DEFA after East Germany ed. by Brigitta Wagner (review)

Over the course of the past decade, scholars interested in the cinema of East Germany have been offered a smorgasbord of excellent English-language secondary literature on this national cinema. There has been no shortage of essays, monographs, and edited volumes ranging in breadth (East German film histories) to depth (close readings using a wide range of theories and methodologies) to study what, until 1999, was largely uncharted territory in the English-speaking world. Brigitta Wagner’s anthology, released as part of Camden House’s series Screen Cultures: German Film and the Visual, takes a unique approach in both content and range of contributors. At its core, DEFA after East Germany somewhat overlaps with another book in the same series, Reinhild Steingröver’s Last Features: East German Cinema’s Lost Generation (2014) in its focus on a group of films released between 1988 and 1992 that have become known as Wende flicks.

Yet, to compare Wagner’s book to Steingröver’s would be like comparing apples to oranges: if Last Features is a traditional scholarly monograph, DEFA after East Germany should be read in the context of the Indiana University DEFA Project directed by the editor between January and April 2010. A product of this four-month-long event, Wagner’s anthology is thus a hybrid of conference proceedings, oral history, and ancillary classroom material about the Wende flicks and four films not originally part of that film series, making it a useful tool for teaching undergraduate (and to some extent graduate) courses on a unique moment in DEFA’s feature film production.

The anthology consists of thirty-five chapters distributed across five parts. Those familiar with DEFA scholarship might be surprised at the lack of wellknown English-language DEFA researchers (Barton Byg being the notable exception) and at the large number of contributors (twenty-four). Yet, given the scope of the anthology as conference proceedings and teaching aid, it makes sense that names such as Johannes von Moltke or Jennifer Kapczynski pop up. Because of the large number of chapters, I will concentrate my review on a few contributions I find noteworthy for various reasons.

Part I, “Sketching DEFA’s Past and Present,” consists of three contributions (two of which are products of oral history) that attempt to depoliticize DEFA filmmaking and situate the studio’s production in a larger transnational context. In Part II, “Film in the Face of the Wende,” six pieces address the Wende as “personal, professional, and aesthetic turning point” (4). As in Part I, most of the contributions (in this case, those by Knut Elstermann, Peter Kahane, Eduard Schreiber, and Jörg Foth) are either interviews or personal memories put on paper. Part III, “Migrating DEFA to the FRG,” also features the combination of “practitioners” such as Katrin Schlösser and Frank Löprich (both of Ö-Film) and Klaus Keil (former head of the Filmboard Berlin-Brandenburg) with analytical pieces by von Moltke, Kapczynski, and the editor (who also contributes two interviews to her own anthology). The three pieces in Part IV, “Archive and Audience,” total just over twenty pages. Here, the reader finds reports about the curation of the Wende Flicks series by the DEFA Film Library’s Executive Director, Skyler Arndt-Briggs, about the DEFA Stiftung in 2010 by Helmut Morsbach, and by Thomas Krüger, about a DEFA DVD box set released by the Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung. The final eighteen chapters, housed in Part V that is aptly entitled “Reception Materials,” are English translations of German film reviews of the films shown in the project and therefore only a few pages long. They serve as substitutes of synopses and were curated by students as part of the DEFA Project—a nice gesture of the editor (and presumably supervising professor) to honour their roles in the IU DEFA Project.

Some readers might be disappointed by the relative lack of rigorous scholarship in favour of an abundance of oral history...