eJournals

Colloquia Germanica
0010-1338
Francke Verlag Tübingen
Es handelt sich um einen Open-Access-Artikel, der unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC by 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/31
2017
501
BAND 50 • Heft 1 Themenheft: New Perspectives on Young Adult GDR Literature and Film Gastherausgeberinnen: Ada Bieber and Sonja E. Klocke Inhalt Introduction: New Perspectives on Young Adult GDR Literature and Film Ada Bieber and Sonja E. Klocke � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 3 Love Lessons in East German Children’s Films Benita Blessing � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 13 “Nicht so schnell! ”: Female Sexuality and Socialism in DEFA Youth Films Faye Stewart � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 35 Who’s Afraid of Angela Davis? : An American Icon and the Political Uses of Youth Literature in the GDR Ada Bieber � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 55 “Es war (noch) einmal”: Grimm Versions of New Fairy Tales in the GDR Melissa Sheedy and Brandy E. Wilcox � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 77 “Risen from Ruins”: Berlin, Generations, and Identity in Herrmann Zschoche’s Insel der Schwäne Sonja E. Klocke � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 101 Verzeichnis der Autorinnen und Autoren � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 123 Introduction: New Perspectives on Young Adult GDR Literature and Film 3 Introduction: New Perspectives on Young Adult GDR Literature and Film Ada Bieber and Sonja E� Klocke Humboldt Universität zu Berlin / University of Wisconsin - Madison “In progressiven Epochen der Geschichte hat sich schon immer eine große Schicht der Jugend an den Idealen ihrer Avantgarde, vor allem in der Literatur, gebildet�” [In progressive periods of history, a large social stratum of youth has always been molded by the ideals of their contemporary avant-garde, particular as presented in literature�] Christa Wolf, 1962 Almost thirty years ago, the world witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall� Less than a year later, the forty-year division of Germany ended with the unification of 1990, and the socialist GDR (German Democratic Republic, also referred to as East Germany) ceased to exist� Even the last generation born into the GDR, the so-called Wende-Kinder [children of the turning-point] (Ahbe and Gries 556-69), has since come of age, and in fact, many of its members are raising their children now� With this last generation which was so forcefully thrown into a massive process of transformation, images of childhood and youth in East Germany gradually disappeared. This can largely be attributed to the fact that GDR literature for youth, and to a certain extent film for a young audience, essentially vanished from the market in the aftermath of unification. Unsurprisingly, the political forces challenging the legitimacy of GDR culture in general - one is immediately reminded of the so-called deutsch-deutscher Literaturstreit [German-German debate on literature] starting in 1990 1 - were also at work when it came to literature and film for the youngest members of East German society. In fact, the goals of the press campaign only initially directed at Christa Wolf and subsequently expanded to include all politically engaged writing were also applicable to children’s and youth literature. After all, the maneuver was about putting an end to politically charged culture in unified Germany, and appropriating the authority to interpret (literary) history for the future� 2 4 Ada Bieber and Sonja E� Klocke Youth played an important role in GDR politics, and it is fair to say that youth was addressed on a broad scale by literature and film for both aesthetic and educational, i.e., ideological reasons. Right from the beginning, the GDR identified as a state for a youth entrusted with taking on a “hervorragenden Anteil […] am Aufbau der antifaschistisch-demokratischen Ordnung” [paramount share […] in building the antifascist-democratic order] (“Gesetz über die Herabsetzung des Volljährigkeitsalters” 437), and officials accentuated the need to raise a generation characterized by an incontrovertible belief in antifascism and socialism� While ideologues hardly succeeded in generating such “socialist personalities,” even the set goal was, of course, not compatible with the objectives for a unified Germany. 3 After all, the GDR’s founding narrative was diametrically opposed to that of the FRG (Federal Republic of Germany): collapsing Nazi terror and Communist dictatorship into the rhetoric of totalitarianism, the West also claimed to have drawn the right conclusions from the catastrophe of National Socialist rule� Consequently, evidence of the GDR’s foundational master narrative, namely the claim that the GDR presented the only alternative to capitalism and National Socialism, became undesirable and had to be purged from cultural products for the youngest citizens of a unified Germany. For both GDR children’s and youth literature and film, which often aimed at entertaining and simultaneously educating the youngest members of society in a socialist spirit, the consequences of diminishing the significance of fiction that also carried political content were particularly grave. Literature and film for youth were infused with the ideas and ideals of socialism, and accordingly played a significant role in young people’s socialist and cultural education. GDR authorities took a noteworthy path by interfering in their writers’ and filmmakers’ social function� From the start, the government provided for its Kulturschaffende [those engaged in the cultural sector] - many of whom were survivors of Nazi concentration camps or returning exiles - with the expectation that they imbue their cultural products with partisan political meaning� Since writers such as Alex Wedding, Max Zimmering, and Benno Pludra, a budding author in the 1950s, largely identified with the country, its ideology, and the underlying ideals, their prose reflected the attendant values and norms for youth privileged by the state. Predictably, their works were often adapted for the screen by DEFA ( Deutsche Film Aktiengesellschaft [German Film Corporation in the GDR])� Such films targeted a young audience and increasingly served the goal of educating socialist progeny. The Soviet Military Administration in Germany ( Sowjetische Militäradministration in Deutschland , SMAD) endorsed and in fact buttressed specialized publishing houses, such as Verlag Neues Leben (founded in 1946) and Der Kinderbuchverlag (founded in 1949), aspiring to launch an innovative socialistic literature for youth� Correspondingly, DEFA quickly turned towards Introduction: New Perspectives on Young Adult GDR Literature and Film 5 a young audience� Even with its earliest productions, DEFA addressed youthful viewers, as Gerhard Lamprecht’s Irgendwo in Berlin [Somewhere in Berlin] (1946) attests. In 1953, DEFA initiated an official working group ( Künstlerische Arbeitsgruppe , KAG) for original children’s and youth film. Often in close collaboration with the literary scene, which resulted in a vast number of film adaptations of children’s books and screenplays by writers of books for youth, it flourished throughout the lifetime of the GDR. A law from 1950 outlining the significance of youth for the buildup of the GDR confirmed these efforts. 4 The determination to promote a vibrant scene for literature for youth becomes manifest in competitions and awards� Authors of literature for the youngest citizens were eligible also for the most prestigious prize the GDR had to offer, the Nationalpreis der DDR [National Prize of the GDR], and a number of prize competitions for progressive authors additionally enriched an energetic and innovative cultural scene for youth. The first of the newly launched prizes, the Alex-Wedding-Preis [Alex Wedding Prize] endowed by the Akademie der Künste [Academy of the Arts] and conferred annually since 1968 on June 1, International Children’s Day, stands out since the bylaws emphasize the goal of establishing an explicitly socialist German literature for children and teenagers� 5 The reformed Jugendgesetz [Youth Law] of 1974 updated and substantiated the state’s commitment to its youngest generation: Presse, Rundfunk, Film und Fernsehen der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik sind verpflichtet, die Qualität und die Anzahl von Veröffentlichungen, Sendungen und Produktionen zu erhöhen, die den vielseitigen Interessen der Jugend und den Erfordernissen sozialistischer Jugenderziehung entsprechen� [The press, radio broadcasting, film and television of the German Democratic Republic are obligated to increase the quality and the number of publications, programs, and productions that correspond to the multifaceted interests of our youth and meet the demands of socialist youth education�] 6 Thus, GDR children’s and youth literature - as well as film - was unmistakably perceived as an effective means to educate the youngest citizens and to convince them of the legitimacy and moral superiority of the socialist state� In this context, we should bear in mind that all publications were subject to routine censorship in the GDR (Barck et al.; Thompson-Wohlgemuth; Zipser). In addition to common self-censorship, limited official print allowances and the complicated processes required to obtain the authorization to print - the socalled Druckgenehmigungsverfahren - further impacted degrees of expurgation� Nonetheless, literature for children and young adults was not reduced to political and didactic purposes� In 1995, Karin Richter called for scholarship on 6 Ada Bieber and Sonja E� Klocke GDR children’s literature to progressively move beyond focusing exclusively on the political context� Rather, analyses of literary forms and content were indispensable: Dieser Weg kann zum einen wegführen von der alten und neuen Auffassung einer monolithischen KL [Kinderliteratur] der DDR, zum anderen öffnet er den Blick für Wandlungen im Werk einzelner Schriftsteller (291). [On the one hand, this approach can steer us away from the old and new perception of a monolithic GDR children’s literature; on the other hand, it opens up a view to transformations in individual authors’ oeuvre�] Richter’s plea can undoubtedly be extended to literature for young adults, a particularly diverse field encompassing various genres for readers between fourteen and roughly twenty-five years of age. Film adaptions of successful literature for youth as well as other DEFA productions targeting this age group also offer original insights into issues pertinent to everyday life in the GDR as well as matters of aesthetics. Most importantly, both literary and cinematic productions targeting young GDR audiences were often not distinctly defined for specific age groups, and genres and subjects were frequently blurred. Modeled on the Soviet Union’s objective to educate all citizens via culture, this approach aimed at overcoming the rift between literature and film for youth, and fiction targeting more mature audiences. This tactic provided space for cultural communication that could reach a variety of addressees and even instigate intergenerational dialogue. Over the GDR’s lifetime, numerous texts such as Erwin Strittmatter’s Tinko (1954) , Brigitte Reimann’s Ankunft im Alltag (1961), modern GDR fairy tales in collections such as Es wird einmal: Märchen für morgen (1988), and Helmut Dziuba’s film classic Sabine Kleist, 7 Jahre (1982), enjoyed multigenerational reception� 7 Therefore, this special issue takes an approach we consider valuable for future scholarship: focusing on aesthetics and formal aspects without ignoring (political) content; and pushing notions of genre and reception by considering children’s literature/ film, youth literature/ film, hybrid genres, and literature for adult audiences that became popular among youth� Scholarship has contributed to the growth of a national canon of literature and film for youth, in East Germany and beyond (e.g., Karin Richter, Christian Emmrich, as well as multiple essays published by Fred Rodrian and Steffen Peltsch). However, research offering detailed analyses of the aesthetics, subject matters, and genres that distinguish East German cultural products aimed (also) at youth are rare. The Handbuch zur Kinder- und Jugendliteratur: SBZ/ DDR , edited by Rüdiger Steinlein et al�, as well as Karin Richter’s and Bernd Dolle- Weinkauf and Steffen Peltsch’s remarkable studies present exceptions. Research Introduction: New Perspectives on Young Adult GDR Literature and Film 7 exploring specific topics such as race and international political connections in literature for youth ( Jack Zipes; Peggy Piesche) and studies that focus on GDR authors who deliberately wrote for cross-generational audiences (Thomas Di Napoli) complement these efforts. Such approaches, like recent scholarship that acknowledges the aesthetic value of DEFA children’s films (Sebastian Heiduschke) and its long-lasting canonical anchoring even after the Wende (Seán Allan and Sebastian Heiduschke), provide valuable insight into the depth and diversity of the entire field of GDR studies. While DEFA film for youth was recognized for its cinematic quality even beyond the Iron Curtain, topical analyses focusing on these productions remain rare� Contributions to this volume build on the excellent research begun by Benita Blessing, Qinna Shen, Henning Wrage, and Marc Silberman. These scholars have drawn attention to the highly valued Grimm fairy tale adaptions, the beginning of DEFA film about and for children, and gender education in socialist cinema, often embracing the established East German canon� This special issue thus aims to supplement these scholarly endeavors by highlighting aspects of GDR literature and film for youth that have previously gone unnoticed or received little attention. The fictional texts discussed here stand out for their vigilant exploration of topics that were significant in East German culture more generally, such as gender and sexuality, race, links with international politics and youth movements outside the GDR, urban youth in conflict with their parent generation, forms of writing for a variety of audiences, and links between literature and cinema. The contributors to this volume engage with fictional texts that - due to the subject matter, specific genres and potentially their subversion - often appeal to both adolescent and adult audiences. Thus, this issue builds on the premise that cultural products targeted at young people in the GDR present a substantial part of state-sponsored culture at large, and we are convinced that it behooves us to start shedding light on these artefacts from perspectives previously reserved for the analysis of literature and film not specifically aimed at young people. Deliberately approaching East German culture and politics from a perspective that refuses to marginalize youth culture, we take into account narratives that influenced the “new socialist generations” charged with building and (re-)shaping the East German state over the course of forty years� Each of the five articles comprised here investigates fictional representations of central aspects of childhood and youth in real-existing socialism� While all of these contributions examine literature or film meant to cater primarily to youth in the GDR, the analyses are founded on the understanding that narratives for youth present one segment of cultural productions that open up space for serious discussion of issues that are politically and socially relevant� A critical 8 Ada Bieber and Sonja E� Klocke examination of femininity in DEFA children’s and youth films serves as the point of departure for the first two contributions. Both authors stress the enduring relevance of this topic, and demonstrate that girls’ and young women’s bodies are staged in highly normative ways. Often, these female characters are expected to accept and even embrace male domination of their bodies, and ultimately their being. For example, underscoring how children’s films buttressed conservative and submissive gender roles for girls for decades, Benita Blessing’s article “Love Lessons in East German Children’s Films” takes issue with DEFA productions that imparted normative views of love relationships with the opposite sex, including lessons about the body and sexuality� In “‘Nicht so schnell! ’: Female Sexuality and Socialism in DEFA Youth Films,” Faye Stewart brings to light links between politics, female sexuality, and intimacy, and exposes the purported images of femininity as propagated by DEFA film as rather restrictive. Ada Bieber’s “Who’s Afraid of Angela Davis? : An American icon and the Political Uses of Youth Literature in the GDR” discusses depictions of the American activist throughout several genres� She reveals that GDR literature for youth tended to gloss over Davis’s more radical beliefs to make her expedient for the socialist state’s anti-American propaganda built on sympathizing with “Black America�” In “‘Es war (noch) einmal’: Grimm Versions of New Fairy Tales in the GDR,” Melissa Sheedy and Brandy E� Wilcox highlight how GDR authors utilized the Grimms’ fairy tales’ subversive potential to address issues of politics and gender� Drawing on seditious narratives by Irmgard Morgner, Kerstin Hensel, and Stefan Heym, they expound how these authors toyed with the traditions of the genre to criticize life in real-existing socialism� Finally, Sonja E� Klocke’s “‘Risen from Ruins’: Berlin, Generations, and Identity in Herrmann Zschoche’s Insel der Schwäne ” accentuates that full appreciation of the film depends on fathoming just how it interlaces the dichotomy city/ countryside with generational problems specific to the GDR in more pronounced ways than Benno Pludra’s homonymous novel from 1980� All contributions to this special issue thus echo Christa Wolf’s observation that - particularly in times of social change - fictional texts acquire prodigious significance for all readers, and for the youngest generations in particular. Literature and film can provide them with avant-garde ideals that shape their outlook on the world� As the various essays in this special issue demonstrate, attempts to transport such ideals can cut both ways: they can support thought affirming the state’s ideology, and they can just as easily promote oppositional thinking� Introduction: New Perspectives on Young Adult GDR Literature and Film 9 Notes 1 Triggered by West German media reactions to Christa Wolf’s novella Was bleibt (1990; “What Remains,” 1995), a menacing press campaign evolved that was first directed at Wolf and subsequently extended more generally to intellectuals who had allegedly stabilized the GDR regime� In the last phase, it expanded to include all politically engaged literature, including West German fiction and its putative Gesinnungsästhetik [aesthetics of political conviction]. The so-called deutsch-deutscher Literaturstreit is documented in Anz, Es geht nicht um Christa Wolf , and in Deiritz and Krauss, Der deutsch-deutsche Literaturstreit � 2 Ulrich Greiner, one of the most influential literary critics in Germany and head of the culture section of Die Zeit in 1990, eventually admitted this to be the goal of the staged literary debate� See “Die deutsche Gesinnungsästhetik” 208� See also Brockmann, Literature and German Reunification 1; Bullivant, The Future of German Literature 70-71� In “Der Literaturstreit - ein Historikerstreit im gesamtdeutschen Kostüm? ,” Heidelberger-Leonard reads the literary debate of the early 1990s as a reissue of the West German Historikerstreit [historians’ dispute] of the 1980s (74-75)� 3 On the GRD’s success rate in raising “socialist personalities” see Brock, “Producing the ‘Socialist Personality’? ” 4 “ Gesetz über die Teilnahme der Jugend am Aufbau der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik und die Förderung der Jugend in Schule und Beruf, bei Sport und Erholung ,” §35: “Schaffung einer neuen Jugend- und Kinderliteratur” [Law regarding youth participation in building the German Democractic Republic, and promoting youth in school and career, in sports and in recreation, §35: Creating a new literature for youth and children]� 5 From 1950 onwards, competitions in children’s and youth literature were first advertised by the Zentralrat der FDJ [Central Council of the Free German Youth], later by the Ministerium für Volksbildung [Ministry for National Education], and from 1956 onwards by the Ministerium für Kultur [Ministry for Culture]. However, these competitions were not very effective and initiated few successful careers, such as Benno Pludra’s� In 1968, the Akademie der Künste introduced the aforementioned Alex-Wedding-Preis [Alex Wedding Prize], since 1975 accompanied by the Hans-Baltzer-Preis [Hans Baltzer Prize] for illustrators� In 1976, it added the Edwin-Hoernle-Preis [Edwin Hoernle Prize] for theory and literary criticism, in 1977 the Sally-Bleistift-Preis für jüngere oder neue begabte Autoren [Sally Bleistift Prize for Gifted Younger or New Authors], in 1978 the Preis für populärwissenschaftliche Kinderliteratur [Prize for Children’s Literature in Popular 10 Ada Bieber and Sonja E� Klocke Science], and in the following year the Alfred-Holz-Preis [Alfred Holz Prize] for translation (Steinlein et al� 93-94)� Authors who received the Nationalpreis - among other aspects for addressing youth - include Friedrich Wolf, Erwin Strittmatter, Ludwig Renn, Franz Fühmann, Alex Wedding, Auguste Lazar, Benno Pludra, Max Zimmering, Peter Hacks, and Alfred Wellm, to name a few ( Verlagsverzeichnis 12-13)� 6 Jugendgesetz der DDR 1974, S. 14 (§ 3, Absatz 2). 