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12 - Kittler's Sound
- Edited by Rolf J. Goebel, University of Alabama, Huntsville
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- A Companion to Sound in German-Speaking Cultures
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- 21 February 2024
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- 24 October 2023, pp 195-209
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Summary
I. Introduction
Although Friedrich Kittler is sometimes cited by proponents of sound studies, it is unlikely he would have approved of much of their work. First: although his work may in some ways seem cognate to that of sound studies, in his “provocation” of traditional disciplinary boundaries, and his shared reference to Foucault, he himself was a sharp critic of Anglo-American cultural studies, which have arguably been the matrix for sound studies. Second, his own concept of sound—a term he largely contributed to popularizing in German—is quite distinct from, and even opposed to, that of sound studies, in its ontological dimension. This distinction has been continued by several of Kittler's German inheritors, whether in media studies or in musicology. Yet for all the seemingly conservative overtones of his later writing (with its central reference to Heidegger and Greece), his project remains difficult to frame or place within traditional disciplinary or philosophical contexts. Nonetheless, we can use the term sound itself as an Ariadnefaden or leitmotif to work out the peculiar theoretical status of Kittler's writings.
Relating Kittler to sound studies is rendered more difficult by the latter's lack of airtight definition, which some would see as a deliberate foil to traditional notions of scholarship. One could, perhaps, borrow Lawrence Grossberg's now-familiar, standard definition of cultural studies as “an interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and sometimes counter-disciplinary field that operates in the tension between its tendencies to embrace both a broad, anthropological conception of culture and one that is more narrowly humanistic.” Right away one sees where Kittler differs: his own notions of culture were neither anthropological nor (certainly) “humanistic.” In Eine Kulturgeschichte der Kulturwissenschaften (A Cultural History of Cultural Studies), written at around the time of his own Kehre or turn from media hardware to music and mathematics, he looks the concept of culture squarely in the eye. For Clifford Geertz, the patron saint of so much American culturalist (and new historicist) work, he has little time, calling him overrated; one suspects Geertz's debt to hermeneutics (one of Kittler's lifelong enemies) and his reduction of culture to text could hardly have interested him. Instead, Kittler is interested in the Schnittstelle (interface) of culture and technology, something “humanistic conceptions” have not always been interested in. In his attention to marginal phenomena around the production of intellectual history, Kittler may look like a practitioner of cultural studies or New Historicism.
2 - Genesung (1956)
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- The Films of Konrad Wolf
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GENESUNG(RECOVERY , 1956) Wolf's second film, was based on a Hörspiel (radio play). It tells an antifascist conversion narrative, that of the happy-go-lucky Friedel Walter, a popular entertainment musician during the Third Reich, who is gradually drawn in to the anti-Nazi resistance, in part through his love for Irene Schorn (played by Karla Runkehl, who had already had an important role in Kurt Maetzig's Schlösser und Katen [Castles and Cottages, 1957]). However, when Friedel finally finds Irene again after the war, she is already married to an older (and handicapped) antifascist, Max Kerster (Wilhelm Koch-Hooge), and Friedel must renounce his love, having only a bright professional future under socialism: he can become the doctor he only falsely claimed to be during the war, under an assumed name. The end of the film gives him amnesty for this deception and sends him off to his future prospects. Genesung thus reverses the roles often given to male and female protagonists in Wolf: the role of self-sacrificing idealist, who must renounce love in return for a happier or truer future, will be the lot of Lissy at the close of her film, Lutz at the end of Sonnensucher, and Rita at that of Der geteilte Himmel (and perhaps Sunny in the last scene of her film, although there the future is no longer political). This melodramatic close is familiar from Hollywood models such as Stella Dallas (dir. King Vidor, 1937, with Barbara Stanwyck) or Now, Voyager (dir. Irving Rapper, 1942, with Bette Davis); here, however, the sacrificial role is for a man. Friedel is, in his softness and passivity, hardly a traditional male lead in any case. The plot idea of a doctor working without proper qualifications had been tried out in West Germany in Rolf Hansen's Die grosse Versuchung (The Great Temptation, 1952), starring Dieter Borsche and Ruth Leuwerik, as one GDR reviewer noted (Leipziger Volkszeitung, March 23 1956). Wolf himself was quoted in another GDR paper as saying his film did not belong to the doctors’ genre (“kein Kittelfilm,” Lausitzer Rundschau, February 25, 1956).
