but also with Wolf’s entire oeuvre, for which Sterne is seen as exemplum; the present book’s response to the essay will thus be found not only in this chapter.) Any attempt at a fresh look at it has thus to engage Elsaesser’s work, and that of Gertrud Koch, just as Elsaesser himself had to begin his book on Weimar cinema “with a re-reading of Kracauer and Eisner.”2 In addition, one will need to consider Sterne within

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what has, especially since the 1990s, begun to emerge as a Holocaust genre, or to an emerging “genericization” of the event, which nonetheless includes (in Barry Langford’s terms) a “point where cultural signifying practices are split from within,”3 presenting the spectator with generic shifts or unassimilable registers of experience. This shift in Holocaust representation has been one from the modernist austerity of Resnais’s Night and Fog (1956) toward increasingly generic narratives (since the US TV series Holocaust of 1978 and Spielberg’s Schindler’s List of 1993); Wolf’s film can be said to participate in both these formal strains (in the latter case, perhaps anachronistically, since its generic aspects may be linked to UFA). Like others of Wolf’s films, Sterne borrows heavily from the genre of melodrama, as Elsaesser noted in his first brief mention of the film; this connects it not only to Genesung and Lissy but also to Solo Sunny. As Elsaesser’s second and longer discussion of Sterne realized, though, this generic framework coexists with another one, which Elsaesser describes as much in terms of reception as of artistic form, namely the historical temporality he names with his notion of the historical imaginary (mentioned earlier in this book’s introduction). In the second part of what follows, this other dimension will be further elaborated via a recurring formal problem in Wolf’s films, namely allegory (another recurring dimension of Wolf’s work), thereby suggesting a crypto-modernist dimension to Sterne. The complicated cohabitation of these dimensions, melodrama and modernism, will then appear as a figuration of Langford’s split signifying practices, one linking Sterne to similar splits in Wolf’s other work (in Sonnensucher and Ich war neunzehn, for instance). Elsaesser’s and Michael Wedel’s first characterization of Sterne is at once critical and measured: Sterne [. . .] is an archetypal melodrama of the victim and victimization which in a typically German pattern predating both Wolf and, for instance, Sanders-Brahms, casts women as victims, in order to test the male protagonists’ capacity for change, while the women are tested for their endurance in suffering. With its ending, where the man, despite his best intentions, comes “too late” to rescue the woman he loves, Sterne, however, also invites comparison with many of the “apologetic” moments in both UFA/Nazi cinema and postwar West German mainstream cinema. Where the latter is rightly regarded as self-pitying, Wolf’s protagonist might be given the benefit of his stoic resignation as the mark of inner resistance.4

The redemptive moments of Sterne are found, for Elsaesser and Wedel, in its “quality of pastiche of stylistic traditions and perfect mimicry of generic conventions”—as if Wolf were anticipating by decades the ironic reworking of genre operated in New German Cinema, or even the ironic reflexive turn taken by later Holocaust films. Melodrama, however,

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is a very large generic category; what could it mean to try to specify Sterne’s generic reference more closely? The film is clearly not a family melodrama (the topic of Elsaesser’s most-quoted essay),5 but it does turn out to have many similarities to Stanley Cavell’s proposed genre of the “melodrama of the unknown woman” (already referred to in the discussion of Lissy, and looking at these more closely will help bring Elsaesser’s observations on the film’s inner temporality into closer focus. Cavell, for his part, is concerned to define his own subgenre in (perhaps dialectical) relation to its complement, the comedy of remarriage: “Whereas in remarriage comedy the action of the narrative moves [. . .] from a setting in a big city to a conclude in a place outside the city, a place of perspective, in melodramas of unknownness the action returns to and concludes in the place from which it began or in which it has climaxed, a place of abandonment or transcendence.”6 This place is, in Sterne, the train platform with which the opening flashback begins, returning at the film’s end, and it is very much a place of both “abandonment” and “transcendence,” since it is where Walter finds, on the muddy ground, the emblematic Star that will signal his conversion to antifascism. The return of this space, and the recurrence of particular shots and sites within the film’s setting, such as the bird’s-eye view of a nocturnal place or square crossed by the protagonists, or the church tower, effects a spatialization of time, one anticipating the more overtly modernist use of such recurrent images in Der geteilte Himmel, but here already tied to the internal plurality of Elsaesser’s “historical imaginary” (which in this book I seek to differentiate into archive and chronotope).7 In Cavell’s view, this spatial enclosure has moreover an ethical implication, for “the woman’s ability to judge the world [. . .] comes from the woman’s being confined or concentrated to a state of isolation so extreme as to portray and partake of madness, a state of utter incommunicability, as if before the possession of speech” (16). We would have to modify this description slightly for Sterne, however: on the one hand, this “isolation” is not—as in Cavell’s melodramas—merely a private one but very much collective and bearing a specific historical index, and on the other, the female protagonist, Ruth, is, much of the time, less mute than eloquent, giving voice to a particular creed of “humanism” that was a mainstay of GDR ideology. That Ruth is at once representative of her people and also of socialist ethics gives her a dual identity, and means that, like Cavell’s heroines, “in her metamorphosis she is and is not what she is” (134). Her inner transfiguration, supported by her vision of Walter as a “good person” (ein guter Mensch), also gives her “the power to demand the man’s transformation” (117). Interestingly, Cavell pries the melodrama away from the associations with masochistic conceptions of fate typical of Peter Brooks’s conception of the genre: “the quality of stardom or magnetism exercised by the women of these melodramas is not what is called their

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personal beauty but lies in their declaration of distinctness and freedom, of human existence. They are, if goddesses, not ones of love or fate, but of chance and choice” (128). Chance and choice are presented in melodramas as “stern and clear moral dictates” (134), affiliating the genre with the moral sublime (and less so with Brooks’s “moral occult,” which Cavell criticizes on p. 41). We will need to return to this problem of the sublime again when considering Sterne’s crypto-modernist dimension. To have mapped Sterne onto Cavell’s unknown woman template is not merely yet another exercise in taxonomy, for it opens up the genre internally to elements of choice and change, rather than leaving it frozen as something that can only be pastiched (as in Elsaesser and Wedel’s essay). More important still is Cavell’s association of the genre with his own larger philosophical concern with skepticism. Cavell works this out systematically as little as Elsaesser does his historical imaginary, but the connection of skepticism and melodrama is suggested early on in his book: “It stands to reason that the threat to the ordinary that philosophy names skepticism should show up in fiction’s favorite threats to marriage, namely in forms of melodrama and tragedy” (10). Philosophy’s “hyperbolic doubt” is seen as the root of melodrama: “doubt to excess, to the point of melodrama” (9). A little later Cavell specifies the location of this doubt in the genre still further: “The idea of unknownness in the melodramas, matching the continuing demand of the woman in remarriage comedy to be known, reads back, or forward, into [. . .] the meeting of skepticism and tragedy at the point, or drive, of an avoidance of—terror of, disappointment with—acknowledgment” (13). Given that Cavell also associates melodrama with opera, one might even surmise that it is the admixture of skepticism that differentiates melodrama from tragedy proper. Skepticism is central to Sterne, characterizing not only Ruth’s initial disbelief in Walter’s capacity for humanity, but also Walter’s own cynical view of history (as regressing to the level of chimpanzees, as he puts it early on in the film, 13ʹ20ʺ). It is also typical of earlier Holocaust film, marking the narration of Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, Nuit et brouillard, 1955), which cannot quite believe in the reality of its own images, or in the ability of its viewers to understand them. As Elsaesser writes of Holocaust films in general: “Was machen sie mit dem Wissen, das sie weder den Protagonisten vorenthalten noch mit ihnen teilen können, was machen sie mit der Unausweichlichkeit der Katastrophe, die sie dennoch am liebsten ungeschehen machen wollen?” (what do they do with the knowledge which they neither withhold from the protagonists nor can share with them, what do they do with the inevitability of catastrophe, which they would nonetheless prefer to undo?).8 Ungeschehenmachen— undoing or “turning back the clock”—is a central strategy for dealing with anxiety, a central affect of the film (and of its Italian neorealist

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predecessors).9 Sterne thus “answers” its skepticism dually: once through Walter’s conversion to antifascism—which, as Elsaesser and Koch note, risks instrumentalizing the Holocaust for the purposes of Marxist historical teleology—but also in another, more cryptic fashion, as Elsaesser recognizes in his more recent essay: namely as an injunction to remember the victims. It is here where the film (in the present reading) will obliquely tip toward a more allegorical and modernist dimension (one which also tallies with our larger concern with the archive). Interestingly, this question of skepticism not only inside the film’s diegesis (the skepticism of its characters), but also of its frame (its narration, its address) brings Wolf into proximity to a figure who turns up periodically in this book as his shadowy double or companion, namely Siegfried Kracauer. For Gertrud Koch’s criticisms of the latter are close kin to her comments on Wolf; both, in her view, were not fully capable of facing up to the Holocaust in their respective works, whether as critic or filmmaker. The dual solution to skepticism we have found in Sterne turns up in Koch’s reading of Kracauer’s Theory of Film as well. Toward the end of his book, Kracauer compares film’s ability to show us what we could not otherwise stand to contemplate to the shield of Perseus: “The film screen is Perseus’ polished shield.” Yet despite this, “Perseus, the image watcher, did not succeed in laying the ghost for good.”10 Koch comments on this: “Für Kracauer folgt aus dieser Unauflösbarkeit der Schreckbilder, dass sie Selbstzweck seien, nicht die vordergründige, appellative Funktion, die auf konkretes Handeln verweist, sondern die Aufhebung der Geschichte im Gedächtnis ist ihr heimliches Telos” (for Kracauer, it follows from this indissolubility of fearsome images that they are an end in themselves—not the ostensible, appellative function that points to concrete action, but the sublation of history into memory is their secret telos).11 So too, as we will see, the visual figuration of Sterne points beyond Walter’s conversion to a mnemonic, archival function; this is what is meant by Elsaesser’s “historical imaginary,” which is characterized by Nachträglichkeit and is thus not simultaneous with historical time. Wolf’s film is a message not only to the present but also to the future (its imperative to remember is thus, in a sense, in the future perfect);12 this internal temporal complexity, reflected in the film itself by flashback, is a central aspect of his filmic poetics (as we will see in Der geteilte Himmel). This temporal problematic of the film is also linked to its peculiar lack of present tense, on which Elsaesser comments: in the famous traveling shot over the faces of the Jews when they are called up for inspection by the Nazis, the use of music “already mourns and weeps for them, as if the Jews only still existed in the memory traces of their future murder.”13 Is this only another telltale symptom of the dominance of antifascist teleology over Holocaust working-through? We might contrast Wolf’s treatment of the topic with another contemporary one from the GDR. Bruno Apitz (1900–1979),

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a Buchenwald survivor who wrote the best-selling novel Naked among Wolves, soon filmed by Frank Beier (1963)—a canonical GDR text that has since come in for criticism—published a short story titled “Esther” in 1959, made in 1962 into a GDR TV film with music by Hanns Eisler. It is the story of a love affair in a concentration camp; Esther, a Greek Jew, is about to be gassed, and has a brief encounter with Oswald just before this. At one point, Esther refuses Oswald’s offer to die with her with the following justification: Nein . . . Du wirst leben. Vielleicht. Vielleicht auch nicht. Aber Tausende werden nach uns sein. Und der Tod, so wir ihn zu sterben haben, er muss sein. Ich ahne ein Grosses, das hinter unserm Tod sich aufrichtet. Mir ist, als vermöchte ich mit meinen Augen den Nebel des Gegenwärtigen zu durchdringen, und ich weiss: das Kommende ist unseres Todes wert. Uns reisst eine sinkende Welt in ihren Strudel hinab. Ich darf nicht meinen eigenen Tod sterben, denn das Samenkorn am Rande des Feldes trägt immer taube Ähren. Ich aber will auf fruchtbaren Boden fallen. [No . . . You will live. Maybe. Maybe also not. But thousands will be after us. And death, as we have to die it, must be. I intuit something great that arises behind our death. It is as if I could penetrate the fog of the present with my own eyes, and I know: that which is coming is worth our death. A sinking world tears us down in its maelstrom. I may not die my own death, for the seed at the edge of the field always bears poor ears. I want to fall on fruitful earth.]14

One could hardly imagine a more horrifying “justification” for the Holocaust, which is here seen as a necessary martyrdom in order to bring about socialism’s future—even using Christian references (Jesus’s seed parable from the synoptic Gospels) to justify the death of Jews. Wolf’s treatment of the topic, while not unproblematic, is light-years removed from Apitz’s colossal blindness. Koch, however, goes even further in her reading: in her view, the confrontation with the Holocaust forced Kracauer to abandon what she calls the “Primat des Optischen” (primacy of the optical) in his thought. “Die Überlegungen zur Massenvernichtung stossen an die Binnengrenzen von Kracauers Konzept vom optischen Primat, der Anschaulichkeit. Sie kehren wieder als Flucht ins Imaginäre, in hilflose Paradoxien, als die der Gedanke an so etwas wie Versöhnung mit den Toten nur gedacht werden kann” (the considerations of mass annihilation run into the internal limits of Kracauer’s concept of the primacy of the optical, of intuition. They return again as a flight into the imaginary, into helpless paradoxes, which is the only form in which the thought of a reconciliation with the dead can be conceived).15 Her example for this is Kracauer’s figure

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of Ahasver at the end of History: The Last Things before the Last, whose redemption Kracauer can only imagine as being at the end of time. “Der Sprung aus der Zeit, der undenkbare, wäre die Rettung. Kracauer freilich belässt dies alles im Imaginären” (140; the leap out of time, unthinkable, would be salvation. Kracauer admittedly leaves all this in the imaginary). Put otherwise: “Der Primat des Optischen ist nur aufgegeben, um die Dinge in eine andere mediale Ebene zu bringen” (141; the primacy of the optical is only given up to bring things to another medial level). Although both critics situate their work relative to the Frankfurt School, Koch—in this perhaps closer to the negativity of Adorno’s taboo on images, while Elsaesser follows the optical primacy of Kracauer—situates the imaginary differently than does Elsaesser. For Koch, Kracauer’s imaginary is linked to a compensatory evasion of the negativity of the Holocaust, which his “primacy of the optical” is inadequate to grasp. This imaginary dimension, this outside of history, is figured in Sterne in two ways: through the superimposition of enlarged images of the human face, and through the stars. It is here, in these specific visual and rhetorical tropes of the film, that melodrama and modernity ambiguously interfere and intersect with each other.

Tropes and Narrative Forms One of the most striking aspects of Sterne is its use of superimposition in several dream-like nocturnal sequences, when Ruth and Walter have their peripatetic conversations on humanity and history. On the most immediate level of plot, it is surely significant that Walter is a Kunstmaler (art painter), albeit an amateur one, at the film’s beginning; like Kracauer, he is forced to give up the “primacy of the optical,” even of the aesthetic itself, abandoning the domain of detached artistic contemplation of his surroundings in favor of political commitment. But even beyond this, the technique of superimposition itself is significant. An older commentator on Sterne, Albert Cervoni, noted “le côté un peu démodé de son style, le goût des surimpressions alors souvent jugé anachronique, par exemple, jouant avec l’attirance pour les décors ‘naturels’ repris de la méthode italienne” (the slightly outmoded aspect of his style, the taste for superimpositions which was, at the time, judged anachronistic, playing against the attraction to “natural” settings taken from Italian neorealism).16 This judgment of “anachronism” was passed on superimposition by none other than André Bazin, in an essay omitted from the first translation of What is Cinema?, titled “The Life and Death of Superimposition.”17 In it, Bazin sees superimposition as historically dated, rendered obsolete by more recent developments in film technique: “Superimposition can, in all logic, only suggest the fantastic in a conventional way; it lacks the ability actually to evoke the supernatural” (44). Daniel Morgan comments

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Figure 5.1. Dramatic night sky. ©DEFA-Stiftung/Lotte Michailowa.

on this: “Of course, Bazin does not mean that filmmakers stopped using superimpositions altogether, or that he expected they would. His account is more Hegelian: superimposition simply ceases to be of importance to cinema. It may live on in various forms, but its status as a vital part of cinema is over.”18 The use of superimposition is a stylistic element found in others of Wolf ’s films as well, including Sonnensucher and Der geteilte Himmel. With this last film, Sterne also shares the iconographic motif of dramatically receding walls, along which the couple walks. The similarity of images is strong enough to suggest one of narrative structure as well: all these films dramatically contrast opposing individual figures representative of distinct ideological options. This consistency across different films does suggest a quasi-auteur status for Wolf. On one level, we could see these superimposed faces as a fantastic element;19 they go hand in hand with Sterne’s tendency toward parabolic narration, by heightening the figure of Ruth to the point where she points beyond the limits of the story. Ruth is, of course, a biblical figure; as Elizabeth Ward remarks on the film, “the underdevelopment of Ruth as a fully-formed character performs a quite different role on a hypertextual level. Through Ruth, Wolf appeals to three quite different cultural models which once again lift the character and, consequently, the film, out of its specific national context and imbue it with an international quality so frequently absent in DEFA films.”20

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These models are Juliet from Shakespeare, the Biblical Ruth—herself not only a figure of devotion to her people but also a convert from another faith—and Anne Frank, whose story was then very much in the public eye. We might remember another Eastern European film about Jews and resistance from roughly the same time: Andrzej Wajda’s Samson (1961), which “relies heavily on symbolism and biblical associations, relegating to the margins [. . .] the historical and social background”21 in order to abstractly stylize the film. The extra-textual references here contribute to what Cavell calls the woman’s “transcendence” of the story (37), and given that Sterne, too narrates something of a conversion narrative (a form discussed earlier in the context of Lissy), this gives the story something of the quality of a legend, in André Jolles’s sense, namely a story to be imitated. Of this particular simple form, Jolles wrote: So hat das Mittelalter imitari eindeutend mit immutare in Verbindung gebracht: sich so verwandeln, dass man in etwas anderes eingeht. Der Heilige, in dem als Person die Tugend sich vergegenständlicht, ist eine Figur, in der seine engere und seine weitere Umgebung die Imitatio erfährt. Er stellt tatsächlich dengenigen dar, den wir nacheifern können [. . .] Er ist eine Gestalt, an der wir etwas, was allseitig erstrebenswert erscheint, wahrnehmen, erleben und erkennen und die uns zugleich die Möglichkeit der Bestätigung veranschaulicht—kurz, er ist im Sinne der Film ein imitabile.22 [Thus the Middle Ages linked imitari unequivocally with immutare: to transform oneself in such a way that one merges into something else. The saint, in whom virtue is objectified as a person, is a figure in whom both his closer and more distant environment experience imitation. He actually represents the one we should imitate [. . .] He is a figure in whom we perceive, experience, and recognize what is generally to be striven for, and who simultaneously makes the possibility of confirmation intuitive—in short, he is an imitabile in the sense of film.]

Strictly speaking, Sterne would have to be one of Jolles’s “bezogene Formen” (ordered forms) or “gegenwärtige Formen” (present forms), meaning a modern derivation of a simple form, authored by an individual, “Die Vita, die Legende überhaupt zerbricht das “Historische” in seine Bestandteile, sie erfüllt diese Bestandteile von sich aus mit dem Werte der Imitabilität und baut sie in einer von dieser bedingten Reihenfolge wieder auf. Die Legende kennt das ‘Historische’ in diesem Sinne überhaupt nicht, sie kennt und erkennt nur Tugend und Wunder” (40; the vita or legend in general breaks the “historical” apart into its components; it fills these latter out with the values of imitability and rebuilds them in

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a sequence determined by this last. The legend entirely ignores the “historical” in this sense, it knows and recognizes only virtue and miracle.) James Young has discussed how, even in Holocaust narratives not deliberately seeking Wolf’s parabolic dimension, “legendary motifs” and “legendary stories” tended to creep in to the retelling of events.23 Wolf’s use of voiceover and flashback—both also prominent in Der geteilte Himmel and Ich war neunzehn—also suggests this parabolic aspect. In rhetorical terms, the enlarged face of Ruth, superimposed upon the backdrop of her surroundings, becomes something of a synecdoche, a central figure in much Holocaust narrative.24 This is also where Sterne becomes problematic, for Ruth’s particularity as Jew is also, by this literal enlargement of her facial image, brought into relation to a larger, more generalized “humanity” which will allow her to change Walter. Ewa Płonowska Ziarek has commented on a similar strategy in Cavell’s work, which seeks to answer the risk of isolation and estrangement with what he calls “attunement” to a larger human community. In doing so, he “articulates alterity”—in our context, Ruth’s difference as Jew—“within the vision of representative speech—within the economy of the common and the shared. In this vision, both the subject and the other have the exemplary status as a ‘representative human,’ as a member of the group, and this status within the community enables their mutual acknowledgment as well.”25 Here is the point where Sterne’s melodrama suggests a more esoteric dimension, one of cryptic modernism. For the faces of Ruth and Walter against the night sky brings them into relation with the film’s eponymous stars, and makes them into a kind of constellation. On the one hand, these stars remain firmly within our melodramatic context, especially Ruth’s words to Walter: “Ein jeder Stern gehört in sein Sternbild, und jeder Mensch hat einen Stern am Himmel. Und wenn der Stern sich von seinem Platz losreisst, geht dieser Mensch zugrunde.” (Every star belongs to its constellation, and every person has a star in the sky. And when the star tears loose from its place, then this person perishes.)26 In light of the larger melodramatic frame, it is perhaps not so jarring to recall Charlotte Vale’s words to Jerry at the end of Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942): “Oh, Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars.” This is melodrama’s answer to the Kantian moral sublime.27 Cavell comments on this as follows: A word about the moon Charlotte proposes she and Jerry not ask for and the stars she says “we” have. The phrase “don’t ask for the moon” has a fixed, idiomatic meaning; “we have the stars” has no such meaning. She is improvising now, on her own. Charlotte’s rhetoric makes having the stars seem something less than (a compensation for not) having the moon. But this trades—tactfully—on the conventional, conventionally romantic reading of the moon.

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Granted that forgoing the always-vanishing Jerry is painful for this woman, it is at the same time an intellectual relief, to say no more. Let us take “we have the stars”—since it is beyond the security of shared idiom—allegorically, that is, as an interpretation of what stars (literally) are. (137)

Cavell then sees the stars as allegories both of the film star and of “a romance with the universe, a mutual confidence with it” (138); we could add that they also point to the larger “attunement” with the human community Ziarek analyzes in his work. (It should be noted that Cavell’s view runs against that of much feminist scholarship on melodrama; a recent example of an opposed take on Charlotte’s sublimated stars is offered by Lauren Berlant.28) Such an association would also be strengthened by Sterne’s music, which relies, precisely in these dreamlike nocturnal sequences, on a voiceless choir (itself something of a topos in Holocaust film: one might think of the voiceless choirs in Jan Kadar and Elmar Klos’s Shop on Main Street from 1965).29 In the context of German (and Continental) modernism, however, stars have other resonances, beginning with Mallarmé’s Un coup de dès n’abolira jamais le hasard and running through Benjamin’s Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Origin of the German Tragic Drama) and Adorno to, most recently, Alain Badiou. One should not run modernism together with melodrama in a blur, however;30 for all that melodrama has had to do with modernity, modernism is another matter altogether. What the modernist constellation shares with that of melodrama is the dimension of sublime futurity born paradoxically out of failure (which is precisely the dimension of Elsaesser’s historical imaginary as well). In a gloss on a phrase from Mallarmé’s poem, “rien n’aura eu lieu que le lieu, excepté peut-être une constellation” (nothing will have taken place but the place, except perhaps a constellation), an older exegete, Robert Cohn, noted: “A literal meaning is that all this”—the disaster and failure, the shipwreck, of the Coup de dès—“is only possible, since it is in the invisible future.”31 Badiou, in an essay from the Handbook of Inaesthetics, reads Mallarmé as a political allegory, an aspect even more relevant to Sterne. For Badiou, it is when “the master hesitates to throw the dice”—to act—“that Truth arises, like an ideal dice throw inscribed in the nocturnal sky.”32 The empty place of the train platform with which the film begins and ends is then the void Place of Mallarmé: “nothing will have taken place but the place.” “The master can confer a poetic chance upon a truth only at the point where (perhaps) there is nothing but the desert, nothing but the abyss” (48). Badiou reads the two poems he has linked with each other, Un coup de dès and an Arabic poem by Labid ibn Rabia (ca. 560–661 CE) from before Islam, as a political allegory of two false alternatives to be avoided, namely Stalinism or neoliberal capitalism. “We must recompose,

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for our time, a thinking of truth that would be articulated onto the void without passing through the figure of the master” (53). Is this not what Wolf was trying to do not only with the figure of Walter, but also those of Lissy, Lutz, Rita, and Gregor Hecker, who all must confront a potential void or “shadow line”—such as Gregor Hecker’s menacing allegorical landscape of the Oder River—before they can reach their truth? The ordinariness and hesitation of these characters of Wolf’s means that they cannot be “masters” of historical knowledge. (Badiou’s “figure of the master” would, in DEFA, correspond to the Party figures whose allknowing presence DEFA officials so often demanded in film—or even to Apitz’s Esther, secure in her knowledge of the radiant future beyond her own sacrificial death.) This would be the place where an auteurist reading of Wolf would emphasize the function of mise-en-scène in his work, would show how, at these moments of allegorical suspension of antifascist narrative, his protagonists must enter and pass through a Deleuzian “time image” or “any-space-whatever” before reaching a truth that lies, finally, offscreen and outside the film’s narrative. (Such moments indeed exist in Wolf’s work; but they are in tension with a wish to produce a more functionally popular, generic cinema as well.) It is also, as we will see, the place where different forms of ethics—the antifascist imperative of resistance and the equal imperative to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust—come into tension. Another familiar allegorical instance from German literature is closely related to Sterne’s figure of the fallen star. “Die Hoffnung fuhr, wie ein Stern, der vom Himmel fällt, über ihre Häupter weg” (Hope traveled away, like a star falling from the sky, over their heads).33 Benjamin comments on this: “Sie [Eduard and Ottilie] gewahren sie freilich nicht und nicht deutlicher könnte gesagt werden, dass die letzte Hoffnung niemals dem eine ist, der sie hegt, sondern jenen allein, für die sie gehegt wird” (They do not admittedly perceive this hope, and it could not be said more clearly that the last hope is never one for the person who fosters it, but only for those for whom it is fostered).34 In Sterne, the hope is dual: for Ruth, it is for memory, and for Walter, for action in the service of freedom. But that hope is also for the film’s viewers, for its posterity, as well (as Elsaesser’s “historical imaginary” with its Nachträglichkeit or deferred reception of the film suggests). As Daniel Morgan noted on the technique of superimposition: “Superimposition may have an afterlife; it’s just that, within the line of thinking that moves from Dulac to Bazin to Godard, it’s not in the world of cinema anymore.”35 Sterne’s stars and its superposed faces, with their quasi-theological (or at least metaphysical) and mnemonic dimension, also have their afterlife outside of, or beyond. the visual world of the film, and are thus part of the film’s historical archive. It is interesting that both this film and Wolf’s next, Sonnensucher, have “cosmic” or at least natural symbolism in their titles; so, for that

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Figure 5.2. Walter (Jürgen Frohriep) alone, confronting his need to decide. ©DEFA-Stiftung/Lotte Michailowa.

matter, does Der geteilte Himmel, which also uses heavenly metaphors to represent a specific historical conflict. Whereas Sonnensucher’s sun is more straightforwardly metaphoric (as befits its status as a “concrete universal”), Sterne’s stars are more unstably metonymic. (Der geteilte Himmel’s heaven will combine elements of metaphor and metonymy.) Like the shadow line of Ruth’s loss and death that Walter must cross into antifascism, the stars mean different things at once: both the yellow star of Nazi racial ideology and also the universalism of humanitarian hope. This duality is also apparent in Ruth’s role in the film: “Sie steht in Sterne sowohl stellvertretend für diese Opfer, als auch für das gute Gewissen” (She stands, in Sterne, both representatively for the victims and also for the good conscience).36 This fits the multiple significations of the Holocaust itself, not only in Sterne. “On the one hand the Holocaust, to use Alon Confino’s phrase, is becoming a foundational past: a kind of defining metaphor which sustains global human rights regimes, while on the other hand being intimately linked to a particular historical agent, namely its Jewish victims [. . .].”37 When Sterne was shown in West Germany, occasionally its overt antifascist end was truncated. This is not merely a symptom of Adenauer-era anti-Communism, but also points to a fragile moment within the film itself: the point where, according to Gertrud Koch’s criticism, the Holocaust risks being sublated into antifascism—or where, in Badiou’s political

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reading of Mallarmé’s constellation, a vanishing signifier points to the imperative of an Event (and thus where, for Badiou’s critics, the particularity of history—in the present context, Jewish history—is too completely sublated into an ahistorical universal).38 Yet Sterne is sparing in its deployment of the usual classical Marxist explanations of Nazism and the Holocaust through larger historical and economic causality; we are given no lectures by any omniscient personification of Party wisdom.39 The film’s nocturnal dark, the arcanely stellar distance of hope, are linked to the isolation of the individuals Walter and Ruth from any overarching historical certainty, and their imperative need to act despite this isolation. In this situation, Ruth’s humanist credo, so often degraded to official ideology in the GDR, acquires a concreteness and specificity one can still, over a half century later, sense as authentic. As with the division of the two main characters in Der geteilte Himmel, or the internal break within Gregor Hecker as German and not-German, the film’s complexity (and thus its debatability) depends on a metonymic split—here figured in the distant plurality of “stars”—between an ethical imperative to remember and one to act, between the particularity of Ruth as Jew and the universality of Walter as antifascist, between a backward-looking aesthetic of melodrama and a more hidden one of modernism. As Elsaesser argues, the film is both part of DEFA’s (antifascist) historical imaginary and of a larger European Holocaust memory. Yet it has not fully become part of the canon of Holocaust film, in part due to the complicated internal relation between multiple traumas (that of the Holocaust, that of Germany and the GDR, of a historical failure to act), and thus remains latent within that canon—another figuration of the historical archive, of a future perfect that did not happen.

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6: Professor Mamlock (1961)

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that preceded it, Professor Mamlock narrates an antifascist conversion that comes too late to save its eponymous protagonist. Hans Mamlock (Wolfgang Heinz) is an assimilated Jewish surgeon who served in the German military in the First World War; he cannot take the Nazi threat seriously, wants all political discussions banned from his clinic, and tries to forbid his son Rolf (Hilmar Thate) from participating in Communist resistance work. Only when his daughter Ruth is driven out of her school by anti-Semitic harassment, and he himself is paraded through the streets by SA men, wearing a sign inscribed JUDE, and his fellow doctors weakly agree to sign a statement against him, does he realize what is happening and commits suicide. In a subplot, one of the nurses, Inge Ruoff (played by Lissy Tempelhof, who would provide the omniscient voiceover narrator for Der geteilte Himmel), who is at first a Nazi sympathizer, turns to help Mamlock’s son escape and defies Dr. Hellpach, a Nazi. Several of Mamlock’s Jewish colleagues at the clinic (Drs. Hirsch and Simon) serve as foils to his heroic but flawed character. NLIKE THE FILMS

A Splintered Parable Even within a difficult body of work, Professor Mamlock is one of Wolf’s most opaque films: the knot of overdetermined contradictions, between didactic function and indirect stylistic autonomy, is unusually dense here. Professor Mamlock is not only an adaptation of a play by the director’s father, a powerful figure if ever there was one, but also a remake of a popular 1938 Soviet film the younger Wolf had seen as a child, and furthermore, a highly topical and tendentious public intervention on the eve of the building of the Berlin Wall. Historically, one has to see it as an implicit justification for GDR politics at the beginning of the 1960s, like Karl Gass’s stridently agitprop “documentary” Schaut auf diese Stadt (Look at This City) from 1962. It touches on the sensitive topic of anti-Semitism and the relations between Jews, Communism, and the bourgeoisie. Its aesthetic combines both aspects of filmic modernism and overtly appellative, propagandistic function; if one finds this alloy suspect, one might remember that a similar linkage may be found in Kalatozov’s I am Cuba from 1964 (not to mention earlier instances of political modernism in Eisenstein, Vertov, or Dovzhenko). Professor Mamlock is thus finally a

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historical and aesthetic palimpsest, one on which not only the director had written. Critical opinion of the film has been mixed. Gertrud Koch wrote a scathing indictment of it for its subordination of Mamlock’s Jewishness to the political struggle against the bourgeoisie; even Erika Richter, in Das zweite Leben der Filmstadt Babelsberg, could not muster up much enthusiasm, and Wolf himself was critical of it in retrospect, saying he would have relied less on filmic “gimmicks” (Mätzchen) had he made it later on. Yet Anne Barnert, in a lengthy discussion that unravels many of the contradictory strands of the film, including its prehistory in the 1930s, arrives at a more tentative view, pointing to sequences where the images suggest greater room for Mamlock as Jew than the text. Barnert’s analysis runs to more than eighty pages and is the fullest treatment of the film to date; what follows will have thus to be in dialogue with it. We will begin with Koch, though, since her criticisms are the sharpest so far made of the film. After quoting the motto that closes the film—“There is no greater crime than to refuse to fight when fight one must!”—Koch comments: These lines are utterly scandalous because they implicitly suggest that Mamlock the suicide victim was not only the direct cause of his own death but also the deeper reason for it—he bears the guilt for his death in the very same way that had already been expressed in the propagandistic allegations of the early 1950s in the show trials against [Paul] Merker. The German Jews are condemned to their own death—as part of the bourgeois class, they bear part of the blame for it. The topicality of the drama which ends in suicide and not in the murder of millions of Jews is a kind of closure to an historical narrative which, at least in Wolf’s drama, still has the prerogative of historical openness.1

Koch’s article places Konrad Wolf’s ambiguous representations of the Holocaust in his films in the larger context of the GDR’s own instrumentalization of it for a larger political narrative, the amount of scholarship since 1989 devoted to this topic2 only substantiates her criticism. Barnert, too, can do no more than inflect Koch’s critique, not reject it (212, 248).3 As she points out, the film elides most of the specific references to Jews and anti-Semitism from Friedrich Wolf’s play. (The play, Wolf’s most popular work, had itself gone through multiple editions before becoming a canonized GDR classic; part of the process consisted precisely in the shift of accent from Mamlock’s Jewishness to his bourgeois class identity.) A psychoanalytic extension of this criticism would want to see Wolf’s film as a form of “deferred obedience” to his dead father, seven years after the latter’s death, and as a manifestation of what has been called an “uncanny love” of Jewish survivors for the GDR, a love going hand in hand with the old tradition of “Jewish self-hatred.”4 At the same time,

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the film repeats Friedrich Wolf’s own gesture of killing off the figure of bourgeois Jewish assimilation in Mamlock in favor of his Communist son; it is both an obedience to the father and a (partly modernist) revision of his populist-appellative agitprop aesthetic of the 1930s. Both these points have their validity, and we will need to return to them; yet viewing Wolf’s film in isolation, only within the context of GDR history, can risk near-sightedness. If our current perspective on Professor Mamlock differs significantly from that which viewers would have had in 1961, this is also true of other Holocaust films. Christian Delage has written of Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog, Alain Resnais, 1955), a monument in the history of filmic memory, and a far more canonical film than Wolf’s, that its initial reception was followed by “a form of institutionalization that that brought with it a second wave of criticism questioning how apposite its status was as a key work about the history of the genocide of the Jews.” He cites Serge Klarsfeld, Georges Bensoussan, and Annette Wievorka, who all note what they see as a marginalizing of the Jews from the film’s historical narrative, in favor of the persecution of political opponents. Delage’s discussion of the film’s production, which involved not only censorship from officials but also self-censorship by the author, Jean Cayrol (who removed specific reference to the “definitive solution to the Jewish problem” from the final version), ends with this plea: “We should not regard Night and Fog with suspicion from an anachronistic perspective—ignoring similar unsuccessful attempts in other postwar countries.”5 Such “unsuccessful attempts” are indeed abundant in filmic representations of the Holocaust. A comparison could easily be made to Andrzej Wajda’s Samson, from the same year as Professor Mamlock. Wajda’s hero is a Jew who has escaped the Warsaw Ghetto, is stricken with survivor’s guilt, and dies a redemptive death fighting as a Polish patriot against the German occupiers: just as in Wolf, Jewishness must here be subsumed under national and Communist political resistance to fascism. Marek Haltof has recently analyzed this film, together with Wajda’s other depictions of Jews in his films, and his reading brings out the complexity of Samson, disagreeing with the more denunciatory view of Ewa Mazierska’s “attack on Wajda for his alleged biased representation and disregard for historical truth.”6 We do not need to restrict ourselves to films from behind the Iron Curtain, either, to bring out how difficult it was for any filmmaker to address the Holocaust circa 1961. Other scholars have also argued that Israeli film, too, avoided treatments of the Diaspora in the 1940s and 1950s, or that the unrepresentability of the Holocaust was a more general phenomenon of the first postwar decade.7 Even Hollywood had to show the Holocaust via the figure of the “muscular Jew” as macho resistance fighter in Otto Preminger’s Exodus (1960), another film contemporary

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with Professor Mamlock, starring Paul Newman as the manly and photogenic Ari Ben Canaan. The elision of Jewish suffering, and of the specificity of the genocide of the Jews, was widespread, and it was not until the Eichmann trial, which began on April 11, 1961, a month before Mamlock’s premiere on May 17, that this began to change. Omer Bartov’s survey of Jewish representations in film after 1945 sums the problem up nicely, with reference to Haum Gouri’s The Eighty-First Blow (1974, more than a decade after Mamlock): “Linking Jewish victimhood with both courage and helplessness, that is, making the ‘Jew’ as victim into the ‘Jew’ as hero, and vice versa, stripping the latter of his unique heroic mantle and turning him into merely one more instance of the former, is at the center of this representational conundrum (reflecting in turn the Jewish existential conundrum during the Holocaust).”8 In the case of Professor Mamlock, we find a main protagonist who is both heroic—Wolfgang Heinz (born David Hirsch in Plzeň) is—very much like Friedrich Wolf himself!—a larger than life figure, a First World War veteran who is physically powerful and forceful both within his family and in the clinic (his sheer bodily mass further emphasized by many closeups and shots from below)—and also intellectually helpless, due to his assimilated bourgeois culture, to understand the rise of Nazism. His lastminute demand for “justice” and “democracy” remind one of nothing so much as Schiller’s Marquis von Posa in Don Carlos (1783–87), pleading “Geben Sie/Gedankenfreiheit, Sire” (grant freedom of thought,/Sire). Friedrich Wolf’s play had in fact reverted to a Schiller-like aesthetic of cathartic effect, away from the author’s earlier interest in literary modernism.9 If we look at the literary genealogy of Friedrich Wolf’s play, which is itself already a “remake” of Artur Schnitzler’s Professor Bernhardi (1912)—a play in turn responding to Theodor Herzl’s Das neue Ghetto (1894), and like Herzl’s play, also a response to the Dreyfus affair—matters become even more complicated. Bernhardi, like Mamlock, is an assimilated Jew and a doctor who wants to stay out of politics, even when he is jailed due to an anti-Semitic cabal orchestrated against him. Like Mamlock, he is a principled idealist (his betrayer Flint calls him an “Überschätzer der Menschheit” [overvaluer of humanity]) and an individualist; when, at the end, he refuses to fight the political battle offered him by his liberal allies, he insists that in his case, “es handelte sich plötzlich um allgemein ethische Dinge” (it was suddenly a question of general ethical matters).10 Although Bernhardi does not die at the end of Schnitzler’s play, he has not, either, learned the political lesson Mamlock has. One of the strangest aspects of Bernhardi is his odd impersonality and detachment, always viewing the events around him, no matter how much he himself is involved, with an ironic eye. (Schnitzler subtitled the play Eine Komödie.) Mamlock, too, is in some ways an impersonal construction; as Koch puts it, he is “starkly schematic” (70). When Bernhardi sees

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that, like Mamlock, he is being betrayed by his colleagues at the clinic, he stands “regungslos” (436; unmoving) in Schnitzler’s instruction and says nothing. The abstraction of his behavior is a manifestation of his own abstract liberal individualism, which denies the reality of the political; in Wolf’s film this has been replaced by the subsumption of Jews under a different abstraction (that of antifascism). As Barnert points out, this may have been due to censors’ intervention as much as to Wolf’s own choice. Mamlock is more impulsive and warm-hearted than Bernhardi, yet when confronted with his colleagues’ signing a Nazi protocol criticizing him, he does not play dead, like Bernhardi, but literally kills himself. Like another failed revolutionary of the German theater, Lessing’s Odoardo Galotti, he has a brief moment of monologue, then turns his revolver against himself and not his oppressors; as in the classicizing aesthetic of Schiller to which Friedrich Wolf’s Aktionsdrama reverted,11 Mamlock must die to be eternally remembered. The dying Jew becomes a vanishing mediator for proletarian class struggle: it is his own existence that he must “radikal durchstreichen” (radically cancel out).12 Mamlock thereby becomes a traditional object lesson to the public. The abstractness of Friedrich Wolf’s constructed object lesson, and of Konrad Wolf’s starkly composed images and montage, are meant to carry through this transformation. (Mamlock’s own Jewishness is seen, at one point, by his own wife as similarly abstract, as “intellectual” or “cerebral.”13) The martyrlike status given to Mamlock suggests that for Friedrich Wolf, as for Theodor Lessing, “the Jews’ history has made them bearers of ‘supranational values,’”14 an object lesson to the proletariat. The strangeness of this idea comes out even more strongly in another quote of Lessing: “The proletariat in all countries is nothing other than a single Jewry. A giant ghetto! It is therefore self-evident that the painful experiences of the Jews can be of use to the proletariat.”15 The ambiguity of both play and film is concentrated in this overdetermined abstractness, at once linked to a modernist didacticism and also effecting an elision of the particularity of Jewish history. (We may recall, in this context, Brecht’s perennial inability to acknowledge the importance of anti-Semitism in analyzing fascism;16 it was not by Brecht but by Friedrich and Konrad Wolf that this question would be dramatized.) Both play and film have parabolic qualities to them. The Wolfs were not alone in deploying parable as a means to represent the Holocaust,17 and the revival of parable—after its waning in the nineteenth century—was a central feature of many modernist works (Kafka’s work and Brecht’s Keuner-Geschichten among them). We will run into the parabolic form in other films of Konrad Wolf (such as Mama, ich lebe) as well. Parable may be opposed to Brechtian casus (evoked by Jameson with reference to André Jolles’s Einfache Formen)18 as object lesson to example lesson. Andreas Huyssen contrasted the latter two as follows, in a

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discussion of Brecht’s Lehrstücke: “An object lesson would say: the young comrade was wrong in being humane; he learned from the consequences of his error and sacrificed his life for the greater collective and the revolution. An example lesson would say: here is the representation of a contradictory process and the mental reflections of and upon that process; play these contradictions through.”19 Professor Mamlock is an object lesson, not an example lesson. Similarly, it has parabolic aspects. Parables are characterized by their inclusion of the reader or viewer by appellatory address; their urge to convey not only a teaching (Lehre), but also an ethos; and often a reliance on emotional effect (Wirkung) to get the message across.20 Unlike Jolles’s and Brecht’s casus, it does not however put legal norms themselves on trial. This is why Wolf’s play can seem at once bathetic and moralizing, relative to Brecht.21 In the history of assimilated Jewish protagonists in German drama earlier alluded to, Wolf has reverted to the elements of Rührstück found in Herzl’s Das neue Ghetto, as opposed to the ironic Komödie of Schnitzler’s Bernhardi.22 It is as an attempt at intensifying the emotional Wirkung of his father’s play that we may see Konrad Wolf’s filmic adaptation. Like Herman Rapaport’s 1938 Soviet film version, Konrad Wolf’s adds street scenes of the Communist resistance to the purely indoor drama of his father, which was restricted to two locations, clinic and Mamlock family home. Wolf fils also adds a few lines to strengthen both the anti-Semitism of the Nazi Hellpach (who calls Mamlock a “verdammter Jude” at one point) and the class consciousness of the wounded worker whom Mamlock treats. The worker tells Mamlock that he does not know that fascism, too, is a sickness, like cancer. Some of the most striking additions in the film are purely formal. One is the heightened attention to media, specifically radio and gramophone, in the film, which looks ahead to the radio broadcasts heard in Der geteilte Himmel, Ich war neunzehn, and Mama, ich lebe. In one montage sequence, Mamlock’s very consciousness is shown as split between the bourgeois domesticity or interiority (Innerlichkeit) of gramophone music and the drastic externalization of radio. A second addition are the subjective point-of-view shots of Ruth being taunted by anti-Semites at her school, or Mamlock when he is made to walk through the street wearing a sign painted JUDE on his chest. This scene was not shown either in the play or in Rapaport’s film (which did however come up with the genial idea of having Mamlock return to operate in his clinic without removing the sign around his neck). Mamlock’s procession through the streets is presented as coinciding with Carnaval festivities, which allows Wolf to present Mamlock’s fellow German citizens’ Nazi behavior as a stylized grotesque. (In fact, many at the time, in 1933, perceived Nazi street processions as having something Carnaval-like about them.)23 Right before

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Figure 6.1. Mamlock (Wolfgang Heinz) is publicly humiliated by the Nazis. ©DEFA-Stiftung/Walter Ruge.

Mamlock’s death, Wolf inserts a hyperdramatic montage sequence, with flashing lights and Mamlock’s face in closeup, to rather embarrassing effect. He admitted only a few years later in a 1965 discussion of the film with West German students that he himself was “appalled” at his own rhetorical bombast in it, “Ich habe heute den Film seit Jahren zum erstenmal wiedergesehen, und ich war über einige, hauptsächlich formale Momente entsetzt. Heute würde ich mehr Vertrauen in die Sache setzen und weniger in gewisse Mätzchen.”24 (I saw the film today for the first time in years, and I was appalled at some moments, primarily formal ones. Today I would put more trust in the matter itself and less in certain gimmicks.) Mätzchen are gimmicks or tricks, which may well refer to the use of montage. As an Abschlussarbeit for the Babelsberg film school from 1969 already admits, “Die Montage . . . ist ein Gestaltungsmittel der parteilichen Interpretation” (the montage is a formal means for partisan interpretation). Further: “um ein Bewusstsein hervorzurufen, bedarf es also bestimmter filmischer Strukturen” (in order to call forth a consciousness, specific filmic structures are needed).25 This is, of course, precisely the reason why Bazin rejected montage after 1945. Wolf’s film thus appears to be attempting to revive Deleuze’s movement-image, against the larger historical postwar tendency toward time-images. It is not only Wolf’s representation of Jews that is problematic but also his filmic form itself. As another GDR film-school diploma paper must admit, as early as 1963:

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“In diesem Film geht es auf Kosten der Emotionen, die zwar überwiegen, aber nicht durchgehend erreicht werden” (in this film, it is done at the expense of the emotions, which may dominate, but are not consistently attained).26 Could we link this melodramatic overdoing of effect (and affect) at this moment to Konrad Wolf’s discomfort at having to re-enact the death of a both powerful and ambivalent father figure? The failure of the film’s emotional effect (Wirkung), so crucial to the intended outcome of parabolic instruction, is most glaring in its peculiar use of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, something not specified in Wolf’s play. (We have already seen a cognate use of Beethoven to symbolize heroic resolve in Die Genesung.) In the Konzeption or draft conceptualization of the film dated July 16, 1960, it is stated: (IV.) Zur Musik. Es wird vorgeschlagen, sich bei der Musik zu diesem Film ausschliesslich auf Beethovens Werke, in erster Linie auf die 9. Sinfonie zu beschränken. Gründe: 1. Der Inhalt und die vulkanisch dramatische Ausdruckskraft der Musik von Beethoven entsprechen dem Konflikt und dem Charakter des Mamlock, da wo er widersprüchlich ist, vor allem aber auch da, wo seine Lebensziele und Auffassungen sich mit den unsrigen decken. 2. Die Verwendung der Musik von Beethoven gibt uns die Möglichkeit, die zwei gegensätzlichen Gesichtspunkte (des bürgerlichen und des sozialistischen) bei der Verwertung des klassischen Erbes künstlerisch auszudrücken. Hierbei scheint uns besonders die 9. Sinfonie Beethovens sehr geeignet. 3. Schliesslich gibt uns die Beschränkung auf diese eine musikalische Führung ein zusätzliches Stilmittel, die äussere und innnere Handlung wie oben geschildert zusammenzufassen.27 [It is suggested that the music in this film should be restricted to Beethoven’s Ninth. Reasons: 1. The content and the volcanic force of Beethoven’s music correspond to the conflict and the character of Mamlock, where he is contradictory, and above all where his life’s goals and conceptions are identical with ours. 2 .The use of Beethoven’s music gives us the possibility of expressing the two opposing viewpoints—bourgeois and socialist—regarding the use of the classical inheritance. In this respect, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony seems particularly apt. 3. Finally, the restriction to this one musical cue gives us an additional stylistic means to bring together external and internal action, as noted above.]

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This heavily symbolic deployment of Beethoven, however, directly contradicts the wish of the authors, only two pages earlier in the same Konzeption, to avoid symbols: Wir wollen als stärkste Waffe das Detail im breitesten Sinne dieses Wortes einsetzen. Damit ist keinesfalls der falsch verstandene oder ausgelegte Begriff “Symbol” gemeint. Wir wollen, ausgehend von der Grundkonzeption, uns in der optischen Sprache bewusst auf das Allernotwendigste beschränken. Wir wollen eine karge, scheinbar ausschliesslich sachliche Sprache sprechen.28 [We want, as the strongest weapon, to use detail in the broadest sense of this word. With this we do not mean the falsely understood or interpreted concept of the “symbol.” We want, beginning with the fundamental conception, to limit ourselves in our optical language to that which is absolutely necessary. We want to speak a bare, apparently objective language.]

The visual language of Konrad Wolf’s film is indeed “karg” and “sachlich” (another reason for the impression of abstraction felt by so many viewers). But the pathos of Beethoven, used as a purely ideological symbol, stands in sharp contradiction to this. (This split between image and sound will also be a problem in Der geteilte Himmel, where the soundtrack, specifically the voiceover, has a “tutor function” in contrast to the language of the images.) Even the diegetic motivation for the music is slightly implausible (or anachronistic): what cultured German Bildungsbürger would put a record of the Ninth Symphony on the gramophone for mere “background music” to New Year’s champagne toasts in 1933?29 The absurdity of the Beethoven is only heightened by its insistent re-use throughout the film, especially at moments of pathos. Beethoven is being used here to suggest that Communism is the “heir” to the “humanistic inheritance,” but the music’s semantics exceed this merely instrumentalized conception. Ironically, we may also hear Beethoven as a sign of the failure of Jewish assimilation. As early as in the nineteenth century, Beethoven’s music was seen as a universal cultural value enabling the assimilation of Jewish musicians. Brahms’s friend, the Jewish violinist Joseph Joachim, called the Ninth Symphony “Zukunftsmusik” (music of the future, a term from Wagner) in 1866, imagining that the public should sing along with the finale. “In Joachims Vision wandelt sich der Aufführungsraum der 9. Sinfonie vom Konzertsaal zum Sakralraum, und das passive Publikum wird zur aktiven Gemeinde” (In Joachim’s vision, the performance space would be transformed into a sacred one, and the passive public would become an active community).30 Yet when Joachim wanted to perform Beethoven in a synagogue for a benefit concert in 1879, he received an anti-Semitic attack from Ernst Rudorff, proving that

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Joachim’s ideal of Beethoven’s music as transcending confessional or ethnic differences could not be fulfilled.31 The complexities of Konrad Wolf’s Professor Mamlock, summed up as “Multiperspektivität” by Barnert (312) and “multi-dimensionality” by Coulson (168), may be correlated to those of Wolf’s own political, historical, and familial position. This position was one of internal division, one we could in turn see as a form of Freud’s Ichspaltung or splitting of the ego (later taken up by Lacan). Freud’s term was developed in a late text from 1938, the year of Friedrich Wolf’s play’s first filming in the USSR. In it, Freud puts forward a model of psychic division distinct from repression: what is split off in ego-splitting is not unconscious or repressed (displaced into the id), but remains conscious, although isolated and deprived of affect.32 Splitting of the ego happens under the pressures of psychic trauma; faced with a conflict between the drives and a threat to them from reality, the child must decide whether to recognize the threat and renounce drive satisfaction, or deny the threat. “Das Kind tut aber keines von den beiden, oder vielmeht, es tut gleichzeitig beides, was auf dasselbe hinauskommt” (The child does neither, or rather simultaneously both, which amounts to the same thing).33 Freud’s example for such a conflicted situation is, unsurprisingly, the threat of castration, the perception of the mother’s lack of phallus, so that the ego-splitting response is kin to the “denial” of fetishism. Ego-splitting has however also been given various political readings. Homi Bhabha saw it as typical of “the construction of the colonized subject” in his reading of Fanon; others have seen a “split” within the subjectivity of assimilated Jews.34 Jacques Le Rider’s monograph on Otto Weininger finds his subject characterized by “Ichspaltung und Depersonalisation.”35 Lawrence Langer has also found a splintering of the person effected by the trauma of the Holocaust.36 Both fascism and Stalinism have been seen as producing ego-splitting via defense against realities too harsh to recognize.37 The splitting of the ego can thus be found in both perpetrators and victims; as with the linkage of trauma and historiography, a risk of generalization is also present (as La Capra has warned). Many of these splittings can be found in Konrad Wolf’s biography, and then also represented in his films: between Jew and Gentile (Sterne, Professor Mamlock), Jew and Communist (Professor Mamlock), survivor and victim (Sterne, Ich war neunzehn), German and Russian (Sonnensucher, Ich war neunzehn). These terms are also at times correlated with familial pairings: father/mother, father/son. Friedrich Wolf himself had already, in the play, split his own person between Mamlock father, the doctor, and his son Rolf, the Communist. The multiplicity of binaries is further complicated by the fact that the distinctions or split pairings do not necessarily map onto each other. If father and mother correspond to Jew and Gentile, and Communist to survivor, the Jewish side of the distinction is

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multiply splintered (corresponding to Friedrich Wolf’s being first a Jew and not a Gentile, and then sublating his Jewishness under Communism). Were one to use the “calculus of forms” Niklas Luhmann borrowed from George Spencer-Brown, Jewishness would be the unmarked side of the distinction (which is nonetheless always “carried over” together with the marked side).38 As Barnert argues (248), both Wolfs, father and son, tried with this play and its filming to keep these distinctions apart—to keep “Jew” from meaning “capitalist,” or from meaning “Eastern” and “non-German” (in Friedrich Wolf’s “cultural” reaction against older antiSemitism), or also to keep “Jew” from becoming equivalent to “passive victim” (for both Friedrich and Konrad). It was the enduring persistence of anti-Semitism, whether before or after 1945, that allowed the different distinctions to blur and map onto each other—just as it was the enduring power of GDR antifascist doctrine that seems to have forced Konrad Wolf into compromise positions when making his film. The presence of these multiple positions, together with that of a simultaneous conflict between father and son (in the play), a deferred (nachträglich) obedience of son to father, and a revision of the father by the son, thus make Professor Mamlock into something of a political and aesthetic palimpsest. (Friedrich Wolf had not, after 1945, been able to replicate the success he had had with Mamlock before the war, and was unhappy with his assignment to the job of first GDR ambassador to Poland; his son’s filmic remake could be seen as a kind of rehabilitation.) Barnert (336) quite rightly notes that polyvalence (Mehrdeutigkeit) is in and of itself not necessarily “subversive”; to try to read the film completely against the grain of GDR historiographical orthodoxy would be forced and implausible, when it is at most an extremely veiled and indirect modulation of that orthodoxy. Aesthetically, too, Professor Mamlock is a very strange blend of an at times strikingly modernist visual language with a melodramatic narrative—something we will find again in Der geteilte Himmel. The images of the film are often powerful, including an abstract element of graphic matches to link crosscut action, often via circular compositions, as between fireworks and the New Years’ guests’ circle of champagne glasses, or the rotating gramophone and a roulette table, at the beginning. Similarly, the composition of Mamlock’s confrontation across a desk with an injured worker who tells him he is blind to the “cancer of fascism” is reproduced over the cut to Rolf and Ruth listening, in similar confrontation, to the radio announcement of the Reichstag fire. Sharp contrasts of foreground and background serve to illustrate and dramatize ideological conflicts. At times, strong graphic compositions are used for heavy rhetorical underlining, as when Hellpach’s hands, in black surgical gloves, are magnified in the foreground while he preaches about German imperial expansion Eastwards, further underlined by non-diegetic military music. Another such rhetorical moment is the freeze-frame on Ruth’s

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Figure 6.2. Dramatic composition in the operating room. ©DEFA-Stiftung/Walter Ruge.

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terrified face (after she is driven out of school), over which the soundtrack plays nondiegetic shouts of Juden raus! as if in direct representation of her frightened thoughts. Occasional uses of aural montage also show a debt to filmic and radiophonic modernism. As later in Der geteilte Himmel, individual shots or compositions—the corridor at Mamlock’s clinic, the overhead shot of his domestic living room, the clinic clock showing 8:00 a.m., Dr. Ruoff’s face in the foreground, or Mamlock shot from below while walking—are repeated throughout the film, creating a modernist sense of the spatialization of time, “Aber die metaphorischen BildTon-Kompositionen verbinden sich nicht mit der thesenhaften Intention des Films.[. . .] die freie und bewegliche Kamera und die komplexen audiovisuellen Montagen stehen allerdings immer wieder der eigentlichen Erzählung im Weg”39 (but the metaphorical image-sound compositions do not link to the thesis-like intention of the film . . . the free and mobile camera and the complex audiovisual montages are again and again in the way of the actual narrative). Given these internal contradictions, one can hardly attempt to perform a redemptive auteurist reading of this film, the way the Cahiers critics did with Hollywood films.40 Professor Mamlock remains a Janus-faced film, divided between the modernist vividness of its filmic techniques and the petrified frozenness of its ideological message. In this, the film is a form of archive, both of its director’s familial memory and of that of the GDR.41 It seeks at once obliquely to preserve the memory of Friedrich Wolf’s persecution as a Jew—the historical archive of Jewish trauma, of the Holocaust, without which National Socialism remains incomprehensible—along with the memory of his eclipsed authority as political writer, and also to outbid or sublate the father’s patriarchal power through a sacrificial death updated by filmic montage. The harshness of the film’s visual language, its rhetoric, is inseparable not only from its ostensible ideological message but also from this ambivalent relation to the paterfamilias, its compulsive repetition of a traumatic violence that Konrad Wolf was only beginning to work through in his late, unfilmed filmscript for Die Troika. Herman Rapaport has written about Yosef Yerushalmi’s Freud’s Moses: At issue throughout is an act of traumatic (if not talmudic) violence directed at the father of psychoanalysis, setting him apart as the patriarch upon whom a society and a science (of the “we”) can be based. It is traumatic, of course, not because of the violence simply, but because that violence is directed at a patriarch and, as such, repeats (perhaps interminably) the traumatic and terminable violence done to a figure like Moses in the distant past.42

Konrad Wolf’s complex relation to his Jewish father and his own (half-)Jewishness is thus no isolated case. We might think, most recently, of Derrida’s confession with regard to his own Jewishness that it seemed

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to him, “Comme si, paradoxe que je ne cesserai pas de déployer et qui résume tout le tourment de ma vie, il m’avait fallu me garder du judaïsme pour garder en moi quelque chose que je surnomme provisoirement la judéité”43 (as if, paradox that I will not stop deploying and that resumes all the torment of my life, I had had to keep myself from Judaism in order to preserve in me something I provisorily name “Judeity”). Yet Mamlock’s Jewishness, for all its fighting humanist commitment to David and Judas Maccabeus, is not preserved in the film, as Derrida’s Jewishness is preserved as a “spectral messianicity [that] is at work in the concept of the archive,”44 but perishes, apparently inevitably. Mamlock thus cannot gain any proleptic Star of future hope as can Ruth in Sterne; it is this abrupt conclusion, so unlike the open, tentatively promising ends of Lissy, Sterne or Ich war neunzehn, that continues to trouble its viewers today.

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7: The Minor Films: Leute mit Flügeln (1960), Der kleine Prinz (1966/1972), Busch singt (1982)

I

or exaggerated to claim that all Wolf ’s films are of equal interest or value. Along with a few that are, or should be, part of the German and international film canon—Ich war neunzehn, Sterne, Solo Sunny—there are films that are intelligent and subtle but remain stubbornly marginal due to their intimate dependence on a GDR context unfamiliar to most viewers, such as Der nackte Mann auf dem Sportplatz; films that mark an important historical event but are flawed, such as Der geteilte Himmel, with its often ponderous script; and finally an ambitious work like Goya, that falls short of greatness due to an unconvincing performance by Olivera Katarina as the Duchess of Alba. The role for Margarita Terechova in Mama, ich lebe feels also not quite plausible (and did for the actress herself at the time of filming); Wolf himself later realized that the rhetoric of Professor Mamlock (especially the final sequence of the suicide) was overdrawn. In general, Wolf is at his least effective when trying to be dramatic or overtly emotional, as in Mamlock or parts of Goya (where the intent seems to oscillate between a Brechtian distancing and the absorbing grandeur of historical-epic spectacle), and best when most understated and reflective, as in Sterne or Ich war neunzehn. The kind of drama that Wajda could pull off in Man of Marble (1977), or The Promised Land (1977), or in which Fassbinder so often excelled, was not his forte. There are also, in Wolf’s oeuvre, films that seem either to be a socialist realist potboiler, such as Leute mit Flügeln, or oddly marginal to his larger project, like Der kleine Prinz. Busch singt is another matter altogether: his last completed work, and one that in many ways sums up or returns to key medial and historical concerns that run through all of his films. These films are perhaps less interesting in themselves—as independent artworks—than in relation to the rest of Wolf’s overall work, and they will be viewed accordingly in this chapter. As will become clear, even a minor film like Der kleine Prinz uses a key rhetorical device (enallage) which was crucial in the structuring of Der geteilte Himmel.