7 Es wird einmal: Märchen für morgen. Moderne Märchen aus der DDR , edited by Hanne Castein, contains fairy tales by renowned authors, many of whom wrote for both young and adult audiences� Among these are Franz Fühmann, Günter Kunert, Stefan Heym, Peter Hacks, Rainer Kirsch, Irmtraud Morgner, Karl Mickel, Lothar Kusche, Klaus Rahn, Helga Schubert, Rudi Strahl, and Joachim Walher� Works Cited Ahbe, Thomas, and Rainer Gries. “Gesellschaftsgeschichte als Generationengeschichte: Theoretische und methodologische Überlegungen am Beispiel DDR.” Die DDR aus generationengeschichtlicher Perspektive: Eine Inventur . Ed. Annegret Schüle, Thomas Ahbe and Rainer Gries� Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2006� 475-571� Allan, Seán, and Sebastian Heiduschke� “Introduction: Re-Imaging East German Cinema�” Re-Imaging DEFA: East German Cinema in Its National and Transnational Contexts � Ed� Seán Allan and Sebastian Heiduschke� New York: Berghahn, 2016� 1-16� Alter, Manfred� Das proletarische Kinderbuch � Dokumente zur Geschichte der sozialistischen deutschen Kinder- und Jugendliteratur. Dresden: VEB Verlag der Kunst, 1988� Anz, Thomas, ed. Es geht nicht um Christa Wolf: Der Literaturstreit im vereinten Deutschland � Frankfurt a�M�: Fischer, 1991� Barck, Simone, Martina Langermann, and Siegfried Lokatis, eds� “Jedes Buch ein Abenteuer”: Zensur-System und literarische Öffentlichkeit in der DDR bis Ende der sechziger Jahre � Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997� Blessing, Benita. “Happily Socialist Ever After? East German Children’s Film and the Education of a Fairy Tale Land�” Oxford Review of Education 36�2 (2010): 233-48� Brock, Angela� “Producing the ‘Socialist Personality’? Socialization, Education, and the Emergence of New Patterns of Behaviour.” Power and Society in the GDR, 1961 - 1979: The ‘Normalisation of Rule’? Ed� Mary Fulbrook� New York: Berghahn, 2009� 220-52� Brockmann, Stephen� Literature and German Reunification � Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1999� Bullivant, Keith� The Future of German Literature . Oxford: Berg, 1994. Castein, Hanne, ed� Es wird einmal: Märchen für morgen. Moderne Märchen aus der DDR. Frankfurt a�M�: Suhrkamp, 1988� Deiritz, Karl, and Hannes Krauss, eds� Der deutsch-deutsche Literaturstreit oder “Freunde, es spricht sich schlecht mit gebundener Zunge.” Hamburg: Luchterhand, 1991� Introduction: New Perspectives on Young Adult GDR Literature and Film 11 Di Napoli, Thomas. “Thirty Years of Children’s Literature in the German Democratic Republic�” German Studies Review 7�2 (1984): 281-300� —� “Peter Hacks and Children’s Literature of the GDR�” The Germanic Review 63�1 (1988): 33-40� Dolle-Weinkauff, Bernd, and Steffen Peltsch. “Kinder- und Jugendliteratur der DDR.” Geschichte der Deutschen Kinder- und Jugendliteratur . Ed. Reiner Wild. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2002� 372-401� Ebert, Günter� Ansichten zur Entwicklung der epischen Kinder- und Jugendliteratur der DDR von 1945 bis 1975 � Studien zur Geschichte der deutschen Kinder- und Jugendliteratur 8� Berlin: Kinderbuchverlag, 1976� Emmrich, Christian, ed� Literatur für Kinder und Jugendliche in der DDR � Berlin: Kinderbuchverlag, 1979� —, ed� Literatur und Medienkünste für junge Leute � Berlin: Kinderbuchverlag, 1986� “Gesetz über die Herabsetzung des Volljährigkeitsalters� Vom 17� Mai 1950�” Gesetzblatt der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik 57 (May 22, 1950): 437� Greiner, Ulrich� “Die deutsche Gesinnungsästhetik�” Es geht nicht um Christa Wolf: Der Literaturstreit im vereinten Deutschland . Ed. Thomas Anz. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1991� 208-16� Heidelberger-Leonard, Irene� “Der Literaturstreit - ein Historikerstreit im gesamtdeutschen Kostüm? ” Der deutsch-deutsche Literaturstreit oder “Freunde, es spricht sich schlecht mit gebundener Zunge.” Ed� Karl Deiritz and Hannes Krauss� Hamburg: Luchterhand, 1991� 69-77� Heiduschke, Sebastian� East German Cinema: DEFA and Film History. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013� Pietsche, Peggy� “Black and German? East German Adolescents Before 1989: A Retrospective View of a ‘Non-Existent Issue’ in the GDR�” The Cultural After-Life of East-Germany: New Transnational Perspectives � Ed� Leslie A� Adelson� Washington, DC: AICGS, 2002� 37-59� Richter, Karin� “Entwicklungslinien in der Kinder- und Jugendliteratur der DDR: Vorüberlegungen für eine neue literaturhistorische Betrachtung des kinderliterarischen Schaffens von 1945-1989.” Zeitschrift für Germanistik 5�2 (1995): 290-300� —� Die erzählende Kinder- und Jugendliteratur der DDR: Entwicklungslinien - Themen und Genres, Autorenporträts und Textanalysen : Eine Aufsatzsammlung � Vol� 1� Baltmannsweiler: Schneider Verlag Hohengehren, 2016� Shen, Qinna� The Politics of Magic: DEFA Fairy-Tale Films. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2015� Silberman, Marc. “The First DEFA Fairy Tales: Cold War Fantasies of the 1950s.” Framing the Fifties: Cinema in a Divided Germany � Ed� John E� Davidson and Sabine Hake� New York: Berghahn, 2007� 106-19� Steinlein, Rüdiger, Heidi Strobel, and Thomas Kramer, eds. Handbuch zur Kinder- und Jugendliteratur: SBZ/ DDR: Von 1945 bis 1990. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2006. Thompson-Wohlgemuth, Gaby. Translation under State Control: Books for Young People in the German Democratic Republic. New York and London: Routledge, 1996� 12 Ada Bieber and Sonja E� Klocke Verlagsverzeichnis 1949 - 1979. Herausgegeben zum 30. Jahrestag des Kinderbuchverlages. Berlin: Der Kinderbuchverlag 1980� Wolf, Christa� “… mit der Jugend zu rechnen als mit einem Aktivposten� Gespräch mit Christa Wolf�” Forum 51-52 (1962)� Wrage, Henning� “Neue Jugend: Einleitung�” Handbuch Nachkriegsliteratur: Literatur, Sachbuch und Film in Deutschland (1945 - 1962) � Ed� Elena Agazzi and Erhard Schütz� Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013� 641-51� —. “DEFA Films for the Youth: National Paradigms, International Influences.” DEFA at the Crossroads of East German and International Film Culture: A Companion � Ed� Marc Silberman and Henning Wrage� Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014� 263-80� Zipes, Jack� “Die Freiheit trägt Handschellen im Land der Freiheit: Das Bild der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika in der Literatur der DDR�” Amerika in der Deutschen Literatur: Neue Welt - Nordamerika - USA � Ed� Sigrid Bauschinger, Horst Denkler and Wilfried Malsch. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1975. 329 - 52� Zipser, Richard, ed� Fragebogen: Zensur. Zur Literatur vor und nach dem Ende der DDR � Leipzig: Reclam, 1995� Love Lessons in East German Children’s Films Benita Blessing Oregon State University Abstract: East German cinema played an important role in the emotional education of girls and boys� In a process I refer to as “cinema pedagogy,” filmmakers offered socialist “love lessons” to young people about the possibilities and limits of heterosexual, romantic relationships. In fairy tale films ( Märchenfilme ), everyday films ( Alltagsfilme ), and historical features ( Geschichtsfilme ), children watched both fantasy and realistic characters role model how - and how not - to be a couple behind the Wall. These love lessons were not static. Over five distinct periods in the Soviet Zone (1945- 1949) and German Democratic Republic, children saw adults and children on-screen acting in increasingly emancipated expressions of female agency in love and passion� Keywords: DEFA, German Democratic Republic, children’s films, love, sexuality, pedagogy Recent years have witnessed increasing scholarly interest in East German cinema, i.e., those films produced during the Soviet Zone of Occupation (1945-1949) and the GDR (German Democratic Republic)� Although scholars once criticized the films by the state-owned production company DEFA ( Deutsche Filmaktiengesellschaft ) 1 as facile vehicles for Moscow-led socialist indoctrination, studies in the last two decades have compellingly demonstrated a far more nuanced picture. East German filmmakers did ultimately answer to their regime, but in addition to periods of strict censorship, they experienced significant periods of artistic and intellectual freedom - a series of “freezes and thaws” that affected all areas of cultural production (Heiduschke 11-17)� Far from mouthpieces for the ruling SED party ( Sozialistische Einheitspartei [Socialist Unity Party]), filmmakers were artists, many of them committed to utopian antifascist-humanist 14 Benita Blessing ideals, and they offered audiences films that promoted critical discussions about politics and society� DEFA children’s films mirrored and contributed to these discussions. From the first children’s film of 1946 (a mere year after war’s end) to the last one screened in 1990 (a year after the fall of the Wall), young and old audiences enjoyed almost 200 films that spoke to children and their experiences. In fairy tale films ( Märchenfilme ), everyday films ( Alltagsfilme ) and historical features ( Geschichtsfilme ) - the three main categories for children’s feature films - children found encouraging lessons and discussions about how to grow up as antifascist, humanist socialists. The messages in these films were not static. As societal norms and mores evolved over time, so too did the stories and their intended morals for young people. One constant trope in these changes deserves particular scholarly attention: love. Whether married queens and kings bickering, or girls and boys flirting, DEFA children’s films, as I argue in this article, taught young people about being in love with the opposite sex� The work of Christine Gölz, Karin Hoff, and Anja Tippner informs my study, and I draw on their claim that children’s films help construct normative ideas about childhood, instead of one-sidedly portraying the role of children in society at a given point in time (7-17)� Equally important for this theoretical framework - that children’s films affect how children see themselves and how they act - were the oral history interviews that I conducted throughout the years 2007-2014 with DEFA children’s filmmakers, and with whom I have corresponded in ensuing years� 2 Particularly those directors, actors, and technicians who worked on multiple children’s films talked of love as a key trope in the lessons they wanted their young audiences to learn� Finally, I suggest how feminist theories of love and sexuality in the GDR (with particular reference to Julia Hell’s concept of “post-fascist bodies” as developed in her seminal study Post-Fascist Fantasies ) can help us understand the young bodies in DEFA’s children’s films - those on screen, and those in the audience. A number of DEFA’s children’s films exemplify changes over time in what I call socialist “love lessons” for children, but I focus here on the near-seismic shifts in messages that reflect a more nuanced film periodization than the traditional categories of postwar, middle, and late years. In nearly five decades of DEFA, five distinct periods represent broad cultural shifts and their reflection in children’s films. For the first decade after the war, I look to Paul Verhoeven’s 1950 Das kalte Herz [The Cold Heart] and its representations of female sacrifice for love. Children’s films of the early 1960s, the second period, reacted negatively to the early rumblings about gender equality in loving relationships with films such as Walter Beck’s König Drosselbart [King Thrushbeard] (1965). Within a few years, Rainer Simon established the GDR’s readiness to accept women’s Love Lessons in East German Children’s Films 15 emancipation and the third period in children’s filmmaking with the close-ofthe-decade fairy tale film Wie heiratet man einen König [How to Marry a King] (1969). I address the discussions of race and sexuality that briefly made an appearance in DEFA children’s films in the fourth period with Helmut Dziuba’s well-received 1981 adaptation of the children’s book Als Unku Edes Freundin war [When Unku was Ede’s Friend]. Finally, I devote my attention to the last years of that decade where the fifth and final period in children’s filmmaking in the GDR is represented by popular Kinderfilmdirector Rolf Losansky’s Weiße Wolke Carolin [White Cloud Carolin] (1985), with its tale of two children learning to experience love both intellectually and physically� I have selected these films based on their popular reception as well as for their ability to demonstrate the evolution of societal attitudes regarding the kinds of loving relationships that children should strive for. The following section discusses the role of film in society and suggests a framework for conceptualizing emotions and their physical expressions in children’s films in general, and especially in the GDR. I then provide social and cinematic context for love and its celluloid portrayal in the exemplary children’s films of each era. DEFA was not unique in consciously and unconsciously educating its citizens in cinemas, nor is the education of audiences a particularly socialist feature of filmmaking. Studios and regimes have long acknowledged and used the power of films to socialize citizens. By the 1930s a large body of scholarship in the United States began to appear on this subject in English-speaking and international contexts that played a role in the government’s explicit and implicit demands of Hollywood productions (Luke 39)� Disney, for instance, boasts of the role its instructional and feature films for militaries, classrooms, and cinemas played in boosting morale during World War II with patriotic messages that aligned closely with US military and political policies (Baxter)� Cinema’s socialization lessons extend beyond official political aims, though. Scholarship of the late twentieth century highlighted the ways in which films engage in “cultural pedagogy,” that is, teaching audiences about appropriate socio-cultural behavior (Bell et al� 20)� Henry A� Giroux, complaining that traditional, narrow views of education are limited to school settings, called for a definition of pedagogy that “extends beyond the boundaries of schools” to include spaces like cinema (57). I call this use of films to educate and socialize audiences, regardless of their ages, “cinematic pedagogy�” Like traditional classroom pedagogy, cinematic pedagogy reflects and contributes to changing political and societal attitudes and practices. In the case of Hollywood, for instance, interventions in response to evolving social norms and expectations have resulted in princesses coded with masculine characteristics, such as military skills, with a trend towards princes and princesses displaying androgynous 16 Benita Blessing behaviors (England et al�)� In the same way that celluloid representations of gender contribute to the construction of gender outside the cinema (De Lauretis 3), representations of sexuality both reflect changing social norms and contribute to the construction of acceptable sexual behavior for adults and children� In other words, children in cinema audiences recognize the gender and sexuality lessons in children’s films. Moreover, children practice gendered behavior based on repeated exposure to behaviors that are portrayed in mainstream media (England et al� 556)� I insist on the importance of analyzing children’s films in terms of reception theories about proffered gender roles because, in contrast to DEFA’s women’s films ( Frauenfilme ; see Creech), these frameworks are often absent in studies of the Kinderfilm [children’s film]. 3 Love and sexuality behind the Wall took place within a historical, political, and social context marked by an antifascist-humanist response to the end of the Nazi regime and a rejection of capitalist ideologies (McLellan). Yet scholarship on these films has not looked to theories of children’s gendered and sexual bodies and the construction of the young antifascist-humanist “socialist personality” that educators, filmmakers, and functionaries identified as the ideal emerging citizen. With rare exception, analyses of DEFA children’s films have not adequately addressed how young love, or young sexuality, evolved within a socialist context (Shen)� Unlike animated Hollywood films for children about fairy tales or anthropomorphic tales of animal creatures, cameras in DEFA children’s films gazed exclusively at live-action bodies, including children’s bodies� Boys rode on bikes to solve a crime ( Alarm im Zirkus [Alarm at the Circus], 1954), girls became the first female advisor to a king - albeit observed by a watchful (live) rat queen ( Gritta von Rattenzuhausbeiuns [Gritta from the Rats’ Castle], 1985) - and in all such instances, children in cinema audiences watched gendered bodies move through real and imaginary socialist spaces. These scenes were not unique to the screen� As Julia Hell has argued regarding East German literature, GDR authors linked public and political post-World War II ideologies with the Oedipal struggle to define the “post-fascist body” (103-33). In this interpretation, sons and daughters rebelled against the patriarchy of fascism and turned towards the communist mother, personified by Mother Russia. Films, too, prescribed antifascist behavior to socialist bodies, and these lessons about reeducating fathers to non-violence and building loving socialist communities started with children’s films. This assertion calls into question the view of the family as the main socializing force in GDR society� Although Dagmar Herzog, for instance, has underlined family practices such as nakedness at home and nudity at the beach as an example of East German parental role modeling of open attitudes to sexuality in the 1970s (Herzog 203), children’s attitudes about their bodies have Love Lessons in East German Children’s Films 17 never been dictated primarily by home practices� Indeed, the topic of young people’s emotional and sexual lives in socialism was a key focus of popular books and articles, such as the 1956 guide to intimate relationships for adolescents, Die Geschlechterfrage: Ein Buch für junge Menschen , by the physician and social hygienist Rudolf Neubert� A more inclusive understanding of the role of sexuality in the GDR can be found in John Urang’s Legal Tender: Love and Legitimacy in the East German Cultural Imagination , where he posits romantic love as both a socio-political solution to and evidence of interpersonal tensions, whether between two individuals or between the individual and the state (1-22): all you need is (romantic) love based on (socialist understandings of) the body as a politically/ ideologically negotiable space� Still, historiography about love and sex behind the Wall have focused on children only as young members of the family, without looking to children as agents in their own social-sexual development. DEFA films, though, recognized children as societal members who longed for love and passion that grew within an antifascist-humanist society� East German children’s films thus offer far more than a measure of how well the state successfully indoctrinated young people with Marxist-Leninist theories of capital. The films’ love lessons help us understand how East German society helped girls and boys negotiate and express their emotional and physical feelings of love as young antifascist-humanist socialists� The pedagogical function of the Kinderfilm developed amidst policies and practices of reeducation programs in the postwar years� Cinema had the explicit function, alongside school, of educating young people to become antifascist-humanist, socialist citizens who would embody the values of a “socialist personality” ( sozialistische Persönlichkeit ). The GDR’s youth law of 1964 codified this vague term’s definition with equally vague instructions: “be loyal to socialist ideas, think and act as a patriot and internationalist, strengthen socialism and defend it unfailingly against enemies” (“Gesetz” 75)� It fell to educators to communicate what those terms meant to children, including film pedagogues who worked with educational theorists and filmmakers to make films for children that were entertaining, yet pedagogically valuable. Unlike instructional films ( Unterrichtsfilme ) shown in the classroom, described by the national educational minister Hans-Joachim Laabs in 1954 as “aids for teachers,” the Kinderfilm was its own pedagogical art form that should “provide children with lovely experiences, relax them, make them happy and attend to their personal inclinations” (Laabs 5). That is, films for schools addressed educators’ needs, whereas filmmakers and pedagogues charged the Kinderfilm with children’s needs, both physical and emotional� Not all DEFA children’s films fall into a clear category of emotional how-to films, but this is one of the uses they served in addition to portraying actual prac- 18 Benita Blessing tices and attitudes about love. In no case did filmmakers express the intention to teach children about the physical side of love, but this aspect, too, is evident in children’s films. At times functionaries worried about scenes that bordered on the sexually explicit, but I found no instance of these concerns turning to censorship. Even in films that superficially showed the innocence of young love, children watched love unfold in characters’ minds as well as their bodies. After all, emotions are felt in the body, for children and adults� 4 Sexologists in the GDR acknowledged the physicality of children’s love, drawing especially on the pedagogical theories of the Soviet pedagogue Anton Makarenko (Borrmann)� Yet post-1989 studies of young people’s relationships in the GDR have focused on sexual considerations, such as number of partners