Notes
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The Films of Konrad Wolf
- Archive of the Revolution
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- 06 October 2020
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- 16 March 2020
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This is the first book in any language on the films of Konrad Wolf (1925–1982), East Germany's greatest filmmaker, and puts Wolf in a larger European filmic and historical context.
7 - The Minor Films: Leute mit Flügeln (1960), Der kleine Prinz (1966/1972), Busch singt (1982)
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IT WOULD BE FORCED or exaggerated to claim that all Wolf 's films are of equal interest or value. Along with a few that are, or should be, part of the German and international film canon—Ich war neunzehn, Sterne, Solo Sunny—there are films that are intelligent and subtle but remain stubbornly marginal due to their intimate dependence on a GDR context unfamiliar to most viewers, such as Der nackte Mann auf dem Sportplatz; films that mark an important historical event but are flawed, such as Der geteilte Himmel, with its often ponderous script; and finally an ambitious work like Goya, that falls short of greatness due to an unconvincing performance by Olivera Katarina as the Duchess of Alba. The role for Margarita Terechova in Mama, ich lebe feels also not quite plausible (and did for the actress herself at the time of filming); Wolf himself later realized that the rhetoric of Professor Mamlock (especially the final sequence of the suicide) was overdrawn. In general, Wolf is at his least effective when trying to be dramatic or overtly emotional, as in Mamlock or parts of Goya (where the intent seems to oscillate between a Brechtian distancing and the absorbing grandeur of historical-epic spectacle), and best when most understated and reflective, as in Sterne or Ich war neunzehn. The kind of drama that Wajda could pull off in Man of Marble (1977), or The Promised Land (1977), or in which Fassbinder so often excelled, was not his forte.
There are also, in Wolf's oeuvre, films that seem either to be a socialist realist potboiler, such as Leute mit Flugeln, or oddly marginal to his larger project, like Der kleine Prinz. Busch singt is another matter altogether: his last completed work, and one that in many ways sums up or returns to key medial and historical concerns that run through all of his films. These films are perhaps less interesting in themselves—as independent artworks—than in relation to the rest of Wolf's overall work, and they will be viewed accordingly in this chapter.
3 - Lissy (1957)
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DEFA FILMS ARE (as noted in the introduction) characterized by a peculiar and uncanny historical quality unlike that of other films because of the disappearance of the nation that produced them. This “pastness,” this historical index or datedness—DEFA's “spectral” quality— is particularly evident in Lissy, which—like Fassbinder's later films on the early history of the BRD—tries to uncover an archaeology of fascism in the Weimar past. In doing so, the film not only recreates a fiction of Weimar, of its working-class and petty-bourgeois milieu, but also refers back to the filmic inheritance of Weimar (its left film traditions, its didactic or “propadeutic” narratives of conversion to political consciousness). The film is thus an archive in multiple senses, both historiographically (of the Weimar working-class past) and in medial terms (of generic narrative templates).
Generic Memories
Lissy (1957) has been seen as Konrad Wolf's first mature film, yet in some ways it is still a transitional work; its protagonist's exit from the ritualized world of Nazism at the film's end could be seen as an allegory for the director's own departure from the aesthetic practice of Stalinism that had crippled DEFA production in the first half of the 1950s. The film tells the exemplary story of a working woman in depression-era late Weimar whose unemployed husband joins the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers Party), but who herself learns, through the death of her brother at the hands of the Nazis, to become an antifascist resistance fighter. In this process she is aided by her friendship with the loyal Communist fighters Max and Toni Franke, as by her own working-class parents’ experience with Nazi thugs who destroy their home in a search. The screenplay derived from an exile novel by a now-forgotten socialist author, Franz Carl Weiskopf (1900–1955), who had been (with Willi Bredel) one of the editors of Neue Deutsche Literatur in the early ‘50s, a publication known for its fidelity to Party demands.
