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Post-Fascist Continuity and Post-Communist Discontinuity inGerman CinemaIngar SoltyPublished online: 05 Mar 2015.

To cite this article: Ingar Solty (2015) Post-Fascist Continuity and Post-CommunistDiscontinuity in German Cinema, Socialism and Democracy, 29:1, 43-72, DOI:10.1080/08854300.2014.998421

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Post-Fascist Continuity and

Post-Communist Discontinuity

in German Cinema

Ingar Solty

Over the decades, much has been written and revealed about thecontinuity of economic and political elites in the transition fromGerman fascism to post-war West Germany. This understanding per-tains mostly, however, to the spheres of politics, the judicial system,secret services, the military, and higher education. With regard tocinema, by contrast, such continuity has gone largely unnoticed.

Post-fascist culture and post-war film industry regulations

In the 1950s, West German cinema was dominated by the so-calledHeimatfilm. This was in several respects an expression of the era of res-toration. Together with the market-dominating Hollywood films, theHeimatfilm not only offered apolitical light-escapist happy-endfodder and the opportunity to forget about recent history, but it wasalso in essence tied seamlessly to the unfortunate tradition of the Hei-matfilm under fascism. Here it fulfilled the function of distracting thepopulation from the organizational elimination of the labor movementand the physical elimination of its leaders, from the reality of concen-tration camps, forced labor, the “war of extermination” in the East, andthe Holocaust. As a matter of fact, the Heimatfilms of the 1950s werepartly direct remakes of material produced during the Nazi era bythe Ufa (Universum Film AG), which had been privatized in 1949and was then – in the words of one of the greatest experts on WestGerman post-war film and author of the international standardwork The Ufa Story: A History of Germany’s Greatest Film Company(1st English edition, 1999), Klaus Kreimeier – re-founded in 1956 as a

Socialism and Democracy, 2015Vol. 29, No. 1, 43–72, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08854300.2014.998421

# 2015 The Research Group on Socialism and Democracy

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“prime example of the restoration of the German film industry inaccordance with political interests.”1

According to the Allied Forces’ denazification regulations, per-mission to work in the West German film industry was possible onlyby means of a specific license which the occupation authoritiesgranted to “those German nationals . . . who appeared ‘politically’ suit-able following an evaluation of the questionnaire used by the militarygovernment.” The main goal of the “film legislation of the allied forces”was the “exclusion of former Nazi party members from leading or crea-tive positions in the film industry.”2

After the beginning of the Cold War in 1947, however, the denazi-fication process was terminated. The reinstallation of the old elitesseemed inevitable in order to position the Federal Republic ofGermany as a remilitarized frontline-state of the capitalist West. Thisfact is demonstrated by the remarkable continuity of personnel, includ-ing in cinema.

Nazi elite continuity in West German cinema

Most of the films popular during the 1950s were made by directorsfrom the “Third Reich.” This was true not only for the (seemingly) anti-political Heimatfilm directors, but also for the so-called Vorbehaltsfilme,i.e. those films which had been banned by the Allied forces as Nazi pro-paganda and could only be screened under strict conditions. In fact, itwas only in exceptional cases that leading Nazi directors did not con-tinue their careers in West Germany.

Thus, Eduard von Borsody (1898–1970), who had been the master-cutter in fascist propaganda films such as Morgenrot (Dawn) (1933) andFluchtlinge (Refugees) (1933) and the director of the cheerful-volkisch filmWunschkonzert (Request Concert) (1940), now directed Heimatfilms suchas Bergwasser (Mountain Water) (1949) or shallow musical films such asHab’ ich nur Deine Liebe (As Long as I Have Your Love) (1953). Accordingto the German Reich’s Film Superintendent (Reichsfilmintendant) FritzHippler, Wunschkonzert was developed in direct cooperation withJoseph Goebbels and then declared to be “state-politically valuable”(“staatspolitisch wertvoll”) by the Nazi Film Evaluation Office

1. Kreimeier, Klaus, “Der westdeutsche Film in den funfziger Jahren.” In: Bansch,Dieter, ed. 1985. Die funfziger Jahre. Beitrage zu Politik und Kultur (Tubingen: GunterNarr Verlag): 290.

2. Horbrugger, Anja. 2007. Aufbruch zur Kontinuitat – Kontinuitat im Aufbruch. Geschlech-terkonstruktionen im west- und ostdeutschen Nachkriegsfilm von 1945 bis 1952 (Marburg:Schuren Verlag): 43–44.

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(Filmprufstelle) and became the commercially second-most successfulfilm of the Nazi period. The Allied Control Office banned its screen-ings; in West Germany it was rereleased in 1980.

Then there is the biography of Wolfgang Liebeneiner (1905–1987).During the Nazi era, he directed the pro-euthanasia film Ich klage an(J’accuse) (1941) in close collaboration with the Ministry of Propagandaand as part of the political preparation for Operation T4 (the Nazis’euthanasia program which killed psychiatric patients and the disabled)as well as the historical biopics Bismarck (1940) and Die Entlassung (Bis-marck’s Dismissal) (1942), which constructed an “historical analogybetween the ‘Iron Chancellor’ and Adolf Hitler.”3 Right to the bitterend Liebeneiner worked on the unfinished film of German persever-ance Das Leben geht weiter (Life Goes On). From 1948 on, Liebeneinerwas back in business – with for instance Melodie des Herzens (Melodyof the Heart) (1950) or 1 April 2000 (1952), the latter of which aimed tojustify Austria’s myth of having been the “first victim of fascism”and to cleanse the land of its guilt in the war of destruction inEastern Europe and the Holocaust.

The next biography is that of Carl Boese (1887–1958). In theWeimar Republic Boese had already made several revanchist andpre-fascist films, including the anti-French Die schwarze Schmach (TheBlack Disgrace) (1921), which depicted the occupation of the Rhinelandby French black soldiers – stereotyped as animal-like sexual predators– as a Jewish conspiracy to bastardize the Aryan race. In the fascist eraBoese went on to direct countless distraction-comedies and continuedthe same kind of work after 1949.

Then there is Erich Waschneck (1887–1970). Since 1933 he hadbeen a member of the National-Socialist Factory Cell Organizationof German-Born Film Directors (Nationalsozialistische Betriebszellenorga-nisation deutschstammiger Filmregisseure). As part of the ideologicalpreparation for the Holocaust, he had directed the anti-Semitic filmDie Rothschilds (The Rothschilds) in 1940. In 1952, he managed toreturn to the movie business with films such as Hab’ Sonne imHerzen (Sunshine in My Heart Again). Fritz Peter Buch (1894–1964),who had produced the fascist propaganda films Annemarie (1934),Die Warschauer Zitadelle (The Warsaw Citadel) (1937), Katzensteg (TheCats’ Bridge) (1937), Jakko (1941) and Menschen im Sturm (People in theStorm) (1941), returned to the West German film industry once morein 1952 with Cuba Cubana – a film starring Zarah Leander, who had

3. Wenk, Michael. 2005. “Der Staatsregisseur. Zum 100. Geburtstag von Wolfgang Lie-beneiner,” Neue Zurcher Zeitung, 7 October.

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been the highest-paid actress between 1933 and 1945 based on herinvolvement in numerous Nazi films. Even Franz Seitz Sr. (1888–1952), director of the notorious SA-Mann Brand (SA Man Brand)(1933), was able to write screenplays again. And Heinz Paul (1893–1983), who had also been a member of the National Socialist FactoryCell Organization since 1933 and had directed several films heavilyinflected with Nazi ideology such as William Tell (1933), Die vier Mus-ketiere (The Four Musketeers) (1934), Wunder des Fliegens (Miracles ofFlight) (1935) and Kameraden auf See (Military Buddies at Sea) (1938),made his comeback with comedies such as Gluck aus Ohio (Happinessfrom Ohio) (1950) and the Heimatfilm Wo der Wildbach rauscht (Wherethe Mountain Torrent Rushes) (1956). Fritz Kirchhoff (1901–1953), direc-tor of entertainment and propaganda films such as Anschlag auf Baku(Attack on Baku) (1941) and Der 5. Juni (June 5th) (1941), returned in1948 with (guilt) suppression films such as Schuld allein ist der Wein(It’s the Wine’s Fault) (1948) and Nur eine Nacht (Just One Night)(1949). And Jurgen von Alten (1903–1994), who had joined theNSDAP and the Nazi Factory Cells Organization already during theWeimar Republic and who during the period of fascist rule directedamongst other films the “state-politically valuable” anti-Semitic filmTogger (1937) and Das Gewehr uber! (Shoulder Arms!) (1939), a filmwhich flanked the Poland invasion, created from 1950 onwards anumber of films including Herzen im Sturm (Hearts in the Storm)(1951). In 1987 he received the Film Award in Gold for his acting inthe short film Die Geige (The Violin). Carl Froelich (1875–1953), aNazi party member who from 1933 on headed Nazi Germany’sAssociation of Film Production and Distribution (Gesamtverband derFilmherstellung und Filmverwertung) and between 1939 and 1945 waspresident of the Reichsfilmkammer, Nazi Germany’s National FilmBoard, was initially arrested after the liberation from fascism;however, in 1948, he was classified as denazified and ended upshortly before his death as a producer again of films such as DreiMadchen spinnen (Three Stupid Girls) (1950) and Stips (1951). All ofthis despite the fact that with 10 films, he had directed the second-most number of films banned by the Allied Control Council – onlyto be topped by the notorious Veit Harlan.