and attitudes about contraception (Zimmermann)� Such separation of romantic or platonic feelings from physical responses is a false dichotomy of love versus lust, on-screen or off. East German children watched bodies on screen in pain and pleasure, with scenes of children and adults feeling love sick, dying for love, holding hands, passionately kissing, and hinting at sexual activity. The visual eroticization and sexualization of fairy tale figures and idealized children became part of the world that East German children grew up in. DEFA children’s films took their cues from contemporary societal practices and aspirations, so that they not only reflected, but also reinforced, the messages that young people were exposed to in multiple areas of their lives about love, sexuality, and the body� Postwar DEFA films demonstrated the call for young and old to spare nothing in the physical and spiritual rebuilding of the nation, including their lives� Children’s films in the immediate postwar years showed the need for a love of others defined by self-sacrifice. Adult men played the dominant role as antifascist heroes in films, their virility recaptured with every brick they laid and fire they stoked, “erotic heroes” whose sexuality is predicated not on love or compassion but rather their aggression (Pugh 64)� Boys were called upon to imitate these fathers and father figures, demonstrating their commitment to the new state through hard labor and the suppression of emotions in favor of demonstrations of physical strength� Much is made now of the women who toiled amongst the ruins of bombed-out cities, helping the nation begin physical (re)construction, but the myth of the “rubble woman” would appear only two decades later in the mid-1960s (Treber)� Women and girls did not only provide emotional support, however. In much the same way that women in the first half of the century had been called upon to see themselves as domestic soldiers in the fight against the enemy (Davis 34), postwar women had a specific gender role to play: that of emotional and physical suffering in the home. In optimistic children’s film depictions of this trope, wives and girlfriends were rewarded for having tirelessly waited for their men to come home from the war� Love Lessons in East German Children’s Films 19 Part of postwar reconstruction included a push to reestablish the nuclear family as the only viable solution for organizing private relationships, regardless of emotional or physical cost. This message is part of the plot of DEFA’s first children’s film - more about children than for them - Gerhard Lamprecht’s Irgendwo in Berlin [Somewhere in Berlin] (1946). The film argues for individual sacrifice in order to demonstrate love of the nation with subplots of an orphan’s death-as-redemption and a Penelope-like wife who waits for her husband to return from the war. The film set the stage for more tropes of passionate, Christlike suffering that would bring about true love through death, as seen in DEFA’s first fairy tale film, Das kalte Herz [The Cold Heart] (1950). Also DEFA’s first color film, The Cold Heart offered a feast for the eyes - “masterful in color and photography,” as Heinrich Müller wrote in his 1950 review for Neues Deutschland. Although criticized in initial reviews for the portrayals of violence, The Cold Heart remained one of the top ten most-viewed DEFA films from 1946 to 1990 with 9,779,526 audience members in cinemas (Ziob n� pag�); in 1988, the East German popular film magazine Filmspiegel celebrated the return of the film to cinemas. Although DEFA did not create an official children’s film working group ( Künstlerische Arbeitsgruppe “Kinder- und Jugendfilm” ) 5 until 1953, the question of intended audience accompanied contemporary film reviews in East and West Germany, with some critics claiming that it was a film for adults only (Menter), and others - like the West German Catholic newspaper Film-Dienst in 1951 - complaining that Hauff had written his fairy tales for young and old, but that Verhoeven’s film adaptation was not artistically complex enough to be of interest for any adults� Ultimately, whether young or old, neither critics nor audiences in East or West Germany appeared to question the film’s love lesson that women must love erotic heroes with their bodies and souls, up to and beyond their last breath� Men, in other words, were worth dying for, regardless of their flaws - an important message in postwar Germany, where men struggled to regain their place in society� Set in nineteenth-century Germany, the film superficially warns of misplaced love, specifically of loving material goods over people (Shen 59-69). Its deeper message to young viewers is that desirable female partners carry the responsibility of forgiving and potentially dying for their husbands’ sins. In the first scene between Peter and Lisbeth, they begin a physically consuming romance that he desires but that she initiates, a decision that within the film’s moral architecture makes her responsible for his later irresponsible behavior towards her. After a long day of turning coal into charcoal for the village, he spies her, the queen of a local festival, and she asks him to dance in front of bystanders who have begun to mock his appearance� Dirty from coal dust, he hesitates to begin the dance and runs off, stuttering, “I didn’t want to even come to the 20 Benita Blessing dance festival. I wanted….” The extended shot of their longing gazes finishes the sentence for him, and with a look she acknowledges that she, too, finds him physically desirable. The unfulfilled passion of that moment foreshadows the fulfilled passion in a later scene when he announces their wedding, where he finally can be with her intimately, the dance a hint at pleasures soon to be had. But Peter is not content to have gotten the girl. He pursues riches with the help of magic, and, in a predictable turn of events, loses everything� Abandoning Lisbeth at the altar, he strikes a deal with the devil - Dutch Michael - to regain his wealth, as in the original nineteenth-century tale� He trades in his warm human heart for a stone cold one, marries Lisbeth, and becomes a heartless miser - a perfect archetypal capitalist for the new GDR� Lisbeth, uninterested in money, offers succor to a beggar - who is actually the “Little Glass Man,” a good, if sly, magical counterpart to the evil Dutch Michael. Peter flies into a rage at his wife’s generosity with his money, the music swells, and he hits Lisbeth with his walking stick - itself an extension of sexualized, phallic wealth - so hard that she dies. It is a sensual death, with Lisbeth slowly sinking to the floor in the beggar’s arms, a trickle of blood on her forehead a reminder that Peter has attacked her. Her fall is a final, orgasmic release to Peter’s desire to possess her body and soul. Breathily, she asks Peter to forgive her just as she forgives him the violation of her body, and her eyes close slowly, languidly, as death possesses her. The long camera shot is a voyeuristic spectacle of sexualized violence, drawing on the heritage of scenes of girls’ and women’s eroticized murders at the hands of men in Fritz Lang’s classic Weimar-era UFA films Der müde Tod [Destiny; better translated as Weary Death] (1921), Metropolis (1927), and M (1931), a clear sign that postwar men and cameras still engaged in sexualized murder ( Lustmord ) fantasies (Tatar). After satisfying his sexual rage, Peter suddenly recognizes that he has done wrong and, with the help of more good magic, steals back his heart from Dutch Michael� His loving wife is brought back from her violent death, unquestioning even now in her love for him. The facile reading of this film, then as now, as a tale of love conquering even death ignores the fetishization in East German children’s films and popular imagination of the power that men had over women’s lives and death� Having killed her, Peter can bring Lisbeth back to life - and is free to begin this cycle of violence anew, a harrowing lesson for girls hoping to find love regardless of political and economic ideologies. As in Somewhere in Berlin , there are religious overtones of suffering, passion, and redemption in this film. Those girls and women who practice good deeds and love for humanity can be brought back from the dead if they have sacrificed enough, and it is only their passionate suffering that proves their love. The decision to frame Wilhelm Hauff’s nineteenth-century fairy tale’s humanist lesson about materialistic greed within a love story serves to magnify, rather Love Lessons in East German Children’s Films 21 than question, the extent of Peter’s power over his domestic sphere� It was not enough to note that those who, like Peter, abandon their love for humanity are nothing more than capitalists, and only the loving suffering of others can save them� It was rather that Peter’s desire for dominance knows no bounds� After acquiring Lisbeth’s love, he moves on to acquiring wealth. Only when his control of his wife begins to slip does he take notice of her and regain his power over her� At the same time, Lisbeth’s role makes clear within this Lustmord fantasy that she has forced him to kill her through her actions� Indeed, although contemporary criticism such as Müller’s 1950 review in Neues Deutschland pointed to gratuitous violence in the film, the complaints were most often about Dutch Michael’s macabre cave, filled with beating, bloody hearts. When the two young readers Leonie Weymann and Ewald Thoms wrote to the socialist youth newspaper Junge Welt to criticize the scene of Lisbeth’s murder, it was only the violence on-screen, and not the fact of it, that elicited their ire� As a young bride, Lisbeth embodies an innocence that is coded as appropriate erotic submissiveness; by violating the sexualized hierarchy of this relationship by caring for another man, she provokes Peter to put her back in her proper place� Only the sacrifice of her physical body allows her and her spouse to return to the path of love and true physical happiness. Those women worthy of love, children in the audience learned, were meant to martyr themselves and suffer, longing for a physical release that could only be brought by a redemptive death for them and those around them� Christlike, Lisbeth returns from the dead, “resurrected,” as Ulrike Odenwald noted, redeeming Peter (19). Having offered her body in exchange for the forgiveness of sin, she and Peter, the erotic hero, can return to a more chaste union free of passionate crimes, one made possible only by allowing and even insisting that Peter live out and learn from his violent passion for her body, which was predicated on her body having been a necessary tool in his emotional maturation. The cinematic pedagogy of the immediate postwar years taught that only total emotion and physical submission in love would be rewarded in the new antifascist order� This fetishization of a passionate, even Christian, love for one’s fellow antifascists gave way in the 1960s to a love focused on sexual desire that must be disciplined� Love behind the Wall turned introspective and more traditionally erotic, with princes and princesses its standard bearers� New discussions about women’s rights, including their sexuality, informed this decade of fairy tale films especially, with children’s films creating a discursive space for the unsettling debates about women rejecting their role of loving wives and mothers� As in Hollywood children’s films, girls and women in DEFA children’s films of this era were blatantly coded as objects of sexual desire by their clothes, male character glances, and camera shots (Wojik-Andrews 154); fantasies of upper and 22 Benita Blessing lower social classes offered an additional layer of erotic longing. Most importantly in this decade, though, suspicions about emancipated women gave way to their gradual, grudging acceptance, accompanied by the now overt message that true love is sexual in nature, always� The decade began with the regime walling in its citizens to ostensibly protect them from the decadence of the West. Although a few feature films dealt directly with the building of the Wall, children’s films did not comment on this political development� Konrad Petzold’s 1961 Das Kleid [The Robe], which adapted the fairy tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes” and focused on a city divided by a wall, had been completed before the actual building of the Wall in August of that year� Yet, the DEFA fairy tale film did not premiere, a decision based in large part on the filmmakers’ worry that they had gone too far in their criticism of political divisions (Günther and Schenk 54). Most films, including children’s films, turned to more private matters, such as how men and women interacted with each other in love. In a climate of political repression, films reassured audiences that the gender order would remain stable, and any challenges to it would be met with societal walls. In this vein, the first post-Wall children’s films reflected fears of displays of overt female sexuality that functioned outside a traditional marriage; in the same gesture, they reinforced ideas about female characters, young and old, as objects of sexual desire� Calls for international solidarity became part of this discourse, with stories of race and sexuality intertwined� Director Gerhard Klein had thematisized race and masculinity for young people with the 1958 Brechtian Lehrstück production of Die Geschichte vom armen Hassan [The Story of Poor Hassan], where a young person of color must free himself from economic and physical oppression to enjoy love� Two years later, Siegfried Hartmann followed suit, broadening his focus to race and sexuality� With his Hatifa , an erotic thriller of slavery, escape, and love, the “magic of oriental fairy tale films” captured children’s need for fantasy and adventure, as one enthusiastic reviewer claimed; no mention was made of the ambiguous feelings that Hatifa and her savior have for one another once they realize that she is his long-lost daughter, thus recoding the pedophilic elements of the film into an uncomfortable, if more acceptable, Electra complex (G�S�, “Hatifa”)� More explicitly, the Mongolian-East German coproduction Die goldene Jurte [The Golden Yurt] of 1961 offered Mongolian and German viewers an international opportunity to gaze upon the female body - first, through the lens of exotic Orientalism; then, by turning the camera to tantalizingly exoticize the white female body� A mere five years later, worries about overt female sexuality had become a problem to be dealt with physically in the third period of DEFA’s Kinderfilm (Blessing 109-31). Amidst the Eleventh Plenum’s banning of DEFA films whose ideological stances functionaries did not agree with or understand, a children’s Love Lessons in East German Children’s Films 23 fairy tale film survived censorship and succeeded in its mission to teach children about modern love� In Walter Beck’s wildly popular König Drosselbart [King Thrushbeard] (1965), the Princess Roswitha learns to calm her fiery temperament and become a dutiful, working wife; an East German version of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew or - as Beck noted in an interview with me in 2008 and in printed sources - George Sidney’s 1953 blockbuster Hollywood film Kiss Me Kate that he found “enchanting” (Berger and Giera 57-58)� Beck’s version updated the psychological and physical torture of Katherina/ Kate by shaming Roswitha into believing that her unimpressive work skills and ideas about the means of production have no value. The princess first encounters King Thrushbeard when he stops to help mend the broken wagon wheel of her carriage that she had clearly subjected to a medieval-era joyride� Not believing that the poorly dressed man without a retinue is a king, but finding him attractive, she initiates erotically charged provocations that he returns in kind� She nicknames him King Thrushbeard for his bird’s nest of a beard that protrudes from his chin like a thrush’s beak. This attempt at coquettish humiliation will cost her dearly, and becomes part of the justification for his punishing behavior towards her� Later, at court, he shows up disguised as a beggar-minstrel and tricks her father into keeping his promise that the next man to enter the room will be her husband. The suitors she has cruelly rejected corner her and cheer, jeer and prevent her from running away from the beggar, a defiant and dangerous army of wounded masculine ego� It is a spectacularly disturbing scene, with the suitors delighted that she will “finally be taught a lesson” by a stronger man than they� With this homoerotic scene, boys in the audience learned that they should bond together, in violence if necessary, to keep girls in place; the love lessons for girls warned of rejecting suitors� With a mixture of Schadenfreude and revenge fantasies evident on all the men’s faces, they physically help the beggar to carry off the kicking and screaming Roswitha. Thrushbird enjoys her desperate struggles in his arms, telling her that she claws and hisses like a cat, a sexualizing and infantilizing comparison� Although her father protests feebly at the trick of marrying his daughter off to someone of a lower social standing, he does nothing to prevent her forcible removal by her husband� Girls in the audience thus learned that their fathers willingly turn them over to abusive husbands; boys learned that their marital role is that of abuser� Traditional gender hierarchies ruled the day, at least idealistically� Young audiences also learned the love lesson that once the bride becomes property of a husband, her family abandons her entirely, and her body and mind will be subjected to a new regime. One possible intended lesson in this narrative positions the careless, aristocratic father as the capitalist state, with the new patriarch representing the socialist state that educates its spoiled citizen-subjects 24 Benita Blessing with a firm, but loving, hand. Such a lecture about the patriarchy knowing best for its people makes further sense within the context of the contradictory nature of women’s employment in the GDR; the SED’s commitment to full employment for women did not extend to wanting equal gender representation throughout the work force. The majority of working women were employed in traditionally female fields where they did not reach the upper echelons in their professions and received lower salary rates than men, pointing to disparities between the state’s stated aim of gender equality throughout society and the reality of working women’s lives (Alsop 19-42). The ways in which Thrushbeard trains Roswitha to work as his unpaid servant underlines the reading that, whether at home or work, men in the GDR wanted women to remember their place� Thrushbeard’s near-sadistic treatment of his new bride/ employee begins as soon as he carries her over the threshold of their hut� Although he ostensibly wants her to learn the value of labor, he does not offer Roswitha adequate training or support� He sets up a series of impossible domestic tasks that he knows she cannot complete, from cooking his favorite meal to selling wares at the market� With every failure to immediately master those skills, Roswitha’s anger grows in proportion to his increasing ridicule, which he mixes with just enough sexual innuendo to make her humiliation almost complete� Unlike Pertruchio/ Fred in the famous spanking scenes of The Taming of the Shrew and Kiss me Kate that Beck had seen, Thrushbeard does not spank his unrepentant wife - corporal punishment was outlawed in the GDR - but his psychological disciplining leaves the audience with no doubt that he often wants to put her over his knee for her inadequacy and petulance, and that she deserves it� She runs away, but in the end she has learned her lesson and discovers that her beggar husband is truly a king and thus her true love� She understands - like the Shakespearian and Broadway shrews before her - that he has only ever wanted the best for her. Thrushbeard has broken her, physically and emotionally, and become her master, for which she is grateful. There is a hint that she has a bit of erotic spark left in her, but it is one that appears only at her husband’s behest. The natural order of things has been maintained in this fairy tale� In a particularly socialist spin on this fairy tale, girls no longer see love lessons that insist that they suffer in order to save their husbands, as in The Cold Heart . Instead, they learn that gender roles knew no class differences; even wealthy women must bend their will and bodies to men so that they can find love. Critics at the time praised the film for the way in which Roswitha, tamed and servile, becomes a “valuable human being” (G�S�, “Die Prinzessin als Spielmannsfrau”)� In 2006, Karin Ugowski, the actress who played Roswitha, explained that the film told of the “power and patience of love,” a modern retelling of the old story without “brutality” as benefited the GDR’s “humanist Love Lessons in East German Children’s Films 25 worldview” (“Prinzessin”)� More recently, Qinna Shen has agreed with such assessments, describing Thrushbeard as “a wise, patient, and loving monarch” who “lovingly” disciplines his aristocratic wife to value work (Shen 138-39)� But “ sanfte Gewalt ,” whether translated as “gentle violence” or “gentle discipline,” as Berger and Giera named Thrushbeard’s actions (Berger and Giera 58), has little to do with love or humanism and everything to do with a grown man coercing his adult wife to become his princess-slave� When the critic for the Berliner Zeitung exclaimed that Thrushbeard could be “a young man