4 - Sonnensucher (1958/1972)
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SONNENSUCHER FEATURES an unusually rich plot, and on an epic scale. Lotte Lutz is a young orphan who runs away from an abusive employer to her older friend Emmi, who has been a woman of ill repute; the two women go to the Wismut mining complex, where Emmi meets up with an old flame, Jupp Koenig (played by Erwin Geschonneck), and Lutz, after a failed relation with a younger miner, is taken in by Franz Beier, a one-armed war veteran (played by GÜnter Simon). Beier dies in a mining accident near the end, leaving Lutz alone with their child; although Lutz really loves the Soviet officer Sergei (Viktor Avdyushko), whose life Beier helped save (thereby sacrificially atoning for his own Nazi war crimes), she must take leave from him at the film's close.
Sonnensucher offers one of the most complex generic mixes of all of Wolf's films. It has a documentary aspect, since its scriptwriters, Karl- Georg Egel and Paul Wiens, spent time researching their topic among the Wismut miners, and parts of the film were shot on location, including sequences shot in an unused mineshaft. Several characters, including those of Jupp Konig and of Josef Stein, were based on real individuals; others, most notably that of Lutz, were invented for dramaturgical purposes. Sonnensucher may be seen as a Gegenwartsfilm (film of the present), yet its view of the present is also strongly colored by historical memory; moreover, it also has elements of Western, melodrama, and Socialist Realist “production film.” Its production and reception history are similarly complicated; despite the director's agreeing to multiple revisions requested by the authorities, the film was Wolf's only film to be censored and shelved, purportedly due to the sensitivity of the topic of the Wismut uranium mines during the Cold War. The Wismut also inspired one of the most interesting censored novels of the GDR, Werner Braunig's epic production story Rummelplatz, which was, like the Rabbit Films, a victim of the Eleventh Plenum of 1965 and could not be published until 2007.
8 - Der geteilte Himmel (1964)
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DER GETEILTE HIMMEL, based on Christa Wolf's 1963 novel of the same title, is without doubt one of the key films not only in Wolf's work but also within DEFA as a whole. It marks not only the beginning of the very short-lived DEFA “New Wave”—which lasted not much longer than a year (if one counts from the premiere of this film on September 3, 1964 to the Eleventh Plenum in December 1965), or perhaps a few years at most (if one counts from films like Rolf Kirsten's Auf der Sonnenseite [On the Sunny Side] from 1962)—but also addresses the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961. Based on Christa Wolf's novel of the same name, which similarly marked a breakthrough for its author and for GDR literature into a less rigid form of writing (one less molded by the patterns of socialist realism), it tells the story of a young woman named Rita (Renate Blume) and her older lover Manfred (Eberhard Esche), who ends up leaving for West Berlin on the eve of the building of the Wall, due to his frustration about his inability to get a new chemical procedure supported by GDR authorities. Manfred is a man on whom the burden of his family's (especially his father’s) Nazi past weighs heavily, and he cannot shake off cynicism when he sees his father replace Nazi party membership with that in the Communist Party. Rita visits him in West Berlin, but finding both the milieu and a newly cold and selfish Manfred unsympathetic, chooses freely to return to the East and its more communal social project. Although she is studying to be a teacher, she also works in a train wagon factory, which gives the film a double plot structure. At the factory she meets Wendland (Hilmar Thate), a young idealistic manager (and socialist foil to Manfred's world-weary cynical individualism), and Meternagel (Hans Hardt-Hardtloff), an older man whose health is failing, but who manages to implement a new production system in his brigade, one that will increase productivity.
