
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…
150% True In August 2016, I presented a program devoted to the young Federal Republic of Germany in cinema at the Locarno International…
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 &…
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…
Legends has it that Will Tremper (like Gerhard T. Buchholz an echt Adenauer-era conservative anarchist) saw a short by Georg Tressler on how…
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…
In October 1906, a cobbler turned conman called Wilhelm Voigt entered Köpenick city hall with a small detachment of soldiers he picked up…
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…
Whatever happened to his village? Richard Hartwig wonders when he returns to Dossental: The village had turned into something like a pleasure quarter…
After years as a POW in the USSR, Heinz Weimann returns to his home, Bärenweiler, a village somewhere in Bavaria; there, he just…
It says a lot about the Federal Republic of Germany that a group of Wehrmacht officers was made into the nation’s epitome of…
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…