of our days” in a 1965 review (M.H., “König Drosselbart”), he undoubtedly spoke the truth: far from being ready to treat women as equals, young men behind the Wall waited just as eagerly to “gently” break the will of their future wives every bit as much as did sixteenth-century theater audiences in England and postwar American cinemagoers. Beck’s claim of wanting to offer a pedagogical lesson in modern love notwithstanding (König et al. 152-53), King Thrushbeard offered titillating sadomasochistic fairy tale pornography for children (and their parents)� This rejection of women as equals in loving relationships could be sustained neither in society nor in children’s films. In 1969, Rainer Simon’s Wie heiratet man einen König [How to Marry a King] brought the decade and with it the third period to a more satisfying close, with physical passion in independent women now a reason to marry them and make them queen� Just as in Hollywood children’s films of the late twentieth century, girls and women in DEFA children’s films were coded as objects of sexual desire by their clothes, male character glances, and camera shots (Wojik-Andrews 154)� In DEFA’s socialist erotic ragsto-riches fantasy, the clever farmer’s daughter’s ascent to queenhood in How to Marry a King , based supposedly on her wit instead of her beauty, nonetheless provides her with lavish gowns and adoring gazes from her husband and her subjects� She arrives almost naked to the court - solving the king’s riddle of how to come “neither naked nor clothed” by wrapping herself in a fishing net - and he rewards her with improved social standing by marrying her� Her gowns become ever more lavish, reminding the audience that they have had a glimpse of the body that she now covers in garments. The audience’s fascination with the queen’s body did not stop in the cinema, either, a phenomenon of the GDR’s “socialist star system,” as Sabine Hake termed it, that offers an intriguing emotional nuance to the idea of DEFA actors’ bodies playing a key role in public life (Hake 197)� Director Rainer Simon cast the Dutch actress Cox Habbema to star in the film, and she soon fell in love with Eberhard Esche, who played the king. Their love affair and marriage heightened the charged sense of romance and passion so central to the film’s success, with stories and photos about her real-life relationship dominating those of her fantasy life (M�H�, “Die Kluge kommt aus Holland”)� 26 Benita Blessing The idea that the queen should be tamed or educated did not arise during filmmaking or in reviews; indeed, during an interview with me in 2007, Simon still agreed with his 1968 claim that he had intended the film to be more about women’s equality in a loving relationship than a fairy tale that ends happily ever after (Anon., “Keine Märchenehe”). But the sexualized love scenes worried the Film Office, and it initially rejected its release as a children’s film (Minister für Kultur). The wedding banquet in particular was subject to criticism; a long, erotically charged scene in which the royal couple teasingly feeds each other tasty morsels as the villagers watch on at their own banquet in the courtyard, both voyeurs (like the now sexualized audience) and imitators of sexualizing food consumption. The sheer variety of the dozens upon dozens of dishes, from stuffed pig to exotic fruits, made for mouthwatering, erotically charged moments� In a country not known for its abundance of food, this excess must have been even more tantalizing, an early variation of what would become hash-tagged photos of “foodporn” in the age of Twitter. With scenes of the king spearing cherries on the points of the queen’s crown, it is hard to take seriously the Film Office’s complaint that children would find such displays “boring.” It is not quite a scene from a state-sponsored school lunch in the cafeteria, but the use of mealtimes to grab the attention of a cute girl or boy is hardly an adult invention. The director, Simon, recounted to me that he proved that such sexually-laden scenes resonated with children by insisting that the film be screened for a test audience of children. They adored the movie, silencing official reservations about it. The erotic fantasies of socialist modern love, just a few years after Roswitha’s taming, had taken on an edge of true equality for women in love, but also of longing for the excesses of the west, from the availability of food to its women� To be sure, these films told children that love conquers all, particularly when it is to be found in heterosexual marriages. But they did more. They explored ideas about sexuality for adult and child audiences� It is easy to suggest that children did not understand what they were seeing, and that the sexual nature of these films was lost on young audiences. But these films, even if they entertained adults, also were conceived with children in mind, and children watched these films. Their exposure to adult forms of emotional and physical love onscreen was as important as their exposure to love and passion off-screen. Over the course of the 1960s, although winning the man was still the ultimate objective, the women in these films begin to show an intellectual, emotional and sexual depth not seen in earlier children’s films. That these films remained firmly in the realm of fairy tale lands suggests less about the fantasy character of love and lust and more about the ability of the screen to make sense of evolving ideas Love Lessons in East German Children’s Films 27 of love and its physical manifestations in a well-established German tradition of exposing young people to adult worlds through the stories of kings and queens� Much has been written about the appearance of Frauenfilme [women’s films] and emancipated expressions of female love and sexuality in the late 1970s and 1980s (Schieber 267-77; Creech), but a similar phenomenon can also be found in what I will refer to as DEFA “girls’ films.” The last years of the GDR brought everyday films about children firmly into DEFA’s repertoire with a strong focus on girls struggling in and against gender roles� With discussions of youth sexuality now an accepted topic after the advent of adolescent-specific films such as Herrmann Zschoche’s 1978 hit Sieben Sommersprossen [Seven Freckles], filmmakers turned to girls and boys in love, no longer relying on adult actors as royalty to tell stories about love. DEFA children’s films never overtly focused on sexuality the way that youth films did, but the decision to portray children in love facilitated a discourse about gender, emotions, race, and the body, all projected onto children’s on-screen bodies, sexualizing them for their off-screen, real-life audience. DEFA did not abandon fairy tale films with their happy endings for princes and princesses entirely in its last productions, but it no longer relied primarily on adults to model emotions for young people. Like adult films from the era, including Unser kurzes Leben [Our Short Life] (1981) and Kaskade Rückwärts [Bailing Out] (1984), children’s films, especially girls’ films, offered complicated lessons about the emotional and physical constraints of love within the context of calls for women’s emancipation from traditional gender roles� Girls’ films saw a trend away from adapting Grimms’ fairy tales and towards adaptations of Weimar-era children’s stories� Alex Wedding’s 1931 children’s book Ede und Unku [Ede and Unku], burned by the Nazis in 1933 and required school reading in the GDR, provided the basis for Helmut Dziuba’s 1981 adaptation Als Unku Edes Freundin war [When Unku was Ede’s Friend] that represents the brief fifth period in DEFA children’s films. Set in 1920s Berlin, Unku tells the love story of a local working-class boy, Ede, and his relationship to Unku, a Sinti girl who is in town for the Gypsy Circus. The intersectionality of gender, sexuality, and race informs the difficult emotional and physical negotiations between the two children falling for each other� However, Unku promised a continued engagement of DEFA with race and sexuality in the Kinderfilm that could not be fulfilled in the few years before the collapse of the GDR and, with it, its state-sponsored film industry. Themes that would be developed a few years later starred independent girls who could more freely express themselves as independent of boys and men, while the latter could more freely express romantic emotions coded as too feminine in the four previous eras� In Rolf Losansky’s Weiße Wolke Carolin [White Cloud Carolin] (1985), the twelve-year-old Carolin and Hannes are best friends 28 Benita Blessing who discover their first true love with one another. Although not truly part of the historical films that dominated the 1980s, Carolin nods to this trend, with Carolin engaged in a school project about the antifascist history of their town with another boy, Benno� Against this background of antifascist education in schools, Carolin and Hannes offer an antifascist education to their audiences about how boys should behave towards smart girls they love� Unlike the frustrating unfinished love of Unku , with Ede unable to maintain a loving relationship with his Sinti girlfriend, Carolin celebrates the energy and joy that accompany new love without shying away from love’s problems, including the lack of emotional and physical (self-)control that must also be managed by young lovers� So ecstatic is Hannes in his newfound feelings for this girl that he rows into the bay to call out Carolin’s name over and over, both a private moment and one to be shared with the heavens� At the height of his rapturous shouts, he sees a beautiful white, puffy cloud that resembles the girl he loves. Nature has responded to his declaration of love with a signal that romantic love, with its notion of fate, remains the preferred framework for girls and boys� The Carolin-like clouds underscore Carolin’s angel-like stature in his eyes, and suggest an orgasmic emission that reminds the audience that young love is not an ephemeral emotion void of sexuality. The development of their relationship, though, remains firmly in the hands of Carolin, so that while the film depicts a boy’s dreamy love for a girl, it also tells the dreams of a girl, as one critic noted (Giera 14), which became a trend visible in the last years of DEFA girls’ films. Carolin, in a calmer manner than the untamed Sinti girl Unku, takes on the still typically female educative function in helping Hannes sort out his love for her and his jealousy of her male friend, Benno� Unlike Unku, Carolin does not abandon her suitor when he missteps, but she is relentless, insisting that he treat her as an equal in their relationship� In a twist on traditional gender roles in the giving and receiving of gifts, Carolin presents Hannes with a “pirate earring” in a final scene, a piece of gender-bending that is not quite a marriage proposal, but rather an invitation for him to continue in a relationship that radically questions gender and sexual roles. There is no hint of violence here, and their physicality is portrayed as a shared enjoyment in each other’s hearts and bodies - in an allusion to a beloved scene from Seven Freckles , Hannes even suggests she count his freckles - moving beyond playmates to a relationship predicated on definitions of late twentieth-century love and its manifestations. The change from Lisbeth as a victim of love in The Cold Heart and Carolin as a master of love could not be more decisive. The immediate postwar period had offered love lessons about a girl physically responsible for her lover’s moral well-being; Carolin taught children that girls remained in charge of the emotional work in a relationship with Love Lessons in East German Children’s Films 29 the opposite sex, but that they no longer needed to sacrifice their professional or private ambitions for boys� Despite the popularity of Carolin , girls’ films did not neatly follow a trajectory of female emancipation in the very last years of the GDR� Certainly, the same year saw the feminist film adaptation of Gisela and Bettina von Arnims’ fairy tale Gritta von Rattenzuhausbeiuns [Gritta from the Rats’ Castle] and its intimations of a girls’ society that had no need of boys in matters of love or work. But the 1987 girls’ film Hasenherz [The Coward] depicted a boyish girl who, after proving her bravery in the role of a boy in a film-within-the-film, rides away in a pink gauzy dress into the sunset on a white stallion with the boy of her dreams� To be sure, the prince-turned-princess held the reins, but as in so many other women’s and girls’ films, her foray into independence brought her back to the impossibility of love without a manly, male partner. The last months and years of the decade could not conceive of a relationship that entirely abandoned notions of traditional heterosexual romance, failing to usher in a sixth period of Kinderfilm � Still, girls and boys had more room for some experimentation within their prescribed roles� Basing themselves on such role models as the princess of How to Marry a King , girls like Carolin could more openly begin to call the shots within the private sphere, at least, having more say over their hearts and bodies� Boys and men continued to define their lives, but it was possible to teach them to do so within a more equal distribution of gender and sexual roles. Though not a triumph of socialist claims to have broken through bourgeois power dynamics, the last DEFA children’s films before the failure of socialism hinted at a shake-up of how its boys and girls would construct love and how they would use their bodies� Over the course of nearly a half-century of socialism, East German films led girls and boys through an ever-changing socio-cultural framework for understanding acceptable forms of heterosexual loving relationships� As society embraced ideas about women’s rights at work and at home, children at the movies watched love lessons about increasingly emancipatory expressions of female agency in their romantic relationships� At the same time, neither the state nor individuals entirely abandoned typically bourgeois relationship ideals, including a yearning to maintain female bodies in submission to males - with force if necessary, from the Lustmord of The Cold Heart to the humiliation of Roswitha in King Thrushbeard to admittedly less popular films like The Coward � Girls and boys thus moved in a world of feelings motivated by the dream of a highly sexualized but romantic happy ending that nonetheless acknowledged an increasing impracticality of expecting or practicing fairy tale-like relationships, in fantasy and in real life� 30 Benita Blessing Amidst the social and political upheavals of the 1980s, though, children’s filmmakers increasingly offered girls and boys lessons that attempted to address love from young people’s viewpoints within clearly changing societal attitudes about relationships. Not until 1989 did the film Coming Out show same-sex male relationships within the explicit framework of homosexuality; work remains to be done on the love lessons of same-sex relationships in children’s films, but as far as girls and boys at the cinema were concerned, first loves behind the Wall did not yet rebuff heteronormative models of love. DEFA children’s films do not tell the definitive, complex story of East German boys and girls in emotional and physical love. Viewed as part of a pedagogy specific to the cinema of the GDR, they do, though, provide invaluable insights about East German children’s love lives, as imagined and presented by adults and learned and lived by children� Notes 1 The direct translation “German Film Joint Stock Company” is deceptive, since the term referred to a postwar economic relationship specific to the GDR and the Soviet Union; in 1949 the GDR took over direct ownership of DEFA� (Allan and Heiduschke 1)� 2 Interview notes are in my possession; I have noted the year of specific interviews here� 3 Functionaries, filmmakers, and pedagogues often employed the singular form - der Kinderfilm , or der Kinderspielfilm (the children’s film, or the children’s feature film) - in theoretical and political contexts, but used the plural ( die Kinderfilme ) when considering them more broadly� I will use the German singular, der Kinderfilm , for the first case, and the English plural children’s films for the second. 4 My thanks to participants of the workshop on Gender and Sexuality at the German Studies Association 2016 meeting for helping articulate this idea� 5 The increasingly employed designation of Jugendfilm , or youth film, was included in official statistics as children’s films but portrayed adolescents who had reached puberty� Works Cited Alarm im Zirkus [Alarm at the Circus]� Dir� Gerhard Klein� DEFA, 1954� Allan, Séan, and Sebastian Heiduschke� “Re-imagining East German Cinema�” Re-Imagining DEFA . Ed. Séan Allan and Sebastian Heiduschke. New York/ Oxford: Berghahn, 2016� 1-16� Love Lessons in East German Children’s Films 31 Als Unku Edes Freundin war [When Unku was Ede’s Friend]� Dir� Helmut Dziuba� DEFA, 1981� Alsop, Rachel� Women, Work and Change in East Germany . New York/ Oxford: Berghahn, 2000� Baxter, John� Disney During World War II: How the Walt Disney Studio Contributed to Victory in the War � Glendale, CA: Disney Editions, 2014� Bell, Elizabeth, Lynda Haas, and Laura Sells, eds� From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture � Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995� Berger, Eberhard, and Joachim Giera, eds� 77 Märchenfilme: Ein Filmführer für jung und alt � Leipzig: Henschel, 1990� Blessing, Benita� “Discipline and Educate: Teaching Gender Roles in East German Fairy Tale Films�” Genesis: Rivista della Società italiana delle storiche XIII�2 (2014): 109-31� Borrmann, Rolf� Jugend und Liebe � Berlin: Urania, 1966� Coming Out � Dir� Heiner Carow� DEFA, 1989� Creech, Jennifer� Mothers, Comrades and Outcasts in East German Women’s Films � Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2016� Das kalte Herz [The Cold Heart]. Dir. Paul Verhoeven. DEFA, 1950. “Das kalte Herz�” Film-Dienst 7 Dec� 1951� Das Kleid [The Robe]. Dir. Konrad Petzold. DEFA, 1961. Davis, Belinda� Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin � Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2000� De Lauretis, Teresa� Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987� Die Geschichte vom armen Hassan [The Story of Poor Hassan]. Dir. Gerhard Klein. DEFA, 1958� Die goldene Jurte [The Golden Yurt]. Dir. Gottfried Kolditz and Rabschaa Dordschpalam. DEFA-Mongolfilm, 1961. England, Dawn Elizabeth, Lara Descartes, and Melissa A� Collier-Meek� “Gender Role Portrayal and the Disney Princesses�” Sex Roles 64�7-8 (2011): 555-67� “Gesetz über die Teilnahme der Jugend der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik am Kampf um den umfassenden Aufbau des Sozialismus und die allseitige Förderung ihrer Initiative bei der Leitung der Volkswirtschaft und des Staates, in Beruf und Schule, bei Kultur und Sport�” Gesetzblatt der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik 1964� Teil I� Berlin: Staatsverlag der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, 1964� 75� Giera, Joachim� “Ein Traum von einem Mädchen�” Filmspiegel 15 (1985): 14� Giroux, Henry A� “Memory and Pedagogy in the Wonderful World of Disney�” From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture � Ed� Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas and Laura Sells� Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995� 43-61� Gölz, Christine, Karin Hoff, and Anja Tippner, eds. Filme der Kindheit - Kindheit im Film � Frankfurt a�M�: Peter Lang, 2010� Gritta von Rattenzuhausbeiuns [Gritta from the Rats’ Castle] . Dir� Jürgen Brauer� DEFA, 1985� G�S� “Hatifa�” Neue Zeit 10 Dec� 1960� 32 Benita Blessing G�S� “Die Prinzessin als Spielmannsfrau�” Neue Zeit 30 July 1965� Günther, Egon, and Ralf Schenk� “Die verzauberte Welt� Nachdenken über Film und Politik�” apropos: Film 2000. Das Jahrbuch der DEFA-Stiftung � Ed� Ralf Schenk and Erika Richter� Berlin: Das Neue Berlin, 2000� 50-75� Hake, Sabine� “Public Figure, Political Figures, Famous Stars: Actors in DEFA Cinema and Beyond�” DEFA at the Crossroads of East German Cinema and International Film Culture � Ed� Marc Silberman and Hennig Wrage� Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014� 197-220� Hasenherz [The Coward]. Dir. Gunter Friedrich. DEFA, 1987. Hatifa � Dir� Siegried Hartmann� DEFA, 1960� Heiduschke, Sebastian� East German Cinema: DEFA and Film History � New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013� Hell, Julia� Post-Fascist Fantasies: Psychoanalysis, History and the Literature of East Germany � Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997� Herzog, Dagmar� Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany � Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2007� Irgendwo in Berlin [Somewhere in Berlin]� Dir� Gerhard Lamprecht� DEFA, 1946� Kaskade Rückwärts [Bailing Out]. Dir. Iris Gusner. DEFA, 1984. “Keine Märchenehe�” Neue Berliner Illustrierte 3 Dec� 1968� König Drosselbart [King Thrushbeard]. Dir. Walter Beck. DEFA, 1965. König, Ingelore, Dieter Wiedemann, and Lothar Wolf, eds. Zwischen Marx und Muck: DEFA-Filme für Kinder � Leipzig: Henschel, 1996� Laabs, Hans-Joachim. “Pädagogische Bemerkungen zum Kinderfilm.” Deutsche Filmkunst: Zeitschrift für Theorie und Praxis des Filmschaffens 5 (1954): 5-7� Luke, Carmen� Constructing the Child Viewer: A History of the American Discourse on Television and Children � New York: Praeger, 1999� McLellan, Josie� Love in the Time of Communism � Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2011� McLuhan, Marshall� Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man � New York: Mc- Graw-Hill, 1964� Menter, Leo. “Ein Märchen für Erwachsene.” Neue Filmwelt 50 (1950): n� pag� M.H. “König Drosselbart.” Berliner Zeitung 29 July 1965� M�H� “Die Kluge kommt aus Holland�” Der Morgen 22 Dec� 1968� Minister für Kultur, Hauptverwaltung Film. “Stellungnahme des VEB DEFA Außenhandel zu dem Film ‘Wie heiratet man einen König? ” 19 Nov. 1968. Berlin: Bundesarchiv / Filmarchiv, fol� 178, no� 280� Müller, Hermann� “Das kalte Herz�” Neues Deutschland 12 Dec� 1950� Neubert, Rudolf� Die Geschlechterfrage. Ein Buch für junge Menschen � Rudolfstadt/ Berlin: Greifenverlag, 1956� Odenwald, Ulrike. Familienalbum derer, die im DEFA-Studio für Spielfilme Filme für Kinder gemacht haben . Berlin: Trafo Wissenschaftsverlag, 2010. Pugh, Tison� Innocence, Heterosexuality and the Queerness of Children’s Literature � New York: Routledge, 2011� Schieber, Elke� “Anfang vom Ende oder Kontinuität des Argwohns�” Das zweite Leben der Filmstadt Babelsberg, 1946 - 92 � Ed� Ralf Schenk� Leipzig: Henschel, 1994� 265-327� Love Lessons in East German Children’s Films 33 Shen, Qinna� The Politics of Magic � Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2015� Sieben Sommersprossen [Seven Freckles]� Dir� Herrmann Zschoche� DEFA, 1978� Tatar, Maria� Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany � Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1995� Treber, Leonie� Mythos Trümmerfrauen: Von der Trümmerbeseitigung in der Kriegs- und Nachkriegszeit und der Entstehung eines deutschen Erinnerungsortes � Essen: Klartext, 2014� Ugowski, Karin� “Ich wollte keine Prinzessin sein�” Superillu Interviews 2006� Unser kurzes Leben [Our Short Life]. Dir. Lothar Warneke. DEFA, 1981. Urang, John Griffith. Legal Tender: Love and Legitimacy in the East German Cultural Imagination � Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2010� Wedding, Alex� Ede und Unku � Berlin: Malik, 1931� Weiße Wolke Carolin [White Cloud Carolin]� Dir� Rolf Losansky� DEFA, 1985� Weymann, Leonie, and Ewald Thoms. “Jugendliche schreiben an die DEFA.” Junge Welt 15 Dec� 1950� Wie heiratet man einen König [How to Marry a King]� Dir� Rainer Simon� DEFA, 1969� Wojik-Andrews, Ian� Children’s Films: History, Ideology, Pedagogy, Theory � New York: Routledge, 2002� Zimmermann, Susanne� Sexualpädagogik in der BRD und in der DDR im Vergleich � Gießen: Pyschosozial-Verlag, 1999� Ziob, Parick. “Die 10 erfolgreichsten Filme in Ostdeutschland (1945-1990).” Superillu 15 Jun� 2017� “Nicht so schnell! ”: Female Sexuality and Socialism in DEFA Youth Films 35 “Nicht so schnell! ”: Female Sexuality and Socialism in DEFA Youth Films Faye Stewart Georgia State University Abstract: Female sexuality in DEFA youth films comprises the two distinct yet intertwined paradigms of purity and promiscuity� In this article, I examine these two archetypes in conjunction in order to reveal their ideological significance within wider national and transnational discourses during the Cold War� My study uncovers the persistence and interdependence of the young female prude and slut in five popular DEFA youth films produced between the 1960s and the late 1980s: Joachim Hasler’s Heißer Sommer (1967); Bernhard Stephan’s Für die Liebe noch zu mager? (1973); and Herrmann Zschoche’s Sieben Sommersprossen (1978), Und nächstes Jahr am Balaton (1980), and Grüne Hochzeit (1988). In these films, the virginity and purity of young female characters are consistently aligned with socialist values and collectivism, while permissiveness or sexual experience suggest bourgeois influences and individualism. Keywords: children’s films, sexuality, virginity, Joachim Hasler, Bernhard Stephan, Herrmann Zschoche The German Democratic Republic’s commitment to producing children’s and youth films reveals its estimation of its young generations as central to envisioning socialist futures. DEFA, East Germany’s state-owned film studios, produced 160 to 200 films for and about children, adolescents, and young adults. 1 Children’s and youth films spoke to the desires and concerns of their target audiences while fulfilling political and social directives, keeping sight of their ideological mandate to promote a narrative of social progress and to shape the next generation of socialist citizens, laborers, and leaders� In addressing emerging sexual maturity for young audiences, DEFA cinema for and about youth brought discourses of nationhood and political ideologies together with 36 Faye Stewart depictions of gender, desire, and intimacy� In DEFA as in other cultural traditions, girls and young women bear the symbolic weight of signaling national strength, fecundity, and futurity� Whether in their roles as unruly daughters and rebellious teenagers; as nurturers and mothers; or as students, workers, and vacationers, female youth in East German films conveyed social hopes and anxieties while also functioning as politicized ciphers� In this study, I read female sexuality in five popular DEFA youth films as comprising two distinct yet intertwined paradigms: purity and promiscuity. These films include Joachim Hasler’s Heißer Sommer [Hot Summer] (1967); Bernhard Stephan’s Für die Liebe noch zu mager? [Too Young for Love? ] (1973); and three works by Herrmann Zschoche, Sieben Sommersprossen [Seven Freckles] (1978), its sequel Grüne Hochzeit [ Just Married] (1988), and Und nächstes Jahr am Balaton [Next Year at Lake Balaton] (1980). These patterns of young female sexuality in DEFA productions bear ideological weight within wider national and transnational discourses during the Cold War� Virginal girls are a common symbol in East German cinema for the socialist state, solidarity, and incorruptibility. Their more experienced, desirous, and seductive counterparts embody challenges to socialist morality through bourgeois values or the allure of the West� Emphasizing the persistence and interdependence of gender archetypes, this study traces continuities in sexual discourses over the last two decades of the GDR’s lifetime� Children’s and youth films can be broadly defined as productions that seek to entertain young viewers, and whose main characters are under the age of twenty. The primary texts under scrutiny here can be categorized as youth films or young adult films due to their focus on teenagers. Although they address more “adult” topics like marriage and pregnancy, they are made for young spectators, even if their target audiences are not strictly “children�” 2 The films educate viewers about love and intimacy, advancing the SED’s aims to mold the youth into productive citizens: “Teaching young people the right things about sex and relationships, for example, would result in sound marriages and happy family life� Both were essential if men and women were to contribute to the workforce, and children to be raised as confident ‘socialist personalities’” (McLellan 24)� DEFA’s youth protagonists model behaviors for their spectators as they acquire an understanding of themselves and the world within as well as beyond the GDR - an understanding that is closely intertwined with the films’ negotiations of gender, desire, and intimacy� With narratives set in the present-day GDR, these productions directed by Hasler, Stephan, and Zschoche belong to a subgenre of children’s cinema identified by Benita Blessing as the children’s everyday film and by Dieter Wiedemann as the gegenwartsorientierter Kinderfilm [children’s film oriented toward contemporary life]. The children’s everyday film is one of three main subcatego- “Nicht so schnell! ”: Female Sexuality and Socialism in DEFA Youth Films 37 ries of children’s live-action fiction cinema - alongside children’s historical and fantasy films - that are “designed to stimulate young cinema-goers to follow the protagonists’ actions and ideals” (Blessing, “Defining” 252). 3 Moviegoers also learn to eschew the behaviors of the character foils and antagonists� Due to their realistic settings, Wiedemann explains, East German productions of this genre had a strong impact that stemmed in part “aus einer Nähe zu jenen Prämissen und Regularien, die den Alltag vieler DDR-Bürgerinnen und -Bürger bis 1989 bestimmte” [from a proximity to the very premises and formalities that determined the everyday lives of many GDR citizens until 1989] (116)� Depictions of gender and sexuality in such productions are part of this bigger picture, conveying contemporary concerns about social expectations, cultural developments, and political policies that defined the lives of both children and adults in East Germany� In the cinematic culture of the GDR, the female archetypes of the virgin and the promiscuous girl were not just products of 1950s postwar morality but persisted over the decades. Idealized depictions of innocent girls in films of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s betray a lasting interest in linking young femininity with abstinence, nature, and the color white� Chaste girls become emblematic for socialist ideals, and, by extension, the socialist nation� By contrast with this ideal, youthful female promiscuity takes on pejorative hues in DEFA films, where female-embodied erotic desire is aligned with decadence, selfishness, and capitalist influences. Examining these two archetypes in conjunction reveals that the young female prude and slut are not discrete types but rather symbolically and ideologically intertwined� The virtuous girl whose origins lie in the values of the 1950s has both transnational and specifically East German significance. After World War II, traditional gender roles provided a foundation for reestablishing social order in East and West Germany: the turmoil of the war and the postwar era had compromised youth sexual integrity through disease, rape, prostitution, and lack of privacy (Fenemore, “Growing” 72-73)� Embodying a rejection of Nazi perversions of the past, girls became a screen for the projection of national fantasies of innocence and rebirth. They also represented the procreative and political future: “Their emerging sexuality was accompanied by certain obligations to the German nation that superseded individual biological or emotional desires” (Blessing, Antifascist 99)� Asserting girls’ indispensable sexuality necessitated its containment and deferral� Mark Fenemore notes that, “In both German states, girls were expected to be pretty and chaste, their grace, charm and elegance only betraying innocence and virtuousness” ( Sex 105)� Blueprints for healthy generations to come entailed depictions of girls as selfless, industrious, and devoted to their families, such as those found in the pastoral idylls of the popular West German Heimatfilm [home- 38 Faye Stewart land film] of the 1950s. Fenemore identifies hairstyles and footwear - specifically “plaits and sensible shoes” - as features of this dominant feminine paradigm ( Sex 105). Equally meaningful in DEFA’s filmic portrayals of adolescent femininity were white clothing and natural settings signaling purity and wholesomeness. The escalation of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s produced national dimensions to East German representations of girlhood. The discourse of abstinence aligned itself with Leninist and Stalinist ideologies of sacrifice and the sublimation of sexual energies for the greater social good (see Fenemore, “Growing” 80-81). The GDR distinguished itself from the FRG by heralding communalism over individualism� While Western styles and American culture in particular appealed to many a youth in East as well as West Germany, “the implications of the changes produced by Western youth culture were particularly explosive [in the GDR] because they coincided with and ran counter to a revival of traditional ideas about how young women should behave” (Fenemore, Sex 105). The SED, the GDR’s ruling party, was suspicious of styles resembling those popular in the United States or that gave the impression of exoticism or rebellion. Virtuous girls in East German media thus signaled both an affirmation of socialist values and a rejection of capitalist cultures� East German coming-of-age films celebrate this ideal feminine type. The virgin protagonists of Sieben Sommersprossen and Und nächstes Jahr am Balaton remain chaste despite their boyfriends’ and suitors’ attempts to bed them. Für die Liebe noch zu mager? also features a virgin protagonist, though she becomes sexually active by the film’s end. These films engage in sex education by acknowledging teenagers’ emotional maturity; distinguishing between love, sex, and nudity; and addressing contraception, pregnancy, and abortion. On the one hand, in celebrating virginity and true love, the films adhere to the directives of the SED’s 1963 Jugendkommuniqué [Youth Communiqué], which pushed for greater attention to adolescents’ needs and desires while embracing traditional notions of love as the basis for healthy relationships in a socialist society� 4 On the other hand, these films speak to social concerns of the 1970s, which saw increasingly open discussions about youth sexuality, a cultural shift ushered in by Erich Honecker’s accession to the GDR leadership and loosening of censorship in 1971, and East Berlin hosting the Weltfestspiele der Jugend und Studenten [World Festival of Youth and Students] in 1973� Each of the films I analyze here offers a character foil to the innocent female teenager in a sexually assertive, experienced, or permissive competitor for the affections of the male love object. In addition to promiscuity’s moral and ideological functions in characterizing feminine anti-role models, it introduces the subjects of pregnancy and young motherhood, edifying young spectators about the life-changing stakes of sex. Perhaps due to the risk of pregnancy, such films “Nicht so schnell! ”: Female Sexuality and Socialism in DEFA Youth Films 39 imply that female promiscuity is more problematic than male promiscuity� Josie McLellan notes the pervasiveness of sexual double standards: despite the GDR’s official stance embracing gender equality, girls faced higher expectations of obedience, conformity, and monogamy than boys (46-47)� While boys can have sexual relations with multiple girls without such behavior being censured or vilified, desirous or experienced girls bear the weight of social disapproval and embody warnings to young audiences� Such is the case with the promiscuous blond bombshell Brit, who causes trouble in the collective in Joachim Hasler’s 1967 blockbuster hit, Heißer Sommer � Hasler’s musical differs from the other films I analyze because its depiction of desire is considerably tamer and its social critique is less overtly sexualized than in later productions. The late 1960s were a time of increased cultural constraints, following the SED’s Eleventh Plenary of 1965 and the banning of numerous political and socially critical films. 5 True to contemporary mores, Heißer Sommer opts for conservative depictions of chaste romance, avoiding nudity or explicit sexuality. Its plot conflict revolves around the age-old rivalry between the sexes: eleven girls and ten boys journey from Leipzig to the Baltic coast, playing pranks on each other, singing popular Schlager melodies, and becoming romantically entangled along the way� 6 The GDR’s policies on gender equality comically take on mathematical proportions in the film’s cast of characters: eleven girls plus ten boys would seem to add up to one girl being left out, but when two girls - twins - flirt with the same boy, we might hope for an even outcome. However, flirty Brit entertains the affections of two boys, Wolf and Kai, leaving the film’s female lead Stupsi without a male admirer, though Stupsi clearly has feelings for Kai� Tensions, jealousy, and secrecy unfold, leading to blows between Kai and Wolf� Heißer Sommer contains drama and violence but eschews sex for good, clean, intellectual fun: Brit spends a night with Wolf in a barn, but instead of having intercourse, they recite poetry and fall asleep fully clothed� White clothing and natural settings belong to the visual vocabulary of female sexuality that Heißer Sommer shares with the later coming-of-age films I analyze here. The white jacket and pants Brit wears on her night with Wolf, which recall other white garments she has previously donned and resonate with the white beds shown in a cross-cut of the girls’s sleeping quarters, signal innocence and purity. The scene’s setting in a barn, with Brit and Wolf sleeping in the hay alongside a dog, naturalizes chastity� Heißer Sommer ’s pastoral scenery - fields, beaches, and bodies of water - suggests the inevitability of desire among teenagers, but also emphasizes their childishness and naïveté. The soundtrack further characterizes the teenagers as immature and inexperienced with songs like Chris Doerk’s “Männer, die noch keine sind” [Men Who Aren’t Yet Men] and “Was erleben” [Experience Something]� 40 Faye Stewart Hasler’s film uses female characters to dramatize a conflict between Eastern collectivism and Western individualism, warning that selfishness can cause social disruption. The cinematic grammar structures this message through visual contrasts between ensemble sequences - including the opening and closing scenes - in which the gendered groups dance and sing joyfully in unison about shared goals and experiences, and scenes emphasizing the unruly or unreciprocated desires of individuals or couples� Such framing portrays collective endeavors as producing healthier subjects and more gratifying outcomes than those that serve the needs of just one or two� Excessive self-interest and individualism were qualities that ran counter to the East German ideal type, which heroicized the quintessentially socialist values of altruism, compassion, and community-mindedness� Coupling up and treating members of the opposite sex like possessions, Heißer Sommer implies, causes friction with socialist values, a message that resonates with 1950s school bans against heterosexual relationships because they “weakened the collective spirit and lowered group morale” (Fenemore, Sex 109)� Brit’s inability to commit to either boy ultimately leads to her departure, but the musical finale shows her rejoining the collective, a utopian ending that suggests the possibility of reconciliation in a healthy socialist community� Hasler’s musical shares plot and setting elements with Zschoche’s later road movie Und nächstes Jahr am Balaton : both tell of summer adventure and romance for teenagers hitchhiking to the shores of East Germany and Bulgaria, constructing these socialist geographies as offering heaps of fun. As Sebastian Heiduschke notes, vacationing is central to Heißer Sommer ’s message: “Travel to the Baltic Sea appears to be a regular pastime for East Germany’s teenagers, thus normalizing society and putting it in line with citizens of Western nations having the freedom to travel at leisure” (89)� Indeed, excitement, passion, and beautiful scenery are close at hand within the GDR’s boundaries� Mobilizing the genres of the musical and the beach party film, the latter of which became popular in the US in the 1960s, Hasler’s blockbuster demonstrates that “young comrades could remain committed to socialist ideals while enjoying American-style pop tunes, sports, and flirtations” (Hake 135). But Heißer Sommer ’s narrative, which neither leaves the GDR nor addresses national identity, betrays its production in the 1960s, after the closing of the border with the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and the enforcement of travel restrictions� While Heißer Sommer shows innocent East German girls having fun on vacation, Stephan’s 1973 Für die Liebe noch zu mager? tells a story of sexual awakening and politicizes its female characters as laborers and nurturers rather than carefree travelers� Stephan’s protagonist, eighteen-year-old Susanne, is a productive member of socialist society: when she is not doing exemplary work in the textile plant, she participates in political demonstrations, volunteers for “Nicht so schnell! ”: Female Sexuality and Socialism in DEFA Youth Films 41 the Red Cross, and does the housework in the apartment she shares with her father and brother. But Susanne is romantically unfulfilled: as Henning Wrage notes, “the film contrasts her personal disorientation on the one hand and her unproblematic social functioning on the other” (279)� Her lack of romantic ties apparently enables her to be a model citizen� Susanne remains a virgin for most of Für die Liebe noch zu mager? , though she eventually becomes involved with her neighbor Lutz. At first Lutz does not see Susanne as a potential mate and instead gets her permissive friend Daisy pregnant. After several unsuccessful attempts to gain Lutz’s affections, Susanne lashes out, losing the respect of her coworkers, who tear down a picture on the factory bulletin board heralding Susanne as “eine unserer Besten” [one of our best]. Unfulfilled sexual desire, it seems, engenders unproductive behavior, causing problems in the workplace. However, both matters are soon resolved: Susanne’s supervisor defends her and rehangs the article, Susanne gets back to work, and Lutz finally reciprocates Susanne’s affection. A montage of shots of Susanne and Lutz at play and at work - the two going places together, Susanne enjoying the attention of other men, Lutz working as a plumber, Susanne in a first aid class, and a close-up of the spindles at the textile plant - links their romantic bliss and Susanne’s desirability with productive and gratifying labor� But this harmonic state is short-lived, as Lutz soon leaves to join a freight ship crew: he wants to travel, especially to socialist Cuba and Vietnam, though he is open to stopping in Western or Middle Eastern locales like