Defa Foundation: Christa Kožik: The protective dream

What does someone draw from throughout their life? From your own childhood. Christa Kožik’s childhood (born January 1, 1941) fell victim to the war. That’s why she keeps making up for it in her writing, to this day. For a long time she asked herself, why did her mother become so hard and evil? Again war was the answer.

But the great seriousness of the two-year-old Christa had already come with another event. The father was a railway lineman in Liegnitz, Lower Silesia. One day he was hit by a train and suddenly she was alone with her mother. Her father’s absence was a big mystery for her. A photo shows the little girl at his grave. Deeply immersed in itself, it faces its first – unsolvable – metaphysical puzzle.

Then the front came closer and the mother had to flee with the four-year-old girl at the beginning of 1945. But the train is bombed and explosions and screams can be heard everywhere. There are dead and injured people in the rubble of the train, and there is blood everywhere. You can reach Frankfurt/Oder on foot. She keeps seeing frozen corpses in the snow along the way. This is a terrible sight for a small child who does not know why so many terrible things are happening around him. The worst noise was when these frozen corpses were picked up and thrown onto wagon surfaces. A person becomes a thing so quickly. This haunted her for many years.

It was one thing to be saved, but there was something missing from a good life! Christa Kožik experienced through her mother what it is like when people die inside and lose their soul. But she didn’t want to give up the child’s soul, because that’s what’s actually valuable from which we draw. Her children’s books and film scenarios are about this “inner eye”. Occasionally she also quotes Karl Marx: “Imagination rises above reality in order to penetrate all the deeper into it.”

At sixteen she began an apprenticeship as a cartographic draftsman at the State Geological Institute in Berlin. Every day she passes the antiquarian bookstore near the Dorotheenstadt Cemetery. And there she makes a discovery that will change her life: Hölderlin’s poems! She, who drags her sad childhood with her, finds comfort in it. Hölderlin’s poems were like “opium” for her.

This close proximity to Hölderlin also made it possible for her to write the script for one of the most beautiful (and important) Defa films: “Hälfte des Leben” (1985) directed by Herrmann Zschoche with Ulrich bother as Hölderlin and Jenny Gröllmann as Susette Gontard. The steward in the Gontard house, who falls in love with his employer’s beautiful and imaginative wife. The genius as the breadwinner of a trivial banker who considers himself far above the “poet” in his social rank. This becomes a tragedy in a double sense, which Christa Kožik delicately depicts. The unliveable love for the married woman and the class difference – both together destroy Hölderlin and drive him crazy.

But the children were most important to Christa Kožik. They should be allowed to be children and learn through play. But after the war, survivors mostly only saw the practical side of everyday life. You had to work! Mental health problems were not taken seriously and “dreamer” was almost a dirty word. Christa Kožik wanted to change that. She began to write – winter poems were the first thing she recited at the poetry evenings that took place all over the GDR in the early 1960s. At an event in Potsdam, she immediately stood out as a great talent with her poems.

What followed was a typical GDR path for young authors: from the Circle of Writing Workers (a result of the Bitterfeld Conference of 1959) it went gradually to the Writers’ Association. She was lucky and found sponsors everywhere. Finally she studied dramaturgy at the film school in Potsdam.

The film scenario for “Philip the Little” (1976) was her graduation work and the first meeting with the director Herrmann Zschoche. The story is already typical for her in its fairytale-like nature and is then taken up again in “Moritz in the Advertising Column”. Philipp is a child who feels strange and misunderstood in the world. He’s short, bad at sports, and different in every way. A favorite object of discipline from adults and ridicule from other children. Then he also loses his flute, which he was given as a gift (but he receives a new one from the music dealer), a miracle flute with which he can make things bigger or smaller. The big child’s dream: to be a magician!

Christa Kožik then placed this magical dimension at the center of her most famous children’s book, “Moritz in the Advertising Column” from 1980, which is the basis for the 1983 film of the same name directed by Rolf Losansky. Nine-year-old Moritz is slow and dreamy, to the chagrin of his dutiful parents and strict teachers. He is admonished and reprimanded when he paints a sun with ears and birds with hats. Where did he see something like that? He saw it, with his mind’s eye.

One day he has had enough of always being misunderstood and hides in an advertising column. The little escape from the world to the test. The highlight: He has company from a talking cat (an adorable cartoon character) who gives him age-wise and nose-wise advice about the way the world works and human nature. Christa Kožik will later explain how she came up with the idea for the book and film: her six-year-old son Adrian ran away from school on the second day. You had to look for him, and when you found him in a park, he made the simple and powerful statement: “I didn’t like it.”

Anyone who grew up in the GDR in the 1970s probably knows Herrmann Zschoche’s “Seven Freckles” (1978), for which Kožik wrote the screenplay. Love at fourteen! A topic that could only be brought to the screen with great sensitivity. A successful Defa film with over a million viewers. Less well-known is the sequel: “Green Wedding” (1988), again directed by Zschoche. This is also a typical GDR topic. Susanne is seventeen and Robert is eighteen. Both are in love for the first time. Susanne reads Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” again and again. She is a factory worker and he is a carpenter in a small boatyard. They get married with romantic feelings – and everyday life in the marriage is of course overwhelming for both of them. Especially since Susanne is pregnant and will be the mother of twins, whom she euphorically names Romeo and Juliet.

There is evil inherent in history, and they both have to fight against it, with an uncertain outcome. By the way, the then 17-year-old Anja Kling, who later became very well known on television, played a great role as Susanne, but here she plays a dramatic role with a moving naturalness. This is also something that the GDR’s society of shortages promoted: great expectations of life.

Christa Kozik has written many wonderful film stories about this, in which dreams meet reality without being destroyed by it. For this she has now received the Defa Foundation Prize for her life’s work.