Even for the worst propaganda film-makers like Harlan (1899–1964), Karl Ritter (1888–1977) and Bobby E. Luthge (1891–1964) itwas at least temporarily possible to continue their work in WestGermany. Thus, Luthge, who in 1933 had shot Hitlerjunge Quex(Hitler Youth Quex), could now reemerge and succeed with mass-culture films such as Schwarzwaldmadel (Black Forest Girl) (1950) and

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Grun ist die Heide (The Heath is Green) (1951). And Luthge’s militarycomedies such as Mikosch ruckt ein (Mikosch Enlists) (1952) not onlycatered to the need for Wehrmacht nostalgia and masculine fraterniza-tion, but also politically flanked the highly contested remilitarization ofWest Germany, which was occurring at the same time. Ritter, who hadbeen the producer of Hitlerjunge Quex, and also of anti-communist andanti-Russian films supporting the war of annihilation in the East suchas Patrioten (Patriots) (1937), Pour le Merite (1938), Im Kampf gegen denWeltfeind (Fighting the World Foe) (1939), Kadetten (Cadets) (1941), Uberalles in der Welt (Above Everything in the World) (1942) and GPU(1942), returned from Latin America once the Cold War had started,and now directed romance films such as Staatsanwaltin Corda (Prosecu-tor Corda) (1954), as well as cheerful musical comedies such as Ball derNationen (Ball of Nations) (1954). Finally, Harlan, who had activelysought to become the director of the ruthlessly anti-Semitic concoctionJud Suß (Jew Suss) (1940) and who, according to a famous speech by thesocial democrat Carlo Schmid in the Bundestag, had helped create “themass-psychological preconditions for the gas chambers of Auschwitz,”now in post-war West Germany made Heimatfilms such as HannaAmon (1951).4

People heavily burdened with guilt such as the aforementionedFritz Hippler (1909–2002) and the screenwriter Eberhard Taubert(1907–1976) were also able to continue their careers. Hippler, whoin direct collaboration with Hitler and Goebbels and in preparationfor the “Final Solution” had produced the anti-Semitic “documentaryfilm” Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew) (1940), was able to continueshooting documentaries under his own name after 1945. His script-writer for Der ewige Jude, Eberhard Taubert, who had been a high offi-cial in the Reich’s Ministry for Public Education and Propaganda(Reichsministerium fur Volksaufklarung und Propaganda) as well as thepublishing director of the anti-Semitic publishing house NibelungenVerlag during the “Third Reich,” was also re-integrated into the estab-lishment. During West Germany’s remilitarization he became theConsultant for Psychological Warfare (Referent fur PsychologischeKriegsfuhrung) of West Germany’s far-right Minister of Defense,

4. The latest attempt at coming to terms with Harlan was made by the film directorOskar Roehler in his film Jud Suß – Film ohne Gewissen (2010). Roehler is also the direc-tor of the film No Place to Go (2000), a remarkable tribute to his mother, the WestGerman communist novelist whose work had been particularly popular in EastGermany and who committed suicide shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall andthe dissolution of the Soviet Union.

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Franz Josef Strauss and his team of advisers,5 one of the many factsthat may help explain why Strauss’s “Stasi” file was destroyed after1990 “for his own protection.”6

Only in rare cases were Nazi film directors banned from the WestGerman (or Austrian) film industry. And in the case of Gustav Ucicky,who, with his militarist, anti-Slav and anti-Semitic films such as Morgenrot(Dawn) (1933), Fluchtlinge (Refugees) (1933) and Heimkehr (Homecoming)(1941), ranked among the most important Nazi directors, this ban wasoverturned. Later in 1957, Ucicky could make his comeback with the Hei-matfilm Edelweißkonig (The Edelweiss King) – together with his formerscreenwriter Gerhard Menzel (1894–1966), who during the Nazi yearshad belonged to the group of 87 writers who signed the Pledge of theMost Faithful Followers (Gelobnis treuester Gefolgschaft) for Adolf Hitler.

In 1975, Hans-Peter Kochenrath, the first scholar to systematicallyresearch and document the Nazi past of West German cinema, came toa devastating verdict:

While an attempt was made in the other arts, to eliminate the barbarism of Naziart and start over, cinema unabashedly adopted the legacy of those dark times.In West Germany, it was only in the first years after 1945 that a few well-inten-tioned attempts to “deal with the past” occurred; however, attempts to “dealwith the present” were completely non-existent. . . . The personal tiesbetween the creators of Nazi film and post-war West German film are sostrong that one can speak without exaggeration of an uninterrupted continu-ation of the Third Reich film in West Germany. Certainly one had to give upsome time-related nuances – for instance, anti-Semitic tendencies andattacks on the Western powers who now had turned into allies. But everythingelse has been preserved: the Heimatfilms, the melodrama, the anti-commun-ism, the worship of authoritarian leaders and systems, the love of theGerman Wehrmacht, the emphasis on German Gemut and cheap farces of pro-tagonists confusing each other or satires about German peasants. Yes, even the“doctor film” already existed during the Third Reich.7

5. See Der Spiegel, No. 20, 1989, 43–44.6. A few notable biographies not discussed here are those of Peter Paul Brauer (1899–

1959), Viktor Tourjansky (1891–1976), Paul Martin (1899–1967), Georg Jacoby (1882–1964), whose blacklisting (also) ended in 1947, Herbert Maisch (1890–1974), whodirected the Nazi propaganda films Starke Herzen (Strong Hearts) (1937), Menschenohne Vaterland (People Without a Fatherland) (1937), III 88 (1939) and Ohm Kruger(1941) but did not return to the film industry after 1947, continuing instead as astage director and the Superintendent of Stages of the City of Cologne. Anothercrucial Nazi propaganda film director, Hans Steinhoff (1882–1945), died shortlybefore the end of the war.

7. Kochenrath, Hans-Peter, “Kontinuitat im deutschen Film.” In: Bredow, Wilfriedvon/Zurek, Rolf, eds. 1975). Film und Gesellschaft in Deutschland. Dokumente und Mate-rialien (Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe): 286ff.

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Kochenrath made yet more unsavory discoveries, such as the bio-graphy of Gunther Rittau (1893–1971). In 1941, Rittau produced thefilm U-Boote westwarts (Westbound Submarines) on behalf of the ThirdReich’s Navy; and in 1960 he made the film Spionage (Espionage) onbehalf of the Bundeswehr (the newly founded West German army) –a film which according to the West German film expert Klaus Kreime-ier was designed to strengthen “the preparedness of the FederalRepublic against infiltration by the Eastern intelligence agencies.”8

Another biography Kochenrath brought to light was that of JohannesHaußler (1908–1964). Under fascism Haußler had directed BlutendesLand (Bleeding Country) (1933) and Deutsches Land in Afrika (GermanLand in Africa) (1939); and in 1951, he could – in the words of Kreime-ier, who drew on Kochenrath in his research – “continue his tenden-tious production with the so-called documentary Kreuzweg derFreiheit (Crossroads of Freedom) on the former Eastern territorieswithout significantly compromising his nationalist sentiments.”9 Andin the same outright revisionist vein there followed Mutter Ostpreußen(Mother East Prussia), Das deutsche Danzig (German Danzig), Das warKonigsberg (That was Konigsberg) (all 1954) and Schlesierland – DeutschesLand (Silesia – German Land) (1956).10

Kreimeier himself’ added the biography of Gerhard T. Buchholz(1898–1970), who had written the screenplay for Die Rothschilds (TheRothschilds) and now – among other things – reappeared in 1952 asthe director of Postlagernd Turteltaube (Poste Restante Turtledove),which targeted the GDR as the Cold War intensified. As late as 1958Buchholz was part of the jury at the International Film Festival inBerlin.

Kreimeier concluded his research by saying that these kinds offilms were “examples of undisguised political propaganda.” Yet, heargued, beyond the continuation of personnel the real scandal wasthe aesthetic continuity:

The dominant film . . . both in the Nazi state as well as later in the FederalRepublic was the so-called “non-political entertainment movie.” It representsa rather subliminal continuity . . . a latent identity in emotional attitudes, inthe relationship to reality, in that particular realm of the “collective uncon-scious” which is reflected by the medium of film perhaps more sensitivelyand with more nuance than in other forms of mass culture and low art. This

8. Kreimeier, “Der westdeutsche Film in den funfziger Jahren.” (note 1): 286.9. Ibid.10. See also Ebbrecht, Tobias. 2007. “‘Wir hatten eine Heimat, und die Heimat starb’.

Johannes Haußler und die Kontinuitaten im politischen Dokumentarfilm vor undnach 1945,” Filmblatt 12, no. 34, 7–26.

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identity, this continued effect of collective consciousness is particularly signifi-cant in cases where the cliches of the ostensibly “apolitical,” de facto anti-pol-itical and in its effect de-politicizing entertainment film are perpetuated andallow conclusions about the ideological foundation of [West] German every-day life. . . . [I]n the film genres of the fifties, specific ideological patternsbecome manifest that did not just emerge in this decade and that have not sub-sequently disappeared.11

Nevertheless, even if the Heimatfilm typified the climate of suppres-sion of the 1950s, it did not have exclusive status in West Germany’spolitically guided culture industry. In addition to shallow entertain-ment, there existed also revisionist historical misrepresentations. Lie-beneiner, Luthge, Rittau, Haußler and Buchholz have already beenmentioned. More examples were films like Solange du lebst (As LongAs You Live) by Harald Reinl (1908–1986). Reinl had worked as assist-ant director of Leni Riefenstahl’s film Tiefland (Lowlands). This film wascreated between 1940 and 1944 with Sinti and Roma people forciblyrecruited from concentration camps who were deported after the com-pletion of the film to the extermination camp of Auschwitz. And now,in Solange du lebst (1955), Reinl openly glorified the bombing of theSpanish Republic by the Nazi “Condor Legion.” Eventually Reinlwould create more Heimatfilms as well as some of the highlypopular Edgar Wallace and Karl May movies. Reinl’s Solange du lebstwas so notorious that film-maker Karl Paryla in the GDR respondedmore or less directly to it with the DEFA film Mich durstet (I AmThirsty) (1956) based on a novel by Walter Gorrisch which portrayedthe opposite perspective of the left-wing defenders of the SpanishRepublic.

