East Germany graced international screens most recently in the Euro-blockbuster Good Bye, Lenin! (2003). Iconic of millennial German Ostalgie (nostalgia for the old East Germany), the film cast rising star Daniel Brühl as a TV technician who dupes his frail, socialist mother into believing that the German Democratic Republic still exists. The comedy is predicated on the son’s quest to procure the provincial pickles and unfashionable clothes vanishing as the two Germanys prepare to unite.
Whether one views Good Bye, Lenin! as a serious contribution to post-Communist memory or simply a slick attempt to market Ostalgie, it does correctly analyze the East German condition as a function of material culture and generational tension. The remarkable selection of oppositional and banned GDR films that will screen over the next two weeks at the Harvard Film Archive confirms that the downfall of real, existing Communism in Germany came about more because of bananas and blue jeans — and the resulting discord between children and their parents — than from ideological shortcomings.
DEFA, the state film company, was itself riddled with generational imbalance. Filmmakers in the GDR, often 40 before being allowed to direct their first feature, usually had to cut their teeth on the so-called anti-fascist film, a state-sanctioned genre of historical films that depicted Communist victimhood at the hands of the Nazis, often at the expense of ignoring the Jewish Holocaust. Although many of these films were routine exercises, two examples stand out for the way in which they deploy a modernist æsthetic drawing on international cinematic traditions.
A rare film shown in a beautiful new print, Das zweite Gleis|The Second Track (1962; February 19 at 9 pm) might have been Sam Fuller’s first feature had he grown up in Dresden or Rostock. Station inspector Brock witnesses a robbery but fails to report the culprit; instead he requests a transfer to another post. His daughter grows suspicious and begins to investigate her family’s past. Joachim Kunert’s film is a landmark for its frank portrayal of East German complicity in Nazi crimes, but also for canted shots used for psychological effect. Uncanny touches, such as lightly suggested incest, borrow from the vernacular of Hollywood’s subversive Europeans: Sirk, Preminger, Wilder.
Gerhard Klein’s Der Fall Gleiwitz|The Gleiwitz Case (1961; February 12 at 7 pm) is an Alain Resnais art film parading in anti-fascist uniform. Reconstructing the Nazis’ staged attack on a border radio transmitter by which Hitler excused his occupation of Poland, Klein uses narrative abstraction and formal rigor to estrange the past. The camera obscures or removes faces completely, transmitting evil as a synecdoche of hands, buttons, and bells. Klein’s montage at times echoes Eisenstein, at others parodies Leni Riefenstahl, or subscribes to the European ’60s code of successively radical changes in shot lengths. With documentary footage, icy overdubs, and Hanns Eisler’s allusive score, Der Fall Gleiwitz disjoints image and sound. Too radical for the authorities, it quickly disappeared from cinemas.