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Leute mit Flügeln The end of the 1950s and the early 1960s were an interregnum for DEFA, between the negative aftereffects of the Second Film Congress in July 1958 (“ein ähnlich tragisches Datum für die DEFA wie später der Dezember 1965 mit seinem 11. Plenum” [a similarly tragic date for DEFA as December 1965 with its Eleventh Plenum was later])1 and the brief liberalization of Ulbricht’s New Economic System in 1963. At a time when new waves were already evident in Soviet and Polish film (The Cranes are Flying, Ashes and Diamonds), DEFA seemed to have run aground. For Wolf, too, the years after Sonnensucher and Sterne saw some of his least distinguished work; Leute mit Flügeln in particular “confirms,” as Sabine Hake has it, that “Wolf—under pressure—was fully capable of directing straightforward propagandistic works in the accepted socialist realist style.”2 This is hardly high praise, to be sure; the film flopped at the Karlovy Vary film festival (“sang- und klanglos,” “without much ado”),3 and was criticized by Ruth Herlinghaus in a discussion in Filmwissenschaftliche Mitteilungen. Herlinghaus noted “die Gefahr . . . soziologische Erkenntnisse in Bildhandlung umzusetzen anstatt dramatische Handlungen, Konflikte zu finden” (the danger . . . of merely making images for sociological knowledge, instead of finding dramatic actions, conflicts).4 The Ideenskizze of the script’s authors confirms this, asserting in a “Vorbemerkung” that “Erst eine klare und richtige ideologische Perspektive gibt Handhabe zur Meisterung von künstlerischen Fragen” (only a clear and correct ideological perspective gives a handle toward mastering artistic questions).5 Wiens and Egel, with whom Wolf had worked on Einmal ist keinmal, Die Genesung, and Sonnensucher, put here the historical master narrative of GDR antifascism into a film script. Leute mit Flügeln needs to be seen not only as related to Maetzig and Günter Reisch’s 1958 Das Lied der Matrosen (whose story, also written by Wiens and Egel, it continues), but also as comparable to other filmic pieces of that master narrative, which would include both the Thälmann films and Beyer’s Fünf Patronenhülsen (Five Cartridge Shells, 1960) and Nackt unter Wölfen (Naked among Wolves, 1963)6—all of which are more successful at dramatizing antifascism than Wolf’s film. Leute mit Flügeln uses the main character, Ludwig Bartuschek, played by Erwin Geschonneck, to connect the dots between the Spanish Civil War, Buchenwald, and the GDR’s then contemporary aircraft industry, which would soon be discontinued. In 1933, Bartuschek is a plane mechanic in Germany, and refuses his boss’s attempts to enlist him for the Nazis, escaping to fight in Spain, where he ends up taking his former boss prisoner. Bartuschek then goes to the East to fight for the USSR, returning to Germany under a French alias; he is taken prisoner with an American friend named Dave (Manfred Krug), and participates

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in an uprising in the Buchenwald concentration camp. He then finds his son Henne (Hilmar Thate), who has been enlisted in the Volkssturm, but becomes a flier for the GDR Volksarmee after the war; in this capacity, Henne captures an American pilot, who turns out to be none other than Dave. The film ends with the presentation of the new GDR fighter planes, inspected by Bartuschek, Henne and the latter’s son. The forced quality of the connections the film makes between past and present are evident not only in its wildly improbable plot, but also in the soundtrack, which awkwardly tries to meld identificatory symphonic orchestral pathos (antifascist past) with the distantiating effect of electronic music (high-tech jet production in the present). Two lengthy flashbacks, one to Spain and one to Buchenwald, are used as argumentative means for Bartuschek to convince his son Henne of the correctness of his action, and the viewer suspects that the woodenness of this film might be due to this narrative structure, which has not yet worked out the more subtle interweaving of past and present (via enallage) that will be typical of Wolf’s films from Der geteilte Himmel onward. Thomas Heimann has suggested that Leute mit Flügeln was “undoubtedly inspired” by the success of Apitz’s novel Nackt unter Wölfen,7 published in 1958, the year when Buchenwald was opened to the public. Wolf’s film’s protagonist thus represents (allegorically) both the working class and antifascism in one person; the choice of Erwin Geschonneck, who represented the paradox of a working-class star for DEFA as could few others, was therefore a logical one. The very name of his character, Bartuschek, refers to the Polish (formerly East Prussian) town of Bartoszyce (Bartenstein) where Geschonneck was born. Geschonneck had already played the role of Jupp König in Sonnensucher, and would star in both Fünf Patronenhülsen and Nackt unter Wölfen; it was at this time, around 1960, that his stardom was confirmed in DEFA film.8 But whereas Jupp in Sonnensucher was able to dramatize the tension between the vital spontaneity of working-class culture—a Weimar inheritance the GDR was, fatally, never able to claim—and the dictate of Party leadership,9 in Leute mit Flügeln these two roles are unified from the start, with the historical omniscience of the Party in secure control. As Herlinghaus noted in her critique, the result is that Bartuschek completely overwhelms his son Henne (played by Hilmar Thate), and that the scenes in the present seem pale and uninteresting relative to the grand heroism of Bartuschek’s antifascist past. The central conflict of father and son, which will continue into Wolf’s next film, Professor Mamlock, with the son again played by Thate, is here devoid of real dramatic tension. Leute mit Flügeln may be seen as the swan-song of a certain kind of old-Marxist Utopian projection of a heroic, voluntarist New Man: Wiens and Egel’s Ideenskizze programmatically declares that “anders als ein dokumentarischer Filmbericht . . . müssen wir in unserem Film . . . den

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Akzent auf die neuen Menschen, auf ihre neuen moralischen Qualitäten legen” (otherwise than in documentary film reportage . . . we must in our film . . . place the accent on the new men, on their new moral qualities).10 Yet Wolf’s film is less effective in “the accepted socialist realist style” (Hake) than Maetzig’s Thälmann films were, or than Nackt unter Wölfen would be; its mass scenes are less exciting than Maetzig’s, and there is less emotional pathos than in Beyer. Wolf was more convincing when depicting hesitant and conflicted female characters such as Lissy or Rita than when working with the male-dominated, action-driven world of this film, and his failure here suggests also that he was less comfortable with straight popular generic typologies (of action or character) than with a reflexive mixture of genres. Geschonneck is too energetic and impulsively vital to become the rigidly iconic figure of organizational discipline that Günther Simon’s Thälmann was, yet Leute mit Flügeln lacks the comic or at least humorously populist episodes in which Sonnensucher had allowed that vitality to show itself. Claudia Fellmer, in her discussion of Geschonneck as star, cites Herfried Münkler’s idea that “there are three distinguishable ways of imparting political myth, which nonetheless merge and overlap: narrative-extensive, iconic-condensing, and ritual-scenic.”11 The Thälmann films, with their stylized use of color (especially green and red) and their tableau-like mass compositions, abounded in iconic and ritual moments; Leute mit Flügeln, lacking these, relies more on narrativeextensive representations of the GDR’s antifascist template. Paradoxically, however, some of its images of the Buchenwald camp inmates’ self-liberation would serve as models for Nackt unter Wölfen.12 That Leute mit Flügeln was soon withdrawn from circulation was a consequence of external political factors, just as in the case of Sonnensucher (and later for Der kleine Prinz). As Geschonneck put it, looking back at the film, once the GDR’s airplane production was halted, “ist der Film sozusagen gegenstandslos geworden. Er stösst ins Leere” (the film became, so to speak, objectless. It thrusts into a void).13 This historically produced emptiness is evident in many other DEFA films besides this one.

Der kleine Prinz Der kleine Prinz (1966/1972) has been even more thoroughly buried by history than the rest of Wolf’s work, or the corpus of DEFA production in general. The reasons for this neglect are multiple: on the one hand, the film got caught in the crossfire of the Eleventh Plenum, which took place during the shooting of the film. Although the project had been conceived of as a vehicle for the eventual launch of color TV in the GDR (an undertaking that was repeatedly started and stopped), Heinz Adameck (1921–2010), Intendant of the DFF from 1954 to 1989, sought to get out of his commitment to fund the film, until Albert Wilkening

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insisted he honor it.14 The film is thus an unwitting document of noncooperation between film and television at a time of political crisis. On the other hand, rights were not requested from the author’s family until the film’s completion, and could not be obtained. As a result, the film was not shown until May 21, 1972 on GDR television, and after that not again until 1995; only with the expiration of the copyright term in 2015 did it enter public domain and was given special showings at the Brotfabrik in Berlin in June 2015.15 Saint-Exupéry’s story has become a minor classic of children’s literature. It begins with the narrator telling of how he once drew a boa constrictor eating an elephant, which was misinterpreted by adults as a drawing of a hat. (This vignette may have inspired a later episode in Der nackte Mann auf dem Sportplatz, where the hero’s son gets into trouble in school for drawing a horse on a submarine.) The narrator (Eberhard Esche) crashes his plane in the Sahara and meets the Little Prince (Christel Bodenstein, Wolf’s then-wife), who tells him about his life over the next eight days. The Prince comes from a remote planet, and has left to explore the universe, meeting up with various figures: a king with no subjects, a vain man, a drunkard, a businessman, a lamplighter who pointlessly lights and extinguishes a lamp, over and over, and a geographer. Before the pilot is able to repair his plane and leave, there are further parabolic stories of a snake, a desert flower, and a fox. The film’s delay in exhibition makes for an unusual degree of archival latency in the film, even more than in the case of the Kaninchenfilme that were at least shown in the last months of the GDR’s existence. Der kleine Prinz is mentioned in none of the literature on DEFA children’s films.16 Not only is the film historically obscure: it does not fit easily within the rest of the director’s oeuvre either (Jacobsen and Aurich call it a “Fremdkörper” or “alien body”). Reviews were muted when it was shown in 1972.17 When the film was brought out of the vaults to celebrate Christel Bodenstein’s seventieth birthday in 2008, a reviewer saw it as “eher eine verfilmte Theateraufführung” (more like a filmed theater performance”) and added, “Er wirkt statuarisch, kühl, die Typologie der Gestalten ist ganz und gar der literarischen Vorlage entnommen, er findet zu keiner filmischen Interpretation. Ein Film, der sich stark auf das Wort des Dichters konzentriert.”18 (It has a statuary, cool effect; the typology of the figures is completely derived from the literary basis, and no filmic interpretation is reached. A film that is strongly concentrated on the word of the poet.) The criticisms were made by one of the only scholarly essays devoted to the film, a graduating senior’s thesis from the Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen from 1987. Due to the “sehr distanzierte Kameraführung,” “man hat den Eindruck, dass Konrad Wolf die Ereignisse mehr ausstellt, um nicht an die Realitât der dargestelten Phantasiegebilde zu glauben, sondern nur um den Parabelcharakter zu rezipieren. [. . .] Konrad Wolf

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Figure 7.1. The Little Prince (Christel Bodenstein) on a crowded planet.” ©DEFA-Stiftung/Rudolf Meister.

“zeigt” Saint-Exupérys Kleinen Prinzen, aber er schafft nicht seinen eigenen Kleinen Prinzen mit Filmbildern.”19 (One has the impression that Konrad Wolf prefers to exhibit the events in order not to believe in the reality of the represented fantasy-images, but only to acknowledge the parabolic character.[. . .] Konrad Wolf “shows” Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince, but he does not create his own Little Prince with filmic images.) Not only is the magical story shown in extremely distanced (and textdominated) fashion, but Wolf felt obliged to frame it with an added prologue and postlude, showing the pilot’s plane over the desert and linking the entire story to the author’s mysterious disappearance during his last reconnaissance flight in 1944. After a typewriter punches out the facts of Saint-Exupéry’s own wartime flights (in Courier script, as if reported by a war correspondent), we hear Manfred Krug’s voice singing a ballad penned by Wolf’s frequent collaborator Paul Wiens, as the screen shows us topical documentary photographs of then-contemporary anti-imperialist struggle in Vietnam and elsewhere. The juxtaposition feels forced, to put it mildly. It is thus hard to make the case that this is a forgotten masterpiece of children’s film, and yet one senses that one’s judgment may also be affected by the film’s historical obscurity, its lack of reception or resonance. Reconstructing the context of its production may help clean some of the dust off the film.

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We may begin by asking where Der kleine Prinz fits into DEFA’s larger production. Does it belong to the genre of the fairy-tale film? Some commentators on the story have argued for its fairy-tale qualities.20 The author himself supposedly considered beginning it with il y avait une fois (once upon a time).21 The case has also been made that Saint-Exupéry’s fable belongs to the tradition of the Voltairean conte philosophique,22 a classification that would nicely account for the story’s initiatory and educative aspects.23 The question of genre is perhaps as undecidable as that of the film’s addressee—children or adults?—debated by the secondary literature. Comparing the film to DEFA fairy-tale films, though, brings out some common features and helps us to see Wolf’s sole film for children as something less of a black swan. The script, authored by Angel Wagenstein, Wolf’s collaborator from Sterne, is prefaced by the stern injunction: “Es darf kein Märchen im üblichen traditionellen Sinn werden.[. . .] Die Grundlage des gesamten Märchens ist eine realistische” (It should not become a fairy tale in the usual traditional sense [. . .] The foundation of the whole fairy tale is a realistic one). Therefore, there should be no “konventionelle Märchenfilmtricks” (conventional fairy-tale tricks).24 These comments remind one strongly of the GDR’s complicated relation to the literary inheritance of German fairy tales. “The conviction that they ‘bear the stamp of their reactionary bourgeois recorders’ made them highly dubious in the eyes of the GDR cultural functionaries. Moreover, a narrow understanding of realism in the GDR let the tales appear ‘idealistisch, illusionär-romantisch und mystisch’ (‘idealistic, illusorily romantic and mystic’).”25 DEFA fairy-tale films, too, tended to underplay magic (as if in a deliberate rationalistic reaction against the prevalence of animated special effects in Disney films).26 In this, they may have been more faithful to their sources than Disney: as one specialist in the genre, Lutz Röhrich, has it, “Folktales rarely begin as tales of magic: the narrative’s initial situation is almost always possible. Only as the story develops does the narrative abandon external reality.”27 Due to the ongoing persistence of the dogma of “realism,” “politicization of fairy tales is the only way they could be reintegrated into socialist cultural production.”28 Such politicization sometimes took Brechtian form, as in Gerhard Klein’s Die Geschichte vom armen Hassan (1958), or in Wolf’s framing ballad for Der kleine Prinz. Although “for the most part the aesthetic quality of the films is quite good,”29 “DEFA fairy-tale films were conservative in their aesthetic.”30 Interestingly, Der kleine Prinz was made just at the end of the first floruit of fairy-tale films; by the later 1960s, their popularity would be overtaken by that of the Indianerfilme.31 New artificial fairy tales (Kunstmärchen), moreover, would not be produced in the GDR until the 1970s, as part of the “new subjectivity” characteristic of that decade’s literature.32

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Some of the qualities of stodgy “fidelity” reviewers have found in Der kleine Prinz may also be medium specific, that is, bound to television (and GDR television perhaps in particular), as the following characterization of TV adaptations of classic literature suggests: Given the relative lack of physical and spatial movement available to the actors, and the limitations of the television camera in terms of cutting rapidly from one person to another to pick up tiny details of performance, verbal aspects of performance were of crucial importance. [. . .] Television established a tradition of valuing writing, and words, above other aesthetic aspects. (In this, it also reflected its predecessor: radio).33

Moreover, the aesthetic of “fidelity” typical of Der kleine Prinz was due not only to the technical limitations of television but also to the medium’s educational vocation in the GDR (an aspect it had in common with BBC television). “Historically speaking, a television adaptation, unlike a film, cannot be regarded as mere entertainment. Its aim is not limited to being financially viable or even artistically successful; its accomplishment are also measured with reference to (. . .) broader conceptions of television’s public role.”34 Despite these limits, Der kleine Prinz must also be seen as part of the brief moment of liberalization in the early 1960s that preceded the Eleventh Plenum. Saint-Exupéry’s story had only just been published in the GDR that year, by the publisher Volk und Welt, the major publisher of international literature in the country. Volk und Welt had launched a series of concerts and performances called Jazz und Lyrik as a publicistic undertaking in 1963; the series was then expanded to Lyrik-Jazz-Prosa, and featured not only Manfred Krug’s band, JazzOptimisten, but also popular public readings, such as Eberhard Esche’s famous “Der Hase im Rausch” (The Drunken Hare), a mildly anti-governmental animal fable of a drunken hare who badmouths the powerful lion, only to withdraw his criticism in abject humility once confronted with the threat of punishment. Esche (who acted in both Der kleine Prinz and Der geteilte Himmel) first performed the reading in 1964.35 If one can hardly view Wolf’s film as “dissident” without forcing one’s interpretation, it did nonetheless participate in a larger context of cultural and political openness in the mid-1960s. The film becomes more interesting, however, if we put it in relation to the films that immediately preceded and followed it in Wolf’s oeuvre. Der kleine Prinz followed shortly on the completion of Der geteilte Himmel and was only itself made due to delays in filming Wolf’s next project, Goya—which would be interrupted not only by Der kleine Prinz but also by Ich war neunzehn, made as a response to the Eleventh Plenum. There are elements linking Wolf’s children’s film both backward and forward in his overall production: narrative elements shared with Der geteilte

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Himmel, and graphic or visual ones shared with Goya. We may begin with the former. The Utopian moments of Der geteilte Himmel are often cast in the generic mould of fairy tale. In some cases, this is explicit, as in the antiMärchen of Manfred’s childhood (which might remind one of the sickly boy in the Grimms’ Die sieben Geisslein).36 In others, the allusion is more fleeting, as in the faint echoes of Cinderella when Rita sees herself as “queen of the ball” (82).37 Many myths are alluded to in the story, from Orpheus and Eurydice (64) to Hero and Leander (80) and the Tarnkappe (124). In general, there are at least three fairy-tale strands in the narrative: the romance (which might resemble the Arne-Thompson-Uther classificatory type 884, the “forsaken fiancée”); the story of Yuri Gagarin, the peasant’s son who ploughs the skies, which is a fairy-tale of technology; and finally the building of socialism itself. In each case, Rita’s fairy-tale hopes must be (“dialectically”) confronted with hard reality, the “Druck des härteren, strengeren Lebens” (the pressure of a harder, stricter life), and partly demythified; Manfred says at one moment to her, “bloss das ist keine Zeit für Märchen” (138; only it is no time for fairy tales)—an assertion that is refuted by the Gagarin story only two pages later—and Schwarzenbach says to Rita in their long discussion near the end, “Sozialismus—das ist keine magische Zauberformel” (186; socialism—that is no magical formula). If with Gagarin, fairy-tale desires can be realized, they remain only hopes in the other two cases; hope however remains just a much a principle for Christa Wolf as for Ernst Bloch, namely the perennial hope of reform socialism.38 Such hope may be demythified or partly disenchanted, but never entirely given up, “. . . das Märchen erzählt eine Wunscherfüllung, die nicht nur an seine Zeit und das Kostüm ihrer Inhalte gebunden ist. Zum Unterschied von der allemal lokalisierten Sage ist das Märchen freibleibend; es zieht uneingelöst, also unveraltet durch die Zeiten.”39 (the fairy tale narrates a wish fulfilment, which is not tied only to its time and the costume of its contents. In distinction to the always localized sage, the fairy tale remains free: it travels, unfulfilled, but without ageing, through the ages.) To try to draw specific narrative parallels between Der geteilte Himmel and Der kleine Prinz would be forcing matters (although both narratives are about a couple, of which both male halves are played by Eberhard Esche, thus putting Rita in the functional position of the Prince, or Princess, and both narratives end with a kind of sacrificial death, whether the Little Prince’s mysterious disappearance or Rita and Manfred’s separation).40 What is more important is the larger moral—and not political41—message of both works, a moral that is largely individual in focus and deliberately vague and unspecified in content (just as it is in Ernst Bloch). The individual is told it must believe, although what one is to believe in is left unclear: some horizon of hope or faith is sketched in,

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but in the broadest of terms. (This is particularly problematic at the close of Der geteilte Himmel, which seems to shift generic gears into a mockepic tone at its conclusion; borrowings from the epic have been seen as typical of socialist realism.)42 It is passages like this that were the target of the campaign against Christa Wolf after 1989, derogatorily referred to as “Gesinnungsästhetik”;43 yet such criticisms are not found only in the polemics of Schirrmacher, Greiner, and Bohrer, and they may sometimes apply to Konrad Wolf as well. Most interesting of all are the comments of one reader on SaintExupéry’s story on its rhetorical devices. Nicole Biagoli remarks on the particular function of the author’s own deliberately unskilled or childlike illustrations to the book—which give it a proto-filmic quality even before it was filmed, and may have inhibited Wolf in his adaptation (as it did Stanley Donen in his filmed version a few years later). Although the drawings were meant to aid child readers in identifying with the narrator, Biagoli notes that “cette fonction phatique et traductrice du dessein est entrée à un moment en conflit avec la fonction illustrative” (this phatic and translational function of the drawings at one point comes into conflict with the illustrative function).44 At first, the story had included drawings with the pilot in them, but the author later cut these out. “Le narrateur, c’est-à-dire l’auteur conscient adulte, a donc été évincé de l’image et ce que nous voyons, sans le savoir, c’est l’image inconsciente du corps de l’auteur, c’est-à-dire le petit prince” (The narrator, that is the conscious adult author, has been ousted from the image and what we see, without knowing it, is the unconscious image of the author’s body, that is to say, the little prince”). (Biagoli refers to the idea of child psychologist Françoise Dolto that children’s drawings represent their unconscious image of their body.) In other words, the nature of the drawings—with their point of view elided—allows for an identification of reader with author. Biagoli links this to the rhetorical figure of enallage or substitution: À cette énallage de genre qui substitute l’autobiographique au récit de fiction, s’ajoute une énallage sémiotique: la forme deviant le contenu, puisque l’engagement de l’action—le mouton—, et le senza fine de la resolution—la courroie que le narrateur oublie de dessiner—, sont fournis par l’image même. La croyance en la réalité de l’image fait partie du pacte lectoral de l’ouvrage. C’est en la partageant qu’adultes et enfants s’entendent: “Je t’ai donné un petit mouton. Il pencha la tête vers le dessin:—Pas si petit que ça . . . Tiens! Il est endormi” (fin du premier chapitre). [To this generic enallage which substitutes autobiography to the fictional narrative is added a semiotic enallage: the form becomes the content, since the engagement of the action—the sheep—and endlessness of the resolution—the belt that the narrator forgets to

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draw—are furnished by the image itself. The belief in the reality of the image is part of the readerly pact with the work. It is in sharing it that adult and children are agreed: “I gave you a little sheep. He bends his head toward the image:—Not so little as that. Well! He’s fallen asleep” [end of chapter 1].]

To this intermedial enallage (which Biagoli calls “semiotic”) of drawing for word, Wolf will add his substitution of filmic image for drawing. Here is precisely where the moment of Brechtian distantiation enters in: for Wolf consciously refuses to take recourse to animation (“Trickfilm”), instead reproducing Saint-Exupéry’s drawings with the gentlest hint of filmic motion. So, too, Wolf has human actors take the place of the snake and fox in the story, rather than animated figures. Here, in his filmic mobilization of the drawings, he anticipates the use of Goya’s drawings and paintings he will make in his film of that name. We can however extend Biagoli’s insight further. Enallage can mean substitutions not only of persons, or genres—as in Biagoli’s essay—but also of times, meaning an unmarked substitution of one time for another in a narrative: Enallage temporel: se caractérise par un remplacement du T0 réel par un T1 coïncidant avec l’instant où se passent les événements narrés, sans que l’on puisse identifier si ce remplacement correspond à une réactualisation des faits passés qui sont transportés au coeur de sa propre actualité ou si, au contraire, c’est le narrateur qui remonte le cours du temps et se rend en imagination à l’époque qu’il décrit.45 [Temporal enallage is characterized by a replacement of real time by a time coinciding with the instant when narrated events happen, without one’s being able to identify if this replacement corresponds to a reactualization of the past facts which are transported into the heart of the present or whether, on the contrary, it is the narrator who returns backward, in imagination, in the course of time to the epoch he describes.]

This is a description of the very technique used by Christa Wolf in Der geteilte Himmel, to shift back and forth between the present tense of Rita’s convalescent remembrance and narration and the past of her love affair with Manfred. By means of this blurring of times, Wolf purposely projects Rita’s later healing back into the past, and makes the contingent events of that past point ahead to the redemptive socialist future in which all wounds will be healed. Temporal enallage is a rhetorical technique familiar enough from salvation history (Heilsgeschichte), and thus it is not surprising that it should be found also in Protestant references to Pauline theology:

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Grâce à l’énallage de temps le Pasteur peut rapprocher les fidèles de l’apôtre Paul. Observons bien que de nombreuses phrases où nous trouvons l’énallage de temps se manifestent sous la forme de commandements: “l’apôtre Paul dit: efforcez-vous” “c’est Paul qui le dit: approchons-nous avec assurance du trône de la grâce” [. . .] Le pasteur n’aurait pas le même effet persuasive s’il utilisait la forme la plus proche du prototype. Avec l’énallage temporelle, l’auditoire se sent plus concerné car c’est un message direct. Le pasteur n’a pas dit “l’apôtre Paul a dit que vous devriez vous efforcer” car il sait que cette structure est moins séduisante bien qu’elle respecte les règles grammaticales.46 [Thanks to the enallage of time, the pastor can bring the faithful near to the Apostle Paul. We may observe that many phrases where we find temporal enallage are manifest in the form of commandments: “The Apostle Paul says: make an effort.” “It is Paul who says: let us approach with assurance the throne of grace.” [. . .] The pastor would not have the same persuasive effect if he used the form closer to the prototype. With temporal enallage, the listeners feel more concerned, because it is a direct message. The pastor didn’t say, “the Apostle Paul said that you should make an effort,” since he knows this structure is less seductive even though more grammatically correct.]

This same structure of temporal enallage will be used again by Konrad Wolf in Ich war neunzehn to shift back and forth between 1945 and 1968, the time of antifascism and the time of the film’s narrative present. We find the same again at the conclusion of Goya, with its ironic juxtaposition of the Inquisitor’s sentencing Goya to oblivion and the artist’s triumphant signature. Enallage is the master trope of Wolf’s filmic narration of history. It occurs also at the frankly religiose end of Der kleine Prinz, when the aviator tells the reader to keep an eye out for the Prince, in case he turns up again. As at the end of Der geteilte Himmel, the narrative opens up onto a vista or horizon of Utopian futurity.

Busch singt (1982) Wolf’s last project was an omnibus film, a six-part television series documenting the career of Ernst Busch, whom he had known personally and whose voice had been featured in Ich war neunzehn. Wolf did not live to see the series completed; he himself oversaw the project and was

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responsible for parts 3 (1935 oder Das Fass der Pandora) and 5 (Ein Toter auf Urlaub). Peter Voigt directed part 1, Erwin Burkert parts 2 and 4, and Voigt and Burkert together the final part. The complete title, Ernst Busch: Sechs Filme über die erste Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts, points to the archival quality of the film. The real archive is Busch’s voice itself, as documented in recording; as Aurich and Jacobsen point out, “Ausgangspunkt der Dramaturgie ist immer der Ton. Erst nach der Ton- ist die Bildmontage entstanden” (The point of departure of the dramaturgy is always sound. The montage of images only arose after that of the sounds).47 It could not be more appropriate, given the centrality of the voice to Wolf’s aesthetic (already mentioned in the introduction), that he should have concentrated on the voice in this last project. In many ways, Busch singt links up to filmic practices used in Wolf’s later films, such as the documentary still photography of Mama, ich lebe, or the frequent use of freeze-frame shots; its centrality of the voice connects also to the microphoned voice of Gregor in Ich war neunzehn, the gramophone of Mamlock and Sunny’s tape recorder, “Donna Clara” in Lissy, or the radio-play aesthetic of both Die Genesung and Mama, ich lebe. As with so many of Wolf’s films from Ich war neunzehn onward, this film too is informed by a sense of nostalgia for a lost revolutionary past. 1981 was the year that MTV was launched, a drastically different linkage of music and image via rapid cutting and imagistic association that would contribute to the larger (medial) forgetting of the revolutionary memory to which Wolf’s work had been dedicated. (Der nackte Mann auf dem Sportplatz is dedicated to just this problem of forgetting, which that film associates with television and popular music.) The nostalgic tone is so strong that even the beginning sequences of 1935 oder Das Fass der Pandora—depicting Nazi Germany—is only gently ironic in tone (due to the juxtaposition of images of Germany with Busch’s voice singing “Ich wollt, wir wär’n noch klein”). The nostalgic aspect of Wolf’s film lies not only in its material but also in its technique: much of part 3 relates image and sound via what Eisenstein would call “audio-visual counterpoint,” the ironic contrast of the two media, for didactic purposes. (Aurich and Jacobsen again: “Buschs Lieder sind weitestgehend auf ihr kämpferisches Pathos, müssen etwas behaupten, was so gar nicht ausschliesslich in ihnen steckt.” [Busch’s songs are oriented largely to their militant pathos, and must assert something that does not exclusively reside in them]).48 Wolf seems to have treated Busch’s voice as if it were the aural embodiment of Bazin’s “mummy complex,” as if it were a Real Presence. (“Speech has as it were become immortal,” as was said of Edison’s invention of the gramophone.)49 Ute Holl describes how Wolf played a record of Busch at the Tenth Parteitag of the SED in April 1981, during a dark time for the Party, when Solidarity had just been formed in neighboring Poland and the Soviets had been bogged down in Afghanistan. “When Wolf, according to

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the protocol, put the needle on the record and said “Ernst, you have the floor!” [Ernst, Du hast das Wort], the physical aspect becomes palpable as a making-present of a double absence”—namely of Busch and of Thälmann, the subject of the song.50 In an interview with Horst Knietzsch in Neues Deutschland from April 11, 1981, Wolf claimed that Busch’s songs were “im Sinne des Kommunistischen Manifests ‘Gespenster,’ die sie [the enemies of Communism—LP] das Fürchten gelehrt haben” (specters in the sense of the Communist Manifesto, that have taught fear to them). But we may see this voice as “spectral” in another sense, as well: namely that of Derrida’s archive, marking an absence and a loss as much as something present. Seen (or heard) thus, Busch singt becomes part of the larger (allegorical) mourning work of Wolf’s films: the documentation of the slow loss of the ideals and hopes that made Wolf’s Moscow childhood a paradise he could never regain. Part 5 of the series works this problem through in more reflexive and complex form than Part 3, since it chronicles a period when Busch did not sing—a period when his voice was already absent. In its place, we have the voice and image of Wolf himself, moderating his own documentary as a subjective commentator. Wolf retraces the stages of Busch’s exile, which often resemble his own, and that of his father Friedrich; as the latter was interned in the French camp of Le Vernet, so Busch was interned in Gurs. Busch singt comes here into the vicinity of the unrealized autobiographical project of Die Troika; it also cites Wolf’s beloved Chapaev (Sergei and Georgii Vasil’ev, 1934) near the end. The Busch film makes explicit the dimension of contingency in Wolf’s own life, noting that he might well have encountered Busch earlier, given how close they were to each other at moments in their lives. Moreover, the documentary material is intercut with scenes from Wolf’s own films, products of the same shared history. Once more the aural ghost of the Spanish Civil War—Busch’s song of the Jarama Front—is called up, with its visual homage from Ich war neunzehn. At one point (ca 22ʹ from the beginning), as a train leaves a station in the present—re-enacting Busch’s own train journey to captivity in Berlin after his arrest—we hear Eisler’s setting of Becher’s “Heimat, meine Trauer,” sung by Busch, with the same effect as that long traveling shot away from the new mayor in Ich war neunzehn. A shot of a riverine landscape in bright color (36ʹ) evokes the opening sequence of Ich war neunzehn, by the Oder. (One wonders what Wolf thought of Tarkovsky’s visual references back to Spain in The Mirror, since some of Wolf’s images of hang gliders and zeppelins in Busch singt remind one of Tarkovsky’s dreamlike balloonist in his autobiographical film.) The ghostly aspect of this chronicle is heightened by the wispy, understated atonal music of Reiner Bredemeyer (1929–95), who had also composed the film music for Mama, ich lebe. As in the latter film, Bredemeyer’s music is heard over traveling shots, here not from a train, but on

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the road over the French concentration camp of Gurs, where Busch was interred (12ʹ); the combination of overgrown path with dissonant music is almost a topos of Holocaust film. Moreover, this section of Busch singt shows the material storage media by which Busch’s voice was preserved and disseminated, whether tape recorder, vinyl record or loudspeaker; one segment shows Wolf playing a tape to Busch’s neighbor Eva Kemlein (1909–2004), a documentary photographer who had herself lived in exile and would become the chronicler of the re-founded Berliner Ensemble. The film is a nostalgic look back not only at Busch but also at Wolf’s own career in film, which was linked to Busch not only through shared beliefs but also (and not less importantly) through shared media.

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8: Der geteilte Himmel (1964)

D

ER GETEILTE HIMMEL, based on Christa Wolf’s 1963 novel of the same title, is without doubt one of the key films not only in Wolf’s work but also within DEFA as a whole. It marks not only the beginning of the very short-lived DEFA “New Wave”—which lasted not much longer than a year (if one counts from the premiere of this film on September 3, 1964 to the Eleventh Plenum in December 1965), or perhaps a few years at most (if one counts from films like Rolf Kirsten’s Auf der Sonnenseite [On the Sunny Side] from 1962)—but also addresses the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961. Based on Christa Wolf’s novel of the same name, which similarly marked a breakthrough for its author and for GDR literature into a less rigid form of writing (one less molded by the patterns of socialist realism), it tells the story of a young woman named Rita (Renate Blume) and her older lover Manfred (Eberhard Esche), who ends up leaving for West Berlin on the eve of the building of the Wall, due to his frustration about his inability to get a new chemical procedure supported by GDR authorities. Manfred is a man on whom the burden of his family’s (especially his father’s) Nazi past weighs heavily, and he cannot shake off cynicism when he sees his father replace Nazi party membership with that in the Communist Party. Rita visits him in West Berlin, but finding both the milieu and a newly cold and selfish Manfred unsympathetic, chooses freely to return to the East and its more communal social project. Although she is studying to be a teacher, she also works in a train wagon factory, which gives the film a double plot structure. At the factory she meets Wendland (Hilmar Thate), a young idealistic manager (and socialist foil to Manfred’s world-weary cynical individualism), and Meternagel (Hans Hardt-Hardtloff), an older man whose health is failing, but who manages to implement a new production system in his brigade, one that will increase productivity. In shock at her loss of Manfred, Rita faints at the beginning of the film and is nearly run over by a car, and the film is told in flashback as she convalesces from her trauma. The trick of the film’s complex narration lies in the projection backward into the past of the “higher necessity” of socialism, understood only later (in deferred or nachträglich fashion, to borrow Freud’s term). The film is one of Wolf’s most sophisticated, in technical terms—in its use of both sound and montage—and paved the way for what would be his greatest film, Ich war neunzehn. Yet due to its political message, particularly in the way Christa Wolf’s novel represents and dramatizes that message, it is also a deeply

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problematic film. Some of the debate over these problems can be found in the extensive literature on Christa Wolf, and need not be repeated here; what follows will concentrate more on the medial specificity of the filmic adaptation, particularly on its staging of larger medial characteristics of the GDR, its visual depiction of New Wave femininity, and on its use of music, which operates almost as a filmic subconscious.1 (Sound plays in general an important role in almost all of Wolf’s films, from Einmal ist keinmal all the way to Busch singt, and it is inseparable from their narrative form and political content.) Given that Christa Wolf was the object of the most spectacular post-1989 controversy about the value of GDR literature, it is inevitable that this chapter, dealing with Konrad Wolf’s filming of her most important novel, cannot avoid touching on sensitive questions. The question of “what remains” (was bleibt, in Christa Wolf’s formulation) of Konrad Wolf’s work is at its most acute here, in what was perhaps his most directly politically engaged film.

Media Landscapes and New Wave Women In Der geteilte Himmel (1964), it is not only the ideal sky—“this whole vault of longing and hope, love and mourning”2—that is divided, but also the media, the bearers of this vault. With somnambulistic assurance, the film registers the division of Germany not only into two literatures but also into two media societies, especially two television systems. Although the televisual and radio heaven of Germany remained undivided, despite repeated attempts by the GDR state to seal itself off against the West, GDR television increasingly cut itself off from Western influences after the building of the Wall and thereby became a “medium of the fathers.”3 It is not by chance that we see a TV in Manfred’s West Berlin room, and radio—including Western (RIAS) broadcasts—at home in the East. This division left its traces also in the peculiar discrepancy between Konrad Wolf’s images, with their deliberate and sometimes exaggerated modernity, and the often pathos-laden, metaphorical bombast of Christa Wolf’s diction.4 The split between word and image that thereby arose is also one within the protagonist Rita’s own subjectivity, and might recall, for some viewers, Freud’s “splitting of the ego in the process of defense.” According to Freud, this splitting takes place under the influence of a psychic trauma . . . The ego . . . finds itself in the service of a powerful drive impulse, which it is accustomed to satisfying, and is suddenly shocked by an experience that teaches it that the continuation of this satisfaction will have a real danger in consequence, one that would be hard to bear. The ego must now decide either to recognize the real danger [. . .] or deny reality.5

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Figure 8.1. Abstract composition influenced by Hiroshima mon amour. ©DEFA-Stiftung/Werner Bergmann.

Freud’s child—or, in Christa Wolf’s novel, the “girl” Rita—does neither of these, or rather does both simultaneously, which amounts to the same thing. In the context of the film, it is interesting that for Freud, this maneuver needs no hallucination, “but rather . . . only a displacement of value [Wertverschiebung], whereby the mechanism of regression comes to help out.”6 That it is, in Freud’s case, a matter of a male child who mourns the lost phallus of the mother will only make richer a discussion of the gender-coded division of Heaven. To return to the film: it would not be accurate to maintain that Konrad Wolf’s montage technique, which had learned from Godard and Resnais, was simply a step ahead of Christa Wolf’s novel. For it is precisely Konrad Wolf’s apparent borrowing from the French New Wave that brings further complications with it, above all in the portrait of Rita (Renate Blume)—which offers us something like A Portrait of a Socialist as a Young Woman. Rita’s shared traits with her cinematic sisters Anna Karina, Jeanne Moreau, or Emmanuèle Riva—or, in the East, with Tatiana Samoilova or Krysztyna Stypułkowska—allow for a filmic interpretation of the text through the lens of international cinema. The resemblances result as much from the way the heroine is filmed as from her own characteristics. Geneviève Sellier remarks on women in the New Wave:

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In the manner in which the heroine is filmed, we can see the mark of the New Wave: no apparent makeup; the magic of black and white that, thanks to big close-ups, highlights skin tone and the sculptural design of the face; the face and body expressing suffering and joy beyond any erotic or photogenic consideration (in the sense of commercial cinema). The actress becomes the instrument of a poetic vision of the body and of physical love, which effaces the individual to celebrate the human.7

In other words, “the new cinema introduced a subliminal eroticism that passes more through the face and voice (and through the lighting and framing) than through the body.”8 This went hand in hand with an accent put on the naturalness of woman, both in her imagistic representation and in her fictional character.9 This new naturalness is already to be found in Christa Wolf’s novel, and not only in Rita’s character as a “white raven,”10 but also in the many natural images that permeate the text and are not only seen from Rita’s perspective. Precisely the iconic flatness of the image of a woman’s face—expression of a painfully perfect beauty—is paradoxically also supposed to be an index of her subjectivity, should “encourage the viewer’s interest in the mental condition of the heroine.”11 A contradiction arises, however, from the perfect framing and visionary illumination of the iconic image of the woman: “There is a kind of inverse relation between the heroine’s capacity for diegetic initiative and the aura she imparts, as she can only become fascinating passivity, an object of contemplation for the camera to the extent that she is not the active subject of the plot.”12 In Rita’s case, such passivity is already present in the novel, as several critics have remarked.13 It is linked to a deliberate averageness or everydayness both of the story and its protagonist, as we find in the formulation “Rita’s banal story.”14 This tendency to deliberate banality explains, in the case of New Wave auteurs, their fondness for pop literature,15 which in their case is coupled with an irony of which there is not the slightest trace in Christa Wolf’s borrowings from romance novels.16 Redemption from this everyday banality is meant to happen through passion and heterosexual love, set up normatively as a timeless ideal, and often going hand in hand with a restoration of traditional gender roles.17 Thus it is hardly surprising that this mystification of love goes together with a tragic victim’s role for the woman. Rita’s tear-streaked face may recall that of Anna Karina in Vivre sa vie (1962) when she is watching Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). (That it also recalls the face of Tatiana Samoilova in The Cranes Are Flying [Mikhail Kalatozov, 1957] is a matter to which we will return again later.) On the other hand, the women of the New Wave are not merely passive, iconic objects of contemplation. In one café scene from Vivre

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sa vie, Anna Karina talks at length to a new acquaintance (played by the philosopher Brice Parrain), wherein she stresses her own, perhaps existentialist, ethics of responsibility: “Moi, je crois qu’on est toujours responsable de ce qu’on fait, et libre . . . Après tout, tout est bon: il n’y a que s’intéresser aux choses et les trouver belles” (Me, I think one is always responsible for what one does, and free . . . After all, everything is good: it’s just a question of being interested in things and finding them beautiful).18 This will to see things as beautiful is certainly an important tendency within modernism and may be traced back to Nietzsche,19 as also to thencontemporary influences of phenomenology. In this, the women of the New Wave are mouthpieces for their directors and their search for authenticity.20 This mouthpiece-function explains also the great dominance of the verbal in these films, which sought to define their own modernity in relation to modern literature, instead of in relation to painting or music, as earlier filmic modernity had done, before the Second World War.21 We will need to pay special attention to a particular filmic technique of the verbal here, namely the voice-over. On the whole, it may be said that the figure of the woman in the New Wave is a paradox: iconic closure or sufficiency of the woman’s face, coupled with an unfathomable inwardness and spontaneity; deliberately everyday banality or averageness of character in strange combination with an impulsive desire for adventure; passivity and reflective self-awareness— and finally, naturalness and consumer-driven artifice (as in Godard’s Une femme est une femme [A Woman Is a Woman, 1961] or Une femme mariée [A Married Woman, 1964], whose story is presented together with quoted scraps of fashion advertisements, as if the woman were herself a composite image of the latter). All these traits are, however, also figures of the self-reflexivity of the auteur cinema. Karina’s statement from Vivre sa vie, quoted earlier, continues thus: “un message, c’est un message; une assiette, c’est une assiette; les hommes sont les hommes; et la vie, c’est la vie” (a message is a message; a plate is a plate; men are men; life is life”). The tautology of Une femme est une femme also means: cinema is cinema.22 The woman’s face, object of the endless fascination of the male directors, is an overdetermined and polyvalent sign, both for consumer society (in exemplary fashion in Une femme mariée) and for the whole New Wave movement. One could add that the woman’s face, which is the woman’s face, is also a sign for the cybernetic and televisual information society that arose in the early 1960s, and to which the New Wave was a response. It is not by chance that Anna Karina’s affirmation of the selfreference and simple being of everything that is should begin with “un message, c’est un message.” The Woman is thus the black box of information society: one cannot look into her, but only describe her surface, or

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how she “works.”23 In the New Wave, it is less her education (Bildung) than her programming as a non-trivial machine (in Heinz von Foerster’s formulation)24 that is described.25 This is the reason why, in Godard, women’s offscreen voices often whisper an apparently incoherent chatter of scraps of phrases (again paradigmatically in Une femme mariée): their stream of consciousness, as was already the case with Joyce’s Molly Bloom, is not only code but also the random white noise of the transmission channel itself.

Voice and Image How do Der geteilte Himmel and its heroine relate to this historical context? Obviously, the filming of a feminine Bildungsroman by a woman author had to take different form than the films of the mostly male directors of the French New Wave. But it would be hasty only to see this difference only in a relative feminist progressiveness of the DEFA film, compared to its Western relatives. Certainly Der geteilte Himmel grants its heroine apparently more subjectivity or freedom of action than Godard allows his female figures, which are often seen from a provocatively external (or “superficial”) perspective. The film’s narrative turns on Rita’s central decision to stay in the East, and also on her mourning work—the working through of her most recent and traumatic past. In this, the film resembles Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959) more than Godard, as Barton Byg has noted.26 Its theme of memory and mourning also links it to Wolf ’s other films, from Lissy to Sterne to Ich war neunzehn. But everything depends on what kind of subjectivity is ascribed to Rita. On the one hand, the filmic adaptation represents in many ways a modernization of the novel. The bathetic natural metaphors that have irritated many readers are quietly omitted or replaced by severe geometrical compositions, such as the alley of poplars, the street crossing before the wagon factory, the bridge over the river where Rita and Manfred meet, or the aqueduct in Rita’s home village. The repetition of these images gives a sense of spatialization of time, a motif that has long been seen as typical of classical modernism.27 In turn, this symbolic repetition suggests a further parallel to Hiroshima mon amour, which also uses repeated imagery. An exception to this overall elision of metaphor is the awkward and ponderous figure of the boat on the stormy sea at the end of chapter 15 of the novel, which is taken over literally in the film, together with the unintentionally comical rejoinder of the voice-over that follows, with deadpan earnest: “Eight months later, the boat had sunk.”28 Within the visually modernist aesthetic context of this film, this pronouncement feels like an odd relapse into generic melodrama.

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Figure 8.2. Recurring visual motif of the viaduct. ©DEFA-Stiftung/Werner Bergmann.

Figure 8.3. Manfred’s (Eberhard Esche) and Rita’s (Renate Blume) symbolic lantern of hope. ©DEFA-Stiftung/Werner Bergmann.

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At such moments one senses the discrepancy between image and word, which is a recurrent problem not only in DEFA films but also in other films of the Eastern New Wave. Maya Turovskaya had written about The Cranes Are Flying that she could approve of the work of the director and the cameraman, but not of the script.29 Due to the occasionally overblown rhetoric of the screenplay, the images, impressive in themselves, must serve the purpose of a pathos from which the iconic quality of the images simultaneously wants to free itself. Image and education, Bild and Bildung, diverge from each other, so that the problem lies precisely in the relative fidelity of the adaptation of the novel. This problem is especially acute in the technique of the voice-over. A central aspect of Christia Wolf’s novel is that the narration is internally divided between experienced present on the one hand and flashbacks from the perspective of an older, wiser, recovered Rita, on the other. The trick of the novel, both in terms of its narration and its politics, is to make these two levels of time and knowledge gradually converge, thus teleologically motivating the goal of Rita’s development to correct socialist consciousness by the end. Konrad Wolf’s film accents and even outbids this distinction of narrative levels by assigning the voice of the older Rita to another woman’s voice, namely that of Lissy Tempelhof, who had shortly beforehand played Dr. Inge Ruoff in Professor Mamlock, and had a minor role as a singing voice in Sonnensucher. Lissy Tempelhof’s voice is clearly deeper and more serious than that of Renate Blume, and sounds more like the unspecified We who speaks in the novel’s prologue and epilogue (a collective that might be “the people of the GDR,” or more simply the Party). The solemn earnest of the voice not only at the beginning and the end of the film, but also at other moments, such as the aforementioned one of the “sunken boat,” has something of the quality of a commenting radio announcer’s voice. Tempelhof’s voice is presumably meant to give the narrative frame and other parts of the narrative a quasi-documentary authenticity, as if it were “reporting” on the events from outside the narrative. Could one see here a distant affinity to the voice of Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler in the GDR TV program Der schwarze Kanal, or in Karl Gass’s film Schaut auf diese Stadt (1962)—also made to vindicate the building of the Berlin Wall? In all these examples, a discrepancy between the statements made by the images and those of the voice becomes evident, a discrepancy that was influenced by the medial regression or backward tendency of GDR television. The modernist split between visible protagonist and offscreen voice with which Günter Stahnke experimented in Monologue for a Taxi Driver (1962) had to be sacrificed to this tendency, and could not be integrated into Der geteilte Himmel. In its rather conservative use of the voice, Konrad Wolf’s film exemplifies why the use of voice-overs was criticized in the 1960s and 1970s (see Bruzzi).30

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It is this maternal voice of Tempelhof that will direct Rita’s odd “development”—or rather her ego-splitting in the mechanism of defence. As Julia Hell has argued in her analysis of Christa Wolf’s work, this development or deformation had to lead to a splitting off or exclusion of Rita’s sexuality. Instead of becoming a woman, Rita has to identify with Wendland (which explains the strange dream she has in chapter 18 of the novel, which was interestingly not included in the film): she becomes a son-like daughter-figure of an ideal socialist parent. With this, the educational and narrative project of the novel ends, in what Julia Hell calls “the complementary synthesis of man and woman as allegory of a restored (social) totality”: not the unity of man and woman, but that of woman as man.31 According to our earlier Freud quote, this development must go hand in hand with an assertion of the sufficiency of parental authority, and that of the state (as phallic mother). One is almost tempted to identify the voiceover as that of Anna Seghers, Christa Wolf’s authorial godmother. Thus it is not surprising that this turn away from sexuality is also one away from semiotics. The renunciation of the sexual body is also one of the body as sign, of an “empire of signs” (Barthes) which is represented by West Berlin with its huge Persil ad, in front of which Rita and Manfred are as flattened out as Anna Karina is in front of a wall of posters in Vivre sa vie. In both in the New Wave and the New Novel, and also in Der geteilte Himmel, women are depersonalized so that they may become symbols or signs for something else; yet we should distinguish between different kinds of sign functions.32 Love can only become a symbol of the future socialist nation in a sublimated, renounced form. In this, Rita is a living allegory of a film industry that could not take on the form of a consumer product33 but had to remain under the veil of a rhetorically invoked concept of culture. The question remains how we are now to see this specter of Marx or “future past” (Koselleck) today.34 The erstwhile status of the film as slightly delayed first-born child of a GDR literature of “arrival” and of a film production that had also been belatedly de-Stalinized (over half a decade later than that of its Polish neighbor) is only part of the story. Many works of Western European modernism of the 1960s may seem today to have aged. As Adorno had it, “the new . . . is the longing for the new, hardly itself; everything new suffers from this.”35 But the new in socialism was different from that elsewhere, in that it was planned. “If one announces the arrival of the new, divides it from what already exists and, from this backward-looking perspective, passes over to the planning of the new, then one can hardly say with any exactness what constitutes its novelty.”36 The new here was as abstract as Bloch’s Principle of Hope, from which Christa Wolf especially, but also the entire reform socialist project in general, drew sustenance.37 This was a particular form of modernity within state socialism. As Brecht had already seen in his ironic poem “The

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Solution” from 1953, the people that should represent the absolute reason of the planning state did not yet exist.38 Therefore, this people had first to be imagined in socialist art, heavy with the future as it was. Rita is thus like a female John the Baptist of a new socialist type of human. She has already received her somnambulistic higher “consciousness” from the maternal voice-over, although this word could not yet become flesh.39 Konrad Wolf’s later filmic alter ego Gregor Hecker in Ich war neunzehn will also be split between public and private roles and voices—a division that will take the form of a medial difference between microphoned and “natural” (electronically unmediated) voice.40 In Rita’s case, the nonpublic (sexual) voice must be given up in favor of the expected future of socialism. In the programmatic feedback loop of the offscreen voice, one hears the peculiar reception of cybernetics in the GDR, which sought to couple systemic self-reference with higher insight into the necessity of History. Rita’s nonidentity as a woman is the condition of her integration (not different in this from Gregor Hecker, who had to become, emphatically, German and not Jewish). Une socialiste est une socialiste, parce qu’une femme n’est pas une femme.

Soundtrack: Between Mourning and Presence The New Wave films of the early 1960s were also characterized by a new approach to film music, and this was true not only in the West but also in Eastern European and Soviet film. Along with the better-known examples of this latter group, such as Andrzej Wajda’s Popiół i diament [Ashes and Diamonds, 1958] or Mikhail Kalatozov’s Letyat zhuravli [The Cranes Are Flying, 1957], which rewrote national war narratives with new cinematic techniques, there were also films of everyday life, such as Wajda’s Niewinni czarodzieje [Innocent Sorcerers, 1960] and Marlen Khutsiyev’s Vesna na Zarechnoy ulitse [Spring on Zarechnaya Street, 1956] or Zastava Iliycha/Mne dvadtsat let [Lenin’s Guard/I am Twenty, 1961/1965], which often made use of popular music, including jazz. In France, many New Wave films had jazz soundtracks, and Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud [Elevator to the Gallows, 1958, with music by Miles Davis] and Godard’s À bout de souffle [Breathless, 1960, with music by Martial Solal] are but two examples of this trend. Godard applied the same ironic montage techniques to music as to the image, deliberately chopping up bits of sound or quoting them, in homage to classical Hollywood practice.41 Although Der geteilte Himmel may seem superficially less radical than a film such as Godard’s Une femme est une femme [A Woman Is a Woman, 1961] in its audiovisual montage, the soundtrack to Wolf’s film is, nonetheless, extremely subtle and complex in its levels of meaning, and merits further analysis. Wolf’s composer for this film was Hans-Dieter Hosalla, who was for years the music director of the Berliner Ensemble

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and composed songs to texts by Brecht along with incidental music for his plays.42 The score to Der geteilte Himmel is extremely understated, eschewing symphonic grandeur in favour of solo instruments and smaller ensembles, including jazz bands; even in underscored passages, winds are also preferred to the string choir, in order to avoid the kind of pathos found in older symphonic scores. The most extended musical passages occur during the opening credits and at several crucial narrative junctures in the film. The musical material is divided into two main thematic areas. The first is the deliberately brash and upbeat opening, for trombone, with jazzy syncopations. The second is the guitar theme occurring under the credits, usually in the minor key, and slightly recalling the main theme from the first movement of Dvořák’s Piano Concerto in G minor (1876). This second theme is based on the German folksong “Ich hab’ die Nacht geträumet.” These two themes are opposed in character, the first major and descending, while the second is minor and ascending. If the first theme is a musical embodiment of presence and immediacy, the second is linked to Rita’s memory and mourning. The first theme is heard much less often than the second, only at the opening and close of the film, and alluded to during the (very Godard-esque) driving scene (ca. 28ʹ40ʺ; compare the famous driving scenes in À bout de souffle). The second, however, recurs at every flashback, and is usually associated with the image of the aqueduct near Rita’s mother’s house, where she goes to recover from her trauma.43 It thus suggests to the viewer the process of Rita’s “working through” her trauma. Along with these nondiegetic uses of music, there are also important instances of diegetic music, such as the popular dance music for Rita’s recollection of meeting Manfred, or the waltzes at the factory party, and frequent snippets of radio, whether East German pop tunes of the period (like Robert Stefan’s “Schwarze Maria”) or bits of Western radio broadcasts suggesting the atmosphere of crisis at the time of the building of the Berlin Wall. These passages serve to underline the documentary aspect of the film: its claim to represent a moment of specific historical crisis between East and West, in accordance with Marshall McLuhan’s idea that radio is a “hot” medium.44 In one scene, where Manfred and Rita are guests at a party of scientists (ca. 73ʹ40ʺ), the hard cuts between diegetic radio music (linked to the external setting) and nondiegetic soundtrack (linked to Rita’s thoughts) are often abrupt, lopping off the music mid phrase, in the manner of Godard. The ironic use of radio as simultaneous commentary on the characters’ speech, juxtaposing the collective and historical dimension of the mass media to the intimate and individual domain of love, points ahead toward the later practice of Fassbinder in such films as Die Ehe der Maria Braun [The Marriage of Maria Braun, 1979]. In general, the dominance of solo instruments, especially guitar and saxophone, may be correlated to the centrality of Rita’s individual

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mourning to the narrative. If it is the task of the film to lead Rita out of her traumatic past into a positive (socialist) present and future, the music must also participate in this process. It does so by expanding the solo guitar into ensemble writing, which is by its nature collective. “Polyphonic music says ‘us,’” as Adorno observes,45 and this is true for film music as well as autonomous concert music. Thus Hosalla’s score again and again extends the guitar’s memory-leitmotif into dialogue with other instruments, as Rita remembers her past, and her own “banal story” is interwoven with that of other characters. The flexibility of this theme, like that of the classical instrumental tradition as a whole, allows for great semantic variability. Thus at the end, Hosalla shifts the theme’s key to major, to suggest Rita’s hard-won optimism, and harmonizes it with a Neapolitan lowered second,46 to hint at her painful loss of Manfred. Most interesting is that we rarely hear more than the opening of the memory theme (what one might call its “head motif” [Kopfmotif]). Only during the credits is it extended into a full melodic statement, as if to underline the film’s idea that the entire meaning of Rita’s narrative only becomes clear in retrospect. The theme is so varied in its renditions as to move between popular and classical connotations. During the credits, it is extended into a deliberately archaic, modal close, suggesting the epic or legendary narrative tone of “once upon a time.” In Rita’s first flashback, the theme briefly suggests the texture of a Bach invention; elsewhere it ends in jazzy chords with added sevenths. Only once is the music directly synchronized with visual action, in a technique known to film music scholars as “MickeyMousing.”47 This is when Manfred suddenly reasserts his love for Rita, at a moment when their relationship is already disintegrating (80ʹ05ʺ), so that the dramatic synchronizing of the sound has an ironic effect, as if it were overdoing itself, like Manfred in his desperation. Certain passages are partly athematic, as when Manfred admits to Rita (83ʹ36ʺ) that he lacks a “festen Punkt” (secure point) or when Rita weeps after receiving Manfred’s letter from West Berlin (86ʹ30ʺ, with a rare use of piano); the dissonance of these sections, and their disconnection from the rest of the music, may be linked to the narrative’s moments of doubt or pain. The sound engineers also make subtle use of added reverb or echoing resonance to suggest the dimension of remembrance at certain points in the narrative. The most complex moment in a film full of modernist techniques is the Yuri Gagarin sequence near the end. Here the film’s multiple narratives—of Rita and Manfred, of Rita and the railway carriage factory, with Meternagel and Wendland—are metonymically juxtaposed with the simultaneous occurrence of the first manned space flight on April 12, 1961. The technological accomplishment of the Soviet cosmonaut, who was the object of an immense public propaganda campaign48 (thereby vindicating Manfred’s sarcastic comment: “I know what’s coming—a big

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propaganda campaign”), is set in parallel to the railway carriage factory’s work on brake testing. As Christa Wolf’s text and script soar off into the sublime heights of metaphor, the film cuts rapidly between its diegesis and documentary still shots of ground-control personnel monitoring Gagarin’s flight. We do not see Gagarin himself, although the camera zooms up heavenward at one point, and a voice-over reads a quote from Gagarin in German translation, before Rita’s voice-over goes on to comment on it. Christa Wolf’s novel, to which the film has remained fairly faithful, is at its most problematic in such metaphoric passages, where the “scientific-technical revolution” (as it was called in the GDR in the 1960s) is blended with evocations of maternal Nature: Gagarin, the “peasant’s son,” “ploughs the heavens,” and the stars are like “seed corn.” Music plays a crucial role in this sequence. Just as the images are an intrusion of the extradiegetic world into the fictional narrative, so Hosalla’s score here breaks with its normal reserve. Massive, slow string chords enter at precisely the moment when Wolf’s film includes an image of the Vostok rocket’s take-off (81ʹ57ʺ), underlining the sublimity of this historical moment. The musical material itself seems also unrelated to the rest of the film, in accordance with the event’s exceeding the limits of Rita’s story. After the string passage, a solo flute continues with a deliberately archaic passage, suggesting again the tone of a legend or fairy tale. In the tension between modernist image and archaizing text that defines this film, has the music simply taken the side of the text and its metaphorical claims to ideological legitimacy? The archaic, modal sound of the music here is clearly meant to suggest the overarching authority of history. To answer this criticism requires looking at Hosalla’s score as a whole. Wolf’s film may be said to participate in a tendency toward the abstract “parametric” narration theorized by Noel Burch in 1967.49 This tendency treated individual aspects of film as constructive “parameters,” following the model of 1950s musical serialism (especially that of Boulez, one of the chief theoreticians of serialism). As David Bordwell describes it, the parametric model provided “a conception of spatial form which treats any discrete configuration as one paradigmatic possibility, and thus only a variant of a hidden order.”50 Thus in Der geteilte Himmel the story appears spatialized, simultaneous in Rita’s memory, unified by recurring iconic images and sounds. Each occurrence of an image or sound is felt to be a “musical” or parametric variation on a hidden order of memory. Within the story, the Gagarin episode feels like a foreign body, a utopian attempt to “break out” of the confines of the personal into the domain of history. For it to be convincing, and not merely a heavy-handed imposition from above, this segment has to have some relation to what surrounds it. We may see this problem as akin to the modernist moment Adorno found in Mahler’s music, namely the breakthrough (Durchbruch) out of classical sonata forms. For Adorno, Mahler’s compositional

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reflection meant recognizing that even radically new musical materials, which broke through the logical unity of the sonata form, had somehow to be “mediated” with that form.51 Is Hosalla’s music in this particular sequence also integrated with the music for the rest of the larger narrative that surrounds it? If one listens repeatedly to the score, one recognizes that the archaic, legendary (“medieval”) tone of the Gagarin sequence was already hinted at during the credits sequence. Closer attention to the film’s music can change the way we evaluate the film as a whole. Here in the music as elsewhere, the film is performing a hazardous balancing act between a modernist openness to contingency and a didactic impulse to structure narratives toward a definite closure. Given how divided opinions can be of this film, every detail must matter; and given how sparing Wolf usually was with music in most of his other films, the stronger presence of nondiegetic music here is a key part of the film’s aesthetic.

