Date, Monday, March 26, 2007

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-German@h-net.msu.edu (March 2007)

Daniela Berghahn. _Hollywood Behind the Wall: The Cinema of East
Germany_. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005. ix + 294 pp.
Contents, list of figures, acknowledgements, references, index. $74.95
(cloth), ISBN 0-7190-6171-7; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 0-7190-6172-5.

Reviewed for H-German by Andrew Gaskievicz, Department of History
and Political Science, Mansfield University of Pennsylvania

A History of Film in the GDR

Daniela Berghahn's _Hollywood Behind the Wall_ is the first
comprehensive, book-length history of film in the GDR in the English
language. It is a welcome addition to a growing but underrepresented
body of scholarship on East German cinema.  Compared to work on
Weimar, Nazi and West German cinemas, East German filmmaking
has received little attention until recently. Although a number of articles
and even book-length studies have been published in English--such as
Joshua Feinstein's _Triumph of the Ordinary_[1]--on aspects of East
German cinema, only Sabine Hake in _German National Cinema_[2]
has covered the entire history of film in the GDR, although only in two
chapters. The value of Berghahn's book, however, is not just its almost
encyclopedic coverage of East German film. This book has balance.
On the one hand, it provides a detailed history of DEFA, East Germany's
state monopoly film company, as well as the political and ideological
influences on film production in the GDR. On the other hand, Berghahn
devotes a considerable portion of her book to detailed textual analyses
of important East German films, such as the rubble film _Die Mörder
sind unter uns_ (1946) and the banned _Spur der Steine_ (1966/90).
A further great strength of this text is its location of East German films
in the context of eastern European and West German cinemas. In
chapter 5 on "Women on Film," for example,  Berghahn argues that
"what distinguishes Soviet and East German films about women made
during the 1970s and 1980s from those made in the West is that they
pursue no feminist agenda as such. Nor were they linked to a women's
movement" (p. 181). She goes on to say that both GDR and Soviet
western-style feminism were "discredited as a bourgeois protest
against the oppression of women under capitalism which was deemed
to be uncalled for in a socialist society, an alleged community of equals"
(p. 181). Thus, East German and Soviet films on women of this era were
more concerned with a "critique of the collective" than the emancipatory
individualism of western feminism. Hence, as Berghahn points out, DEFA
productions on women in the 1970s and 80s were "curiously out of step"
(p. 183) with their western, particularly West German, counterparts.

Berghahn's balanced and nuanced analysis of GDR cinema is reflected
in the organization of her book. The first chapter, the "East German Film
and the State," gives a history of DEFA, explaining its institutional
structures, censorship mechanisms and distribution and exhibition
processes. The most interesting part of this chapter is the discussion of
DEFA's genre films. Berghahn argues that DEFA was "suspicious of
genre cinema" because it tried to differentiate itself from western genre
cinemas, most notably that of Hollywood (p. 39). The kinds of films
principally referred to in this regard are the so-called East German
_Indianerfilme_, mostly produced as escapist films in the aftermath of
restrictive measures imposed on DEFA by the Eleventh Plenum of the
Central Committee of the SED in 1965. _Indianerfilme_ were undoubtedly
westerns, although they differed from Hollywood westerns in both plot
and form. Their inclusion here is an important moment of the book, as
they were among the most popular films that DEFA ever produced, yet
Berghahn devotes less than two pages to them. She also only devotes
two pages to DEFA's fairy-tale productions, which were, in terms of box
office receipts, East Germany's most successful films; they were even
popular in West Germany. The fact that at least representative examples
of these films were not included among the twenty-some film analyses
that comprise this book is a weakness.

The remainder of Berghahn's book departs from the straightforward
overview of the history of DEFA given in the first chapter. Chapters 2
through 6 are organized topically around distinct themes that informed
East German film production. Chapter 2 covers DEFA's anti-fascist films,
arguing that _Vergangenheitsbewältigung_ meant something entirely
different in East Germany than in the West, although, as in West
Germany, "coming to grips with the past" was a crucial discourse in
the "construction" of East German identity (p. 59). Through DEFA, the
SED disseminated the "myth of heroic anti-Fascist resistance," which
denied any notion of German guilt because the communist East German
state represented a "clean break" with the Nazi past. According to the
Marxist critique of fascism, by eliminating the root cause of the Nazi
takeover--capitalism--the SED prevented any possibility of a Nazi
resurgence. The East German state was established by supposedly
heroic communist resistors who fought against the Nazis in concentration
camps like Buchenwald. Hence, in DEFA films, other victim groups, most
notably Jews, are omitted or completely deemphasized. The real victims,
according to the SED, were average Germans. This stance is reflected in
DEFA's earliest film, Wolfgang Staudte's _Die Mörder sind unter uns_,
which, according to Berghahn, "created a universal model of victimhood
that allowed the Germans to conflate their own experience of suffering
during and after the war with the experience of the primary victims," the
Jews (p. 71). By the 1980s, however, this state-imposed interpretation of
the Nazi past was under considerable attack and many East German
filmmakers began to admit that East Germans had to consider their share
of guilt for the Nazi past as well.

