Screening Art: Modernist Aesthetics and the Socialist Imaginary in East German Cinema by Seán Allan (review)

Screening Art makes a significant and substantial contribution to the scholarship of East German film and cultural history. Examining primarily so-called Künstlerfilme, films about artists, Seán Allan makes broader arguments about art, culture, and politics in and of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Although Screening Art focuses on a relatively small body of Künstlerfilme, one of Allan’s arguments is that these films and their many associated aesthetic and cultural questions tell us more than what we can potentially learn about individual directors or the conditions of production for a specific film. Indeed, the Künstlerfilme were discursive spaces in which, Allan argues, “not only questions of aesthetics, but also human subjectivity […] could be debated” (3). The filmmakers considered issues within and beyond East Germany’s borders as they offered “new paradigms of socialist art in postwar Europe” (3). Screening Art demonstrates that these artist films evolved to meet the needs of the changing cultural moment and made a different contribution to cultural-political discussions in every decade of East Germany’s existence.

Building on Charles Taylor’s Modern Social Imaginaries (2004), Allan contends that the Künstlerfilme contribute to and help form what he calls the “socialist imaginary.” Taylor’s original concept comprised an analysis of the ways in which people think of their social reality, the relationships that contribute to it, and the norms that shape its existence (4). Allan’s intervention adapts Taylor’s theory, which focused on capitalist nations in the West, and applies its modified form to the context of the GDR and real-existing socialism. The usefulness of Taylor’s concept as a foundation for this study, Allan argues, lies in its appreciation of the realities and limitations of social theory. Like other Eastern bloc nations, the GDR was rooted in Marxist-Leninist social theory, which permeated official policies. By contrast, a socialist imaginary, in Allan’s coinage, allows one “to focus on the way in which ordinary people ‘imagine’ socialist society and seek to articulate this not in theoretical documents, but rather in terms of a set of images, stories, legends and other cultural products, including, above all, film” (4). This theoretical adaptation fuels the book’s engagement with cultural debates that appear in and behind the cinema of East Germany.

In the remainder of the extensive introduction, Allan details the complex debates around aesthetics and cultural policy that occurred before the Second World War and that played an important role in the development of cultural policy in the GDR. The two most consequential debates were, first, the discourse on formalism which shaped the establishment of socialist realism in the Soviet Union and, second, the so-called Expressionism Debate of the late 1930s, in which well-known figures like Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Georg Lukács participated and which shaped the production and reception of avant-garde art. Crucial underlying questions within these debates included the role of cultural heritage and history and German society’s relationship with its past; these issues remained red threads, Allan argues, throughout most of the GDR’s history. In the first few postwar years, the aesthetic arguments about cultural heritage and the past, including the immediate history of National Socialism, had to be confronted by the filmmakers who were given permission by the Soviets to begin producing films, both features and newsreels. The multiple approaches to antifascism in these first few years of the GDR fostered diverse cinematic offerings. An under- appreciated aspect of early GDR cultural production is that the DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft) Studios, the state-run studios licensed by the Soviet occupation authority, had to contend with the weight of cinematic legacy behind their aesthetic discussions. This artistic heft came from Soviet film, German expressionist film, proletarian Weimar Republic films, and the studio production by Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft (UFA, the film company founded in 1917), especially...