Divided Viewers Under the cover of mourning and melancholy, Der geteilte Himmel remains a partisan and polemical film; it uses the device of enallage (discussed in the previous chapter in the context of Der kleine Prinz) to justify the building of the Berlin Wall. Apart from the awkwardness of Christa Wolf’s prose, and the disingenuous political function of her moralizing, the film also suffers from Eberhard Esche’s brittle and irritating portrayal of Manfred. Esche, too high-strung to be an attractive romantic leading man, is less than convincing in the film’s more relaxed moments (such as the visit to the fairgrounds on Rita’s birthday), and his strained earnestness contrasts oddly with the jollity of the jazzy soundtrack; one wonders how the film might have turned out with a different. Fritz Lang reputedly said after seeing it that he found the joylessness of the young people depressing, and Wolf himself reported that he heard again and again from West German viewers of the film that Manfred was “zu fies,” too meanspirited or nasty,52 and this impression is hard to avoid, especially in the speechifying debates between Manfred and Wendland (where the novel’s, and the film’s, ideological contents are much in evidence). This film will always divide its viewers as much as it does its protagonists. True believers in the socialist cause, whether from the defiant old guard of the GDR or those now too young to know what real existing socialism meant in practice, will want to defend it (and thus sharply disagree with some of this chapter’s criticisms). But although its importance as a document of a crucial moment in the GDR’s history is indisputable, it is hard to imagine that this earnest, moralizing parable, which argues for the necessity of a political action that was dubious at best and desperate at worst, could ever become fully part of the European film canon. Evaluating Konrad Wolf’s work as more than merely an instrumentalized

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political weapon requires facing up to the difficulties of this film and the discomfort it can occasion; doing so is the only chance to get out of the rigid, Cold War friend-versus-foe oppositions that were, in practice, usually used to crush needed reforms within the Warsaw Pact countries (or in the West), and should not be continued today. We do not need to acquiesce in handing over the portrayal of the GDR to tendentious postWende films such as The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006) to recognize this, nor does this mean a blanket dismissal of all of Konrad Wolf’s work as “Gesinnungsästhetik” (aesthetics of political conviction), as Christa Wolf’s writing was termed by Ulrich Greiner and Frank Schirrmacher. The criticisms of Der geteilte Himmel need rather to be weighed against the evaluations of Wolf’s other films in this book— most particularly of Ich war neunzehn. We can further situate Der geteilte Himmel within this book’s larger concerns. Within Wolf’s oeuvre, the film stands as part of a diptych with Ich war neunzehn as an acme of Wolf’s modernism, the two films representing respectively each of the GDR’s master genres, the Gegenwartsfilm, as a generic inflection of female melodrama, and the antifascist film, a generic inflection of the male Western. Both these films share an elision of sexuality, which in Der geteilte Himmel is melodramatically sacrificed, as it is by the female protagonists of Lissy and Sonnensucher; Der geteilte Himmel moreover goes even further in its concluding elision of femininity, as Hell’s book argues. The archival moment here would then be double (according to our dual concept of archive as medium and trauma): on the one hand, it consists in the film’s reliance on a specific medial configuration of radio and TV in the early 1960s, allegorized in the film’s title. On the other, it must also lie in the affects associated with the elision of sexuality and femininity: thus Anke Pinkert has claimed, with specific reference to DEFA, that “film can serve as an affective archive, as a repository of mediated feelings and emotions, which are encoded not only in the content and representational choices of the texts themselves, but in the practices that surround their production and reception.”53 Within Wolf’s film, the music—appropriately enough given the melodramatic narrative—bears a great deal of this affective weight; as noted earlier, the soundtrack is largely dominated by one of its two components, the folkish minor theme associated with female mourning, while the jazzy brass music (perhaps more masculine in coding) occurs only at the opening, while Manfred is showing off his car, and—significantly—at the end, in his absence, now connoting an affirmative GDR everyday that is sufficiently vital and communitarian to support Rita alone. In this context, the striking modernist visual abstraction of the film’s visual images is also divided, namely between a Utopian hope for the construction of a socialist modernity and a memory of mourning and loss.

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9: Ich war neunzehn (1968)

W

OLF’S MOST SEEMINGLY autobiographical film—loosely based on but not literally duplicating his own experiences—is also his most significant. Ich war neunzehn was made in answer to the crisis of the Eleventh Plenum, which had brought DEFA production to a standstill; its title is also an answer to Marlen Khutsiev’s I am 20 (Mne dvadsat’ let, USSR 1964), a key film of the Soviet New Wave, which had run into trouble with Khrushchev and could only be released in a much-cut version. Where Khutsiev’s film shows the undramatic, everyday life of young Muscovites, in a New Wave-influenced style marked by location shooting, handheld camera, and unstaged events, Wolf’s film solidly returns its young protagonist, Gregor Hecker (played by Jackie Schwarz), to the larger historical foundation narrative of the GDR. It is thus a system loyalist’s answer to a Soviet film perceived as dissident. What is new about the film is Gregor’s uncertainty, self-doubt, and vulnerability, which make him kin not only to French New Wave figures such as Antoine Doinel in Truffaut’s 400 Blows (1959) but also to other Eastern European New Wave protagonists such as Ivan from Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood (1964) or Maciek in Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds (1957). The film, based on Wolf’s own experiences at the end of the Second World War,1 chronicles Gregor’s travels through Germany as part of a propaganda squad calling on German soldiers to desert, with two other men, a Russian teacher of German named Vadim (Vasiliy Livanov) and a blonde Russian named Sasha (Alexey Eybozhenko) who is shot at the end of the film during a surprise SS attack. As with Sonnensucher, the international cast, speaking Russian as well as German, links Wolf’s film not only to East German but also to Soviet film traditions. Wolf worked with his regular crew of cameraman Werner Bergman, scriptwriter Wolfgang Kohlhaase, set designer Alfred Hirschmeier, cutter Evelyn Schmidt, and assistant director Doris Borkmann; Rainer Simon was an additional second director. The narrative is loosely episodic in neorealist fashion, including lengthy digressions, such as an interview with an apolitical German architect who lived near Sachsenhausen, quotes from documentary footage on the concentration camps, and Gregor’s own interior dialogue with his mother’s voice when he is drunk at a victory celebration in Potsdam. In the scene with the architect, Gregor hears Vadim quote a famous line from Heine—“Ich hatte einst ein schönes Vaterland” (Once I had a beautiful fatherland), and reacts with scorn to the evoked high-cultural ideal: the scene reminds

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one of another in Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds, where Wajda’s hero—like Gregor—completes a quote from literary Romanticism (Cyprian Kamil Norwid) begun by his lover Krzystyna and throws his cigarette away in disgust. Combat scenes are largely avoided, meaning the film does not quite fit the war genre. In what follows, the considerations of genre and filmic comparativism that have informed other chapters will be combined with a closer reading of a film that has more of an auteurist fingerprint than many of Wolf’s earlier works (and a reading that will be in dialogue with Elsaesser and Wedel’s essay on the film).

Genre, History, Nation In a much-quoted statement about the politics of auteurism, André Bazin once suggested that “the American cinema is a classical art, but why not then admire in it what is most admirable, i.e. not only the talent of this or that filmmaker, but the genius of the system . . .”2 The problem with DEFA is precisely that we cannot do this. The very idea of DEFA’s having a “genius of the system” is, for many reasons (some of which I have touched on earlier in this book), problematic: as the history of DEFA shows, its management was much less genial in support of its filmmakers than comparable institutions in other East Bloc countries (Poland offering a particularly vivid contrast). Among these reasons are the difficulty in defining DEFA’s generic system, the complicated status of directors in DEFA (who were not quite auteurs in the same way Wajda or Jacsó were, since although their films may often bear auteurist signatures, the larger institutional dispositif of auteurism was lacking), and an equal difficulty in ascertaining audience reception of the films (what Aniko Imre has called the missing public of Eastern European film). The “system” of DEFA itself was a deeply conflicted one, where administration often worked at cross-purposes with its directors, not only during the Eleventh Plenum but also during the entirety of the studio’s final decade. The archives at SAPMO (Foundation for the Archives of Party and Mass Organizations of the GDR, Berlin) are, tellingly, often still in chaotic condition, since many materials were apparently destroyed during the final months of the GDR’s existence; many crucial decisions or communications affecting the industry’s history were deliberately made via telephone, thus only accessible to oral history (at a time when many of the actors in this history were already no longer alive).3 All this has made work on DEFA difficult in crucial ways. Without an unambiguously defined institutional context, auteurist arguments, which, historically, arose in relation to an understanding of the studio system, tend to float in a void. There is still much work to be done on DEFA as (generic and production) system, work that could stand beside Bordwell and Thompson or Thomas Schatz on Hollywood, Rentschler’s Ministry of Illusion, or even Emmerich’s standard

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history of GDR literature. Like these historical investigations, and like post-1989 historiography of the GDR, a systematic overview of DEFA would need to stress its non-monolithic nature, its internal tensions and contradictions. Yet such an overview could not evade the responsibility of systemic criticism without being robbed of insight. Merely to pile up historical evidence in the mode of “post-theory” would remain inadequate.4 In a special issue of New German Critique devoted to DEFA, Thomas Elsaesser and Michael Wedel tried to define what they call “DEFA’s Historical Imaginary” with specific reference to the films of Konrad Wolf.5 Elsaesser and Wedel, too, had to begin with a caveat, by noting the absence of larger, integrative histories or of fundamental research into the specific conditions of DEFA production. In this situation it is understandable, albeit also risky, if Elsaesser and Wedel try to explain Wolf relative to the more familiar figures of the New German Cinema. Their analysis of the film to be discussed in the present essay, Ich war neunzehn, thus sounds like a variation of Elsaesser’s well-known readings of Fassbinder through genre and historicized subject positioning. Wolf’s film, loosely based on his own experience (and that of other collaborators on the film), retells the story of a 19-year-old lieutenant in the Red Army who, having fled Nazi Germany with his Communist (and Jewish) parents in 1933, returns in 1945 to a Heimat he has in fact hardly ever known. Earlier articles on this film took Wolf’s claim to autobiographical sincerity and authenticity of witness at face value, thereby following the confessional tactics of former GDR artists themselves.6 Elsaesser and Wedel’s view is a cannier one, aware as it is of Wolf’s intertextual and generic references. Here are Elsaesser and Wedel on Ich war neunzehn: When set against the German-American axis so prominently featuring in, say, Wenders, Reitz and Fassbinder, it no longer seems too far fetched to think of the common basis of several directors’ cinematic versions of “national foundation films” as rooted in the classical movie tropes, such as the frontier with its definition of national identity and otherness, its geography of homelands, enclaves of civilization, and minority reservations. What the road movie is for Wenders, the family odyssey for Reitz, and the female melodrama for Fassbinder has already emerged in Wolf as a keen appreciation of the classical Western, in the manner of John Ford, Robert Aldrich or even Sam Fuller! (20–21)

Elsaesser and Wedel’s view would certainly tally with a number of other critics’ perception of the key role played by the Western in DEFA film, from Spur der Steine and Fünf Patronenhülsen back to Die Mörder sind unter uns with its “rubble canyons.”7 Nor does DEFA’s borrowing from a popular Hollywood genre necessarily contradict its larger indebtedness to Italian neorealism,8 for this could be answered by pointing out

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that even neorealism, a style apparently so opposed to generic formulae, often defined itself through negative references to the latter.9 Nonetheless the impression remains that Elsaesser and Wedel have left important questions still to be answered. The same cinephile references to Hollywood, or to art cinema auteurs, do not function the same way in a DEFA film as they do in New German Cinema. To explain why this is so will require consideration of spectatorship and subjectivity, questions Elsaesser has dealt with in his work on Fassbinder, but less in his DEFA essay with Wedel. After some discussion of the sociology of genre in the context of state socialist cinema, and of the peculiar status of History in DEFA narrative, a closer look will be taken at the opening and closing sequences of Ich war neunzehn to see if it might tell us something specific about the historicity of the spectator in GDR film. This particular film has long been seen as having a privileged position not only within Wolf’s work but also within the larger corpus of DEFA film; the following will also point up some of the reasons for this exemplary status.

DEFA and the New Wave In one crucial aspect, DEFA may be seen as structurally kin to its Western sibling, the New German Cinema: namely in its dependence on state sponsorship and consequent need to invent an audience not reachable by more familiar commercial or genre-driven means.10 The search for an audience is a matter that specifically concerned Konrad Wolf, and most particularly in Ich war neunzehn.11 As noted, the nineteen-year-old protagonist of Wolf’s film bears an obvious resemblance to the youthful heroes of the French New Wave, in particular to Jean-Pierre Léaud in Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, a film Wolf himself singled out for special praise, or to the protagonist of Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood. But the tactics deployed in DEFA could not be the same as those of the New German Cinema. In particular, there could not be the same revolt against the cinéma de qualité that had marked the French New Wave, and that had been partially recapitulated in NGC’s double rebellion against not only Opas Kino (Grandpa’s Cinema) of the 1950s but also that of the Oberhauseners (such as Alexander Kluge) as well. DEFA’s socialist allegiance to pedagogical humanist values, not to mention its principled mistrust of American pop culture (only allowed in via the medium of lighter entertainment genres such as the musical or the Indianerfilm), would not have permitted this.12 This meant that DEFA could not pass through the phase of ironic appropriation of American popular genres that characterized Breathless or Fassbinder’s American Soldier—at least not until the belated genre and audience breakthroughs of The Legend of Paul and Paula and Solo Sunny. (DEFA was thus, in a sense, a cinema that could never define itself through an Oedipal revolt, or could only do so too

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late; this corresponds to the absence of a ’68 movement in the GDR.) In this allegiance to traditions of quality, DEFA, and Wolf in particular, resemble less Fassbinder or Wenders than Schlöndorff, whose filming of Musil’s Young Törless—another narrative of problematized adolescent Bildung—preceded Ich war neunzehn by only two years.13 The criticisms levelled at Schlöndorff for having “all too uncritically worked within the patterns of dominant cinema, never finding a radical formal expression for his ostensibly progressive political content”14 may remind one of some critics’ ongoing discomfort with DEFA; just as Schlöndorff appears to sit between alternative and popular filmmaking, so DEFA is difficult to situate between art cinema and state service.15 What this meant was that, while remaining most often as unpopular with native audiences at home as was New German Cinema, DEFA could not articulate itself as a late-modern art cinema on the international market or festival system, as could NGC—or even, alternatively, enjoy the large West German audiences of GDR writers such as Heiner Müller and Christa Wolf. The contrast with other Eastern European cinemas, such as those of Poland, Hungary, or Czechoslovakia, which also followed the art-cinema strategy, is instructive as well. (Matters were not helped by DEFA’s conspicuous lack of dissident stance, which can be documented from the building of the Berlin Wall to Biermann’s expatriation in 1976, supported by Konrad Wolf.) One way to understand the peculiar positioning of DEFA between art film and “the tradition of quality” is in its relation to History, certainly one of the major signifiers or discourses of Germanness in film, as well as a master signifier within Marxism. Both the French New Wave and its successor NGC defined themselves in part through a break with a traditional mode of historical representation within film. Truffaut touched upon this when he sardonically referred to Aurenche and Bost as “the Viollet-Leduc of adaptation.”16 He was thereby disparaging the persistence of a certain historical romanticism inherited from the nineteenth-century, which legitimized its lack of faithfulness through appeals to a supposed spirit (Geist). This mode of historical film went hand in hand with a dominance of the scriptwriter or scenarist (another characteristic of the DEFA dispositif, since scripts were often most closely vetted by the authorities before approval), and an attempt to bring larger social conflicts onto the level of individual depth psychology (or “psychological realism”).17 In the terms familiar from German existentialism, the New Wave tended to replace Geschichte (history) with Geschichtlichkeit (historicity) as personal authenticity, crystallizing its plots not around reference to a social problem but to an individual experience of extremes. This went hand in hand with a looser structuring of narrative, one more open to improvisation than classical studio films had been; Wolf however never shared this penchant for improvisation.

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Similarly, as Elsaesser has noted elsewhere, “the New German Cinema came to making films about history late,”18 that is, in the 1970s. When it did so, moreover, it did so via a “taking back of neo-realism” and a turn to melodramatic forms. The turn to History was thus combined, in New German Cinema, with an intensified subjectivization of film and a heightened reflexivity on the medium as such (on genre, on subject position, and the relation of Germany to America, among other things). In DEFA, History in film had been there all along, right from the beginning. There was no ahistorical, escapist Opas Kino of the 1950s to overcome. Yet History had also been there in an officially canonized form, as, indeed, one of the major signifiers of Marxist Diamat, a master narrative or grand récit if ever there was one. Official filmic historiography took the form, in DEFA, of great-men biopics, such as Kurt Maetzig’s two heavily rhetorical Ernst Thälmann films of the 1950s. If we follow Hayden White’s idea of the essentially metaphorical nature of Marxist historiography,19 then these films are metaphorical in the extreme, loaded with representative figures, typologies, embodiments of historical forces. As in Soviet socialist realist film, this was expressed not only in terms of plot, but also in the “dominance of actors” over directors, resulting in a “repersonalization of history . . . not just on the level of plot or director but also on the level of physiognomy.”20 History with a capital H thus went hand in hand with a peculiarly Stalinist star system. History was the signifier of the regime’s legitimacy, and thus required an ever-renewed stance of official witnessing to the past. In the terms of the discussion of memory versus history of the 1990s, GDR History bore traces of fantasy, a cover-up of trauma and mourning.21 Given Konrad Wolf’s documented loyalty to his regime, his relation to this form of History could only be an oblique one: less a direct refusal than an inflection. He had already long since turned away from the monumental version of official history in films such as Lissy and Sterne (although he could also “relapse” into convention in Leute mit Flügeln). The new inflection of history took, in Ich war neunzehn, at least two forms. The first was an attention to the private, personal aspects of History, their sizing down to the specific and unheroic figure of Gregor Hecker. This is a tactic familiar from the Soviet Thaw films of the 1950s, such as Cranes are Flying or Ballad of a Soldier, films Wolf himself knew and admired, or from his own earlier work in the 1950s, and we have seen it already at work in Lissy and Sterne. Through the shift from public to private, History becomes history, a matter less of grand narrative than of aleatory anecdote.22 Already here, though, it must be said that Wolf may appear, relative to Kalatosov, somewhat timid. His Gregor is a much more subdued and muted character than the dramatic figure of Veronika in Cranes, or of Zbigniew Cybulski’s Maciek in Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds, who are

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Figure 9.1. A German girl (Jenny Gröllmann) seeks refuge in Gregor’s headquarters. ©DEFA-Stiftung/Werner Bergmann.

both visibly “hystericized” by their conflict between the sexual and the public. Gregor’s lack of any private life, that is, of any sexual nature, deprives Wolf of a major source of potential audience identification. His sexuality is, as it were, elided directly on the seam of national (non) identity, in the scenes where he confronts a female Soviet soldier who is obviously interested in him, and a young German woman trying to avoid being raped. (This scene took the place of an originally planned one where large numbers of German women sought protection from Red Army rapes, a deletion ordered by Anton Ackermann.) Even the combat film genre does not, as a rule, efface sexuality as much as Wolf does here, deploying it rather as a melodramatic foil to the horrors of war. Ich war neunzehn’s consistent bracketing of sexuality places it in the ambiguous vicinity of buddy-films or road films. As later with the heroes of early Wenders,23 it is precisely Gregor’s evasiveness, his lack of emotional engagement, that is most “characteristic” of him and will need further attention. Gregor’s emotional distance testifies to traces of trauma in his character at which the film can only indirectly hint (thereby constituting an “affective archive” kin to Rita’s in Der geteilte Himmel). His peculiar detachment is bound up not only with his reluctant German nationality but also with the displacement of Wolf’s own Jewishness and a resultant ambivalence toward nationality.

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Yet within the film itself, this character is stylized into what looks very much like Wolf’s answer to Method acting and Marlon Brando. If ever there was a cinematic case of nomen est omen, it would have been Jaecki Schwarz, whom his mother named after the Jackie Coogan of Chaplin’s The Kid. Like his namesake in the Chaplin film, Jaecki/Gregor is orphaned, here not only biologically but also by his own nation and language. Like Brando in On the Waterfront, Gregor is an “ostensibly inarticulate type,” with a “hesitant, potentially rebellious, neurotically intense expressiveness . . . indicating a brooding, restless emotionalism that [his] character[] struggle[s] to repress.”24 As with Brando and the ambiguous anti-heroes of the New Wave, this type of character is driven by essentially private concerns, by a search for inner authenticity. It is the secret of Wolf’s film, the root of its muted and complex tone, that he manages to keep this tendency balanced with the need for authentic witness to the foundations of the GDR in official History. The second aspect of Wolf’s revision of History is his use of generic conventions and cinephile references, most specifically to Westerns and to neorealism. The Western is a natural choice for a film dealing with history: as Jim Kitses once put it, rephrasing Bazin, “the Western is history,”25 and it need not be only an American one. It is precisely the metaphorical aspects of the Western, what were once called, in the days of Lévi-Straussian readings of film genre, its mythical aspects, that well suit it to depictions of History. Just as it has been argued that Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) was made at a period when there was a heightened need for patriotic consciousness, or that the anti-Westerns of the 1960s should be read in the light of Vietnam, we may also see Wolf’s reference to the Western as bound up with the need to re-found DEFA after the crisis it had undergone with the Eleventh Plenum. If the genre of the Western was bound up with the end of the Civil War and the “closing of the frontier” of the West,26 it is not hard to see how this could be transposed not only onto the end of the Second World War, but also onto a society that had closed its own frontiers with the building of the Berlin Wall. We should thus beware of automatically assuming references to the Western to be “subversive,” given their ongoing popularity even under socialism.27 Wolf’s relation to Italian neorealism is more complex. It has been a staple of DEFA criticism to this day that neorealism was the dominant mode of DEFA production and constituted an indirect form of resistance to the pedagogical demands of state-sponsored cinema.28 Important DEFA figures such as the scriptwriter Wolfgang Kohlhaase have testified to the importance of neorealism for their work. Yet it seems somehow too easy to leave matters at that, thereby taking DEFA at its own word. Neorealism cannot mean simply the pursuit of the concrete; this latter has, in any case, a complex and overdetermined history within Russian literature29 and then within socialist realism, where titles such as Story of

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a Real Man (Boris Polevoi) were meant to vouch for the authenticity of their testimony (see chapter 4 on Sonnensucher’s relation to certain topoi from Russian literature). Moreover, if neorealism, despite its very short life in postwar Italy, whence it came, did come to be dominant in European art cinema, and not only in DEFA, it could hardly avoid changing its function over such a long period of time. In DEFA, in particular, one could argue that neorealism became something of a stylistic marker for History in a neoMarxian sense. Pierre Sorlin has argued that the aesthetic categories of neorealism were less normative than “traces of a historical experience.”30 Yet they were also norms precisely for the representation of history. History was, to borrow again from Hayden White, the content of the form31 of neorealism. If the historical epic in Hollywood production was marked by stagey “excess”32 or, later, by illusionist verisimilitude,33 in DEFA, the austerity of neorealism meant the metonymic rejection of Nazism’s society of the spectacle and its metaphors of fascination, as well as a refusal of Stalinist metaphors, and thus the bare, unadorned authenticity of historical witness. There was also a compulsive aspect to this aversion, this aesthetic of refusal: almost an allergy or taboo, and certainly an element of trauma.34 All these subjective aspects were to be found in the literary movements contemporary with neorealism, especially the nouveau roman. Adorno summed this up in an elegiac passage from Negative Dialectics, “Reflektierte Menschen, und Künstler, haben nicht selten ein Gefühl des nicht ganz Dabeiseins, nicht Mitspielens aufgezeichnet, als ob sie gar nicht sie selber wären, sondern eine Art Zuschauer.”35 (Reflective people, and artists, have noted not seldom a feeling of not quite being there, of not playing along, as if they were not themselves, but a kind of onlooker.) Such an attitude is indeed characteristic of Gregor Hecker (as of many a protagonist in New German Cinema). Yet DEFA’s ongoing reference to neorealism could not be a straightforward one. In Italy itself, neorealism had been born out of the spirit of partisan resistance,36 and its deliberately anti-rhetorical, anti-psychological stance relied on the implicit assumption of a collective popular subject: the inhabitants of Rome in Rome Open City (Rossellini, 1945), the workers of Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948), the women rice pickers in Bitter Rice (De Santis, 1949). Neorealism was thus inseparable from a certain form of nationalism. Ulrich Gregor and Enno Patalas already noted in their 1965 film history that “after 1945 Italian cinema became the avantgarde of those European countries that had gone through the war.”37 This influence extended even as far as India, to Satyajit Ray. Given the fluidity of any formal definitions of neorealism, the reasons for this influence are ultimately political. Neorealism was used at once to articulate the historical memory of fascism and colonialism, and also to formulate an ongoing resistance in the present to the

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postwar superpowers, whether the Soviet Union (in Eastern Europe) or the United States, and Hollywood in particular (in the West). Both collective subject—the People—and the sense of popularly based resistance are lacking in Wolf. Moreover, the historicity of Ich war neunzehn, its reference back to an event that took place more than twenty years ago, is arguably in tension with neorealism’s focus on the absolute documentary present. (As Zavattini put it, “the present is the only source of art,” which meant a suspicion of montage, since it “creates historicity”; Ich war neunzehn’s opening sequence, with its interposed documentary flashbacks, did just this.38) Nonetheless, it is clear that Wolf leans heavily on what has been called the ethical stance or moral attitude of neorealism,—what one might describe as its authenticity-effect, its preference of ethos over pathos, its avoidance of rhetoric. (As one commentator on neorealism noted, the movement was “an ethics of aesthetics,” not any set of normative rules.)39 He does so in an attempt to define the peculiar genre of the antifascist film. As Elsaesser and Wedel have it, that genre and the Gegenwartsfilm were “the two genres of DEFA cinema on which its claim for the foundation of an alternative tradition”40 depended. As types, they may be traced back to Soviet cinema before them.41 This idea may be taken still further. The genre of antifascism was the film genre kat’exochen [par excellence] of the GDR as nation. The definition of this genre was inherently linked to the definition of a GDR “nationality” as such. We may thus expect to find some of the problems inhering in the latter construct to be at work in film form as well.

Genre Differentiation and GDR Nationality It is important, however, to specify the nature of this relation between genre and nation more carefully. We are moving into historians’ territory here, and it is imperative to avoid the sociological dilettantism of much cultural studies. Many discussions of “national identity,” for instance, tend to assume what they prove in advance. The main problem with “identity” is its naively causal, one-to-one idea of social function, and its unacknowledged hermeneutical circularity. Again and again we hear the predictable mantra about how some cultural product supposedly “functions” to construct national identity. But sociology has long since abandoned this sort of facile idea of function.42 “Identity” arguments are often tautological and nonfallibilist, proving an assumption few would dispute: almost anything under the sun could be said to reinforce national identity, but this is finally not saying very much, and often has a naively teleological ring about it, like a modern-day Dr. Pangloss happily arguing that God made noses to put glasses on them. (One instance from DEFA studies would

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be Joshua Feinstein’s Triumph of the Ordinary, which claims that “for better or for worse, DEFA pictures participated in the making of East Germany”—a claim that is simply tautological.43) Rick Altman has argued most persuasively for a connection between genre and nation, yet he leaves this connection somewhat undeveloped.44 We may flesh it out more using his own suggestion of a syntactic-semantic approach to film genre. (Altman’s third dimension, the pragmatic, could indeed be related to “culture,” in the sense of how generic texts are used or appropriated by viewers; to work this last dimension out properly would require historically reconstructing what GDR film audiences actually liked or disliked.) In other words, identifying genres merely on the basis of themes or motifs alone is inadequate, for one needs to payattention to the formal, syntactic, or structural elements as well.45 So, for instance, the genre of the Western is defined not only by a certain iconographic tradition of landscape or a set of stock-type personae, but also by certain narrative structures or templates, after the model of Propp’s or Lévi-Strauss’s structural analysis of myth.46 A further step may be taken by correlating this distinction to that made in sociology, specifically Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory, between social structure and semantics.47 Semantics, for Luhmann, means inherited and transmitted cultural forms of meaning; structure means the underlying form of differentiation characteristic of a specific social order. In the context of GDR historiography, this might be correlated with the discussion of the GDR in the light of modernization or differentiation theory. One of the most frequently voiced criticisms of the GDR was its inadequate degree of differentiation. In terms of the art system, this meant an inadequate differentiation of art itself from its direct dependence on the political system, resulting, in many cases, in aesthetic tameness and blandness: didacticism and half-hearted dabblings in modernism. In terms of film, this meant a lack either of art-cinema autonomy or of a viable (popular) genre cinema. Nonetheless, the state could not deny film any autonomy at all, and directors such as Wolf were engaged in a constant process of navigating around this. In other words: Konrad Wolf’s lifelong attempt to define a genre of the antifascist film did not just nebulously build toward some presumed monolith of “national identity” or, as has been far too often said, Anderson’s “imagined community.” (Wolf himself was already aware, earlier on in the 1960s, that there was no one filmic public for DEFA films;48 how could there have been one “identity” or “imagined community” . . .?) Rather, it had to be tied to an attempt to differentiate the system of film production out from its direct linkage to political codes. The reiiance on genre in Wolf’s film is linked to an impulse to reach his audience emotionally and not merely through an official political message. This may

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well seem paradoxical in view of Wolf’s own explicit statements of political loyalty and high moral purpose. Yet genre definition must be correlated with a certain autonomy of film production (in DEFA’s case, linked historically to the introduction of the Künstlerische Arbeitsgruppen or KAGs in 1959).49 With this, we have rid our argument of all traces of the old-Marxian Abbild- or reflection-theory, which still persisted in references to “ideology.” Once the film system has differentiated itself out, there can be no one-to-one correspondence between aspects of the film system and those of the political system: Vom Kunstsystem her gesehen entsprechen die so entstandenen internen Differenzierungen in keiner Weise mehr den Differenzierungen, die sich in der innnergesellschaftlichen Umwelt dieses Systems finden, also nicht der Differenzierung von staatlichem Verwaltungsapparat und politischen Parteien und erst recht nicht dem Parteienspektrum selbst . . . und schon gar nicht den Grossdifferenzierungen von Religion, Politik, Wirtschaft, Erziehung usw. Jede Teil-für-Teil-Entsprechung zwischen System und Umwelt . . . ist unterbrochen.50 [Viewed from the art system, the internal differentiations thus arising do not correspond in any way to those in the inner-social environment of this system, thus not to those of state administration and political parties and above all not to the spectrum of parties itself . . . and not with the larger differentiations of religion, politics, economics, education and so on. Any one-to-one correspondence between system and environment . . . is interrupted.]

It is, however, precisely this one-to-one correspondence that was decreed by the socialist realist doctrine of Parteilichkeit (Russian partii’nost’ or party-mindedness), which—although it was loosened over the course of the GDR’s history—did not fully disappear until the last years of the country’s existence. Hence Wolf, and DEFA with him, were caught in the Sisyphean project of attempting both to work out genres and to remain subservient to Parteilichkeit; DEFA’s deployment of neorealism thus bears traces of what one must term a “compromise formation” in terms both psychoanalytical and sociological. Rick Altman has noted how, during the Second World War, the interference of the American Office of War Information (OWI) failed to produce stable new genres by government mandate alone: “Whereas textual analysis suggests that wartime generic revisionism failed because of its lack of syntactic substance, discursive analysis of the same phenomena suggests that the new genres were from the beginning mandated by the government itself, and disappeared as soon as the government no longer had any reason to encourage their use . . .”51

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Given that the socialist model of the planned economy derived from Lenin’s observation of the German war economy in the First World War,52 it would not be surprising if GDR intervention in its own state film industry had a similar outcome, in terms of film genre formation. (Maya Turovskaya remarked on how “the genre structure” of Soviet Cold War spy thrillers “was considerably weakened” by the necessity of Socialist Realist character typologies and stock plots.)53 In terms of DEFA film production, this would be tied to the fate of the aforementioned film production units (KAGs), which had attained some limited autonomy during the New Economic System (NÖS) of the early 1960s, only to have this revoked by the Eleventh Plenum.54 Film genre, in the way it is here defined, becomes, instead of a mere tool to engineer supposed “identity,” a form of feedback loop between the film system and the paradoxical (socialist) public sphere (Öffentlichkeit). Genre, on the one hand, entails a structural coupling (thus a hetero-reference) with the public and its demand, but it does this not only through direct appeals to the public (in a capitalist economy, through tie-ins and other commercial devices), but also through self-reference; that is, through reference to the history of the film system, its previous productions, and the audience expectations they have generated.55 Altman has noted how generic narratives tend to reinforce and reproduce audience expectations with formulaic patterns:56 in systems-theoretical terms, this would be a “re-entry” of the system’s distinctions back into itself. The problem of Wolf, and of DEFA production in general is that of how to define genre without this feedback loop. In the GDR, the function occupied by the market in the West had to be held, somewhat uneasily, by publicly organized discussions, by a “controlled debate,”57 or by research institutions such as the Leipzig Zentralinstitut für Jugendforschung (founded in 1966, and employing Lothar Bisky among others). GDR viewers could indeed still vote with their feet, as we see in the comparative lack of success of Mama, ich lebe, which prodded Wolf into the experiment of Solo Sunny. We can see how concerned Wolf was with his audiences in the research he did on audience response to his film; we may tie this in with the GDR state’s pedagogical anxiety about youth loyalty, and its ultimately futile attempt to combat the ongoing attractions of Western pop culture to its younger citizens. Yet in the end the antifascist genre hung in something of a systemic and production vacuum. If GDR economists could not abandon the idea of value (Wert), they had to engage in the Sisyphean effort of trying to measure it “without the mediation of the market.”58 As an “Eigenvalue” (Heinz von Foerster’s term) within the film system,59 the antifascist genre, in part a didactic tool of the state, thus becomes a form or genre that is permanently in search of a public.

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Opening and Conclusion of the Film These internal tensions are played out in exemplary fashion within the film Ich war neunzehn itself, most specifically the first few minutes, which Elsaesser and Wedel termed “an allegorical prologue” (18), without however specifying what it is an allegory of. We may see this allegory as one of the conditions of film production that have just been sketched in, specifically of genre formation.60 (Mama, Ich Lebe, concerned with similarly autobiographical material, will also begin with a complex montage of sound, documentary photograph, voiceover, and landscape.) The opening, in accordance with a long German tradition dating back to M, gives the soundtrack priority over the visual, since we hear the voices of the men in the truck several seconds before we see the latter. We do not know at first who is in the truck, which backs into an empty scene amid a clear sense of confusion and disorder. Nor can we at first identify the voice from the microphone as belonging to Gregor. There is no establishing shot showing us the interior of the loudspeaker truck, nor the latter’s relation to the landscape. It is not until the end of the sequence that a pan left identifies the hand we first see on the record player as Sasha’s.61 In place of the usual spatial coordinates of continuity editing, we have implied metaphors: the shot of the hanged deserter lasts eight seconds, as does the first shot of Gregor’s face, establishing a proportional relation meant to show the potential identity of both “deserters.” Both landscape shots last about twenty seconds. The confrontation of silent Nature and technologized Voice will be one of the leitmotifs of the entire film. What structures this opening sequence is its absences, and this will hold true for the film as a whole. First, it is typical of the film that we do not see the absent German soldiers to whom Gregor is speaking. In fact, we never once see their reaction to his speeches. Second, this sequence is clearly structured by a tension between word and image, a tension that determines the positions of subject and spectator. The same split returns at the film’s close, giving it a virtual framing function around the entire film. For at the very end we have again a liminal situation, a confrontation of technologically mediated voice and silent nature across the natural boundary of a river. As Hans-Jürgen Wulff has noted, “der Raum, in dem das Geschehen angesiedelt ist, ist von vornherein eine metaphorische Konstruktion” (the space in which the events are situated is from the beginning a metaphorical construction).62 That is, the new foundational time of the beginning of the GDR is spatialized, translated into a “rite of passage” from Nazism to socialism. (Theorists of performativity would here think of Victor Turner.) As at the film’s beginning, we do not see the viewpoint of the Germans, and the camera stays on Gregor’s side of the river. Wulff notes the anti-dramatic pace of the scene, the neorealist inclusion of a cat who has strayed into the human drama,

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the details of eating (141). Even the death of Gregor’s comrade seems accidental. Yet this death provokes a sudden outburst from Gregor, who grabs the microphone in a passionate and personal denunciation of the SS. As he does so, the camera suddenly moves, opening up the space, while Gregor’s voice is also given a broader echoing resonance, as if his speech had suddenly burst the bounds of the film’s diegesis and were directed straight at the audience. At the end, however, the echo is removed, and Gregor’s voice is muted and toned down to the quieter dimensions of privacy again. It is as if the public persona had been abruptly stripped away to leave nothing but the dimension of autobiographical confession. Gregor’s call westward over the military border remains unanswered and unrecognized, like Bruno’s Tarzan-like yell from West to East at the end of Wenders’s Kings of the Road (1976). In this undermining of appellative speech, Wolf comments on the very center of the antifascist genre, on its implied difficulty. For if there is anything that is typical of the antifascist genre, it is didactic speech-making, directed at the audience as much as the protagonists: this is true of Murderers Are among us, as of Rotation.63 (Didactic speechifying is also frequently inserted into other DEFA genres, as in the close of Berlin—Ecke Schönhauser.) Here Wolf’s film gives a specific historical note to Bazin’s neorealist idea that film should be a “dramaturgy of nature.”64 For the borderlands shown in this film, most especially in its opening and closing moments, have strong historical resonance. French historians have shown how the notion of natural borders (frontières naturelles) developed simultaneously with bourgeois nationalism:65 the “imagined community” had also to ground its exclusions in imaginations of nature. Ich war neunzehn transposes the fluidity of the GDR’s political and media borders onto the geographical openness of the German East. The very opening scene, with its gruesome shot of the hanged deserter, is one with historical resonance. In 1790 Goethe, not normally a friend of revolutions, painted an image of a Freiheitsbaum (freedom tree) on the Mosel, on the border of France. The tree wore a Phrygian cap and the inscription: “Passans [sic] Cette terre est libre” (Passers-by This earth is free). Wolf’s hanged deserter proclaims the exact opposite. His “dramaturgy of nature” might even be correlated, in the course of the film, to a GDR variant of the road film, a late descendant of the Western that was being redefined (in Easy Rider [Hopper, 1969]) around the time Ich war neunzehn was being made. If early examples of the road movie, such as It Happened One Night (Capra, 1934) or Sullivan’s Travels (Sturges, 1941) were successful in their pursuit of the genuinely popular, then later, postwar examples are defined by “the absence of the people,” and must therefore “travel between a nostalgia for a lost people and a hope for a future one.”66 Gregor Hecker’s ambivalent relation to Germany and the Germans could hardly be better characterized.67

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A blend of mourning and muted hope characterizes the film just as it does Der geteilte Himmel. Unlike the former film, Ich war neunzehn has no non-diegetic music at all (except in the quoted documentary about Sachsenhausen). The diegetic musics it uses are however all significant, from the sentimental popular music Gregor plays over his loudspeaker to the Bach record Sasha puts on the gramophone at the Sachsenhausen architect’s home (which might remind some viewers of Celan’s famous link of fugue and fascism in “Todesfuge”). Repeatedly, the camera lingers on figures being left behind as Gregor’s truck departs, whether the young German girl from Bernau, or later, the new mayor, Kurt, who is left with his suitcase, as the record player booms out the voice of Ernst Busch singing “The Jarama Valley” to commemorate comrades lost in a Spanish Civil War battle of February 1937. After Gregor is led into the room of an older woman who has committed suicide in Bernau just before the Red Army’s arrival, the camera moves around the room, showing in detail all the sentimental mementos of the woman’s life, from her wedding photos to a keepsake ebroidered Mutter. When a young Soviet soldier is senselessly killed toward the film’s end by German soldiers who have temporarily broken out of the enclosure of Berlin, slow motion draws out his expression of disbelief and then horror at his bleeding wounds before he falls and dies. In general, the optical style of the film is much more restrained and sober than that of Der geteilte Himmel, in accordance with its neorealist emphasis on ethos over pathos; camera movement is generally restrained, with a few exceptions, such as a nearly 360 degree pan around the room where Gregor is sewing his shirt while listening to shortwave radio with a Russian woman colleague, or the abrupt swish pans over the officers’ faces in Spandau as they hysterically deny the reality of their own defeat to Gregor and Vadim. More typical is the long-held shot of the gate to Sachsenhausen while Gregor’s voiceover comments; “We arrived too late” (to liberate the inmates). Throughout, the tone of Gregor’s voice is understated and neutral, rarely betraying emotion until the final sequence. Ich war neunzehn reached its public more effectively than had Der geteilte Himmel, and makes a much less divided or divisive impression; it has become a canonical film within DEFA, and arguably within postwar German film as a whole. It is thus less marked by the oblique or latent quality affecting others of Wolf’s films, such as Sonnensucher (due to its censoring) or Der nackte Mann auf dem Sportplatz (due to an unusually indirect artistic message). Yet this very success of the film is not due to its “realism,” for Wolf was forced (probably by Anton Ackermann) to eliminate references to the real plunderings and mass rapes committed by the Red Army at the war’s end. Rather, the film’s success lay precisely in Rick Altman’s “generification” (a term already referred to in the context of Sonnensucher), namely in creating an antifascist generic myth comparable to that of the heroic Western.

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A Split Subjectivity The film’s central tension of word and image may be interpreted with reference to the aforementioned opposition of structure to semantics, which should now be further specified. Structure means not just the old Proppian or Lévi-Straussian “types of narrative”—that is, the quest narrative or revenge narrative—which are so general as to have little explanatory power.68 It refers rather to who is narrating, and how, or from where: what was once, in the 1970s, called “subject position,” and is now related to spectatorship. In a by now canonical analysis of Fassbinder’s “historical subject,” Elsaesser—once again—has described how, in New German Cinema, anxiety “almost graphically marks the place, the position where the ego, the self, ought to be, or used to be, but isn’t. It is the empty center, the intermittent, negative reference point that primarily affects the protagonists, but which in another movement is also the empty place of the spectator.”69 So too in Fassbinder, there is a “split” between seeing and being seen, voyeurism and exhibitionism (544). This split, however, rather than being frozen in the potential ahistoricity of (Metzian) psychoanalytic disavowal, is historicized by Elsaesser as referring to the exhibitionism of Nazi visual culture, to its pleasurably spectacular nature. Elsaesser even asserts that “the personality split” characteristic of Fassbinder’s protagonists “is metonymically related to economics” (544), that is, to a certain type of (masochistic) petit-bourgeois-class character. Here, in Wolf, there is a different kind of emptiness or split. The film is, in a sense, trying to construct its own status as genre, to locate both a performative role for its protagonist and an audience or ideal spectator.70 Gregor Hecker’s futile address urging the Germans to surrender to the Red Army is emblematic of a “national cinema” that was born not, like Italian neorealism, from the spirit of partisan resistance but from an absence of activity, from an agency always imposed from elsewhere. The split we find here is, in a sense, an older, more traditional one, namely that of word and image, familiar from the unreliable male narrators of film noir with their traumatic flashbacks, and from a larger tendency of German cinema to control images with words, a tendency only accented by the GDR’s text-centered media landscape.71 The spoken word here, that of the official Gregor at the microphone, and of his subsequent comments over documentary footage—is tied to his pedagogical, didactic (and perhaps metaphorical?) function as the “Voice of God”—as voiceovers have traditionally been called in the documentary tradition. The voice is here multiply overdetermined: it is at once the voice of “History itself,”72 the pedagogical instance of the State (in Bhabha’s sense), and yet it is still also the inheritor of the old Nazi radio politics of the public sphere.73 The image, however, of the silent landscape and the unresponding Germans, will not obey or “resonate.”

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Figure 9.2. Gregor (Jaecki Schwarz) traveling through his strange German Heimat. ©DEFA-Stiftung/Werner Bergmann.

If Fassbinder’s actors stage or perform their post-fascist exhibitionism and voyeurism within a regime of the image, the performativity of Wolf ’s Gregor, his mimic attempts at conformity, are still bound up with the word and with music, as we see in his discomfort at speaking German, or his reassuring himself at one point through singing “Katyusha,” a well-known Red Army war song, as his truck travels through the countryside. The song here functions almost as a lullaby, albeit one in an adopted mother tongue. The poignancy of this scene is only heightened if one considers the words of the song, which is about a soldier’s loved one at home in the Motherland, and the imperative to save the latter (Pust’ on zemlyu berezhyot rodnuyu, “may he defend his native land,” as the last stanza says). The irony of this is that Gregor has no such Motherland nor, one suspects, a “simple maid” Katyusha to remember there (vspomnit devushku prostuyu). This is why this scene takes the place of the visual flashbacks to peacetime and love that are a normal feature of war films, including Soviet ones (such as Ballad of a Soldier or Cranes Are Flying). Relative to Fassbinder’s exhibitionists, Wolf’s hero in a sense does not even get to the specular mirror stage. Yet the “acoustic mirror” of voice that takes the latter’s place does not function in quite the same way. In particular, this centrality of voice is exposed, later on in the film, during

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the scene of Gregor’s drunkenness at Sans Souci, as dependent on his mother. In this scene, Gregor’s mother chides him for his hasty maturity and manhood, implying that the latter is based on a bluff. Here Wolf’s film may be seen as kin to the postwar films of weakened male subjectivity that Kaja Silverman analyzed in Male Subjectivity at the Margins; alternately, we may recall a passage from The Acoustic Mirror where Silverman claims that in the mother’s voice is saved up “all that is unassimilable to the paternal function.”74 In Gregor Hecker’s case, this means his fear of inadequacy for the position of good soldier and Stoic strong man, his inability to perform not only manhood but also Russianness, as it were. Nationality is thus implicitly given gender and parental coding here: if the father may implicitly become Russian through political allegiance, the mother and her Tongue remain more archaic, more bound to Nature and the unconscious. When Gregor toasts his mother at Sans Souci, he is thus unconsciously toasting Germany.75 Thus too the opening scene may be understood as an address to the mother, to the yet Absent Nation—a form of speech that has historical roots in Germany (cf. J. G. Fichte’s Reden an die deutsche Nation of 1808). The voice of Gregor is insistently thematized as an index of authenticity, and it is not so much what he says (his langage) as his tone and grain of voice and his langue (maternelle) that are meant to be true. As he says near the beginning, after putting down the loudspeaker: “Solche Sätze sage ich jeden Tag” (I say such sentences every day), that is, such sentences of argument and plea to the absent German people; it is implied that these Sätze are ineffective, perhaps even not fully credible. Part of the authenticity effect of Ich war neunzehn lies in the contrast of the public and private voices of Gregor, and in this Wolf’s film participates in a central tendency of GDR art, one that has been most associated with Christa Wolf and her pursuit of “authentic voice.” Could we say that the division of Gregor’s voice into public and private reflects the division of nation and state previously diagnosed as the root of Ich war neunzehn’s generic instability? It might be more accurate instead to see the very role of the voice as such as a signature of the instability of genre.76 On the seam where specularity cannot close, where image and sound cannot meld, Gregor’s voice(-over) falls out77 as a remnant, a confession of disunity and nonidentity. That Konrad Wolf then stylized this use of the voice-over into the subjectivity of an art film—in this, also, kin to Christa Wolf—does not diminish its effectiveness. Our analysis has thus perhaps ended up with a new definition of authenticity, one bound not to biographical reference but rather to system and function, and to the latter’s instability.78 Rather than serving to prop up some supposed “national identity,” the film is a staging of Gregor’s, and the GDR’s, non-identity with themselves.

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Postcolonial Aspects It is possible to interpret the arguably ambivalent (or split) subject of DEFA genre that has been worked out here in terms of postcolonial theory. Gregor would be then read as an instance of “sly civility” or mimicry of his Russian mentors, the film’s performative aspects as an attempt to escape the confines of the pedagogical,79 the antifascist genre would be a postcolonial “hybrid” (of Western, noir, and reflexive art film), and so on. This would not be wrong, but it is not the whole story. To be sure, one would need to proceed with extreme caution here, so as not to end up participating in a general re-victimization of Germans that has been, recently, proceeding apace (as the discussion of Winfried Sebald’s last, posthumous work shows). But there are deeper problems even than this obvious political one. A great deal of postcolonial theory derives, whether directly or indirectly, from precisely that semi-psychoanalytical (and partly Foucauldian) 1970s theory against which film studies has recently, tant bien que mal, been reacting. To return film studies to postcolonialism’s now slightly predictable rehearsals of hybridity, otherness, borders, textuality, fantasy, and the like would be to reenter an old, familiar hermeneutical circle of projective interpretation (very like the circle of “identity” earlier criticized, in fact). Barbara Klinger has shown in some detail how the old ideology-critical readings of melodrama profiled their supposed subversions and contradictions against the “closure” of the classic textual system.80 Yet many postcolonial readings persist in just this same enterprise, with the difference that standard nineteenth-century historiography has taken over the straw-man place once held by the “classic Hollywood text.”—If we are to take the historicity of spectatorship seriously, this means not yielding to the urge to reduce history to rhetorical figurality. Indulging in a cultural theorist’s contempt for the mere facts of the historian, in the name of aesthetically blurred “difference” or “representation,”81 will not help matters. It is undeniable that there is “mimicry” here in this film (Gregor’s, of Russianness), along with “hybridity,” “borders,” and so on. Yet as Arif Dirlik has drily noted, “hybridity and in-betweenness are not very revealing concepts.” The reason they are not is that they remain on a semantic level and are thus merely descriptive. (Dirlik again: “The problem here may be the problem of all historicism without a sense of structure.”82) Some recent scholarship (notably the work of Neil Lazarus) has suggested that postcolonial theory might do well to reconsider the political (or even Marxian) contexts from which Derridean textuality so quickly removed it; this would certainly be a helpful approach for DEFA.83 Thus rather than subsuming the preceding discussion under the institutional conformity of a prevalent discours de l’Université, it may be more fruitful to make a few specific suggestions in closing.

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The first is that DEFA studies could profit from new directions in the study of Soviet history. In a recent book on nations and nationalism in the Soviet Union, Terry Martin has shown how the Soviet approach to individual nations within the multinational empire “aimed at disarming nationalism by granting what were called the ‘forms’ of nationhood” without the latter’s substance.84 (It is almost as if the Soviet authorities had cannily read postcolonial theory avant la lettre, allowing their subjects all the “narrations,” “fictions” and “cultural texts” they wanted—just no state sovereignty.) Martin is admittedly writing of former Soviet republics such as Belarus, Georgia, and Ukraine, and not of Eastern Europe or Mitteleuropa. Yet given the willingness on the part of Soviet authorities after 1945 to support the founding of DEFA, one wonders about the special status of the GDR, of the degree and type of nationhood that was permitted it, in contradistinction to potentially more dangerous forms of nationalism such as that of Poland. Germany and German culture always had a particular and quasi-sacrosanct status within Russia (as none other than Lenin would testify);85 we need accordingly to think more about what “Germanness” could have meant for a Russian (or Soviet) observer—especially a cultural bureaucrat concerned with raison d’état.86 The second is that it makes no sense to avoid questions of the state in analyzing even a historical context that bears similarity to that of colonialism. Narration alone has never made a nation. Luhmann has put it with his usual trenchancy, “Nationale Identität ist nicht gegeben, sie muss definiert, gewonnen und gesichert werden.[. . .] Die Nation kann daher nur eine imaginierte Gemeinschaft sein, und eben deshalb bedarf sie der Konkretisierung durch einen Staat.”87 (National identity is not given, it must be defined, won and secured [. . .] The nation can thus only be an imagined community, and therefore needs concretization through the state.) This is a matter made particularly acute in the case of the GDR, whose peculiar “identity” as nation was defined precisely by an unresolved and unresolvable contradiction between nation and state. This contradiction itself has deep roots in the history of Marxist theory, going back to Marx and Engels’s subordination of national particularity to the the cosmopolitan ratio of world revolution, which was then reiterated by Lenin and Stalin,88 and then again by official GDR doctrine. On the one hand, this doctrine emphatically rejected any idea of nation as merely culturally determined, as “Schicksalsgemeinschaft” (“community of fate,” in Otto Bauer’s Austro-Marxist variant, rejected by Lenin and Stalin) or “Zusammengehörigkeitsgefühl” (“feeling of belonging together,” Willy Brandt in 1970). “Die DDR-Theoretiker sahen die Existenz des sozialistischen Staats immer als ganz wesentliches Merkmal der sozialistischen Nationen an” (The GDR theoreticians always saw the existence of a socialist state as a quite essential feature of socialist nations).89 This emphasis on the state

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was moreover only accentuated over time, especially after the Wall, when the new constitution of 1968 (the year of Ich war neunzehn’s release) declared the GDR to be a “sozialistischer Staat deutscher Nation,” thereby requiring the subsequent development of a “sozialistisches Staatsbewusstsein” (socialist state consciousness)(sic!). In fact, GDR theorists reversed Lenin’s original idea that the realization of socialism would result in the withering away of the state, claiming instead—and, not by chance, shortly after the Wall was built—that “mit der Entstehung des sozialistischen Staates und seiner Entfaltung entsteht und entfaltet sich die sozialistische Nation” (Karl Polak; “with the genesis of the socialist state and its unfolding there arises and unfolds a socialist nation.”)90 It was as if the GDR officials were taking Brecht’s famous ironic injunction that the state “elect itself another people” seriously. To make matters worse, the concept of the nation could not be abandoned either. As Fred Oelssner put it in 1954, “wenn wir sagen, dass die deutsche Nation nicht mehr existiert, nehmen wir der Nationalen Front des demokratischen Deutschland den Boden, aus dem sie erwachsen ist” (if we say the German nation no longer exists, then we pull out the ground from under the National Front of democratic Germany that the latter was grown on).91 This position was reaffirmed by the “Nationales Dokument” of the National Front published a year after the Wall in 1962.92 The GDR thus could not close its boundaries as a state without abandoning its claim to be the representative of the German nation. Yet at the same time, the GDR state both sought—against the more flexible position of its Soviet superiors—to define itself against the BRD and also to be recognized by the latter as a state! The result was that “die DDRVerfassung hielt sich in einem territorialen Schwebezustand.”93 (the GDR constitution kept itself in a territorial limbo). The “German question,” the question of the nation, was deliberately kept open (at least during the Ulbricht period) both by the Soviets, who hoped thereby to gain bargaining points with the West, and by GDR authority itself, in order to claim its representative status for all of Germany. The state of emergency that Konrad Wolf’s film sets at the historical moment of 1945, when all was still open, and which would then recur in 1989–90, when “die Geschichte” was once again “offen,”94 was thus in a sense a permanent characteristic of the GDR, and helps to explain Heiner Müller’s ironic comment after 1989 that “the GDR never existed.” The “tension between a social-political claim made beyond the state on the one hand, and the actually practiced form of traditional national statehood on the other”95 could not be resolved into any hermeneutical relation of part to whole, and thus had to be temporalized, resolved only in an unspecified revolutionary future. The nation was viewed as being “im Übergangsstadium”96 (in a state of transition), presumably on the way to some higher synthesis.

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Ironically enough, Luhmann’s theory, with its central postulate of differentiation against which so many modernization theorists have found the GDR wanting, shared this view of the nation with its Marxist counterpart. For the age of capitalist globalization, the nation must of necessity be as obsolete, or at least as “transitional,” as it was for the theory of global revolution, “Offenbar gehört die Idee der Nation also zu jenem Bündel transitorischer Semantiken, die eine Übergangszeit faszinieren konnten, ohne zu verraten, auf welches Gesellschaftssystem sie bezogen waren.”97 (Apparently the idea of the nation belongs to that bundle of transitory semantics that could fascinate a time of transition, without letting on what social system they belonged to.) Yet this “Übergangszeit” is far from over, as has become evident in the wave of re-nationalization since the 1990s, followed by the collapse of the post-1945 international order. Perhaps it is because we are ourselves still in such a “transitional period” that the “transitory semantics” of Wolf’s film, whether of nation or of genre, can still continue to fascinate. As Wolf reminds us, the narrative and history with which this film engages are not yet complete.

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10: Goya (1971)

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HARD WAY TO KNOWLEDGE (1971) is yet another rarity in Wolf ’s oeuvre: a historical epic, set in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Plans for making it date back to the 1960s, but the production was delayed for a number of reasons, among them the inability to find the Western stars originally envisioned for an international coproduction. Instead of Western stars, Donatas Banionis (best known today for his role in Tarkovsky’s 1972 Solaris) was cast as Goya, and Olivera Katarina (who had made her name in Aleksandar Petrović’s I Even Met Happy Gypsies, 1967) as Alba. For a director usually associated with DEFA’s brand of understated neorealism, the kind of swashbuckling grandeur typical of the historical epic (or biopic) must have been an uncomfortable fit, and this oddity is palpable in aspects of the film (such as the slightly implausible love affair with the Duchess of Alba, or Goya’s weird, almost horror-movie fits of laughter near the end of the film, presumably meant to show his Falstaff-like vitality and earthiness; the melodramatic depictions of his fears of madness are also far from Wolf ’s normal palette). The film narrates Goya’s transformation from a successful bourgeois portrait painter of the Spanish aristocracy to an engaged, sympathetic observer of political life, of Spain’s war against Napoleon. It is thus a variant on the “conversion narrative” so often used by Wolf in other films (Die Genesung, Lissy, Sterne, Professor Mamlock, Der geteilte Himmel). Goya has a love affair with the Duchess of Alba, sees the persecution of the singer Maria Rosario by the Inquisition, and rides through the countryside in a Quixote-like journey, discovering the life of the people and discoursing on art with his friend Esteve. At the end, he flees over the border to France, escaping from the Inquisitor, and we are treated to an audiovisual montage of Goya’s works, combined with gunfire, calls for revolution, and flamenco. OYA OR THE

Breaking the Frame of Painting It is a tautology to note that films about painting tend to be themselves painterly—thus iconodule or iconophile—pointing beyond the medium of film to that of the canvas. Analysis of such films can link up with a tradition in film criticism of legitimizing the filmic medium through its painterly past. The reference of film to painting had a brief

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boom as early as the 1980s, when filmmakers such as Godard (Passion, 1982) or Leos Carax (Mauvais Sang, 1986) alluded to painting, and it continues to flourish to this day: Angela Dalle Vacche has published or edited several volumes on painting and cinema, and David Bordwell appears ever more in the guise of an art historian interested in mise en scène, poetics, and stylistics.1 In Erwin Panofsky’s art historical terms, this tendency in film studies may translate into a move back to iconography instead of iconology. Iconography means attention to questions of style and content, as opposed to iconology’s interdisciplinary interest in sociology, culture, or the ideology of form. With the recent iconographic turn in Bordwell’s work, art history of a particular type is put forward as paradigm to replace the supposedly discredited speculations of Grand Film Theory. Formalism and stylistics are seen as a way to balance to the latter’s inflated interpretative budget with an empirically provable hard currency. Certainly one cannot argue with the need to ground interpretation in close formal readings. Yet one may be wary of the desire for institutional respectability and methodological security that the art-historical linkage might foster: a linking of film back to Wölfflin and Panofsky might easily encourage a return to a canon of Old Masters, thus serving a covertly anti-modernist agenda. As Leo Steinberg pointed out nearly fifty years ago, the “solid standards . . . set by the critic’s long-practiced taste” can serve to exclude works that do not satisfy familiar and established criteria.2 Within art history and criticism itself, Steinberg’s article marked the beginning of a strong critique of formalism and Panofskian iconography. Film studies’ interdisciplinary link to art history should not become one to art history’s past rather than its present.3 As what follows will show, Goya would not be well served by an iconographic isolation of style or art-historical surface from its other aspects. From a purely stylistic point of view, the film may seem eclectic and inconsistent. Yet this lack of closure in stylistic or generic terms4 might also suggest that we look beyond its iconographic surface to iconological questions of its social function. Although Goya was once called a “socialist Gesamtkunstwerk” by Heinz Blumenrath and Klaus Scherpe,5 in what follows I will instead stress its internal tensions, and how style and poetics are inseparable from a contradictory institutionalizing of authorship. Bordwell’s current preoccupation with style can thus be complemented by his earlier accent on the “mode of film practice” as “context,” requiring that we “connect the history of film style to the history of the motion-picture industry,”6 in this case DEFA history. For as the film’s final sequence shows, Konrad Wolf’s view of Goya within art history is rather iconoclastic than iconodule, for specific historical and political reasons. The breaking from iconic confines at the film’s end will be seen as a late form of the modern sublime.