London, Brussels, and Alexandria too. It seems fitting that the boy who wears “echte Levi’s” [real Levi’s] - an indicator of Western capitalism and individualism - should leave the GDR and the East German girl who loves him to see the world� Lutz’s wanderlust appears selfish in contrast with Susanne’s guilelessness, loyalty, and charity, which come across as the more desirable socialist qualities. The final sequence, a shot-reverse-shot of Susanne looking at the photo of herself on the factory bulletin board, shows that she has blossomed into a confident woman, reconciling self-knowledge with her social (and socialist) engagements� White garments and natural settings figure centrally in the virgin’s character development in Für die Liebe noch zu mager? , as well as in Zschoche’s later teenage dramas. In Stephan’s film, white clothing announces Susanne’s chastity: she often wears white or pink while she is a virgin - we first meet her in a white dress and off-white sweater; in later scenes, she wears a white jacket, blouse, underclothes, and shoes - but prefers more colorful attire after becoming sexually active� Some of Susanne’s white clothes have colorful collars and embellishments along the hems, which create visual links to the white leotard with a red neckline worn by champion Soviet gymnast Olga Korbut, whom Susanne watches on television. White apparel thus acquires political signifi- 42 Faye Stewart cance, signaling a connection between innocence, strength, and socialism. The sequence showing Korbut’s celebratory pose after her gold-medal performance in the 1972 Summer Olympics precedes the film’s dramatic climax and resolution, foreshadowing Susanne’s victory in the tacit competition with her friend and coworker Daisy for Lutz’s attention: if Susanne works hard, she will win her trophy. Keeping her eye on the prize also means that Susanne must fend off advances from other boys. Before becoming involved with Lutz, Susanne briefly entertains the affections of another boy, Martin, who takes her into a wooded area where they fool around� Susanne initially shows interest, removing her pale pink dress to reveal white underclothes� But when Martin tells Susanne to close her eyes, she realizes that he is not the boy she wants to see atop her and pushes him away� In this scene as well as the later scene in which Susanne loses her virginity to Lutz, natural settings imply innocence and purity. Exiting the thicket alone after her flirtation with Martin in Für die Liebe noch zu mager? , Susanne rubs a fistful of grass over her face and neck, as if to cleanse herself. The lush outdoor setting naturalizes Susanne’s decision to abstain, though in ensuing scenes with Lutz, arboreal backdrops do the opposite, establishing their intimacy as natural because she has loved him all along, waiting patiently for him to reciprocate her feelings� In what Sabine Hake characterizes as a “provocative portrayal of the ambiguities of desire,” the film celebrates Susanne’s initial abstinence as well as her later deflowering (143). It is in the woods, where Susanne has followed Lutz to work, that he sees her as a sexual being for the first time, admiring her curves. The next scene shows their first sexual encounter in a greenhouse filled with exotic plants where Lutz works on the plumbing. Amid low-hanging vines and against the aural backdrop of an educational nature tour introducing the greenhouse’s exotic species in a voiceover, Susanne and Lutz fall into each other’s arms and disappear among the foliage, as if they were part of the nature story we hear amplified overhead. Juxtaposed with their implied sex act, the nature narrative in the voiceover reads as a parody of contemporary sex education: “Even when it was taught in schools, observers felt that it was not tackled early enough or with enough focus on human beings, as opposed to plants and animals” (Fenemore, “Growing” 83)� Just as the woods previously served as a fitting milieu for the preservation of Susanne’s virginity, so too do they now set the stage for her to give it to her true love. The film’s discourse of love aligns itself with contemporary ideologies about youth sexuality that “sex between young people who loved each other could not be wrong, whether or not they were married” (McLellan 26). It also fits with the post-reunification romantic narrative that “the GDR had enabled a natural, uncommercialised sexuality, unsullied by the demands of capitalism” (McLellan 206). Stephan’s filmic ending “Nicht so schnell! ”: Female Sexuality and Socialism in DEFA Youth Films 43 implicitly celebrates the GDR as a fitting milieu for girlhood to flourish into womanhood without sullying socialist values� Susanne’s coworker and confidante Daisy is her promiscuous counterpart in Für die Liebe noch zu mager? Like Brit in Heißer Sommer , Daisy only considers her own needs and desires, selfishly ignoring those of her female friend. We first meet Daisy when Susanne confesses to her that she has a crush on Lutz� Daisy ignores Susanne’s declaration, responding only that she had a fling with him. She seems startlingly uninterested in Susanne’s hopes and dreams, which comes as no surprise, given that the English name “Daisy” points toward foreignness, evoking beauty and ephemerality� Daisy’s pregnancy is central to the film’s socialist moral. Daisy already has one child (whose father is apparently not around) and claims to be pregnant by Lutz, though she is also sleeping with Susanne’s brother (who could presumably be the father)� Lutz is willing to take responsibility for the pregnancy, prompting Daisy to fantasize about respectable family life, but there is no indication that they genuinely care for each other or that the relationship will last� Daisy - who, among the girls I analyze here, most closely exemplifies a “slut” in her promiscuity - embodies a warning about what can happen to East German girls who sleep around: lasciviousness and young motherhood inhibit her full social development� By contrast with Daisy, Susanne becomes more fully integrated into the socialist collective through her relationship with Lutz, but this is only made possible when Daisy opts for an abortion, thus renouncing her claim on Lutz. With the decadent Daisy as a character foil, the film heroicizes Susanne’s selflessness in helping the friend who slept with the boy Susanne loves. Susanne collects money from their work brigade and - despite a jealous outburst that culminates in Susanne devouring the chocolates her coworkers bought for Daisy - visits Daisy in the abortion clinic, bearing flowers and apples. By dramatizing the social taboo surrounding abortion but refraining from heavy-handed moralizing against Daisy, Für die Leibe noch zu mager? evokes sympathy for her and celebrates a liberal, worker-friendly GDR, where abortion had been permitted under certain conditions since 1965 and available to all since 1972, a year before this film’s release (see McLellan 62-64). By showcasing the accessibility of abortion, the film gestures toward the GDR’s progressiveness vis-à-vis the West; in combination with access to childcare, financial independence, and job opportunities, abortion rights factored into East German women’s overall ambivalence toward feminism (see Herzog 81, 84)� In West Germany, by contrast, the early 1970s saw widespread feminist campaigns for abortion law reform, a battle that was ongoing as Stephan’s film appeared. Susanne exemplifies community-minded socialist values by showing compassion for the friend with an 44 Faye Stewart unplanned pregnancy, while the unflinching depiction of abortion underscores the GDR’s support of women’s emancipation� By contrast with the girls of Stephan’s film, the female main characters of Herrmann Zschoche’s dramas Sieben Sommersprossen and Und nächstes Jahr am Balaton refrain from having sex. Zschoche’s films share themes with Heißer Sommer , celebrating chastity and following parallel arcs narrating teenagers’ romantic adventures on summer vacation: Sieben Sommersprossen ’s fourteenyear-old Karoline and fifteen-year-old Robert attend summer camp in rural East Germany, while Und nächstes Jahr am Balaton ’s eighteenor nineteen-year-old Ines and Jonas travel separately across Eastern Europe. The age of consent for heterosexual sex in the GDR was fourteen, and Zschoche’s films assert that their teenaged protagonists are mature enough to make decisions about sex� Participating in dominant East German discourses of the 1960s and 1970s, these works tame the perceived threat of youth sexuality by connecting it with love and self-awareness (McLellan 26-32)� Teenagers Karoline and Ines are innocent but not naïve: they know their boyfriends desire intimacy and can get it elsewhere, but they refuse to do anything they are not ready for� Authority figures like the teenagers’ parents are neither role models nor positive influences, instead representing unhealthy or repressive attitudes towards sex and relationships� Such scenarios echo the sentiments of East German sexologist Rudolf Neubert, who suggested in the 1960s that parents and teachers might be in greater need of sexual enlightenment than their children (cited in Fenemore, “Growing” 83). The adults’ troubled approaches to sex and relationships correspond with their apparent belonging to the Nazi generation and are set into relief against “popular values [in the GDR], which simply saw sex as the customary way to express love” (Herzog 73)� Glimpses into Karoline’s and Robert’s parents’ lives touch on divorce, neglect, alcoholism, and materialism; and the camp director in Sieben Sommersprossen attempts to suppress any cultural influences that might give the teenagers ideas about love and sex, including a performance of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet � Ines’s parents in Und nächstes Jahr am Balaton are a paradigm of dysfunction: the meddlesome mother and her browbeaten husband seem most at ease when they are apart� Mother Irene is exceedingly interested in her daughter’s budding sexual maturity, and her attempts to encourage it (by inviting Jonas to spend the night) or contain it (by pushing Ines and Jonas to wear engagement rings on their trip) construct her as controlling, intrusive, and overly concerned about appearances. Through such adult characters, the films dismiss bourgeois attitudes in favor of open discussion about sex, while at the same time celebrating abstinence in a sort of strategic prudery� “Nicht so schnell! ”: Female Sexuality and Socialism in DEFA Youth Films 45 Zschoche’s critically acclaimed romance dramas celebrate Karoline’s and Ines’s embracement of chastity as appropriate and natural� Zschoche’s directorial choices, such as the use of natural settings, nudity, and white clothing, underline this message. Notably, both films feature scenes in which naked and desirous teenagers in pastoral settings appear to be on the verge of having sex but then do not. The best-known sequence in the 1978 Sieben Sommersprossen puts nature, nudity, and abstinence on full display: Karoline and Robert spend a day together in the camp’s rural environs, during which they undress, swim in a river, run through tall grass, and lie naked in a field discussing sex. Their nudity is neither problematic nor transgressive but matter-of-fact, confirming McLellan’s claim that, “by the 1970s and 1980s, nude bathing had been refigured in official discourse as a symbol of a young, forward-looking East Germany” (167). Equally progressive is the film’s frank treatment of sex. Karoline is a virgin but not a prude: though Robert suggests they could get married (likely an attempt to seduce her), she wants to wait. As this scenario indicates, the virgin girl archetype of postwar East German culture - Fenemore observes that, “[t]o preserve their ‘freshness and purity,’ impulses and desires had to be controlled and repressed” ( Sex 105) - persisted for decades, well into the 1970s� As in Für die Liebe noch zu mager? and Und nächstes Jahr am Balaton , the female partner in Sieben Sommersprossen bears the burden of saying no to sex� Karoline wants to be with Robert, but not at the cost of making hasty or risky choices; moreover, she’d like to finish her studies before becoming a bride. This resonates with Dagmar Herzog’s assertion that, “[i]n the East, discussion of sex was seen […] as a means for orienting people toward the future” (73)� In line with socialist ideology, Karoline wants to prepare for a future not just as a wife and mother, but also as a member of the workforce� Sieben Sommersprossen implies that the GDR’s young citizens will build a better foundation for the socialist future if they exercise self-control and wait until they are older for sex and marriage. The film thus indirectly addresses the high rates of young marriage and divorce in the GDR, due in part to housing shortages and the challenges of finding apartments for young couples and families (see McLellan 54-55, 78-80). If it is difficult to draw a more overt political message from Zschoche’s film, this is because, in the words of Wrage, it “reveal[s] a significant disconnect between the demands of the political and the needs of private life, a form of alienation or even schizophrenia that was indeed typical for the later years of everyday life in East Germany” (279). The nude scene’s idyllic setting isolates the teenagers from their social environment and naturalizes Karoline’s virginity and self-awareness, resonating with two intertwined discourses that McLellan identifies as pervasive in the GDR: on the one hand, ideas about nudity as both close to nature and distinct from sex, and on 46 Faye Stewart the other hand, trends in erotic art of naturalizing nudity by locating it outdoors (160-62, 180-83)� Citing Ina Merkel, Wolfgang Engler points to a disconnect between nudity and eroticism in DEFA films: “Die Nacktheit, gekoppelt mit profanen Gesten, soll am Ende enterotisierend wirken” [Nudity, coupled with profane gestures, should, in the end, be de-eroticized] (cited in Engler 267). The scene ends in comedy: Karoline and Robert discover that the clothes they left on the river bank before swimming have been stolen by mischievous boys, and, in desperation, they don the women’s undergarments they find hanging on a nearby clothesline. Desexualized by this comical feminine attire - both are in white underwear or sleepwear: Robert sports white one-piece bloomers bearing pink bows and Karoline wears a modest white nightgown - the teenagers return to the camp, where they channel their desire for each other into a performance of Romeo and Juliet with them in the starring roles. The substitution of literature for intimacy recalls the barn scene in Heißer Sommer , when Brit and Wolf recite poetry instead of copulating� Young love, we learn from these scenarios, is purest when it can be disentangled from sex and flourish without erotic baggage, and what better place to nurture it than in the youths’ paradise of the GDR? Zschoche’s youth films celebrate female virginity and young love, with seductive and sexually experienced girls embodying anxieties over bourgeois preoccupations and capitalist influences. Marlene in Sieben Sommersprossen is Karoline’s sexually experienced counterpart who poses a bigger danger to Karoline than to their shared male love interest, Robert. Coming from a more affluent family than the working-class Karoline, whose alcoholic single mother struggles to support three daughters (one of whom is herself a single mother), Marlene feels entitled to both the starring role in Romeo and Juliet and the affections of Robert, the cutest boy in the camp� When Marlene senses that Robert’s interests lie elsewhere, she manipulates the situation by attempting to sabotage his budding relationship with Karoline� Feigning kindness to Karoline, Marlene is doubly decadent by offering Karoline birth control pills and then reporting her to the camp director for having the pills. Through their alignment with Marlene, the pills - implying her previous sexual experience and casualness towards intimacy - serve less to educate young viewers about contraception than to warn of the risks inherent in sexual activity. Marlene personifies selfishness, bourgeois entitlement, and decadence, and her unscrupulous behavior is a warning to East Germans about Western corruption with money, sex, and deceit� But, true to the socialist values heralding humility and the working class, Karoline ultimately wins the boy and gets to play Juliet, while Marlene almost gets ejected from the camp for her duplicity� Und nächstes Jahr am Balaton resonates with Heißer Sommer and Sieben Sommersprossen in depicting young East Germans flirting on vacation, but unlike “Nicht so schnell! ”: Female Sexuality and Socialism in DEFA Youth Films 47 their predecessors, the protagonists of Zschoche’s 1980 road movie leave the boundaries of the GDR� Und nächstes Jahr am Balaton shows viewers that other socialist countries offer adventure without posing too great a threat to a girl’s well-being, integrity, or virginity� When teenaged lovers Ines and Jonas’s plans to travel together from Berlin to the Black Sea coast are derailed by an argument with Ines’s parents, Ines journeys across Eastern Europe alone and arrives safely at her destination� Ines wears the same demure long-sleeved white blouse and long skirt throughout the voyage, except for one scene in which she is shown alone and restless in her hotel room in white undergarments, the white blouse hanging beside her� Like in Für die Liebe noch zu mager? , the white bra and panties in Und nächstes Jahr am Balaton signal innocence, foreshadowing Ines’s enduring chastity: they echo the strikingly similar underwear of another East German girl whom Jonas attempts to seduce and who turns him down in an earlier scene. Ines too meets a potential fling on her voyage, a Bulgarian boy in Nesebar who invites her into his untidy seaside shack, where he halfheartedly attempts to straighten up, picking up a dark-colored bra hanging over a chair and tossing it out of sight. The abandoned bra signals promiscuity and stands in contrast with Ines’s bright white underwear from the hotel scene� Ines’s Bulgarian suitor speaks little German, but some words are easily understood: he mentions flirting, adventure, and romance, evoking an exotic image of the Black Sea and the excitement it holds for visitors, while also spelling out his intentions� As the boy undresses, Ines runs away, preserving her virginity. Though the Bulgarian tries to seduce Ines, he presents no real threat, and, having shown her the way to her hotel, he has already been more helpful than harmful. Through crosscutting, the film creates parallel scenes of Jonas and his friends having positive experiences with helpful locals too, generous Poles and Hungarians who offer them food, rides, and shelter. East German coming-of-age films place the responsibility of abstaining on their female protagonists� While boys seem ready for intimacy at almost any time, it is the girls who repeatedly say no� Perhaps the greatest menace to Ines’s agency and integrity is not the foreigners but rather her boyfriend Jonas, who is eager to have sex after dating for five months. In Und nächstes Jahr am Balaton ’s opening scene, Ines gets angry with Jonas for being too physically assertive� Despite this, the two purchase a tent together for their upcoming vacation, a transaction that implies Ines’s equal footing with Jonas in the relationship and her openness to becoming more intimate� However, the prospect of intimacy never materializes, as they spend most of the story apart and only meet again at the end, when Ines finds a naked Jonas in their tent with another girl, Shireen. Ines is furious, though the film’s conclusion points toward reconciliation. She meets Jonas again on a beach, where she hands him his watch, as if to suggest 48 Faye Stewart that, if he can wait until the time is right, she will reward him with intimacy� Here as in other scenes, the backdrop of the sea naturalizes both their youthful passions and Ines’s abstinence� Depicting Eastern Europe as an expansive recreation area replete with stunning landscapes, unexpected adventures, and intercultural exchanges, Zschoche’s film advances an image of the Soviet Bloc as an exciting yet safe travel destination� Like its musical predecessor Heißer Sommer , Und nächstes Jahr am Balaton “convey[s] the message of a happy young generation of East Germans on summer vacation” by celebrating the lands behind the Iron Curtain as “presenting young people with an abundance of opportunities” (Heiduschke 89, 88)� Indeed, as both the dialogue and imagery suggest in Und nächstes Jahr am Balaton , Eastern Europe offers breathtaking views and titillating diversions that rival those of the Swiss Alps and the Mediterranean Sea� Ines’s rival, the Dutch Shireen, is explicitly linked with the West through her nationality� Moreover, her decadence is sexualized when she tries to seduce Jonas as they hitchhike across Eastern Europe together: two scenes show the two unclothed youths on the verge of having sex. Despite Jonas’s attraction to Shireen, they are not meant to be together and never consummate the act: “Wenn zwei nackte Körper miteinander im Bett zu sehen sind …, dann handelt es sich nicht um wirklich echte Liebe, sondern es wird gerade fremdgegangen” [When two naked bodies are seen in bed together …, then it’s not a matter of real, true love, but rather of unfaithfulness] (Merkel cited in Engler 267, ellipsis in the original)� But unlike the virgin teenagers in Sieben Sommersprossen whose innocent and unassuming nudity I discuss above, Shireen conflates nudity with sex and undresses primarily to tempt Jonas; the Dutch girl’s nakedness