Another example is Alfred Weidenmann (1918–2000). As a 16-year-old, this son of a factory owner had been a fanatical member ofthe Hitler Youth and embarked on a storybook career. He wentthrough several propaganda departments of the Hitler Youth, and at18 published his first in a series of Hitler Youth stories (many ofwhich would be turned into movies); as an assistant to Hitler Youthleader Baldur von Schirach, he later headed the War Library ofGerman Youth (Kriegsbucherei der deutschen Jugend), which was spon-sored by the High Command of the Army, Navy and Air Force andwhose purpose was to strengthen the readiness for sacrifice amongstGerman youth. Later Weidenmann became director of the Film Depart-ment of the Reich’s Youth Leadership (Hauptabteilung “Film” der Reich-sjugendfuhrung) and in 1941 he directed the Hitler Youth documentary

11. Kreimeier, “Der westdeutsche Film in den funfziger Jahren,” 287.

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film Soldaten von morgen (Soldiers of Tomorrow). This film was followedone year later by the feature film Hande hoch! (Hands Up!), which wonan award in fascist Italy, and, in 1944, Junge Adler (Young Eagles), a filmwhich, according to his biographer Peter Longerich, was particularlyenjoyed by Joseph Goebbels because it told “the story of a group ofapprentices enthusiastically helping to build bombers.”12

After the war, once remilitarization allowed for such an undertak-ing, Weidenmann’s colleagues from the War Library established thewar book series SOS – Schicksal deutscher Schiffe (SOS: Fate of GermanShips), Fliegergeschichten (Air Force Stories) and Soldatengeschichten ausaller Welt (Soldier Stories from Around the World), which romanticizedwar, catering to Nazi nostalgia, and which today can still be boughtat even the most provincial (West) German corner store. Weidenmannhimself, whose writings were banned in the Soviet-Occupied Terri-tories/GDR, continued his work in West Germany and cooperatedfurther with his friend Herbert Reinecker (1914–2007), who hadachieved a similar career in the propaganda departments of theHitler Youth and later in the Waffen SS (the SS’s most brutal and fana-tical wing). Among other things, Reinecker wrote the screenplays forthe Weidenmann films Canaris and Der Stern von Afrika (The Star ofAfrica). The latter treats the life stages of German fighter pilot Hans-Joachim Marseille and his missions in World War II, and was pre-miered in 1957 at a ceremony with Marseille’s mother. On the occasionof the film’s re-release a few years ago, the film critic Michael Boldhauswrote:

When the movie came out in August 1957 . . . the young Federal Republic ofGermany was marked by the Cold War and rearmament. On 1 April 1957the first recruits had been drafted into the “Bundeswehr.” . . . With his 158downings, Marseille had already been a gem of Nazi propaganda, and withits trivializing, entertaining depiction of war as an adventure, in whichyoung men dressed in dashing uniforms can prove themselves, this film getsquite close to the Nazi propaganda films.13

Moreover, in 1954 Weidenmann produced Canaris about WilhelmCanaris who was the head of German Military Intelligence Defense atthe High Command of the Wehrmacht (Militargeheimdienst Abwehrbeim Oberkommando der Wehrmacht) during the fascist period. Film his-torian Claudius Seidl writes, “Especially the foreign film criticsnoticed that in Canaris history was not only played down; it was

12. Longerich, Peter. 2010. Goebbels. Biographie (Munchen: Siedler Verlag): 562–563.13. Boldhaus, Michael. 2002. Faschismus und Zweiter Weltkrieg im Spiegel ausgewahlter

Kinofilme, Teil 4. http://www.cinemusic.de/rezension.htm?rid=1821

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falsified.”14 Nevertheless (or precisely because of that fact), Weiden-mann was given the “especially valuable” award by West Germany’sFilm Review Board (Filmbewertungsstelle), in 1955 he received theGerman Film Award for Best Director (Filmband in Gold), and in1956 the Gold Cup for the best feature film as well as the Bambifor the commercially most successful film.

Post-communist discontinuity after German “re-unification”

The continuity of the Nazi directors in the young Federal Republicof Germany stands in blatant contrast to the handling of the film-makers of the German Democratic Republic. When the GDR was dis-mantled, the politics of so called “re-unification” after October 3,1990 led not only to the fire-sale privatization of collectively ownedenterprises but also to the destruction of, with very few exceptions,all existing socialist institutions as well as mass layoffs of the over-whelming majority of creative workers – from higher education tothe film industry – in east Germany. A comprehensive survey of essen-tially all established and still-active directors of the Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA) directors active until the dissolution of theDEFA (1991), the careers of at least 41 directors were cut short due tothese developments. These film-makers, whose careers now endedlike those from many other areas of society, in most cases involuntarily,included: Siegfried Hartmann and Walter Heynowski (both 1927–),Gunter Reisch (1927–2014), Hans-Joachim Kasprzik (1928–1997),Gunther Stahnke (1928–), Walter Beck, Joachim Kunert, AchimHubner, Peter Hagen, Hans-Joachim Hildebrandt (all 1929–),Joachim Hasler (1929–1995), Frank Vogel (1929–1999), Fritz Borne-mann (1929–2005), Gerhard Scheumann (1930–1998), Ralf Kirsten(1930–1998), Konrad Petzold (1930–1999), Lothar Bellag (1930–2001),Martin Eckermann (1930–2005), Werner W. Wallroth (1930–2011),Kurt Veth (1930–2012), Wolf-Dieter Panse (1930–2013), Barbl Berg-mann (1931–2003), Wolfgang Hubner (1931–), Joachim Hellwig(1932–), Roland Graf and Irmgard Ritterbusch (both 1934–), SiegfriedKuhn, Erwin Stranka, Helmut Nitzschke, Roland Oehme (all 1935–),Lothar Warneke (1936–2005), Horst Seemann (1937–2000), Fred Noc-zynski and Werner Kohlert (both 1939–), Ursula Bonhoff (c.,1940–),Ernst Cantzler, Hans Kratzert (both 1940–), Eckhard Pottraffke and

14. Seidl, Claudius. 1987. Der deutsche Film der funfziger Jahre (Heyne Filmbibliothek):208.

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Rainer Simon (both 1941–), Roland Steiner (1949–), and Rudi Hein(born in the late 1940s or early 1950s).

Furthermore, this kind of “re-unification” also more or less put anend to the careers of Horst E. Brandt (born 1923 but still an active direc-tor with his 1989 DEFA film Die Beteiligten [The Participants]), RolfSchnabel (1925–1999) and Hubert Hoelzke (1925–, both still active asdirectors and, in the case of Hoelzke, also as an actor in 1989, but notafter that), Klaus Gendries (born 1930, only one post-transition filmin 1996), Helmut Dziuba (1933–2012, only one more film in 2004),Helmut Kratzig (born 1933, sparse television series episodes after1989), Kurt Tetzlaff (1933–), Gitta Nickel (famous documentary film-maker in the GDR, born 1936, only some public television documentaryfilms on the regional channel MDR), Karlheinz Mund (1937–), VeraLoebner (born 1938, few scattered TV engagements until 2004),Eduard Schreiber (1939–), Richard Engel (born 1940, fairly precariouswith few engagements), Jurij Kramer (born 1940, only individual actingengagements after 1989), Claus Dobberke (born 1940, fairly precariouswith very few documentary films), Detlev “Ted” Tetzke (1941–2004,only one more film in 1996), Ulrich Weiss (born 1942, four moremovies, but only until 1994), Peter Rocha (1942– ), Jochen Kraußer(born 1943, only three more films from 1994 until 1998), ChristianSteinke (only one TV movie after 1989), Heinz Brinkmann (born1948, a few more documentaries in the early 1990s), Jorg Foth (born1949) and Petra Tschortner (1958–2012), who both continued in thefilm industry but under quite precarious conditions, Michael Kann(young GDR film hopeful born 1950, only one Hungarian TV documen-tary in 1996), Sibylle Schonemann (born 1953, a few more and infre-quent documentaries before a complete change of professions) andDieter Schumann (born 1953, only two more documentaries in 2003and 2010).