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Genre On one level—that of iconography, theme, and genre—Wolf’s film appears to be a clear instance of the genre of the artist biopic, a historical costume drama. Here, though, we must already proceed with care, because this genre did not mean the same thing in the GDR as in the West. For one thing, historical drama would be associated with Kurt Maetzig’s monumental Stalinist Ernst Thälmann biopics of 1954/1955. It is, for the Goya film, surely significant that Wolf was the assistant director on these films: one wonders whether his later discomfort with the historical genre might have its origins in this experience. There was also a larger turn to historical fiction in both East and West Germany in the 1970s that affected literature as well, from Peter Schneider to Christa Wolf, whose Kein Ort. Nirgends (No Place on Earth, 1979), ostensibly about Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811), is also about restrictions on freedom in the present. Konrad Wolf’s parable of the solitary artist’s conflict with the Spanish Inquisition has thus been seen as an allegory of censorship in the GDR. In addition, however, and ironically enough, this turn to history, in Goya, also took a form dear to Hollywood, for none other than Darryl Zanuck was fond of using great-men biopics for the purpose of “re-creating his own success story” and “selling his own personality.”7 Thus many of the other clichés of the artist biopic, such as the artist’s struggle with poverty, his faithful friend who supports him during his lonely struggles, and his appeal to the vox populi against State and Academy, or the parallel narratives of artistic breakthrough and love-life, are to be found here too. Wolf’s own statements on the film show that he quite deliberately referred to Hollywood genre formula in the first part of the film in an attempt to secure viewer identification.8 Finally, there is the somewhat Brechtian or at least didactic historical novel by Lion Feuchtwanger on which the film was based, and which was itself an allegorical response to the McCarthyist “inquisition” around 1950. (We will need to return to the influence of Feuchtwanger later on.) Thus, as so often with DEFA films, we are dealing here with a film that is located between “Hollywood and Bergman,” in Lothar Bisky’s phrase.9 Little wonder that Goya shows multiple ruptures of style and genre. In addition to these popular generic references, however, Goya may well have been a socialist response to Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, which although completed in 1966 was not finally released until several years later. Wolf’s biographers, Jacobsen and Aurich, have documented that Goya, from its first planning stages in 1964, was intended for an international market, the same one that Andrei Rublev took by storm, to the consternation of Soviet authorities. This is borne out by the archives, which show careful attention on the part of the film’s producers to

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potential tie-ins to the film, including concerts by singer Paco Ibañez, record releases, and reproductions of Goya’s works.10 Both foreign contemporary reviewers and Wolf’s DEFA colleagues evoked Rublev in discussions of the film.11 Although Rublev could not be officially purchased by the GDR for public exhibition, the film could have been seen at internal showings for DEFA personnel (called “Informationsschau neuer sowjetischer Film”).12 However, the latter could not openly acknowledge the relation to Rublev in official publications. In a contemporary discussion between Herlinghaus and Wolf, many other recent Soviet films from the late 1960s are mentioned, but none by Tarkovsky or Paradzhanov.13 Like Andrei Rublev, Goya shows an artist’s development from disengagement to concern with the people and a committed message.14 Wolf shared a number of actors with Tarkovsky, such as Margareta Terekhova and Donatas Banionis. Goya was also an East Bloc coproduction shared between the GDR, Bulgaria, the Soviet Union, Poland, and Yugoslavia. There are specific similarities one may find between scenes: the mise en scène of Goya’s painting of San Antonio de Florida, with its assistants and scaffolding around a central cupola, clearly recalls that of Rublev’s Last Judgment. More importantly for the present essay, Goya also ends, like Andrei Rublev, with a final apotheosis of painting underpinned by nondiegetic music. Yet the differences from Tarkovsky are multiple. Most obvious is that most of Goya is, unlike Tarkovsky’s soberly black-and-white narrative leading up to the final explosion of iconic color, very much a period costume drama, dominated by the sets of Alfred Hirschmeier,15 and even color-coded—blue being associated, almost in the manner of Pierrot le Fou, with Goya’s seaside idyll with Cayetana, and red with both Cayetana’s clothes, the Inquisitor’s cap, and the blood of the French Revolution. Like other 1970s DEFA historical films about Beethoven or Goethe, Goya is a film of nostalgia for the Age of Revolution, and it stages that nostalgia through a poetics of excess. Yet as we shall see, unlike Hollywood’s melodramatic or emotional “excess,” the excess in Goya serves very specific functions within the film. To paraphrase Comolli’s famous stricture on the historical film (1978), the art-historical film is “a frame too much,” and many scenes in Goya are staged as tableaux vivants, that is, precisely what Tarkovsky sought to avoid in his film16 and without much of the Brechtian estrangement effect Godard used in his own filmic meditations on Goya in Passion. (The Brechtian element here would lie rather in Banionis’s acting, which is deliberately detached and impassive, as many reviewers were quick to note.) We will need to return to this notion of framing in discussing the film’s close. The grandeur of Goya has also historical predecessors in Soviet cinema. In many of the large crowd scenes of Goya, the ghost of the later Eisenstein is palpably present—especially the coronation

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scene of Ivan the Terrible, to which Wolf’s long interior auto-da-fé scene is indebted, both visually and aurally. Iconographically, Wolf’s film follows the model used in other Goya films. As in Carlos Saura’s later Goya in Bordeaux (1999), the most familiar paintings of Goya are used here, from portraits of Cayetana and the royal family to the bleak late pinturas negras of the Quinta del Sordo, seen by most scholars as a reflection on madness and reason. Here, too, Wolf is often prudish with regard to sex, making a number of painful cuts on Cayetana’s disrobing, or only filming her naked body in a decent blur—thereby showing himself less daring than was his painterly subject.

Montage It is in the final montage sequence, the most immediately engaging part of the film, that we may define both Goya’s relation to Andrei Rublev and its peculiar iconographic instability more closely. Here Wolf breaks from the biopic genre17 and supplements the text of Feuchtwanger’s novel, creating a more-than-ten-minute montage that condenses multiple artworks produced at different stages of the painter’s life, from The Third of May 1808 to the famous Colossus, the San Antonio de Florida frescoes, the Romeria de San Isidro, and the Desastres de la Guerra prints. All of this is accompanied by a complex aural montage of flamenco guitar, stamping and clapping, and songs composed by the Valencian singer Paco Ibañez (b. 1934). The typed production notes to the film explicitly state that “here the music must be the main nerve, the backbone of the optical narrative technique. The music defines the optical realization and final montage of this concluding complex of the film.”18 The prominent role of music means also that filmic movement is stressed against the iconic stability of the image. Unlike Tarkovsky, however, Wolf continues to contrast his quoted images of Goya’s work with images of the actor Goya fleeing to France over the Pyrenees, or the contrasting faces of Goya himself—eyes downcast, brooding sadly as if he were himself the figure on the first page of the Desastres (Tristes Presentimientos) lamenting over what he has seen— and even of the Inquisitor Lorenzana. Some of the cuts are frankly problematic, such as one from a yellow-pantalooned corpse glimpsed on the ground to the famous Christlike execution victim of The Third of May painting. Wolf’s montage is thus not simply neo-avant-garde: it has elements of conventional cross-cutting as well. In many ways, this final montage is a Marxist March of Time. One could in fact describe it as a historico-philosophical chase scene, with Goya on the run from the Inquisition to the final immortality of his signature. On a thematic or semantic (or iconographic) level, the conclusion is anything but unambiguous, thus providing yet another example of the

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Aesopic language of art under socialism. It has been pointed out that the Inquisitor is portrayed in oddly sympathetic terms—Jacobsen and Aurich want to see in him the filmmaker’s brother Markus, the famous East German spymaster—and the Inquisitor’s last words, “I condemn Goya to eternal oblivion,” are clearly an instance of heavy Brechtian irony, followed as they are by the painter’s eternally unforgotten signature, an equally heavy emblem of the artist as Name of the Father, or perhaps Derridean signature as parergon (on which, more to follow). It is surely significant that this conclusion was one of the few parts of the film that drew criticism from the censors, both in the GDR and in the Soviet Union.19 Linking theInquisitor and Goya’s name is the color red, multiply coded not only as the color of the glorious blood of the Revolution but also of the aristocratic sensuality of the Duchess of Alba, and also of the Inquisitor’s own clerical attire. Even more ambivalent is the terrifying image of the open-mouthed pilgrim from the Pilgrimage of San Isidro, to which Wolf’s camera repeatedly returns. Art historians have commented that this painting depicts Goya’s absolutely unsentimental contempt for the rabble, the populacho, as unredeemable as the “heroes who smell bad” in Flaubert’s Éducation sentimentale. It is not clear whether Wolf read this image as an outcry of popular suffering for revolutionary liberation;20 yet given the grim picture of everyday philistinism that Wolf would depict around his sculptor hero Kemmel in his next film, Der nackte Mann auf dem Sportplatz, it is hard not to think he knew very well how little any artist’s work was ever understood by the people.

Iconography and Iconology Such iconographic aspects are, like all semantic aspects, inherently polysemic and unresolvable. We may thus come back now to the formal—iconological—aspects of this final montage. In it Wolf has produced precisely the opposite of Tarkovsky’s Rublev finale. This is hardly surprising, given that the larger message of Goya, namely the artist’s duty to be politically engaged, is diametrically opposed to Tarkovsky’s contemplative mysticism. Where Tarkovsky’s slow camera movements have a static effect, Wolf ’s rapid cutting speeds up time, in accordance with his Marxian preference for History as against Tarkovsky’s cosmic liturgy21 or deus sive natura. Wolf is, in effect, reverting to the pre1945 movement-image, as opposed to Tarkovsky’s time-image of long takes and signature slow traveling shots, an instance of Bazin’s “dramaturgy of nature”22 if ever there was one. Within this final sequence, one should distinguish between the slower, dream-like pace of the segments where Goya himself appears in person, witnessing the scarcely believable real events of the Spanish guerrilla war against Napoleon, and the faster tempo of the reproduced images.

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Again, this is not neo-avant-garde in the same way as Godard’s Vertov-inspired montage of the late ’60s. The final montage sequence of Goya is heavily appellatory, seeking to address the audience just as Soviet montage had once done. Wolf’s film is here kin to the work of his friend Peter Weiss, whom he had known well since the mid-1960s. Weiss devoted a section of his magnum opus, Die Ästhetik des Widerstands, to a discussion of Goya, specifically the Third of May 1808 execution, the Desastres, and the portrait of Charles IV with family; Weiss, too, was interested in the dialectics of Enlightenment, most particularly of madness and reason, and had then staged this not long before in Marat/Sade, which ends with the desperate appeal of Jacques Roux to the audience: “When will you learn to see / When will you learn to understand.”23 The anguished open mouth of the pilgrim from San Isidro—historically and iconographically recalling similar shots in Eisenstein’s Potemkin—might be the visual equivalent of such an appeal. Wolf’s final montage sequence could be read as an attempt at a filmic Moritat, the didactic and popular “street ballad” form revived by Brecht and taken up again by none other than Peter Weiss in the 1960s. (In the undated transcript of the meeting where Wolf showed his rough cut to his colleagues, he referred to this final section as a “ballad against war.”24) Feuchtwanger’s novel ends each of its chapters with a set of unrhymed strophes in four-beat iambic Knittelvers, commenting on the moral of the narrative. Wolf’s montage can therefore be seen as an attempt at an intermedial transposition of this poetic epilogue. Here Wolf’s film can indeed appeal to Goya himself as ancestor. Like Mizoguchi’s Utamaro, Goya was a popular printmaker, influenced by the English political caricaturists of his day. The “technical reproducibility” of his books of Caprichos and Desastres, which Wolf shows in his film as a form of mechanized industrial factory-production, is once more absolutely opposed to the cultic, auratic singularity of Tarkovsky’s saintly icon painter. Even more than El Greco, whom Eisenstein famously wanted to read as a proto-cinematic painter, Goya broke with rules of pictorial composition inherited from the Baroque, destroying the monumental picture plane linking figure and surrounding space. As the art historian Theodor Hetzer put it: “Goya frees himself from the old convention that a picture should not extend beyond the limits set by the frame. It becomes obvious that a frame can no longer enclose a world. Its only function is an artistic one: it is there to create a painting out of something that is, in fact, only a segment of a wider view.”25 The analogies to cinematic framing are obvious, and indeed explicitly called up by Wolf’s quotation of proto-cinematic compositions such as number 26 of the Desastres, “One cannot look at this,” with its cutoff bayonets on the right. Wolf himself suggested that “one is almost tempted to see Goya’s etchings as the first silent movie.”26 In this, Goya

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participates in a larger shift within painterly practice of his time, which Jacques Aumont has described as one from the ébauche to the étude, the sketch to the study.27 One suspects there is a relationship between this liberation from traditional framing and Goya’s own late development from a fairly conventional and thus successful court painter to the artist of the Desastres and the Black Paintings. Double framing, or a frame within a frame, had been one of the marks of the developing autonomy of art.28 In the Spanish Baroque, we would connect this to Velasquez’s much-analyzed Las Meninas. In conduct manuals such as those of Balthasar Gracian, seeing the world as a stage is linked to a practice of desengaño or disillusion,29 and Feuchtwanger’s novel is centrally concerned with a loss of illusion. Goya himself, ironically enough, lived in the Calle del Desengaño, the Street of Disillusionment, at one point in his life. The narrative of the film may be read as a gradual breaking out of this convention of Baroque framing. Earlier episodes in the film are characterized by a strong concern for framing. This is evident in the lengthy, deliberately tense sequence where Goya marches the Spanish royal family back and forth in the palace to get the correct light and placement for his portrait, but it is also thematized in the sequence in the Duchess of Alba’s tower, where the Maja desnuda is rotated into a frame that also holds the clothed Maja. Similarly, many earlier scenes are characterized by enclosed framing, such as the claustrophobic, almost Fassbinder-like scene where Goya is handing his mistress Pepa Tudo over to Don Miguel, the architectonic spaces of the cathedral (for the auto-da-fé), the Inquisitor’s grand and sonorous rooms (up until near the end), or Goya’s own studio crowded with canvases. Against this are opposed Goya’s symbolic smashing of the mirror after his argument with Alba, the outdoor shots of his long trip with the mule-driver Gil, and his final emergence into a blinding and more than physical light after his final interview with the Inquisitor and passage through the dungeons. (This bright outdoor light, an allegory of Enlightenment, is opposed to the film’s earlier recourse to the Baroque chiaroscuro of candlelight, especially in the early sequence of Goya’s all-night painting aided by candles affixed to his hat.) The final works of Goya treated by the film before the concluding montage sequence, namely the San Antonio de Florida frescoes and the Quinta del Sordo wall-paintings, similarly break from courtly framing devices. This process of gradual narrative deframing is however not a mechanical or linear process in the film, for the workshop where Goya and his assistants produce the Caprichos is also shown (framed) as an indoor, factory-like space.

The Signature and Judgment of History Wolf’s version of Goya thus does not remain within this autonomous double framing, but seeks to break out into an almost photographic,

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documentary aspect, tied to the appellatory aspect already mentioned. In this respect, Wolf’s Goya goes beyond the aesthetics of disillusion—as embodied in the Baroque frame—to one of “unframed” and mobile political engagement. It is here where the break from iconography to iconology is most evident. If Tarkovsky pushes the relation between cinema and painting at one of its extremes, making the camera enter into the painting in precisely the way Bazin forbade30—making the cinema literally “iconic,” as it were—then Wolf seems to want to make his film into a collection of snapshots—something equally impossible in view of film’s extension in time.31 He does so in an attempt to violate another traditional limit on art: namely, that art, according to aesthetic theory from Kant to Adorno, cannot judge.32 For the end of Wolf’s film is clearly meant as a judgment on history, and it is explicitly stated in the confrontation of the Inquisitor’s judgment of Goya—“I condemn Goya to eternal forgetting”—and the very last shot of the film, the painter’s equally eternal signature against a bright red background. It is a bit as if Wolf were signing off with a trademark: Copyright by Goya & Co. Ltd. The signature archives not only the painterly image but also the revolutionary promise for which Goya’s work stands.33 Elsaesser and Wedel might conceivably use this final signature to bolster the auteurist reading of Wolf they have sketched in for Ich war neunzehn. Goya is, however, too ambiguous a film to contain entirely within an auteurist approach, just as it does not fit into the genre of historical film/ artist biopic; nor does its iconography of heroic Great Man remain stable. Stylistically, as we have seen, Goya is an eclectic combination of deliberate borrowings from Hollywood and nostalgia for a revolutionary past since become historical. We thus need to venture a little beyond the obvious opposition of artistic individuality and the institution of the Church to grasp the film’s conclusion. The last formulation—Copyright by Goya & Co.—may remind one of discussions of the signature and authority that occupied Derrida both in his controversy with Searle and in The Truth in Painting.34 It would lead us too far afield to discuss how Derrida’s familiar structure of supplementarity is transposed onto the painterly elements of frame and signature as parergon. Nor is his critique of signature as vouching for authorship or intentionality especially relevant. What is important here, however, is the linkage of artistic signature and judgment at the end of Wolf’s film, which bears a specific historical date (as it also does in Kant, and still as a residue or trace in Derrida). For this signature is cognate to the image of Goya’s Colossus we have seen not long before in this same sequence. The signature, the authorship of Goya as artist is colossal, covering the entire screen. As such, it is sublime: the signature of Genius. Sublimity, for Kant, is defined in several ways: first, it is “absolutely great” (schlechthin gross),35 thus felt as formless; second, it is tied to a sense of admiration or respect (Bewunderung oder Achtung, 89);

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Figure 10.1. The Inquisitor (Mieczyslaw Voit) in search of Goya. ©DEFA-Stiftung/Arkadi Sager.

third, it is reflexive, bound to the subject’s autonomous self-definition (116); fourth, it results from an unexpected feeling of release subsequent to a “momentary inhibition (Hemmung) of force” (88). All this is evident in Goya’s signature, especially its abrupt juxtaposition to the condemnation of the Inquisitor, the embodiment of “inhibition” in every sense. The immortal, depersonalized sublimity of Genius is here opposed to the Authoritarian Sublime of the Inquisitor, who, facing straight on into the camera while pronouncing his sentence (or judgment) on Goya, derives all his authority from the monumental frame. The Inquisitor here has the sublime body of the Stalinist Father,36 the same body as Ernst Thälmann in Maetzig’s aforementioned Cold War epics, and the same one possessed by the indestructible Stalinist Chapaev (Georgi Vasilyev 1934), a film beloved of the young Konrad Wolf. This is why it is so important to show Goya eating and drinking, with a gusto worthy of Brecht’s Galileo, near the end of the film: sublime fathers do not do this. Another way of putting the opposition between Stalinist sublime and that of Goya is one between mise en scène and montage, iconography and iconology, or framing and deframing. As Wolf interestingly suggested in discussing Goya with Ruth Herlinghaus, “it might be worth investigating how much elements of the monumental [for example, the sublime, LP] are present here, not in the individual image, but in the series.”37 Wolf’s taking the side of a mobile, montage serial sublime is thus directed implicitly against the static, authoritarian sublime of heroic Stalinist father figures. The historical sublime, one of the future perfect (whether of Goya’s posterity or the still unrealized revolution), can only be paradoxically “contained” between the shots, not in any single monumental one of them.

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The concluding recourse to Goya’s signature is also something of a desperate measure, although it is a different sort of desperation than that which Derrida finds in Kant’s Third Critique. In Derrida’s reading, Kant must force aesthetics into the straitjacketed frame of transcendental analytic, just as the parergon, as framing, “always supports and contains that which, by itself, collapses.”38 There is a different kind of forcing here. It is very much as if the final signature were oddly produced by the condemnatory judgment of the Inquisitor that precedes it. Iconoclastic de-framing (Bonitzer’s décadrage) and iconophilic framing stand in a complementary relation here. In the signature, its materiality and ornamentality are contrasted with the traditional aesthetic of the Church—and perhaps also of the State as well. That older aesthetic would be, in Kant’s terms, one of Verstand or comprehension (Bordwell’s level of style), not Vernunft or reason. On this division, the socialist Gesamtkunstwerk splits apart, opening up a transcendental vanishing point to a double future: one of Goya’s genial posterity, one of a revolution both nostalgically remembered from 1789, and hoped for as a Utopia that would not come. This is also the place where any reference to iconography, or the poetics of mise-en-scène, may also be complemented by iconology—or Bordwell’s “denotative function” of style by its irreducibly symbolic one.

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11: Der nackte Mann auf dem Sportplatz (1974)

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WOLF’S most original and subtle films, Der nackte Mann auf dem Sportplatz (1974) is also one of his most GDR-specific works. Much of the film is hardly comprehensible without knowledge of its very local context. Even for a director who avoided rhetorical bravura as much as Wolf, this is an extremely understated film, all in half tones and fine shadings of irony and humor. The film narrates a few weeks in the life of the sculptor Kemmel, who is experiencing something of a crisis in his work, although one without any high drama, and which thus has to be guessed at from small nuances of his performance. Kemmel is played by Kurt Böwe, a beloved GDR actor who also had the role of mayor Jadup in Rainer Simon’s Jadup und Boel (1980/1989). As in that film, Böwe plays a rough, gruff Everyman, very much an East German type,1 and not at all the typical artist as genius. Although he is married and has a child, he also has a younger mistress whom he visits. His artistic career runs into multiple obstacles: an earlier relief has been unceremoniously deposited in a storeroom rather than displayed; an attempt to portray a worker (named Hannes) fails, although he manages to connect with the worker on a personal level; and his commissioned sculpture of an athlete for a local football club (which gives the film its title) is not well received when the locals, expecting a man in a footballer’s uniform, discover he has portrayed one clad only in Greek nudity. Other episodes of the film treat the artist’s profession by contrast, such as a visit from a pretentious younger countercultural couple, one of whom affects to have a Russian soul and sings an Orthodox hymn along with a tape recording, or the opening of an exhibition accompanied by incongruous Pan pipes. Jackie Schwarz from Ich war neunzehn also makes a cameo appearance as the artist’s model. Throughout the film, Kemmel is also wondering about what the purpose of an artist in the workers’ and peasants’ state should be, and how art relates to history (in particular to specific traumas such as Babi Yar or Buchenwald).2 The sculptures in the film were by the GDR artist Werner Stötzer (1931–2010),3 and photographs by Einar Schleef (1944–2001)are also shown. The soundtrack, by Karl-Ernst Sasse (a prolific film composer who wrote among other things the scores for Indianerfilme), was also as understated as the story and the imagery.

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Intermedial Form The film’s episodic looseness and leisure of narration and its intermedial incorporation of still photographs tempt one to see it as Konrad Wolf’s closest approximation to the essay film as we know it in the West in Chris Marker, Kluge, or Godard. This is, however, less to assign the film a genre than to acknowledge its generic openness; recent literature on the essay film gives up on defining it other than as “somewhere in between fiction and nonfiction cinema.”4 The film was not one of Wolf’s most popular at the box office. Much of the irritation experienced by viewers at the time of the film’s premiere was linked to its mixture of documentary and fictional aspects, as the protocol of a discussion on May 31, 1974 notes: “Eine andere mögliche Ursache der Irritation vieler Zuschauer [. . .] schien einigen Teilnehmern auch der authentisch-dokumentarische Eindruck, der vom Milieu wie von den Figuren des Films, auch und gerade von der Gestalt Kemmels, ausgeht und so den Vergleich oder die Identifikation mit einem bestimmten Künstler herausfordert” (Another possible cause of many viewers’ irritation[. . . .] seemed to some participants to be the authentic documentary impression made by the milieu and the film’s characters, even, or especially, that of Kemmel, so that one was provoked into a comparison or identification with a specific artist).5 Even Fritz Cremer, who had been consulted on the film, baldly asked during this discussion: “Ist das nun ein Film über Werner Stötzer oder nicht?” (Is it a film about Werner Stötzer or not?) In fact, one could also see the film as a veiled self-portrait of the director himself, “Das Verfahren Kemmels, die Dinge nicht zu forcieren und seine Haltung nur vorsichtig zu offenbaren, findet sich im gestalterischen Gestus des Films von Konrad Wolf in ziemlich analoger Weise wieder.”6 (Kemmel’s method of not forcing things and only cautiously revealing his own attitude may be found again in the artistic gesture of Konrad Wolf’s film itself in rather analogous fashion.) This loose, documentary construction of the film meant a deliberate de-dramatizing of its subject—perhaps as a corrective to Wolf’s previous film, Goya, which had more closely approximated an artist-biopic, succeeding least well precisely where it sought to dramatize the artist’s life (as in Goya’s love affair). Unlike the narrative of Goya, Der nackte Mann auf dem Sportplatz has aspects of a puzzle or rebus: it is Wolf’s most oblique and allegorical film, the most subdued and veiled in its tone. As Peter Wuss has noted, its hidden structure, centered on the quiet but stubborn attempts of the artist to maintain his position in the world, only emerges on repeated viewings.7 Paradoxically, its inadequate reception means also that it is still fresh to a current viewer, as if still awaiting adequate understanding. Part of the difficulty of Wolf’s film is that it is not only a filmic “essay” on the problem of the artist under socialism but is also concerned

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with the problem of collective memory in a televisual age. The calculated obliquity of the narrative is thus a strategy both to circumnavigate clichés about art and artists and also to renew historical memory via medial reflexivity. This medial context is evident in various aspects of the film. The first is that Der nackte Mann may be related to the loose subgenre of the documentary fiction film as Peter Wuss has defined it, a subgenre or mode practiced from the late 1960s on by Lothar Warneke, Roland Gräf, and the younger Rainer Simon in the GDR and Krzysztof Zanussi in Poland. The motor behind this was the expansion of television, which, as Siegfried Zielinski has noted, was already the “vanishing point” for the Oberhauseners in the BRD.8 In the GDR’s slightly delayed media development, television became a mass medium in 1960, when the number of TV viewers surpassed the one million mark, and moved toward color technology in the next few years (the Fernsehturm was built in 1969). Television spelled an end to the dominance of the traditional DEFA master-code of neorealism. In Der nackte Mann, documentary scenes, shot with a handheld camera, are numerous, whether the sequence in the market where Kemmel unsuccessfully tries to ask a young woman to be his model, or the teenage dance hall in the provinces, hearkening back to similar segments in Boettcher’s Jahrgang ’45 (Born in ’45, 1966). The television itself is also shown with scenes of the moon landing or of jets taking off. The moon landing is trivialized by its being merely on in the background, only half-noticed by Kemmel’s aunt, who indulges in nonstop chatter about his father and the war until Kemmel asks her to cut it out. (The ironic juxtaposition of her chatter with the “historic event” of the astronauts might be compared to the scene in Kuhle Wampe where Bönicke père reads a newspaper article about Mata Hari while his wife tries to do the family’s reckoning for food expenses; the difference is that in Wolf the irony is much less clear. The fighter jets and moon landing are ambiguous images of military high technology, and Kemmel’s aunt is remembering the war; it is not clear which is commenting on which. The TV images may be implying that the war the aunt treats as memory is by no means past.) Second, however, televisual culture is treated as the enemy of the GDR’s central foundational collective memory, that of the Second World War. Wolf’s deployment of still photographs must thus be understood as a strategic answer to this. Raymond Bellour saw “le développement de l’arrêt sur l’image et de toutes les formes du photographique” (the development of fixing on the image and of all the forms of the photographic”) in film as linked to new televisual and video technologies;9 as documented in David Campany’s recent work on photography and film, “documentary and photojournalism” became, in the 1960s, “thoroughly allegorical” relative to the increasing “barrage of mass media coverage.”10 Again and again we see that in the new media environment of the 1970s,

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and the consumer-driven society that went with it, GDR citizens are no longer interested in wartime memory. As Kemmel’s friend the provincial Parteivorsitzender tells him, to explain why his monument is languishing in the Feuerwehrturm instead of being publicly displayed, “die Gesichter sind vielleicht doch zu ernst” (the faces are maybe too serious) and nowadays, “man will jetzt was Schöneres” (one wants to see something prettier). Even Kemmel, after his wife has read aloud from Anatoly Kuznetzov’s memoir of Babi Yar, says that he can’t remember, since he wasn’t there and could not experience it himself.11 Historical amnesia is everywhere in Wolf’s film, from the young woman at the country train station who thinks Babi Yar is “etwas mit Indianern” (something to do with Indians) to Kemmel’s friend Willem, who names Victor Hugo’s hero Der Glockner von Rotterdam and not Notre Dame.

Holes and Rebuses The loss of memory of the war is however not merely a matter of individual amnesia or lack of interest, or televisual shortness of attention, but lies in the unrepresentability of the events themselves. Here Wolf, to borrow a later and famous title of Saul Friedländer, is already probing the limits of representation.12 When passages about Babi Yar are read, we see either a photograph of Buchenwald, or later, a black screen (with the rock music of the provincial teenage dance hall ironically in the background). Babi Yar cannot be represented, not even by a photograph. This is a topos in the literature on Babi Yar, beginning with Yevtushenko’s 1961 poem on the massacre: No monument stands over Babi Yar.[. . .] Wild grasses rustle over Babi Yar, The trees look ominous, like judges. Here all things scream silently . . .13

When Elie Wiesel visited Babi Yar in 1965, he also searched in vain for some sign or monument, some visible form of memory: “You have to close your eyes to see the thousands falling into an open grave. You have to concentrate with all your energy to hear their cries in this silence, which seems to restful and so natural. Where are the mass graves? Where is the blood? Does anything visible remain of that drama of horror? Nothing. [. . .] There is nothing to see at Babi Yar.”14 This lack of monument was due to deliberate Soviet policy, so that even at the time of Wolf’s film, there was still no commemoration at the site (a first monument would be built in 1976, but not one that acknowledged that the victims were Jews).15 (Babi Yar, and the official silence around it, had been a flashpoint during the later years of Khrushchev’s

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thaw period of liberalism, thanks to Yevtushenko’s poem of 1961, set to music by Shostakovich in his Thirteenth Symphony of 1962.) Even the photo of Buchenwald to which Kemmel repeatedly returns is itself an empty shot of nature, not a dramatic one of bodies in the camps. Its uncanny emptiness anticipates the much later photographs by Mikael Levin, which Ulrich Baer has analyzed as deliberately showing us nothing, nothing but “visual dead ends” and “carefully constructed blind spots.”16 As Baer argues (81), the “matter-of-factness” of photographs stands in tension with “historical narrativization” of the past: in fact, “this ability to register an event’s lack of coherence is singularly programmed into the technology” (170) which is another way of putting what Vilém Flusser has seen as the contradiction between photographic apparatuses and older, statist-industrial conceptions of recording technology17 and thus also the memory culture they generate. Photography “levels the meaning of all events,” in Susan Sontag’s phrase; for Kracauer, it can only generate the “dregs” of history, disunited “parts in space” without connection, mere Abklatsch (a poor copy or rip-off).18 Thus even photographic evidence of the past must prove inadequate as guardian of memory in Der nackte Mann. In work on memory pioneered by Aleida Assmann and further worked out by Jens Ruchatz, it is stated that “eine Fotografie wird . . . nicht als Gedächtnis geboren, sondern erst bei der Betrachtung als Spur des Vergangenen gedeutet” (a photograph is . . . not born as memory, but only interpreted as a trace of the past by contemplation).19 It is thus the digressive, episodically loose narrative of Der nackte Mann that must perform this work of interpretation: the photographs must be narrativized to be brought to life. What Eric Santner once wrote about Handke’s image-driven Die Stunde der wahren Empfindung, published a year after Der nackte Mann in 1975, could also apply to Wolf: “a narrative constellated out of the juxtaposition of photographic images—an imagist narrative—would be a form placing maximum emphasis upon the spaces between the strides.”20 Wolf’s filmic narrative is indeed “constellated” out of a series of juxtaposed images: it moves from the photograph of Buchenwald, past a photographic reproduction of Breughel’s Icarus, to a contact sheet of photographs taken by Einar Schleef, to the final humorous snapshot of two girls obviously laughing at the male member of the sculpture of the Naked Man, their faces shot together with the sculpture’s crotch. How does Wolf manage to get from the somber topic of a concentration camp to a dirty joke for teenage girls? The answer lies in the “constellative” form of the filmic narrative, which requires the viewer to fill out the implicit “spaces between the strides.” Wolf’s film thus obeys an imperative that one could, paraphrasing Horace’s Ars poetica, term ut pictura diegesis. The impossibility of direct representation of memory in metaphors or symbols requires a

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metonymic, combinatory approach, one that occasionally resembles the old Renaissance technique of emblems or rebuses, a technique not coincidentally linked with mnemotechnics. Only at one point in the film, where memorial sculptures at the Ravensbrück KZ are combined with loud train sounds in a slightly heavy-handed montage sequence, is metaphor offered to us. Wolf gives us the clue to the film’s poetics when Kemmel says of art: “es gibt etwas, was man gleich sieht, und etwas, was man nicht gleich sieht” (there’s something one sees right away, and something one doesn’t see right away). Within the film’s esoteric pictorial language, this is hinted at when Kemmel clips a reproduction of Breughel’s Icarus to the photo of Buchenwald. A young man from the Nationale Volksarmee who is visiting Kemmel comments that Breueghel’s main event, Icarus’s death, happens off-center, as if incidentally within the context of everyday life. W. H. Auden famously remarked about this painting in his 1938 poem “Musée des Beaux Arts” that “suffering . . . takes place/While someone is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.”21 This is the key to Wolf’s poetic of memory. Later in the film, Kemmel must defend his son, who got a bad grade in school for a drawing of a horse on a submarine, by explaining in a note to the teacher that the submarine could have saved the horse from a shipwreck not itself depicted. This narrativizing of the single image again points self-referentially to the film’s own indirect rebus-like technique. For not only the Holocaust has become unrepresentable, but work or labor itself, the central concept of Marxism and the ostensible basis of the GDR state, cannot be shown anymore. Kemmel destroys his failed sculpture of the worker Hannes, in a move that can be seen as the direct negation of the erstwhile Bitterfelder Weg (1959–65) proclaiming the unity of work and art. When Jaeckie Schwarz, his model for the Nackter Mann, starts to strike affected poses in Kemmel’s garden, and is asked what he is doing, he says: “Ich stelle Arbeit dar” (I am representing work), with unintended but obvious irony. It is as if Wolf had read Adorno’s famous stricture against Brecht: “Alles ist erlaubt zu spielen, nur nicht den Proletarier” (one is permitted to perform everything, just not the proletarian).22 Even the artist, the nominal topic of the film, cannot be theatrically represented. Kurt Böwe, the East German Columbo who played the title role, told an interviewer that he had seen “nichts zu spielen” (nothing to play) in the script.23 In his memoirs, Böwe saw that the “Berufsrisiko” (career risk) of this film “bestand darin, dass diese Rolle so verdammt alltäglich war” (consisted in the fact that this role was so damned everyday).24 As Böwe came to grasp, the portrait of Kemmel had to be not only his own self-portrait but also that of Wolf himself, peeled away layer by layer like Peer Gynt’s onion to get to the “naked man” beneath.25 The extreme obliquity of the narrative, its generic slipperiness, suggests asking narratological questions, as with other Wolf films. Mama, ich

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lebe will turn out to have parabolic features (see the next chapter); Professor Mamlock was earlier shown to have aspects of André Jolles’s casus, a form first associated by Fredric Jameson with Brecht. Jameson’s mention of the casus is however extremely brief, almost en passant, more a suggestion or a hint than fully worked out. Many questions have to be answered for a reference to Jolles’s simple forms to become productive. First, Jolles defines his forms through what he calls Sprachgebärde, linguistic gesture. Defining them apart from language would seem impossible: as one exegete of Jolles asserts, “Ohne Bezug auf Sprache, ohne Erfassen der Textgestalt und ihrer Musterhaftigkeit ist eine Einfache Form nicht zu erfassen” (Without relation to language, without grasping the textual form and its model qualities, a simple form may not be grasped).26 This makes one wonder if Jolles’s forms could be applicable to a visual medium such as film at all. But Jolles says of his forms early on that they can be “weder von der Stilistik, noch von der Rhetorik, noch von der Poetik, ja, vielleicht nicht einmal von der ‘Schrift’ erfasst werden” (can be grasped by neither stylistics, nor rhetoric, nor poetics, indeed perhaps not even by writing).27 They seem as ineffable and ungraspable as Foucault’s archive: more conditions of possibility than definable forms. Jolles is interested more in what language does28 than in what it is; he wants to understand language as work, a perspective that would well suit Wolf’s Portrait of the Artist as an Ordinary Worker. Wolf was, in this, only following official GDR policy, which sought—in opposition to concepts of genius seen as bourgeois—to view art production as simply another form of work.29 The difference, again, is that artistic work (like manual work) is shown here as a self-reflexive process, not a representable and clearly signifying object. Although Jolles begins his discussion of “Sprache als Arbeit” (language as work) by claiming that “sofort erhebt sich das Bild einer menschlichen Arbeitsgemeinschaft” (11; at once there arises the image of a human working community), the Heideggerian alliterations and heavy Germanic substantives in his writing (21; “Wildnis und Wirrsal,” wilderness and confusion), the assertion that “der Bauer gehört zur Scholle” (15; the peasant belongs to the earth), the almost Dumézillike trifunctional division of society into Bauer, Handwerker, and Priester (peasants, craftsmen, and priests), not to mention the evocation of Mussolini, all suggest a workers’ community of the Right and not the Left. Nonetheless his association of Dichten (poetry writing) with Handwerker (artisans) is not far from Wolf’s project in this film; one wonders whether the narrative forms of socialism might perhaps also be seen as kin to Jolles’s simple forms (as Kunstformen or “bezogene Formen” derived from them). Ulla Fix refers, in her discussion of “quotable, model and reproducible text types,” to “rituell gebrauchte[r] Texte” (ritually used texts);30 and ritualization is one feature of socialist realism.31 Within them, we would have to distinguish between what Fix calls “Mustertexte”

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(model texts) and “Zitiertexte” (quotable texts), with the former capable of more fluidity than the latter. Second, which of Jolles’s forms best fits Wolf’s film? If it is a casus, does it weigh different norms against each other—those of art’s socially functional usefulness versus its autonomy, perhaps? The puzzle-like qualities would suggest Jolles’s riddle (Rätsel), and the laughing old woman in the photo contact sheet and laughing girls at the end, his joke (Witz). Are these reconciliable in one form? That the film is so full of rebuses— the horse on the submarine, Breughel with Buchenwald, or Buchenwald with Babi Yar, the juxtaposition of the marble gravestone Kemmel has obtained from the provincial minister with Buchenwald, or even the scene in the art gallery where we hear some rather precious Pan Pipe music while viewing the paintings on the walls—would suggest a riddle, since rebus in German is precisely Bilderrätsel. Yet Kemmel is not “im Besitz des Wissens” (Jolles, 129; in possession of the knowledge), cannot solve the riddle, which is posed as much to us as viewers as it is to him. In one scene, he in fact writes a note to his son’s schoolteacher asking the teacher to explain why a horse cannot be on a submarine (if the latter has just sunk a boat with the horse in it). By contrast, Jolles’s description of jokes is suggestive in the context of Wolf’s film: “Dass die Geschichte eine ernste Tendenz hat, scheint . . . nicht zweifelhaft, aber es ist ebenso sicher, dass sie gewisse Lücken hat, dass hier irgend etwas nicht ganz stimmt” (250; that the story has a serious undercurrent seems . . . not to be in doubt, but it is equally certain that it has certain gaps, that something isn’t quite right here). Most interesting is Jolles’s idea that jokes “loosen” or “unbind” something: “So müssen wir zunächst sagen, dass in der Form Witz, wo immer wir sie finden, etwas gelöst wird, dass der Witz irgend ein Gebundenes entbindet” (248; we must say at first that in the form of the joke, wherever we find it, something is solved, that the joke releases something that is bound). Entbinden in German also means to give birth, and thus Jolles cannot leave matters at that: he needs to ask further what jokes give birth to: Wenn wir nun aber das Komische für das, was wir bis jetzt gesehen haben, einsetzen, so scheint es zunächst etwas Negatives zu sein. Wir haben überall von Entbindung gesprochen, und wir haben überall gefunden, dasss es irgend etwas, Sprache, Logic, Ethik, Einfache Form gab, das entbunden wurde. Es war nicht so wie im Märchen, wo eine unmoralisch empfundene Welt umgeschaffen und danach in ihrer Tragik vernichtet wurde, sondern etwas anderes musste da sein, um in seinem Dasein von dem Witz ergriffen, entbunden zu werden. Es erhebt sich die Frage, ob und inwieweit dieses Entbindende selbst in der Lage ist, eine neue Form zu schaffen, oder ob und inwieweit das, was entbunden wird, trotz der Entbindung sich gleich bleibt. (252–53)

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[If we now replace what we have so far seen with the comical, then this appears at first to be something negative. We have spoken in every case of unbinding, and we have found in every case that there was something—language, logic, ethics, or simple form—that was released. Things are different from the fairy tale, where a world felt to be immoral is recreated and then destroyed in its tragic aspect; something different had to be there, in order to be seized and released by the joke. The question arises how and to what degree this releasing element itself is capable of creating a new form, or whether and to what degree that which is released stays the same nonetheless.]

What was “in its existence seized by the joke and released” was nothing other than the figure of the artist himself, portrayed as the Naked Man, and then laughed at by the girls. But to continue with Jolles’s question: what is gained by this, what new form arises from it? Surely Wolf meant more than merely a cheap joke at the end of his film? It is helpful here to think further about what rebuses, Bilderrätsel, are and how they function (in Jolles’s terms, what their Sprachgebärde or Geistesbeschäftigung are). Not long before Wolf’s film, Lyotard was thinking about rebuses as exemplifying what he called “figure” in Discours, figure (1971). Lyotard cites Freud’s discussion of dreams as rebuses as his point of departure: Suppose I have a picture-puzzle [Bilderrätsel], a rebus, in front of me. It depicts a house with a boat on its roof, a single letter of the alphabet, the figure of a running man whose head has been conjured away, and so on. Now I might be misled into raising objections and declaring that the picture as a whole and its component parts are nonsensical. A boat has no business being on the roof of a house . . .32

Nor does a horse on a submarine, adds Wolf’s film. What is the purpose of the rebus, of Lyotard’s figurality? Lyotard’s answer is as follows: “Freud taught us the meaning of utopia in the strictest sense. Utopia is the fact that truth never appears where it is expected. This means many things, of which the following two at least will show us the way forward. First, truth appears as an aberration when measured against signification and knowledge” (18). In other words: truth is in that “which one doesn’t see right away,” in the terms of Wolf’s film. It is not the Discourse of the Master (signification and knowledge, savoir), but rather the artist’s reflection and self-criticism that this film seeks to represent. In one of his other greatest roles in DEFA film, as Rainer Simon’s mayor Jadup in Jadup und Boel (a film made in 1980 only a few years after Der nackte Mann, but not shown until years later, in 1988), Böwe gave a speech pleading for just such openness and skepticism, as opposed to believing in tidy solutions.

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Near the end of his analysis of the rebus, Lyotard arrives at something like a result or product of the form, answering Jolles’s question of what the humorous reading effected by jokes might give birth to: “In the rebus, desire does not achieve immediate fulfillment as it does in the dream, and these operations come to light only partially: the search for the object of the drive is abandoned, while the search for the drive itself has begun. Desire desires itself” (305). The rebus becomes thus, in rather classical Kantian fashion, reflexive. Could this search be, in terms of Kemmel’s experience, the initial search for the object of art—for a truthful portrait of the worker Hannes’s face, at which Kemmel fails, or for recognition from the outside world, which he continually lacks—which then comes to be replaced by an ironic acceptance of his status as artist? Kemmel has not succeeded in his project of finding an adequate form for memory or labor, but he has managed to accept his place as an artist in society, which might allow him to work better in the future; this is why the film’s end remains open. The rebus, moreover, also fits into this chapter’s (and the film’s) concern with media and intermediality, specifically the television. Tom Conley, writing on Lyotard’s rebus, noted: “To a strong degree the process of the rebus rehearses the beginnings of the adventure of reading and seeing, such as we tend to imagine the efflorescence of the genre, first in the twilight of the fifteenth century, and later in its fortunes when it is subject to repression and ideological control.”33 We could add to this that the rebus also rehearses the end of the adventure of reading, in the late twentieth-century’s twilight of print and even film culture, when these “storage media” and their attendant memories are subject to diffusion and displacement by transmitting media such as television.

Memories and Jokes Since neither the trauma of war nor the heroism of work can survive or be “played” in the televisual Alltag of the mid-1970s GDR, Wolf and his sculptor must make a detour to the most everyday form of Spiel, namely sports. (The Naked Man in the Stadium is a piece of functional art, made for a humble purpose: to commemorate the deceased goalie of a local team.) The means by which this detour is effected are not only metonymic but also often humorous. Freud’s joke book makes the point that der Witz, like the dream evading the censor, can only communicate its truth “auf allerlei Umwegen” (via all sorts of detours).34 So Wolf’s narrative must make one more detour, via the studio of Kemmel’s girlfriend, in reality the apartment of Einar Schleef, where the camera finally holds on an image of a laughing old woman, anticipating the laughing young girls at the film’s end. Humor is omnipresent in this film, from the absurd

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Figure 11.1. Kemmel (Kurt Böwe) meets a pair of GDR hippies. ©DEFA-Stiftung/Wolfgang Bangemann, Alexander Kühn.

sermon given by a Lutheran minister about a dead goalie’s being called “vom irdischen Sportplatz” (from the earthly playing field) to God as the “highest referee,” to Kemmel’s pretentious wannabe-artist acquaintance Igor Klippfisch, with his Russophile beard and cassock, and Aunt Marie who never stops chattering about Kemmel’s father in the war. What kind of humor is this? Is it only the harmless resignation of what Schleef called “DDR-Biedermeier,” or Stefan Wolle the “Gartenzwergidylle” (garden gnome idyll) of the GDR’s “heile Welt,” which in the then-contemporary Soviet Union of Brezhnev was called “the period of stagnation” . . .?35 (One commentator on GDR humor has noted “dass ‘innere’ Satire in der DDR tatsächlich fast nur die kleinen Alltagsnöte zum Thema hat” [“inner” satire in the GDR actually had almost only petty everyday problems as its theme];36 bigger topics would have risked censure.) A clue might be given in the ironic title of an anthology of Berlin Biedermeier poetry edited by Christa Wolf’s husband Gerhard a decade later: Rückwärts geh’n die Krebse gern / Aber vorwärts eilt die Zeit (Crabs like to go backward/But time rushes forward).37 One would only have to correct the author of this verse, Adelbert von Chamisso, that crabs go not only backward, but also sideways—like Konrad Wolf in the metonymic narrative of this film.

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Media, Memory, and Modernity That narrative retells the evolutionary story of media of memory, moving from what Aleida Assmann calls Funktionsgedächtnis—the official “stated memory” of the public sphere and of the GDR bureaucracy that managed it—to Speichergedächtnis, “storage memory,” or a more latent, archival form of memory, in the form of the candid and humorous snapshot. Another way to state this difference is one from photography as “externalization” to photography as “trace.” Photography by lay people tends to emphasize the aspect of trace, as in Barthes’s famous nostalgic last book (Camera Lucida) dedicated to a snapshot of his mother. So too the last photograph of Der nackte Mann auf dem Sportplatz seems to withdraw its earlier failed claims at monumental public memory into the private sphere of the girls’ humorous picture—thereby allegorizing both the larger tendency of GDR citizens to withdraw into a private Nischengesellschaft and the film’s own quasi-emblematic esoterism of form. The final photograph represents also a further de-mystification of the figure of the male artist, for the girls are literally laughing at the sculpture’s phallus, unveiling the sculpture a second time, now to corrosive humor and not shock. Martha Nussbaum has commented on Aristophanes’s comedies as such an unveiling or demasking: “Comedy deals with painful matters: the limits of the body, its subjection to indignities, its closeness to death. But the spirit of comedy turns these gloomy matters into sources of delight, even triumph.[. . .] The triumph of the comic hero is the triumph of all that is flawed, material, nonhard: of this phallus, that is not one.”38 Nussbaum’s concluding phrase evokes Irigaray’s notion of the nonidentity of femininity, here shared with its male counterpart. The humor of this conclusion can be linked back to Kemmel’s girfriend’s photographs of laughing old women, who might evoke Baubo, the exhibitionist female cousin of Priapus.39 The Antique reference of Kemmel’s statue’s nudity points not to classicizing authority but to the bawdy humor of Old Comedy. Kemmel’s self-exposure in the sculpture is thus a renunciation, not an affirmation of male artistic authority. The viewer hardly knows if the film’s last shot of the girls offers a liberating humor or only one of resignation at the diminished status of the artists in the GDR, where so few people have any understanding of art. The sequences preceding this, where Kemmel is shown at work, chiseling away at a block of stone, may be contrasted with the end of Goya. Where the earlier film ends in a triumphant montage of Goya’s paintings followed by his signature, a set of canonical masterworks confirmed by history, Der nackte Mann ends still as work in progress, unsure about Kemmel’s (and implicitly its own) future social acceptance. The closeups of Kemmel’s shoulders and arms as he hammers are kin to the shot of Goya eating and drinking with gusto near the end of that film: both emphasize the artist’s physicality and humanity.

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The sculpture of the Naked Man himself is also an allegory for the complexities of memory culture in the GDR. For one can see culture— like memory, to which it is often linked—as having two dimensions of internalization and externalization. Culture both keeps up the latent pattern maintenance system of society, in Talcott Parsons’s terms, and supplies values and motives to society in the form of externalized symbols, such as public monuments.40 Thus culture may offer a “critical” perspective from which to observe society, not only society’s ideology. As one commentator has it, culture “makes observable the difference between humankind and society—and from both sides of the difference, which may be interpretable as the humanizing of society or the civilizing of humans.”41 The difficulty addressed in Der nackte Mann is that Kemmel cannot manage to create external symbols for his society anymore: the memory of the Second World War (central to the GDR’s legitimatory discourse) is no longer binding, and culture in the GDR is in the process of ceasing to be normative. The irony, humor and understatement of the film are all part of this imperative to reflect on what art, on what culture might mean in a postmemorial socialist society.42 It is not only the norms of art that have become uncertain: again and again in the film, characters confront each other in long moments of silence, whether Kemmel and his wife on the phone, or Kemmel and the worker Hannes when the latter comes to visit the artist’s studio. Dirk Baecker’s comments on how culture changes when it loses its traditional normativity are helpful here: “Der Ausgangspunkt für eine [. . .] gleichsam gelassene Arbeit mit dem Kulturbegriff ist der Wechsel von einer Ebene erster Ordnung, auf der Normen ‘gelten,’ auf eine Ebene zweiter Ordnung, auf der Normen miteinander verglichen, abgeschwächt, verstärkt, unterstrichen und kritisiert werden können” (the point of departure for a [. . .] more or less serene approach to the concept of culture is the switch from first order observation, on which norms are valid, to a second order one, where norms can be compared with each other, softened or sharpened, underlined, or criticized).43 This is, of course, precisely what Jolles’s casus does; the film as a whole, however, ends with a non liquet, as if the director and the artist threw their hands up at the final joking photograph of the girls. In the context of the GDR, the cultural idea of a “humanizing of society” was the ideology of Marxist humanism. The Naked Man is at once the symbolic re-entry of GDR humanist anthropology in the form of a nude body, the figure of the artist Wolf’s ethical self-questioning as to his own authenticity, and a form of deliberately provocative exhibitionism. In this last guise the Naked Man is thus a very distant, muted, and ironic echo of the aesthetics of the avant-garde, in an age and a society that had otherwise banished that aesthetic. Like Wolf’s other late films, Der nackte Mann auf dem Sportplatz is a farewell to cinema’s equivalent of Heine’s Kunstperiode—although what followed would be a different

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kind of heteronomy than Heine’s—and also to a certain type of memory. One might say that the film absorbs the genre of the antifascist film into the genre of the film of the present (Gegenwartsfilm): the past can only be made sense of in the present, but the sense of the present is also inseparable from memory. The film thus continues the process of Wolf’s lifelong work on genres and has a central place in his oeuvre.44 If according to Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, “the final phase of a worldhistorical form is its comedy,”45 this had to be true of Der nackte Mann as well. Watching it now, we have the same experience that Kurt Böwe did when visiting his school during the film’s making: “Plötzlich komme ich mir vor wie jene Leute auf uralten Postkarten, die der Fotograf in einem Moment Leben erfasst hat, das alle Zeit überdauert, aber diejenigen, die da innehalten auf dem Bild, sind doch längst tot, vergraben, vergessen; nur diese eine Postkarte bewährt ihr Leben auf wie ein Stück gerettete, aber unwirkliche Unschuld” (All at once I seem to myself to be one of those people on old postcards, whom the photographer has caught at a moment of their lives that outlasts all time, although those captured on the picture are long since dead, buried, and forgotten; only this postcard preserves their lives like a bit of salvaged, but unreal innocence).46 Der nackte Mann auf dem Sportplatz possesses to an unusual degree that documentary quality Wolf saw as inhering in film, and preserves for the viewer a vivid sense of the everyday reality of the GDR, while still infusing that depiction with artistic concerns that are anything but ordinary.

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12: Mama, ich lebe (1977)

A

FTER VENTURING INTO the historical epic and the Gegenwartsfilm, Wolf returned to more familiar ground with Mama, ich lebe. The film tells the story of four young German soldiers who have been taken prisoner by the Soviets and agree to work with the Red Army against the Nazis. Only three of them are willing to use weapons, though, and their delay in helping a friend (Kolya) leads to the latter’s death. One of them, Pankonin, works on listening to German radio together with a female Soviet officer (played by Tarkovsky’s leading lady Margarite Terekhova) and falls in love with her. Once at the front, three of the four are selected for a commando behind enemy lines, from which none of the three return, leaving only one member of the group a survivor. Mama, ich lebe has not received much more recognition from subsequent criticism than it did from its first viewers in 1977. Like its predecessor, Der nackte Mann auf dem Sportplatz (1974), it is one of Wolf’s most subdued, leisurely, and understated films, far less dramatic than its closest relative, Ich war neunzehn, of which it thus may superficially appear a pallid remake. The film’s lack of popularity is probably linked to its having relied less on generic reference (to the Western) than had Ich war neunzehn. Yet Mama reworks not only many of the same thematic materials as other, films of Wolf’s—the moral pathos of political decision, of redefining individual authenticity apart from nationhood, and the constellation of private and collective memories—but also similar filmic techniques. Among them are the exploration of intermediality, of voiceover, audiovisual montage, and quoted photographs or stills found in Der geteilte Himmel, Ich war neunzehn, Goya, and Der nackte Mann auf dem Sportplatz. Like Genesung, Mama, ich lebe was based on a radio play. These techniques are used to help refurbish the GDR’s foundational narrative of antifascism through heightening medial reflexivity and subjectivizing viewpoint, meant to suggest the authenticity of witness. Moreover, that narrative is itself a parabolic one—which is one of the chief reasons for the film’s neglect until now. In what follows I will begin by looking at the film’s opening, then discuss its use of landscape and go on to see how its narrative is parabolically structured.

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Opening Sequence Intermediality is most in evidence in the film’s opening few minutes, where—following the earlier radio play by Wolfgang Kohlhaase on which the script was based1—the narrative takes its point of departure in a sepiatoned photograph of the four young men who will be its protagonists. The photo will recur twice during the film, once around 34 minutes in, when it is anchored within the narrative as a freeze-frame, and once at the very end. Each time it is accompanied by a voice-over, a clear remnant of the film’s radiophonic origin. Where the radio play narrativized this still photograph through a combination of ekphrastic description and didactic, rhetorical question-and-answer, clearly meant to instruct a young girl on the historical background to a photograph she has found and cannot identify, the film withholds the voice-over for nearly five minutes, following the photograph with shots from a moving train and the train’s sound, blended with dissonant woodwind chords. This in turn gives way to the scene where Becker, the main character, is separated from his fellow German POWs and taken away to begin his education as part of the Red Army’s propaganda unit. As in other filmic deployments of photo stills or freeze-frames, Wolf’s use of these can be understood as a recursive form, acknowledging film’s own intermedial nature and signaling what Garrett Stewart called “the plot’s (as well as the medium’s) own nostalgia for itself.”2 It has thus elements of a mise en abyme as well as of metaphor,3 most obviously for death itself, as many readers of photography, most famously Barthes and Sontag, have noted. Yet this does not in itself set the practice necessarily in opposition to mainstream cinematic narration; as Stewart (again) noted, “narrative cinema . . . can invoke the deathlike stasis of photography . . . without necessarily incurring any damage to its own mobility of representation.”4 Like the “sepia keepsake” at the end of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969), Wolf’s still photo of smiling young Germans might be seen as just another candid shot from the family album of antifascism, laden with nostalgia for a lost authenticity of revolutionary commitment (a nostalgia we have seen here in terms of archival spectrality). The photograph’s constant accompaniment by a radiophonic voice-over certainly works to keep it under control. Radio has been seen by recent scholarship as arguably one of the more staid participants in the GDR’s media landscape, technically subordinate to the post office,5 and dominated by the word,6 so that none of the experiments of the West German Neues Hörspiel were possible. Even the representation of dreams in radio, familiar from the radio plays of Eich and others in the 1950s, was “out and out anxiously avoided” in GDR radio.7 In fact, even if we do see this four-minute prelude as a mise en abyme—a form that had been, in Western Europe, brought back into literary practice by the Nouveau

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Roman—this formal aspect is not incompatible with the appellatory purpose of the antifascist film. As Lucien Dällenbach noted in a standard work on this trope, “sa visée n’est-elle pas simultanément d’intégrer . . . l’auteur et le lecteur empiriques?” (is its aim not simultaneously to integrate . . . the empiral author and reader?).8 In other words, by including reference to the narrator, thereby violating the normally objective closure of narration, the socialist mise en abyme also suggests a sublation of art into the viewer’s life, appealing to continue the Antifa narrative into the present. Nor is the intermedial combination of photo, voice, and quasi“atonal” music to depict flashback more daring here in Wolf than it most often has been in Hollywood.9 Flashback in Mama, ich lebe is consistently used on the level of individual psychology, to intensify the character’s selfdoubts as to their own moral commitment to antifascism, or to explain the latter’s origin in their Nazi experiences. Occasionally it does disturb the narrative’s chronology through being relatively unmarked.10 To conclude this look at aspects of the film’s opening: we might detect a faint spectre of the forbidden and displaced topic of the Holocaust in the insistent train sounds of the opening, a spectre Gertrud Koch has analyzed with reference to other aspects of this film.11

Functions of Landscape More difficult for the viewer than this opening montage may be the extremely leisurely, episodic pace of the narrative itself. Actual combat or shooting is even more absent than it was from Ich war neunzehn. The narrative makes frequent pauses either on landscape scenery or on scenes of largely emotional valence, slowing to let camera and spectator linger on details of an abandoned Russian Orthodox church, its interior sonorous with chirping birds, or of a village of log huts in bright verdant green. The atmospheric coloring around the train smokestack against sunlight breaking through clouds (ca. 46ʹ), or the tall trees in the forest, have an iridescent beauty as pure image that seems almost to float free of any dramatic purpose in the story. Wolf’s use of color-coding to suggest both the filtering distance of history and a parable-like stylization appears at moments to have learned a trick or two from Frank Beyer’s then-recent Jakob der Lügner (1975).12 Interior textures such as curtains or wood are rendered with leisurely, sensual immediacy.13 Certain images, such as the birch forests seen from the train, have a particular nostalgic coding in Russian culture, exploited also by Tarkovsky in films from Ivan’s Childhood to The Mirror.14 The empty Orthodox church is a detail Wolf may also have taken from Andrei Rublev, although here the violence of Tarkovsky’s burning church filled with groaning wounded and dying is replaced by a quiet, dream-like irreality, as if the bird-filled church and its staring icons were somehow reconciled with nature in their abandonment. The very

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Figure 12.1. Pastoral Russian landscape amid war. ©DEFA-Stiftung/Michael Göthe.

close of the film, where Svetlana (played by Margarita Terekhova) tells the surviving Becker that his three comrades are dead, is clearly also an homage to Tarkovsky’s Mirror, which has many shots of the same actress either sitting on the edge of the forest or seen from a distance at the forest’s edge. Given that Mirror was also a dreamlike, nostalgic remembering of the Second World War, and was released only two years prior to Mama, Wolf’s homage or imitation is not surprising.15 Moreover, these images of the East cannot help reminding one of a close poetic cognate from the GDR, namely the elegiac poetry of Johannes Bobrowski, who served as a soldier in the Wehrmacht and later wrote of his impressions of the Russian landscape in an acutely historicized form of Naturlyrik. (Peter Huchel wrote similar poems.) Bobrowski even used a photograph as his point of departure for one of these poems. The irony of three out of four of Wolf’s “Germans” having non-German-sounding names—Kowalevski, Kuschke, and Pankonin—may also be found in Bobrowski, whose novel Levins Mühle states at the beginning that in the German-Polish borderlands, “die Deutschen hiessen Kaminski, Tomaschewski, und Kossakowski und die Polen Lebrecht und Germann” (the Germans were named Kaminski, Tomaschewski, and Kossakowski, and the Poles were named Lebrecht and Germann).16 Most cognate to Bobrowski, however, is the sense of being visually overwhelmed by the strange landscape of the East, its flatness and formlessness. Bobrowski’s

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description of this experience in a letter of March 30, 1943 to Ina Seidel tallies closely with what we are made to see in Wolf’s film: Das Erste, was wir hier lernten, ist das Sehen. Die Landschaft, immer wieder abgesucht, kam uns mit nichts entgegen. Die Endlosigkeit der Ebene, die auch ein Fluss und der (zudem meist niedrige) Wald nicht unterbrechen konnten, wollte uns immer mit einem Gefühl von Verlorenheit betrügen, und so befand sich der Blick immer wieder bei der Fahrt von Wolken, den Farben des Abends und bei den Sternen. Aber da hielten die Worte nicht mit.17 [The first thing we learned here was seeing. The landscape, scanned again and again, seemed not to respond to us. The endlessness of the plain, which even a river or the forest (which was anyway mostly low) could not interrupt, wanted to deceive us with a sense of lostness, and thus one’s gaze kept turning to the clouds’ travelling, the colors of evening and the stars. But there words left us.]

