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East Germany’s ruling party never officially acknowledged responsibility for the crimes committed in Germany’s name during the Third Reich. Instead, it cast communists as both victims of and victors over National Socialist oppression while marginalizing discussions of Jewish suffering. Yet for the 1977 Academy Awards, the Ministry of Culture submitted Jakob der Lügner – a film focused exclusively on Jewish victimhood that would become the only East German film to ever be officially nominated. By combining close analyses of key films with extensive archival research, this book explores how GDR filmmakers depicted Jews and the Holocaust in a country where memories of Nazi persecution were highly prescribed, tightly controlled and invariably political.
“Ward … offers an interesting perspective on a socialist world where Jewish persecution would normally give way to communist heroism. Remarkably, the persecution of Jews in these films is given a tragic honesty often not found in the ideologically controlled world of the German Democratic Republic….Highly recommended.” • Choice
“Elizabeth Ward's East German Film and the Holocaust is an excellent book that is well written and thoughtfully tackling a difficult and controversial topic. In a lively way, Ward brings her readers closer to unknown archive materials and well-known films, reconstructing the contexts of the underlying dramaturgical and film-technical decisions. At the same time, it shows how the state and cinematic instrumentalization or even sacralization of the Holocaust worked. In this way, Ward encourages people to return to the archive and tell the story of DEFA more from a discourse-historical perspective.” • Filmblatt
“Elizabeth Ward’s careful and wide-ranging analysis of a set of nine Defa films, in the specific socio-historical and discursive context of their production, proves to be an important contribution to research on the memory of the Holocaust in east Germany.” • The German Quarterly
“[This] exceptionally researched monograph...[with an] extensive filmography—also the first of its kind in English—and the archival materials including press and print reviews that Ward consulted make this book an important resource for scholars and teachers of East German cinema. Equally important to scholars of East German film and Holocaust studies is Ward’s ability to foreground subtle yet crucial details in her film analyses and weave them together with insights from interviews, private and company correspondence, political officials’ statements, and industrial papers.” • Europe Now
“Offering new historical information coupled with refined close readings and an impressive amount of archival work, East German Film and the Holocaust is an informative, insightful and fascinating book. It will be of interest to film scholars and historians alike.” • Brad Prager, University of Missouri
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations and Acronyms
Part I: 1945–1949
Chapter 1. Picking Up the Pieces. Kurt Maetzig’s Ehe im Schatten
Part II: 1949–1961
Chapter 2. The German Democratic Republic’s Ambassador of Good Will. Konrad Wolf’s Sterne
Chapter 3. Reframing Victimhood. Konrad Wolf’s Professor Mamlock
Part III: 1961–1971
Chapter 4. Crimes of the Past and Politics of the Present. Wolfgang Luderer’s Lebende Ware
Chapter 5. ‘In Babelsberg, Nothing New’. Gottfried Kolditz’s Das Tal der sieben Monde
Part IV: 1971–1980
Chapter 6. New Encounters on Well-Worn Paths: Kurt Jung-Alsen’s Die Bilder des Zeugen Schattmann
Chapter 7. Returning to the Past: Frank Beyer’s Jakob der Lügner
Part V: 1980–1989
Chapter 8. Shifting Identities. Michael Kann’s Stielke, Heinz, fünfzehn
Chapter 9. Calendar-Based Shame? Siegfried Kühn’s Die Schauspielerin
Conclusion
Filmography
Bibliography
Index