In fact, the only East German film directors who have been able tocontinue their work in the German film industry beyond 1991 are basi-cally the makers of children’s films Heiner Carow (1929–1997, threemore television movies after 1991), Gunter Friedrich (1938–), RainerBar (1939–), Gunter Meyer (1940–) and Rolf Losansky (born 1931,three more films), the comedy film-makers Hermann Zschoche (born1934, working after 1991 for various low-brow television series) andBernhard Stephan (born 1944, also probably somewhat precarious inTV series production), as well as the documentary film-makers LewHohmann (born 1944) and Andreas Voigt (born 1953), and ChristaMuhl (1947–), who after 1991, instead of directing film adaptationsof Bertolt Brecht, Anna Seghers and Theodor Fontane novels and

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stories, was now also involved with more or less undemanding televi-sion series and telenovelas. A similar fate awaited Peter Wekwerth,Michael Knof (both born 1949), Gunther Scholz (1944–) and ManfredMosblech (1934–2012) who also – like many of the others mentionedbefore – only managed to survive in schmaltzy pre-prime-time TVserials, never being able to return to either the big screen or ambitiousintellectual projects such as Knof’s 11-part documentary Marx undEngels: Stationen ihres Lebens (Marx and Engels: Stages in Their Lives)(1978–1980) or the 1983 three-part TV series Aufbruch – Verrat – Hoff-nung (A New Beginning – Betrayal – Hope) on the German 1918 revolu-tion or Wekwerth’s 1979 five-part TV epic Die lange Straße (The LongRoad) on problems and conflicts in the construction of socialism from1949 until the 1970s or his 1985 four-part TV biopic Flug des Falken(The Falcon’s Flight) on the young Friedrich Engels in 1839 and thebeginning of his friendship with Marx. Finally, another director whoapparently could have continued working as a film director wasUlrich Thein (1930–). Yet in contrast with Muhl, Wekwerth, Mosblechand Knof, he refused to do so, saying that he was not interested in“creating the shit that I have been offered by producers.”

The careers of Jurgen Bottcher (1931–) and Konrad Weiß (1942–)seemingly could only continue because they had sought other voca-tions beyond just film: Weiß as a GDR dissident and Alliance 90/Greens parliamentarian and Bottcher as an artist outside the film indus-try. The careers of other DEFA directors such as Egon Gunther (1927–),Frank Beyer (1932–2006), Thomas Langhoff (1938–2012), and CelinoBleiweiß (1938–) continued because they had already created a repu-tation for themselves in West Germany during the early 1980s –partly through direct relocation (Gunther, Beyer, Bleiweiß). Thus, itwas easy for them to continue their work even after the dissolutionof the DEFA in 1991. Finally, Iris Gusner (1941–) had the goodfortune to have relocated to West Germany already in the summer of1989, which may have helped her to continue her work in the filmindustry, albeit also under apparently quite precarious conditions.

Among those directors who had worked exclusively in the GDRuntil its absorption, only the documentary film-maker Volker Koepp(1944–), Helke Misselwitz (born 1947, still occasionally working as adirector and now professor of Film and Television at Potsdam Univer-sity), Jurgen Brauer (born 1938, several detective series films until2008), Peter Kahane (1949–), Bernd Bohlich (1957–), and Andreas Klei-nert (1962–) managed a successful transition – and in the case of Klei-nert his DEFA debut did not occur until 1989. Meanwhile, the careers ofthe two best known East German directors today – Andreas Dresen

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(1963–) and Matti Geschonneck (born 1952 as the son of the famousDEFA actor and Cap Arcona survivor Erwin Geschonneck,15 but,unlike his father, a resident of West Germany since 1978) – onlybegan after 1989.

In short, even on the most generous assumptions there are just 24east German DEFA directors who were able to continue their work, orprobably could have if they had wanted to (Koepp, Misselwitz, Brauer,Kahane, Bohlich, Kleinert, Gusner, K. Weiß, Bottcher, Carow, Fried-rich, Bar, G. Meyer, Losansky, Zschoche, Stephan, Hohmann, Voigt,Scholz, Wekwerth, Knof, Mosblech, Muhl and Thein) juxtaposed toat least 66 DEFA directors whose careers in Germany ended largelyinvoluntarily with the absorption of the GDR by the FRG. This factstands in stark contrast to the fact that – almost without exception –all directors of German fascism were able to continue their careers inthe West after 1945. The explosive force of this balance sheet lies inthe sole conclusion that one can draw from it: Just as in reference tothe transition of the film industry from the Nazi era to the FederalRepublic it is impossible to speak of a break with the past, so also isit impossible to apply the term “re-unification” to the transition ofthe film industry from the GDR to the “Berlin Republic.” Post-fascistcontinuity after 1945 is matched by post-communist discontinuity after 1989.

Particularly worrying in this context is the fact that many of theinterrupted DEFA directors provided artistically valuable works forthe necessary coming to terms with the fascist past. These include,for instance, Joachim Kunert’s immensely successful masterpiece filmDie Abenteuer des Werner Holt (The Adventures of Werner Holt) (1965)based on the eponymously titled two-part Bildungsroman by DieterNoll (a coming-of-age story of a small group of young Nazi war sup-porters between emotional hardening, barbarization and resistanceand their return from the war); Kunert’s seven-part film Die glaserneFackel (The Torch of Glass) (1989) about the Carl Zeiss corporation; the

15. On 3 May 1945, five days before the end of the war, the British Royal Air Forceattacked the luxury ocean liner SS Cap Arcona, filled with approximately 5000 con-centration camp inmates, in the Bay of Lubeck. While the concentration campinmates tried to save their lives by swimming to the nearby shore, they eitherdrowned in the cold water or were shot dead by members of the SS waiting forthem. Geschonneck was one of the only roughly 400 survivors, who also includedthe composer of the concentration camp song “Peat Bog Soldiers” (Die Moorsolda-ten), Rudi Goguel (1908–1976), the GDR politician Ernst Goldenbaum (1898–1990), the resistance fighter Heinz Lord (1917–1961), the Czech composer Emil Fran-tisek Burian (1904–1959) and Sam Pivnik (1926–), who would later write booksdescribing his experiences at Auschwitz, during the death marches, and on theCap Arcona.

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five-part film Gewissen in Aufruhr (Conscience in Turmoil) (1961) byHans-Joachim Kasprzik and Gunter Reisch based on the turbulentautobiography of the antifascist Rudolf Petershagen, who surived theBattle of Stalingrad in 1943, actively surrendered his battalion in thebattle of Greifswald in 1945 (leading to imprisonment and the deathpenalty from the Nazis) and would later be imprisoned again by theUS secret service in 1951 under accusations of espionage; the antifascistchildren’s film Als Martin vierzehn war (When Martin was Fourteen)(1964) by Walter Beck (from the long-standing GDR tradition of anti-fascist children’s films aimed at presenting historical events from achildren’s perspective rather than shielding them from current affairsas in West German children films during the 1950s and early 1960s);the extremely popular seven-hour TV saga Wege ubers Land (WaysAcross the Country) (1968) by Martin Eckermann (depicting agrariansocial relations in East Elbia between 1939 and the early 1960s);Wengler & Sohne (Wengler & Sons) (1987) by Rainer Simon, a sagastretching across several generations of a working-class family from1871 to 1945; the much-acclaimed and (among West German leftists)widely diffused five-part labor movement epic Krupp und Krause(1969) by Horst E. Brandt; and the documentary films KamaradKruger (Comrade Krueger: Honor Without Conscience) (1986) and DerMann an der Rampe (The Man Who Met the Train) (1989) by GerhardScheumann and Walter Heynowski, focusing on Nazi and Auschwitzwar criminals living undisturbed lives in West Germany.

The FRG’s film policy during the Cold War

The Cold War brought an end to the barely begun denazification inthe West. This resulted inevitably in differences with the Soviet-Occu-pied Zone/GDR where, as a result of denazification measures, the topleadership positions were now occupied largely by the opponents andsurviving victims of Nazism and fascism – resistance fighters, concen-tration camp returnees, exiled political activists and intellectuals –while conversely in the West essentially the opposite was the case.This circumstance favored continuity between Nazi cinema and thatof the FRG. Moreover, because of systematic denazification in theSoviet zone, many of the old elites lost their cliques and networksfrom the time of the Nazi dictatorship. This meant that even forthose who did not politically reject the Soviet Zone/GDR, a career inWest Germany, where these connections were largely preserved, wasmore desirable.

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In West Germany all possible apologies for the immense continuitywere therefore tried until the mid-60s, and those apologies find uncri-tical acceptance again today. Thus, the media historian Anja Horbrug-ger, who was born in 1979 in Hofgeismar in West Germany, forinstance, approvingly quotes Peter Pleyer’s 1965 book about post-war film when she writes that the effort to exclude former Nazisfrom senior or creative positions proved to be “simply not feasiblebecause, ‘almost all directors, writers, actors, cameramen and tech-nicians had been more or less active members of the Nazi Party. Thatis why over the course of time this policy changed and now licenseswere issued to film-makers including those who had only passivelyformally belonged to the Party’.”16 The implication that key Nazi direc-tors like Harlan, Luthge or Ucicky were only fellow travelers ofGerman fascism is in itself already outrageous. In addition, however,the example of the DEFA shows that there indeed existed alternativesand that there were directors not burdened by guilt who could havebeen promoted. The fact that Horbrugger overlooks (or maybe evenhides) this simple truth can be interpreted as an example of thetunnel vision (or opportunism) which is characteristic of many WestGerman historians.

