The Triumph of the Ordinary

by Feinstein, Joshua

• ISBN13: 9780807853856
• ISBN10: 0807853852
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-09-01
• Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr

Summary

Were movies in the East Bloc propaganda or carefully veiled dissent? In the first major study in English of East German film, Joshua Feinstein argues that the answer to this question is decidedly complex. Drawing on newly opened archives as well as interviews with East German directors, actors, and state officials, Feinstein traces how the cinematic depiction of East Germany changed in response to national political developments and transnational cultural trends such as the spread of television and rock 'n' roll. Celluloid images fed a larger sense of East German identity, an identity that persists today, more than a decade after German reunification. But even as they attempted to satisfy calls for "authentic" images of the German Democratic Republic that would legitimize socialist rule, filmmakers challenged the regime's self-understanding. Beginning in the late 1960s, East German films dwelled increasingly on everyday life itself, no longer seeing it merely as a stage in the development toward communism. By presenting an image of a static rather than an evolving society, filmmakers helped transform East German identity from one based on a commitment to socialist progress to one that accepted the GDR as it was.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Abbreviations	xiii
Introduction: Back to the Future	1	(18)
Conquering the Past and Constructing the Future: The DEFA Film Studio and the Contours of East German Cultural Policy, 1946--1956	19	(26)
The Discovery of the Ordinary: Berlin---Ecke Schonhauser and the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU	45	(33)
A Case of Love Confused?: Slatan Dudow's Verwirrung der Liebe as a Meditation on Art and Industry	78	(32)
Straddling the Wall: Socialist Realism Meets the Nouvelle Vague in Der geteilte Himmel	110	(41)
The Eleventh Plenum and Das Kaninchen bin ich	151	(25)
A Dream Deferred?: Spur der Steine and the Aftermath of the Eleventh Plenum	176	(18)
The Triumph of the Ordinary: East German Alltag Films of the 1970s	194	(34)
Conclusion	228	(7)
Epilogue. Arrested Alltag?: East German Film from the Biermann Affair to DEFA's Final Dissolution 1976-1993	235	(22)
Notes	257	(38)
Selected Bibliography	295	(12)
Selected Filmography	307	(6)
Index	313