“Whoever has discovered a truth must also bear witness to it and make it known,” says the critical Potsdam high school graduate and pastor’s son Alexander Schulz at the start of the film and adds: “You must also endure the personal disadvantages.” Between March 1989 and March 1990, Kurt Tetzlaff follows the intelligent boy through a time of upheaval. At their graduation, Alexander and his class perform the play “Dictatorship of Conscience” by Mikhail Shatrov. He takes part in the demonstrations in autumn 1989 and refuses to serve in the army. Sequences from the GDR news demonstrate how far removed from the citizens the state leadership had become.
Andrees’ graduation project approaches the perky 14-year-old Jacki mainly through her social environment: the stressed patchwork family mother, the solitary long-distance truck driver father, the eclectic neighbourhood. The closer the film gets to its protagonists, the freer the movements of the camera become, gliding through a studio as if in a trance or flying over the nocturnal motorway as if over a UFO landing strip.
High up north, in the Stralsund People’s Dockyard, Gitta Nickel encounters a youth brigade whose members speak frankly: “I’m 27 now. Judging from my own example I can say: it’s been nothing but work, really nothing. I can really say that about me, stark and stiff.” Stralsund as the focal point of socialist conditions of value creation: A ship may be completed every two weeks, but housing, let alone leisure facilities aren’t. The diagnosis: The quality-of-life to performance ratio is less than ideal. The brigade’s team spirit, though, is still strong, even if, as some think, there are some shortcomings on the “ideological side”.
Sibylle Schönemann’s film about abortion lets young and older women speak; women who were forced to abort by their partners or who chose to carry the baby to term despite predicted difficulties. Assembled as a kind of collage, a round table alternates with stylised passages, while the camera also shows moments in a clinic right before and after the procedure. The attitude vacillates between drama and affirmation of life. Liberal perspectives, with one exception, are left out. Schönemann, together with Tamara Trampe, almost managed to take up the complex issue in a feature film.
The self-taught nature filmmaker Ingeborg Tölke uses quotes from literary encounters with the flora and fauna of the moor in a gentle approach to this landscape. With great empathy, she uncovers the often all-too-hastily overlooked beauties and cruelties of the place, using time-lapse and macro techniques. Her debut work, which was also amazing in terms of film craft, won several awards.
The filmmaker Herbert Kasinski portrays the Mitropa restaurant at Leipzig Central Station which seems a little out of time. The figures quoted at the beginning of the film and the number of hungry and thirsty people extrapolated from them are still impressive today: Every day, 800 trains carrying 250,000 passengers arrived at Europe’s biggest terminal with its then 32 platforms.
After studying at the German Academy of Film Art Potsdam-Babelsberg, Karlheinz Mund made this documentary tour of Jewish cemeteries in Berlin. The gravestones preserve the names of famous and unknown people. They preserve their places of death, where no distinction was made between the famous and the unknown: Auschwitz, Mauthausen. When the West German Short Film Festival invited Mund’s film, the committees in charge enforced one distinction after all: The images of graves defaced with anti-Semitic graffiti taken from the West German press were allowed to remain, footage of the same content filmed in East Berlin had to be removed for the theatrical release in the GDR.
What was unsuccessful 400 years earlier in the German Peasants’ Wars is achieved in 1945 by the unbreakable bond with the Soviet Union: Under adverse conditions, workers and peasants build a socialist state. In 1970, when this film was made, the SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) asserts its claim to leadership grounded in the past – it moves forward on the “Way from the I to the We”.
Petra looks back on an eventful day: Together with other kids she went on a paperchase, solved a few small tasks and coordinated with her assigned partner. There were some adventures, but also a classroom situation set up in a meadow where one’s knowledge of the local flora was tested. In the end, they all boarded sailing boats and glided off into an atmospheric evening. A protocol in letters, accurately drawn up at the Potsdam Pioneer House, serves as the framework for one of the first completed films of the newly founded German Academy of Film Art in Babelsberg.
A lady, presumably from the FRG, takes an excursion on the narrow-gauge railway. Her astonishment at finding the line operated by Young Pioneers is evident. “It’s unbelievable” how she is asked for her ticket with childlike gravity. This film was produced at the active and extremely productive “Iskra” pioneer film studio at the 31st Secondary School in Leipzig-Probstheida.
Opening the film is a highly visible Soviet coat of arms with translations of Marx’s call “Workers of the world, unite!” into several languages. In the middle of a media circus, representatives of the Soviet Union restituted art treasures to the GDR. The highlight was the return of “evacuated” objects to the Green Vault in Dresden.
At the turn of 1968/69, the decision was taken to introduce a Leipzig City Express to “relieve inner city traffic as an attractive local passenger transport system”. A forward-looking measure of traffic policy which – at a time when the car-friendly city was still the dominant concept in urban planning – represented an appealing mobility option for the citizens of Leipzig.
The railway from the point of view of people who travel by bicycle, on foot or by car: A Schlager music recording of GDR singer Chris Doerk is re-cut many times to accompany the endless-seeming wait at a railway crossing. Meanwhile, young people find each other, couples form. Even the birth of a child finds a place in this ironic short film.
A wall stands in a barren, inhospitable landscape, insurmountable. While the birds are flying unhindered through the air, a human being struggles in vain to open a door in the wall. First as a small child, then as an adult, finally as an old man. When the door at last unexpectedly gives way, it seems too late. A dark allegory by the Leipzig-based painter and graphic artist Rainer Schade.
In short sequences of images pointedly set to music by Louis Armstrong, the film follows the pleasurable triumph of young life over the obstacles of setting out into the world. As short as the film is and as curious its contents, the chequered story of its working and release titles is just as interesting. In 1987, the industry magazine “Film und Fernsehen” presented it simply as “A DEFA film by”. The text printed there ends with a sentence in brackets: (And many a viewer may marvel at the courage of the little ducklings and feel encouraged themselves.)
Far removed from the officially propagated GDR cultural sector, Christine Schlegel created her very own energetic cosmos on 8mm stock between 1977 and 1986. She painted over or scratched lines and shapes on footage of the dancer Fine Kwiatkowski. She projected painted footage on the dancing body during live performances, enveloping and re-shaping it.