This landscape has elements of what German war historian Vejas Liulevicius calls, with reference to the East, a “mindscape,” meaning “the mental landscape conjured up by looking out over an area: ways of organizing the perception of a territory, its . . . features and landmarks.”18 Although Wolf did not himself refer to Bobrowski as a model, he was very much aware of the subjectivizing of history Christa Wolf—following Bobrowski—was developing at the same time as Mama, ich lebe, in her novel Kindheitsmuster. His 1977 public discussion with her brings this out, in terms of a loss of the old assurance he had still had in Ich war neunzehn with respect to the historiography of the Second World War. In the earlier film he had felt that his privileged position as émigré “gave him the right” to help others work through their Nazi past. In Mama, ich lebe, he “saw himself in the position of having to work through something [etwas zu bewältigen] himself.”19 As we shall see, this “working through” entailed also a parabolic reflection on his own position as a quasi-official filmic historiographer of DEFA, as an artist working under state patronage.

Episodic Construction These observations help to flesh out an intuition of Knut Hickethier’s from the 1990s about this film: namely: “in Mama, ich lebe . . . haben sich diese kleinen Dinge, die zwischen den grossen Ereignissen wie der Kitt zwischen den Einstellungen sitzen, in den Vordergrund geschoben, sind zur eigentlichen Sache geworden” (In Mama, ich lebe . . . the little things that sit between the big events like glue between the shots, have become the main focus).20 What Hickethier calls “diese kleinen Dinge” are what

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we have specified as contemplative landscape moments, or the emotive role of musical interludes such as the two women singing a Russian folk song near the end of the film. This loose, episodic construction is part of DEFA’s neorealist inheritance, which according to Joshua Feinstein meant that DEFA films’ real program was not depicting socialist Utopia but rather “the triumph of the ordinary.” In this respect, Mama, ich lebe transfers the understated, localized, episodic construction of Der nackte Mann auf dem Sportplatz from the genre of the Gegenwartsfilm to that of the antifascist film. Yet here, in Wolf, what is breaking apart the ostensible narrative is anything but ordinary or everyday. What he has produced with this film is almost an antifascist L’Avventura (Antonioni, 1960), for the earnest mission of the four young men is not only misrealized at the end, deprived of its expected heroic dénouement, but also seems marginal to much of their real actions. They are told near the beginning that they will die in one of two ways: either bravely, within view of their comrades, or “like a dog,” unseen and alone. But neither of these tragic possibilities is realized in the film: the three who die simply disappear, their death left unexplained by Glunsky, who reports it to their surviving comrade. It is as if they had just vanished into the endless Russian forests, much as they do in one scene in pursuit of the enemy German soldiers who shoot Kolya. The penultimate shot of the film, which pulls back into the woods from Becker and Svetlana, who are standing at the edge of the trees, also suggests this silent disappearance. Here as in Tarkovsky, or as so often in Antonioni’s temps morts, what remains is the silence of nature. The sepia photograph, returning at the very end to close the film, remains thus in a sense an unsolved enigma.

Film as Parable How can one bring together these various observations about Wolf’s film into an overall interpretation? Neither landscape theory or film music, taken on their own, could provide one that would not do violence to the text, producing a forced reading from only one angle that overlooks the many peculiarities of the film. These last can only make sense if we see Mama, ich lebe as a filmic parable. The term has much solid evidence, both aesthetic and sociological, to recommend it. Not only was Brecht—whose importance for Wolf still needs further investigation—one of the most important modernist figures in the revival of the old parable form, with parabolic theatre pieces such as Der gute Mensch von Szechuan, but the didactic aesthetics of parable lay at the very foundation of GDR culture. One of the first theatrical performances in the GDR was Lessing’s Nathan der Weise, with its humanistic parable of the rings at the end. In this reference to Lessing, as in many other aspects of its cultural policy, the GDR consciously sought to return to an eighteenth-century

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Enlightenment model of Kultur-als-Didaxe (culture as teaching), paradigmatically in the Kulturbund and Johannes Becher’s model of a Literaturgesellschaft (society of literature). The humanistic moral conscience of this didactic culture continued to inform GDR literature as an alternative public sphere, one holding up hopes of a reform socialism despite the latter’s impossibility in practice: the author most crucially affiliated with this position was Christa Wolf.21 Yet parable was a two-sided weapon in socialist societies. Scholars of Soviet literature have long recognized that parable could be an indirect way of formulating critique in Aesopic language, or what Brecht called Sklavensprache (slave speech).22 There are many instances of this in GDR literature (one thinks immediately of Stefan Heym). This would be, if one will, the allegorical Kafka-wing of the modernist parable, in complement to the Brechtian one. Even beyond this, however, daily life itself in socialism came to take on parabolic dimensions, due to the double-bind or -loop of private life’s constantly having to take on the official functions of the citizen, in a context where private and public had been de-differentiated under the overarching dominance of the political.23 Signs alone came to signify more and other than reality in such a system. This explains the considerable difficulties involved in trying to decipher Konrad Wolf’s filmic parables. Many of his films may be considered parabolic, whether Professor Mamlock, Der geteilte Himmel, Ich war neunzehn, Der nackte Mann auf dem Sportplatz, or Mama, ich lebe. On one obvious level, we can see parabolic elements in individual sequences of these films, miniature Lehrstücke such as, in Mama, the sequence of Volodya’s death, or Pankonin’s chair-building. But the overdeterminations of Wolf’s parables are multiple and at times conflicting. As has already been mentioned, Gertrud Koch singled out one episode of Mama, where the Russian officer Svetlana tells Pankonin about her Jewish neighbor back in prewar Russia, his happy life with a blonde wife and many children, as a parable malgré lui, an involuntary betrayal of an otherwise concealed Jewish subtext to Wolf’s film. Koch comments on this scene as follows: The story of the Jew is that of a lost paradise, the image of which is now projected onto the motherly figure of the Russian woman. A secularized version of the story of salvation, in other words, a subjective memory, that erratically comes to a standstill in the film and is not rendered more plausible by its compulsive subordination within a didactic scene . . . Such mythological metaphors express the confusion of identities which Konrad Wolf attempts to press, with dramaturgical means, into the corset of political texts and doctrines and which then re-surface as the omnipotence of remembered images, images of being a foreigner in one’s own home.24

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This criticism resonates with doubts about the love affair of Pankonin and Svetlana, doubts felt not only by the film’s first viewers but also by the actors themselves at the time of production. Uwe Zerbe, the actor who played Pankonin, later said that Terekhova found this love story extremely unlikely.25 But this romantic episode in the film abuts directly onto Pankonin’s flashback to why he had deserted to become an antifascist in the first place, which it frames at both ends. An extremely telling cut from the face of a young Russian woman who spits at Pankonin after he has been taken prisoner, to the face of Svetlana (112ʹ45ʺ), both positioned in the same way within the frame, drives this parallel home. Pankonin’s love for Svetlana is inseparable from the desire to atone for his guilty conscience at having been implicated in the deliberate shooting of Russian POWs. The second love episode follows directly on Becker’s statement to Kowalewski: “Eigentlich enorm, dass sie uns so vertrauen” (Actually a tremendous thing that the Russians trust us so, 118ʹ22ʺ), as if to illustrate the improbable enormity of this trust by extending it to love. When Svetlana finally reaches over to touch Pankonin, it is only when he tells her—in negation of the central longing of all four men for Heimat—that he “will not go home.” Their love is thus under the sign of death and Pankonin’s tragic consciousness from the start, and it is ironically accompanied not only by the dissonant woodwind chords of the film’s beginning but also by the BBC’s Morse-code “V for Victory” signal from the radio. Koch’s critical commentaries on the effects of a half-hearted acknowledgment of the Holocaust on Wolf’s film aesthetic, producing a disjunction between affective image and didactic text, remind one of another lifelong exile or émigré centrally concerned with history, namely Siegfried Kracauer. If Kracauer also rarely made specific reference to the Holocaust in his own work on film and history after 1945, under pressure from a Cold War ideology opposed to that defining Wolf’s position, this may also be related to a split in his thinking between materialist concretion and a nostalgic longing for a sense of being at home. The conflict between the real horror of the Holocaust and Kracauer’s stubborn belief in the redemptive power of optical representation results, in his last work, History: The Last Things before the Last, in “a flight into the imaginary, into helpless paradoxes, which is the shape of something that can only be thought of as the idea of reconciliation with the dead.”26 This is most evident in the chapter in History devoted to Ahasverus, the Wandering Jew, who is Kracauer’s allegory for the exile as historian. Of him, Kracauer wrote: “To be sure, his face cannot have suffered from aging, but I imagine it to be many faces, each reflecting one of the periods which he traversed and all of them combining into ever new patterns, as he restlessly, and vainly, tries on his wanderings to reconstruct out of the times that shaped him the one time he is doomed to incarnate.”27 If Konrad Wolf’s brother Markus was, in the title of his autobiography, The Man

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without A Face,28 then Konrad was, like Kracauer’s Ahasverus, one with many faces. In this, he became himself one of the parables or “paradoxes” he illustrated in his films. Thus the most fundamental parabolic tension in Wolf’s films may be one between antifascist parables and self-reflecting parables of the artist under socialism—exemplified in Der nackte Mann auf dem Sportplatz, but present in one way or another in many of Wolf’s films. Another parable of particular relevance to Wolf’s own biography, and present both in Ich war neunzehn and Mama, ich lebe, is that of the prodigal son. Wolf’s version of it has a particularly modern aspect, for as in Rilke’s rewriting of the same parable at the end of Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, his son cannot come home. Mama, ich lebe is insistent in its ironizing of the four young men’s unrealizable desire to go home, to reach their lost Heimat. The main reason they give for joining the antifa group is less an ardent wish for socialism than the statement: “Ich will nach Hause gehen.” That they never do so speaks also for Konrad Wolf’s own sense of homelessness in the GDR, his nostalgia for the idealized Soviet Russia of his childhood, which also permeates the film’s idyllic landscapes and emotion-laden music that I have already mentioned. Again and again the rural peasant world of Russia, with its communal sobor’nost29 or Gemeinschaft, is shown in the film to be an organic Heimat only destroyed by Nazi invasion—and not, for instance, by the violence of forced collectivization or the famines of the 1930s.30 Central to the aesthetics of the parable is a rhetorical appellatory quality: the reader or viewer is called upon to solve a problem in the narrative through reflection and praxis. As Theo Elm described Enlightenment parables, one is given “Positionen der Uneinsichtigkeit” (positions of insightlessness)31 requiring correction. This is clearly the case with the four young men in Mama, who do not fully understand their own position or motivation as both antifascists and Germans. The deliberately unrealistic or idealized aspects of the narrative—the idealization of the Red Army, of life in prisoner-of-war camps, the pastoral idyll of nature— are similarly to be understood as parabolic Verfremdungen.32 Crucial to the active understanding of a reader or viewer of a parable is what Wolfgang Iser’s reader response theory called a Leerstelle,33 an empty place in the narrative that demands filling out. In Mama, ich lebe, it is chiefly the four young men’s oddly hollow characters that form this Leerstelle. That emptiness is one of historical allegory, for Wolf and Kolhhaase wanted the youthfulness of their protagonists to appeal to the young viewers DEFA was losing by the mid-1970s.34 In a sense, the incomprehension of the four antifascists anticipates that of younger viewers in 1977 who no longer understood the antifascist narrative.35 Wolf’s insertion of strongly emotive elements such as idyllic landscape and Russian war ballads was an attempt at emotional engineering to compensate for this: the emotional response

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that the young men traumatically cannot have is thus displaced (in a Freudian sense) to the soundtrack or the image, or to the hostile, silent stares of the local Russian villagers at German intruders, which stand in complementary relation to the consoling gaze at natural landscapes.36 Yet Wolf’s appellatory parable signally failed to reach its young viewers, a failure that caused the director some soul-searching—and eventually led him to that deliberate pact with Hollywood that would be Solo Sunny.37 For parables cannot function outside of a specific social context of conventions that mediate their reception.38 “Nur wo eine alte Ordnung geglaubt blieb, oder eine neue als verbindlich gepredigt wurde, behielt bis in unsere Zeit die Parabel ihr bescheidenes Renommee” (Only where an old order is still believed in, or a new one preached in binding fashion, has the parable kept its modest reputation until today).39 The non-autonomy of the parable as Lehrdichtung, its origins in an oral community, meant also its “Angewiesensein auf die Interaktionsgemeinschaft von Sprecher und Hörer” (dependence on the interactive community of speakers and listeners).40 The endless staged public discussions of DEFA film, whether in person or in newspapers, were an attempt at reinstating this old oral interaction community, so as to provide that archaic, preprint-medium intimacy of author or director with his public that is so typical of, for instance, Christa Wolf’s stance towards her readers.41 That that community failed in its function is the reason why Wolf’s cinematic parables sometimes remained closed to their intended public—and also why viewers have had difficulty deciphering them to this day.

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13: Solo Sunny (1980)

S

SUNNY (1980), Konrad Wolf’s last completed film, is significant not only within the director’s oeuvre but also in the history of DEFA film as a whole. It marks not only a generic breakthrough for a director otherwise better known for his antifascist films of the Second World War but also the tail end of a group of late-’60s and ’70s DEFA women’s films, and the last gasp of the final brief period of liberal cultural policy in the GDR at the end of the 1970s. That fleeting window of liberalization, moreover, ended right at the time the film was premiered, so that its reception and unusually lively public discussion was choked off before it could properly develop. The emigration of the film’s starring actress, Renate Krössner, to West Germany only a few years later (1985) further diminished its public resonance, for those who “fled the republic” immediately became personae non gratae, put under a ban of public silence, once they left. The film thus offers an unusual wealth of interpretative problems both in terms of production (its aesthetic form) and of reception and spectatorship. It can be read both generically, as a melodrama and star vehicle, and also sociologically, as a intervention (Eingriff) into public discourse on women and private life, an area where the GDR, like other Eastern European societies, had developed a domain called in German a Nischengesellschaft (niche society),1 which, if it was not always as political as the nascent civil societies of then-contemporary Poland or Czechoslovakia, nonetheless presented an alternative to official models of citizenship and managed public sphere. The “local genre” of the woman’s film, in its ambiguous relation to melodrama and star vehicle, will be seen as the vehicle for this intervention, as the ground where questions of form and reception intersect. As will become evident, the formal and generic questions raised by the film can only be answered through its reception. Although it is possible to view Wolf’s film through an auteurist lens, as the director’s cinephile response to other women’s films and melodramas made in West Germany and the United States at the time, in what follows I will seek to complement such attention to the immanent surface of the film with its reception history. Documenting that history is, in the case of the GDR, much more difficult than with Hollywood or New German Cinema, since public discussion of films was so highly regulated and even manipulatively staged by the state. Reader’s letters and newspaper articles cannot be taken at face value as representing spontaneous opinion

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but must be paired with archival material, including protocols of discussions behind the scenes at the studio (and eventually material from the central Stasi archives in Berlin). Wolf’s film was and is representative of these problems, not only because its director was a prominent public figure (head of the GDR’s Academy of Arts) but also since it was seen as an intervention in then-urgent public concerns. The ambivalence of both the film’s protagonist and its mode of address toward stardom will thus be shown to mirror a deeper one of its director toward his own social function as state-sponsored artist.

Genre and Mode: Woman’s Film and Melodrama Solo Sunny tells the story of a single woman in Berlin who is struggling, with only moderate success and even more moderate talent, to establish herself as a popular singer. The narrative shows not only her performances in both the capital and the provinces but also her conflicted relations with men, whether in her band or in private. None of her romantic relations work out, whether with the unengaged philosopher Ralph (whom she catches in bed with another woman), or with the bluff and well-meaning but insufficiently romantic taxi driver Harry. The film’s subject links it to other late DEFA films about women and it could also be compared with Susan Seidelman’s contemporary Smithereens (1982) about the similarly rough-and-tumble adventures of a woman in the New York punk scene. The story—once again scripted by Wolfgang Kohlhaase—was based on that of a real-life protagonist, Sanije Torka, whose life has since been documented in a 2008 film by Alexandra Czok.2 Care was taken by Wolf’s frequent collaborator, set designer Alfred Hirschmeier (who worked with Wolf on every one of his films from Der geteilte Himmel onward, except Mama, ich lebe) to reproduce real Prenzlauer Berg milieus. Unusually, Wolf did not work with his favored cameraman, Werner Bergmann, but chose the younger Eberhard Geick instead. When Renate Krössner, who played Sunny, left for the BRD in 1985 (after several applications to leave), the film could no longer be shown in the East; it has since attained a cult status in German film. Women’s films in East Germany were, like feminism itself, a disputed topic, to the point where their very existence as a genre was denied, even by women scholars (such as Christel Gräf) and women filmmakers (such as Helke Misselwitz).3 For much scholarship on East German film, the male-coded genre or style of neorealism has provided the key, with the result that even a film such as Wolf ’s Der geteilte Himmel (1964) could be subsumed under neorealism, thereby marginalizing its melodramatic aspects, its female author, and its heroine alike.4 The reasons for this neglect lie not only within the film industry. Daniela Berghahn notes that “Soviet and East German films about women made

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during the 1970s and 1980s . . . pursue no feminist agenda as such. Nor were they linked to a women’s movement.”5 Yet if these films do not pursue the same “agenda” as Western woman’s films of the time, they are certainly linked to a pursuit of women’s autonomy, albeit one defined differently than in the West. Irene Dölling has noted that due to changes in state policy since the mid-1960s, the “lived contexts [Lebenszusammenhänge] of women were changed in the GDR as in hardly any other land of the socialist bloc.”6 Nonetheless there exists not only important and still under-evaluated work by women directors but also a substantial corpus of films about women, many of which date from the 1970s and early 1980s. Among them would be Erwin Stranka’s Sabine Wulff (1978), Evelyn Schmidt’s The Bicycle (1982), Egon Gunther’s Her Third (1972), and Lothar Warneke’s Apprehension (1981). Reference to this group of films is important for contextual understanding of Sunny, in terms not only of production but also of reception. Beneath the stylistic differences that distinguish these films from each other, there is an overall continuity of thematic concerns. This allows us to see them as a “local genre,” in Barbara Klinger’s pragmatic sense, depending on “a process of definition arising from a particular institutional and social location.”7 It avoids simply projecting onto DEFA the “ideology of genre,” as a purely stylistic or auteurist reading would do.8 As with Western women’s films, this corpus is generically varied, including melodramas, comedies, and films that fit neither of those genres; their unity is defined rather thematically and in terms of address than in terms of invariant structure. There are, however, difficulties entailed in the critical model of the woman’s film. How can one assume a continuity between the weepies of the 1940s, on which Mary Ann Doane centered her work on this genre, and the more self-reflexive or at least open films from the mid-1960s onward?9 To take one instance: Karen Hollinger notes that “the woman’s film, a multifaceted film genre with a long cinematic history” was “transformed in the 1970s into what some critics have called the new woman’s film.” Hollinger cites Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman (1978) and Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) as examples,10 both films that have kinships with Solo Sunny. Yet she does not specify how this “transformation” took place. To the tauter narrative causality of classical melodrama, the later films preferred looser, more episodic narratives, and a breaking of the unity of melodramatic tone with comic or documentary moments; in this, they betrayed the enduring postwar influence of Italian neorealism and the European art film generally. If there are melodramatic aspects to women’s films of the 1960s and early 1970s, they are a matter of mode, not genre—thereby substantiating Linda Williams’s 1998 revision of melodrama as a pervasive inflection or mode.11 Yet many of the themes of the classical woman’s film persisted, along with a need for

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heightened dramatic treatment that would only increase over time (as will become evident). A look back at the generic description offered by Doane confirms this continuity. If we follow Rick Altman’s suggestion of a syntactic-semanticpragmatic approach to genre (reserving the pragmatic aspects for later discussions of spectatorship), we can begin with semantic or thematic aspects, which are easiest to identify. Semantic definitions of the woman’s film have leaned heavily on the melodrama—which was never definable in a structural-narrative sense as the Western could be—and Doane’s is no exception, “The films deal with a female protagonist and often appear to allow her significant access to point of view structures and the enunciative level of the filmic discourse. They treat problems defined as “female” (problems revolving around domestic life, the family, children, self-sacrifice, and the relationship between women and production vs. that between women and reproduction), and, most crucially, are directed toward a female audience.”12 Like their New Hollywood sisters, DEFA woman’s films expand traditional treatments of family to single mothers. Significantly, Sunny has as its central character an orphan, which thereby brackets out family conflicts. There are still other aspects recognizable from the woman’s film. Doane also mentions an “insistent iconography” of the genre: “. . . women and waiting are intimately linked, and the scenario of the woman gazing out of a window usually streaked by persistent rain has become a well-worn figure of the classical cinematic text” (2). In Sunny’s case, the window would have to be complemented by a mirror, an “insistent” iconographic feature of many of these films (including Karla [Herrmann Zschoche, 1965], Her Third [Der Dritte, Egon Günther, 1972], and Apprehension [Die Beunruhigung, Lothar Warneke, 1981). To these aspects we could add the motif of female friendship, and also potentially melodramatic moments such as Sunny’s attempted suicide (and subsequent interview with a psychologist) and her contemplated murder of Ralph, which is deliberately defused by Sunny’s low-key acting when he finds a knife in their bed. Thus the thematic aspects just listed do indeed pervade the body of DEFA woman’s films, yet we need to clarify their generic status still further. The blurry generic boundaries of women’s films in the GDR are evident in Daniela Berghahn’s chapter devoted to them, which ranges from Slatan Dudow’s Destinies of Women (Frauenschicksale, 1952) to Evelyn Schmidt’s The Bicycle (Das Fahrrad, 1982), thus covering the entire range from socialist melodrama to socially critical realism. (One could even conceivably include Kurt Maetzig’s Das Kaninchen bin ich [The Rabbit Is Me, 1965] as a predecessor).13 To clarify the status of these films requires historical periodization, marking off distinct periods within the woman’s film. The landmark films within the history of the woman’s film would be

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Figure 13.1. The potential melodrama of a planned murder is defused by understated acting. ©DEFA-Stiftung/Dieter Lück.

Wolf’s Der geteilte Himmel (1964) on the one hand, and Heiner Carow’s The Legend of Paul and Paula (1973) on the other. If Der geteilte Himmel inaugurates a “modernist” phase indebted to the French New Wave, Legend is the beginning of a return to melodramatic modes typical of the 1970s and 1980s, and exemplified in Solo Sunny. Thus rather than assuming an unchanging unity between woman’s film and melodrama, the relation between these two can be historicized. Melodrama becomes a kind of limit case or boundary of the woman’s film: in older 1940s films, whether Doane’s Hollywood ones or the UFA pictures that continued to influence DEFA in the 1950s, the two largely coincide. In the 1960s, under the influence of television and European modernist cinema (especially the New Wave and cinéma vérité), they diverge; by the mid-1970s they converge again. Thus in DEFA, too, the woman’s film is “criss-crossed by other genres,”14 and not simply coterminous with melodrama,15 although for different reasons than in Hollywood. This coexistence of different conflicting strands or strata in Solo Sunny has again historical roots in the context of DEFA film, where genre had an uneasy status. Within DEFA, a decisive turn to melodrama was made with The Legend of Paul and Paula (Heiner Carow, 1973), like Sunny a runaway box-office success, and one which made theatre actress Angelika Domröse into a star. Paul and Paula is important because it marks what Thomas Elsaesser, in the context of

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1970s Western European “retro-mode” films, has called “the taking back of neo-realism,” with its “amalgam of kitsch and sentimentality.”16 In DEFA this did not entail the rediscovery of the suspect glamour of fascism, but it did mean a turn away from the official aesthetics of neorealist sobriety that had long dominated DEFA film, in tandem with a shift of subject from public to private, political to sexual. The camp elements of Sunny, which refer clearly to Bob Fosse’s Cabaret (1972), would not have been possible without Paul and Paula beforehand. However, Paul and Paula, with its heroine’s concluding sacrificial death for the purposes of educating its hero, is not exactly a woman’s film (as its angrily critical reception by West German feminists testified).17 The film seems rather to return to precisely the old formulae of female suffering and pathos typical of the older melodramatic love story,18 although it does so in a half-ironic pop and camp mode, as if in quotations (thus the “legend”). Yet precisely Paula’s uncompromising pursuit of private happiness in the present, and the depiction of the real difficulties of an uneducated worker and single mother, found considerable resonance among female as well as male viewers. Irene Dölling19 especially underlines Paula’s ancestry among sexually uninhibited female factory workers in the nineteenth century, an aspect anticipating Solo Sunny. The paradoxical romantic optimism of Paul and Paula did not persist beyond the middle of the 1970s. Beyond the obvious thematic resemblances to Doane’s melodramatic woman’s film listed above, something like a generic convergence toward melodrama can be detected from the mid-1970s onward. This stylistic shift parallels a thematic one in the depiction of women, “from models to misfits” (Rinke). The turn away from women’s careers to their private lives in the 1970s seems to have required the deployment of generic means used to depict questions of romantic love and motherhood. Moreover, melodrama went hand in hand with a tightening of censorship in the GDR by the later 1970s. Steve Neale has described melodrama less as the crisis of an order than “a crisis within it, an in-house rearrangement,”20 and the melodramatic turn in DEFA, too, can be seen as a loss of earlier optimism about the possibilities of transforming the GDR, an optimism palpable in the New Wave- and Direct Cinema-inspired aesthetic of the 1960s. Solo Sunny is paradigmatic of this as well. Melodrama within woman’s films must also be understood as a tactical outreach to audiences, an appeal to the spectator, on the part of a state cinema that had considerable trouble finding a popular base. This can be illustrated via an American parallel. The return to melodrama that we find in films like Until Death Do Us Part (Bis dass der Tod euch scheidet, Heiner Carow, 1979) and Sunny interestingly parallels a similar tendency in New Hollywood at the time, which was, like DEFA, caught between the Scylla of artistic ambition and the Charybdis of audience expectations, unable to

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do justice to both at once. The melodramatic mode thus expressed real institutional strains in DEFA: it had thus an implicitly allegorical function. In the American context, Thomas Elsaesser has described this predicament in terms of a conflict between a more modernized, episodic narrative construction eschewing the usual Hollywood plot formulae with their demands of stringent causality, and a need for direct emotional appeal: It appears that directors opt for a kind of realism of sentiment that tries to be faithful to the negative experiences of recent American history . . . By foregoing the dramaturgy of interpersonal conflict, suspense, intrigue, or the self-alienated aggressiveness of emotional frustration, the films are somehow led to stylizing despair or helplessness into the pathos of failure . . . pathos provides the emotional closure to an open-ended narrative and retrieves affective contact with the audience.21

Like post-Vietnam and post-Watergate Hollywood, DEFA, too, had its “negative experiences of recent history” in the background—namely the Biermann affair of 1976. Elsaesser sees this change in filmic form in terms of a resigned return to familiar topics, in order to “keep open the lines of communication with a mass public” (288): In search of a new realism, [Robert] Altman and [Monte] Hellman after periods of experiment . . . can now be seen to return to the realm of the thematic material that is, as it were, culturally coded and already cinematically sanctioned . . . The price of relevance to the historical moment seems to be an acknowledgment of the reigning ideology and the condition of realism in this situation is the emotional stance of defeat. (287–88)

In DEFA, this “price of relevance” meant rather an “acknowledgment” of the bankruptcy of the “reigning ideology,” and not its triumph. But here, too, as in New Hollywood, the reliance on material that was already “cinematically sanctioned” led to what Noel Carroll has described as a cinema of allusion,22 a cinema of stylized nostalgia for lost authenticities. We can find this poetics of nostalgia in virtually all Konrad Wolf’s work after 1968. In Ich war neunzehn, Mama, ich lebe, and Goya, Wolf’s nostalgia was for the lost historical authenticity of antifascism and the Revolution. Here, on the contrary, it is for the audience appeal of popular American genre cinema. In every case, though, Wolf’s poetics of allusion takes the form of meta-cinematic references that might seem to give his work an auteurist consistency. However, this dimension needs to be seen in its sociological context, and not simply inserted into a canon of Great Masters. This inevitable question of auteurism brings us to one last stylistic comparison, before turning to the problem of the paradoxical function of

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stardom and spectacle in Solo Sunny. For Sunny’s relation to melodrama is—certainly not by chance!—comparable to Fassbinder’s (and in some ways more to his middle period of domestic melodramas than his later historical ones).23 If New Hollywood was, in Elsaesser’s words, “the last Great American Picture Show,” New German Cinema may have been the last auteurist movement. Wolf and Fassbinder were both a swan-song of art cinema in its twilight hour, before both would be supplemented by the overt commercialism of what Eric Rentschler has termed the postWall “cinema of consensus.”24

Nostalgia as Reflexive Commodity Form: The Impossible Star The exemplary force with which Solo Sunny articulates the generic problems of DEFA previously outlined is linked to its reference to the star vehicle. The film’s melodramatic inflections reflexively stylize the problems of women’s status in the GDR, and DEFA’s ongoing difficulties in reaching a popular audience, as a failure or blockage of stardom. Wolf’s earlier films had, as noted, been increasingly marked by an aesthetics of nostalgia, whether for the revolutionary pathos of the French Revolution (Goya, 1971) or for the lost authenticity of antifascist engagement (Mama, ich lebe, 1977). In Solo Sunny, the nostalgia is for stardom, expressed in iconographic references. The veil over Sunny’s face in closeup, the glittering performer’s costumes, excessive unto camp, must be seen as recalling Marlene Dietrich. Again, this nostalgia is one shared with New Hollywood, whether in Cabaret’s Liza Minnelli or Klute’s Jane Fonda.25 In Wolf’s case, the nostalgia is one for popular genre cinema as such, for film’s commodity status, at once desirable and taboo in the context of the GDR. The character of Sunny, which partakes at once of Dietrich’s yearning artifice and Katharine Hepburn’s aggressive androgeny, performs the classical star function of both articulating and containing the contradictions of a society. The irony of this film and its protagonist, if considered against the backdrop of scholarship on the woman’s film, is that Sunny seems to be desiring precisely the grandly melodramatic spectacle and suffering that feminist theory has seen as suspect. Paradoxically, it was precisely this blocked desire to be desired that reached audiences and did indeed briefly make Renate Krößner into the star she could not be within the film: “Young East Germans reacted with enthusiasm and extensively modeled themselves on Sunny’s appearance and lifestyle.”26 Not only does Sunny try again and again to capture the attention of her audiences, but she also seeks deliberately to provoke in her private life as well, acting the part of the diva offstage, desiring to be desired both as star and as unusual, individual, or provocative. This extends from her

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outré clothing, which reminds one of New Wave fashion in its eclecticism and campy collage of quoted styles,27 to her deliberately melodramatic concealment of a knife in the bed of her lover, her constantly provocative talk and behavior, down even to her suicide attempt, which the film leaves deliberately unclear—that is, whether it was meant to succeed or not. Clearly she wants high dramatic “excess” in any form she can obtain it. The old psychoanalytical topos of femininity as masquerade is very much applicable to Sunny, who is so strong-willed as to be overbearing, and whose staged “femininity” appears to be a mask or act she is trying to put on or put over on her audiences. One might also ask whether the film should be seen as an example of a camp or even queer aesthetic, although again—in contrast to Paul and Paula—such aspects are deliberately held in check here, as will be shown. Thus it is not entirely ironic that the film itself stages the very blockage of stardom that is its subject. This happens not only at the level of the plot, which could easily have been treated in melodramatic terms. Although Sunny is linked to melodrama through the plot and subject elements listed earlier, its filmic treatment of these elements consistently evades their melodramatic potential. Certain elements of the plot bear the stamp of melodramatic coincidence: Ralph’s just happening to be in the next room, practicing saxophone, at the moment the band’s flutist is out of commission with a split lip, or Sunny’s happening to come back (unexpectedly) to Berlin the night Ralph is with another woman. Sunny’s failed suicide attempt and her (deliberately?) botched plan to murder Ralph are also both potentially melodramatic. Yet only Sunny’s discovery of another woman in Ralph’s apartment leads to real drama—Sunny bashes down the door to run in and grab her sheets literally from under the other woman— and even this is given comic touches (the other woman tries awkwardly to hide her nudity behind a liquor bottle once Sunny has snatched away the sheet). The overslept murder of Ralph, too, ends with an absurd image of Ralph dressed in a blanket, in obvious parody of a Hindu fakir, mocking not only his taste for Indian music but also his pretention to philosophical detachment. Both Harri the cabdriver’s humiliating bedroom rejection by Sunny and Sunny’s own tearful breakdown with her friend Christine are photographed with extreme discretion, showing only the backs of the protagonists’ heads at moments of great suffering. In the second of these sequences, the camera even pans away from the back of Sunny’s head to range over the grey rooftops of East Berlin, as we hear Sunny’s sobbing repetitions of Es geht nicht! When Norbert, the band’s flutist, sexually assaults Sunny in her bedroom, the brutal sequence of his striking her and her finally hitting him back with her shoe in self-defense is filmed without diegetic sound, thereby distancing the viewer from the violence (we do not hear the blows).28 The stop-motion photography at this moment—possibly borrowed from the end of Klute, where Charles

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Cioffi’s scuffle with Fonda before falling out of the window is similarly stopped—even distances the participants themselves, their faces caught in moments of shock and surprise, as if they do not themselves understand what is happening. Solo Sunny appears to straddle the distinction often made between melodrama and star vehicle, which tend to treat their often female protagonists rather differently—that is, if melodrama heroines are frequently idealized sufferers, star vehicles are about pleasurable spectacle.29 Similarly, the film brings together narrative and spectacle within one female character.30 (In the work of Laura Mulvey and Linda Williams, for instance, the reduction of woman to passive spectacle and fetish is opposed to male agency in narrative.) Sunny, like the protagonists of other DEFA women’s films, however, is shown as being quite actively in charge of her own life, however much resistance she meets with from a male-dominated environment. Thus the film leaves the causality of Sunny’s continued frustration undecided: is it her indifferent environment—as in a melodrama—or is her own performance itself too much, mismatched to its environment? As mentioned before, the film’s narrative balances its few melodramatic chance events with a larger episodic or epic tendency, consisting of a series of vignettes from Sunny’s life. The end, although guardedly hopeful, is still open-ended and not at all decisive. The editing, too, contributes to this epic, making sparing use of the dramatic fluidity of one associates with Ophuls’s camerawork, and little of the nervous mobility one finds at the end of The Marriage of Maria Braun.31 The mise-en-scène often distances itself, and thus the viewer, from Sunny’s performance. We are invited to see Sunny from an ironic, even slightly comical, distance, although without any cynical or trivializing condescension. This may be contrasted to Fassbinder and Schroeter, directors “whose mise en scène treated their actors as stars well before their talent or reputation legitimated them as such.”32 Such irony undercuts the Manichean opposition of innocent virtue versus conniving evil typical of melodrama,33 or the progression from innocence to knowledge Peter Brooks saw in the genre.34 What might be seen as potentially melodramatic would be Sunny’s search for recognition, her desire to be known, as Stanley Cavell had it.35 Sunny’s behavior may be melodramatic, but the film’s direction is not.36 Most telling, in a film where music is so central, is the film’s extreme reticence with its soundtrack. Again and again, in scenes where another director would have underlined the emotional significance with nondiegetic music, Sunny remains perfectly silent, whether during Sunny’s first kiss with Ralph, her windowside conversations with him, her discussion with the hospital doctor after her failed suicide, or during the painful non-romance with Harri. There is no music whatsoever for nearly ten of the most climactic minutes of the film, between her perceived failure

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to attract the audience’s attention during her solo and her car ride with Harri out of town, and none for some six minutes between her return home after finding Ralph with another woman and the beginning of her solo (this includes the scene with the botched murder). Sunny’s reticence becomes clearer if the film is contrasted with Until Death Do Us Part, which relies very heavily on melodramatic pathos from its opening sequence onward, not only in its soundtrack and its acting, but also in the script itself (wherein both Jens and Sonja insist with stubborn and selfdestructive blindness that love alone must conquer all difficulties). The most potentially melodramatic moments in the film are the closeups of Sunny’s face, whether during her conversations with Ralph or during her performances, or during the brief sequences when we see pictures of her framed or pinned to the wall. Not only her constantly varied hairdo, but also Krößner’s remarkable range of facial expression prevent these closeups from becoming too static or iconic. As Wolfgang Kohlhaase later wrote of her, “she was beautiful, but not only and not from all sides. One could gaze after her without immediately knowing what one thought of her. Her face consisted of various faces.”37 Krößner’s facial features thus inherently resist the kind of statuesque fixture associated with the Garbo closeup; in this she is again kin to Hepburn.38 Most affecting of all must be the final sequence, where we see Sunny’s face partly hidden between her hat and her foxfur, literally smiling through tears at the much younger band for which she will audition: here, at last, the filmmakers make an exception and provide non-diegetic music to underline the pathos of the moment, quoting Sunny’s own theme song by Günther Fischer. It is this theme song, insistently recurrent in various guises (with or without words), which more than any other aspect of the film renders it literally melodramatic. The visual climax of the film is the scene when Sunny performs it in her aforementioned Dietrich-like headdress, with many closeups, stylized blue lighting (reminiscent of Cabaret), and a striking shot of her against the band in shadow.39 The first word of the song, blue, is moreover echoed throughout the film’s blue tinted lenses, Sunny’s painting Ralph’s apartment blue, or even the blue note that gives the song its particular character (a major sixth in an otherwise minor-key context). Yet until the very end of the film this song is only heard diegetically; even at the end, we hear not Sunny’s voice singing the melody but a freer saxophone improvisation on the tune, as if to illustrate the main character’s need to improvise her own life to survive. The most frequent non-diegetic music, which is heard nine times in the film (thus more often than Sunny’s theme song, heard only seven times), is the tinkly, deliberately out-of-tune piano theme, with a bass line alternating between Alberti figuration and boogiewoogie or stride piano reminiscences: a kind of latter-day homage to Tin Pan Alley. If her “blue” theme song not only symbolizes but embodies her public stage persona, this non-diegetic piano music is associated with

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Figure 13.2. Dramatic lighting of Sunny (Renate Krössner) onstage. ©DEFA-Stiftung/Dieter Lück.

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Sunny’s multiple private setbacks and her doughty determination not to give up. The character of the music, at once childlike, naïve, and doughty in its simple stepwise motion—it is played without chordal harmony, as if with one finger, with the awkwardness of a finger-exercise or Chopsticks— can vary almost as much as Sunny’s face, being played at a slow, dragging tempo at sadder moments, such as during the drive with Harri out to the failed hotel romance. This reticence regarding non-diegetic music has the effect of reining in both the depiction of Sunny’s emotions and fantasies and the viewer’s (and listener’s) identification with it.40 In the theme song’s text, we are given The Legend of Sunny, or of her ambition to become someone, for the words talk of her in the future, “one day.” When Ralph composes the text, he pointedly asks Sunny to repeat the English words “the salt of tears,” as if quoting the essence of melodrama. The futurity of Sunny’s ever-deferred stardom is jarringly parodied in her nightmare near the film’s end, where she sees her empty apartment and hears people saying “Sunny lived here, there are traces of her here.” It is these traces or theatrical props—the celebrity-style photographs, the tape recorder (possibly also reminding one of Klute)—to which Sunny clings in her attempted self-definition; and it is their recognizability, and the song’s, which most give her star status within the film. In German, a recurrent theme song is called an Erkennungsmelodie or “recognition melody.”41 In Sunny, it serves not only for our recognition of the protagonist but also for her self-recognition; to paraphrase a term from Hegel’s philosophy that has returned in recent debates, we could call it an Anerkennungsmelodie.42 Anerkennung means not only recognizing a commodity brand name, or a star, but also a kind of moral respect; the trouble with Sunny is that she wants both to have her commodity stardom and eat it too (as respect). This search for recognition explains why Sunny appears to pursue precisely the status of woman-as-spectacle and consumer object once so sharply criticized by feminist film theory (Kuhn, Modleski, and Doane among others). In this, she is only continuing the project of The Legend of Paul and Paula: melodrama, spectacle, and commodity are the forms taken by the turn away from the responsibly civic and public role demanded of GDR citizens toward a less regulated private one. Here as in so much else, the culture of GDR socialism varied a pattern already familiar from the eighteenth century. Thomas Elsaesser famously wrote of that period: “Paradoxically, the French Revolution failed to produce a new form of social drama or tragedy. The restoration stage [. . .] trivialized the form by using melodramatic plots in exotic settings and by providing escapist entertainment with little social relevance.”43 In the earlier phases of DEFA, this could apply equally to the “melodramatic plots” of socialist realism, or the Cold War “escapist entertainment” of For Eyes Only (János Veiczi, 1963).44 Elsaesser’s judgment is less

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valid for the period from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, when DEFA was more successful at defining its own genres, such as the antifascist film or Gegenwartsfilm. Yet in the course of the 1970s, these “new forms of social drama” had clearly become less attractive than more overtly melodramatic films such as Paul and Paula or Until Death Do Us Part. The use of the star vehicle or performer genre helped both to enhance audience appeal—by highlighting Sunny’s difference alongside her ordinariness—and to defuse the nonconformity of her behavior. “The role of actress, as a medium for female self-assertion, is, and has long been, ideologically innocuous”; it works “to contain by enclosing the assertive, ‘masculine properties . . . in the category ‘professional actress.’”45 We can find the same duality in the way stardom is thematized by the film. Sunny’s “solo” refers both to her public performance at the film’s climax—that is, to her bid for artistic autonomy—and also to her desire to live differently and the high price she must for pay her autonomy in terms of personal solitude. The “solo” is, on the one hand, the negation of the socialist ideology of Gemeinschaft or community, which Lawrence McFalls has described as one built on “modesty, solidarity, and above all equality.”46 Yet the failure of Sunny’s bid reinforces precisely these values, reassuring the audience that she is, after all, not so different from them as to be incomprehensible. Her melodramatic bid for stardom stands in for the melodrama of GDR citizenship itself, with its continually frustrated aspirations, its paradox of wanting more freedom, but not so much as to undermine equality or solidarity. Thus, as with Fassbinder’s heroines of the same time, Sunny’s dramatic self-stylization also generalizes her into a kind of national allegory, a GDR variant of Germania performed as “excessively,” in her own way, as Hanna Schygulla’s.47 Wolf’s tactical use of generic patterns may also be contrasted with Fassbinder’s. The ironic and often deliberately provocative reappropriation of commercial genre formulae used by Fassbinder for affective purposes both resembles and differs from Wolf’s.48 Unlike Fassbinder, Wolf constantly evades potentially melodramatic climaxes, as has been noted; the discrete use of Solo Sunny’s music is also in stark contrast to Fassbinder’s excessive deployment of sound (most particularly in Lili Marleen). Nonetheless, Konrad Wolf was very much aware not only of Hollywood film and French and Soviet New Wave49 but also of what was going on on the other side of the Berlin Wall. The Marriage of Maria Braun predated Solo Sunny by only a year, and Solo Sunny received exactly that Silver Bear award at the Berlinale that Fassbinder coveted in vain for his own film. Although Solo Sunny is in some ways less complex than Fassbinder’s melodramas, lacking their dimension of historical retrospective and intertextual quotation of 1950s film, as well as the typical masochistic doublebind situation,50 there are also similarities. Wolf, like Fassbinder, worked

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for a filmic institution that had to work hard for its audience, and genre formula was one way to reach for the latter. Fassbinder’s women, like Sunny, are also very much playing roles, as outsiders who are nonetheless too active and clever to be mere mute melodramatic victims.51 Like Fassbinder, who so often made gramophones (The Merchant of Four Seasons, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant [both 1972], Why does Mr. R. Run Amok?[1970]), radio (Lili Marleen [1981], The Marriage of Maria Braun [1978]), and television (Ali—Fear Eats the Soul [1973]) into important contributors to characters’ self-staging, Wolf makes Sunny dependent on media technologies such as photography and the tape recorder to produce herself. As in Fassbinder, too, the complexity of this performance both asks for and renders difficult spectator identification (this will need to be returned to again). And just as Fassbinder had to reach his German public through the detour of Hollywood formula, Wolf reached for an East German public through a double loop, namely through Fassbinder’s Hollywood. Without Fassbinder’s example, Wolf would not have been able to make Solo Sunny. It is a testament to Wolf’s continued openness as a director that he could continue to learn from others so late in his career. Solo Sunny thus now emerges, like Fassbinder’s Brechtian melodramas of the 1970s, as a critical or reflexive form of melodrama, in that it both bids for spectator identification of a popular, that is, directly emotional, nature, and simultaneously requires a more distanced, detached evaluation. The difference between Fassbinder and Wolf is the difference between irony and humor. Where Fassbinder underlines the self-pitying melodramas of his figures with heavy irony, exposing the final randomness of the events they believe tragically necessary, Wolf interrupts or breaks dramatic moments with comic aspects—again a Brechtian aspect. The comic elements of Sunny are in fact not misogynistic, since they are optimistic: they show where tragedy will not work, and are thus inseparable from the guarded hopefulness of the film’s end. We may now look at our second problem, namely the social context of GDR women’s history against which the film profiles itself. This is especially pertinent given that since the 1990s film studies have moved away from the sorts of generic constructions of women’s films defined through psychoanalytic theories of the viewer, and toward more concrete historical investigations of spectatorship. The case of Sunny also offers an amount of documentation of viewer response that is unusual for DEFA. We will need to pay close attention to questions of women as spectators here, because the peculiar position of women in GDR society was a focus of film production during the last decades of DEFA, during a time when the GDR state shifted its emphasis from an earlier revolutionary Utopianism to a (failed) attempt to provide its citizens with consumer gratifications at least comparable to those available in the West.

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Spaces of Contingency: Interaction in Socialist Societies As is well known, Fassbinder’s melodramas refer back not only to Douglas Sirk but also to German films from the 1950s, films that have been analyzed recently in terms of female consumption and postwar citizenship. Given the current vogue for GDR consumer studies, and given that feminist film scholarship has often compared female film stardom to commodity aesthetics, it would seem logical to see Solo Sunny in this context as well. In such a reading, Sunny would stage not only “the desire to be desired,” but also, if one will, the desire to be a commodity, the ultimate desideratum. We could then see Sunny as a belated version of the “woman empowered by consumerism” who has been depicted by Victoria de Grazia, Erica Carter, Heide Fehrenbach, and others.52 Thus we could link Sunny up to a GDR equivalent of that “cultural consumption” that Uta Poiger has chronicled in her reception history of popular music in postwar Germany.53 There are, however, some historical problems with such a reading. First, the GDR’s attempt to become a consumer society had arguably come to an end by the mid-1970s. The TV advertising program “Tausend Tele Tips,” begun in 1960, was abruptly halted in 1976. Second, even before this, GDR ad culture was in constant contradiction with the consumer shortages of real existing socialism.54 Third, it might be slightly questionable to claim that GDR consumerism could somehow be a vehicle of “agency,” given that Erich Honecker’s policy after coming to power in 1971 was to pacify the populace through greater availability of imported consumer goods! (We can find the same phenomenon in Gierek’s Poland of the 1970s, with similar resonances in Polish film.) To compound the difficulty of assuming that any and all importations of American popular culture into the East were liberating, Günther Fischer, the musician responsible for the songs in Sunny, was an active Stasi informer. As this example shows, we should beware of importing “culturalist” interpretative models from studies of Western European and American cinema without being aware of the specific social and institutional context of Eastern Europe. It is still interesting to contrast the cheery optimism of the film that made Manfred Krug a star, Auf der Sonnenseite (Ralf Kirsten, 1962), with star vehicles such as The Legend of Paul and Paula and Solo Sunny. If, in Paul and Paula, there is still hope for rebuilding in the GDR—as evinced in the demolition of old buildings with which the film begins—that hope has considerably diminished by the time of Sunny, which seeks less to demolish the old Berlin Hinterhaus than to find pragmatic ways of surviving in it. If female stardom—which can be traced back to Angelika Domröse’s breakthrough in Dudow’s Verwirrung der Liebe (Love’s Confusion) of 1959—peaked later in the GDR

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than male stardom, it may also have had to do so in a peculiarly critical or reflexive form.55 It may thus be argued that Sunny marks the end of the GDR’s attempt to create its own consumer and star culture, an attempt that may be dated back to the early 1960s.56 Sunny cannot make herself into a desirable consumer product in a culture that did not manage to create the overall medial dispositif for such a strategy.57 For the same reason, she cannot enter into the cold contractual capitalist relationships of a Maria Braun, as analyzed by Elsaesser. To assert that her behavior can be explained through reference to these familiar consumer coordinates would be to wipe out the historical and sociological context of the film and see it through exclusively Western lenses. Sunny can, however, by means of her attention-catching strategies and deliberate provocations, and by making scenes, challenge the grayness and lack of spontaneity typical of socialist societies . As noted, GDR society was characterized by an ideology of Gemeinschaft or community, and of enforced solidarity. In the language of sociological modernization theories, the GDR did not differentiate its various social subsystems, whether artistic, economic, or scientific, preferring to keep them all under the domination of the political system. Society was viewed as a single organization with its summit in the State.58 Given this, any spontaneity on the part of individual subsystems was suspect and highly restricted. Not only that, but social interaction itself was subject to an unusual amount of regulation. We can see this vividly depicted in Solo Sunny, when Sunny is forced to answer for her “male visitors” to the police, to whom her aged neighbors have tattled. The state here serves as an authoritarian guarantor of a certain kind of highly regulated “community.” In historical terms, the independence of individual interaction from social organizations is a late development, one analyzed by writers as distinct as Émile Durkheim and Richard Sennett. One problem with state socialist societies such as the GDR was the lack of independence of interaction from state organization. It is precisely this independence of interaction that Sunny is seeking. Her deliberately outrageous behavior, her excess candor, her disregard for what Erving Goffman called “role distance,” are all means to provoke shock and spontaneity on the part of others, to break through the massive, gray “civil inattention”—another term from Goffman59—that was so typical of socialist societies. Another sociologist, Niklas Luhmann, has noted that the distinction of interaction and organization depends on what he calls “articulated contingency.” He adds: “The autonomy of the interaction system can however be so restricted that its course becomes colorless and uninteresting, and leaves no possibility open other than making mistakes.”60 There we have it: Sunny’s deliberate “mistakes,” her constant violation of unstated rules of communal “solidarity.” Even things like fashion

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or consumption are, in this view, less worthwhile in themselves than because they open up spaces of articulated contingency, spaces where one cannot predict the outcome of interaction. This is the freedom Sunny wants. Her extremism, her uncompromising stubbornness, are a typical trait of Wolf’s protagonists, which marks them off as authentic in heroic isolation from their context. Thus for Gregor Hecker in Ich war neunzehn (1968), the end of the war becomes a kind of existentialist test of his inner truthfulness. This heroism also distinguishes Sunny from other female figures in GDR women’s film, such as the heroine of Evelyn Schmidt’s The Bicycle (1982), who has nothing of Sunny’s histrionic grandeur about her, or even from the central character of Lothar Warneke’s Die Beunruhigung, who thinks much more than she acts out.

Reception History This background helps us to understand the real reception history of Sunny, how—despite the absence of unambiguous genre formulae or a culture of consumption, two aspects often tied by film and social historians to questions of women’s self-definition—the film met with such a strong identificatory response, especially (but not only) among younger women.61 If one reads the letters to the Berliner Wochenpost from February to April of 1980, contemporary viewers of the film indeed saw it largely in the terms that have been sketched in here. Sunny is recognizable as kin to Paula from The Legend of Paul and Paula in her “Glücksanspruch,” her claim to happiness; this claim is seen in terms of having personality, that is, being able to articulate one’s public action in spontaneous terms.62 On the one hand, many viewers, especially women, claimed that Sunny was one of them; on the other, Sunny is seen as unusual, as not average. This combination is, as Richard Dyer has noted, typical of stars. One woman wrote: “Sunny is a woman who has an image [Bild] before her, of herself, of her relations to other.”63 Another wrote that she saw the moral of the story as: “One can’t give up one’s I [Ich], one must fight one’s way through.” All this leads one to see that the director Konrad Wolf’s adaptation in Sunny of the moral form of audience address typical of many DEFA films, especially of antifascist films, worked quite well. Despite her apparent rebellion, the earnestness of Sunny’s claims to happiness stands directly in the tradition of socialist morality. This earnestness is poles apart from the knowing, winking, ironic conspiracy with the audience’s fantasies typical of Western European and Hollywood star vehicles, whether The Blue Angel (von Sternberg, 1930) or Gilda (Vidor, 1946), or even The Marriage of Maria Braun. Sunny naively believes in her role as authentic, and this gives her a pathos and a vulnerability different from that of a Dietrich or a Rita Hayworth. It is this peculiar moral of authenticity that

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accounted for Sunny’s success with GDR viewers. It is also this perceived authenticity that links Sunny to other films of the time, and allows us to see their common traits. What emerges from a look at the archives in Berlin is that the success of Solo Sunny proved to be a disturbingly uncontrollable runaway horse from the point of view not only of the GDR State but even of the director Wolf himself, who after his initial satisfaction at having reached his public so effectively, began to worry that the discussion over the film was bearing too much political weight! It is very clear from newspaper reviews and letters to the editor that considerable public discussion of the film did take place, discussion that was not entirely staged or managed by Party officials. How did the State respond to this? To what extent was this public debate in fact encouraged by the State as a legitimation of its rule?64 On this, extant documents are not entirely clear. The historical background should be sketched in a little here. A few years before the release of Sunny, in 1976, the popular singer Wolf Biermann had been forcibly expatriated from the GDR for his reform socialist opinions: his passport was revoked during a concert trip to West Germany, and he was not allowed to return. This provoked a wave of protest from many writers and intellectuals in the GDR, including Christa Wolf; Konrad Wolf, however, took the side of the State against Biermann. By 1978 this controversy had cooled to the point where a new course of relative openness could be envisaged by the regime. This was the period when Heiner Carow was producing his controversial marriage drama Until Death Do Us Part (1979). In the discussions between the functionaries Kurt Hager and Hans-Dieter Made, one sees a desire to tolerate a certain amount of controversy, as long as it was kept within limits. Thus Made wrote to Hager on March 26, 1979: “I think it urgent that although we may evaluate [Carow’s] film critically in some of its artistic exaggerations, within the whole spectrum of our film productions, we may claim it as a proof of a wealth of conflict.” Hager wrote at the same time: “We will accept problematic film scenarios in appropriate dosages, so that they do not endanger the development of the main line.”65 In other words, the State wanted a little conflict, a little initiative from its citizenry, but not too much. We can see the same decorous desire for moderation in Made’s notes from January 18, 1979, where he states why the GDR did not want to make a film of Klaus Mann’s novel Mephisto (which was eventually made in the West by Istvan Szabo in 1981): Made saw the novel as too controversial and did not want the DEFA studio to get drawn into processes of scandal-making—that is, precisely the sort of publicity often sought by film studios in a market economy. With characteristically academic concern for scholarly accuracy, he went on to say that one should not make such films without first consulting with professors re the historical record. At such moments the schoolmasterly aspect of DEFA’s pedagogical purpose

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becomes very evident. (One can easily imagine Made’s horrified reaction to even more scandalous projects, such as Fassbinder’s.) What is most striking is that Wolf himself, after initial satisfaction, began to feel uneasy about the ongoing discussion of the film. This emerges clearly in a discussion with Wolfgang Kohlhaase (the scriptwriter), the poet Franz Fühmann, and others on June 24, 1980. Konrad Wolf noted: “there is now a kind of overburdening of the film,” that is, the film was made to bear too much political weight, to stand in for too great a lack of freedom in the rest of civil society.66 Fühmann went on to add that this was true of all art in the GDR. It emerged in the discussion that Wolf was almost afraid of the demand made for Lebenshilfe (practical advice for life) that people addressed to his film, and pointed out that more was being read into it than he had intended. This was, of course, a direct result of the politicization of every sphere of life in socialist society, of the lack of differentiation between the public or political and the private spheres. The film’s demarcation of a distinct private sphere was felt to be an Eingriff (intervention) into political questions, and although Wolf had himself argued for an “interventionist” (eingreifend) role for the East German Academy of Sciences (of which he was president), he could only back off timidly in practice when his film actually succeeded in becoming such an intervention. The potential unleashing of spontaneous energies from a hitherto-repressed GDR civil society was too much for a State artist. The result of this is that when Gunter Agde wanted to publish a selection of the newspaper reviews and letters, together with a transcript of the aforementioned public discussion with Wolf and Kohlhaase, Wolf and the Berlin publisher (Henschel Verlag) began to drag their feet by the end of 1980.67 The nascent public sphere, evidence of cultural energies from a civil society that could not entirely be regulated, was thus suppressed before it could take on too much life of its own. Agde confirmed in conversation with this author (June 2007) that there was internal opposition to this publication at the time. (A likely candidate would be Roland Bauer, first Party secretary of the Berlin Bezirksleitung, a hardline Stalinist known for his censorship of theatrical productions.68) It is not surprising that there was backpedaling at this time from the Party, since this was a time of economic crisis in the GDR, and also the time when the Solidarity movement was peaking in Poland (1980 was a year of workers’ protests, and in 1981 General Jaruzelski would impose martial law). When Rainer Simon’s 1981 Jadup und Boel was banned, it was clear that the last brief window of liberalization in DEFA that had begun around 1977–78 was over. (Christa Wolf, a personal friend of the director, was of the opinion that Konrad Wolf died in 1982 at a point when he could see no way ahead for him or for his country.69) Thus even a film as popular as Sunny could not but generate an “archival” latency around it, in this case one of a suppressed reception or stifled Öffentlichkeit.

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Yet some of the social problems addressed by Solo Sunny have persisted even after German unification. As Marc Howard (59) remarked, the “private, anti-political attitude” of East German niche-society did in fact manage to condense into a distinct “GDR culture,” and film was very much one of its architects. That culture, or subculture, has continued to this day to define itself through the problematics of recognition or Anerkennung, although recognition is now desired notfrom the GDR state but from West Germans. The central problem of Solo Sunny has thus metamorphosed into one of recognizing erstwhile East Germans and their real existing history. That this problem has not always been made easier by former East Germans themselves may also have been anticipated by the complexity of Sunny’s own behavior. Beate Rössler, a German social theorist, has pointed out in a feminist critique of Honneth’s model of a “struggle for recognition” (mentioned earlier in this essay as a possible key to understanding Sunny’s demand for Anerkennung), that Honneth’s category of recognition suffers from multiple unclarities. On the one hand, recognition is seen chiefly in terms of a “socially relevant achievement,” such as work. On the other, distinct social domains such as work and love are blurred together.70 Unlike Liza Minnelli in Cabaret, who understands very clearly that love will get in the way of her career ambitions, Sunny cannot separate the two: she wants to be loved for her singing as much as have the latter recognized as art. The last-ditch bid for spectatorship and popularity made by the Wolf operated with a similar confusion: the film’s subtitle might have been borrowed from a Fassbinder film, I Only Want You to Love Me. The “desire to be desired” of the GDR state, and of its citizens after the Wende, was similarly ambiguous. Rössler’s criticisms of Honneth point to the limits of a liberal reading of Sunny as merely a struggle for recognition. Is simply being included via recognition into the socialist community of people (sozialistische Menschengemeinschaft)71 all that Sunny wants? How would her deliberate stepping on the hand of an older woman neighbor who is cleaning the stairs fit into this? There is something not only in Sunny’s behavior but also in her social status, her position in society, that resists such integration; she is pulled at once in two directions by her eccentric social position, both backward and forward, a Janus-faced figure. On the one hand, Sunny looks toward the past, as an orphan, for orphans have been important figures for the evolution or even engineering of society since the eighteenth century (that crucial historical origin of so much of the GDR’s culture).72 On the other, as a product of the new society that the GDR had created through its support for women’s rights, and of the eroding of traditional family structures, she could be described as looking to an as yet undefined future, in the form of what Christopher Nealon has called a “foundling.” In Nealon’s terms, the foundling is defined both by “an exile from sanctioned experience, most often rendered as the experience of participation

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in family life and the life of communities and, on the other, a reunion with some ‘people’ or sodality who redeem this exile and surpass the painful limitations of the original home.”73 As such an outsider figure who does not fit into the texture of existing society, Sunny can even begin faintly to resemble a figure who has recently become emblematic for exploring the implications of social marginality—namely Antigone, paradigmatically discussed by Judith Butler in an influential book.74 Butler’s view of Antigone is clearly profiled against a rational liberal politics of inclusiveness and tolerance;75 commenting on Hegel’s reading of Antigone, she adds: “for Antigone, according to Hegel, there can be no recognition with desire” (14). Antigone is defined by the impossibility of representing her or her desire within a rational liberal commonwealth, within the Hegelian state as personified by Creon: “Antigone finds no place within citizenship for Hegel because she is not capable of offering or receiving recognition within the ethical order” (13). This ethical order (Sittlichkeit) depends itself on kinship, implying that the state also does. Yet Butler’s reading, in a game of oneupmanship, outbids Hegel’s and even Irigaray’s view of Antigone as “one who articulates a prepolitical opposition to politics” via kinship (2), since for Butler, “Antigone comes to represent kinship in its dissolution” (3). “Antigone represents not kinship in its ideal form but its deformation and displacement” (24). In her characteristic deconstructive manner, Butler seeks, with Antigone, less to oppose a realm of nature (kinship, blood, the maternal) to one of culture (state, citizenship, masculinity) than to blur or muddy these distinctions altogether, to show up their instability. Against this, Antigone can only oppose melancholy (78) and the death drive (54); she has herself no definite identity with which she could oppose the state or Sittlichkeit, since she is, for Butler, “not quite a queer heroine” (72), a latency or indefiniteness kin to that of Nealon’s foundling. If Butler and her critics agree on anything, it is that Antigone stands for a chance to rethink the politics of public and private, of citizenship, kinship and gender. Solo Sunny offers such a chance in a specifically East German context. Like Antigone, Sunny is at times depressive to the point of attempting suicide, and “will only love a man who is dead” (60)— in Sunny’s case, Ralph, whose favorite place to walk is a cemetery, who listens to Indian music and is made in one comical shot to look like a fakir (in his blanket, after Sunny has considered killing him), and who is apparently without affect in his sexual relations. Like Nealon’s foundling, Sunny almost seems to want to assemble her own ersatz “family” via the band, or her network of friends.76 (The complete absence of families from this film is remarkable; more work could be done on representations of the family in DEFA.77) The very last scene of the film, where she auditions with a younger group of musicians, shows her attempt to reintegrate herself in the GDR’s subculture after being kicked out of Die Tornados,

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the breakdown of her relation with Ralph, and her failed suicide. Rather than simply pasting Antigone (as a kind of “ideal type”) onto Sunny, however, we need also to historicize and contextualize the similarity. The dissolution of Sittlichkeit that Butler finds in Antigone was, in the GDR, a very real and concrete phenomenon, not merely one of social theory; the social theorist Andreas Wildt diagnosed what he called “a hopelessly destroyed Sittlichkeit” in the later GDR.78 In less dark terms, Donna Harsch has argued that “gender relations and domestic issues were major stimuli of the metamorphosis of the ‘classic Stalinist system’ into the ‘welfare dictatorship’ and ‘consumer socialism.’”79 It is these changes in GDR society that Sunny successfully articulated, to the point that she became an emblematic figure for late DEFA. Referring her outsider status to that of Antigone is a means of describing that emblematic or almost mythic quality, in the work of a director and a studio system that both often made use of parabolic narratives.80 That Sunny was such a breakthrough for Wolf and for DEFA was also related to the film’s rewriting of some of DEFA’s fundamental narratives: to the predominance of father-son conflicts in so many DEFA films, from Der Untertan to the Kaninchenfilme, wherein younger male protagonists are shown as caught, Hamlet-like,81 in a family and state nexus they cannot change, Sunny opposes a new narrative option, a space partly outside these older conflicts. Like Antigone, Sunny stands for two conflicting ideals: “equality and singularity,”82 represented in the film by her combination of ordinariness and stubborn individualism, which made her appealing to GDR viewers, especially women. In this central combination, the film’s generic complexity, between melodrama and comedy, woman’s film, and star vehicle, become the means of articulating an optimistic political ideal of female autonomy—one that could however not be realized outside of cinema.

