The Legacy of DEFA’s Three Hazelnuts for Cinderella in Post-Wall Germany: Tracing the Popularity of a Binational Fairy-Tale Film on Television

I examine the legacy of Václav Vorlícek’s Three Hazelnuts for Cinderella (1973) in contemporary Germany. In particular, I am concerned with the relationships between the film’s binational coproduction and socialist ideology and its transnational reception and the ways in which intermediality and fandom feed into the film’s cult popularity. Seeking to understand the film’s extraordinary appeal that has continued for over forty years, I argue that this Czech–East German coproduction’s popularity is reinforced by the intermedial relations between the film, television, and the Internet. A combination of factors make this a “Cinderella” adaptation unlike any other, with its feminist undertones, female-to-male cross-dressing, modern twists, socialist and anti-authoritarian messages, a sense of realism, memorable music, and a natural winter setting. Based on a Czech fairy tale written by Božena Němcová, the live-action film not only resists conforming to the Grimm hypotext of “Cinderella” but also has become a staple of German television culture.