The continuity was, however, not merely the result of somethinglike post-fascist comfort and habit, but it came into existence with thedirect influence of the anti-communist state. The background for thiswas the West German system of Federal Guarantees, which the govern-ment granted during the 1950s in order to “securitize the film-makersagainst potential credit risks.”17 Klaus Kreimeier writes:

The producers who sought a federal guarantee had to submit . . . the script, thecost estimate and all contracts for review. This installed a political control overthe content of films which had a restrictive impact in countless cases. Thus in1952 the film Das Herz der Welt [The Heart of the World] by Harald Braun, abiography of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Bertha von Suttner, was denieda federal guarantee because its pacifist convictions did not fit into the politicalclimate of the re-militarization of West Germany and its integration into theWestern defense alliance. Furthermore, producers, who entertained contactswith the DEFA . . . could not expect guarantees. A scandal was causedwhen the then Federal Minister of the Interior [Robert] Lehr refused a guaran-tee for Wolfgang Staudte. Staudte was not ready to abandon his work at DEFA.. . . The second guarantee period expired in 1955, but tellingly in 1956 the gov-ernment nevertheless provided Alfred Braun with a 1.6 million [mark] loan sothat he could produce his film Stresemann. The film was intended to help the

16. Horbrugger, Aufbruch zur Kontinuitat – Kontinuitat im Aufbruch, 44; the quote istaken from Pleyer, Peter. 1965. Deutscher Nachkriegsfilm, 1946–1948 (Munster): 29.

17. Kreimeier, “Der westdeutsche Film in den funfziger Jahren” (note 1): 290.

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election campaign of the CDU in the following year, but was a commercialfailure.18

Alfred Braun? That name rings a bell. Right, it was he who during theThird Reich had written the screenplays for the Harlan films Jud Suß(Jew Suess), Die goldene Stadt (The Golden City) (1942) Opfergang (Sacri-fice) (1944) and the monumental morale-boosting “perseverance film”Kolberg (1945) and who had directed the Reich’s air force propagandafilm Himmelssturmer (Sky Stormers) (1941). Presumably because Strese-mann was such an economic disaster, Braun received the GermanFilm Award in 1957.19

Moreover, the German government aggressively impaired orblocked the distribution of DEFA films that strove for an antifascistcoming to terms with history. The provisional constitution of WestGermany, the Grundgesetz, like its counterpart in the GDR, boasted:“Censorship does not take place.” However, as Martin Loiperdingerwrites in his contribution to the joint work History of German film,this “meant little . . . for actual practice.”20 Although after the thirdreading of the Main Committee for the Preparation of the Grundgesetzin 1949 the people involved distanced themselves from a bracketing-out of film from the freedom from censorship, “even without aspecial censorship law . . . the freedom of film-makers remainedrestricted by the ‘law in general’.” This resulted in “the political filmimport control, which – rooted in the Cold War – blocked filmsfrom the Eastern Bloc countries up until the beginning of the sev-enties.” The role of “reviewing board” was assumed by the secret“Inter-Ministerial Committee” which “began its work at the instiga-tion of the Verfassungsschutz [West German intelligence agency] on16 June 1954” and decided without legal basis about the importpermit for Eastern Bloc films.”21 As Alexander Kotzing from the pre-dominantly conservative, state-run Federal Centre for Political Edu-cation (Bundeszentrale fur politische Bildung) writes, its activity wasaimed at “banning from the screen criticism of the Nazi past and refer-ences to elite continuities from the ‘Third Reich’ to the Federal

18. Ibid.19. Braun had been back in business since 1949, directing Ave Maria (1953) starring

Zarah Leander.20. Loiperdinger, Martin. 2004. “Filmzensur und Selbstkontrolle. Politische Reifepru-

fung.” In Jacobsen, Wolfgang/Kaes, Anton/Prinzler, Hans Helmut, ed. 2004.Geschichte des deutschen Films (Stuttgart: Sammlung Metzler), quoted from http://www.mediaculture-online.de/fileadmin/bibliothek/loiperdinger_filmzensur/loiperdinger_filmzensur.pdf, 19.

21. Ibid.

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Republic of Germany.”22 The existence of the Inter-Ministerial Com-mittee was not revealed until 1957, when its actions were uncoveredby an inquiry in the Bundestag. This practice of censorship stood, ofcourse, in dazzling contrast to the crocodile tears shed over theGDR’s Cold War censorship at the time of the SED’s Central Commit-tee Plenum of 1965. Yet it would be continued without interruptionuntil the new Ostpolitik and justified by the Federal Minister of Econ-omics Ludwig Erhard “with regard to the persecution of anti-consti-tutional tendencies (§93 StGB) and the banning of the GermanCommunist Party by the Constitutional Court in 1956.”23

The West German population thus remained unmolested by anti-fascist DEFA films. This was all the more so because directors suchas Staudte, who were active in both East and West Germany, wereusually severely hampered in their critical work. For example,Staudte’s significant DEFA film Rotation (1949), in which he showsthe role played by fellow travelers – exemplified realistically by the fic-titious printer Hans Behnke – in helping the cause of fascism, was sup-pressed in West Germany for nearly a decade and then only shown in acensored and annotated version (at that time Staudte had long relo-cated to the West as a result of a conflict with Brecht and HeleneWeigel). Earlier on, Staudte’s adaptation of the Heinrich Mann novelThe Loyal Subject (Der Untertan; in English also known as Man ofStraw and The Kaiser’s Lackey) had also already been banned in WestGermany. And Staudte’s classic The Murderers Are Among Us (DieMorder sind unter uns), the first German post-war film ever made,was not aired on West German television until December 18, 1971.24

“Braunbuch BRD”! “Braunbuch DDR?”: Nazi directors in the“Soviet zone”

The Federal Republic of Germany, in turn, responded to the alle-gations raised in the other German state that it is a “restoration

22. Kotzing, Andreas. 2009. “Zensur von DEFA-Filmen in der Bundesrepublik.” In AusPolitik und Zeitgeschichte, 1–2/2009. Online at Bundeszentrale fur politische Bildung:http://www.bpb.de/publikationen/YY0DNH,4,0,Zensur_von_DEFAFilmen_in_der_Bundesrepublik.html#art4

23. Loiperdinger, “Filmzensur und Selbstkontrolle” (note 20): 19.24. Among the films directly banned were Eisenstein’s Aleksandr Nevsky, Jiri Krejcik’s

The Higher Principle (1960) about the wave of terror following the 1942 assassinationof Reinhard Heydrich in Prague, the anti-fascist documentary film Du und mancherKamerad (1956) and even films such as Berlin – Ecke Schonhauser as well as the fairy-tale Das tapfere Schneiderlein. See further Kotzing, “Zensur” (note 22).

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state” run by old Nazi regime cadres, with the accusation that the samecontinuities allegedly existed in the German Democratic Republic (or,as the diplomatically unrecognized second German state was officiallycalled, the [Soviet] “zone” or “GDR” in quotation marks). In responseto the publication of the highly successful Braunbuch BRD (Brown BookFRG), which sought to document the post-fascist elite continuity in theWest and was translated into numerous languages, the FRG publishedthe Brown Book GDR. In the film industry, however, a parallel develop-ment cannot be confirmed.

There did indeed exist a handful of former Nazi era artists in theGDR. The difference to West Germany, however, was that the continu-ation of their careers – in the context of the democratic anti-fascist andlater socialist self-image of the GDR – was possible only through abreak with their past, which also had to be reflected in their artisticwork.

Apart from Staudte, there were nine other directors (and actors)who did have a fascist past: Adolf Fischer (1900–1984), Milo Harbich(1900–1988), Helmut Kautner (1908–1980), Eduard Kubat (1891–1976), Gerhard Lamprecht (1897–1974), Arthur Maria Rabenalt(1905–1993), Robert Adolf Stemmle (1903–1974), Erich Engel (1891–1966) and Georg C. Klaren (1900–1962). However, these artistsbecame actively involved in the efforts to come to terms with thefascist past. Of course, it must be added that – against the backdropof the DEFA procurement practice – a continuation of their respectivecareers would otherwise have been hard to imagine. Moreover, most ofthem did not stay for long in East Germany for a number of reasonswhich need to be clarified.

Hence, Harbich, whose career started in 1933 and who had workedas a cutter for Hitlerjunge Quex (Hitler Youth Quex), initially directed thefilm Freies Land (Free Land) about the successful land reform in theSoviet zone (one of the many demands of the West German socialdemocrats to be realized only in the East), but then emigrated toBrazil. Stemmle, who had directed the Nazi propaganda film Jungens(Boys) in 1941, wrote the anti-fascist novel “Die Affare Blum” afterthe war as well as the screenplay to its DEFA film adaptation directedby Erich Engel, but then ended up continuing his work in WestGermany writing screenplays for commercial entertainment filmsfrom Karl May to Edgar Wallace. Staudte, who had been an actor inJud Suß (Jew Suß) as well as in . . . reitet fur Deutschland! ( . . . ride forGermany!) (1941), now earned himself anti-fascist merits not onlythrough the aforementioned DEFA films Die Morder sind unter uns(The Murderers Are Among Us), Rotation, and Der Untertan (Man of