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Notes Introduction 1

Interview with Konrad Wolf, “Über bequeme Sessel und unbequeme Filme,” in Direkt in Kopf und Herz (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1989), 284–85. Unless otherwise specified, all translations are my own. 2

Bazin, What Is Cinema? vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 9. 3

In 1950 the East German state bulldozed the war-damaged remains of the Berlin Castle (Schloss), replacing it in the 1970s with the modernist Palace of the Republic; in 2006, Angela Merkel agreed to demolish the East German building and reconstruct the earlier castle, a project still underway and controversial to many.

4

The Literaturstreit or “literary debate” was a public controversy in German newspapers in 1990 about the value of a literary canon that, for many, was fatally compromised by its emergence in the dictatorial GDR state. For Ulrich Greiner (“Die deutsche Gesinnungsästhetik. Noch einmal: Christa Wolf und der deutsche Literaturstreit. Eine Zwischenbilanz,” Die Zeit, November 2, 1990), the literature of the GDR was fatally marked by what he called an “aesthetics of political conviction [Gesinnung].” An overview is given in Thomas Anz, Es geht nicht nur um Christa Wolf: Der Literaturstreit im vereinten Deutschland (Munich: Spangenberg, 1991). 5

Andreas Huyssen, “Authentic Ruins: Products of Modernity,” in Ruins of Modernity, ed. Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 27. 6

Kluge, Nachrichten aus der ideologischen Antike (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2008).

7

“träfe ein Blick von einem anderen Stern die Kunst, so wäre ihm wohl alle ägyptisch” (to a gaze from another star, all art would seem Egyptian). Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, Gesammelte Schriften 7 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 209. Adorno’s comment refers to what he perceived as the disappearance of the institution of high culture or art in its emphatic sense in the West, yet (as this book will argue) one can see Wolf’s twilit art as part of this larger dusk of art as institution. 8

“Engagement,” Noten zur Literatur III, Gesammelte Schriften 11: 419–20.

9

Dietmar Hochmuth, personal communication, June 2017.

10

Aber ich sah ja selbst, das war der Krieg: Kriesgtagebuch und Briefe 1942–1945, trans Jürgen Schlenker (Berlin: Die Möwe, 2015).

11

Claus Löser has made the same argument against Wolf’s auteur status: “Konrad Wolf war, wie die meisten namhaften DEFA-Regisseure, kein Autorenfilmer in dem Sinne, dass er über eine ganz persönliche Handschrift verfügte, die sich

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zweifelsfrei als solche identifizieren liesse. Er war in hohem Masse von den von Film zu Film verschiedenen Bedingungen abhängig, von den ihm zuarbeitenden Gewerken, vor allem von seinen engsten Mitarbeitern im Drehstab sowie beim Drehbuch” (Konrad Wolf was, like most of the notable DEFA directors, not an auteur director in the sense that he disposed of a personal “handwriting,” that was identifiable beyond doubt as such. He was highly dependent on conditions that varied from film to film, on the subsections doing preliminary work for him, above all on his closest collaborators on the production team and script). Claus Löser, “Liebe und Schuld im Zeichen des Holocaust. Konrad Wolfs Spielfilm STERNE (1959),” in“Welchen der Steine du hebst”: Filmische Erinnerung an den Holocaust, ed. Claudia Bruns et al. (Berlin: Bertz und Fischer, 2012), 309–20, here 314. Wolf himself denied that he saw himself as an Autor in an interview with Ulrich Gregor (“Ich betrachte mich nicht als Filmautor.” Gregor, Wie sie filmen: Fünfzehn Gespräche mit Regisseuren der Gegenwart (Gütersloh: Sigbert Mohn, 1966), 313, and also in another interview with Günter Netzeband, “Über bequeme Sessel und unbequeme Filme,” in Konrad Wolf, Direkt in Kopf und Herz: Aufzeichungen, Reden, Interviews. (Berlin: Aufbau, 1989), 285–86. In favor of a quasi-auteur status, it might be noted that Wolf worked with the same team of collaborators over a long period of time, such as Werner Bergmann (camera), Wolfgang Kohlhaase (script), Doris Borkmann (casting), Alfred Hirschmeier (set design) and Evelyn Schmidt (editing). He did not, however, use the same actors again and again, unlike most auteur directors (one thinks of Bergman’s relation to his actors and especially actresses, Wajda’s with Zbigniew Cybulski and Daniel Olbrychski, or Tarkovsky’s with Anatoly Solonitsyn). 12

Colin B. Grant, Literary Communication from Consensus to Rupture: Practice and Theory in Honecker’s GDR (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995). 13

For recent work emphasizing that realism is also a variable code or language and not an invariant form of hetero-reference, see Volker Pantenburg, “Neo-, Sur-, Super-, Hyper-. Realismuskonzepte im Kino,” in Die Wirklichkeit des Realismus, ed. Veronika Thanner, Joseph Vogl, and Dorothea Walzer (Munich: Fink, 2016), 69–84; Guido Kirsten, Filmischer Realismus (Marburg: Schüren, 2013). Both Pantenburg and Kirsten note that there is more than one “realism,” that concepts of “realism” vary over time, and that realism is a code of reading or interpretation as much as it is an aesthetic of production. 14

Anne Barnert points this out in the conclusion to her Die Antifaschismus-Thematik der DEFA: Eine kultur- und filmhistorische Analyse (Marburg: Schueren, 2008). 15

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), both directed by Kurt Maetzig. 16

This is the master narrative proposed by Joshua Feinstein, correct in substance, but needing some nuancing in detail. The Triumph of the Ordinary: Depictions of Daily Life in the East German Cinema 1949–1989 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 17

For censored films, two dates are given in this book, the first for the year of production and the second for the (delayed) premiere.

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18

As analyzed in equally exemplary fashion by Thomas Elsaesser in Fassbinder’s Germany (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 1989), a book we will need to refer to again here. 19

Annegret Schüle, Thomas Ahbe, Rainer Gries, eds., Die DDR aus generationengeschichtlicher Perspektive: Eine Inventur (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2006). 20

Jacobsen and Aurich, in Der Sonnensucher Konrad Wolf (Berlin: Aufbau, 2005), have excavated important material pertaining to Wolf’s half-Jewish ancestry (his mother, Else Dreibholz, was not a Jew, which makes Wolf’s position comparable to that of Adorno, another child of a Jewish father and Gentile mother), but questions still remain, not all of which the present book can answer: was, for instance, Wolf’s powerful identification with Russian culture a displaced manifestation of unacknowledged Jewishness? (A cognate syndrome could be found among German-Jewish emigrants to the United States.) The speculation is as unavoidable as any definitive answer is presumptuous.

21

To name only a few works: Mary-Elizabeth O’Brien, Post-Wall German Cinema and National History: Utopianism and Dissent (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012); Nick Hodgin and Caroline Pearce, eds., The GDR Remembered: Representations of the East German State since 1989 (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011); Nick Hodgin, Screening the East: Heimat, Memory and Nostalgia in German Film since 1989 (New York: Berghahn, 2011). 22

Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany, 7. It might be added that loosening this link to History does not require an “ahistorical” reading of Wolf—one that would be purely stylistic or textual, as much auteurist or mise-en-scène criticism was—but means rather a decoupling from a Hegelian or Marxist conception of history, which was the GDR’s own official one as well. 23

Aniko Imre, A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas (Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, 2012); Anikó Imre, ed., East European Cinemas (London: Routledge, 2005), with no chapter on DEFA; Ewa Mazierska, Lars Kristensen and Eva Näripea, eds., Postcolonial Approaches to Eastern European Cinema: Portraying Neighbors On-Screen (London: Tauris, 2014), also without discussion of DEFA; Pavle Levi, Disintegration in Frames: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Cinema (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007); Dina Iordanova, Cinema of Flames: Balkan Film, Culture and the Media (London: BFI, 2001).

24

André Bazin, “On the politique des auteurs,” trans. Peter Graham, in Cahiers du cinéma: The 1950s; Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave, ed. Jim Hillier (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 248–59, here 239. Originally “De la politique des auteurs,” Cahiers du cinéma 70 (April 1957): 2–11. 25

This stereoscopic view of film—as both art and not art alone, nonfunctional and functional—is not solely tied to Luhmann’s sociology, and thus need not bear any particular political point of view with it, either. Alain Badiou’s work on film also emphasizes that film is both a mass art and a mass art, for example, both “democratic” and “aristocratic.” See his Cinema, ed. Antoine de Baecque, trans. Susan Spitzer (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), especially the essays “The False Movements of Cinema,” 88–93, and “On Cinema as a Democratic Emblem,” 233–41;

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also Alex Ling’s comments in Badiou and Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 43–44. A good discussion of the usefulness, and also limits, of using Luhmann’s sociology in a GDR context is found in Henning Wrage, Die Zeit der Kunst (Heidelberg: Winter, 2008), 19–29. 26 This puts Wolf in relation to an interesting argument by Bonnie Honig in Antigone, Interrupted (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) on the “dramaturgy” (4) of interruption in Sophocles; Honig reads Antigone in part against Judith Butler’s take on her, seeing her “interruptions” as a sign for a possibly more hopeful politics of lamentation. Like Honig’s Antigone, Wolf’s interrupted melodramas are also an indirect sign of hope—in his case, for an escape from the fascist past, for a better future. We will return to this in the last chapter on Solo Sunny. 27

Interestingly, Andras Balint Kovacs, in Screening Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 84 sees postwar artfilms—such as Wajda’s or Antonioni’s—as linked to a melodrama of middle-class intellectuals. Wolf’s protagonists, by contrast, and in accordance with DEFA’s enduring attachment to neorealism, were more ordinary people than Wajda’s Maciek or Antonioni’s Giuliana (in Red Desert, 1964) or Thomas (in Blow-Up, 1966). Rita calls her own story ‘dull’ and ordinary; the four men in Mama, ich lebe are thoroughly average, and Sunny’s pathos lies precisely in the contradiction between her desire for recognition and her ordinariness. 28 Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, trans. Jussi Parikka (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 46. 29

Ernst, Im Namen von Geschichte (Munich: Fink, 2003), 86–87.

30

Das Gesetz des Gedächtnisses, 141 (film archives); 194 (GDR as archival state).

31

Derrida, Mal d’Archive: Une impression freudienne (Paris: Galilee, 1995); Foucault, L’Archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969). For a survey of uses of the term, see Marlene Manoff, “Theories of the Archive from across the Disciplines,” Libraries and the Academy 4, no. 1 (2004): 9–25. 32

Zuzana M. Pick, Constructing the Image of the Mexican Revolution: Cinema and the Archive. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011); Anke Pinkert, “Tender Males: Jewish Figures as Affective Archive in East German Film,” Studies in Eastern European Cinema 3, no. 2 (2012): 193–210, referring to Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Culture (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2003). For DEFA, see the chapters by Claudia Breger and Thomas Krüger in DEFA after East Germany, ed. Brigitta Wagner (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2014). 33

In German: Dietmar Schenk, Kleine Theorie des Archivs (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2007); in English, Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002). For practitioners of Medientheorie, the archive, like any other medium, inherently resists definition— “Nichts scheint dringender, aber nichts wäre auch fruchtloser, als definieren zu wollen, was Medien eigentlich sind” (“Nothing seems more urgent, but nothing would also be more fruitless, than to want to define what media actually are”). Bernhard Dotzler, Erhard Schüttpelz, and Georg Stanitzek, “Einleitung,” in Die

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Adresse des Mediums, ed. Stefan Andriopoulos, Gabriele Schabacher, and Eckard Schumacher (Cologne: DuMont, 2001), 9. 34

Vismann, Akten; Medientechnik und Recht (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2000); Ernst, Im Namen von Geschichte: Sammeln—Speichern—(Er)zählen (Munich: Fink, 2003); Ernst, Das Rumoren der Archive (Berlin: Merve, 2002). 35

For a discussion of Ernst’s recent work, see my review essay, “Media as Technology and Culture,” German Studies Review 37, no. 2 (May 2014): 405–16. 36

Ernst, Im Namen von Geschichte, 81–82; Das Rumoren der Archive: Ordnung aus Unordnung (Berlin: Merve, 2002), 7; Digital Memory and the Archive, trans. and ed. Jussi Parikka (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 194; Das Gesetz des Gedächtnisses: Medien und Archive am Ende (des 20. Jahrhunderts) (Berlin: Kadmos, 2007), 219.

37 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993), 380, §73; English: Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1962), 431–32. Ernst refers to this in Das Gesetz des Gedächtnisses, 34. 38

Joachim Paech, “Für eine Filmgeschichte der Medienwissenschaft,” Lili 132, no. 33 (2003): 125–32.

39

An example: Ebeling’s assertion that metaphysics and archives both work the same way (“Die Asche des Archivs,” in Das Archiv brennt, ed. Georges DidiHuberman and Knut Ebeling [Berlin: Kadmos 2007], 102–7). “Der Wahn dieser Einrichtungen [namely: metaphysics and archives, LP] besteht in ihrer eingestandenen Negativität; er besteht darin, jede Wirklichkeit an eine Wahrheit zu koppeln, die gleichermassen vergangen wie ausserhalb abrufbar ist” (106; The delusion of these institutions consists in their admitted negativity; it consists in coupling every reality to a truth, which is equally past and retrievable as if from outside). But this “negativity” is nothing other than that of language as such, which cannot simply paste “reality” into the symbolic. (Like Kittler, Ebeling overlooks the role of language and rhetoric on which his own ultimately “rhetorical” conception depends.) To this negativity Ebeling opposes an unclear conception of “das Reale” that oscillates between Lacanian overtones (of the non-symbolizable) and straight empirical givenness. There is a straw man argument going on here. On top of this, Ebeling multiplies double-binds to the point of vertigo: although the archive is about fixity of records, “das Verlangen nach seiner Zerstörung” (the longing for its own destruction) is born with it (123), yet “wer gegen sie [archive and metaphysics, LP] vorgeht, sichert nur ihre Macht” (124; he who opposes them only secures their power). Unsurprisingly, Ebeling can then read all archive history back to ancient Greece as exemplified in Kafka’s “Vor dem Gesetz” (122). 40

Knut Ebeling, Wilde Archäologien I: Theorien der materiellen Kultur von Kant bis Kittler (Berlin: Kadmos, 2012). The archive thus becomes a cultural leading metaphor (Leitmetapher) like the network On the function of such Leitmetapher, see now Alexander Friedrich, Metaphorologie der Vernetzung: Zur Theorie kultureller Leitmetaphern (Paderborn: Fink, 2015). 41

Wolfgang Ernst, “Medienarchäologie praktiziert etwas, das ich als den “kalten Blick” der Medientheorie bezeichne,” Medienwissen(schaft), zeitkritisch: Ein

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Programm aus der Sophienstrasse; Antrittsvorlesung (Berlin: Humboldt University, 2004), 6. 42

Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language: An Elementary Exposition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 34. The famous long footnote 24 on p. 35 also refers to this problem. 43

John P. Burgess, Saul Kripke: Puzzles and Mysteries (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 136, emphasis added. See also Jeff Buechner, “Not Even Computing Machines Can Follow Rules: Kripke’s Critique of Functionalism,” in Saul Kripke, ed. Alan Berger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 343–67. I have discussed this problem with reference to Hilary Putnam and multiple realizability theory in The Differentiation of Modernism (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2014), 105. 44

On this, see my “Excursions and Recursions. Kittler’s Homeric Wake,” Cultural Politics 8, no. 3 (2012): 429–42. 45

A third variant (less compatible with this book’s perspective) would be Moritz Bassler’s “kulturpoetisches Archiv,” which derives from New Historicism and ideas of textuality.Bassler, Das kulturpoetische Funktion und das Archiv (Tübingen: Francke, 2005). 46

As David Bell has noted in “Infinite Archives,” SubStance 33, no. 3 (2004): 148–61, esp. 152–54. 47

Herman Rapaport, Later Derrida: Reading the Recent Work (New York: Routledge, 2003), 76. 48

This is argued by Amit Pinchevski in “Archive, Media, Trauma,” in On Media Memory: Collective Memory in a New Media Age, ed. Motti Neiger, Oren Meyers and Eyal Zandberg (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 253–64. Other recent discussions of this problem may be found in Ursula von Keitz and Thomas Weber, eds., Mediale Transformationen des Holocaust (Berlin: Avinus, 2013) and, “Remediating the Holocaust,” part 2 of Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture, ed. Claudio Fogu, Wulf Kansteiner, and Todd Presner (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 49

Cited in Ernst, Das Rumoren der Archive, 81. Csongor Lörincz refers to this as “das modern gouvernemantale Auseinandergehen der Dispositive des Rechts und der Verwaltung.” Lörincz, “Zeugnis, Archiv, Gewalt: Die ungarische Staatssischerheit und Péter Esterházys Verbesserte Ausgabe,” in Gewalt der Archive: Studien zur Kulturgeschichte der Wissensspeicherung, ed. Thomas Weitin and Wolf Burkhardt (Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2012), 161–81, here 165. 50 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 7. 51

Dietmar Hochmuth, personal communication, June 2017.

52

Jacobsen and Aurich, Der Sonnensucher, 38 (referring to Wolf’s popular book Die Natur als Arzt und Helfer). 53 Abraham and Torok, L’Écorce et le noyau (Paris: Flammarion, 1987), section 4, 229–321. 54

Berta Mark Fischer, My Lives in Russia (London: Harper and Row, 1944); Berta Mark (Markoosha) Fischer, Reunion in Moscow: A Russian Revisits Her

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Country (New York: Harper and Row, 1962); Victor Fischer, To Russia with Love: An Alaskan’s Journey (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2012). 55

The classic formulation is Octave Mannoni, “Je sais bien, mais quand même,” Clefs pour l’imaginaire: ou l’Autre scène (Paris: Seuil, 1969), 9–33. Ingrid KerzRuehling has explored what she calls the “blindness with open eyes” of many StasiMitarbeiter in “Blindheit bei sehenden Augen: Verleugnung und Missinterpretation von Wahrnehmungen mit Hilfe von Legendenbildung in gesellschaftlichen Konfliktsituationen,” Zeitschrift für politische Psychologie 10, no. 3/4 (2002): 343–60. 56

The katechon—Greek for that which holds back—is a term Carl Schmitt took from St. Paul’s 2 Thessalonians 6–7, where it means what delays the Antichrist; for Schmitt, it is what delays the end of the world. See Carl Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde im Völkerrecht des jus publicum Europaeum (Cologne: Greven, 1960). Ernst refers to this concept in his discussion of storage media (which function as a katechon). 57

Manfred Rasch and Astrid Dörnemann, eds., Filmarchivierung: Sammeln, sichern, sichten, sehen (Essen: Klartext, 2011). 58

Ernst, Im Namen von Geschichte, 560.

59

Ernst, Im Namen von Geschichte, 60; the reference to the “Bruchstelle” is on page 77.

60 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 129; Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (New York: Routledge, 2013), 101. John Frow makes a similar connection between Foucault’s discourse and genre (“‘Reproducibles, Rubrics, and Everything You Need’: Genre Theory Today,” PMLA 122, no. 5 [October 2007]: 1626–34). 61

For an extension of this idea, see Michael Wedel, “Constitutive Contingencies: Fritz Lang, Double Vision, and the Place of Rupture,” in Mind the Screen: Media Concepts according to Thomas Elsaesser, ed. Jaap Kooijman, Patricia Pisters, and Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008), 166–68. 62

Elsaesser, New German Cinema (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 7. 63

This model of a decentered society decoupled from older notions of state-centered politics is what I described as “the differentiation of modernism,” a process in which television had to be a secret sharer. Powell, The Differentiation of Modernism (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013). 64

Elsaesser, “The New German Cinema’s Historical Imaginary,” in Framing the Past: The Historiography of German Cinema and Television, ed. Bruce Murray and Chris Wickham (Carbondale: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 303, emphasis added.

65

Henning Wrage, Die Zeit der Kunst (Heidelberg: Winter, 2008), 182.

66

Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996), 63.

67

Tutor instance is meant here via analogy to Daniel Dayan’s idea of a “tutor code” in classical cinema (“The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema,” Film Quarterly 28, no. 1 [Autumn, 1974]: 22–31).

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68

These silences, too, could be linked to the archive—perhaps by Giorgio Agamben’s reformulation of a concept of “testimony” in the archive’s vicinity, which names something “between a possibility and an impossibility of speech.” “The subject [of testimony, LP] is thus the possibility that language does not exist, does not take place—or better, that it takes place only through the possibility of its not being there, its contingency.” Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 145–46. Agamben’s variant of the archive, like that of the present book, inflects the Foucauldian idea of archive with a notion of trauma indebted to psychoanalysis (like Derrida’s). 69

Hans Helmut Prinzler, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau—Ein Melancholiker des Films (Berlin: Bertz, 2003).

70

“Unter den Gebärden Kafkascher Erzählungen begegnet keine häufiger als die des Mannes, der den Kopf tief auf die Brust herunterbeugt.” Benjamin, “Franz Kafka,” Gesammelte Schriften II:2, Aufsätze, Essays, Vorträge (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991), 431; on this, see also Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure (Paris: Les Éditions de minuit, 1975), 12. 71

Huchel, “Chausseen,” Die Gedichte (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 141.

72

Anselm Haverkamp, Leaves of Mourning: Hölderlin’s Late Work, trans. Vernon Chadwick (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 5.

73

Hölderlin, Werke und Briefe, ed. Friedrich Beissner and Jochen Schmidt (Frankfurt: Insel, 1969), vol. 1, 198–99. 74

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), xi. On film and allegorical landscape, see also David Melbye, Landscape Allegory in Cinema (New York: Palgrave, 2010).

75

Markus Wolf, Die Troika (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1989).

76

One is almost tempted to imagine a Lacanian correspondence for this trio, with the American representing the Imaginary, the Russian the Symbolic (Name-ofthe-Father), and the German the Real (meaning the impossible, the traumatic— since Lothar Wloch lost his father to the Stalinist terror). Eerily, “troikas” also referred to the impromptu Stalinist tribunals that were set up to deliver swift verdicts on enemies of the people during the time of the Terror. 77

Catherine Merridale has thus warned sharply against generalizing “trauma studies” or “memory studies” from West to East, to the Russian case. Based on her interviews with former Soviet citizens about life during the Second World War, she observed that “the western European emphasis on the ego is entirely foreign to the Soviet generation. Their Communist culture, and—more or less in harmony with it—their older, collectivist culture emphasized membership of the group, not the analysis of individual feelings.” Even their wartime “stories have a synthetic feel. They talk as if, almost, they were describing events and emotions that affected someone else.” Merridale, “Soviet Memories: Patriotism and Terror,” in Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, ed. Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 376–89, here 381, 387. 78

Alexander Etkind, Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 2, 42.

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79

Aleida Assmann, “Europe’s Divided Memory,” in Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe, ed. Uilleam Blacker, Alexander Etkind, and Julie Fedor (New York: Palgrave/St. Martin’s, 2013), 25–41, here 32. 80

Joseph Conrad, The Shadow Line (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 11. 81

Interview with Konrad Wolf, “Über bequeme Sessel und unbequeme Filme,” in Direkt in Kopf und Herz, 276–77. 82

The present author was once informed at a conference by an older DEFA director that he, as an American who “hadn’t been there,” would never understand these films (a comment heard more than once from older fellow-travelers): the continuation of what Wolf criticized as Bevormundung in slightly updated form. (The author refrained from answering that he had indeed been to the GDR in 1983.)

Chapter One 1

Von Moltke, No Place Like Home (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 90. 2

Jacobsen and Aurich, Der Sonnensucher Konrad Wolf (Berlin: Aufbau, 2005), 264.

3

Rimgaila Salys sees them as combining show and folk musicals. Salys, The Musical Comedy Films of Grigorii Aleksandrov: Laughing Matters (Bristol: Intellect, 2009), 5.

4

The third and obvious term of comparison here would be the West German Revue Ffilms of the 1950s or the UFA operettas of the 1930s, on which see Sabine Hake, “Colorful Worlds. The West German Revue Films of the 1950s,” in The Cosmopolitan Screen: Germany and the Global Imaginary, 1945 to the Present, ed. Stephan Schindler and Lutz Koepnick (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 58–76. 5

The Treuhand company was created in 1990 to privatize thousands of former state enterprises of the GDR (including the DEFA studios), and existed until 1994. 6

Poiger, Jazz, Rock and Rebels (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 65. 7

Adorno, “Schubert,” Musikalische Schriften IV in Gesammelte Schriften 17 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 21–23.

8

Adorno, Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975), 200.

9

Paul Bekker, The Story of the Orchestra (New York: Norton, 1936), 14. See also p. 38 on “the modern orchestra” as “the state’s ideal.”

10

Toby Thacker, Music after Hitler (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 232.

11

Scott Miranda, “East German Nature Tourism 1945–1961: In Search of a Common Destination,” in TURIZM: The Russian and East European Tourist under Capitalism and Socialism, ed. Anne Garsuch and Diane Koencker (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 266–80, 279.

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12

Jost Hermand, “Attempts to Establish a Musical Culture in the Soviet Occupation Zone and the Early German Democratic Republic, 1945–1965,” in A Sound Legacy? Music and Politics in East Germany, ed. Edward Larkey (Washington: American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, 2000), 15. 13

Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 57. 14

Palmowski, Inventing a Socialist Nation: Heimat and the Politics of Everyday Life in the GDR, 1945–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 15

Jan Palmowski, Inventing a Socialist Nation, 51.

16

“Not God but a tranquil, immediate Nature guides the pen from the depths of the soul through clear eyes.” Kittler, Discourse Networks, 64. 17

Hermand, Heinrich Heine: Kritisch, Solidarisch, Umstritten (Cologne: Bohlau, 2007), 191.

Chapter Two 1

The “doctor’s film” was an important subgenre of the melodrama in the 1950s FRG, a genre in which Hansen specialized; he and Borsche (who often played doctors) had begun their careers under the Nazis. 2

Lenin’s theory of art as a “copy” of reality was a central tenet of official Marxist aesthetics. Erwin Pracht, “Sozialistischer Realismus und Leninsche Abbildtheorie,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 19, no. 6 (June 1971): 755–77. 3

Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: BFI, 1999), 219.

4

Niklas Luhmann, Soziale Systeme (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984), 618.

5

Niklas Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, vol. 2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1997), 883.

6

Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, 2:880 (author’s emphasis).

7

The Kulturbund was a mass association of the GDR, consisting of a federation of local clubs, founded on August 8, 1945, and lasting as long as the GDR. Its cultural program was foundational for the state’s official notion of Kultur, and it formed part of the Socialist Unity Party. See Manfred Jäger, Kultur und Politik in der DDR: 1945–1990 (Cologne: Edition Deutschland Archiv, 1995). 8

On film as a form of self-description of society, see Jens Schröter, “The Wire: Szenen performativer Mediatisierung,” in Performativität und Medialität populärer Medien: Theorien, Ästhetiken, Praktiken, ed. Marcus Kleiner and Thomas Wilke (Wiesbaden: Springer VS Verlag, 2013), 75–92, esp. 77–78. 9

Buscombe, “The Idea of Genre in the American Cinema,” Film Genre Reader, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 17.

10

Alan Nothnagle, Building the East German Myth: Historical Mythology and Youth Propaganda in the German Democratic Republic, 1945–1989 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999); also Thomas Heimann, Bilder von Buchenwald: Die Visualisierung des Antifaschismus in der DDR (1945–1990) (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2005).

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In the archive at Fehrbelliner Platz (no date).

12

See the later discussion of Ich war neunzehn in chapter 9.

13

Altman, Film/Genre, 221–22.

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225

14

Robert Shandley, Rubble Films: German Cinema in the Shadow of the Third Reich (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001); Anke Pinkert, “Can Melodrama Cure? War Trauma and the Crisis of Masculinity in Early DEFA Film,” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 44, no. 1 (February 2008): 118–36. 15

Altman, Film/Genre, 50–54.

16

Whether there was direct influence of these films has not yet been proven. Casablanca received its belated West German premiere on August 29, 1952, but in a severely cut version with most references to World War two removed; the uncut version was not shown in the BRD until October 5, 1975 (on ARD). Magnificent Obsession premiered in the BRD as Die wunderbare Macht on October 29, 1954. The open border between East and West Berlin meant that GDR citizens would have been able to cross into the West to see these films. (Scriptwriter Paul Wiens was in Geneva and Lausanne in 1942, but it seems doubtful that he could have seen Casablanca before being arrested in Vienna in 1943.) 17

Rick Altman, “Casablanca,” in The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, ed. John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 287; see also Richard Maltby’s comments on the same film’s “tension between the plot’s determinist pressure towards a resolution of events, and the ‘realist’ objections to an idealist simplicity in the tidy end-stopping of events at the film’s conclusion” (“Casablanca,” ibid., 285). 18

Radio premiere on Rundfunk der DDR, December 7, 1954. A recording of this has been preserved in the Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv (Archiv-Nummer 3000217/8/9). Ernst Mellin’s voice was taken by Günter Simon (best known for his role as Thälmann in Kurt Maetzig’s biopics). 19

See the copy of the script in the Bundesarchiv, DR 117/12926, 71, 73, 185.

20

Press archive, library of the Filmuniversität Konrad Wolf, no page number.

21

Bundesarchiv, DR 117/26295.

22

Werzlau, “Einige Gedanken über Filmmusik und die Musik zu Genesung,” DEFA Pressedienst Heft Nr. 2/1956, 5–15, here 15. 23

Werzlau, “Einige Gedanken,” 11–12.

24

See the critical comments of Werner and Ingeborg Faulstich, Modelle der Filmanalyse (Munich: W. Fink, 1977), especially 103–11 on “Die Produktionsöffentlichkeit.”

25

Herbert Eagle, “Socialist Realism and American Genre Film: Mixing of Codes in Jazzman,” in The Red Screen: Politics, Society, Art in Soviet Cinema, edited by Anna Lawton (London: Routledge, 2003), 247–62; Birgit Beumers, Directory of World Cinema: Russia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 30–31, on melodrama in the USSR in the 1920s and the Brezhnev era. 26

Derek Spring and Richard Taylor, Stalinism and Soviet Film (New York: Routledge, 2013), 47.

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27

Louise McReynolds and Joan Neuberger, eds., Imitations of Life: Two Centuries of Melodrama in Russia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 28

David Bordwell, “ApProppriations and ImPropprieties: Problems in the Morphology of Film Narrative,” Cinema Journal 27, no. 3 (Spring 1978): 5–20; Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 90. 29

Alexander Prokhorov, “Soviet Family Melodrama of the 1940s and 1950s,” in Imitations of Life, ed. McReynolds and Neuberger, 208–31. 30

Prokhorov, “Soviet Family Melodrama,” 209.

31

Zarzosa, Refiguring Melodrama in Film and Television (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013).

32 Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1995), 40. 33

Brecht, Werke: Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe; Band 15: Gedichte 5 (Berlin and Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993), 205. 34

Fabula is a story’s raw material, and syuzhet its emplotment; the terms originate in Russian formalism and have been taken up by David Bordwell in Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).

Chapter Three 1

Larson Powell, “The Spectral Politics of DEFA,” in The Place of Politics in German Film, ed. Martin Blumenthal-Barby (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2014), 185–99. 2

Ralf Schenk, ed. Das zweite Leben der Filmstadt Babelsberg (Berlin/Potsdam: Henschelverlag and Filmmuseum Potsdam, 1994), 115.

3

Wolfgang Emmerich, Kleine Literaturgeschichte der DDR, 116.

4

Irmfried Hiebel, F. C. Weiskopf—Schriftsteller und Kritiker (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1973), 184.

5

Elsaesser, New German Cinema: A History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 128.

6

Detlev Kannapin, “Gibt es eine spezifische DEFA-Ästhetik?,” in apropos: Film 2000—Das Jahrbuch der DEFA-Stiftung (Berlin: Das Neue Berlin, 2000), 142– 64. Madina Spoden, “Lissy (1957). Gedanken beim neulichen Sehen,” Beiträge zur Film- und Fernsehwissenschaft 39 (1990): 27–33; Klaus Wischnewski, “Ein echter DEFA-Film,” Deutsche Filmkunst (Berlin/DDR), No. 6, 1957.

7

Daniela Berghahn, “Resistance of the Heart: Female Suffering and Victimhood in DEFA’s Antifascist Films,” in Screening War: Perspectives on German Suffering, ed. Paul Cooke and Marc Silberman (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010), 165–86. 8

Heather Laing, The Gendered Score: Music in 1940s Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 19–20. 9

Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

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227

10

Barnert, Die Antifaschismus-Thematik der DEFA: Eine kultur- und filmhistorische Analyse (Marburg: Schueren, 2008).

11

Altman, Film/Genre.

12

Mückenberger, “The Anti-Fascist Past in DEFA Films,” in DEFA: East German Cinema, 1946–1992, ed. Seán Allan and John Sandford (New York: Berghahn 1999), 58–76.

13

Hake, “Political Affects: Antifascism and the Second World War in Frank Beyer and Konrad Wolf,” in Screening War: Perspectives on German Suffering, 103, emphasis added. 14

Thomas Heimann, “Erinnerung als Wandlung: Kriegsbilder im frühen DDRFilm,” in Geschichte als Herrschaftsdiskurs: Der Umgang mit der Vergangenheit in der DDR, ed. Martin Sabrow (Cologne: Böhlau, 2000), 37–85, here 38. 15

Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim ZK der SED, Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung (Berlin: Dietz, 1966), 7, cited in Martin Sabrow, “Nationale Gegenerzählung in der DDR,” in Die historische Meistererzählung: Deutungslinien der deutschen Nationalgeschichte nach 1945, ed. Konrad Jarausch and Martin Sabrow (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2002), 61. 16

“Women were excluded from participating in in political events because of the location and content of party meetings in the Republic’s early years, and then in the early 1930s by increasing political violence.” Helen Boak, Women in the Weimar Republic (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2015), 69. Claudia Koontz noted in her classic Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, The Family and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987, 55), that Nazis did not seek to involve women in their political activities: “Whereas feminists worked for an egalitarian future, conservatives spun out a vision of a past that had never been, in which strong men dominated public space and tender women guarded humane values. Nazi women accepted the promise of second-sex membership in Hitler’s movement in exchange for the hope of preserving their own womanly realm against male interference.” This describes Lissy’s retreat into the private sphere during her acceptance of Fromeyer’s NSDAP activities. 17

“The first GDR ‘women’s film’ was Egon Günther’s Lot’s Woman (Lots Weib, 1965).” Marc Silberman, German Cinema: Texts and Contexts (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 164.

18

Mary Fulbrook comments tellingly on this: “The focus in the GDR was on women, rather than on gender roles as such; with the exception of the ideas of a handful of feminist intellectuals, there is little evidence of any concomitant rethinking of the roles of men.” The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 142. This might help explain why Lissy has to “emancipate herself” from a conjugal devotion to her husband not by confronting him but by walking away. 19 Christopher Wagstaff, Italian Neorealist Cinema: An Aesthetic Approach (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). 20

Jane Gaines, “The Melos in Marxist Theory,” in The Hidden Foundation: Cinema and the Question of Class, ed. David E. James and Rick Berg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 56–71; Kristie Foell, “History as

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Melodrama: German Division and Unification in Two Recent Films,” in Textual Responses to German Unification, ed. Carol Anne Costabile-Heming, Rachel Halverson, and Kristie Foell (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2001), 233–52. 21

See Christiane Wienand, “Remembered Change and Changes of Remembrance. East German Narratives of Anti-Fascist Conversion,” in Becoming East German: Socialist Structures and Sensibilities after Hitler, ed. Mary Fulbrook (New York: Berghahn 2013), 99–120. 22

Patrick Riley, Character and Conversion in Autobiography: Augustine, Montaigne, Descartes, Rousseau and Sartre (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004), 2. 23

Geoffrey Galt Harpham, cited in Riley, Character and Conversion in Autobiography, 18 (the term in quotes is from Paul de Man). 24

Friedrich Kittler, Drakulas Vermächtnis (Leipzig: Reclam, 1993), 86; see also “Über die Sozialisation Wilhelm Meisters,” in Dichtung als Sozialisationsspiel: Studien zu Goethe und Gottfried Keller, ed. Gerhard Kaiser and Friedrich A. Kittler (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1978), 13–124. 25

Spoden, Lissy, 32.

26

Igal Halfin, “From Darkness to Light: Student Communist Autobiographies of the 1920s,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, Heft 2 (1997): 210–36; see now Halfin’s book, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990). Martin Sabrow has also noted how GDR elites constructed “Wunschbiographien” (wishful biographies) for themselves. Sabrow, Geschichte als Herrschaftsdiuskurs: Der Umgang mit der Vergangenheit in der DDR (Cologne: Böhlau, 2000), 25. 27

Compare also Harpham, cited in Riley, Character and Conversion in Autobiography, 19: “One is ‘converted’ when one discovers that one’s life can be made to conform to certain culturally validated narrative forms.” 28

Riley, Character and Conversion in Autobiography, 50.

29

Niklas Luhmann, “Individuum, Individualität, Individualismus,” in Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik, vol. 3 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1989), 149–258, here 221.

30 András Bálint Kovács, Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema, 1950–1980 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 285. 31

Kovács, Screening Modernism, 288.

32

Kovács, Screening Modernism, 289.

33

Vincent Rocchio has tried to define Italian film via this affect: see his Cinema of Anxiety: A Psychoanalysis of Italian Neorealism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999). 34

André Bazin, “Cabiria: The Voyage to the End of Neorealism,” in Federico Fellini: Essays in Criticism, ed. Peter Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 94–102, here 94. 35

Patrick Werly, Roberto Rossellini: Une poétique de la conversion (Paris: Cerf, 2010). Frank Burke also sees Cabiria as a spiritual process of asceticism. Burke, Fellini’s Films (New York: Twayne, 1996), 85–96.

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36

On off-screen space, see Jacques Aumont et al., Aesthetics of Film, trans. Richard Neupert (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), 13–14, and Noel Burch in Theory of Film Practice, 17–30.

Chapter Four 1

Werner Bräunig, Rummelplatz (Berlin: Aufbau, 2007).

2

On the evolution of Cement over the course of its publication history, see Arthur Langeveld, “How Modernism Disappeared from Fedor Gladkow’s Cement between 1924 and 1958,” in Modernism Today, ed. Sjef Houppermans et al. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), 121–34. On Müller, see the chapter by Ulrike Hass on Der Bau in Heiner Müller Handbuch, ed. Hans-Thies Lehmann and Patrick Primavesis (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2003), 193–97. John Davidson has argued that Spur der Steine already implies a “mourning of labor.” “The Mourning of Labor: Work in German Films in the Wake of the Really Existing Economic Miracle,” in The Cosmopolitan Screen: German Cinema and the Global Imaginary, 1945 to the Present, ed. Stephan Schindler and Lutz Koepnick (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 95–116. 3

Wolfgang Emmerich, Kleine Literaturgeschichte der DDR (Leipzig: Kiepenheuer, 1996), 141.

4

Esther von Richthofen, Bringing Culture to the Masses: Control, Compromise and Participation in the GDR (New York: Berghahn, 2009), 154.

5

Detlev Kannapin saw the film as hearkening back to Soviet realism of the late 1920s. Kannapin, “Gibt es eine spezifische DEFA-Ästhetik?” apropos film (2000): 142–64, here 154: he may have been thinking of the films of Fridrich Ermler or Abram Room. 6

Dina Iordanova, Cinema of the Other Europe (New York: Wallflower, 2003) 143–62; see also Nikolina Dobreva on the neglect of genre in Eastern European film studies. Dobreva, “Eastern European Historical Epics,” in A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas, ed. Anikó Imre (Malden, MA: John Wiley, 2012]), 344–65.

7

Wilfried Wilms, “Dresden: The Return of History as Soap,” 136–55, and Jaimey Fisher, “German Historical Films as Production Trend: Cinema and Melodrama in The Lives of Others,” 186–216, both in The Collapse of the Conventional: German Film and Its Politics at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, ed. Jaimey Fisher and Bradley Prager (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010); Mary O’Brien, Post-Wall German Cinema and National History: Utopianism and Dissent (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012); Nick Hodgin, Screening The East: Heimat, Memory and Nostalgia in German Film since 1989 (New York: Berghahn, 2013). 8

“Europäischer Filmpreis: Barbara und Liebe nominiert,” Der Spiegel, November 3, 2011. 9

On this function of art film in Poland, see Dorota Ostrowska, “An Alternative Model of Film Production: Film Units in Poland after World War Two,” in Companion to Eastern European Cinemas, ed. Imre, 453–65; András Bálint Kovács,

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Screening Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), passim, for nation and art film. 10

I have looked at this relation of genre and nation in detail elsewhere: “Gattung, Geschichte, Nation: Konrad Wolfs Ich war neunzehn,” in Konrad Wolf: Werk und Wirkung, ed. Michael Wedel and Elke Schieber (Berlin: VISTAS, 2009), 125–44; “February 1, 1968: Konrad Wolf’s Ich war neunzehn premieres in East Berlin,” in A New Encyclopedia of German Cinema, ed. Jennifer Kapczynski and Michael Richardson (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012), 405–11; also the conclusion of “Winds from the East: DEFA and the Cinemas of Eastern Europe,” in DEFA at the Crossroads of East German and International Film Culture, ed. Marc Silberman and Henning Wrage (Berlin: De Gruyter 2014), 223–42. 11

On Indianerfilm, see Gerd Gemünden. “Between Karl May and Karl Marx,” Film History 10, no. 3 (1998): 399–407; on children’s film, see Benita Blessing, “DEFA Children’s Films: Not Just for Children,” in DEFA at the Crossroads, ed. Silberman and Wrage, 243–62; on musicals, see Andrea Rinke, “Eastside stories: Singing and Dancing for Socialism,” Film History 18, no. 1 (2006): 73–87, and Sebastian Heiduschke, “Renegade Films, DEFA Musicals, and the Genre Cinema,” chapter 9 of his East German Cinema: DEFA and Film History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 85–92. On DEFA and genre, see also Daniela Berghahn, Hollywood behind the Wall: The Cinema of East Germany (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2005), 39–43. What has still not been investigated is DEFA genre as a system: that is, how genres related. 12

Altman, Film/Genre.

13

On the missing spectator of socialism, see Anikó Imre, “Introduction,” in A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas (Malden, MA: John Wiley, 2012), 8 (“the national spectator has been a missing or entirely imagined element”); on DEFA as spectre, see this author’s “The Spectral Politics of DEFA,” in The Place of Politics in German Film, ed. Martin Blumenthal-Barby (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2014), 185–99.

14

Imre, A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas, 7.

15

On “generic memory” in film, see Martin Flanagan, Bakhtin and the Movies (Basingstoke: Palgrave 2009), 90–96. 16

Anke Pinkert’s chapter on Sonnensucher examines the film’s gendered social engineering and working through war trauma in careful detail, and thus need not be recapitulated here; Pinkert also begins to open up the genre questions further pursued here (Film and Memory in East Germany [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008], 128–44). The question still needs to be asked as to how much of socialist realism persisted in the Gegenwartsfilm (see chapter 8 on this). 17

“Introduction” to Fisher, ed., Generic Histories of German Cinema (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013), 2, 3. 18

Altman, Film/Genre, 64.

19

Peter Bächlin, Film als Ware (Basel: Burg Verlag, 1945; reprinted Frankfurt: Athenäum Fischer, 1972), 162. See the recent discussion of Bächlin in Jörg Schweinitz, Film and Stereotype: A Challenge for Cinema and Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 99.

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20

An instance of the kind of work that needs to be done on DEFA finances may be found in Beate Müller, Stasi—Zensur—Machtdiskurse: Publikationsgeschichten und Materialien zu Jurek Beckers Werk (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2006): note the discussion of the costs of filming Jakob der Lügner on p. 126. Yet standard reference works such as the Gabler Lexikon Medienwirtschaft, ed. Insa Sjurts, 2nd edition (Wiesbaden: Gabler Verlag, 2011), have no entry for DEFA! On the complex role of money in the GDR, see now Jonathan Zatlin, The Currency of Socialism: Money and Political Culture in East Germany (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008); for an economic history of the GDR, Andre Steiner, Von Plan zu Plan: Eine Wirtschaftsgeschichte der DDR (Munich: DTV, 2004), now translated as The Plans that Failed: An Economic History of the GDR (New York: Berghahn, 2010). On advertising in the GDR, see Anne Kaminsky’s chapter, “‘True Advertising Means Promoting a Good Thing through a Good Form:’ Advertising in the German Democratic Republic,” in Selling Modernity: Advertising in TwentiethCentury Germany, ed. Pamela E. Swett, S. Jonathan Wiesen, and Jonathan R. Zatlin (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 262–84. The Wismut, as a SAG (Sowjetische Aktiengesellschaft) was a special case in the GDR (see Steiner, Von Plan zu Plan, 32, 102) and cost the state money rather than making it. 21

Brigitte Beumers, “What does Zhanr mean in Russian?” in Directory of World Cinema: Russia (Bristol: Intellect, 2010), 28–34; Rimgaila Salys, The Musical Comedies of Grigorii Alexandrov (Bristol: Intellect, 2006); Marek Haltof, Polish National Cinema, 112, 245. 22

Thus the 1958 Film Conference meant “the end of the Gegenwartsfilm with its critical realism and influences of Italian neorealism.” Heiduschke, East German Cinema: DEFA and Film History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2013), 67. Heiduschke thus confirms the role of the state in permitting this genre.

23

“Sabine, Sunny, Nina und der Zuschauer: Gedanken zum Gegenwartsfilm der DEFA (1),” Film und Fernsehen 8 (1982): 9–12. See also the discussion in Beate Rabe, “Inszenierter Alltag—DEFA—Gegenwartsfilme in der Geschichtsvermittlung,” http://lernen-aus-der-geschichte.de/Lernen-und-Lehren/ content/10149. 24

Ralf Harhausen, Alltagsfilm in der DDR: Die “Nouvelle Vague” der DEFA (Marburg: Tectum, 2007). 25

See Oksana Bulgakowa’s mordant review of Gräf: “Verlogene Nostalgie,” Tageszeitung February 18, 1991, no page numbers; now translated as “Dishonest Nostalgia,” in DEFA after East Germany, ed. Brigitte Wagner (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2014), 263–64. 26

Peter Wuss, “The Documentary Style of Fiction Film in Eastern Europe: Narration and Visual Style,” in Film Style and Story: A Tribute to Torben Grodal, ed. Lennard Højbjerg, Peter Schepelern, and Torben Kragh Grodal (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2003), 215–38. 27

See John Sbardellati, J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies: The FBI and the Origins of Hollywood’s Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), esp. 139– 43, on HUAC’s role in the death of the genre—nicely paralleling Heiduschke’s earlier quote on the Gegenwartsfilm. Japanese cinema has a generic distinction between gendai-geki (films of the present) and jidai-geki (historical films).

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28

Denise Youngblood, “Cinema as Social Criticism: The Early Films of Fridrich Ermler,” in The Red Screen: Politics, Society, Art in Soviet Cinema, ed. Anna Lawton (New York: Routledge, 2003), 67–90, 84. 29

Anna Lawton, “Towards a New Openness in Soviet Cinema, 1976–1987,” cited in Vitaly Chernetsky, “‘A Wild Kazakh Boy’: The Cinema of Rashid Nugmanov,” in Cinema in Central Asia: Rewriting Cultural Histories, ed. Michael Rouland, Gulnara Abikeyeva, and Birgit Beumers (London: Tauris, 2013), 147– 61, here 160. On the melodramatic components of bytovoi fil’m, see also Denise Youngblood, Movies for the Masses: Popular Cinema and Soviet Society in the 1920s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 146. 30

A useful discussion from the literary origins of modern genres is chapter 4 of Nancy Maguire’s Regicide and Restoration: English Tragicomedy 1660–1671, “The Commercial Market: Genre as Commodity” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 102–37. 31

On the difference between mode and genre, see Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). 32

Steve Neale, “Questions of Genre,” in Film Genre Reader IV, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), 178–202, here 179. The difference might correlate to systems theory’s distinction between self-reference and hetero-reference. 33

For an interesting discussion of this relation in Poland, see Paul Coates, The Red and the White: The Cinema of People’s Poland (London: Wallflower, 2005), 61–63. 34

Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, 3rd edition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 162, 164, 167.

35

Victor Terras, Belinsky and Russian Literary Criticism: The Heritage of Organic Aesthetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974), 60. For the political context of Belinsky’s desperate turn to the “concrete,” see Andrzej Walicki, A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1979), 121–27. The “concrete” was, for Belinsky, as much a “vabanque-Spiel” as Kracauer’s empiricism. Kracauer, Das Ornament der Masse (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), 37. 36

Victor Terras, Belinsky and Russian Literary Criticism, 139, citing Belinsky’s 1838 review of Nikolay Polevoj’s Ugolino.

37

Victor Terras, Belinsky and Russian Literary Criticism, 275. See also Katerina Clark and Galin Tihonov, “Soviet Literary Theory in the 1930s: Battles over Genre and the Boundaries of Modernity,” in History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism: The Soviet Age and Beyond, ed. Evgeny Dobrenko and Galin Tihonov (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), 109–43.

38

Régine Robin, Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 215. 39

G. W. F. Hegel, Ästhetik I, vol. 13 of Werke in zwanzig Bänden (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), 111.

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40

See the incisive comments of Habermas on this link between “concrete universal” and statism in Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985), 53: “Im konkreten Allgemeinen behält [. . .] das Subjekt als allgemeines Vorrang vor dem Subjekt als einzelnem. Für die Sphäre der Sittlichkeit ergibt sich aus dieser Logik der Vorrang der höherstufigen Subjektivität des Staates vor der subjektiven Freiheit des Einzelnen” (author’s emphasis). It is not by chance that the Hegelian Marxists Žižek and Jameson both like to refer to Hegel’s “concrete universal”; but in this, they have parted ways with Adorno. 41 Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, in Gesammelte Schriften 7 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 53–54, 147. 42

Hegel, Enzyklopädie, ¶ 177: “Das Urteil der Notwendigkeit als der Identität des Inhalts in seinem Unterschiede 1. enthält im Prädikate teils die Substanz oder Natur des Subjekts, das konkrete Allgemeine,—die Gattung; teils, indem dies Allgemeine ebenso die Bestimmtheit als negative in sich enthält, die ausschließende wesentliche Bestimmtheit—die Art;—kategorisches Urteil.” Hegel, Werke in zwanzig Bänden, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), vols. 8–11. See now also Alenka Zupančić, “The ‘Concrete Universal,’ and What Comedy Can Tell Us About It,” in Lacan: The Silent Partners, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2006), 171–97. 43

Cited in Clark and Tihonov, “Soviet Literary Theory in the 1930s,” 112–13.

44

In Flesh to Metal: Soviet Literature and the Alchemy of Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), Rolf Hellebust traces this back to scientistic fantasies of the Russian symbolists (see page 38, quoting Fyodor Sologub’s The Created Legend from 1907–14 on the energy held in atoms) or even back to Antiquity (13, with a quote from Pliny on the uncanniness of mining). See also Robin, Socialist Realism, 248 on the use of “technical vocabularies” to give an effect of documentary realism; also Hans Robert Jauss, Studien zum Epochenwandel der ästhetischen Moderne (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), 163 on links to nineteenth-century “Poesie der Industrie.” 45

Pinkert (Film and Memory, 129) notes that “by the late fifties,” then-younger directors such as Wolf “turned more rigorously toward the earlier traditions of Weimar film, the Russian avant-garde, and Italian neo-realism,” but does not mention the contradictions between the elements of this eclectic mixture. 46

Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84–258.

47

Wolfgang Emmerich, “Zwischen Chronotopos und drittem Raum: Wie schreibt man die Geschichte des literarischen Feldes DDR?,” in Norbert Otto, ed., Nach der Mauer der Abgrund? (Wieder-)Annäherungen an die DDR-Literatur (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), 43–64, here 61. Michael Ostheimer is directing a project at the University of Chemnitz titled “Chronotopographie der DDR-Literatur” (http:// www.aesthetische-eigenzeiten.de/termine/ddr-literatur/workshop-inselnund-insularitaeten-aesthetisierungen-von-heterochronie-und-chronotopieseit-1960/).

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48

Katerina Clark, “Political History and Literary Chronotope: Some Soviet Case Studies,” in Literature and History, ed. Gary Saul Morson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986), 232. 49 Irina Gutkin, The Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 79–80. 50

Robert Stam, Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); Martin Flanagan, Bakhtin and the Movies: New Ways of Understanding Hollywood Film (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009). 51

Eva Näripea, “National Space, (Trans)National Cinema: Estonian Film in the 1960s,” in A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas, ed. Anikó Imre (Malden, MA/Oxford: Blackwell, 2012), 244–64; and “Nature, Movement, Liminality: Representing the Space of the Nation in 1960’s Estonian Cinema,” Regioninės studijos 5 (2010): 89–107. See also her PhD thesis, “Estonian Cinescapes: Spaces, Places and Sites in Soviet Estonian Cinema (and Beyond)” (Tallinn: Estonian Academy of Arts, 2011). 52 Eric Rohmer, L’Organisation de l’espace dans le Faust de Murnau (Paris: Union générale d’Éditions, 1977), 58. 53

Alastair Renfrew, Towards a New Material Aesthetics: Bakhtin, Genre and the Fate of Literary Theory (London: Legenda, 2006), 120 and 148. Bakhtin, in other words, falls back into idealism just as did his contemporary and rival Lukács. 54

The same would hold true of attempts to deploy Bakhtin’s utterance (vyskazivanie) in a filmic context. See the skeptical discussion in David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 21–26. 55

I have tried to do this recently in an essay that discusses Auschwitz as an Adornian chronotope, following Michael Roth. Powell, “The Meaning of Working through the East,” German Studies Review 37, no. 3 (2014): 597–614. Buchenwald would of course be the chronotope kat’ exochen of GDR antifascism. 56

Christian Colli, “Mit der Kultur gegen die Kultur. Chancen und Grenzen des Kulturbegriffs bei Niklas Luhmann,” Duisburger Beiträge zur Soziologie 6 (2004): 1–48, here 7, citing Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1999), 198. 57

Peter Hitchcock has stated the same idea in a postcolonial context: “The weakness of Bakhtin’s formulation emerges from the tendency to read ‘knots’ as content markers sui generis rather than as abstractions on the means of time/space at stake.” Peter Hitchcock, The Long Space: Transnationalism and Postcolonial Form (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 4. 58

Douglas McNaughton, “Nature, Culture, Space: The Melodramatic Topographies of Lark Rise to Candleford,” in Melodrama in Contemporary Film and Television, ed. Michael Stewart (Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan, 2014), 42–60. 59

“Die Auffassung von einem Genre als ‘Ort des Gedächtnisses’ ist folglich bestenfalls als verunglückte Metapher zu bezeichnen.[. . .] Genres, so muss man schlussfolgern, sind keine ‘Orte,’ sondern Topographien des Erinnerns.” Richard Humphrey, “Literarische Gattung und Gedächtnis,” in Gedächtniskonzepte der Literaturwissenschaft: Theoretische Grundlegung und Anwendungsperspektiven,

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ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2005), 82, author’s emphasis). 60

If the mine (a production site) is the chronotope of Sonnensucher, that of Berlin—Ecke Schönhauser (1957) is the street. 61

Nele Bemong and Pieter Borghart, “Introduction,” in Bakhtin’s Theory of the Literary Chronotope: Reflections, Applications, Perspectives (Gent: Academia, 2010), 7. 62

Marc Silberman, “Sonnensucher,” in Handbuch Nachkriegskultur: Literatur, Sachbuch und Film in Deutschland (1945–1962), ed. Elna Agazzi and Erhard Schütz (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 458–62. 63

Bräunig’s Rummelplatz is also marked by a similar tension, as Wolfram Ette and others have argued. See Ette, Michael Ostheimer, and Jörg Pottbeckers, eds., Strahlungen: Literatur um die Wismut (Würzburg: Königshauen und Neumann, 2010). For Michael Ostheimer (“Wismut-Literatur oder von der Aufgabe der Heimat für den Weltfrieden,” 8–31, here 14), Bräunig “spart . . . weder mit Roheit noch mit Pathos, ohne indes ja in die mythisierende Monumentalisierung von Technik und Arbeitsvorgängen abzugleiten,” while for Ette (“Zur Darstellung des neuen Menschen in Werner Bräunigs Rummelplatz,” 49–59), work is sexualized, with the earth representing Woman relative to male technology—a mythification we find again in Christa Wolf’s novel Der geteilte Himmel, especially in the crucial Gagarin scene. 64

On the relation of chronotope and metaphor, see Darko Suvin, “On Metaphoricity and Narrativity in Fiction: The Chronotope as the ‘DifferentiaGenerica,’” SubStance 14, no. 3 (1986): 51–67. 65

The idea of a particular socialist or Eastern transnationalism is beginning to be discussed in recent scholarship: Eva Näripea notes that “the Soviet film system . . . functioned as a transnational enterprise.” (“National Space, (Trans)national Cinema: Estonian Film in the 1960s,” in A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas, ed. Imre, 244.) However, caution is in order when using this term, so often treated “as a largely self-evident qualifier requiring only minimal conceptual qualification.” Mette Hjort, “On the Plurality of Cinematic Transnationalism,” in World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, ed. Nataša Ďuričová and Kathleen Newman (New York: Routledge, 2010), 13. In the case of socialist realism, a transnational approach would have to address the possibility of seeing this mode as colonialist. “The myth of a Soviet family of nations composed of Russia and its ‘younger’ and less advanced ‘brothers’ is colonialism’s terra incognita.” Greg Castillo, “Soviet Orientalism: Socialist Realism and Built Tradition,” in Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 8, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 32–47, 34—and that myth was expressed in the form of socialist realist aesthetics. My earlier excursus on the nineteenth-century Russian origins of a certain kind of “realism” would support this colonial view: in other words, the “concrete universal” of socialist realism was in fact a national particular! (For particular instances of transnational DEFA productions, see Mariana Ivanova’s dissertation, “DEFA and East European Cinemas: Co-Productions, Transnational Exchange and Artistic Collaborations,” University of Texas, Austin, 2011.)