10 - Goya (1971)
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GOYA OR THE HARD WAY TO KNOWLEDGE (1971) is yet another rarity in Wolf's oeuvre: a historical epic, set in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Plans for making it date back to the 1960s, but the production was delayed for a number of reasons, among them the inability to find the Western stars originally envisioned for an international coproduction. Instead of Western stars, Donatas Banionis (best known today for his role in Tarkovsky's 1972 Solaris) was cast as Goya, and Olivera Katarina (who had made her name in Aleksandar Petrović's I Even Met Happy Gypsies, 1967) as Alba. For a director usually associated with DEFA's brand of understated neorealism, the kind of swashbuckling grandeur typical of the historical epic (or biopic) must have been an uncomfortable fit, and this oddity is palpable in aspects of the film (such as the slightly implausible love affair with the Duchess of Alba, or Goya's weird, almost horror-movie fits of laughter near the end of the film, presumably meant to show his Falstaff-like vitality and earthiness; the melodramatic depictions of his fears of madness are also far from Wolf's normal palette). The film narrates Goya's transformation from a successful bourgeois portrait painter of the Spanish aristocracy to an engaged, sympathetic observer of political life, of Spain's war against Napoleon. It is thus a variant on the “conversion narrative” so often used by Wolf in other films (Die Genesung, Lissy, Sterne, Professor Mamlock, Der geteilte Himmel). Goya has a love affair with the Duchess of Alba, sees the persecution of the singer Maria Rosario by the Inquisition, and rides through the countryside in a Quixote-like journey, discovering the life of the people and discoursing on art with his friend Esteve. At the end, he flees over the border to France, escaping from the Inquisitor, and we are treated to an audiovisual montage of Goya’s works, combined with gunfire, calls for revolution, and flamenco.
Breaking the Frame of Painting
It is a tautology to note that films about painting tend to be themselves painterly—thus iconodule or iconophile—pointing beyond the medium of film to that of the canvas.
1 - Einmal ist keinmal (1955)
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EINMAL IST KEINMAL, one of the few Heimatfilme ever made in the GDR, was not only Konrad Wolf's first film but also his diploma film for the State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow. Wolf had not originally planned to film this script, which is admittedly in a genre and a style one would not associate with this director, best known for antifascist films such as Ich war neunzehn and Sterne. His original idea for a screenplay, titled “Weg in die Heimat,” and based on a sketch written originally in Russian, dealt with a main character who, like both Wolf himself and his later protagonist Gregor Hecker, is caught between the Soviet Union and Germany. This proposal was rejected by the Hauptverwaltung Film of the Kulturministerium der DDR, and Wolf ended up with the scenario we now know. Yet the thematics of a return to Heimat remain, if displaced from the original difference USSR-Germany to that of FRG and GDR. Einmal ist keinmal tells the story of composer Peter Wesely, who is on a visit to his East German uncle in the Saxon town Klingenthal (known for its production of musical instruments), and falls in love with Anna, a worker in an accordion factory and an amateur musician herself. Peter is tired of having to play mechanical, Americanized commercial “Boogie-Woogie” to earn his bread in the West, and thus the traditional folk musical culture of the East (coded as authentic, natural, and healthy) is a relief to him. He stays at first with his uncle Edeltanne in Klingenthal, where he is soon asked to compose a variety of different pieces: one for the accordion factory, for orchestra and accordion, one for his uncle's folk ensemble, and one for a youthful Schlager group. At first he resists the offer to write a Schlager, incurring Anna's displeasure; that his accordion piece is written for another woman, a virtuoso named Marie Alvert, also makes Anna jealous. Finally, however, all these stock-comic obstacles to his love are overcome, and Peter's composition for accordion, solo voice, and orchestra, incorporating local folk music, is sung by Anna herself, who is reconciled with Peter at the end.
