Genres and Film Topics in Germany

A retrospective, initiated by the German Federal Cultural Foundation and the German Cinematheque, is showing fifteen evening programmes of cinematic testimonies of the last decade of the Cold War. In spite of the then rigorous censorship of films, the productions from Germany and Eastern Europe clearly show that the political upheaval of 1989’s peaceful revolution was already prefigured years before.

If we cast a glance at the artistic activity in the German Democratic Republic and in the Eastern European countries of this time, we are struck by the numerous examples of texts, pictures and musical works that can be seen as courageous articulations of the coming upheavals. Almost as if they had been seismographs, they were able to register signs of the changes that were only later to become generally evident. Film appears to have been an especially sensitive instrument; in no other medium did forebodings of the Wende assume a more tangible form.

Hope of change

The forerunner films that have been selected for the After Winter Comes Spring series are exemplary formulations of this hope of a political, economic and above all artistic opening. The series includes both great names in film history and the works of less known directors.

All the films have in common their unusual perspectives, high artistic quality and the circumstance that they were made in the final decade of the Cold War. Some were produced in the official studios of Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Rumania, Czechoslovakia, the GDR and the Soviet Union. Others were realised on the margins of official cinema by mavericks or in the artistic underground. The series is showing feature films and documentary films, experimental cinema and animation films.

Different presuppositions

The cultural and political presuppositions of the individual countries were as different as the artistic signatures of the filmmakers. Between 1949 and 1989, the GRD, for example, alternated between phases of relative liberalisation and of increasing restriction. Telling is the fact that whenever signs of a “thaw” were perceptible in the USSR, the otherwise obedient party leadership in East Berlin opposed these tendencies. After Leonid Breschnev ended Nikita Khrushchev’s domination of the Communist Party in 1964, the Central Committee of the East German Socialist Unity Party fell back to the previous policy of censorship and mistrust in December 1965. Nearly the entire annual production of DEFA was sacrificed to this inner-political restoration. East German film was never to recover from this decimation.

More than twenty years later history repeated itself, now as farce. After Gorbatschev softened the policy of paternalism and indoctrination in the Soviet Union in 1986, formerly prohibited films saw the light of the projection screen for the first time and directors made new works of previously unimaginable daring, the GRD again walled itself off. If before Soviet films in the GRD were often notorious as something that had to be put up with in required viewings, now several of the most important Perestroika films were kept from the public. The contradictions between the GDR and USSR came to a head.

With few exceptions, the DEFA feature film production of this time was in the throes of its last agony. It was delivering humourless comedies, implausible ideal pictures of the work world and arts-and-crafts historical films. There was hardly an aesthetically daring attempt to come to grips with the explosive themes of the day. Documentary films, on the other hand, took a more aggressive line in their reflections on the real world. It is not by chance that the title of Helke Misselwitz’s DEFA documentary film Winter adé (After Winter Comes Spring, 1988) supplies the motto for the film series.

Between repression and tolerance

In Hungary, beginning 1959, Communist Party leader János Kádár already succeeded in putting through a cautious de-Stalinization. In the 1980s the country moved further and further away from Moscow in its economic, domestic and foreign policy. In the arts, apart from a few remaining taboos, much became possible.

Conditions were completely different in Rumania and Bulgaria, where practically no artistic freedom were tolerated and even the slightest deviation from the official party line brought with it downright paranoid stalking by the security forces. In Czechoslovakia the crushing of the “Prague Spring” abruptly aborted one of the most promising political and cinematic developments in Eastern Europe. After 1968, cinema there became trivialised to a degree comparable only to the GDR.

After Winter Comes Spring draws our attention to a hitherto underrated phenomenon in film history and the conflicts bound up with it. It offers a first look at the variously formed systems of totalitarianism and at a series of extraordinary, visionary films that could be wrested from the adverse conditions of the times.