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66

Rick Altman, Film/Genre, 65. Régine Robin suggests an interestingly similar process of “generification” for socialist realism, where—as in Altman—adjectives become substantivized as nouns (Robin, Socialist Realism, 48). 67 Anne Barnert, Die Antifaschismus-Thematik der DEFA: Eine kultur- und filmhistorische Analyse (Marburg: Schüren, 2008), 184. 68

This application of Freud’s “splitting of the ego” to colonial experience was proposed by Homi Bhabha (in part III of “Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism,” in The Politics of Theory: Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature, July 1982, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iverson, and Dianna Loxley (Colchester: University of Essex, 1983), 194–211. Postcolonial theory has recently been extended to post-socialist Eastern European film in Postcolonial Approaches to Eastern European Cinema: Portraying Neighbours On-Screen, ed. Ewa Mazierska, Lars Kristensen, and Eva Näripea (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014). 69

David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 237. 70

Christian Metz, “‘Trucage’ and the Film,” Critical Inquiry 3, no. 4 (Summer 1977): 657–75, here 657. 71

Constantin Parvulescu has recently argued that the traumatic orphan status of many young people in Eastern European cinema after 1945—something certainly true of Lutz here—paradoxically marked a Utopian chance for renewal. Parvulescu, Orphans of the East: Postwar Eastern European Cinema and the Revolutionary Subject (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). 72

Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 4. 73

Dirk Baecker comments on a specifically modern form of culture: “Um so wichtiger wird es dann jedoch, die Differenzierungsfähigkeit der Kultur nicht mehr im Unterschied zu einem Gegenbegriff, sondern als interne Differenz zu beschreiben.” (“It is however all the more important to describe the differential capacity of culture not in distinction from its opposed concept, but as an internal difference.”) Baecker, Die Form der Kultur (Berlin: Stadtlichter Presse, 2006), 14. To translate that into the terms of the present essay: the national characteristics of the film consist in its inner differences. This differential definition is also preferred by Philippe Hamon in a now-canonical essay on defining realism: “Un discours contraint,” Poétique 13 (1973): 411–45, here 412 note 2. 74 Generic memory: Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 106; but see the cautionary comments of Renfrew on this, in Towards a New Material Aesthetics, 135. 75

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht has interestingly linked the period after 1945 to a larger form of latency: see his After 1945: Latency as Origin of the Present (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013). 76

On which see Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).

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77

Benjamin Buchloh, “Warburgs Vorbild? Das Ende der Collage/Fotomontage im Nachkriegseuropa,” in Archivologie: Theorien des Archivs in Wissenschaft, Medien, Künsten, ed. Knut Ebeling (Berlin: Kadmos, 2002), 233–52, here 234.

Chapter Five 1

More detail on the production can be found in Mariana Ivanova’s “DEFA and East European Cinemas: Co-Productions, Transnational Exchange and Artistic Collaborations.” PhD dissertation, University of Texas, Austin, 2011. 2 Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary (London: Routledge, 2000), 2. 3

Barry Langford, Film Genre: Hollywood and Beyond (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 267, author’s emphasis. 4

Thomas Elsaesser and Michael Wedel, “Defining DEFA’s Historical Imaginary: The Films of Konrad Wolf,” New German Critique 82 (2001): 3–24, here 13. 5

Thomas Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama,” Monogram 3 (1972): 2–15. 6 Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 6. 7

Thomas Elsaesser, “Vergebliche Rettung: Geschichte als Palimpsest,” in Konrad Wolf—Werk und Wirkung, ed. Michael Wedel and Elke Schieber (Berlin: Vistas Verlag, 2009), 73–92, here 90. 8

Elsaesser, “Vergebliche Rettung,” 79.

9

Freud, “Hemmung, Symptom und Angst,” Studienausgabe in neun Bänden (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1970), vol. 6, 263. 10 Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 305. 11

Koch, Die Einstellung ist die Einstellung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992), 131.

12

The future perfect is, as noted in the introduction, the temporality of the archive, which Derrida borrowed from Lacan: “To deal with this enigma of the future anterior and the conditional . . . is to deal with the problem of archivization, of what remains and does not remain. [. . .] Quite simply, the concept of history is no doubt itself at stake.” Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 39–40). For Lacan, the future perfect was the anticipated wholeness of subjectivity (jubilantly if falsely assumed in the mirror stage); Derrida links it to Freud’s archive and the temporality of analysis; in our context, it is also the future perfect of the Revolution that never arrived and was thus archived. 13

Elsaesser, “Vergebliche Rettung,” 88. A recent MA thesis at the University of Colorado Boulder comments on this: “Although this introduces an important representation of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust to the East German screen, it also forecloses a future for Jewish Germans.” (Kathyrn Ficke, “Tracing an Absence of Jewish Survivors in DEFA Film, 1959–1965” [MA Thesis, University

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of Colorado at Boulder, 2015], 13–14; accessed October 7, 2019, https:// scholar.colorado.edu/gsll_gradetds/22/. 14

Apitz, “Esther,” . . . aber die Welt ist verändert: Ein Almanach (Berlin: Deutsches PEN-Zentrum, 1959), 7–28, here 27. See the comments on this in Thomas Ahrend, “‘Wir werden ihnen unser Gesicht nicht zeigen’: Eislers Musik zum Fernsehfilm Esther,” in Komponsitionen für den Film: Zu Theorie und Praxis von Hanns Eislers Filmmusik, ed. Peter Schweinhardt (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf und Härtel, 2008), 185–210, esp. 186. 15

Koch, Die Einstellung ist die Einstellung, 141.

16

Cervoni, Les Écrans de Sofia (Paris: Pierre Lherminier, 1976), 53.

17

Translated by Bert Cardullo in “André Bazin on Film Technique: Two Seminal Essays,” Film Philosophy 6, no. 1 (January 2002): 40–62. Bazin’s French publication was from 1946. 18

Morgan, “The Afterlife of Superimposition,” in Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife, ed. Dudley Andrew and Hervé Joubert-Laurencin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 127–41, here 133. 19

Judith Kerman, “Uses of the Fantastic in Literature of the Holocaust,” in The Fantastic in Holocaust Literature and Film, ed. Judith Kerman and John Browning (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015), 13–25. 20

Ward, “Screening Out the East: The Playing out of Inter-German Relations at the Cannes Film Festival,” German Life and Letters 68, no. 1 (January 2015): 37–53, here 50. 21

Marek Haltof, Polish Film and the Holocaust (New York: Berghahn, 2012), 86.

22

Jolles, Einfache Formen (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1969), 36.

23

Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 46–47; see also p. 42 on “allegorical and parabolic” dimensions of Hasidic storytelling. 24

Richard Glejzer and Michael Bernard-Donals, “Synecdoche as Figure of the Holocaust,” in The Responsibilities of Rhetoric, ed. Michelle Smith and Barbara Warnick (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 219–29). See also Debarati Sanyal, Memory and Complicity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 101, on Auschwitz as synecdoche. 25

Ziarek, The Rhetoric of Failure: Deconstruction of Skepticism, Reinvention of Modernism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 54. 26

Cited in Elsaesser, “Vergebliche Rettung,” 87.

27

Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, in Werkausgabe in zwölf Bänden, ed. Weischedel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), VI, 300. 28

Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 203. 29

For another example: Joshua Walden, “Driven from their Homes: Jewish Displacement and Musical Memory in the 1948 Film Long is the Road,” in Dislocated Memories: Jews, Music, and Postwar German Culture, ed. Tina Frühauf and Lila Hirsch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 121–40, esp. 130.

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30

As Jeremy Maron risks doing, when, while attempting to defend Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993) against criticism, he asserts that “the history afforded by a melodramatic historical representation like Schindlers List is more closely associated with Walter Benjamins conception of history, which is not governed by articulating ‘the way it really was.’” Maron, “Affective Historiography: Schindler’s List, Melodrama and Historical Representation,” Shofar 27, no. 4 (Summer 2009): 66–94, here 93).

31 Robert Cohn, Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés: An Exegesis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1949), 101. 32

Badiou, “A Poetic Dialectic: Labîd ben Rabi’a and Mallarmé,” in Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. Alberto Toscano (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 46–56, here 50. Some might object that it is grossly inappropriate to refer to Badiou in the context of the Holocaust, given the controversy around his polemical criticism of Israel in Circonstances 3: Portées du mot ‘juif’ (Paris: Lignes et manifestes, 2005). Yet even Badiou’s harshest critic, Éric Marty—an outspoken advocate for Israeli policies who has denounced many other French intellectuals, mostly those on the Left, for their critiques of Zionism—admits that “Badiou n’est pas antisémite” and his “discours . . . n’est pas un discours antisémite” (interview with Yves Charles Zarka, Cités 3, no. 31 [2007], accessed July 13, 2018, https://www.cairn.info/revue-cites-2007-3-page-151.htm). Badiou is, indeed, careful to insist repeatedly that anti-Semitism remains a real danger and that the Holocaust should never be forgotten. What is at stake in the debate between Badiou and other French critics of Zionism on the one hand and their adversaries on the other is the location of universals, a matter important to French Enlightenment tradition: is Judaism already universal—as Freud argued in Moses and Monotheism, and Derrida continued to suggest in his late writings on “messianicity”—or is the move to universals to be found in St. Paul, as Badiou and Žižek have more recently asserted? The two universals are in fact hard to separate, as Marty argues against Badiou. Marty, Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question,” trans. Alan Astro (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 66. That Konrad Wolf, both in Sterne and in other films, was caught up in this tension between Judaism and the universalism of Marxism might also support our (not uncritical) reference to Badiou (as should become clear, the present argument is by no means simply updating Wolf’s sublation of Jewishness into Marxism via Badiou’s). For some context on this debate, see Nathalie Debrauwere-Miller, ed., Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in the Francophone World (New York: Routledge, 2010). 33

Goethe, Die Wahlverwandtschaften, in Werke, Hamburger Ausgabe in 14 Bänden (Munich: DTV, 1981), vol. 6, 456. 34

“Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften,” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991), 1:1, Abhandlungen, 300. 35

Morgan, “The Afterlife of Superimposition,” 140.

36

Lukas Bartolomei, “Sterne,” Bilder von Schuld und Unschuld: Spielfilme über den Nationalsozialismus in Ost- und Westdeutschland (Münster: Waxmann, 2015), 157–67, here 160.

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37

Amos Goldberg, “The Cultural Construction of the Holocaust Witness as a Melodramatic Hero,” in Melodrama after the Tears: New Perspectives on the Politics of Victimhood, ed. Scott Loren and Jörg Metelmann (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016), 263–80, here 273. 38

See Badiou’s discussion of another Mallarmé poem (“Ses purs ongles très haut dédiant leur onyx”) in Conditions, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2008), 55: the poem’s concluding evocation of the Great Bear is, for Badiou, a “term . . . that from then on ‘fixes’ a possible nocturnal fidelity to the event: the constellation.” 39

“Trotz der differenzierten Schulddarstellung bleiben die Motive des Völkermords in Sterne im Dunkel. Beleuchtet wird weniger das Mordsystem als vielmehr das individuelle Handeln der Tätergruppe” (Despite the differentiated representation of guilt, the motives of genocide remain obscure in Sterne. What is illuminated is less the system of murder than the individual action of the group of perpetrators; Bartolomei, “Sterne,” in his Bilder von Schuld und Unschuld, 164).

Chapter Six 1

Gertrud Koch, “On the Disappearance of the Dead among the Living: The Holocaust and the Confusion of Identities in the Films of Konrad Wolf,” trans. Jeremy Gaines, New German Critique 60 (Autumn 1993): 57–75, here 68. 2

In English: Thomas Fox, Stated Memory: East Germany and the Holocaust (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 1999), with a brief discussion of Professor Mamlock on pp. 99–101; Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). In German: Karin Hartewig, Zurückgekehrt: die Geschichte der jüdischen Kommunisten in der DDR (Cologne: Böhlau, 2000); Moshe Zuckermann, ed., Zwischen Politik und Kultur: Juden in der DDR (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002); Jutta Blickmann, Die DDR und die Juden: Die deutschlandpolitische Instrumentalisierung von Juden und Judentum durch die Partei- und Staatsführung der SBZ/DDR von 1945 bis 1990 (Frankfurt/New York: Peter Lang, 1997); Detlef Joseph, Die DDR und die Juden: Eine kritische Untersuchung (Berlin: Das neue Berlin, 2010). 3

Anne Barnert, Die Antifaschismus-Thematik der DEFA: Eine kultur- und filmhistorische Analyse (Marburg: Schueren, 2008), 212, 248. 4

Vincent von Wroblewsky, ed., Eine unheimliche Liebe: Juden in der DDR (Berlin: Philo, 2001); Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). For “deferred obedience,” see Freud, “Analyse der Phobie eines fünfjährigen Kindes” (Little Hans), Studienausgabe in zehn Bänden (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1970), vol. 8, 36.

5

Delage, “Nuit et Brouillard: A Turning Point in the History and Memory of the Holocaust,” in Holocaust and the Moving Image: Representations in Film and Television since 1933, ed. Toby Haggith and Joanna Newman (London and New York: Wallflower, 2005), 127–39, here 127–28 and 135. 6 Marek Haltof, Polish Film and the Holocaust: Politics and Memory (New York: Berghahn, 2012), 87. Haltof refers to Ewa Mazierska, “Non-Jewish Jews, Good

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Poles and Historical Truth in the Films of Andrzej Wajda,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 20, no. 2 (2000): 213–26. 7

Ariel Schweizer, “Forgetting, Instrumentalization and Transgression: The Shoah in Israeli Cinema,” in Cinema and the Shoah, ed. Jean-Michel Frodon (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010), 151–90; Stuart Liebman, Historiography/Holocaust. Cinema, Challenges and Advances,” ibid., 205–16. 8 Bartov, The “Jew” in Cinema: From The Golem to Don’t Touch My Holocaust (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2005), 59. 9

As one of the doyens of GDR Germanistik put it: “Während Brecht ein antiaristotelisches Theater konzipierte, berief sich Wolf wiederholt auf die Autorität des Aristoteles” (While Brecht conceived of an anti-Aristotelian theater, Wolf repeatedly referred to the authority of Aristotle), including the doctrine of catharsis; and “Die leidenschaftliche Identifizierung des Zuschauers mit ganz bestimmten Personen und Vorgängen auf der Bühne ist die technisch-psychologische Basis der Katharsis” (the passionate identification of the viewer with very specific characters and events on the stage is the technical-psychological basis of catharsis). Werner Mittenzwei, “Streitschriften für eine neue Funktionsbestimmung der Kunst. Zur ästhetischen Position Friedrich Wolfs,” in Positionen: Beiträge zur marxistischen Literaturtheorie in der DDR (Leipzig: Reclam, 1971), 315 and 316. 10

Artur Schnitzler, Meisterdramen (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1971), 413 and 491.

11

On the retreat from Weimar theatrical modernism—such as Brecht’s epic theater—operated by Exildrama like Wolf’s, and the reversion to Aristotelian poetics, see Franz Norbert Mennemeier and Frijthof Trapp, Deutsche Exildramatik 1933–1950 (Munich: Fink, 1980), 26–30. 12

Friedrich Wolf, Professor Mamlock, in Gesammelte Werke in sechzehn Bänden (Berlin: Aufbau, 1960), 3: Dramen, 363. 13

Wolf, Professor Mamlock, 320 (“Gehirn, Gehirn, Gehirn, aber das ist ja das Erbteil eurer Rasse!”).

14 Paul Reitter, quoting Theodor Lessing, On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 112. 15

Reitter, On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred, 112, quoting Lessing, “Jüdisches Schicksal” (1927).

16

See Manfred Voigt, “Rundköpfe und Spitzköpfe. Bertolt Brecht und die Juden: Für den marxistischen Dichter war der Antisemitismus nur eine Klassenfrage,” Jüdische Allgemeine, August 10, 2006 (online at: http://www.juedische-allgemeine.de/article/view/id/6288). 17

Daniel R. Schwartz, Imagining the Holocaust (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), chapter 11: “Aharon Appelfeld’s Parables,” 249–70. (There is a longer Jewish history of the parable or Mashal, on which modern Jewish writers could draw: see Jacob Neusner, “The Parable (Mashal): A Documentary Approach,” in Ancient Israel, Judaism and Christianity in Contemporary Perspective, ed. Neusner et al. (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2006), 259–84. 18

Jameson, Brecht on Method (London: Verso, 1998), 118–21.

19

Huyssen, After the Great Divide (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1986), 83.

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20

Theo Elm, Die moderne Parabel (Munich: Fink, 1982), 24 (on reader or listener inclusion), 36 (on mediating ethos and Lehre), 40 (on emotion). See also Elm and Hans H. Hiebel, eds., Die Parabel: Parabolische Formen in der deutschen Dichtung des 20. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), especially the contributions by Gisbert Ter-Nedden; and Elm and Peter Hasubek, eds., Fabel und Parabel: Kulturgeschichtliche Prozesse im 18. Jahrhundert (Munich: Fink, 1994). Parabolic or fable forms were also employed by many GDR writers. 21

Mennemeier and Trapp, Deutsche Exildramatik 1933–1950, 31.

22

On this aspect of Herzl, see Leif Ludwig Albertsen, “Theodor Herzl als reifer Dramatiker. Gedanken um sein Schauspiel Das neue Ghetto,” Orbis Litterarum 56 (2001): 37–55, here 48. 23

Carolyn Birdsall, Nazi Soundscapes: Sound, Technology and Urban Space in Germany, 1933–1945 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 99–101; Ruth Mateus-Berr, Fasching und Faschismus: Ein Beispiel; Faschingsumzug 1939 in Wien (Vienna: Praesens Verlag, 2007); Carl Dietmar and Marcus Leifeld, Alaaf und Heil Hitler: Karneval im Dritten Reich (Munich: Herbig, 2010). 24

Der Abend (Berlin West), January 14, 1965, no page number (press archive of the Filmuniversität Konrad Wolf), referring to a discussion Wolf had with students at the Freie Universität after showing the film. See also an article in Nacht-Depesche (Berlin West), January 15, 1965. 25

Angelika Oelsner, “Die Rolle der Montage bei der filmischen Adaptation eines Theaterstücks, am Beispiel des Professor Mamlock,” Abschlussarbeit, Schnitt II, 1969 (in the library of the Filmuniversität Konrad Wolf), 29 and 30. 26

Renate Hoffmann, “Raum und Zeit im Film unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Montage am Beispiel Professor Mamlock,” Abschlussarbeit Fachrichtung Schnitt, Juni 1963 (library of the Filmuniversität), 28. 27

Bundesarchiv DR 117/12635, 7.

28

Bundesarchiv DR 117/12635, 4–5.

29

The tradition of performing this piece on New Year’s Eve went back to the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester, whose then conductor Arthur Niekisch was engaged by the Arbeiter-Bildungs-Institut to direct it on New Year’s Eve in 1918; this model would be imitated by many other orchestras, often broadcast live via radio. Inge Lammel, “Die 9. Sinfonie und ihre Aufführungstradition: Zur Beethoven-Rezeption in der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung,” Musik in der Schule: Zeitschrift für Theorie und Praxis des Musikunterrichts 28, no. 2–3 (February–March 1977): 49–53. 30

Beate Angelika Krause, “Joseph Joachims ‘religiöses Glaubensbekenntnis’: Die 9. Sinfonie von Beethoven,” in Musikwelten-Lebenswelten: Jüdische Identität in der deutschen Musikkultur, ed. Beatrix Borchard and Heidy Zimmermann (Cologne: Böhlau, 2009), 116–29, here 122. 31

Beatrix Borchard, “Von Joseph Joachim zurück zu Moses Mendelssohn: Instrumentalmusik als Zukunftsreligion?” in Musikwelten-Lebenswelten, ed. Borchardt and Zimmermann, 31–57, here 48. 32

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Freud, “Die Ichspaltung im Abwehrvorgang,” Studienausgabe, vol. 3, 389–94.

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243

Freud, “Die Ichspaltung im Abwehrvorgang,” 391.

34

Bhabha, “The Other Question,” in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 66–84, here 80.

35

Le Rider, Der Fall Otto Weininger (Vienna: Löcker Verlag, 1985), 55. Paul Reitter (On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred, 21) also quotes a novella by Ludwig Philippson (“Advancement and Hindrance,” 1841) where one character warns another that assimilation will create a “split” within oneself. 36

Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). 37

Samuel Salzborn, “Zur politischen Psychologie des Antisemitismus,” Journal für Psychologie 18 (2010): 1, 1–22; Artemy Magun, Negative Revolution: Modern Political Subject and its Fate after the Cold War (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 35. 38

George Spencer Brown, Laws of Form (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969). Although one would not think that these intuitive oppositions would be “operative” in Spencer Brown’s and Luhmann’s (abstract) sense, Dirk Richter extended this “form” into the domain of nationalism. (Richter, Nation als Form (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1996). 39 Mikosch Horn, “Die zwei Gesichter des Professor Mamlock. Ein Vergleich der Filme von Herbert Rappaport und Konrad Wolf,” in Glücksuchende: Conditio Judaica im sowjetischen Film, ed. Lilia Antipow and Jörn Petrick (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2011), 199–12, here 201 and 211–12. 40

It is interesting that Barnert argues for Wolf’s contradicting GDR orthodoxy in terms of mise-en-scène (thereby reverting to a device familiar from auteurist criticism); Coulson prefers to call attention to the film’s editing. But as John Gibbs reminds us in his Mise-en-scène: Film Style and Interpretation (New York: Columbia/Wallflower, 2002), chapter 3, one cannot make auteurist arguments without assuming an inner coherency of the work—as one cannot here. 41

“When the archive is denied, its weight becomes interiorized as a subjective memory or as genealogical inheritance, and the attendant risk is then of a madness that may well reconstitute the archive as dogma.” Elisabeth Roudinesco, “History, Archives; Freud, Lacan,” in The New Klein-Lacan Dialogues, ed. Julia Borossa, Catalina Bronstein, and Claire Pajaczkowska (London: Karnac, 2015), 293–301, here 294. 42

Rapaport, “Archive Trauma,” Diacritics 28, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 68–81.

43

Derrida, “Abraham l’autre,” in Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly, Judéités: Questions pour Jacques Derrida (Paris: Galilée, 2003), 11–42, here 16. 44

Derrida, Archive Fever, 36.

Chapter Seven 1

Schenk, “Mitten im kalten Krieg. 1950 bis 1960,” in Das zweite Leben der Filmstadt Babelsberg (Berlin/Potsdam: Henschelverlag and Filmmuseum Potsdam, 1994), 134.

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2 Sabine Hake, Screen Nazis: Cinema, History, and Democracy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), 116. 3

Schenk, “Mitten im kalten Krieg,” in Das zweite Leben, 146.

4

Ruth Herlinghaus, “Diskussion: Der Held und sein Konflikt,” Filmwissenschaftliche Mitteilungen, Beilage zu Deutsche Filmkunst 1961, 19–20. The film thus becomes a mouthpiece for East German historiography at its most tendentious: “Marxist historical accounts do have heroes, but the heroes are mouthpieces rather than profiled individuals.” Andreas Dorpalen, German History in Marxist Perspective: The East German Approach (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), 43. See also the acerbic review by Fred Gehler (who in 2012 was himself revealed to have been a Stasi IM) “Das Sammeln von Alibis,” Beiträge zur Film- und Fernsehwissenschaft 39 (1990): 72–78: see Anke Westphal, “Raus aus der Geschichte?,” Frankfurter Rundschau, July 5, 2012), and “Das Sammeln von Alibis,” Beiträge zur Film- und Fernsehwissenschaft 39 (1990): 72–78. 5

BA (Bundesarchiv) catalogue D 117/8444, Ideenskizze of Egel and Wiens.

6

Geschonneck himself, in his autobiography, saw this film as part of a “eine Art Trilogie” with Sonnensucher and Das Lied der Matrosen. Geschonneck, Meine unruhigen Jahre, 2nd edition (Berlin: Dietz, 1995), 195. 7

Heimann, Bilder von Buchenwald: Die Visualisierung des Antifaschismus in der DDR (1945–1990) (Cologne: Böhlau, 2005), 63. 8

Sabine Hake, “Public Figures, Political Symbols, Famous Stars: Actors in DEFA Cinema and Beyond,” in DEFA at the Crossroads of East German and International Film Culture, ed. Marc Silberman and Henning Wrage (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 210; Claudia Fellmer, “The Communist Who Rarely Plays a Communist: The Case of DEFA Star Erwin Geschonneck,” in Millennial Essays on Film and other German Studies: Selected Papers from the Conference of University Teachers of German, ed. Daniela Berghahn and Alan Bance (Oxford: Lang, 2002), 42. 9

On this tension, see Dietrich Beyrau, “Das sowjetische Modell—Über Fiktionen zu den Realitäten,” in Arbeiter im Staatsozialismus: Ideologischer Anspruch und soziale Wirklichkeit ed. Peter Hübner, Christoph Klessmann, and Klaus Tenfelde (Cologne: Böhlau, 2005), 56: “Als angebliche Avantgarde des Proletariats repräsientierte die Partei nicht die Arbeiterklasse, sie bot deren Angehörigen bestenfalls die Möglichkeit dazu, die Arbeiterklasse zu verlassen.” On the loss or repression of Weimar working-class traditions in the GDR after June 1953, see also Renate Hürtgen, “Konfliktverhalten der DDR-Arbeiterschaft und Staatsrepression im Wandel,” ibid., 383–403. 10

DR (Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv/German Radio Archive), catalogue number 117/8444, 2, emphasis in the original. 11

Fellmer, “The Communist Who Rarely Plays a Communist,” in Millennial Essays, ed. Berghahn and Bance, 47. 12

Heimann, Bilder von Buchenwald, 65–68. Heimann also notes a certain awkwardness in the film when Geschonneck is questioning German prisoners after the liberation, suggesting an unwanted recollection of the Soviet repurposing of the camp for its own prisoners (67–68). It is one of the strengths of Ich war neunzehn that awkward moments not fitting into the official narrative can be indirectly

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figured by Gregor Hecker’s hesitation (as with the German girl wanting to escape rapists in his HQ), and not merely glossed over. 13

Geschonneck, Meine unruhigen Jahre, 195.

14

On the effect of the Eleventh Plenum on television, see Claudia Dittmar, Feindliches Fernsehen: Das DDR-Fernsehen und seine Strategien im Umgang mit dem westdeutschen Fernsehen (Bielefeld: transcript, 2014), 329–30. For details of Der kleine Prinz’s production, see Jan Gympel, “Konrad Wolfs unbekanntester Film: Die ambitionierte Saint-Exupéry-Adaption Der kleine Prinz (1965/1966),” Filmblatt 21, no. 60 (Fall 2016): 25–39. 15

See the online article from the German Radio Archive by Julia Weber and Uwe Bräuner, accessed July 7, 2015, http://www.dra.de/online/dokument/2015/ dok2015–1.html. There is only one copy of the film in the archive (according to Claus Löser, personal communication). 16

Ingelore König, Dieter Wiedemann, and Lothar Wolf, eds., Zwischen Marx und Muck: DEFA-Filme für Kinder (Berlin: Henschel Verlag, 1996).

17

Hans-Dieter Tok thought Christel Bodenstein was “not up to this task” (mit dieser Aufgabe überfordert) (Leipziger Volkszeitung, May 25, 1972), a judgment with which Barbara Faensen (“Kleiner Prinz in sonderbarer Gestalt,” Neue Zeit [Berlin], May 24, 1972) concurred. 18

Klaus Büstrun, “‘Für mich wie eine Bibel’. Der kleine Prinz zum 70. Geburtstag von Christel Bodenstein im Filmmuseum aufgeführt,” Potsdam am Sonntag, October 19, 2008, 3.

19

Beate Biermann, “Probleme der Literaturverfilmung und der Verfilmbarkeit von Literatur am Beispiel des Fernsehfilms Der kleine Prinz von Konrad Wolf nach der gleichnamigen Erzählung von Antoine de Saint-Exupéry,” Fachschulabschlussarbeit, HFF, June 15, 1987, 20–21. 20

“Bleibt anzumerken, dass Der kleine Prinz als Märchen alle ungeschriebenen Gesetze dieses Genres erfüllt.” Heide Schrader, “‘Moi et toi, on n’est pas pareilles!’: Wenn Fremde sich begegnen,” Fremdsprachenunterricht (1998): 5: 349–55, here 353. 21

Marie-Anne Barbéris, Le Petit Prince de Saint-Exupéry (Paris: Larousse, 1976), 12.

22

Anne-Isabelle Mourier, “Le Petit Prince de Saint-Exupéry: Du conte au mythe,” Etudes Littéraires 33, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 32–42, here 45. (On page 47, Mourier calls it a “conte d’aventures.”) 23

“Le conte philosophique est un petit Bildungsroman,” in the slightly anachronistic terms of Yves Belaval’s “Le Conte philosophique,” in The Age of Enlightenment: Studies Presented to Theodore Besterman, ed. W. H. Barber et al. [Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1967], 308–17, here 310. James Higgins (The Little Prince: A Revery of Substance [New York: Twayne, 1996], 15) lists “fairy tale, fable, parable, allegory, satire, conte” as possibilities. 24

Bundesarchiv, SAPMO, DR 117/633, I (dated September 24, 1965).

25

Qinna Shen, “Barometers of GDR Cultural Politics. Contextualizing the DEFA Grimm Adaptations,” Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies 25, no. 1 (2011): 70–95, here 71, referring to David Bathrick.

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26 Qinna Shen, The Politics of Magic (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2015), 40. 27

Röhrich, Folktales and Reality, trans. Peter Tokofsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 3.

28

Shen, “Barometers of GDR Cultural Politics,” 72.

29

Jack Zipes, “Two Hundred Years after Once upon a Time. The Legacy of the Brothers Grimm and Their Tales in Germany,” Marvels & Tales: Journal of FairyTale Studies 28, no. 1 (2014): 54–74, 61. 30

Shen, Politics of Magic, 28.

31

Shen, Politics of Magic, 17.

32

Gert Reifarth, Die Macht der Märchen: Zur Darstellung von Repression und Unterwerfung in der DDR in märchenhafter Prosa (1976–1985) (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2003), 75. 33

Sarah Cardwell, “Literature on the Small Screen: Television Adaptations,” in The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen, ed. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 181–95, here 185. 34

Cardwell, “Literature on the Small Screen,” 188. These “broader conceptions” of television, and of the need to refunctionalize fairytales for children, could be seen as playing the role of “interpretant” in Wolf’s adaptation of the story for TV; for this concept, see Lawrence Venuti, “Adaptation, Translation, Critique,” Journal of Visual Culture 6, no. 1 (2007): 25–43. On GDR television as a conservative “Medium der Väter,” see Henning Wrage, Die Zeit der Kunst (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2009), 276. 35

The fable was originally written by a Soviet writer, Sergei Mikhaikow, and translated into German by Bruno Tutenberg; a performance titled “Lyrik-Jazz-Prosa” (poetry-jazz-prose) of October 30, 1965, was released in 1968 on the Amiga LP label (Amiga 855 151). On the history of the publishing house Volk und Welt, see now Roland Links, Anja Augustin; Simone Barck, Martina Langermann, and Siegfried Lokatis, eds., Fenster zur Welt: Die Geschichte des DDR-Verlages Volk und Welt, 2nd edition (Berlin: Links, 2005). 36

Christa Wolf, Der geteilte Himmel (Munich: DTV, 1973), 42.

37

Marion von Salisch calls Rita a fairy, “lachend und unbewusst.” Salisch, Zwischen Selbstaufgabe und Selbstverwirklichung: Zum Problem der Persönlichkeitsstruktur im Werk Christa Wolfs (Stuttgart: Klett, 1978), 16. 38

On the links between Christa Wolf and Bloch, see Yvonne Delhey, Schwarze Orchideen und andere blaue Blumen: Reformsozialismus und Literatur (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2004); on Bloch and fairy tales, see David Bathrick, “Little Red Riding Hood in the GDR,” in The Powers of Speech (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 167–92. 39 Bloch, “Das Märchen geht selber in der Zeit” (1930), in Literarische Aufsätze (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984), 196–99, here 198. See also “Zerstörung, Rettung des Mythos durch Licht,” ibid., 338–47.

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40 Barbéris, Le Petit Prince de Saint-Exupéry, 96–98, tries out Propp’s famous classificatory categories (from Morphology of the Folktale) on Saint-Exupéry, concluding that they are only very broadly relevant. 41

Ingeborg Gerlach, Der geteilte Himmel (Frankfurt: Diesterweg, 1993), 49. Dieter Sevin notes that Rita is won over by Meternagel’s moral qualities, not his ideological or political beliefs. Sevin, Christa Wolf: Der geteilte Himmel und Nachdenken über Christa T. (Munich: Oldenbourg 1982), 44. Alexander Stephan notes a prevalence of psychological over sociological analyses. Stephan, Christa Wolf, 4th edition (Munich: Beck, 1991, 41. 42

Irina Gutkind, The Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 79–80. 43

Ulrich Greiner, “Die deutsche Gesinnungsästhetik. Noch einmal: Christa Wolf und der deutsche Literaturstreit. Eine Zwischenbilanz,” Die Zeit, November 2, 1990; also the commentary in Bernd Wittek, Der Literaturstreit im sich vereinigenden Deutschland: Eine Analyse des Streits um Christa Wolf und die deutschdeutsche Gegenwartsliteratur in Zeitungen und Zeitschriften (Marburg: Tectum, 1997), 105–6. 44 Biagoli, “Le Dialogue avec l’enfance dans Le Petit Prince,” Etudes Littéraires 33, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 27–42, here 30. 45

Jessica Anunciação, “Le Discours persuasif. Analyse pragmatique et cognitive des serments de pasteurs évangélistes” (PhD thesis in linguistics, Université d’Avignon et des Pays de Vaucluse, 2013), 78, accessed July 7, 2015, www.theses. fr/2013AVIG1125). 46

Anunciação, “Le Discours persuasif,” 261.

47

Jacobsen and Aurich, Der Sonnensucher Konrad Wolf, 446.

48

Ibid., 446.

49

Cited in Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 72. 50

Ute Holl, “Mediale Historiographie,” Konrad Wolf: Werk und Wirkung, ed. Michael Wedel, Elke Schieber (Berlin: Vistas 2009), 181.

Chapter Eight 1

The term subconscious, and not unconscious (in Freud’s usual dream-related sense) is used deliberately here. For the difference, see my chapter on film music in The Differentiation of Modernism (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013), “Jokes and their Relation to Film Music,” 96–118. 2

Wolf, Der geteilte Himmel, 1973), 197.

3

Henning Wrage, Die Zeit der Kunst (Heidelberg: Winter, 2008), 182.

4

Joshua Feinstein, The Triumph of the Ordinary (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 111.

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5

Freud, “Die Ichspaltung im Abwehrvorgang,” in Studienausgabe, ed. Alexander Mitscherlich, James Strachey, and Angela Richards (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1970), vol. 3, 391.

6

Freud, “Die Ichspaltung im Abwehrvorgang,” 393.

7

Geneviève Sellier, Masculine Singular (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 171. This is true also for the heroine of The Cranes are Flying, as Maya Turovskaia noted: “one doesn’t know, when leaving the theater, to what the fascination of Samoilova’s face is due, whether to the talent of the actress of to that of the cameraman Urushevsky” Turovskaia, “Da i nyet,” Iskusstvo kino 12 (1957): 14–18, here 14. 8

Sellier, Masculine Singular, 150.

9

Sellier, Masculine Singular, 152.

10

Wolf, Der geteilte Himmel, 67.

11

Sellier, Masculine Singular, 87.

12

Sellier, Masculine Singular, 186.

13

Sonja Hilzinger, Der geteilte Himmel (Munich: Luchterhand, 1999), 317–18; Ingeborg Gerlach, Der geteilte Himmel (Frankfurt am Main: Diesterweg, 1993), 31; Marion von Salisch, Zwischen Selbstaufgabe und Selbstverwirklichung: Zum Problem der Persönlichkeitsstruktur im Werk Christa Wolfs (Stuttgart: Klett, 1975), 12, 14, 16; Alexander Stephan, Christa Wolf (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1991), 38; Dieter Sevin, Der geteilte Himmel/Nachdenken über Christa T. (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1988), 39. 14

Sellier, Masculine Singular, 96 (“daily life . . . often banal or mediocre”); Christa Wolf, Der geteilte Himmel, 11. 15

András Bálint Kovács, Screening Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007) 62. 16

Gerlach, Der geteilte Himmel, 21 (“jeder Sinn für Ironie geht der Autorin ab”).

17

Sellier, Masculine Singular, 191 (“willed confusion between liberation and amorous revelation”); Robin Wood in Jean-Luc Godard: A Critical Anthology, ed. Toby Mussman (New York: Dutton, 1968), 186, 189; Royall Brown, Focus on Godard (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1972), 126. 18 Quoted in Douglas Morrey, Jean-Luc Godard (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2005), 38. 19

Nietzsche, Fröhliche Wissenschaft, book 2, section 107; in Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzeo Montinari, vol. 14 (Berlin/ New York: De Gruyter, 1980), 253. 20

Michel Marie, The French New Wave, trans. Richard Neupert (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 106. 21

Kovács, Screening Modernity, 363 (dominance of the verbal), 54 (literature as model of modernity). 22 Jean-Luc Godard, “Une Femme est une femme,” in Godard on Godard, ed. Jean Narboni and Tom Milene (New York: Viking, 1972), 166. 23

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24 Heinz von Foerster and Bernhard Poerksen, Understanding Systems: Conversations on Epistemology and Ethics, translated by Karen Leube (New York: Kluwer, 2002). 25

Niklas Luhmann, Einführung in die Systemtheorie (Heidelberg: Carl Auer Verlag, 2002), 97–98. This was already noticed at the time of the novel’s publication: “Die Personen [in Der geteilte Himmel] reagieren—um einen wissenschaftlichen Begriff vulgär zu gebrauchen—kybernetisch: Sie streben den Zustand der Ausgeglichenheit an, und sie geraten in Bewegung, wenn dieser Zustand von aussen gestört wird. Das ist ungemein menschlich!—vor allem, wenn man Menschen als Medium betrachtet.” Hans Bunge, “Im politischen Drehpunkt,” in Christa Wolf: Ein Arbeitsbuch, ed. Angela Drescher (Frankfurt: Luchterhand, 1990), 13–17, here 17. 26

Barton Byg, “History, Mourning and Theories of Feminine Identity: Der geteilte Himmel and Hiroshima mon amour,” unpublished ms.

27

Joseph Frank, The Idea of Spatial Form (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991). 28

Wolf, Der geteilte Himmel, 80.

29

Turovskaia, “Da i nyet,” 14.

30

One canonical criticism of the voiceover is that of Roland Barthes in “The Rhetoric of the Image,” Image/Music/Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977, 40–41. One would have to see the narrator of Wolf’s film as a “frame narrator” in Genette’s sense (on this, see Sarah Kozloff, Invisible Storytellers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 42. Through “frame narrators,” “the tale [of the film] is being deliberately addressed to us” (51), and such narrators are “generally heavier on . . . evaluation than first-person narrators, more likely to use their platform to probe, judge, generalize and interpret” (80). Kozloff remarks that this voice-over does not always coincide with the narrative instance of the camera (74), but rather “becomes the voice of the viewer” (95)—that is, the “we” of Christa Wolf’s novel. 31

Julia Hell, Post-Fascist Fantasies: Psychoanalysis, Literature, and the Literature of East Germany (Durham, NC: Duke 1997), 183. 32

According to Jacques Rivette, “Lang’s characters lost their individuality and became ‘human concepts.’ Sarraute’s characters underwent a similar process of losing their individual identity,” Dorota Ostrowska, Reading the French New Wave: Critics, Writers and Art Cinema in France (London: Wallflower, 2007), 54. 33

Peter Bächlin, Film als Ware (Basel: Burg Verlag, 1945).

34

Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx (Paris: Galilée 1993); Jürgen Habermas, Vergangenheit als Zukunft (Munich: Piper, 1993); Reinhard Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979). 35

Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), 55.

36

Delhey, Schwarze Orchideen und andere blaue Blumen, 45. In Christa Wolf’s novel, this abstraction is balanced by Rita’s mourning work after the loss of Manfred; the film, however, reduces this mourning work and replaces it to some extent through the voice-over.

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37

On the relation between Christa Wolf and Bloch, see Andreas Huyssen, “Traces of Ernst Bloch: Reflections on Christa Wolf,” in Responses to Christa Wolf, ed. Marilyn Sibley Fries (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 233–47. On the abstraction of Bloch’s hope, see Peter C. Caldwell, Dictatorship, State Planning and Social Theory in the German Democratic Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 126. 38

Caldwell, Dictatorship, State Planning and Social Theory, 3 (“the people . . . were not yet present”). 39

On socialist “higher consciousness” (höheres Bewusstsein), see Caldwell, Dictatorship, State Planning and Social Theory, 159, 169. 40

Especially in the final scene: see the discussion in the next chapter. One can also find similar, if not identical, sacrifices or losses made by women in Western societies, as the price paid for social integration; on this, see Christine Weinbach and Ursula Pasero, eds., Frauen, Männer, Gender Trouble (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003). 41

On Godard’s sound practice, see among other works Laurent Juillier, “To Cut or Let Live? The Soundtrack according to Godard,” in Sound and Music in Visual Media, ed. Graeme Harper (New York: Continuum, 2009), 352–62; and Jürg Stenzl, Jean-Luc Godard—Musicien: Die Musik in den Filmen von Jean-Luc Godard (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2010). There is a documentary film on Godard’s use of music, À l’écoute de Godard (On Listening to Godard, dir. Vincent Perrot, 2007). 42

Hosalla had previously collaborated with Wolf on Professor Mamlock (1961), and also wrote music for films as varied as Das hölzerne Kälbchen (The Wooden Calf, dir. Bernhard Thieme, 1960), Apachen (Apaches, dir. Gottfried Kolditz, 1973) and Denk’ bloss nicht, ich heule (Just Don’t Think I’m Crying, dir. Frank Vogel, 1965). 43

This supports Barton Byg’s view of the centrality of mourning in the film (see his “Geschichte, Trauer und weibliche Identität im Film. Hiroshima mon amour und Der geteilte Himmel,” in Zwischen gestern und morgen: Schriftstellerinnen der DDR aus amerikanischer Sicht, ed. Ute Brandes (Berlin: Lang, 1992), 95–112. 44

See chapter 2, “Media Hot and Cold” in Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (Berkeley, CA: Gingko Press, 2003), which was originally published in 1964 (New York: McGraw-Hill), the year Der geteilte Himmel was released. 45

Adorno, Philosophie der neuen Musik [= Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 12], 26. See also “Ideen zur Musiksoziologie,” Klangfiguren [= Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 16], 18: “jeder Klang allein sagt Wir.” 46

Neapolitan chords are built on the flattened second degree of the scale, usually in preparation for the dominant, and although already used in the eighteenth century, became commonly used by 1800 in the music of Beethoven, Schubert, and their contemporaries. The effect is of a sudden distant colouring, remote from the main key. 47

Mickey-Mousing is the close, one-to-one correspondence of soundtrack to visual gesture, once common in the 1930s and 1940s. See Chuck Jones, “Music and the Animated Cartoon,” Hollywood Quarterly 1, no. 4 (1946): 364–70.

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48 See Klaus Gestwa, “Der Kolumbus des Kosmos. Der Kult um Jurij Gagarin,” Osteuropa 59, no. 10 (2009): 121–52. 49

Noel Burch, Theory of Film Practice, trans. Helen Lane (New York: Praeger, 1973).

50

David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 277. 51 Mahler: Eine musikalische Physiognomik [= Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 13], 149–320, esp. 190–95 (chapter 3). 52

“das ist hier die Frage. Regisseur Konrad Wolf nimmt Stellung,” in Direkt in Kopf und Herz: Aufzeichungen, Reden, Interviews (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1989), 103. It is telling that Wolf went on to explain Manfred’s unattractive character as linked to his leaving the GDR, and concluded that “es ist gut so” that he could no longer do so after the Wall was built (106). 53

Pinkert, “Tender Males: Jewish Figures as Affective Archive in East German Film,” Studies in Eastern European Cinema 3, no. 2 (2012): 193–210, here 195.

Chapter Nine 1

Although Wolf’s wartime diaries have recently been translated from Russian into German (Aber ich sah ja selbst, das war der Krieg: Kriegstagebücher und Briefe, 1942–1945 [Berlin: Edition Die Möwe, 2015]), they break off in April 1945, the time of Ich war neunzehn’s events. Thus Jacobsen and Aurich note that Wolf’s “eigene[n] Erlebnisse . . . waren ihm lediglich erzählerischer Ausgangspunkt, Motivation” (own experiences . . . were only a narrative point of departure, motivation; Der Sonnensucher Konrad Wolf, 398). 2

Bazin, “La Politique des auteurs,” in The New Wave, ed. Peter Graham (New York: Doubleday, 1968), 154. 3

As will be discussed later, it is still not entirely clear who was responsible for shutting down public discussion around Solo Sunny (see chapter 13). 4

See, on this, the pertinent criticisms of Judith Mayne in her Cinema and Spectatorship (London: Routledge, 1993), passim. 5

Thomas Elsaesser and Michael Wedel, “Defining DEFA’s Historical Imaginary: The Films of Konrad Wolf,” New German Critique (Winter 2001): 3–24. 6

Marc Silberman, “The Authenticity of Autobiography: Konrad Wolf’s Ich war neunzehn.” chapter 10 in German Cinema: Texts in Contexts (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 145–61; also his “Remembering History: The Filmmaker Konrad Wolf,” New German Critique 49 (Winter 1990): 163–91. 7

Shandley, Rubble Films. See also Barton Byg, “DEFA and the Traditions of International Cinema,” in DEFA: East German Cinema 1946–1992, ed. Sean Allan and John Sandford (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 1999), 22–41. 8

See most recently Joshua Feinstein, The Triumph of the Ordinary: Depictions of Daily Life in the East German Cinema 1949–1989 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

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9

So Millicent Marcus in her readings of Rossellini and De Sica (Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). 10

Elsaesser, New German Cinema: A History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), esp. chapters 4, 5, 6. 11

See Wolf‘s reflections on the film’s production history in Direkt in Kopf und Herz: Aufzeichungen, Reden, Interviews (Berlin: Aufbau, 1989). 12

On the tension between Western pop culture and socialism, see Timothy Ryback’s Rock around the Block and Ute Poiger’s Jazz, Rock and Rebels. 13

See Elsaesser’s comments on him in New German Cinema, 132.

14

Eric Rentschler, “Specularity and Spectacle in Schlöndorff’s Young Törless,” in German Film and Literature, ed. Rentschler (New York: Methuen, 1986), 178. Sabine Hake has formulated this as follows: DEFA’s “emphasis on consensus makes it also difficult to speak of film-making either as a typical struggle between artistic freedom and political oppression or as yet another example of opportunist, conformist and subversive artists working under an oppressive regime” (German National Cinema [New York: Routledge, 2002], 121). It is precisely the way in which this ‘consensus’ was staged and maintained around questions of genre, history and nation that will be considered here. 15 On this, see Katie Trumpener, “Moving DEFA into Eastern Europe,” in Moving Images of East Germany: Past and Future of DEFA Film, ed. Barton Byg and Betheny Moore (Baltimore: American Institute for Contemporary German Studies), 85–104; see also R. Taylor, N. Wood, J. Graffy, D. Iordanova, eds., The BFI Companion to Eastern European and Russian Cinema (London: BFI, 2000). 16

“A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” in Movies and Methods, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 224–36, here 227.

17

If the “reduction of faith” to “psychology, plain and simple” was a problem for Bazin’s friend Amédée Ayffre (Truffaut, “A Certain Tendency,” 227), then the reduction of Marxian faiths to mere psychology could cause similar problems for DEFA. On Truffaut’s rejection of social engagement, see John Hess’s two articles, “La Politique des Auteurs,” part 1, Jump Cut 1974: 19–22; part 2, 1974: 20–22. 18 Thomas Elsaesser, “Subject Positions, Speaking Positions: From Holocaust, Our Hitler and Heimat to Schindler’s List,” in The Persistence of History, ed. Vivian Sobchack (London: Routledge, 1996), 145–83, here 158. 19

Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 282. (White in fact prefers the term synecdoche for the final phase in Marx’s scheme.) 20

Maya Turovskaya, “Soviet Films of the Cold War,” in Stalinism and Soviet Cinema, ed. Richard Taylor and D. Spring (New York: Routledge, 1993), 131–41, here 133–34. 21

See among others Eric Santner, “History beyond the Pleasure Principle: Some Thoughts on the Representation of Trauma,” in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution,’ ed. Saul Friedlaender (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 143–54; Julia Hell, Post-Fascist Fantasies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the

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Two Germanies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997; Thomas Fox, Stated Memory (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 1999). 22

On this, see Steven Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 2–3. 23

See on this Elsaesser, “Spectators of Life: Time Place Life and Self in the Films of Wim Wenders,” in The Cinema of Wim Wenders, ed. Roger Cook and Gert Gmünden (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 240–56. 24

James Naremore, Acting in the Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 185, 203. 25

Kitses, Horizons West (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969), 8.

26

Janet Walker, ed., Westerns: Films through History (London: Routledge 2001),

1. 27

Nikita Khrushchev claimed in his memoirs that none other than Stalin himself was, despite ideological suspicions, a fan of Westerns Khrushchev Remembers, trans. Strobe Talbott (London: André Deutsch, 1971), 297. 28

See most recently Joshua Feinstein, The Triumph of the Ordinary: Depictions of Daily Life in the East German Cinema 1949–1989 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 29

A locus classicus would be in Goncharov’s Oblomov, where the main character, in angry reaction against the Zola-like social Naturalism of his literary visitor Penkin, declaims, “Give me man—man!” (anticipating Maksim Gorky’s later ‘Soviet humanist’ saw about the “proud sound” of the word “man”; Goncharov, Oblomov, trans. D. Magarshack (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), 36). The endless Socialist pursuit of “real man” was the Sisyphean complement to bureaucratic overdetermination, only comprehensible against the background of the latter.

30

Pierre Sorlin, Italian National Cinema (New York: Routledge 1996), 93.

31

Hayden White, The Content of the Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). 32

See Vivian Sobchack, “‘Surge and Splendor’: A Phenomenology of the Hollywood Historical Epic,” in Film Genre Reader II, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 280–307. 33

Janet Staiger, “Securing the Fictional Narrative as a Tale of the Historical Real,” South Atlantic Quarterly 88, no. 2 (Spring 1989): 393–413. 34

Most recently, Vincent F. Rocchio has argued for neorealism as a “cinema of anxiety.” Rocchio, Cinema of Anxiety: A Psychoanalysis of Italian Neorealism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999). 35

Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialektik, Gesammelte Schriften 6, 356.

36

Millicent Marcus, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism, 24–25.

37

Ulrich Gregor and Enno Patalas, Geschichte des modernen Films (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1965), 21. 38

Mira Liehm, Passion and Defiance: Film in Italy from 1942 to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 99, 104. Of DEFA’s two main genres, the Gegenwartsfilm and the antifascist film, neorealism would seem to

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work best with the former, as evinced in the Berlin films of Klein and Kohlhaase, or Böttcher’s Jahrgang 45—precisely the films with which the GDR state censors would have the most trouble. Lino Micciché, quoted in Lubica Učník, “Aesthetics or Ethics? Italian Neorealism and Czech New Wave Cinema,” in Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema, ed. Laura Ruberto and Kristi Wilson (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007), 54–71, here 61.

39

40

Elsaesser and Wedel, “The Films of Konrad Wolf,” 12.

41

Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, 236, lists the production film, the film about daily life, and the film about the Revolution. DEFA had to replace the latter with the antifascist film.

42

Niklas Luhmann, “Funktion und Kausalität,” Soziologische Aufklärung, vol.1 (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1973), 9–30. 43

Feinstein, The Triumph of the Ordinary: Depictions of Daily Life in the East German Cinema, 1949–1989 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 228; see my review in South Central Review 21, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 85–87. I have made related dissenting comments on Uta Poiger’s Jazz, Rock and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), which works with similarly unquestioned circular arguments, yet seems to be immune to criticism among American scholars, since it proposes a flattering view of US pop culture as inherently emancipatory; see my The Differentiation of Modernism (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013) for this. 44

Altman, Film/Genre.

45

Altman, Film/Genre, 108–9.

46

But see Bordwell’s criticisms of Propp misuse in “ApProppriations and ImPropprieties: Problems in the Morphology of Film Narrative,” Cinema Journal 27, no. 3 (Spring 1978): 5–20. 47

See esp. Luhmann’s “Gesellschaftliche Struktur und semantische Tradition,” Gesellschaftstruktur und Semantik, vol. 1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1980), 9–71; for a useful commentary on this pair of concepts, see Urs Stäheli, “Zum Verhältnis von Sozialstruktur und Semantik.” Soziale Systeme 4 (1998): Heft 2: 35–340. 48

Konrad Wolf, “Der geteilte Himmel,” in Direkt in Kopf und Herz, 96.

49

On this, see Dagmar Schittly, Zwischen Regie und Regime: Die Filmpolitik der SED im Spiegel der DEFA Produktion (Berlin: Links, 2002), 89. 50

Niklas Luhmann, Die Kunst der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995), 373.

51

Altman, Film/Genre, 109.

52

See Peter C. Caldwell, Dictatorship, State Planning and Social Theory in the German Democratic Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 27. 53

Turovskaya, “Soviet Films of the Cold War,” in Stalinism and Soviet Cinema, ed. Taylor and Spring, 133. 54

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On the KAGs, see Feinstein, The Triumph of the Ordinary, 103–7.

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55 Expectations—German Erwartungen—is a key term in post-Parsonian sociology, bound up as it is with the central problem of how to solve double contingency. 56

“Most narrative crossroads lead to a new event, a new road, and a new and different fork; for genre viewers however, every crossroads is formulaic, with one path always leading to renewed generic activity” (Altman, Film/Genre, 152). 57

Simone Barck, Christoph Classen, and Thomas Heimann, “Controlling the Media: The Fettered Debate,” 213–39 in Dictatorship as Experience, ed. Konrad Jarausch (New York: Berghahn, 1999), with many references to works discussing the paradox of socialist Öffentlichkeit. The ideal model of a socialist public sphere would be Negt and Kluge’s proletarian one (Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt, Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung: Zur Organisationsanalyse von bürgerlicher und proletarische Öffentlichkeit [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972]). 58

Caldwell, Dictatorship, State Planning and Social Theory, 35.

59

Eigenvalues are stable structures or equilibria within dynamic systems. Heinz von Foerster, Understanding Understanding (New York: Springer, 2003), esp. chapter 11, 261–72; Dirk Baecker has extended this idea into cultural values, in “Culture Switch and Culture Brands,” Weimarer Studien zur Kulturpolitik und Kulturökonomie 7 (2011): 33–43, 2011. 60

For another version of “allegories of production,” see the present writer’s “Allegories of Management. Norbert Schulze’s Soundtrack to Das Mädchen Rosemarie,” in Framing the Fifties, ed. Sabine Hake and John Davidson (New York: Berghahn, 2007), 180–93. The type of “allegory” proposed here does not contradict the earlier-cited passage from Luhmann that there are no one-to-one correspondences between economics and culture, for instance. Culture should be seen here as an emergent form (that is, as something that is qualitatively new and cannot be deduced or predicted from its material conditions; on this concept, see Achim Stephan, Emergenz: Von der Unvorhersagbarkeit zur Selbstorganisation (Dresden: Dresden University Press, 1999). 61

These spatial and editing discontinuities are kin to then-recent techniques in Godard: the opening discontinuous shots of Breathless, for instance, are also only later sutured together by a pan left from Belmondo’s female accomplice to the car he is stealing. 62

“Ein Brief zu ‘Ich war neunzehn,’” in Konrad Wolf: Neue Sichten auf seine Filme, special issue of Beiträge zu Film- und Fernsehwissenschaft (Potsdam), 39, no. 31 (1990): 133–45, 139. 63

Mama, ich lebe interestingly replaces this function with that of the object lesson, in the sequence where one character makes a chair in the prison camp and is told that this is less useful than fighting Fascists. 64 Bazin, ‘Theater and Cinema, Part Two,” in What is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 95–124, 110. 65

See Daniel Nordman, “From the Boundaries of the State to National Borders,” in Rethinking France: Les Lieux de Mémoire, vol. 1, ed. Pierre Nora, trans. Mary Trouille (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 117–18. There has

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since been a German parallel endeavor: Etienne François and Hagen Schulze, eds, Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, 3 vols. (Munich: Beck, 2001). 66

Bennet Schaber, “‘Hitler Can’t Keep ’Em That Long.’ The Road, the People,” in The Road Movie Book, ed. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (New York: Routledge, 1997), 17–44, here 35 and 38. 67

On this relation, see now Ofer Ashkenazi, “Homecoming as a National Founding Myth: Jewish Identity and German Landscapes in Konrad Wolf’s I was Nineteen,” Religions 3 (2012): 130–50. Ashkenazi makes Wolf’s Jewishness slightly more well-defined than the present book does (Wolf was in fact only half-Jewish), and views the film’s landscapes as an ironizing of the Heimatfilm tradition. 68

For a good instance of how general and undefined these narrative types can be, see Jon Tuska, The American West in Film (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 23ff. (listing seven formulaic types of Western narrative). 69 “Primary Identification and the Historical Subject,” in Philip Rosen, ed., Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 540. 70 As Altman correctly notes, a genre cannot exist without an audience (Film/ Genre, 162). 71

Jochen Hörisch called this a “seltsame Spätform des Buchmonopols.” Wolfgang Emmerich, Kleine Literaturgeschichte der DDR (Leipzig: Kiepenheuer, 1996), 13; within the filmic dispositif, this meant what in Soviet film history was called the ‘iron scenario’ or untouchability of the script. Peter Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society from the Revolution to the Death of Stalin (London: Tauris, 2001), 71. See also Hake, German National Cinema, 121 on the role of the Dramaturg. 72

Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, 171–72.

73

On the dominant position of the radio in Nazi media, see Norbert Frei and Johannes Schmitz, Journalismus im 3. Reich (Munich: Beck, 1999). 74

Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 81. 75

Markus Wolf, in Die Troika, purportedly based on a never-written autobiographical film scenario of his brother Konrad Wolf, stresses “welche Rolle die Mütter im Leben der Helden dieser Geschichte gespielt haben.” Die Troika (Berlin: Aufbau, 2003), 68. 76

Derrida’s well-known considerations on genre would support this essay’s argument, for he grandiosely claims that “the question of the literary genre . . . covers the motif of the law in general” and “sexual difference between the feminine and the masculine gender.” “The Law of Genre,” in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 221–52, here 243. In the present context, “law in general” must yield to law in historical context, however. 77

In the sense that Lacan’s object little a—which can be the voice—“falls out” of the relation between the subject and the Other (see his “Introduction to the Names of the Father Seminar,” transl. Jeffrey Mehlman, October 40 [Spring 1987]: 81–95, esp. 82–85). 78

We have thus evaded the problematic question of whether DEFA had or did not have a “distinctive style.” Detlef Kannapin, “Gibt es eine spezifische

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DEFA-Ästhetik?” in Apropos: Film 2000: Das Jahrbuch der DEFA-Stiftung (Berlin: Das neue Berlin, 2000), 142–64. Posing the question that way may already ensure a negative answer; but one can hardly claim all Polish cinema had one style, either. The title of Wolf’s film is interesting in its then-contemporary resonances: on the one hand, it echoes Marlen Khutsiev’s anti-heroic film about a young man returned from the war, Mne dvadsat’ let (I Am Twenty, 1964), which was the Soviet New Wave equivalent of a Kaninchenfilm, since it ran into trouble with the censors. Another resonance would be Ya—Kuba (I am Cuba, 1964) of Mikhail Kalatazov, an unfortunately bombastic abuse of that director’s virtuosic skills, which nonetheless also works with a personification of nation as voice-over and natural image. 79

Cf. Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation,” in Nation and Narration (New York: Routledge, 1990), 291–322. 80

Klinger, “‘Cinema/Ideology/Criticism’ Revisited: The Progressive Genre,”in Film Genre Reader IV, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), 74–90; see also Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship, 100. on the “vague discourse of ‘subversion,’” and also Katie Trumpener, “Puerto Rico Fever. Douglas Sirk, La Habanera and the Epistemology of Exoticism,” in Neue Welt/Dritte Welt: Interkulturelle Beziehungen Deutschlands zu Lateinamerika und der Karibik, ed. Susan Cocalis and Sigrid Bauschinger (Tubingen/Basel: Francke, 1994), 115–39. 81

So Bhabha claims his approach “contests the traditional authority of those national objects of knowledge—Tradition, People, Reason of State, High Culture, for instance—whose pedagogical value often relies on their representation as holistic concepts located within an evolutionary narrative of historical continuity” (Nation and Narration, 3). This is a classical straw-man tactic that does justice neither to historians’ real practice nor to the continuing reality of state and people as more than mere “representation.”’ 82

Arif Dirlik, “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism,” Critical Inquiry (Winter 1994): 328–56, here 304 and 306, emphasis added. 83

Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 84

Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1929 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); see the review by Anne Applebaum in the New York Review of Books, February 12, 2004, 9–11 (the quote from Martin’s book is on p. 9 of the review). 85

Among many books dedicated to this: Xaver Streb, Lenin in Deutschland (Berlin: Dietz, 1957); Christa Höpfner, Lenin in Deutschland (Berlin: Dietz, 1970); Ernst Bäumler, Verschwörung in Schwabing: Lenins Begegnung mit Deutschland (Munich: Piper, 1991). 86 See Dagmar Herrmann, ed., Deutsche und Deutschland aus russischer Sicht, 2 vols. (Munich: Fink, 1985–1992); Deutschland und Europa in den Augen der Russen (edited and published by the Institut für Komplexe Gesellschaftsstudien der Russischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Bonn, 2002).