12 - Mama, ich lebe (1977)
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AFTER VENTURING INTO the historical epic and the Gegenwartsfilm, Wolf returned to more familiar ground with Mama, ich lebe. The film tells the story of four young German soldiers who have been taken prisoner by the Soviets and agree to work with the Red Army against the Nazis. Only three of them are willing to use weapons, though, and their delay in helping a friend (Kolya) leads to the latter's death. One of them, Pankonin, works on listening to German radio together with a female Soviet officer (played by Tarkovsky's leading lady Margarite Terekhova) and falls in love with her. Once at the front, three of the four are selected for a commando behind enemy lines, from which none of the three return, leaving only one member of the group a survivor.
Mama, ich lebe has not received much more recognition from subsequent criticism than it did from its first viewers in 1977. Like its predecessor, Der nackte Mann auf dem Sportplatz (1974), it is one of Wolf's most subdued, leisurely, and understated films, far less dramatic than its closest relative, Ich war neunzehn, of which it thus may superficially appear a pallid remake. The film's lack of popularity is probably linked to its having relied less on generic reference (to the Western) than had Ich war neunzehn. Yet Mama reworks not only many of the same thematic materials as other, films of Wolf’s—the moral pathos of political decision, of redefining individual authenticity apart from nationhood, and the constellation of private and collective memories—but also similar filmic techniques. Among them are the exploration of intermediality, of voiceover, audiovisual montage, and quoted photographs or stills found in Der geteilte Himmel, Ich war neunzehn, Goya, and Der nackte Mann auf dem Sportplatz. Like Genesung, Mama, ich lebe was based on a radio play. These techniques are used to help refurbish the GDR's foundational narrative of antifascism through heightening medial reflexivity and subjectivizing viewpoint, meant to suggest the authenticity of witness. Moreover, that narrative is itself a parabolic one—which is one of the chief reasons for the film's neglect until now.
Bibliography
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Index
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5 - Sterne (1959)
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STERNE TELLS ANOTHER antifascist conversion narrative, this time of a German soldier stationed in a small Bulgarian town during the Second World War. Like Friedel in Die Genesung and Lissy, Walter (JÜrgen Frohriep) is an apolitical soldier, more interested in his landscape-painting hobby than in his duties as a Wehrmacht occupation soldier. When he responds with an indifferent shrug to a request to send a doctor into the Jewish camp to help a woman in labor and is then called inhuman by a Jewish woman (Sascha Kruscharska), his conscience is pricked, and he gets to know the woman (symbolically named Ruth), eventually falling in love with her. Although he wants to help her escape the camp before its occupants are deported to Auschwitz, he arrives too late, tricked by one of his fellow soldiers (Kurt, played by Erik Klein). At the end, however, we know Walter will join the Bulgarian partisans resisting the Nazis, just as we know at the end of Lissy that the protagonist will oppose fascism. Sterne was a Bulgarian-East German co-production, shot in several different languages—German, Bulgarian and Ladino for the Jews—and the West German government tried (unsuccessfully) to block its being shown at film festivals; its script was written by the Bulgarian Angel Wagenstein (b.1922), himself also a director as well as an author. Wolf was not able to obtain the actors he had originally wanted for the roles of Walter and Ruth; both JÜrgen Frohriep and Sascha Kruscharska (then a student) were relatively inexperienced and needed much coaching from the director. Others in the cast were veterans: Erik S. Klein, as Walter's friend Kurt, gives a much more subtle and nuanced portrayal of a German soldier than, for instance, the Nazi Kaczmierczik in Lissy. The film's low-key lighting and restrained use of music contributed to an overall poetics of understatement that makes it one of the most successful of early Holocaust dramas.
The film's reception is unusual within Wolf's oeuvre, first because it had international resonance at the time of its release, and second for having been recently analyzed by Elsaesser.
