Re-Imagining DEFA

By the time the Berlin Wall collapsed, the cinema of the German Democratic Republic—to the extent it was considered at all—was widely regarded as a footnote to European film history, with little of enduring value. Since then, interest in East German cinema has exploded, inspiring innumerable festivals, books, and exhibits on the GDR’s rich and varied filmic output. In Re-Imagining DEFA, leading international experts take stock of this vibrant landscape and plot an ambitious course for future research, one that considers other cinematic traditions, brings genre and popular works into the fold, and encompasses DEFA’s complex post-unification “afterlife.”

By the time the Berlin Wall collapsed, the cinema of the German Democratic Republic—to the extent it was considered at all—was widely regarded as a footnote to European film history, with little of enduring value. Since then, interest in East German cinema has exploded, inspiring innumerable festivals, books, and exhibits on the GDR’s rich and varied filmic output. In Re-Imagining DEFA, leading international experts take stock of this vibrant landscape and plot an ambitious course for future research, one that considers other cinematic traditions, brings genre and popular works into the fold, and encompasses DEFA’s complex post-unification “afterlife.”

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Re-Imagining East German Cinema
Seán Allan and Sebastian Heiduschke

PART I: INSTITUTIONS & IDEOLOGY

Chapter 1. The State-Owned Cinema Industry and Its Audience
Rosemary Stott

Chapter 2. History and Subjectivity. The Evolution of DEFA Film Music
Larson Powell

Chapter 3. ‘Fatal Attractions’. Modernist Set Design and the East-West Divide in DEFA Films of the 1950s and early 1960s
Annette Dorgerloh

PART II: NATIONAL AND TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS

Chapter 4. DEFA and the Legacy of Film Europe. Prestige, Institutional Exchange, and Film Co-Productions
Mariana Ivanova

Chapter 5. Betting on Entertainment. The Cold War Scandal of Spielbank-Affäre [Casino Affair, 1957]
Stefan Soldovieri

Chapter 6. ‘Operación Silencio’. Studio H&S’s Chile Cycle as Latin American Third Cinema
Dennis Hanlon

Chapter 7. Deconstructing Orientalism. DEFA’s Fictions of East Asia
Qinna Shen

Chapter 8. Transnational Stardom. DEFA’s Management of Dean Reed
Seán Allan

PART III: GENRE & POPULAR CINEMA

Chapter 9. Walter Felsenstein and the DEFA Opera Film
Sabine Hake

Chapter 10. Dreams of ‘Cosmic Culture’ in Der schweigende Stern [The Silent Star, 1960]
Sonja Fritzsche

Chapter 11. The DEFA Indianerfilm. Narrating the Postcolonial through Gojko Mitic
Evan Torner

Chapter 12. Defining Socialist Children’s Films, Defining Socialist Childhoods
Benita Blessing

PART IV: DEFA’S LEGACY

Chapter 13. DEFA’s Last Gasp. Ruins, Melancholy and the End of East German Filmmaking
Nick Hodgin

Chapter 14. KLK an PTX. Die Rote Kapelle. DEFA’s Antifascist Myth Revisited
Sebastian Heiduschke

Chapter 15. DEFA’s Afterimages. Looking Back at the East from the West in Das Leben der Anderen [The Lives of Others, 2006] and Barbara (2012)
Daniela Berghahn

Bibliography