In chapter 3, Berghahn explains how DEFA appropriated Germany's
cultural heritage through literary adaptations, a hotly contested area
between West and East Germans in the "cultural sphere." DEFA's
"heritage" films, as they were called, often used anachronistic scenes
to connect the GDR with its alleged socialist forerunners. Many of these
films were therefore biopics of men like J.W. von Goethe, Friedrich
Hölderlin and Ludwig van Beethoven, who were all cast as "fervent
supporters of the French Revolution, and thus harbingers of socialism"
(p. 130). West Germans usually dismissed such films as propaganda,
which, Berghahn surmises, "testified to the longevity of Cold War
prejudices and to the different aesthetic sensibilities which audiences
and critics had developed in the East and the West" (p. 130). Still,
West Germans were no doubt unaware that DEFA heritage films could
also be subversive, especially in the aftermath of the Eleventh
Plenum, when censorship became much harsher. Such was the case,
for example, with Egon Günther's _Lotte in Weimar_ (1975), a "flagship"
film that was DEFA's first submission to the Cannes Film Festival, but
received no awards or recognition at home.

DEFA's production of potentially subversive films is one of the most
consistent themes in this volume. Chapters 4 and 5 deal with DEFA's
banned films and women on film, both areas where politically and
socially subversive elements surfaced in the GDR. DEFA's "forbidden
films," as Berghahn terms them, were largely a consequence of the
Eleventh Plenum, as a result of which a dozen films were banned
because of a cultural backlash against the relaxation of norms in the
late 1950s and early 1960s. Berghahn situates the decisions of the
Eleventh Plenum in an international context, associating their
decisions with Cold War trends such as de-Stalinization in the Soviet
Union under Nikita Khrushchev and the backlash against the attendant
relaxation of social and cultural norms under Leonid Brezhnev after 1964.
The Eleventh Plenum essentially banned an entire year's production at
DEFA, largely because the films, mostly known as _Gegenwartsfilme_,
"examined socialist society more critically and more honestly" (p. 142).
The most famous film that was banned, Frank Beyer's _Spur der Steine_,
was actually completed before the Eleventh Plenum convened. Thus,
unlike most of the other films, which were still in production, it actually
reached theaters. The SED, however, resorted to Nazi-like tactics and
hired youth gangs to disrupt the showings. _Spur der Steine_ was
summarily withdrawn from circulation, officially banned and shelved in
the East German film archive under lock and key until the _Wende_.

While the film artists who made the "forbidden" films of the Eleventh
Plenum did not intend to be subversive, many films produced afterwards,
particularly those on women, did so. Naturally, they had to be careful to
mask their subversiveness to escape the harsh censorship of the 1960s.
The best known example of a women's film that "pushed the boundaries"
of what was acceptable on the screen in the GDR was Heiner Carow's
_Die Legende von Paul und Paula_ (1973). The heroine of the film, Paula,
believes that "love meant everything and locates the source of
happiness exclusively in the private sphere ... In short, Paula is anything
but the socialist female role model that was advertised in other DEFA
films of the time" (pp. 194-195). Unlike most other DEFA productions
of the period, which were losses at the box office, _Die Legende von
Paul und Paula_ constituted a rare financial success for the East German
film industry. The character of Paula was seen as a "real" person by
most East German viewers. However, the film, seen by East German
authorities as sexually permissive and morally liberal, was also criticized
for its transgression of the boundaries of what was acceptable in East
Germany. Interestingly, West German audiences seemed not to
understand the significance of this film for East Germans. The West
German feminist journal _frauen und film_ even went so far as to call the
film "a slap in the face of feminism" (cited on p. 202), illustrating how
out of step East and West German film viewers were at the time.

The last chapter in Berghahn's volume explains the fate of DEFA and
its artists after German reunification and examines the phenomenon
of_Ostalgie_ as expressed in post-unification German films. The
privatization of DEFA assets resulted in hard times for many East
German film artists, primarily because West Germans were not
receptive to East Germans' cinematic contributions, particularly their
portrayal of life in the GDR. Very few East German film production
companies survived the first decade of reunification. Babelsberg became
more of an amusement park than a viable, successful studio. Most
disturbingly, West German filmmakers have largely ignored East
Germans, even in films about the GDR. Berghahn argues that a united
German cinema has only very recently begun to emerge, most notably
evidenced in the film _Goodbye! Lenin_ (2003).

Daniela Berghahn's volume is the most comprehensive history of the
East German cinema in English to date. It balances a straightforward
history of East German cinematic institutions with nuanced and
sophisticated analyses of the GDR's most important films. It is
extremely well researched, incorporating the most recent scholarship
on DEFA and rich material from Germany's film archives. There are
weaknesses; Berghahn's book lacks a conclusion and she misses
a chance to sum up and reinforce her arguments. Still, this volume
is an important contribution to the growing body of scholarship on
GDR cinema.

Notes

[1]. 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).

[2]. Sabine Hake, _German National Cinema_ (New York: Routledge,
2002). See especially chapters 4 and 5.

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