Framing the Fifties: Cinema in a Divided Germany (review)

This volume brings together essays on the West and East German cinema of the “long 1950s” (1949– 1961). It is an important contribution to a re-evaluation of German popular cinema and situates itself alongside studies such as Heide Fehrenbach’s Cinema in Democratizing Germany (1995), Erica Carter’s How German Is She? (1997), and Johannes von Moltke’s No Place Like Home (2005). Taking a variety of approaches, the contributions share a determined wish to reappraise the 1950s German cinema whose reputation had become dominated by the angry rejection of the signatories of the Oberhausen Manifesto in 1962. The power of the campaigning Oberhausen slogan—“Papas Kino ist tot!”—combined with the strength of the West German art cinema that followed in the 1970s resulted in the popular stars and genre cinema of the 1950s being dismissed as, at best, trivial, and, at worst, bearing a sinister, lingering imprint of National Socialist cinema. German cinema’s international reputation and place in the international market has rested on notions of quality and artistic ambition, and as such, the widely known and admired periods of German cinema are the Weimar period and the 1970s, with a growing interest in the respected critical realism of DEFA. By contrast, popular cinema generally, and the 1950s cinema in particular, has suffered neglect, or has been treated in a rather generalized, undifferentiated manner.

One of the things this volume achieves is the integration of discussion of DEFA and West German cinema in ways which avoid hierarchical distinctions between the “serious” and the “shallow.” Indeed, in addition to contributions focused separately on West or East German cinema, the two cinemas are discussed together in a number of contributions, not least in Mary Wauchope’s revealing survey of Austrian cinema. The aims of the volume are twofold: first, to bring neglected aspects of 1950s cinema to wider scholarly attention. Many of the films discussed will be unfamiliar to an Anglophone readership, and there is a welcome attention to less widely known genres and actors. Second, the editors wish to expand on existing treatments of German cinema by looking not just at individual films, or indeed individual genres. Accordingly some contributions explore the film industry more widely, looking at production, distribution, exhibition, as well as the role of cinema in a developing consumer culture.

The fourteen contributions are, on the whole, concise and well written. They include fascinating surveys, such as Knut Hickethier’s admirably clear and critical explanation of the problems of the West German film industry’s commercial structure; Hester Baer’s extremely helpful introduction to the way the 1950s magazine Film und Frau addressed women’s concerns and shaped a female spectatorship in a surprisingly progressive and ambitious manner; Matthias Steinle’s discussion of representations of the “other Germany” in East and West German documentaries; and Mary Wauchope’s exploration of the “other German cinema,” which looks at the ways in which the Austrian cinema was linked with both West and East German production, and suggests that ideas of national cinema need to be complicated by regional approaches that allow for a triangulation among three German-language cinemas.

Such informative survey pieces are balanced by contributions that undertake closer readings of individual films, though they also contextualize their analysis. Some rewarding “close-ups” thus give this ambitious and varied volume a pleasing balance: Jennifer Kapczynski’s assured and insightful discussion of war films homes in on Geza Radványi’s Der Arzt von Stalingrad (1958); Marc Silberman presents an enjoyable reading of the development and ideological transformations of the DEFA fairy tale films, focusing particularly on Paul Verhoeven’s Das kalte Herz (1950) and Wolfgang Staudte’s Die Geschichte vom kleinen Muck (1953); Russel Lemmons is also engaged in uncovering ideological approaches to biographical film in his critical reading of Kurt Maetzig’s Ernst Thälmann films (1954 and 1955); Johannes von Moltke’s engaging examination of the refugee/ expellee figure in Heimat films includes readings...