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Straw), but also for the film Rosen fur den Staatsanwalt (Roses for the Pro-secutor) which, in 1959, was basically the first West German film to pro-blematize West German post-fascist elite continuity. For his filmHerrenpartie (Destination Death) (1964), which took a critical look atthe lack of a coming to terms with the past in West Germany,Staudte, who had also directed adaptations of Brecht at a time whenhis plays were blacklisted across West German theaters, was slanderedas a “traitor.”25 Rabenalt, who had directed the films . . . reitet furDeutschland! ( . . . ride for Germany!) as well as Achtung! Feind hort mit!(Attention! The Enemy is Listening!) (1940) and who had also contributedto the aforementioned Riefenstahl film Tiefland (Lowlands), after the wardirected the film Chemie und Liebe (Chemistry and Love) (1948), an anti-capitalist sci-fi comedy based on a template by Bela Balazs. Thereafter,however, he only directed one more film in East Germany – the pacifistDas Madchen Christine (The Girl Christine) (1948) – and then continuedhis career in West Germany with sentimental films such as Hochzeit imHeu (Wedding in the Hay) (1950) and Die Forsterchristl (The Ranger’sChristie) (1952). Lamprecht, who had already been active during theWeimar period with literary adaptations as well as an acclaimedsocial realism trilogy and had kept a strong distance from Nazi propa-ganda films during the “Third Reich,” directed his first so-called DebrisFilm (Trummerfilm)26 Irgendwo in Berlin (Somewhere in Berlin) (1946) forDEFA, but then did not stay. The same thing applies to Kautner, whoduring the fascist period had not only refused to be instrumentalizedby the regime, but had also developed a subversive aesthetic whichran counter to the aesthetic of fascism – something which did notremain unnoticed by Nazi censors. Kautner’s first film in the ThirdReich, Kitty und die Weltkonferenz (Kitty and the World Conference)(1939), was banned, because it was considered by the Nazis to be paci-fistic and too friendly toward Great Britain. And Kautner’s follow-upfilms, which more or less belonged to the entertainment genre, kepttheir distance from the fascist aesthetic in the view of most critics.Toward the end of fascism Kautner fell into conflict with the regimeagain. His penultimate Nazi-era film Große Freiheit Nr. 7 was bannedbecause, according to the Nazi film evaluators, it did not show“German soul heroes”; and his last film Unter den Brucken (Under the

25. Later on, Staudte directed some of the highly popular four-part adventure series(also known as “advent tetralogies” because of their first broadcastings) for WestGerman public television, including two based on novels by Jack London.

26. Debris Movie is the genre name for the films made immediately after liberation fromfascism.

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Bridges) (1944) was still with the censorship authorities when the warended. In the Soviet zone Kautner now directed the Trummerfilm Injenen Tagen (In Those Days) (1947) in order to then continue his highlysuccessful career as one of the few critical film-makers in 1950s WestGermany.

The only former Nazi directors who had careers in the GDR wereKlaren and Fischer. Georg Klaren, a native Viennese now in Berlin, hadstarted in the second half of the 1920s as a screenplay writer and cele-brated his directorial debut in 1931 with Kinder vor Gericht/Die SacheAugust Schulze (Children on Trial/The Case of August Schulze). Duringfascism, Klaren had written largely apolitical screenplays, but he hadalso provided Rabenalt with the idea for Achtung! Feind hort mit! (Atten-tion! The Enemy is Listening!). He was active with DEFA from 1947 on.Among his films were the highly successful Georg Buchner adaptionWozzeck (1947) as well as four other films, including the self-criticallyanti-fascist Die Sonnenbrucks (The Sonnenbrucks) (1951) about fellow trave-lers and resistance fighters during the “Third Reich” as well as the alsonoteworthy Balzac adaptation Karriere in Paris (Career in Paris) (1952).For a short while, Klaren also worked as DEFA’s Chief Scenario Editor.

The second exception is Adolf Fischer, who had played proletarianfigures in the Weimar Republic under the famous Marxist stage direc-tor Erwin Piscator and alongside the communist Brecht-actor and well-known singer Ernst Busch at the Theater am Nollendorfplatz in Berlin.Alongside Busch, he also starred in G.W. Papst’s classic radical filmKamaradschaft (Comradeship) (1931), a German-French co-productiondepicting working-class internationalism during a coalmine disasterunderneath the French-German border, as well as in Brecht’s onlyfeature film Kuhle Wampe (directed by Slatan Dudow in 1932) and Sei-fenblasen (Soap Bubbles) (another Dudow film, directed in 1933 and com-pleted in Parisian exile in 1934). However, unlike all the figuresmentioned, Fischer did not emigrate from Germany, but conformedto fascism instead and acted in propaganda films such as Pour LeMerite, Das Gewehr uber (The Rifle Over), and the aforementionedAchtung! Feind hort mit! (Attention! The Enemy is Listening!). In theGDR, Fischer was eventually rehabilitated and would play a minorrole as the head of production for a number of humanist, anti-fascistand socialist DEFA films by people such as Martin Hellberg, Dudowand the famous Kurt Maetzig.27

27. Another film-maker who should be mentioned here is Helmut Spieß (1902–1962),who had been director of the theater in Weimar after 1933, and created a numberof films in the GDR after 1950 including Hexen (Witches) based on literary material

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“Daddy’s cinema is dead!”: the 1958ers and the beginnings of thedenazification of culture in West Germany

Those born after 1958, if they are cinematically inclined, usuallyassociate post-war West German film with the so called Autorenfilm(auteur film) by artists such as Alexander Kluge, Edgar Reitz, VolkerSchlondorff, Hans-Jurgen Syberberg, Harun Farocki, Rainer WernerFassbinder, Margarete von Trotta, Christian Ziewer, Bernhard Sinkeland Michael Verhoeven (the son of Nazi director Paul Verhoeven).This raises the question of how it was possible to overcome this conti-nuity and cultural dominance of the Nazi directors and their Heimat-films and revisionist films.

When in 1998, the so-called “march through the institutions” of the1960s social movements culminated with the government takeover bya coalition of social democrats and Greens, this kindled a debate aboutthe legacy of 1968, which celebrated its 30th anniversary that year.While the conservative media went after the former cop-beater andnow newly announced Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, trying to tiethe entire 1968 generation to Red Army Faction and Bewegung 2. Juni ter-rorism, the liberal (non-socialist) wing of “1968,” best personified byOtto Schily,28 saw the modernization of post-fascist, restorative-conser-vative Germany as their own accomplishment.

The truth is that a “zero hour” (“Stunde Null”) had indeed existed.However, it had a slightly longer pedigree than just “1968.” The WestGerman historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler, in his magnum opus DeutscheGesellschaftsgeschichte, which is beyond suspicion of harboring anykind of sympathy for the GDR or hostility to the Federal Republic ofGermany, noted that the actual “zero hour” was not 1968, but hadstarted a decade earlier with what he called the emergence of a “newtype of critical public sphere between 1958 and 1964.”29 The denazifica-tion of West Germany’s culture and of its cinema in particular was

of the East German communist author Kurt Barthel better known under his pseudo-nym KuBa.

28. See Solty, Ingar, “Otto Schily – ein politischer Seiteneinstieg im Kontext der hege-monialen Kooptation und passiv-revolutionaren Selbsteinschreibung von ‘1968′ inden Neoliberalismus”, in: Lorenz, Robert, and Matthias Micus, eds. 2009. Seitenein-steiger: Unkonventionelle Politiker-Karrieren in der Parteiendemokratie. Book Series: Got-tinger Studien zur Parteienforschung, Vol. 3, edited by Peter Losche and FranzWalter (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag fur Sozialwissenschaften): 206–222.

29. Wehler, Hans-Ulrich. 2008. Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte. Vol. 5 (Munich: C.H.Beck): 311.

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made possible by this new critical public sphere. And yet, it could onlyarise under very specific conditions.

The denazification of West German film, unlike the liberation fromfascism, did not come directly from outside the country. But it diddepend on outside developments, namely the new constellation ofthe Cold War, which starting in 1958 led to the rise of the “Kampf-dem-Atomtod” (“Fight-nuclear-death”) and the Easter March peacemovement. Only now was the grotesque parallelism of Auschwitzand homeland kitsch to some extent broken. The fear of nuclear warled to the rise of a new political opposition, which was carried by theWest German Trade Union Confederation (DGB), the illegalized Com-munist Party, the left wing of the Social Democratic Party of Germany(SPD) and a number of intellectuals and bourgeois leftists. At the sametime, a “new critical public” and a social climate emerged in whichyounger artists put the suppressed past and the restorative presenton the agenda. This was also partially supported by a moderniz-ation-oriented liberal elite centered around weekly mass publicationssuch as Rudolf Augstein’s Der Spiegel, Henri Nannen’s Stern andlater Marion Grafin von Donhoff’s DIE ZEIT. The result was an accel-erated process of alienation of critical youth from their parents. Thisopposition in the FRG finally linked up, in their own way, with theefforts of the anti-fascist democratic DEFA films. This process led tothe release of classic West German post-war films in quick succession:Wir Wunderkinder (Aren’t We Wonderful?) (1958) by Kurt Hoffmann;Unruhige Nacht (The Restless Night) (1958), Arzt ohne Gewissen (DoctorWithout a Conscience) (1959) and the Hans Fallada adaptation Jederstirbt fur sich allein (Every Man Dies Alone) (1962) by the bourgeois resist-ance fighter Falk Harnack;30 Hunde, wollt ihr ewig leben? (Dogs, Do YouWant to Live Forever?) (1959) by Frank Wisbar, and Die Brucke (TheBridge) (1959) by Bernhard Wicki – the latter two both dealing withthe futility of the war as exemplified respectively by the battle of Stalin-grad and by the Volkssturm, i.e. the 1945 mobilization of underageyouth and the elderly in the hopeless, senseless and criminal causeof defending the Nazi empire against the Allied Forces. Staudte’salready mentioned film Rosen fur den Staatsanwalt (Roses for the

30. Harnack had previously worked in East Germany. However, he relocated to theWest after his 1951 film The Axe of Wandsbek (1951), based on the 1943 exile novelof the same name by Arnold Zweig, caused a controversy with DEFA officials,who objected that the depiction of the Nazi executioner aroused compassion forhim. Brecht tried to resolve the situation by suggesting changes to the script.Instead, the film became the first one to be blacklisted in East Germany andwould not be screened – in an abridged version – until 1962.

