GDR in the film – live and want

Build up, build on «-as a GDR youth song began, which of course not only meant the youth, but all the citizens of this country:» For a better future we will set up home, as the FDJ song continues, could be considered an hymn. Building in the GDR was a permanent process and nevertheless came to an end.

With their anthology “Resurrected from Ruinen”, the two media historians Michael Grisko and Günter Helmes want to measure nothing less than planning, building and living in the GDR game and documentary films. This is a wide, very wide field: »The structure and the associated planning of a new, another state (…) were an essential part of the founding program of the GDR. It was understood in particular in connection with concepts such as ›Neubaustadt‹ or ›prefabricated buildings‹ and realizations such as Hoyerswerda or Halle-Neustadt as a visible design of socialist ideas «, the editors generalize their concerns. The GDR as a constant project, as a permanent social task, was visualized in its films.

All texts gathered here understand the apartment as a social space, but leave deeper questions such as tenancies, special features or according to baure repair concepts. Most of the contributions work on the degen to mythologization of the “housing construction program” as a success story, as is well known, Erich Honecker’s most ambitious and most contradictory concept. The fall height between utopia and reality, between the individual willing of people and the dogmatism of the authorities against the background of the lack of building material as a permanent problem, the strange demands, if not without occasional bitter under tones. To do this, the text by Günter Helmes on the Halle-Moritzburg television theater, a brisk demolition about the lively hard-working offshoot of the Adlershofer headquarters, which has produced moderate family comedies and tails with family milieu for over 26 years, which of course played in many apartments . My home is my Castle. You could list many other DEFA films.

Most are convincing the texts and the films that address the structure in the post -war period: it was really about building up the ruins of the war. Films of this development time such as the comedy “Die Kuckucks” (directed by Hans Deppe, 1949) or “somewhere in Berlin” (director: Gerhard Lamprecht, 1946) are adequately presented and their references to the development problem are conclusively characterized. The help for self -help, especially with a powerful young woman in the center of history, forms an amusing model for the »Kuckucks« that is also suitable for the present. In the GDR there was later the “arrival film”, whereby the arrival in everyday socialist life (with its adversity) is meant. A broken booth, like in “Dach over the head” (director and author: Ulrich Thein, 1980), also becomes a comedy with a woman as the main character.

At his overview of the Halle-Neustadt large settlement, Stephan Ehrig neglected the GDR-specific “new living quality alias quality of life”, which suggested this giant project and uses American theorists instead of empiricism. “The shift of off-votes to interviews, thus increasingly participatory polyphone suber counts”-to describe film observation in such a way is misleading and generally incomprehensible. The report is convincing about the films of the Berlin Housing Combination by Dennis Basaldella. As an amateur film studio, a secondary field of the GDR film production mingled here as a medium. This text was created as part of a research project by the Babelsberg Film University, which was accepted in the GDR.

Ko-editor Michael Grisko delivers an extensive demolition of all films: chronologically and thematically, with scarce information about the stories. Some authors may be too much if they break down the film fables to a kind of mathematics of the story to consider them as a sociological construct, unfortunately they neglect the aesthetic values. This can be understood as a request to see these films again.

Overall, a slightly observed film field is opened up with an expertise and enthusiasm for the fabric in this book. The result is a very wide overview with a few deep serges that you would like to wish for more and more thorough research.

Michael Grisko/Günter Helmes (ed.): Risen from ruins. Planning, building and living in game and documentaries of the GDR. Verlag Herder, 210 pages, born, 48 €.