Contents
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6 - Professor Mamlock (1961)
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UNLIKE THE FILMS that preceded it, Professor Mamlock narrates an antifascist conversion that comes too late to save its eponymous protagonist. Hans Mamlock (Wolfgang Heinz) is an assimilated Jewish surgeon who served in the German military in the First World War; he cannot take the Nazi threat seriously, wants all political discussions banned from his clinic, and tries to forbid his son Rolf (Hilmar Thate) from participating in Communist resistance work. Only when his daughter Ruth is driven out of her school by anti-Semitic harassment, and he himself is paraded through the streets by SA men, wearing a sign inscribed JUDE, and his fellow doctors weakly agree to sign a statement against him, does he realize what is happening and commits suicide. In a subplot, one of the nurses, Inge Ruoff (played by Lissy Tempelhof, who would provide the omniscient voiceover narrator for Der geteilte Himmel), who is at first a Nazi sympathizer, turns to help Mamlock's son escape and defies Dr. Hellpach, a Nazi. Several of Mamlock's Jewish colleagues at the clinic (Drs. Hirsch and Simon) serve as foils to his heroic but flawed character.
A Splintered Parable
Even within a difficult body of work, Professor Mamlock is one of Wolf’s most opaque films: the knot of overdetermined contradictions, between didactic function and indirect stylistic autonomy, is unusually dense here. Professor Mamlock is not only an adaptation of a play by the director’s father, a powerful figure if ever there was one, but also a remake of a popular 1938 Soviet film the younger Wolf had seen as a child, and furthermore, a highly topical and tendentious public intervention on the eve of the building of the Berlin Wall. Historically, one has to see it as an implicit justification for GDR politics at the beginning of the 1960s, like Karl Gass's stridently agitprop “documentary” Schaut auf diese Stadt (Look at This City) from 1962. It touches on the sensitive topic of anti-Semitism and the relations between Jews, Communism, and the bourgeoisie. Its aesthetic combines both aspects of filmic modernism and overtly appellative, propagandistic function; if one finds this alloy suspect, one might remember that a similar linkage may be found in Kalatozov's I am Cuba from 1964 (not to mention earlier instances of political modernism in Eisenstein, Vertov, or Dovzhenko).
11 - Der nackte Mann auf dem Sportplatz (1974)
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ONE OF WOLF'S most original and subtle films, Der nackte Mann auf dem Sportplatz (1974) is also one of his most GDR-specific works. Much of the film is hardly comprehensible without knowledge of its very local context. Even for a director who avoided rhetorical bravura as much as Wolf, this is an extremely understated film, all in half tones and fine shadings of irony and humor. The film narrates a few weeks in the life of the sculptor Kemmel, who is experiencing something of a crisis in his work, although one without any high drama, and which thus has to be guessed at from small nuances of his performance. Kemmel is played by Kurt Bowe, a beloved GDR actor who also had the role of mayor Jadup in Rainer Simon's Jadup und Boel (1980/1989). As in that film, Bowe plays a rough, gruff Everyman, very much an East German type. and not at all the typical artist as genius. Although he is married and has a child, he also has a younger mistress whom he visits. His artistic career runs into multiple obstacles: an earlier relief has been unceremoniously deposited in a storeroom rather than displayed; an attempt to portray a worker (named Hannes) fails, although he manages to connect with the worker on a personal level; and his commissioned sculpture of an athlete for a local football club (which gives the film its title) is not well received when the locals, expecting a man in a footballer's uniform, discover he has portrayed one clad only in Greek nudity. Other episodes of the film treat the artist's profession by contrast, such as a visit from a pretentious younger countercultural couple, one of whom affects to have a Russian soul and sings an Orthodox hymn along with a tape recording, or the opening of an exhibition accompanied by incongruous Pan pipes. Jackie Schwarz from Ich war neunzehn also makes a cameo appearance as the artist's model. Throughout the film, Kemmel is also wondering about what the purpose of an artist in the workers’ and peasants’ state should be, and how art relates to history (in particular to specific traumas such as Babi Yar or Buchenwald).