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Prosecutor), We Cellar Children (Wir Kellerkinder) (1960) by WolfgangNeuss, and Der Transport (Transportation) (1961) by Jurgen Roland,about war deserters shortly before the end of the war, completed thepicture. Together with Hollywood films such as Judgment at Nuremberg(1961) by Stanley Kramer, they shook up the social relationships ofculture in the FRG.

At the same time in this young movement the awareness emergedthat a real break with fascism presupposed the development of demo-cratic cultural forms. With regard to cinema, this culminated in criti-cism of the dominant aesthetic in West Germany articulated in theOberhausen Manifesto of 1962. Under the leadership of AlexanderKluge and Edgar Reitz it postulated: “Daddy’s cinema is dead!” Thenew West German auteur film now experimented not only with anew aesthetic form, but also with a new political expression. It tookits inspiration equally from the French nouvelle vague, the film-revolu-tionary Jean-Luc Godard, the Frankfurt School and its culture industrycritique, Walter Benjamin, and the constantly politically suppressedtheater of Bertolt Brecht. These young directors created the conditionsfor a sustainable aesthetic denazification of West German film and thefoundations for a generally critical and intellectually substantial auteurcinema, on whose shoulders today – consciously or unconsciously – inessence every German-language film still rests.

The denazification of West German film corresponded with similarprocesses in other cultural areas. The 1958ers movement also devel-oped especially in the field of literature and articulated itself in thenoticeable upswing in literary texts trying to come to terms withfascism – building on the earlier criticism voiced in Alfred Andersch’sautobiographical The Cherries of Freedom (Kirschen der Freiheit) (1952), inwhich French existentialist sentiment was connected to a deserter’sindividualist will to survive, and in The Hothouse (Das Treibhaus) byWolfgang Koeppen (1953), which describes in a melancholic way therestoration, Western integration and remilitarization of the Westernhalf of Germany through the lens of a fictional SPD member ofparliament. However, in literature also, a sudden wave of critical pub-lications, which simultaneously expressed and shaped the conscious-ness of oppositional youth, emerged only in the course of theaforementioned Antiatomtodbewegung (Movement against NuclearDeath).

Thus, in quick succession classics of West German literatureappeared that despite all the stylistic differences were united in theirfocus on fascism and in scandalizing the omnipresent suppressionand glorification of the past. These writings included novels such as

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Flight to Afar (Sansibar oder der letzte Grund) (1957) by Alfred Andersch,The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel) (1959) by Gunter Grass, and Billiards atHalf Past Nine (Billard um halb Zehn) (1959) by Heinrich Boll, and theplays Andorra (1961) by Max Frisch, The Deputy (Der Stellvertreter)(1961/63) by Rolf Hochhuth, and The Investigation (Die Ermittlung)(1965) by Peter Weiss. The political maturity and sharpness of thisnew critical intelligentsia reflected itself especially in the Weissdrama The Persecution and Assassination of Jean Paul Marat (Die Verfol-gung und Ermordung Jean Paul Marats) (1964), which already pointedto the impending re-appropriation of Marxism from its submergenceunder fascism.

In music also, there was a concerted effort to overcome post-fascistculture. Kluge’s and Reitz’s slogan “Daddy’s cinema is dead!” wasechoed two years later in the postulate “Daddy’s song is dead!” –articulated by the prominent chanson singer Franz Josef Degenhardt(1931–2011) who would go on to become a leading voice of the 1968generation.31 The confrontation of the post-fascist Heimatfilm, as wellas the culture-industry Hollywood film, by the auteur film was paral-leled here with the confrontation and overwhelming of the old soldiersong and the fascist Schlager, a culture-industry cliche-ridden artefactand alleged “folk” song with no popular roots whatsoever, whichstill dominated the music genre during the 1950s. Now, the so calledLiedermacher (singer-songwriters, literally: song-makers, a term concep-tualized after Brecht’s term “Stuckeschreiber” [playwright]) such asDegenhardt, Peter Rohland, Dieter Suverkrup, Gerd Semmer, thetwin brothers Hein and Oss Kroher, Hanns-Dieter Husch, HannesStutz, Fasia Jansen and later on also Hannes Wader, with roots in theuncompromised, internationalist wing of the German Youth Move-ment, constituted themselves in the influential counter-culture festivalsat the Waldeck Castle in Hunsruck, where they tried to develop a non-fascist song form, the so called intervening or Auteur Song (zeitbezogeneor Autorenlied). In short, the political culture of 1968 was preceded bythe cultural politics of the era since 1958.

At long last the unbearable continuity of the Nazi elite wasrevealed. Indeed, in the GDR it had been a central topic for a longtime. The intellectuals who dealt with it there were sponsored by thestate, since with the revelation of these relationships the East

31. See Solty, Ingar. 2008. “Franz Josef Degenhardt,” in: Killy Literaturlexikon, NewEdition in 12 Volumes (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter), Vol. 2 (“Boa-Den”), 574–577,and Solty, Ingar, “Franz Josef Degenhardt: Ein Klassiker der deutschen Nachkrieg-sliteratur,” 2 parts, in: junge Welt, December 3 and 5, 2011.

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German state could assert its claim that it was the actual “newGermany” (“Neues Deutschland” – also the name of the rulingparty’s daily newspaper and until today the largest socialist dailynewspaper in Germany), and not the least, get closer to its foreignpolicy goal of international recognition. Hence the sensationalsuccess, in the GDR, of a number of literary and cinematic workssuch as the novel Michaels Ruckkehr (Michael’s Return) by LeonhardFrank (1882–1961) or the DEFA film Der Prozeß wird vertagt (The Trialis Being Postponed) (1958), a straightforward adaptation by Herbert Ball-mann (1924–2009), in which Nazi elite continuity was discussed. KurtMaetzig’s film Der Rat der Gotter (Council of the Gods) (1950), which isbased on the Nuremberg Trial records and Richard Sasuly’s IGFarben documentation, impressively problematized the elite’s andthe capitalist system’s continuity with the example of the IG Farbencorporation and its successors Bayer, BASF, Wacker and Hoechst,whose profits were closely connected to the extermination camp inAuschwitz. In addition, from 1955 onwards extensive and systematicresearch on the fascist involvement of the FRG elites was carried outin the GDR and the results disseminated. This culminated in the 1965release of the aforementioned, attention-provoking Braunbuch BRD:Kriegs- und Naziverbrecher in der Bundesrepublik und in West-Berlin(Brown Book FRG: War and Nazi Criminals in the Federal Republic andWest Berlin), which in several editions published incriminating infor-mation on 2300 members of West Germany’s elite. A later investigationby the contemporary (West) German historian Gotz Aly showed thatthe error rate was less than one percent. Some misinformation anddeliberate falsifications were indeed cleverly used by FRG elites as ameans to evade a confrontation with the material as a whole. To theextent, however, that young intellectuals in the West now started toask the necessary questions, the mantle of silence over the fascistpast and the careers of Nazi officials in West Germany became moreand more frayed.

The tireless work of Thomas Harlan (1929–2010), the eldest son ofVeit Harlan, who conducted research in Polish archives about theextermination camps Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmno (Kulmhof) andBelzec, in cooperation with the Hessian federal prosecutor FritzBauer (1903–1968), who in 1963 initiated the first Auschwitz trialover the opposition of broad sectors of society and the FRG’s judi-ciary,32 finally led to the prosecution of at least 2000 war criminals in

32. Frohlich, Claudia. 2006. „Wider die Tabuisierung des Ungehorsams“. Fritz Bauers Wide-rstandsbegriff und die Aufarbeitung von NS-Verbrechen (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag).

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West Germany.33 The federal government, however, responded tothese revelations in an increasingly authoritarian manner. At theFrankfurt Book Fair of 1967, the entire print-edition of the BraunbuchBRD was seized and withdrawn from circulation. Harlan wasaccused of treason by, of all people Hans Globke (co-author and com-mentator of the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws of 1935, who had nowbecome Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s closest adviser), and was pre-vented from entering West Germany until well into the 1970s by thewithdrawal of his passport. State actions such as these, however,only ended up reinforcing the process of alienation among criticalyouth.

The “zero hour” of West German culture lies somewhere between1958 and 1968. The state of the Federal Republic of Germany contribu-ted nothing to this. On the contrary, in the course of integration withthe West and re-militarization it refrained from denazifying the WestGerman film industry. Instead, it took great pains to shield the popu-lation from the efforts of DEFA directors trying to come to termswith fascism and to “direct all intellectual and practical efforts sothat Auschwitz could not repeat itself,” as Theodor W. Adorno haddemanded in the West. In addition, it responded with repressivemeasures against attempts at unveiling by the domestic young leftopposition and the intellectuals in East Germany. All this suggeststhat the denazification of the elites and of cinematic aesthetics, aswell as a coming to terms with fascism (not to mention the economicand political structures which had led to fascism in the first place)would not have happened without these efforts from below andfrom outside. However, this should not come as a surprise. Giventhe systemic and elite continuity between fascism and 1950s WestGermany, the elites could not have had the slightest interest in thiseffort.

Conclusion: where are we now?

The denazification of (West) Germany in general – and of itscinema and film culture in particular – was largely successful and con-tinued through the 1980s as part of a general evolution of capitalismtoward neoliberalism. The political collapse and absorption of theEast German state in 1990 led to a general free-market triumphalism.

