The Films of Konrad Wolf: Archive of the Revolution by Larson Powell (review)

This is a frustrating but also sometimes useful book about East Germany's greatest filmmaker, Konrad Wolf. Larson Powell has set out to explicate Wolf's oeuvre, but the book's main problem—one that eerily echoes an issue that Powell identifies with DEFA and Wolf—is that it is not entirely clear who the audience for the book is supposed to be. Based on Powell's frequent references to a wide variety of theorists, from the sociologist Niklas Luhmann to philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Stanley Cavell, and G.W.F. Hegel, to film scholars such as Mary Ann Doane and Thomas Elsaesser, it might seem that the book is aimed primarily at Anglo-American film scholars who have not yet sufficiently incorporated Wolf and DEFA into their work. Nevertheless, the book also presupposes knowledge about East Germany, DEFA, and Wolf that such an audience would be unlikely to have. It does not give its readers much context about Wolf, his life, his family, DEFA, or the political situation in the GDR. Instead, the book seems to presuppose prior knowledge of these issues on the part of its readers. For German studies scholars, the book seems, conversely, to presuppose a kind of theoretical breadth and sophistication that is equally improbable. The book is likely intended to bridge the gap between these two possible audiences—Anglo-American film theorists on the one hand and scholars of East German film and culture on the other. At its best, it offers hints at the possibility of such intermediation; more frequently, it tends to miss both audiences.

The introduction to the book, which is simultaneously its most difficult and problematic part, cites a wide variety of theorists—Freud, Lacan, Kittler, Schmitt, Ernst, Foucault, Luhmann, and Heidegger—in order to justify the study of Wolf and DEFA as theoretically significant but, in the process, Wolf, DEFA, and even history itself tend to disappear behind the rhetoric of the argument. One has the feeling of someone using a theoretical sledgehammer where a light household hammer might have been more effective.

The same thing happens to many of Wolf's films, including Sonnensucher (1958) and Sterne (1959). The chapter on Sonnensucher reaches its conclusion without ever addressing the film in question head-on (instead the reader is treated to discussions of Mikhail Bakhtin, Eva Näripea, and the concept of a chronotope), while the chapter on Sterne regales its readers with Badiou and Mallarmé, ultimately coming to the conclusion that "the empty place of the train platform with which the film begins and ends is then the Void Place of Mallarmé: 'nothing will have taken place but the place'" (85). To make it clear: what has actually happened at the end of Sterne is that a Sephardic Jewish woman has been deported by Nazis from a camp in Bulgaria to the Auschwitz death camp. I am not sure why this, even theoretically, is "nothing" or how Mallarmé can be helpful in understanding this film specifically or the Holocaust more generally. We get no real appreciation here for a director who created one of the first and best early Holocaust films, and who addressed an aspect of the Holocaust—the murder of Sephardic Jews—that is, to this day, often given short shrift. Instead, Powell tells his readers simply that Wolf's treatment of the Holocaust is "not unproblematic" but at least better than some others. It must be nice to know exactly how the Holocaust should be treated now, and how it should have been treated in 1958 when the film was made.

Such chapters do not do justice to their subject, and one has the sense that Konrad Wolf and his films deserve better. The chapters that tend to be the most successful are the ones that give more historical context and display a lighter touch on theory and judgmentalism. These are the later chapters in the book, as...