There were too many male roles at DEFA: look into the collection of historical helmets in the Babelsberg film studios in Potsdam-Babelsberg.
Photo: dpa
Gitta Nickel began her film career quite determinedly. She first completed a degree in pedagogy at Berlin’s Humboldt University (until 1957). Then, as a young woman, she worked at Defa and learned her craft from scratch, without any academic training. Among other things, she assisted Konrad Wolf, about whom she made an artist portrait film years later. She became one of the few directors in the Defa documentary film studio who was able to hold her own for a long time: with strength, assertiveness, and also with charm. The aura of Karl Gass, the formative master of the Defa documentary film, to whom she was married for a while, was secretly transferred to her.
She made films about women that she had chosen and observed herself, not government-commissioned films. She avoided idealization as best she could. She constantly sought to reveal the contradictory connections between everyday life and the world of work. This look was full of sympathy, sometimes even tenderness, always full of respect. She was lucky in choosing her protagonists and had a good look at them, be it the Ukrainian collective farm chairwoman, the Vietnamese cook or LPG farmers from Mecklenburg.
She did not ignore the constant conflict many women face between work and home life. In doing so, she put the equal rights proclaimed in the GDR to the test in social practice and revealed deficits, not as a thesis discussion, but in each case in terms of concrete fate. Her viewers – and not just the women – discussed this passionately because many recognized themselves in Nickel’s protagonists. Here Nickel also found the deeper meaning of her work: helping to recognize individual contradictions and the resulting demands on others, not least on society as a whole. Seen this way, she was and remained a troublemaker.
A special feature of her films was the decisive withdrawal of author comments in favor of the self-disclosure of her characters. She asked them and let them talk – and they spoke openly and without intimidation. She let herself get involved with her partners almost unconditionally. In doing so, she achieved intimacy and closeness, thereby strengthening the authenticity of her films, for which she received many, including international, awards. She was supported for years by her cameraman Niko Pawloff and her editor Wolfgang Schwarze.
With “Heuwetter” (1972) Gitta Nickel developed a village and LPG panorama. In “…and tomorrow the Polish women come” (1974) she reflected the violent arguments between young Polish “skilled trainees” and GDR workers during the bloody work in a chicken slaughterhouse. The film was not free from clichés and sentimentality and yet managed to avoid propagandistic statements. She twice shot double portraits of men. “Two Germans” (1988) are two child soldiers at the end of the war – one praised by Goebbels, the other crying uncontrollably after a battle (as the poster motif “Never again war!”). Nickel tracked down their lives in East and West, and world history was opened up through consistent personalization. In “It began in Eberswalde” (1994), Nickel introduced two German journalists. Both were connected by their place of birth and their shared early youth. Hans Borgelt remained in the bourgeois-conservative milieu and became press chief at the Berlinale, and Gerhard Dengler came to a strict, often orthodox “party view” about Stalingrad and the anti-fascist National Committee for Free Germany and only made milder judgments in old age. Here, Nickel was able to bring the complementary assembly to full effect.
After the fall of the Wall, short films were also made for television, including for the MDR series “People like you and me” and “Here in the Country”. Their knowledge of the country and its people paid off in the liveliness of these reports.
Gitta Nickel died on December 18th in Werder at the age of 87.
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