Frontmatter
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Introduction: Shadowlines: Viewing Wolf’s Films
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LATE IN LIFE, Konrad Wolf remarked on the ability of even fiction films to acquire quasi-documentary value over time, and on human memory’s need to be kept alive with such documents:
Der Film hat—vorausgesetzt, es ist gelungen, darin etwas wirklich Wesentliches genau und kunstlerisch komprimiert zu gestalten— mehr vielleicht als alle anderen Kunste die Eigenart, nach einer gewissen Zeit zu einem Dokument zu werden.[…] Eben dieser Eigenart wegen empfinde ich das Filmemachen als eine so grosse Verpflichtung […] Das Gedächtnis der Menschen kann aber nur wachgehalten werden, wenn es immer neue Nahrung erhält. Wir konnen uns darum nicht mit dem begnugen, was aus der Vergangenheit geliefert ist. Jede Generation sucht ihren Zugang zum Vergangenen.
[Film has—assuming it has managed to create something truly essential in a precise and artistically compressed form—perhaps more than any other art the quality of becoming a document after a certain time. […] It is precisely due to this quality that I feel filmmaking to be such a great obligation […] People's memory can only be kept awake if it receives ever new nourishment. We cannot therefore be satisfied with what has been bequeathed from the past. Every generation seeks its own approach to the past.]
We could read this statement as an understated criticism of the official GDR faith in das Erbe, the “inheritance” from the great bourgeois classics: for Wolf, that inheritance, although it is binding, must always be created anew. It is also Wolf's own variant of Bazin's mummy complex. This documentary status holds true in particular for the films of the state film studio of the GDR (DEFA), but not only due to the long dominance of a neorealist aesthetics within DEFA. Film was, in the GDR as in other Eastern European countries, the national keeper of History in a very particular and emphatic sense. For the GDR, film also has a peculiar status as the visual archive of a society or a nation (terms that will need to be explored more in the course of this book) that no longer exists. This strange documentary status thus invites one to speculate as to how it might best be described.
9 - Ich war neunzehn (1968)
- Larson Powell
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- Book:
- The Films of Konrad Wolf
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 06 October 2020
- Print publication:
- 16 March 2020, pp 133-155
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Summary
WOLF'S MOST SEEMINGLY autobiographical film—loosely based on but not literally duplicating his own experiences—is also his most significant. Ich war neunzehn was made in answer to the crisis of the Eleventh Plenum, which had brought DEFA production to a standstill; its title is also an answer to Marlen Khutsiev's I am 20 (Mne dvadsat’ let, USSR 1964), a key film of the Soviet New Wave, which had run into trouble with Khrushchev and could only be released in a much-cut version. Where Khutsiev's film shows the undramatic, everyday life of young Muscovites, in a New Wave-influenced style marked by location shooting, handheld camera, and unstaged events, Wolf's film solidly returns its young protagonist, Gregor Hecker (played by Jackie Schwarz), to the larger historical foundation narrative of the GDR. It is thus a system loyalist’s answer to a Soviet film perceived as dissident. What is new about the film is Gregor's uncertainty, self-doubt, and vulnerability, which make him kin not only to French New Wave figures such as Antoine Doinel in Truffaut's 400 Blows (1959) but also to other Eastern European New Wave protagonists such as Ivan from Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood (1964) or Maciek in Wajda's Ashes and Diamonds (1957). The film, based on Wolf's own experiences at the end of the Second World War, chronicles Gregor's travels through Germany as part of a propaganda squad calling on German soldiers to desert, with two other men, a Russian teacher of German named Vadim (Vasiliy Livanov) and a blonde Russian named Sasha (Alexey Eybozhenko) who is shot at the end of the film during a surprise SS attack. As with Sonnensucher, the international cast, speaking Russian as well as German, links Wolf's film not only to East German but also to Soviet film traditions. Wolf worked with his regular crew of cameraman Werner Bergman, scriptwriter Wolfgang Kohlhaase, set designer Alfred Hirschmeier, cutter Evelyn Schmidt, and assistant director Doris Borkmann; Rainer Simon was an additional second director.