33. According to some of his friends and colleagues, Bauer’s sudden death from a sleep-ing-pill overdose on 1 July 1968 was a suicide provoked by the personal attacks heexperienced due to his work.

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Even though the problems which state socialism had sought to over-come – social inequality and insecurity, capitalist crises and war – con-tinued to exist, becoming in fact more pronounced than ever, the deadbody of the GDR came to be used as a tool to fend off any criticism ofthe capitalist status quo. History, or rather a very particular and ideo-logical reading of it, is always used as a weapon of politics. In this case,the dominant and official historiography now depicted the EastGerman state as merely a criminal “footnote” and “dead-end street”in German history, instead of as a legitimate but ultimately unsuccess-ful first attempt to build socialism on German soil. And the quarter-century since the fall of the Berlin Wall was now presented as a narra-tive of “freedom” for the East German population.

The official doctrine told of “two German dictatorships,” likeningthe GDR to German fascism. Tens of thousands of killed communistand social-democratic workers and labor leaders, six million Jewsand others murdered in the Nazis’ extermination camps, an imperialistwar of annihilation (especially in the East) which cost 55 millionpeople, including 25 million Russians, their lives were now supposedto be no more evil than the German Democratic Republic which wasindeed responsible for the crime of a minimum of 138 people shotdead at the state border between the FRG and the GDR (includingeight GDR border patrol soldiers who were killed by gunfire fromthe West) but which, unlike the reunified German state after 1989,had never participated in any war abroad, let alone a war of aggressionsuch as the NATO war in Kosovo in 1999.

The monstrosity of this “demonization [of socialism] by compari-son,” which failed to include the Cold War crimes of the West,34 wasobvious from the beginning – but nevertheless it prevailed. Based onthe notion that everything that existed in East Germany was “ideologi-cal” or inferior to what had existed in the West, more or less all existingsocialist institutions were eliminated or their employees replaced byWest Germans. The post-communist discontinuity in German cinemais just one example – and not even the most drastic one – of this com-prehensive endeavor. Occasionally it was even being pursued as a sup-posed equivalent of the campaign against post-fascist continuity inWest Germany, with the notion that one could now “make up” forwhat had been “missed then” (i.e. in West Germany after 1945), bybeing extraordinarily thorough in eliminating “socialist ideologues”from their positions. The result was that the societal elites in the

34. Wippermann, Wolfgang. 2009. Damonisierung durch Vergleich. DDR und Drittes Reich(Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag).

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GDR were completely replaced by West Germans.35 Moreover, underthe rule of the two East German state leaders – Angela Merkel as Chan-cellor and the war-mongering pastor Joachim Gauck as President – thisdevelopment continues into the present. Thus, as comprehensivestudies by the Jena sociologist Raj Kollmorgen have shown, EastGermans today comprise only between five and nine percent of theeconomic and political elites of “reunified Germany,” although theyare roughly 20 percent of the total population. The only part ofsociety where East German citizens have been over-represented is inthe army – of course, only in its lower ranks.36

The dominant and official historiography took a blow, however,with the effects that monetary union and fire-sale mass privatizationsof nationalized industries had on the Eastern economy. With de-indus-trialization out of control and mass unemployment rising, the Party ofDemocratic Socialism (PDS) formed by the reform-oriented wingwithin the Socialist Unity Party (SED), which had ruled the GDRuntil 1989, not only survived politically as an institution for defendingthe political and intellectual elites of the defunct state fighting for theirpension rights, etc. but also continued to grow even beyond the formerSED district capitals into a party supported by roughly a quarter of thepopulation. Furthermore, during the late 1990s and early 2000s thecooptation and absorption of (West) Germany’s center-Left oppositionby neoliberalism and the implementation of the neoliberal Agenda 2010– which deregulated the financial sector and flexibilized labor markets,created the second-largest low-wage sector in Europe, and producedan ever-growing population in poverty – allowed the PDS toadvance spectacularly by merging with social-democratic and labordissidents in the West, allowing it to turn into an all-German party.37

With the global crisis that began in 2007, capitalism also startedlosing its allure in unified Germany. In this context, the West Germanelite’s historical narrative – still obligatory for any political career –

35. Burklin, Wilhelm/Hoffmann-Lange, Ursula. 1999. “Eliten,” In Weidenfeld, Werner/Korte, Karl-Rudolf, Handbuch zur deutschen Einheit 1949–1989–1999. Edited by theFederal Agency for Civic Education (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag): 317–329.

36. While not a single general or admiral was East German, 62 percent of the lowestranks were from the area of the former GDR as were almost 50 percent of all soldiersdeployed in Afghanistan and Kosovo. As a result, even the liberal weekly DIE ZEITsummarized this economic draft as a choice of “unemployed or Afghanistan,” liken-ing East Germans to African Americans in the German version of an “underclassarmy.” Staud, Toralf, “Arbeitslos oder Afghanistan,” In DIE ZEIT (online), 26November 2009.

37. See further Solty, Ingar. 2008. “The Historic Significance of the New German LeftParty,” Socialism and Democracy, 22, no. 1: 1–34.

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has become increasingly shaky. While the older generation of GDR citi-zens has been silenced or has fallen silent except in some (east German)leftist publications, socially engaged members of the younger GDR gen-eration involved in the late 1980s protests in East Germany (thereforecredited as GDR dissidents) are becoming more and more daring andvocal in the mainstream media and are breaking through the increas-ingly stale and hysterical official “freedom” narrative. Hence, duringthe 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the East Germanauthor Landolf Scherzer, praised as someone whose reporting hadchronicled the demise of the GDR, likened the state-official “freedom”narrative and “Unrechtsstaat” terminology and its echo in the conserva-tive and liberal media to the GDR propaganda shortly before its politicalcollapse.38 Another example is East German novelist Ingo Schulze, oneof the activists of the Wende era, who was able to argue in the liberalweekly DIE ZEIT that “reunification” was in reality a kind of annexationof the East German by the West German state, since there was no chance“to really evaluate which of the [GDR’s] structures and propertyrelations, which of its laws and practices were fit for the future andsuperior to those in the West.”39 Later Schulze would add to this hismemories of how the newspaper he had founded after the Wende inthe small town of Altenburg was desperately at the mercy of capitaland its advertising Deutschmarks, which made him wonder: “Had Iever before been squirming in front of a party functionary the way Iwas now squirming in front of the owner of the largest furniturecompany in the region?”40 Likewise, Annett Groeschner, also active inthe Wende era and now a novelist, bemoaned in the blog of the leadingconservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that in terms of social repro-duction and women’s-rights issues such as the “compatibility of familyand career” the old FRG “felt like the middle-ages,” which entailed thatafter re-unification she and other GDR Wende activists ended up “havingto take care” that GDR achievements in this direction “were protected”when what they had actually been rallying for had been “to changethings for the better.” And she then summed up the general feeling ofmany East Germans by saying, “we wanted freedom and we endedup with neoliberalism.”41

38. Scherzer, Landolf, “Ich bin wohl doch Sozialist,” Tageszeitung, 6 November 2014.39. Schulze, Ingo, “‘Vereinigung’ war nur ein Beitritt,” DIE ZEIT (online), 23 July 2014.

(The era of the Wende [turn] is that of the GDR’s collapse.)40. Schulze, Ingo, “Wir leben von der Verdrangung,” DIE ZEIT (online), 16 October

2014.41. Groschner, Annett, “Wir wollten Freiheit und bekamen Neoliberalismus,” Frankfur-

ter Allgemeine Zeitung (Blog), 29 October 2014.

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In the face of this historical opening at a time when capitalism hasby and large lost its vision of a better tomorrow and in light of this sub-altern rebellion against the state-official narrative of post-war Germanhistory, the cracks in the edifice of state-official historiography havebeen widened. The first opening was when the 2007–8 struggleswithin German historians’ circles about whether or not GDR historio-graphy should include GDR everyday history were decided, over theopposition of the conservative wing, in favor of those historians(associated with the Sabrow Commission) who wished it to do so. Fur-thermore, in some fields of culture such as photography, a reevaluationof GDR cultural achievements has begun.

And yet, in many other branches, this development is still at the verybeginning and is facing tremendous opposition from the state and thepolitically extremely well-funded academic establishment wherecareers are still being made in those terms. Nevertheless, the relativereduction of anti-communist hysteria is reflected in the fact that thesegment of society which generally supported the December 2014 elec-tion of Bodo Ramelow to become the first DIE LINKE prime minister (inthe East German state Thuringia) by far exceeded the 28.2 percent ofvotes his party received. Of course, this was helped by another fact,namely that Ramelow is a former trade-unionist from West Germanywho also happens to be a moderate and a Christian. Nevertheless, thecontinuing power of the state-official GDR historiography is reflectedby how especially the support of his election by the social-democraticand Green party junior partners in his coalition government dependedon succumbing to the narrow and unjustified definition of the GDR as an“Unrechtsstaat” – not the least in the coalition treaty agreement.

Generally speaking, Germany is still far away from a non-hysteri-cal analysis and interpretation of its post-war history, in which the twoGerman states would be examined from 1945 forward (instead of from1989 backward), and in which, instead of comparing East Germany toNazi Germany, one would compare the two post-war states with eachother, considering their respective Cold War crimes – surveillance,blacklisting, etc. – in the context of the hegemony and empire of thetwo superpowers. This would be the precondition to a necessarydebate about – and compensation for – the historical injustices experi-enced after 1989 by West as well as East German Cold War victims,including many GDR film directors.

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