Introduction

IN THE 1950S AND 1960S, the SED's active promotion of amateur filmmaking was aligned with its so-called Bitterfelder Weg cultural policies, a top-down directive that sought to create a bottom-up workers’ culture. But to what extent did the state's appropriation and promotion of amateur filmmaking coincide or conflict with what Josie McLellan has described as East Germany's “bottom-up model of the sexual revolution”? With a 1958–59 film produced by a Berlin-Friedrichshain Schmalfilmgruppe (small-format film group) as its focal point, this essay explores the manner and means by which East German amateur film functioned as what Teresa de Lauretis has termed, after Michel Foucault, a “technology of gender.” Even though the GDR leadership “was proud of its destruction of legal patriarchy,” Donna Harsch observes that “women's equality remained, nonetheless, peripheral to the utopian vision, for women's rights did not promote class equality or a collective mentality, much less raise productivity.” Though reliant on and responsive to the staunchly patriarchal policies, discourses, and initiatives coming from the male-dominated SED, East Germany's amateur film movement nevertheless created numerous possibilities, as I will show, for the articulation, negotiation, and contestation of gender roles and equality under socialism.

Drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy's “postdeconstructive” philosophy of embodiment, sense, and sexual difference, this chapter analyzes the aesthetics of maternal labor in Zu jeder Stunde (At Any Moment), an amateur film “mit Spielfilmcharakter” (with the character of a feature film) that was televised on an April 30, 1961, episode of a monthly amateurfilm advice program, Greif zur Kamera, Kumpel! (Reach for the Camera, Pal!). Both directed by and starring Frau and Dr. Strasburg, the sixteen-minute fictional short follows a doctor (Dr. Strasburg) who must decide between supporting his dying wife (Frau Strasburg) in the hospital and making a house call to save the life of a pregnant woman facing a difficult home birth. The doctor chooses duty over love, ostensibly proving his unselfish commitment to others “at any moment,” even when it comes at the cost of passing (so to speak) on his own wife's passing.