Monatshefte

Re-Imagining DEFA represents a significant contribution to contemporary DEFA scholarship—the best of which looks beyond the well-worn study of ideology and censorship, discarding assumptions about monolithic, totalitarian structures and instead embracing this cinema as complex cultural production—with an emphasis on breaking open temporal and spatial boundaries. The superb introduction offers an incisive overview of the rapid evolution of DEFA scholarship over the past 25 years, and invites readers to re-imagine DEFA within a much broader framework of both German and global filmmaking histories and traditions. The volume is guided by a set of interrelated research questions, central among them 1) the extent to which GDR film culture is a transnational phenomenon, bound up not only with West German but also other cinemas, and 2) the role of the popular in GDR film culture, including the complex relationship in DEFA to high/low culture debates that have accompanied cinema since its beginnings. In order to illuminate these questions, the fifteen chapters in this well-edited volume are sorted into four sections: institutions and ideology, national and transnational contexts, genre and popular cinema, and DEFA’s legacy. (The volume concludes with a useful and substantial 20-page bibliography.) Like a collage, the pieces often intersect and inform each other in unintended ways, revealing additional potential categories, most notably questions about prestige and audience. In this larger context, the most compelling chapters are those which eschew historical overview in favor of deep dives via case studies.

Part I (Institutions and Ideology) opens with an excellent overview by Rosemary Stott of structural relations in East German cinema production. Stott illuminates unique aspects of technical and financial structures in socialism: thus, film’s categorization as art more than commerce led to the formation of internal “Künstlerische Arbeitsgruppen,” each with a strong artistic director-leader (e.g., Dudow, Maetzig, [End Page 278] Wolf). With a case study of Die Legende von Paul und Paula, she traces the steps in the production process around both budget and message, noting how test screenings revealed diversity of audience responses, raising questions about the limits of state control over aesthetic reception and highlighting the importance of film as communication. Two other chapters—Larson Powell’s periodization of DEFA film music and Annette Dorgerloh’s exploration of set design in early DEFA films—focus less on institutional structures and more on ideological aspects of aesthetics. Both scholars tell a story of belated or interrupted modernism, analyzing the ideological constraints disallowing DEFA artists’ participation in broader (European) developments. Dorgerloh offers an interesting sidebar about the success of modernism in GDR industrial design, i.e., where it is removed from the ideologically charged arena of the fine arts.

Part II (National and Transnational Contexts) moves into the heart of the volume’s concern with the complex interrelations between DEFA and other cinemas, in both the process of filmmaking and the construction of diverse audiences. Several chapters continue the conversation about broad institutional frameworks for filmmaking practices, focusing more sharply on the Cold War dynamics in entertainment cinema. Mariana Ivanova proposes reframing DEFA cinema as a successor institution to UFA, and to Weimar cinema more broadly, pointing to a common drive to create domestic product that articulates a cultural identity distinct from American competition. A path toward this nationalistic goal is found in (European) co-productions, where DEFA shared talent pools with its partners, and traded technical expertise for exotic landscapes. Stefan Soldovieri’s close reading of the East-West German coproduction Spielbank-Affäre (1957) notes the ideological limits of creative collaboration, while Seán Allan dives into the archives to assess the star phenomenon of Dean Reed, his defection from the United States and (willing) instrumentalization by the East German industry. In each case, cultural prestige exists in tension with audience popularity. Studies by Dennis Hanlon and Qinna Shen, on Latin American and East Asian cinematic connections respectively, shift attention toward the global Cold War and DEFA’s documentary film tradition. While both contributions challenge boundaries of cinematic and cultural (self-)understanding, emphasizing the power of intentionality in attempting to undo centuries of orientalism and cultural imperialism, Shen’s focus on the semiotics of films on China, Mongolia, and North Korea sidesteps potential orientalizing within socialist cinema. More provocatively, Hanlon argues for the inclusion of GDR films on Chile as part of a Latin American “third cinema,” examining production practices in both the GDR and Chile in terms of an aesthetics that intentionally addresses multiple global audiences.

The third section, on “Genre and Popular Cinema,” extends the conversation about socialist audiences through consideration of a tantalizing array of genres. These pieces are most convincing in their parsing of the specific realization of given genres in the East German context. Sabine Hake’s discussion of the opera film stands out for its framing of a minor genre so as to encompass the sweep of 20th-century European aesthetic history. The tight focus on the work of one director (Walter Felsenstein) and GDR cultural politics (e.g., Kulturerbe, or the role of television) merges fluidly with numerous concerns (musical theatre, intermediality) extending beyond DEFA and film studies per se. This essay follows earlier chapters in underscoring the imperative of understanding broader institutional parameters (pursuit of international prestige). Hake’s situating of opera films between competing traditions of bourgeois/high [End Page 279] and socialist/mass culture is echoed by Benita Blessing’s discussion of the Kinderfilm, which highlights the tension between entertainment and pedagogy that implicitly runs through all DEFA cinema. While opera and children’s films are readily grouped under the didactic label, two other contributions in this section—Sonja Fritzsche on science fiction and Evan Torner on the Indianerfilm—approach genre through the lens of the popular. Here, genre cinema offers escape from the socialist everyday through imagination of other worlds, while simultaneously harmonizing with official GDR identity narratives. From the extrapolation of real technological advances in the Cold War space race to the eruption of the pre-socialist hero via postcolonial solidarity narratives, these chapters again underscore the significance of transnational relationships, especially international socialist alliances against American aggressions, displaced onto historical pasts or fantastical futures.

Three closing chapters approach the notion of DEFA’s legacy from widely divergent perspectives. While acknowledging the dangers of constructing a retroactive teleology that seemingly predicts the GDR’s demise, Nick Hodgin argues that a thematics of ruins (and atmospherics of melancholy) dominates the last two decades of GDR filmmaking. An extensive catalog of examples provides compelling evidence for this trend, yet he opens the question of their interpretation by pointing out the “truism that so-called ‘quality films’ [ . . . ] favour unresolved endings to those that provide answers and solutions” (276); indeed, one might read negativity in cultural products as an indicator of a positive development beyond the enforced positivity of socialist realism. Sebastian Heiduschke considers legacy through comparison of a prestige production, KLK an PTX – Die Rote Kapelle (1971), with a post-Wende (2003), archivally based documentary on the same anti-Nazi resistance group; parallel readings provide foundation for critique of the original and its acts of historically inaccurate heroization. A different sort of cinematic “afterlife” study is offered by Daniela Berghahn’s excellent consideration of post-Wende German films that thematize the GDR from (de facto) Western perspectives. Looking at afterimages of the GDR in powerful films by influential directors, such as von Donnersmarck’s Das Leben der Anderen and Petzold’s Barbara, offers the opportunity and the challenge to confront fictionalized memories of the former East. Building on memory theorists such as Michael Rothberg and Alison Landsberg, her approach provides a strong foundation for assessment of these films as “multi-layered palimpsests” (331) that recycle screen memories from DEFA traditions.

The diversity of approaches offered here and throughout the entire volume affirms the power and promise of transnational and transtemporal inquiry; thanks to projects like this, and the rich resources of both German archives and the DEFA Film Library, our appreciation of DEFA’s multiple legacies will only continue to grow.