thus signals hedonism and egocentrism. Shireen’s attempts to seduce Jonas are unsuccessful, the first because Jonas says he is unable, and the second is interrupted by Ines’s arrival. These disruptions resonate with Fenemore’s assertion that, in the view of the SED, “[y]oung people required prophylactics not only against unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases, but also against the corrupting influence of the West” (“Growing” 85). The film’s ending diffuses this threat by sending Shireen away: she heads to India to explore tantric philosophy, while Jonas stays in Bulgaria to reunite with the chaste Ines� In Und nächstes Jahr am Balaton , nature plays a more nuanced role in constructing female sexuality than in the other films I study here. In combination with Shireen’s exaggerated Dutch accent and frequent citation of tantric aphorisms, her white blouse, unpretentious appearance, and fondness for nature come across as constructed, deceptive, and hollow� Shireen’s idealization of the “naturalness” of local agrarians - “Ich fühle, dass die Menschen hier unverdorben sind, ursprünglich und bescheiden” [I feel that the people here are unspoiled, primal, and humble] - simultaneously valorizes Eastern Europe and “Nicht so schnell! ”: Female Sexuality and Socialism in DEFA Youth Films 49 constructs Shireen as shallow and trite. Shots of peasants steering boats, fishing, and working in the background as she utters these words create a visual contrast with Shireen’s leisurely bourgeois posture as she rides down the river in one of their watercraft, exoticizing their labor and simplicity. Moreover, Shireen’s interest in Buddhist traditions and attempts to appeal to Jonas with tantric mantras read as thinly veiled warnings against the seductive allure of foreign ideas and indoctrination, especially given the SED’s suspicious view of religion altogether� Based on Joachim Walther’s 1975 East German novel Ich bin nun mal kein Yogi [I’m Just Not a Yogi], Zschoche’s film (like the title of the book that inspired it) conveys a preference for Eastern European geographies and cultures over those of other regions� Zschoche’s 1988 film Grüne Hochzeit figures as the more mature and insular sequel to Sieben Sommersprossen , narrating the challenges of young marriage and parenthood� Grüne Hochzeit picks up the story of the romance between Robert and Karoline three years later, but with new actors in the roles - and Karoline’s name inexplicably changed to Susanne. The teenagers are still madly in love, but after Susanne gets pregnant at seventeen, she and Robert marry and struggle to raise twin babies on a tight budget. Zschoche’s film educates young audiences about sex and its consequences: if at first Susanne and Robert share tender moments in bed together, we soon see them fighting, each holding a baby, over the copy of Kamasutra they received as a wedding gift. By stressing the couple’s difficulties, the film confronts its viewers with the risks of sex: teenagers may feel physically ready for intimacy, but are they emotionally mature enough to handle pregnancy and parenthood? The challenges of marriage and child-rearing prove almost too great for Robert and Susanne, who have affairs and temporarily separate before reconciling at the film’s end. Both Robert’s and Susanne’s affairs are fleeting, but the contrast between their lovers and the selfish behavior of Robert’s paramour Jeanine girds the film’s moral framework� Grüne Hochzeit casts Robert’s lover, the outgoing Jeanine, in a negative light in comparison with both Susanne and Susanne’s caring lover Paul� Paul gains the viewer’s sympathy by helping Susanne with home repairs and childcare, while Jeanine, who works as a runway model and aspires to be a seamstress, is always exercising, dancing, or on the go, coming across as vain and superficial. In opposition to Robert’s wife Susanne, who dresses modestly in loose-fitting clothes (and, especially in the first half of the film, often in white), his lover Jeanine wears high-end fashions (usually including at least one black garment), jewelry, and an exotic hairstyle of beaded braids� Jeanine’s personal and professional engagements link her to bourgeois assets and foreign interests: she lives alone in a nice apartment, financed by a divorced father who works in Africa, and travels to Hungary and Bulgaria to model in fashion shows. Though 50 Faye Stewart she works in Eastern Bloc countries rather than the capitalist fashion centers of Paris, London, or Milan, her style choices resonate with current trends in western music and popular culture� While Fenemore maintains that in the GDR of the 1950s and 1960s, “[o]vert interest in Western music or fashion was enough to condemn young women as sexually promiscuous” ( Sex 23), this was no longer the case in the late Honecker era� In the mid to late 1980s, when an ever wider range of consumer and western products were available in state-run Intershops, Jeanine’s fashion choices have less explicit moral implications� For contemporary viewers, Jeanine’s interest in style and appearances might subtly caution against conflating the increasing availability and allure of consumer goods in the GDR with the socialist principles on which it was founded. The last scene in which Jeanine appears exposes her duplicity and frivolity: Jeanine reveals to Robert that she hid a letter from his wife and then attempts to distract him through seduction, spraying gold glitter on herself. But Robert sees through her ruse: all that glitters is not gold, and he leaves his lover to return to his wife and their twins, who are aptly named Romeo and Juliet� Ending on a hopeful note for their reconciliation, the film celebrates true love over superficial sexual attraction. Grüne Hochzeit ’s moral might be encapsulated in the three words a very pregnant Susanne exclaims on the ride to her wedding: “Nicht so schnell! ” [Not so fast! ] The message that teenagers should approach sex, marriage, and child-bearing slowly and carefully comes across in all of the DEFA youth films discussed here. This cinematic theme is remarkably consistent over time, despite the increasingly complex gendering of social responsibility in the late GDR� When viewed alongside the playfulness and nuance of Stephan’s and Zschoche’s earlier productions, Grüne Hochzeit ’s heavy-handedness seems at odds with sociocultural developments� It also comes across as formulaic and outdated in comparison with the contemporary documentary Winter Adé [Farewell to Winter] (dir. Helke Misselwitz, 1988), which offers “a collage of women’s voices that resists any singular narrative of gender in the GDR” (Creech 221)� Indeed, perhaps Grüne Hochzeit ’s schematic depiction of female sexuality is evidence of the limitations and stagnation of the youth film genre under the weight of East German political and pedagogical imperatives in late socialism� Sex and political symbolism were intimately intertwined in East German films for youth audiences. Virgin girls were to be understood and emulated as paradigms of socialism, while promiscuous or permissive girls exemplified the alluring yet decidedly negative qualities of selfishness, greediness, and foreignness� By analyzing these prescribed and deviant feminine roles together, I have fashioned a cultural history of the GDR through youth sexuality from the late 1960s to the late 1980s. The gendered paradigms of feminine virginity and per- “Nicht so schnell! ”: Female Sexuality and Socialism in DEFA Youth Films 51 missiveness are embedded within a wide-reaching cultural-ideological matrix, and they take politicized forms in many other East German films beyond those analyzed here. Other DEFA productions show innocent girls in white dresses, such as Sabine Kleist, 7 Jahre [Sabine Kleist, Age 7] (dir� Helmut Dziuba, 1982)� White attire also stresses naïveté and youthful optimism with young adult female characters, like in Bis daß der Tod euch scheidet [Until Death Do Us Part] (dir� Heiner Carow, 1978) and Unser kurzes Leben [Our Short Life] (dir. Lothar Warneke, 1980). Further DEFA films explore promiscuity, premarital sex, and pregnancy through female figures’ experiences of community, labor, and solidarity; examples include Frauenschicksale [Destinies of Women] (dir� Slatan Dudow, 1952), Berlin-Ecke Schönhauser [Berlin-Schönhauser Corner] (dir. Gerhard Klein, 1957), and Jana und Jan [ Jana and Jan] (dir� Helmut Dziuba, 1991)� My analysis of youth films from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s suggests that East German sexual culture was perhaps more repressive than progressive, at least if we measure such attitudes by the sexualities of its young fictional female figures. Such a claim partially resonates with the work of Josie McLellan, who has demonstrated that, while women’s social roles were widely debated and evolved over the GDR’s lifetime, there was little “discussion of how changing gender roles challenged traditional notions of masculinity and femininity” (14)� However, while McLellan argues for an understanding of “the changes […] in East German sexuality” as “revolutionary” (21), my study instead suggests that, with respect to young and especially female subjects, filmic depictions of sexual mores remained comparatively rigid, falling out of step with social changes� Despite the vastly transformed lived experiences of and gendered expectations for East German girls and women from the 1960s to the 1980s, coming-of-age films unwaveringly assigned responsibility for nurturing future socialist generations to female characters in terms of abstinence, true love, marriage, and fidelity. For at least the last two decades of the GDR, girl spectators would learn that the best way to approach sexuality was by hitting the brakes: “Nicht so schnell! ” Notes 1 Estimates of the number of children’s and youth films DEFA made from 1946 to 1992 are approximate, due to the challenges of defining the genre. Dieter Wiedemann and Benita Blessing enumerate these challenges, with Wiedemann indicating that there were over 200, including some 160 to 180 feature films (111), while Blessing cites the lower figure of 160 (“DEFA” 244; “Defining” 252). For more on the difficulties of labeling the genre, see Stefan Röske 53-60. 52 Faye Stewart 2 In a study of children’s films coauthored by Bernd Sahling, Klaus-Dieter Felsmann describes productions like Für die Liebe noch zu mager? and Sieben Sommersprossen as films “mit Blick auf ältere Kinder” [with an eye to older children], setting them apart from those made for younger child audiences (32)� 3 These categories do not include documentaries or animated films, which DEFA also made for children. The three subgenres Blessing identifies have been the focus of most scholarship on East German children’s cinema� Röske concurs that these are “die drei wesentlichen Genres” [the three basic genres] in his study of everyday and historical children’s films by Helmut Dziuba (49)� Blessing’s “‘Films to Give Kids Courage! ’” analyzes all three types, while Wiedemann discusses everyday films and fairy tales in his essay. Additional scholarship on the fairy tale film includes Sebastian Heiduschke, East German Cinema 53-59; Christin Niemeyer, “Between Magic and Education”; and Qinna Shen, The Politics of Magic � 4 The Jugendkommuniqué refers to a Walter Ulbricht speech that was published as Jugend von heute - Hausherren von morgen: Kommuniqué des Politbüros des ZK der SED zu Problemen der Jugend in der DDR (1963)� For the history, content, and impact of the Jugendkommuniqué , see McLellan 25-26; Fenemore, Sex 167-68; and Herzog 74-75� 5 For more on the film censorship, the Eleventh Plenary, and their effects on film production, see Creech 55-58; Hake 128-40; and Heiduschke 77-83. 6 Schlager is an upbeat, sentimental pop music genre with roots in the Weimar era, which underwent a revival with the success of homegrown rock ’n’ roll stars in East and West Germany of the 1960s and 70s� Music was central to Heißer Sommer ’s blockbuster success, as two of the leading roles were played by the East German pop stars Chris Doerk (Stupsi) and Frank Schöbel (Kai), who sang many of the songs on its soundtrack. Works Cited Blessing, Benita� The Antifascist Classroom: Denazification in Soviet-Occupied Germany, 1945-1949 � New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006� —� “DEFA Children’s Films: Not Just for Children�” DEFA at the Crossroads of East German and International Film Culture: A Companion � Ed� Marc Silberman and Henning Wrage� Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014� 243-62� —� “‘Films to Give Kids Courage! ’: Children’s Films in the German Democratic Republic�” Family Films in Global Cinema: The World beyond Disney � Ed� Noel Brown and Bruce Babington� London: I�B� Tauris, 2015� 155-70� “Nicht so schnell! ”: Female Sexuality and Socialism in DEFA Youth Films 53 —. “Defining Socialist Children’s Films, Defining Socialist Childhoods.” Re-Imagining DEFA: East German Cinema in Its National and Transnational Contexts � Ed� Seán Allan and Sebastian Heiduschke� New York: Berghahn, 2016� 248-67� Creech, Jennifer L� Mothers, Comrades, and Outcasts in East German Women’s Films � Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2016� Engler, Wolfgang� Die Ostdeutschen: Kunde von einem verlorenen Land � Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1999� Felsmann, Klaus-Dieter, and Bernd Sahling� Deutsche Kinderfilme aus Babelsberg: Werkstattgespräche - Rezeptionsräume . Berlin: DEFA-Stiftung, 2010. Fenemore, Mark. “The Growing Pains of Sex Education in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), 1945-69�” Shaping Sexual Knowledge: A Cultural History of Sex Education in Twentieth Century Europe. Ed� Lutz D� H� Sauerteig and Roger Davidson� New York: Routledge, 2009� 71-90� —� Sex, Thugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll: Teenage Rebels in Cold-War East Germany � New York: Berghahn, 2007� Hake, Sabine� German National Cinema � 2 nd ed� New York: Routledge, 2008� Heiduschke, Sebastian� East German Cinema: DEFA and Film History � New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013� Herzog, Dagmar� “East Germany’s Sexual Evolution�” Socialist Modern: East German Everyday Culture and Politics . Ed. Katherine Pence and Paul Betts. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2008� 71-95� McLellan, Josie� Love in the Time of Communism: Intimacy and Sexuality in the GDR � Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2011� Niemeyer, Christin. “Between Magic and Education: The First Fairy Tale Films in the GDR�” Cinema in Service of the State: Perspectives on Film Culture in the GDR and Czechoslovakia, 1945-1960 � Ed� Lars Karl and Pavel Skopal� New York: Berghahn, 2015� 189-204� Röske, Stefan. Der jugendliche Blick: Helmut Dziubas Spielfilme im letzten Jahrzehnt der DEFA . Berlin: DEFA-Stiftung, 2006. Shen, Qinna� The Politics of Magic: DEFA Fairy-Tale Films � Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2015� Wiedemann, Dieter. “Der DEFA-Kinderfilm: Zwischen Resteverwertung und Politikdiskursen - Überlegungen zum Umgang mit einem Kulturerbe.” Kindheit und Film: Geschichte, Themen und Perspektiven des Kinderfilms in Deutschland � Ed� Horst Schäfer and Claudia Wegener. Munich: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft, 2009. 111-24. Wrage, Henning� “DEFA Films for the Youth: National Paradigms, International Influences.” DEFA at the Crossroads of East German and International Film Culture: A Companion � Ed� Marc Silberman and Henning Wrage� Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014� 263-80� 54 Faye Stewart Films Cited Für die Liebe noch zu mager? [Too Young for Love? ]� Dir� Bernhard Stephan� DEFA, 1973� Grüne Hochzeit [ Just Married]� Dir� Herrmann Zschoche� DEFA, 1988� Heißer Sommer [Hot Summer]� Dir� Joachim Hasler� DEFA, 1967� Sieben Sommersprossen [Seven Freckles]� Dir� Herrmann Zschoche� DEFA, 1978� Und nächstes Jahr am Balaton [Next Year Lake Balaton]� Dir� Herrmann Zschoche� DEFA, 1980� Who’s Afraid of Angela Davis? : An American Icon and the Political Uses of Youth Literature in the GDR5 5 Who’s Afraid of Angela Davis? : An American Icon and the Political Uses of Youth Literature in the GDR Ada Bieber Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin Abstract: In the early 1970s, Angela Davis was an iconic figure in the GDR, nowhere more so than among youth. The press supported solidarity campaigns for Davis, mainly organized by the FDJ (Free German Youth)� Against the backdrop of Davis’s imprisonment in 1970 and her trial in 1971-72, journalistic and fictional writing as well as radio plays appeared for a young audience. The article compares the ways in which Davis appears as a political figure in literature for youth, and argues that literary portraits were dominantly shaped through the ideological discourse of antifascism and the interest to inveigh against the politics of the USA� By examining texts that were originally addressed towards young audiences or reissued for them, the article gives an account of different generic texts such as Maximilian Scheer’s radio play Der Weg nach San Rafael: Für Angela Davis (1971), the youth novel Schwarze Rose aus Alabama (1972) by Werner Lehmann, and the travelogue Unterwegs zu Angela (1973) by the German-Australian writer Walter Kaufmann� Also included are narrations in magazines such as Bummi (1973) and Neues Leben (1971; 1973). The article shows that all examples served ideological images that were communicated to youth, while distracting from Davis’s radical call for freedom of all people� Keywords: Angela Davis, GDR children’s literature, antifascist youth literature, Maximilian Scheer, Walter Kaufmann, German-Australian literature, Junge Welt, Bummi In the early 1970s, Angela Davis was an iconic figure in the GDR, nowhere more so than among youth. The press, including youth-directed publications like Junge Welt, supported solidarity campaigns for Davis, mainly organized by the FDJ (Freie Deutsche Jugend) [Free German Youth]. The major FDJ campaign, 56 Ada Bieber Eine Millionen Rosen für Angela [One Million Roses for Angela], called upon GDR citizens, and in particular young people, to send postcards of solidarity ( Solidaritätsschreiben ), decorated with flowers, to Davis in San Rafael prison, as well as postcards of protest ( Protestschreiben ) to President Nixon and Governor Reagan to demand freedom for Davis ( Kämpft Angela Davis frei 45-46)� 1 As Maria Höhn and Martin Klimke observe, “East German citizens signed petitions on Davis’s behalf, collected ‘solidarity donations’ for Free Angela Davis -committees in the United States,” and named youth clubs and workers’ teams after Davis (135). The intensity of the response surprised Americans. Time magazine concluded that East Germany was “deeply in the grip of Angelamania” (“East Germany: St� Angela”)� East German interest in Davis dovetailed with a much broader interest in African-American struggles, which was closely tied to the antifascist ideology of the GDR and contemporary proletarian internationalism, as Klimke and Höhn explain: East German leaders saw the oppression of African Americans in the United States as part of an international class struggle, in which former colonies across the globe were striving for liberation and independence. They thus actively championed what they considered the ‘other America’ of black civil rights activists, focusing especially on those who openly shared their Marxist and socialist convictions� (125) What is more, referring frequently to the “African American civil rights movement in domestic and foreign policy” helped to “discredit the Western system of democracy and capitalism” (125), in particular as it related to the next generation. Thus, within the GDR the engagement of school children and young people was a core element for focusing on the political dimensions of Davis’s thought� Leander Haußmann’s movie Sonnenallee (1999), for instance, captures the involvement of youth in Angela Davis campaigns humorously through two school teachers proudly talking about their students involved in sending postcards to Davis: Denk nur an all die Sonnenblumen, die emsig überall im Land gesammelt werden […]� Damit haben wir die Jugendfreundin Angela Davis bestimmt raus� Die Amis zittern schon. [ Just think of all the sunflowers which are being collected industriously all over the country […]. We’ll surely free our comrade Angela Davis with those [postcards]. The Americans are already quaking in fear�] 2 Encouraging youth to learn about Davis spread far beyond school activities and, among other things, found a prominent place in youth literature and media� An American Icon and the Political Uses of Youth Literature in the GDR 57 Against the backdrop of Davis’s imprisonment in 1970 and her trial in 1971-72, reports about her appeared in Junge Welt and Neues Leben, two GDR publications aimed at a young readership . Some of these reports stand out for their literary quality, crossing the genres of political commentary, travel report, and fictional narration, such as Walter Kaufmann’s journalistic reports, Unterwegs zu Angela [On My Way To Angela] for Junge Welt. Surprisingly, scholarship has not yet turned towards literary representations of Angela Davis for young audiences, including texts for children, adolescents, and young adults, which emerged in the context of political interest in Angela Davis in the GDR. This article gives an account of texts about Davis, which were originally addressed towards young audiences or reissued for them, and partly originated in documentary material� Among them are Maximilian Scheer’s radio play Der Weg nach San Rafael: Für Angela Davis [The Way to San Rafael: For Angela