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87 Niklas Luhmann, Die Politik der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 2002), 210–11, emphasis added. 88

On this tension, the classic work is Roman Szporluk, Communism and Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 89

Klaus Erdmann, Der gescheiterte Nationalstaat: Die Interdependenz von Nations- und Geschichtsverständnis im politischen Bedingungsgefüge der DDR (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1996), 39. 90

Erdmann, Der gescheiterte Nationalstaat, 116.

91

Cit. Erdmann, Der gescheiterte Nationalstaat, 100.

92

Helmut Neef, ed., Dokumente der Nationalen Front des demokratischen Deutschland (Berlin-Ost: Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus der SED, 1967). 93

Erdmann, Der gescheiterte Nationalstaat, 75.

94

Michael Naumann, ed., Die Geschichte ist offen—DDR 1990 (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1990). 95

Bernhard Kregel, Aussenpolitik und Systemstabilisierung in der DDR (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1979), 18. 96

Erdmann, Der gescheiterte Nationalstaat, 152.

97

Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 1055. Habermas had a much more sanguine perspective on this; see his The PostNational Constellation, trans. Max Pensky (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001).

Chapter Ten 1

Angela Dalle Vacche, Cinema and Painting: How Art Is Used in Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996); Dalle Vacche, ed., The Visual Turn: Classical Film Theory and Art History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003); Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 2

Steinberg, “Other Criteria,” in Other Criteria (New York: Oxford, 1972), 63.

3

Formalism would be linked to the names of Heinrich Wölfflin and Alois Riegl, yet its methods came under criticism as early as 1918, so that as early as the 1950s it could only be seen as itself a historical phenomenon; see Werner Weisbach, Stilbegriffe und Stilphänomene (Vienna: Schroll, 1957); Friedrich Piel, “Der historische Stilbegriff und die Geschichtlichkeit der Kunst,” in Kunstgeschichte und Kunsttheorie im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Hermann Bauer (Berlin: De Gruyter 1963), 20–27. In English, Clement Greenberg’s neo-formalism was powerfully criticized by Leo Steinberg, then by Rosalind Krauss: The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985]). On Panofsky’s distinction between iconography and iconology and its relevance to film studies, see Thomas Y. Levin, “Iconology at the Movies: Panofsky’s Film Theory,” in The Visual Turn: Classical Film Theory and Art History, ed. Angela Dalle Vacche, 85–114. 4

The want of identifiable style has been seen as typical of DEFA films as a whole (Detlev Kannapin, “Gibt es eine spezifische DEFA-Ästhetik?,” 142–64), as has a

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259

certain trouble with genre formula. This has been countered by Thomas Elsaesser and Michael Wedel, in their article “Defining DEFA’s Historical Imaginary: The Films of Konrad Wolf,” New German Critique 82 (2001): 3–24, although their auteurist approach is also not without problems. In the case of Wolf, though, this “genre trouble” is not merely a matter of an inability to attain Hollywood “professionalism,” but something deliberate and purposive. 5

Blumenrath and Scherpe, “Goya oder der arge Weg der Erkenntnis: Konrad Wolfs Feuchtwangerverfilmung—ein sozialistisches Gesamtkunstwerk,” Praxis Deutsch: Zeitschrift für den Deutschunterricht 62 (1983): 62–68.

6

David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), xiii–xiv.

7

George F. Custen, Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 132. 8

See the review in Junge Welt no. 34, September 17, 1971, “Wie nahe ist Goya dem Zuschauer von 1971?” where Wolf says: “We tried, especially in the first part of the film, to come as close to the habits of the viewer as possible.” Goya did not win first prize in the Moscow Film Festival of that year, though, only receiving a “special prize.” It had 1,001,798 viewers in its first year, considerably fewer than Wolf’s previous film, I Was Nineteen, but nonetheless more than either his next film, The Naked Man on the Playing Field or the belatedly released Sonnensucher (1972); for statistics, see E. Quett, Filmografie der künstlerisch-technischen und ökonomischen Daten: DEFA Kinospielfilmproduktion 1967–1976, vol. 3 (PotsdamBabelsberg, 1978), 213. The film was cut several times by Wolf, and only just recently has an uncut version (longer by some 30 minutes) been located in Russia (Nicholas Rittmeyer, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, personal communication, June 2007). 9

Undated post-release internal discussion for Solo Sunny, 1980 (Bundesarchiv DR 1 MfK—HV Film 86, 2). 10

See the memo of Günter Klein of June 28, 1971 (in the Berlin Akademie der Künste, Wolf Nachlass, 603). 11

See André Cornand, “Goya de Konrad Wolf,” Image et son: Revue du cinéma 257 (1972): 32–42. Günter Reisch and Helmut Baierl both mention Rublev in a discussion with Wolf mentioned in Ruth Herlinghaus, ed. Goya: Vom Roman zum Film (Berlin: Deutsche Akademie der Künste, 1971), 154–55. 12

Günter Agde, personal communication to author, June 25, 2007. According to Oksana Bulgakova, Tarkovsky was a “cult director” in the GDR (personal communication, June 2007). 13

Herlinghaus mentions Aleksandr Mitta’s Burn, Burn My Star (1969), Gleb Panfilov’s There’s No Ford through Fire (1967), Eldar Shengelaya’s An Unusual Exhibition (1968), Igor Talankin’s Daystars (1966), and Tenghiz Abuladze’s Entreaty (1967) as relevant to Goya’s context (Goya: Vom Roman zum Film, 12), and Wolf confirms this shortly thereafter (14). Since there are only a few explicit mentions of Rublev in the archival materials to Goya, the connection made here must be partly one of historical context and form.

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14

It has even been argued that Andrei Rublev, for all its differences of style, has kinship with the narrative patterns of socialist realism, since Rublev “underwent ideological transformation . . . in the course of the film.” Albert Leong, “Socialist Realism in Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev,” Studies in Comparative Communism 17, no. 3–4 (Autumn 1984–Winter 1985): 227–33, here 231. More likely is that Tarkovsky participates in a larger tendency of Russian, not only Soviet, art to see its function as moral, a tendency traced by historians of Russian literature back to nineteenth-century critic Vissarion Belinsky.

15

For a detailed discussion of Hirschmeier’s work on Goya, see Guenter Agde, Spielräume: Aus der Werkstatt des Filmszenographen Alfred Hirschmeier (Berlin: Akademie der Künste der DDR, 1989), 38–44. Closer attention to Hirschmeier’s contribution to Goya might lead to a reading more in line with Bordwell’s recent focus on mise en scène.

16

Dalle Vacche, Cinema and Painting, 136.

17

Ralf Schenk, ed., Das zweite Leben der Filmstadt Babelsberg (Berlin/Potsdam: Henschelverlag and Filmmuseum Potsdam, 1994), 230. In the aforementioned Junge Welt article, Wolf specifically stresses that this final montage sequence takes up where Feuchtwanger’s novel leaves off. The pictorial image, and Goya’s own work, is here expected to narrate beyond the written word. 18

Akademie der Künste, Nachlass Wolf, 594, dated October 28, 1970. In Wagnerian fashion, specific musical themes are associated in these notes with subjects, such as the “Inquisition theme,” and so on. 19

In the “evaluation of the film Goya” by I. N. Kiselew (Chair of the Artistic Commission and director of the Moscow studio Lenfilm involved in the coproduction), the author gives his opinion that the direct address of the Inquisitor to the audience at the end is too “symbolic” (SAPMO DR 117/vol. BA (I) 3358, February 17, 1971); this is seconded by a letter of Aleksandr Dymschitz to Irina Pavlovna of the same day. Here cinematic “excess” was felt by the authorities to be directly political. 20

The production notes call this image “a wild cry of horror, of protest-filled hatred” (Ak. d. Künste, 594). 21

The term is taken from Eastern Orthodox theology: cf. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Kosmische Liturgie: Das Weltbild Maximus des Bekenners (Einsiedeln: JohannesVerlag, 1988). 22

Bazin, What Is Cinema?, vol. 2, 110.

23

Peter Weiss, Die Verfolgung und Ermordung Jean Paul Marats dargestellt durch die Schauspielgruppe des Hospizes zu Charenton unter Anleitung des Herrn de Sade (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1964), 136. 24

SAPMO DR 117/vol. BA (I) 3358.

25

Theodor Hetzer, “Francisco Goya and the Crisis of Art around 1800,” in Goya in Perspective, ed. Fred Licht (Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall 1973), 92–113, here 110; see also Anne Hollander, Moving Pictures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 255. 26

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Herlinghaus, Goya: Vom Roman zum Film, 31.

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261

Aumont, L’oeil interminable, 2nd edition (Paris: Séguier, 1995), 38.

28

David Roberts, “Self-Reference in Literature,” in Problems of Form, ed. Dirk Baecker, trans. Michael Irmscher, with Leah Edwards (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 27–45. 29

Niklas Luhmann, Die Kunst der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995), 177.

30

Dalle Vacche, The Visual Turn, 22.

31

Aumont, L’oeil interminable, 94.

32

Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, in Gesammelte Schriften 7 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 91. 33

“the signature also marks and retains his having-been present in a past now or present [maintenant] which will remain a future now or present [maintenant], thus in a general maintenant, in the transcendental form of presentness [maintenance]. That general maintenance is in some way inscribed, pinpointed in the always evident and Singular present punctuality of the form of the signature.” Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” in Limited Inc. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 20. 34

Derrida, Limited Inc.; The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 35

Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. Karl Vorländer (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1922), 91.

36

Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989); Julia Hell, Post-Fascist Fantasies.

37

Herlinghaus, Goya: Vom Roman zum Film, 33, emphasis added.

38

Derrida, Truth in Painting, 78–79.

Chapter Eleven 1

See my discussion of his character as Jadup in “Vergangene Erinnerungen. Nationale Gedächtnisbilder im polnischen und ostdeutschen Film der 1970er Jahre—Andrzej Wajda und Rainer Simon,” in Unterwegs zum Nachbarn, ed. Brigitte Braun, Andrzej Dębski, and Andzrej Gwózdz (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2015), 315–24. 2

For a discussion of how art is represented here and in Goya, see Seán Allan, “Die Kunst braucht kein Feigenblatt. Art and the Artist in Konrad Wolf’s Goya and Der nackte Mann auf dem Sportplatz,” in Finding a Voice: Problems of Language in East German Society and Culture, ed. Graham Jackman and Ian Roe, German Monitor 47 (Amsterdam/Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000), 171–89. 3

Stötzer also plays a minor role in the film (as a mayor), and his hometown Steinach was the setting for parts of the film. There are also allusions to the work of other GDR sculptors in the film; for a discussion of this, see Tobias Ebbrecht, “Die Unruhe des Künstlers. Kunst, Erinnerung und Geschichte in Der nackte Mann auf dem Sportplatz,” in Konrad Wolf—Werk und Wirkung, ed. Michael Wedel and Elke Schieber (Berlin: VISTAS, 2009), 145–65. The film thus has a crypto-documentary aspect to it.

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4 Laura Rascaroli, The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film (London: Wallflower, 2009), 21. Earlier on in the book the author states: “On the one hand I will argue that we should resist the urge to overtheorize essayistic cinema and to crystallize it into a genre, on the other hand the simple act of grouping these films together . . . suggests the existence of a field, of a domain, if not of a coherent genre as such” (2–3, emphasis added). 5

“Der nackte Mann am Sportplatz. Dialog am Abend,” in Konrad Wolf im Dialog (Berlin: Dietz, 1985), 164. 6

Peter Wuss, Die Tiefenstruktur des Filmkunstwerks (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1986), 157. 7

Wuss, Die Tiefenstruktur des Filmkunstwerks, 158.

8

Siegfried Zielinski, Audiovisions (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999), 200.

9

Raymond Bellour, L’Entre-Images: Photo, Cinéma, Vidéo (Paris: La Différence, 1990), 11. 10

David Campany, Photography and Cinema (London: Reaktion 2008), 47.

11

Anatoli Kuznetsov, Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel, trans. David Floyd (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970). Wolf quotes a passage where the protagonist has “Erde im Mund” (compare the quote from Dina Pronicheva’s memoirs in Kusnetzov, 110). 12

Friedländer, Probing the Limits of Representation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 13

Trans. George Keavey, in Yevtushenko, The Collected Poems 1952–1990, ed. Albert Todd (New York: Henry Holt, 1991), 102–4. 14

Eli Wiesel, The Jews of Silence, trans. Neil Kozodoy, 2nd edition (New York: Schocken, 1987), 31. 15

William Korey, “A Monument over Babi Yar?” in The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, ed. Lucjan Dobroszycki and Jeffrey Gurock (Armonk, NY/London: Sharpe, 1993), 61–74. See also Lucy Dawidowicz, “The True History of Babi Yar,” in What is The Use of Jewish History? (New York: Schocken, 1992), 101–19. 16

Ulrich Baer, Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 126.

17

Vilem Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion, 2000), 24, 29. 18 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 10; Kracauer, “Die Photographie,” in Das Ornament der Masse (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), 30–33. 19

Jens Ruchatz, “Fotografische Gedächtnisse. Ein Panorama medienwissenschaftlicher Fragestellungen,” in Medien des kollektiven Gedächtnisses, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 2004), 83–105, here 103. 20 Eric Santner, Friedrich Hölderlin (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980), 20.

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21

W. H. Auden, Selected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage, 1979), 79. The deliberately drooping, prosy line is one of the moments where Auden most seems to anticipate John Ashbery. 22

Theodor Adorno, “Engagement,” in Noten zur Literatur, in Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt; Suhrkamp, 1997), 11: 422. 23

Hermann Schirrmeister, “Heiteres Nachdenken über Kunst,” Tribüne (Berlin Ost), April 11, 1974. 24

Hans-Dieter Schütt, Kurt Böwe: Der lange kurze Atem (Berlin: Aufbau, 1999), 151–52. 25

Schütt, Kurt Böwe, 174.

26

Ulla Fix, “Was ist aus André Jolles’ Einfachen Formen heute geworden?,” in Sprache und Kommunikation im Kulturkontext, ed. Volker Hertel, Irmhild Barz, Regine Metzler, and Brigitte Uhlig (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996), 105– 20, here 110–11. 27

Jolles, Einfache Formen, 10.

28

See his formulation on p. 22 of how language “anordnend, umordnend in eine . . . Form eingreift, sie von sich aus noch einmal gestaltet.” 29

Wolfgang Ullrich, “Kunst als Arbeit?,” in Was ist ein Künstler? Das Subjekt der modernen Kunst, ed. Martin Hellmold (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2003), 163–76. 30

Ulla Fix, “Zitier-, Reproduzier- und Mustertextsorten: Die Jollesschen Begriffe Sprachgebärde und Geistesbeschäftigung als Anlass zum Nachdenken über produktiven und rezeptiven Umgang mit Texten,” in Oberfläche und Performanz: Untersuchungen zur Sprache als dynamischer Gestalt, ed. Angelika Linke and Helmuth Feilke (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2009), 353–68, here 366. 31

Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

32

Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, trans. Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 294. The passage is in Freud’s Traumdeutung, in Studienausgabe in neun Bänden (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1970), vol, 2, 220).

33

Tom Conley, “From Rebut to Rebus,” Yale French Studies 99 (2001): 27–43, here 42.

34

Sigmund Freud, Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten, in Studienausgabe (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1970), IV, 106. 35

Einar Schleef, Tagebuch 1964–1976 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2006), 20. Stefan Wolle, Die heile Welt der Diktatur (Berlin: Links, 1998), 229. 36

Joachim Jaeger, Humor und Satire in der DDR (Frankfurt: R. G. Fischer, 1984), 70. Jaeger also notes earlier that GDR humor was similar to nineteenthcentury German humoristic practice in its harmlessness (54). 37

Gerhard Wolf, Rückwärts geh’n die Krebse gern/Aber vorwärts eilt die Zeit. Berlin: Verlag der Morgen, 1988.

38

Nussbaum, “The Comic Soul: Or, This Phallus that is Not One,” The Soul of Tragedy: Essays on Athenian Drama, ed. Victoria Pedrick and Steven Oberhelman

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(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 155–80, here 167. Lacan pointed out that the phallus needs to be veiled for it to be powerful; its unveiling, by contrast, “c’est proprement l’élément du comique pur.” Lacan, Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1973), 10. 39

Larissa Bonfante, “Freud and the Psychoanalytical Meaning of the Baubo Gesture in Ancient Art,” Notes in the History of Art 27, no. 2/3 (Winter/Spring 2008): 2–9, here 6: “The Roman Priapus, the personification of the male phallus, is related to Baubo, the female organ.” 40

On culture as externalization and internalization, see Dirk Baecker, “Kulturelle Orientierung,”in Luhmann und die Kulturtheorie, ed. G. Burkart and G. Runkel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004), 58–90. Culture as externalization is Luhmann’s “output” (Leistung); as internalization, it is culture’s function; on the difference, see Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 757–60. 41

Dirk Baecker, Wozu Kultur? (Berlin: Kadmos, 2003), 125.

42

The term postmemory was first coined by Marianne Hirsch in her book “Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-Memory,” Discourse 15, no. 2 (Winter 1992–93): 3–29. 43

Baecker, “Kulturelle Orientierung,” 61.

44

See Ebbrecht, “Die Unruhe des Künstlers,” in Konrad Wolf—Werk und Wirkung, ed. Wedel and Schieber, for a finely observed discussion of the implicit presence of antifascism in the film, and its relation to Wolf’s other films. 45

Marx, Early Political Writings, ed. J. O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 61.

46

Schütt, Kurt Böwe, 172.

Chapter Twelve 1

The radio play (available at the Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv Potsdam-Babelsberg, Archivnummer 00 3000825), which was first broadcast on September 14, 1969, has none of the film’s montage, making only sparing use of music and a telephone (twice, to frame the narrative’s beginning and end). 2 Garrett Stewart, Between Film and Screen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 190, 132, 49. 3

“Zur Fotometapher gerät das angehaltene Bild erst dann, wenn es als Fotografie motiviert ist.” Torsten Scheid, Fotografie und Metapher: Zur Konzeption des Fotografischen im Film (Hildesheim: Olms, 2005), 32. 4

Stewart, Between Film and Screen, 49.

5

Konrad Dussel, “Rundfunk in der Bundesrepublik und in der DDR,” in Zwischen Pop und Propaganda: Radio in der DDR, ed. Klaus Arnold and Christoph Classen (Berlin: Christoph Links, 2004), 305. 6

Sybille Bolik, Das Hörspiel in der DDR: Themen und Tendenzen (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1994), 94.

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Bolik, Das Hörspiel in der DDR, 96 (“geradezu ängstlich vermieden”).

8

Lucien Dallenbach, Le Récit spéculaire (Paris: Seuil, 1977), 105.

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9

On the recuperability of flashbacks, especially in Hollywood WWII films, see Maureen Turim, Flashbacks in Film (New York: Routledge, 1989), 237, 244. For instance, the flashback at 40ʹ to a dying man, accompanied ironically by “Una furtiva lagrima” from Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore (on an unseen radio, and most likely sung by Beniamino Gigli, Mussolini’s favorite tenor), is confusing at first viewing. 10

11 Gertrud Koch, “On the Disappearance of the Dead among the Living,” New German Critique 60 (Autumn 1993): 57–75. On the “constellation” of trains, Jews, and mobility, see Todd Pressler, Mobile Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 12

This is most evident about five minutes into the film, where the four men change clothes to the accompaniment of a solo violin that cannot help recalling that of Jakob. 13 Note the composition at 101ʹ30,ʺ where Pankonin in the background is framed by a richly textured and luminous curtain at left and a stove at right, both in the foreground, recalling Tarkovsky’s Mirror. 14

Dmitri Schlapentoch and Vladimir Schlapentoch, Soviet Cinematography 1918– 1991 (New York: de Gruyter, 1993), 141. The shot of the dead Kolya lying face down in the water is also cognate to a shot of a young man just shot to death in Rublev: in both, the calm and natural beauty of the image of flowing water contrasts with the shock of death. 15

Peter Wuss (professor emeritus at the Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen, and also a onetime Dramaturg at DEFA) has confirmed in conversation with me that Wolf “measured himself against” Tarkovsky (Babelsberg, June 2008). 16

Johannes Bobrowski, Gesammelte Werke in 6 Bänden (Stuttgart: DVA, 1999), 3:10. 17

Cited in Reinhard Tgahrt, Johannes Bobrowski: Landschaft mit Leuten (Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1993), 271. Another common motif with Bobrowski is the impossibility of leaving oneself behind, even in a foreign land (cf. “Ich will fortgehn,” in Gesammelte Werke 4:67). 18

Vejas G. Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 151. The description on page 34 confirms Bobrowski’s experience once more. 19

Konrad Wolf and Christa Wolf, “Kindheitsmuster: Dialog am Abend,” in Konrad Wolf im Dialog (Berlin: Dietz, 1985), 275–88, here 279. 20

Knut Hickethier, “Konrad Wold, Mama, ich lebe: Erinnerung als Identitätssuche,” in Konrad Wolf: Neue Sichten auf seine Filme: Ein Beitrag zur Kulturgeschichte der DDR (Berlin 1990), 186–92, here 181. 21

For a sharply critical view of this, see Yvonne Delhey, Schwarze Orchideen und andere blaue Blumen. 22

See Thomas Seifrid, “Trifonov’s Dom na Naberezhnoi and the Fortunes of Aesopian Speech,” Slavic Review 49, no. 4 (Winter 1990): 611–24.

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23 Seifrid, again: “Illusion” and Its Workings in Modern Russian Culture,” Slavic and East European Journal 45, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 205–15, esp. 211. 24

Koch, “On the Disappearance of the Dead among the Living,” 75.

25

See the review in the Lausitzer Rundschau (Cottbus) of February 2, 1977 (no page number, press archive at Fehrbelliner Platx, Berlin); also the review by Herbert Lassek in the Freie Presse (Karl-Marx-Stadt) of February 28, 1977. 26

Gertrud Koch, “‘Not yet accepted anywhere:’ Exile, Memory, and Image in Kracauer’s Conception of History,” New German Critique 54 (Autumn 1991): 95–109, here 109. 27

Siegfried Kracauer, History: The Last Things before the Last (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 157. 28

Markus Wolf, Man without a Face: The Autobiography of Communism’s Greatest Spymaster (New York: Times Books, 1997). 29

Sobor’nost, the idea of a living community, was formulated by Russian Slavophile thinkers Alexei Khomyakov and Ivan Kireevsky in the 1840s; although originally a religious doctrine, and officially rejected by Lenin, it continued to influence Russian thought into the twentieth century. Since the primitive Russian commune (mir or obschina) bore resemblance to the historical origins of social life sketched in the German Ideology, even Marx had sympathy for its kinship to modern communism: see his November 1877 letter to the Otechesvtenniye Zapiski, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Moscow, n.d., 377.). 30

An interesting comparison could be made to the similar Utopian idealization of Soviet Georgian peasant culture in Brecht’s Kaukasischer Kreidekreis: in both cases, an instance of what Ernst Bloch liked to call a “Vor-Schein” or anticipation of the future; cf. Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985), chapter 15—which could however also be instrumentalized for less than Utopian purposes. 31

Theo Elm, Die moderne Parabel (Munich: Fink 1982), 35; Theo Elm and H. H. Hiebel, eds., Die Parabel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), 10–11.

32

Elm, Moderne Parabel, 49 (unreal elements point to unstated parabolic truth).

33

Elm and Hiebel, Die Parabel, 15.

34

As Wolf noted: “diese vier Jungen sind altersgleich mit den potentiellen Zuschauern, auf die ich besonderen Wert legen möchte” (“these four young men are of the same age with the potential audience, to which I attach special importance”) (“Und doch eine heutige Geschichte,” conversation between Günter Agde and Wolf, Beilage zur Märkischen Volksstimme, February 18, 1977, 2). Wolfgang Gersch reported that Wolfgang Kohlhaase believed these young actors “bringen in die damaligen Fragen heutige Haltungen ein. Es entsteht ein Bruch, der enthistorisierend wirkte.” (they bring today’s attitudes to questions from earlier. There arises a break which has a dehistoricising effect.”) Gersch, “Geschichte und Gegenwart,” Treffpunkt Kino no. 5 (1977), emphasis added. This “Bruch” was intended by Wolf as a Leerstelle for viewers to fill themselves. 35

That Wolf was clearly aware of this loss of continuity emerges from Ruth Herlinghaus’s protocol of in-house DEFA discussions on January 27, 1978 (BA Finckensteiner Allee, Fiche 115, 39–43).

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36

Wolf discussed the way this peculiar accusing stare was repeated during the film’s shooting when he talked with students at the Technische Hochschule in Karl-Marx-Stadt; “Bei Studenten zu Gast,” Filmspiegel 24 no. 7 (1977). The split of image and sound, or narrative and image, may be seen as another aspect of parabolic Verfremdung (on the relation of “Sachhälfte und Bildhälfte der Parabel” as one of “gesellschaftliche Wirklichkeit und verfremdende Darstellung,” see Elm and Hiebel, Parabel, 320). 37

This tactical pragmatism is very evident at the end of Wolf’s discussion in January 1978, in answer to the loss of viewers: “Absolut ohne Rückhalt würde ich da in die Schule der Amerikaner gehen . . . bis zu dieser eigenartigen Nostalgiewelle der zwanziger Jahre, die da seit dem ‘Cabaret’ nun um sich greift” (“I would absolutely and unreservedly go to the school of the Americans . . . all the way to this peculiar nostalgia wave regarding the 1920s, which is spreading now since Cabaret”)(DR 1 MFK—HV Film, Fiche 115, 43, at the Bundesarchive Fehrbellinerplatz). 38

Elm, Moderne Parabel, 14, calls this a “Vermittlungsprozess.”

39

Norbert Miller, “Parabel als ‘Lehre’ und ‘Vorgang.’ Brecht und Kafka,” in Elm and Hiebel, Parabel, 255–68, here 258. 40

Gisbert Ter-Nedden, “Fabeln und Parabeln zwischen Rede und Schrift,” in Fabel und Parabel, ed. Theo Elm and Peter Hasubek (Munich: Fink, 1994), 67–107, here 71. This meant that DEFA cinema was defined by a mimesis of what Fredric Jameson has called a “restricted code,” meaning a code for “ingroups” that predated the “elaborated codes” of modern bourgeois capitalism. Jameson, “The Existence of Italy,” in Signatures of the Visible [New York: Routledge, 1990, 167]). This forms then a structural kinship of DEFA to postcolonial or “third” cinema. 41

On this complicity of reader and writer, see Helen Fehervary, “Christa Wolf’s Prose: A Landscape of Masks,” New German Critique 27 (Autumn 1982): 57–87.

Chapter Thirteen 1

Günter Gaus, Wo Deutschland liegt: Eine Ortsbestimmung (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1983), esp. “Nischengesellschaft,” 156–233. 2

Solo für Sanije: Die wahre Geschichte der Solo Sunny, directed by Alexandra Czok (2008).

3

According to Gräf, “Frauenfilme als spezifische filmische Kategorie [hat es] im DEFA-Spielfilm nie gegeben.” See Helmut Pflügl and Raimund Fritz, eds., Der geteilte Himmel: Höhepunkte des DEFA-Kinos 1946–1992 (Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, 2001), vol. 2, 107). Misselwitz claimed in an interview with Christiane Mückenberger that Winter ade was “kein Frauenfilm.” Mückenberger, “Dinge ins Rollen bringen. Motivationen und Visionen von Regisseurinnen im DEFADokumentarfilm,” http://www.hdf.de/de/publikationen/blickwechsel/mueck enberger.html). 4

Joshua Feinstein, The Triumph of the Ordinary (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). Der geteilte Himmel would in fact need to be read partly

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through melodrama, changing the way the film has been evaluated. On how generic redefinitions may affect this, see Lincoln Geraghty and Mark Jancovich, eds., The Shifting Definitions of Genre (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007). For the link between neorealism and masculinity, see Jaimey Fisher, “On the Ruins of Masculinity: Neorealism and the German Rubble Film,” in Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema, ed. Laura Roberto and Kristi Wilson (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007), 25–53. 5

Berghahn, Hollywood behind the Wall, 181. Compare Andrea Rinke: “There was no explicitly feminist approach to film-making in the GDR.” Rinke, “From Models to Misfits: Women in DEFA Films of the 1970s and 1980s,” in DEFA: East German Cinema 1946–1992, ed. Sean Allan and John Sandford (New York: Berghahn, 1999), 183–203, here 183.

6

Dölling, “‘Wir alle lieben Paula, aber uns liegt an Paul’—Wie über die ‘Weiblichkeit’ einer Arbeiterin der ‘sozialistische Mensch’ konstruiert wird,” Potsdamer Studien zur Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung Heft 1:2 (1997): Filmfrauen— Zeitzeichen. Frauenbilder im Film der 40er, 60er und 90er Jahre. Diva—Arbeiterin—Girlie. Band II: Arbeiterin: 73–108, here 89. 7 Klinger, Melodrama and Meaning (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1994), 55. As one reviewer nicely noted, “A local genre can have a local impact.” J. D. Connor, “Disappearing Inc.: Hollywood Melodrama and the Perils of Criticism, MLN 112, no. 5 (1997), 958–70, here 970. In other words, local genres can contribute to the differentiation of social subgroups, rather than merely engineering false totalities (as in traditional Hollywood genre theory). In the GDR, the woman’s film had to be a local genre, due the aforementioned absence of an “explicitly feminist approach.” 8

Thomas Beebee, The Ideology of Genre (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 1994); Robin Wood, “Ideology, Genre, Auteur,” in Film Genre Reader, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 59–73. This means also that to criticize DEFA for not producing a genre cinema (as some have done, e.g., Detlev Kannapin) may be beside the point. 9

Berghahn, for instance, does not do so, but opposes DEFA woman’s films to earlier ones (209 n.1). 10

In the Company of Women: Contemporary Female Friendship Films (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 1–2. These are still mainstream Hollywood films, unlike the independent filmmakers whom Ann Kaplan preferred to view as the inheritors of the woman’s film; Women and Film (New York: Methuen, 1983). Jill Nelmes’s recent all-encompassing definition of the genre, An Introduction to Film Studies (London: Routledge, 2003), 378) is broad enough to include both. For a historical overview of discussions of woman’s film, one may compare chapter 3 of Joanne Hollows, Feminism, Femininity and Popular Culture (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1999). The difficulty in defining the woman’s film is comparable to that of defining the so-called “social-problem film.” 11 Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” in Refiguring American Film Genres, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley, U of California Press, 1998), 42–88. 12

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Doane, The Desire to Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 3.

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13

A more complete listing can be found in Andrea Rinke, Images of Women in East German Film, 2nd edition (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006). Even earlier films, such as Dudow’s Destinies of Women (1952) or Love’s Confusion (1959) could also be seen as predecessors. 14 Christine Geraghty, “The Woman’s Film,” in The Film Studies Reader, ed. Joanne Hollow, Peter Hutchings, and Mark Jancovich (London: Arnold, 2000), 102–5, here 103. 15

This, too, has been a matter of debate: Laura Mulvey and Tania Modleski both saw them as such; see Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: BFI, 1999), 76; the “confusion . . . between a woman’s film and melodrama” is noted by Geraghty, “The Woman’s Film,” 103; in the case of DEFA film, however, this equivalence cannot work. 16

Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996), 137.

17

Helke Sander and Renate Schlesier, “die legende von paul und paula, eine frauenverachtende schnulze aus der ddr,” frauen und film 2 (1974): 8–48. On the reception, see Irene Dölling, “‘Wir alle lieben Paula, aber uns liegt an Paul.’” Both Dölling and Andrea Rinke (“From Models to Misfits,” 191) defend Paul and Paula against its West German critics. 18 See Doane, The Desire to Desire, chapter 4, “The Love Story” on the “relation” between excessive “female sexuality and death” (122) dramatized in these films. 19

Dölling, “‘Wir alle lieben Paula, aber uns liegt an Paul,’” 92.

20

Neale, Genre (London: BFI, 1980), 22; I follow here Jackie Byars’s comments in All That Hollywood Allows (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 18–19. 21

Thomas Elsaesser, “The Pathos of Failure: American Films in the 1970s: Notes on the Unmotivated Hero,” in The Last Great American Picture Show, ed. Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath and Noel King (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 279–92, here 287. We could find a similar “pathos of failure” in Andrzej Wajda’s The Maids of Wilko of 1979, responding to the failure of Gierek’s 1970s Polish reform socialism—or in the heroic ironies of his two Solidarity movies (Man of Marble and Man of Iron). 22

Noel Carroll, “The Future of an Allusion: Hollywood in the Seventies (and Beyond),” October 20 (Spring 1982): 51–81. 23

“The spectator of a Fassbinder film becomes active [. . .] by the very impossibility of situating him/herself unambiguously or without self-contradiction: a dilemma [. . .] still associated with Hollywood rather than Europe: more precisely with the representation of subjectivity in the woman’s film and melodrama.” Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 1996), 52). Elsaesser’s generic definitions are here less of thematic content than of address: melodrama is, here too, in the eye of the beholders. 24

Rentschler, “From New German Cinema to the Post-Wall Cinema of Consensus,” in Cinema and Nation, ed. Mette Hjort and Scott Mackenzie (London: Routledge, 2000), 260–77.

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25

So Alan Pakula told his cameraman: “I want that entrance when she comes in [to the old man’s office] in her boa—I want to photograph it like Josef von Sternberg photographing Dietrich.” Jared Brown, Alan Pakula: His Films and His Life (New York: Back Stage Books, 2005), 107. Fonda’s character in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (Sidney Pollack, 1969) would also be a predecessor of Sunny. 26

Horst Claus, “DEFA—State, Studio, Style, Identity,” in The German Cinema Book, ed. Tim Bergfelder, Erica Carter, and Deniz Göktürk (London: BFI, 2002), 145. 27

New Wave popular music may be dated from circa 1978–1986, but it was short-lived in Germany and may not have arrived in the East until on into the ’80s with bands like Die Vision; Nena and Lena Lovich had to emigrate to the West. On this, see Ronald Galenza and Heinz Havemeister, Wir wollen immer artig sein . . . Punk, New Wave, HipHop, Independent-Szene in der DDR 1980–1990 (Berlin: Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, 1991); also Herbert Schulze and Michael Rauhut, Melodie & Rhythmus: Bilder aus 20 Jahren DDR-Rock: Fotografien von Herbert Schulze. Mit einem Essay von Michael Rauhut (Berlin: Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, 2001). Sunny, of course, did not have access to the plastic and spandex typical of capitalist New Wave fashion. 28

Norbert was played by Klaus Brasch, who committed suicide by the same method that Sunny had attempted (a cocktail of pills and alcohol) not long after the film’s premiere. 29

As Mary Ann Doane put it, “As spectacle, the female body is sexuality; the erotic and spectacular are welded.” Melodramas, though, “by deeroticizing the gaze . . . disembody their spectator.” Doane, The Desire to Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 19.) 30

Doane, The Desire to Desire, 4.

31

There are two scenes with fairly mobile camera: Norbert’s failed rape, when the camera turns slowly around him, with jump cuts (ca. 40ʹ), and Sunny’s central performance (ca. 71ʹ). Elsaesser’s analyses of the recording session sequence in Lili Marleen shows how Fassbinder goes beyond Brechtian distancing (Fassbinder’s Germany (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996), 160–61)—precisely as Wolf does not. 32

Thomas Elsaesser, New German Cinema (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 285. As we will see, though, Wolf’s somewhat Romanticized presentation of the Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg artist milieu uses some of this same strategy—in contradiction to the other claims to authenticity made by the film. 33

Robert Lang, American Film Melodrama (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 3.

34

Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 29. 35

Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 19. 36

Wolf himself acknowledged this in an interview with Hannes Schmidt where he discussed the deliberate foiling of melodrama in the scene where Sunny hides a knife in Ralph’s bed: “wenn Sie die Geschichte mit dem Messer nehmen . . . hier

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wird die Sache so geführt, dass dahinter auch . . . eine leichte Ironie steht. Ironie Sunny gegenüber, aber auch ein bisschen Filmen gegenüber, die zu dieser Melodramatik tendieren.” Wolf,“aber machen würde ich’s doch immer wieder gern. 21 Monate nach der Premiere von ‘Solo Sunny’. Interview, 17.10.1981,” in Direkt in Kopf und Herz, 352. 37

“Renate Krößner,” Vor der Kamera: 50 Schauspieler in Babelsberg, ed. Ralf Schenk (Berlin: Henschel, 1995), 153. 38

See again Andrew Britton’s comments on why Hepburn’s angular and androgynous face would not lend itself to the closeup. Katharine Hepburn: Star as Feminist (London: Studio Vista, 1995), 30. 39

The actual voice singing was not that of Krössner, but was dubbed over by Regine Dobberschütz, a popular GDR blues and jazz singer, who released one of the film’s songs as a single on the Amiga label (“Come Between Delights”). 40

On the way non-diegetic music works to facilitate identification, see Heather Laing, The Gendered Score: Music in 1940’s Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). 41

The practice of “theme songs” originates, appropriately enough, in French nineteenth-century melodrama; see on this Anselm Gerhard, “Das Pariser Musiktheater des 19. Jahrhunderts und das Prinzip der ‘Erkennungsmelodie’: Zur Frühgeschichte eines Erfolgsrezepts moderner ‘Unterhaltungsmusik,’” in Geschichte und Medien der “gehobenen Unterhaltungsmusik,” ed. Matthias Spohr (Zurich: Chronos, 1992), 77–87. 42

This refers to Axel Honneth’s influential Kampf um Anerkennung: zur moralischen Grammatik sozialer Konflikte (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982); in English, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), to which we will return later. 43

Thomas Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama,” in Film Genre Reader, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 278–308, here 281. 44

Compare the discussion in Cyril Buffet, Défunte DEFA: histoire de l’autre cinéma allemande (Paris: Cerf, 2007), 139–43. 45

Britton, Katharine Hepburn, 65–66. Oksana Bulgakowa made this point about DEFA “woman’s films” in general (that their use of a female protagonist worked to contain conflicts). Bulgakowa, “Die Rebellion im Rock,” Außerhalb von Mittendrin: Literatur/Film, ed. Annette C. Eckert (Berlin, Rotation 1991), 98–102, passim). 46

Cited in Marc Howard, “An East German Ethnicity? Understanding the New Division of Unified Germany,” German Politics and Society 13, no. 4 (1995): 49–70, here 58. 47

See Johannes von Moltke’s comments on this aspect of Fassbinder in “Camping in the Art Closet,” New German Critique 63 (1994). Moltke’s description of Schygulla’s “Hinterhof glamour” (93) certainly applies to Sunny, the resident of Prenzlauer Berg’s Hinterhöfe. 48

Jürgen Klauss, who worked with Wolf before defecting to the West, has documented Wolf’s aversion to genre formulae; see his Zwischen den Meistern in den

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Zeiten: Von Heiner Müller zu Konrad Wolf (Frankfurt a.d. Oder: Frankfurt Oder Editionen, 1996). 49

See the article by Thomas Elsaesser and Michael Wedel, “Defining DEFA’s Historical Imaginary: The Films of Konrad Wolf,” New German Critique (Winter 2001): 3–24). 50

Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany. We might however see a different kind of double bind in DEFA films, since all GDR citizens were always seen both as private and as public figures, given that there was no aspect of life in which the state was not interested—on this, Dirk Baecker, Poker im Osten (Berlin: Merve, 1988), 61). 51

Elsaesser, New German Cinema (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 137, on the search for an audience, and characters playing roles. 52

Victoria de Grazia, ed., The Sex of Things (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Erica Carter, How German Is She? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997); Heide Fehrenbach, Cinema in Democratizing Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). For GDR- and Eastern Europe- specific discussions, see Ingelore König, Dieter Wiedemann, and Lothar Wolf, eds., Zwischen Bluejeans und Blauhemd: Jugendfilm in Ost und West (Berlin: Henschel, 1995); Therese Hörnigk, ed., Jeans, Rock und Vietnam: Amerikanische Kultur in der DDR (Berlin: Literaturforum im Brecht-Haus, 2002); Barbara Einhorn, Cinderella Goes to Market: Citizenship, Gender, and Women’s Movements in East Central Europe (London: Verso, 1993). 53

Poiger, Jazz, Rock and Rebels.

54

Among others: Annette Kaminsky, Wohlstand, Schönheit, Glück: Kleine Konsumgechichte der DDR (Munich: Beck, 2001); Simone Tippach-Schneider, Messemännchen und Minol-Pirol: Werbung in der DDR (Berlin: Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, 1999); Wunderwirtschaft DDR—Konsumkultur in den 60er Jahren, ed. Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst (Cologne/Weimar/Vienna: Böhlau, 1996). 55

An interesting example of the complex coexistence of male and female stardom is Beyer’s Das Versteck (1978), a Bergman-inspired marital drama wherein Jutta Hoffmann seems to eclipse a very muted Manfred Krug; both would leave the GDR not long afterward. 56

On DEFA’s version of stardom, see Claudia Fellmer, “Armin Mueller-Stahl: From East Germany to the West Coast,” in The German Cinema Book, ed. Tim Bergfelder, Erica Carter and Deniz Goktürk (London: BFI, 2002), 90–97. Fellmer notes on p. 91 that film-star polls were taken in the GDR from 1960 to 1982: the end of this star culture thus roughly coincides with the making of Solo Sunny. See also Stefan Soldovieri, “Managing Stars: Manfred Krug and the Politics of Entertainment in GDR Cinema,” in Moving Images of East Germany: Past and Future of DEFA Film, ed. Barton Byg and Betheny Moore (Washington: Ameican Institute for Contemporary German Studies, 2002), 56–71, and “The Politics of the Popular: Trace of the Stones (Frank Beyer 1966/89) and the Discourse on Stardom in the GDR Cinema,” in German Popular Film, ed. Randall Halle and Maggie McCarthy (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003), 220–36. 57

Thomas Beutelschmidt, Sozialistische Audiovision: Zur Geschichte der Medienkultur in der DDR (Berlin: Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, 1995).

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58

The point has been made by Detlev Pollack; see his Dissent and Opposition in Communist Europe, with Jan Wielgohs (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); see also Prue Chamberlayne, “Gender and the Private Sphere: A Touchstone of Misunderstanding between Eastern and Western Germany?” Social Politics 2, no. 1 (1995): 25–36. 59

“One gives to another enough visual notice to demonstrate that one appreciates that the other is present (and that one admits openly to having seen him), while at the next moment withdrawing one’s attention from him so as to express that he does not constitute a target of special curiosity or design.” Goffman, Behavior in Public Places (New York: Free Press, 1963), 84. No behavior could be more opposed to the society of the spectacle, of the mass media. 60

Luhmann, Soziale Systeme (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984), 571–72. On page 573 Luhmann interestingly contrasts conflict (state) and exchange (market) as means to articulate this contingency. The GDR favored the former. Thus unlike Fassbinder’s heroines Sunny cannot make herself into an exchangeable, infinitely desirable “sign without submitting to a referent” (Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany, 164). 61

Recent scholarship has cast doubt on the “assumption that genres employ a single gender address.” Pam Cook, “No Fixed Address: The Women’s Picture from Outrage to Blue Steel,” in Gender Meets Genre in Postwar Cinemas, ed. Christine Gledhill (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 29–40, here 38). Our concluding discussion’s reference to Butler’s Antigone can be linked to this opening up of the film’s gendered address. 62

Berliner Wochenpost, February 1, 1980, p. 7.

63

Berliner Wochenpost, April 25, 1980, p. 14.

64

Compare for instance the skeptical comments of Heinz Klunker, “Sunny politisch Sorgen herzungewisse,” Deutschland Archiv 1980, 1288–99. The younger filmmaker Dietmar Hochmuth (b. 1954) wrote a newspaper letter under the pseudonym of “Ingrid Winter” (making fun of Sunny’s main character Ingrid Sommer) as a sarcastic unmasking of what he saw as a controversy staged by the State. 65

Both in SAPMO-BArch, DR 1—12862.

66

Akademie der Künste, Wolf-Nachlass, 1665.

67

See Agde’s correspondence with Wolf, Akademie der Künste, Wolf-Nachlass (ohne Signatur), letter of Dec. 13, 1980. 68

On Bauer’s role in the theater, see Laura Bradley, “‘Prager Luft’ at the Berliner Ensemble? The Censorship of Sieben gegen Theben, 1968–9,” German Life and Letters 58, no. 1 (2005): 41–54, and “GDR Theatre Censorship: A System in Denial,” German Life and Letters 59, no. 1 (2006): 151–62. 69

“An Konrad Wolf erinnern,” Konrad Wolf (Archiv-Blätter Nr. 14), ed. Torsten Musial and Kornelia Knospe (Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 2005), 25. 70

Beate Rössler, “Work, Recognition, Emancipation,” in Recognition and Power: Axel Honneth and the Tradition of Critical Social Theory, ed. Bert van den Brink and David Owen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 135–63, esp. 147 and 153.

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71

On this concept, put forth by Walter Ulbricht in the 1960s, see Stefan Wolle, Der Traum von der Revolte: Die DDR 1968 (Berlin: Links, 2013), chapter 3. 72

On orphans in the eighteenth century: Ruth Perry, Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Orphans were also a prime subject of postwar social engineering in Eastern Europe, as Constantin Parvulescu has recently argued in Orphans of the East: Postwar Eastern European Cinema and the Revolutionary Subject (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). 73

Nealon, Foundlings (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 1–2.

74

Antigone’s Claim (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).

75

Anne Marie Smith contrasts Butler with Nancy Fraser in “Missing Poststructuralism, Missing Foucault: Butler and Fraser on Capitalism and the Regulation of Sexuality,” in Judith Butler’s Precarious Politics, ed. Terrell Carver and Samuel Chambers (New York: Routledge 2008), 79–91. 76

On this form of non-blood kinship, see also Butler, Antigone’s Claim (New York: Columbia University Press), 74. 77

For a beginning, see Massimo Locatelli’s comments on the “Socialist Holy Family” in DEFA in “Ghosts of Babelsberg: Narrative Strategies of the Wendefilm,” in Textual Responses to German Unification: Processing Historical and Social Change in Literature and Film, ed. Carol Anne Costabile-Heming, Rachel J. Halverson, and Kristie A. Foell (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2001), 211–24, esp. 220. 78

Andreas Wildt, Autonomie und Anerkennung: Hegels Moralitätskritik im Lichte seiner Fichte-Rezeption (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982), 153. 79

Donna Harsch, Revenge of the Domestic: Women, The Family and Communism in the German Democratic Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 310. See also Christine Farhan, “East German Women Going West: Family, Children, and Partners in Life-Experience Literature,” in And They Lived Happily Ever After: Norms and Everyday Practices of Family and Parenthood in Russia and Central Europe, ed. Helene Carlbäck, Yulia Gradskova, and Zhanna Kravchenko (Budapest/New York: Central European University Press, 2012), 85–104, esp. 97, where Farhan notes that in East Germany there is “a concept of family that differs greatly from the West German nuclear ideal type. It appears as a quite loose collective of free members, as opposed to a stable and unchangeable unit.” 80

I have discussed parabolic narratives in Wolf’s work in “Mama, ich lebe: Konrad Wolf’s Intermedial Parable of Antifascism,” in Edinburgh German Yearbook, vol. 3 (2013): Contested Legacies: Constructions of Cultural Heritage in the GDR, ed. Mathew Philpotts and Sabine Rolle, 63–75 (now chapter 12 of this book). 81

On the “Hamlet complex” in DEFA films, see my “The Spectral Politics of DEFA,” in The Place of Politics in German Film, ed. Martin Blumenthal-Barby (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2014), 185–99. 82

Bonnie Honig, Antigone, Interrupted (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 193. In chapter 3 Honig also links Antigone to another form of “genre-switching” (80) between tragedy and melodrama (with reference to Fassbinder).

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Index Adorno, Theodor W., 2–3, 29, 64, 81, 85, 126, 129, 130, 141, 164, 172, 215n7, 217n20, 233n40 affect, 8, 12, 47, 50, 78, 96, 98, 132, 139, 148, 188, 197, 201, 204, 212 allegory, 19–24, 42, 44, 56, 63, 64, 76, 79, 85–86, 105, 116, 126, 132, 146, 158, 163, 168, 169, 178, 179, 187–89, 197, 204, 255n60 Altman, Rick, 27, 35–38, 48, 59, 60, 64, 69, 143, 144, 148, 194 archive, concept of, 1, 3, 9–20, 44, 72, 73, 77, 79, 80, 86, 88, 101, 102, 107, 115, 116, 132, 134, 139, 158, 164, 173, 178, 182, 192, 209, 210, 218n33, 219n39, 220n45, 222n68, 238n12, 243n41 auteurism, 2–9, 14, 33, 38, 59, 82, 86, 101, 112, 121, 122, 134, 136, 164, 191, 193, 197–98, 215– 16n11, 217n22, 243n40, 259n4 autonomy of art, 4–8, 89, 129, 143– 45, 163, 174, 190, 204 Badiou, Alain, 85–88, 217–18n25, 239n32, 240n38 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 58, 65–69 Bazin, Andrè, 1, 9, 52–53, 55, 65, 81–82, 86, 95, 115, 134, 140, 147, 161, 164 Benjamin, Walter, 2, 20, 85, 86 Bergmann, Werner, 39, 46, 120, 192 Beyer, Frank, 4, 6, 38, 48, 104, 106, 183 Biermann, Wolf, 4, 6, 137, 197, 209 Bordwell, David, 70, 130, 134, 157, 166

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Brecht, Bertolt, 2–4, 7, 29, 43, 45, 93, 94, 103, 109, 113, 126, 128, 154, 159, 161, 162, 165, 172, 173, 186, 187, 205, 241n9, 266n30, 27n31 Busch singt, 103, 114–17 passim, 119 Byg, Barton, 52, 62, 123 censorship, 4, 29, 48, 57, 61, 62, 72, 91, 93, 148, 158, 161, 176, 196, 210, 253–54n29, 257n78 cultural studies, 5, 8, 142, 206–7, 272n52 Deleuze, Gilles, 21, 71, 86, 95 Der geteilte Himmel, 3, 7, 10, 11, 15, 19, 23, 34, 41, 42, 52, 54–56, 58, 60, 65, 68, 71, 72, 74, 77, 79, 82, 84, 87, 88, 89, 94, 97, 99, 101, 103, 105, 110, 111, 114, 118–32 passim, 138, 148, 156, 181, 187, 192, 195 Der kleine Prinz, 7, 103, 106–14 passim, 131 Der nackte Mann auf dem Sportplatz, 15, 20, 103, 107, 115, 148, 161, 167–80 passim, 181, 186, 187, 189 Derrida, Jacques, 12, 15, 101, 102, 116, 152, 161, 164–66, 238n12, 239n32, 256n76 documentary film, 1, 4, 8, 15, 44, 49, 54, 57, 61–62, 73–74, 89, 106, 108, 115–17, 125, 128, 130, 133, 142, 146, 148, 149, 164, 168–69, 180, 193, 261n3 Einmal ist keinmal, 19, 25–33 passim, 40, 46, 104, 119

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INDEX

Elsaesser, Thomas, 2, 7, 8, 15–19, 22, 35, 40–42, 45, 75–81, 134–36, 138, 142, 146, 148, 164, 195–98, 203–4, 207, 269n23, 270n31; concept of historical imaginary of, 9–10, 15, 17–18, 41, 76–79, 85–86, 88, 135 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 6–11, 18, 19, 41, 44, 45, 47, 104, 128, 135–37, 149–50, 163, 198, 200, 204–6, 210, 211, 269n23, 270n31, 271n47, 272n50, 273n60 film genres, in general, 7, 35; antifascist genre, 3, 4, 35, 253– 54n29; genre of film of the present (Gegenwartsfilm), 35, 253–54n29; melodrama genre, 40–41, 196; Western genre, 36–38, 48, 57, 58, 64, 67, 69, 132, 134, 140, 143, 145, 147, 148, 152, 181, 194 film music, soundtrack, 11, 19, 25–33 passim, 39–40, 45–47, 52, 54, 59, 70, 75, 79, 80, 85, 94, 96–99, 105, 115–17, 119, 127–31, 132, 136, 148, 150, 159, 160, 170, 174, 183, 186, 189, 199–201, 203, 204, 206 Foucault, Michel, 12, 13, 15, 17, 173 Freud, Sigmund, 15, 16, 98, 101, 118–20, 126, 175, 176, 190, 236n68, 237n12, 239n32, 247n1 Genesung, 19, 34–43 passim, 47, 68, 75, 76, 96, 104, 115, 156, 181 Germany, West, 10, 18, 31, 44, 60, 154, 169, 192 Godard, Jean-Luc, 86, 120, 122–23, 127–28, 157, 159, 162, 168, 170, 187, 188 Goya, 7, 19, 20, 50, 103, 110, 111, 113, 114, 156–66 passim, 168, 178, 181, 197, 198 historiography of GDR, 2, 4, 6–8, 11–12, 35–38, 59–60, 91, 99, 131, 135, 143, 205

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history, as signifier or trope, 1–2, 104, 127, 133, 138, 140, 217n22 Hollywood film, 10, 27, 34, 35, 38, 51, 61, 62, 91, 101, 127, 134–36, 141, 142, 152, 158, 159, 164, 183, 190, 191, 194–98, 204, 205, 208 Holocaust, 22, 75–88, 90–93, 98, 101, 117, 172, 183, 188, 237n13, 239n32 Honecker, Erich, 206 Ich war 19, 4, 6–8, 10, 11, 19, 20, 23, 25, 33, 35, 37, 38, 49, 50, 52, 54, 58, 60, 68, 71, 72, 76, 84, 94, 98, 102, 103, 110, 114, 115, 116, 118, 123, 127, 132, 133–55 passim, 164, 167, 181, 183, 185, 187, 189, 197, 208 Jacobsen, Wolfgang, and Aurich, Ralf, 3, 8, 16, 26, 54, 58, 107, 115, 158, 161 Jews, Jewishness in film, 45, 70, 75–102 passim, 127, 135, 139 Kittler, Friedrich, viii, 12, 13, 30, 219n39 Koch, Gertrud, 75, 79–81, 87, 90, 93, 183, 187–88 Kracauer, Siegfried, 49, 75, 79–81, 171, 188–89 Lacan, Jacques, 3, 16, 18, 22, 98, 219n39, 222n76, 237n12, 256n77, 264n38 landscape, in film, 20–22, 27, 29, 33, 86, 116, 143, 146, 181, 183–86, 189–90 Leute mit Flügeln, 7, 9, 58, 103, 104–6 passim, 138 Lissy, 10, 17, 18, 34, 38, 40, 41, 42, 44–56 passim, 68, 70, 75, 77, 83, 86, 102, 105, 115, 123, 125, 132, 138, 156 Luhmann, Niklas, 9, 15, 51, 66, 69, 71, 99, 143, 154, 155, 207, 217n25, 243n38, 249n25, 255n60

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INDEX Lukács, Gyorgy, 7, 62, 64 Made, Hans-Dieter, 209 Mama ich lebe, 19, 20, 21, 23, 38, 40, 49, 50, 51, 70, 93, 94, 103, 115, 116, 145, 146, 181–90 passim, 192, 197, 198 Marx, Karl, Marxism, 2, 3, 8, 23, 49, 50, 58, 61, 79, 88, 105, 126, 137, 138, 141, 144, 152–53, 155, 160, 161, 172, 179, 180 media, media theory, 2, 11–15, 18, 31, 64, 74, 81, 94, 103, 113, 115, 117, 119, 125, 127, 128, 132, 145, 147, 149, 160, 162, 168–69, 176, 178, 181–83, 187, 205, 207 memory, 1, 6, 8, 10, 11, 15–17, 19, 22, 57, 71–72, 79, 86, 88, 91, 101, 115, 123, 128–29, 132, 138, 141, 169–72, 176, 178–80, 187 metaphor, 12, 14, 18, 21, 22, 49, 68, 87, 101, 119, 123, 130, 138, 141, 146, 149, 171, 172, 182, 187 modernism, 2, 3, 20, 23, 29, 45, 52, 54, 57–59, 63–65, 72, 76, 79–85, 88, 89, 91, 92, 99, 101, 122–26, 129–32, 143, 186, 187, 195 modernization theory, 50, 143, 155, 207 montage, 19, 40, 45, 54, 64, 65, 70, 72–74, 93, 95, 101, 115, 118, 120, 127, 142, 146, 156, 160–62, 165, 172, 178, 181, 183 National Socialism in film, 18, 34, 40, 44–49, 51, 53, 63, 75, 87–89, 92–95, 101, 104, 115, 149, 183, 189 neorealism (filmic style), 1, 37, 42, 49, 52, 53, 62, 64, 70–71, 78, 81, 133–35, 140–49, 156, 169, 186, 192, 193, 196 New German Cinema, 18, 45, 76, 135, 136–38, 141, 149, 191, 198 New Wave: French, 7, 65, 71–73, 104, 119–23, 126, 127, 133, 136–40, 195, 196, 199, 204; in popular music, 270n27; Soviet, 133, 204, 257n78

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311

parable, 20, 80, 89, 93–94, 101, 132, 158, 183, 186–90 photography, 11, 20, 21, 29, 70, 73, 74, 108, 115, 117, 146, 163, 167–71, 178–82, 184, 186, 199, 203, 205 Plenum, Eleventh, 4–7, 48, 57, 58, 72, 104, 106, 110, 118, 133, 134, 140, 145 postcolonial theory, 18, 69, 79, 141, 152–53 Professor Mamlock, 7, 16, 19, 23, 39, 58, 70, 89–102 passim, 103, 104, 115, 125, 156, 173, 187 Rabbit Films, 48, 57, 61, 72, 194 radio, 18, 32, 34, 39, 94, 99, 101, 110, 115, 119, 125, 128, 132, 148, 149, 181, 182, 188, 205 realism, aesthetics of, 62, 109 Simon, Rainer, 5, 133, 167, 169, 175, 210 Socialist Realism, 7, 37, 57, 58, 60, 62–69, 103, 104, 106, 112, 118, 138, 140, 144, 145, 173, 203 Solo Sunny, 5, 7, 10, 20, 41, 47, 61, 72, 76, 103, 136, 145, 190, 191– 213 passim Sonnensucher, 10, 19, 34, 38, 57–74 passim, 76, 82, 86, 87, 98, 104, 105, 105, 132, 133, 141, 148 Soviet film, 7, 16, 26, 30, 35, 40, 41, 52, 58, 60, 62, 64, 65, 69, 70, 89, 94, 104, 127, 133, 138, 142, 145, 150, 158, 159, 162, 192, 204 Stalin, Josef, Stalinism, 3, 8, 16, 19, 22, 26, 44, 58, 62, 65, 85, 98, 126, 138, 141, 153, 158, 165, 210, 213 Sterne, 7, 10, 21, 25, 38, 41, 42, 68, 69, 75–88 passim, 98, 102, 103, 104, 109, 123, 138, 156 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 67, 116, 133, 136, 156, 158–64, 181, 183, 184, 186 television, 80, 106, 107, 110, 119, 125, 169, 246n34

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312

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INDEX

trauma, 15–17, 19, 22, 40, 68, 70–71, 88, 98, 101, 118–19, 123, 128–29, 132, 138, 139, 141, 149, 167, 176, 190 Truffaut, François, 7, 133, 136, 137 Ulbricht, Walter, 104, 154 Wajda, Andrzej, 4, 269n21 Wedel, Michael, 7, 35, 76, 78, 134– 36, 142, 146, 164

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Weimar Republic, 16, 44, 45, 46, 49, 63, 68, 73, 75, 105, 244n9 Wenders, Wim, 135, 137, 139, 147 Wolf, Christa, 2, 5, 7, 8, 111–13, 118– 22, 126, 130–32, 137, 151, 158, 177, 185, 187, 190, 209, 210 Wolf, Friedrich, 3, 6, 15–16, 90–94, 98–99, 101, 118 Wolf, Markus, 3, 15, 16, 161, 188 working through the past, notion of, 5, 10

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Larson Powell is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He has published The Technological Unconscious (2008); The Differentiation of Modernism (2013), and edited volumes on German television and on classical music in the GDR.

668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620-2731, USA PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.camden-house.com www.boydellandbrewer.com

Larson Powell

Cover image: Eberhard Esche and Renate Blume as Manfred and Rita in Konrad Wolf ’s Der geteilte Himmel (Divided Heaven, 1964). Used by permission of the DEFA-Stiftung. Cover design: riverdesignbooks.com

Konrad Wolf

This book, the first in any language on Wolf ’s entire oeuvre, proposes that we understand his work as an archive both of his own personal experience and of the ideology of socialism, embedded in self-reflexive filmic forms and generic references that put Wolf in the vicinity of other filmmakers like Fassbinder, Wajda, and Tarkovsky. The book’s comparativist dimension, as well as its larger examination of the problems of a politically committed artist in state socialism, will make it of interest to all readers concerned with late-twentieth-century film history, art under socialism, and the history of East Germany and Eastern Europe.

The Films of

Konrad Wolf (1925–1982) was East Germany’s greatest filmmaker and also an influential public figure in his country’s political and cultural life. As artist and representative of the GDR, he had to perform a complex balancing act between aesthetic conscience and political function, not unlike Brecht. His work covers almost the whole lifespan of the GDR, in a range of filmic styles and genres, from musicals to antifascist films to films of everyday life.

The Films of

Konrad Wolf Archive  of the Revolution

Larson Powell