Retrospective – Beloved and Rejected 150% True In August 2016, I presented a program devoted to the young Federal Republic of Germany in cinema at the Locarno International…
Genosse Münchhausen (Wolfgang Neuss, 1962) Political cabaret is the too-little discussed red threat that holds Adenauer-era FRG cinema together: From the young nation’s founding years (Eric Ode &…
… und Deine Liebe auch (Frank Vogel, 1962) It’s fitting that DEFA’s first fiction feature film on the Anti-Fascist Protection Wall’s erection would turn out a zenith of GDR-style Modernism, a…
Die Halbstarken (Georg Tressler, 1956) Legends has it that Will Tremper (like Gerhard T. Buchholz an echt Adenauer-era conservative anarchist) saw a short by Georg Tressler on how…
Berlin – Ecke Schönhauser (Gerhard Klein, 1957) Youngsters deemed rebellious by the powers-that-be were a problem in both Germanies, essentially for the same reasons: Postwar values, also the experience of…
Der Hauptmann von Köpenick (Helmut Käutner, 1956) In October 1906, a cobbler turned conman called Wilhelm Voigt entered Köpenick city hall with a small detachment of soldiers he picked up…
Der Hauptmann von Köln (Slatan Dudow, 1956) It’s difficult to imagine that DEFA was not aware of Helmut Käutner’s interest in adapting anew Carl Zuckmayer’s prewar piece Der Hauptmann von…
Die goldene Pest (John Brahm, 1954) Whatever happened to his village? Richard Hartwig wonders when he returns to Dossental: The village had turned into something like a pleasure quarter…
Das verurteilte Dorf (Martin Hellberg, 1952) After years as a POW in the USSR, Heinz Weimann returns to his home, Bärenweiler, a village somewhere in Bavaria; there, he just…
Der 20. Juli (1955; Falk Harnack) It says a lot about the Federal Republic of Germany that a group of Wehrmacht officers was made into the nation’s epitome of…
Stärker als die Nacht (Slatan Dudow, 1954) Hamburg, 1933: With the NSDAP’s election victory and Hitler’s final rise to power, Gerda and Hans Löning, a communist couple from Hamburg, consider…