Davis] (1971), broadcast for school children and youth on public radio ( Neues Deutschland , 11 January 1971), the propagandistic youth novel Schwarze Rose aus Alabama [Black Rose from Alabama] (1972) by Werner Lehmann, as well as the travelogue Unterwegs zu Angela [On My Way To Angela] (1973) by the German-Australian writer Walter Kaufmann, first published as a series of short articles in Junge Welt before appearing as a book� Also included are narrations about Angela Davis in youth magazines, such as Bummi (1973) for kindergarten children, and Neues Leben for youth (1971; 1973)� By bringing these different genres together, this essay compares the ways in which Davis appears as a political figure in literature for youth, and argues that literary portraits of Davis were dominantly shaped through what Julia Hell identifies as the “ideological discourse […] of antifascism” (17), and the interest to inveigh against the politics of the United States of America� In other words, situating Davis among these fundamental GDR discourses reveals that all examples maintain focalization from an East German perspective, in which Davis’s voice and her specific political standpoint are overshadowed by the antifascist educational goal central in the GDR. As a result, East German literature on Davis often distracts from her radical call for freedom and political criticism, presenting her as a supporter and admirer of the GDR� Rather than highlighting her rebellious quality, writers indicated it was her self-declared belief in communism that should attract young readers and create feelings of solidarity with her fight from a certain distance. Literature directed towards youth about Angela Davis includes a wide range of different genres and hybrid text forms, mirroring a complex understanding of children’s and youth literature in the GDR and beyond. Therefore, it is in order to say a few words about the term ‘children’s and youth literature,’ as it is used here. Generally speaking, the term carries a variety of meanings, often synonymous with “original children’s writing,” referring to texts for the target 58 Ada Bieber group of young readers, in which the “author […] expects that the original act of addressing will be respected by all other senders concerned with further transmission, and that her/ his message will be fed into a channel that leads to the desired receivers” (Ewers 13)� However, beside original writing for a young readership, Ewers reminds us that institutions hugely influence the common understanding of literature for youth, a fact that leads to school readings as well as to “intended children’s and youth reading” (18)� Ewers also points out that literary messages for children and adolescents can appear in different media, such as books, periodicals, and magazines� All three categories and their publishing environments mirror different interests through production, distribution, and readership. The broader term ‘literature for youth’ captures the historical and individual transitions between young age groups and their reading material and, additionally, points to mediation as an educational act� It also helps to lower strict distinctions between literature for children and adolescents on the one hand, and so-called adult literature on the other, by avoiding overgeneralizations about age restrictions of texts, such as age-related literary style and/ or educational messages� In the GDR, shortsighted definitions of literature for youth were rejected from early years onwards, and literature for youth was seen as an important literary and political tool, as Johannes R� Becher pointed out in 1956� In reference to Soviet traditions, a broad understanding of literature for youth was embraced, including various genres and media� Christian Emmrich declared in his GDR-published book Literatur für Kinder und Jugendliche in der DDR [Literature for Children and Youth in the GDR] that literature for youth was an important part of national literature (Emmrich 15), building a container for various genres and literary forms directed towards children up to the age of fourteen and then onwards to people as old as twenty-five. Those age indicators stem from the Verordnung zum Schutze der Jugend [Protection of Young Persons Act], defining young people under the age of thirteen as children, while the phase of adolescence ( Jugendliche ) ranged from age fourteen to eighteen� In 1974, the age of youth was extended to the age of twenty-five, which reveals a broader understanding of youth development, including young adults. Those numbers provided a dominant framework for publishing houses; however, cross-publishing of texts originally targeted at children as well as at adults was common in children’s and youth literature concerned with contemporary issues ( Handbuch zur Kinder- und Jugendliteratur SBZ/ DDR 189)� Among these were, for example, Tinko by Erwin Strittmatter (1954) and Ankunft im Alltag by Brigitte Reimann (1961)� Besides a broad readership, the understanding of literature for youth in the GDR contained hybrid forms of fiction and nonfiction to entertain and educate young people� Sebastian Schmiedeler among others has recently shown An American Icon and the Political Uses of Youth Literature in the GDR 59 that nonfictional texts and hybrid genres have not received the attention they deserve (2017)� Schmiedeler’s position overlaps with GDR studies on children’s and youth literature by Günter Ebert and Harri Günther� Günther’s study on Sachliteratur für Kinder und Jugendliche in der DDR von 1946 bis 1986 [Nonfiction for Children and Youth in the GDR from 1946 to 1986], for example, emphasizes the development of nonfictional texts towards higher literary quality: Auf eine höhere Stufe konnte die Sachliteratur für Kinder und Jugendliche nur gelangen, wenn sie sich nicht im Nachtrab zur wissenschaftlichen und populärwissenschaftlichen Literatur befand, sondern wenn sie ihre eigene literarische Qualität entwickelte� (75) [Nonfiction for children and adolescents could only reach a higher level by not imitating research or popular science literature, but by developing its own literary qualities�] In terms of political education, documentaries and research material built a groundwork for narrations that would attract young people as readers. In the case of Angela Davis, the corpus of literature about Davis appears both at the interface of nonfiction and fiction as well as a cross-writing phenomenon for young readers and for adults. While those texts were written for and/ or directed towards children and young adults, they also exploited Davis’s popularity in GDR youth culture in the early 1970s. The mediation of the political figure Angela Davis for youth in the GDR is exceptional� 3 One of the first East German narratives on Davis is a radio play by Maximilian Scheer, whose work had previously engaged with the subject of injustice in the United States. Scheer had fled Nazi Germany, emigrated to the United States, worked in antifascist journalism, and returned to East Germany in 1947� His radio play Der Weg nach San Rafael: Für Angela Davis [The Way to San Rafael: For Angela Davis] engaged with the events leading up to Davis’s imprisonment and was first broadcast on 5 January 1971, the first day of Davis’s trial in California. Shortly after, on 11 January 1971, the play was broadcast on Radio DDR II in a show for “jugendliche Hörer und für Pädagogen” [for young listeners and educators] ( Neues Deutschland, 11 January 1971, 4)� In the same month, the publishing house Verlag der Nation applied for the imprimatur ( Druckgenehmigung ) for a print version of the play with a print run of 30,000, and it is fair to assume that copies found their way into schools and readings of young people. The cover of the print version reads: “Der lange Weg nach San Rafael. Ein Hörspiel FÜR ANGELA DAVIS von Maximilian Scheer” [The Long Way To San Rafael: A Radio Play FOR ANGELA DAVIS by Maximilian Scheer]. The title thus emphasizes both strong solidarity with Davis in her fight against the U.S. government, and active support of her fight for freedom though educating the GDR audience 60 Ada Bieber on her behalf about the broader background of her imprisonment� Although Davis’s trial prompted Scheer to write the radio play, the U�S� activist remains in the background� Rather than placing Davis at the center of the piece, Scheer explores conditions of imprisonment in the United States and specifically the events leading up to Davis’s case by portraying the situation of George Jackson and the Soledad Brothers in the San Quentin State Prison. The play starts with George stating: Ich bin George Jackson und ich erzähle Ihnen kein Märchen� Ich sitze seit zehn Jahren im Zuchthaus wegen siebzig Dollar� Die hat ein Freund von mir an einer Tankstelle geraubt, und ich soll ihm bei der Flucht geholfen haben� (5) [My name is George Jackson, and I am not going to tell you a fairy tale� I have been in prison for ten years because of seventy dollars� A friend of mine stole them at a gas station, and I supposedly helped him escape�] In the following scenes, radio listeners learn about the lives of George and his brother Jonathan, and later how they are linked with Davis’s imprisonment and trial� Although Scheer bases the play on facts, the audience’s emotional engagement derives from introducing an outside “listener” ( Hörerin ) who talks directly to Jackson, but is marked as “far away” ( entfernt , 5), possibly from East Germany. The “listener” engages with Jackson as a voice coming through his prison walls: “Mister Jackson, ich höre Ihnen von weither zu” [Mr. Jackson, I am listening to you from far away] (5)� By introducing such bridging dialogue, Scheer attempts to look behind the scenes for a better understanding of political circumstances. Throughout the play, the voice of the interlocutor keeps the conversation going, and occasionally asks questions that direct the play to criticism of unjust American laws: Was Sie sagen, klingt nun doch wie ein Märchen� Da muß noch etwas anderes passiert sein […]. Und ich soll Ihnen glauben, in ihrem Land sei es üblich, für zehn Jahre ins Zuchthaus zu kommen, wenn einer siebzig Dollar nascht […]? (5) [It sounds like you are telling tales after all. Something else must have happened then� I cannot believe that it is common in your country to get ten years in prison for pilfering seventy dollars�] A second level of the radio play highlights significant interactions not with an outside character but between the Soledad Brothers, Jonathan Jackson, his sister, and a lawyer, as well as public figures such as Charles Young, chancellor of UCLA and Ronald Reagan, then Governor of California� For example, Scheer imagines a dialogue between Ronald Reagan and Charles Young about removing Davis from her position as a professor at UCLA� Furthermore, Scheer’s An American Icon and the Political Uses of Youth Literature in the GDR 61 play depicts a plot against Davis, clearly stirring up emotions against the USA� The author conveys an authentic perspective by including the voices of the Soledad Brothers in order to place Davis’s case in the context of events that led to her imprisonment� Still, Davis herself only appears in the last scene (scene 14), where she speaks directly to the audience as an activist against racism and injustice in America� By additionally connecting Davis’s trial to Nazi Germany, Scheer follows a literary tradition in the GDR that links the Holocaust with the struggles of African-Americans (Bieber; Weßel 104-18), for example in Sally Bleistift in Amerika by Auguste Lazar (1935), or Anna Seghers’ Der erste Schritt [ The First Step ] (1953)� At the onset of the play, Scheer’s narrator states that the prisons in California are similar to Dachau and Buchenwald� 4 Linking U�S� justice with Nazi atrocities, the author contributes to East German discourses on the Holocaust as well as to the antifascist founding myth of the GDR� Accordingly, socialism and thus the GDR presented the only alternative to fascism, which was clearly linked with the imperialism of the capitalist West. That said, Scheer’s generation, which had suffered during the Nazi years, had an authentic contribution to make by opening up the conversation to include global perspectives on forms of state oppression� By connecting political discourses about black liberation and institutionalized racism in the U�S� to the Holocaust, Scheer pursues questions of victimization and comparability� Transatlantic links between histories of genocide and oppression have been (carefully) established since World War II (Wiesen 112)� In part, they resonate in African-American writing, for example in “An Open Letter to My Sister” (1970), in which James Baldwin describes Davis after her imprisonment “as alone, say, as the Jewish housewife in the boxcar headed to Dachau” (Baldwin 13)� The comparison establishes patterns of racism against minorities that repeat themselves in different historical realities and demand continued resistance. It also points to the political system of racist ideology at work in the U�S� Angela Davis, who courageously fought against segregation, racism, and imperialism, appears in Scheer’s play as a young communist resistance fighter, who teaches at first at UCLA, but was then threatened and dismissed by her academic employer with the help of Governor Reagan (scene 5)� Scheer also lets Jonathan Jackson, the younger brother of George Jackson and close companion of Davis, praise her political work: Eine großartige Frau! Und was sie weiß! Was sie erlebt hat in Alabama und in Europa, in den Ghettos und an der Uni! Und wie sie das erzählt! Vor Hunderten jedesmal! Und in verschiedenen Städten! Aber je mehr Erfolg sie hat, desto gefährlicher wird es für sie selbst� (20) 62 Ada Bieber [A great woman! And all she knows, and everything she’s experienced in Alabama and Europe, in the ghettos and at the university! And how she tells the story! In front of hundreds of people every time! And in various cities! But the more successful she is, the more dangerous it becomes for her�] Only after the death of Jonathan Jackson, the foreshadowed danger, systematic oppression against African-Americans, and communist beliefs fall into place: On August 7, 1970, Jonathan Jackson walked into a courtroom in California’s Marin County, holding three guns, and took the judge, the prosecutor, and three jurors hostage� Aided by three inmates, whom he had freed in the courtroom, the seventeen-year-old younger brother of George Jackson led the hostages at gunpoint to a van parked outside. Police opened fire. The shootout took the lives of Jackson, the judge, and two inmates� Police traced the ownership of one of Jackson’s guns to Angela Davis� A week later, Davis was charged with murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy, and a warrant was issued for her arrest� (Kendi 412-13) In the radio play, Davis appears as a character only after she has been imprisoned� Consequently, now her voice sounds through the prison walls as George Jackson’s did earlier in the play� And as Jackson did before, she starts out with accusing the state of unjust and life-threatening politics: Ich bin Angela Davis� Ich weiß nicht, ob Sie meine Stimme erreicht� Ich spreche gegen die Steinwände einer Zelle […]� Denn dies ist die Wahrheit, und ich schrieb sie zwischen den Steinen: Der Gouverneur Ronald Reagan und der Staat von Kalifornien […] fordern jetzt mein Leben� (28-29) [I am Angela Davis� I do not know if my voice gets through to you� I am speaking against stone walls in a cell […]� Because this is the truth, and I wrote it between the bricks: Governor Ronald Reagan and the state of California […] are now demanding the death penalty for me�] Unlike Jackson, who talked to a nameless listener, Davis talks to a figure called Billy Mullis, a U�S� citizen who lives in the GDR� He reminds her that they met in East Berlin on May Day 1967, celebrating socialism in the GDR� While before qualities of resistance and antifascist images were attached to Davis and her cause, she now appears as the victim of U�S� politics, who needs support from both a socialist country like the GDR and fellow Americans who believe in socialism, some of whom even found a new home in East Germany like Billy� In the radio play, Davis confirms that only in East Berlin she understood that she had to return to her own torn country in order to do her part of political work (“in mein zerrissenes Land zurückzukehren und dort das Meinige zu tun,” 30)� While Scheer’s play suggest that experiencing the realities of the GDR turned An American Icon and the Political Uses of Youth Literature in the GDR 63 Davis into an active political fighter, Davis’s own writing does not provide any evidence for this claim� Rather, her autobiography suggests that it was the unease she felt in West Germany, knowing she lived for two years among people who participated - directly or indirectly - in the Nazi terror that motivated her to contribute to changes in the United States (Davis 138-45)� Besides referring to the past, youth literature critiqued capitalism and imperialism, while expressing solidarity with U�S� civil rights movements, emphasizing international solidarity campaigns and their engagement in protection of human rights on an international scale� In the early 1970s, the new Honecker government needed to appear dynamic, and “set out to strive for recognition and prestige in the Western world,” as Anja Werner points out (140)� Set against East Germany’s political environment of that time, officials briefly chose Davis as a role model to support this goal. Klimke and Höhn show that the alliance between the GDR and African-American activists supported the GDR’s efforts to strengthen their international reputation: Still without diplomatic relations with the United States, the East German regime hosted various representatives of U�S� peace organizations and the CPUSA during Davis’s trial, seeking to underline its principled support of her cause and trying to commit these groups to advocate for official international recognition of the GDR (135). However, in the GDR, Davis’s understanding of Marxist thought (“Angela Y� Davis” 15-25) was not completely embraced� Katrina Hagen points out that “in spite of Davis’s support of the GDR, […] ‘ideological holes’ remained problematic” and the “East German media went to great pains to demonstrate that Davis indeed toed the appropriate socialistic line� Indeed, the press deemphasized the revolutionary and racially subversive elements of Davis’s politics” (168)� According to Hagen, the GDR reshaped Davis in a way that was useful to their own political messages: While Davis’s ties to the New Left and black revolutionary politics made her a problematic ‘Hero of the other America,’ her youth and dynamism, as well as her glamour as a black woman, nonetheless gave her public appeal. The East German media played up these qualities to shape Davis’s image in ways that made her an attractive figure for state-socialistic mass consumption in spite of her ideological shortcomings (170)� Dorothee Wierling notes that more than 1,750 articles on Angela Davis appeared in the GDR press between 1969 and 1973, many presenting her as a romantic revolutionary (273). One series of short articles later found their way into the youth novel Schwarze Rose aus Alabama [Black Rose from Alabama] (1972) by Werner Lehmann, which strikingly examplifies East German ideology vis-à-vis the United States. The novel was published in the youth publishing house Neues 64 Ada Bieber Leben in the series “Wissenswertes für junge Leute” [Valuable Knowledge for Young People] with a print run of 15,000. Only two weeks later, an upgraded print run of 35,000 followed (DR 1/ 3545). The quick increase in print runs signaled a huge success and Schwarze Rose aus Alabama became a standard text for informing youth about Davis� In the preface, the author makes a point of highlighting that the following narration builds upon a diverse body of world press coverage of Angela Davis’s imprisonment� Referring to press reports, the author creates a sense of authenticity, although what follows after is largely filtered through the strong propagandistic lens of GDR politics. In other words, the tone differs strongly from world press reports as well as Davis’s letters, interviews, and speeches, although fragments of those form the foundation of the book. The novel’s emotionally manipulative language and simplistic interpretations, employed to portray the case against Angela Davis as nothing but an evil thriller plotted out by Reagan, Hoover, and Nixon (Weßel 109), expose this book as a propagandistic text. Although Davis was acquitted in 1972, the foreword to Lehmann’s narrative suggests that Davis’s safety remains threatened in the USA� Clearly, it is meant to incite anxiety among readers: “Angela Davis hat zugesagt, im Weltfestspielsommer 1973 in Berlin zu sein� Wird sie dabeisein? Ist sie dabei? ” [Angela Davis has accepted the invitation to the Youth Festival in East Berlin in 1973� Will she really be able to come? Will she join us? ] (5)� In some respects, the narration continues to present Davis as a prisoner and a victim rather than someone who has been acquitted. Such a depiction of Davis as a subject of persecution supports the ideological division between East and West. The book underlines this attempt to inveigh against the West in statements, for example, that Hollywood is on the brink of death (“Hollywood lag im Sterben,” 24), and by further contrasting the show business of Reagan’s first career with the riots in Watts and other places: “Das Sterben hatte übrigens auch auf den Straßen anderer kalifornischer Städte um sich gegriffen” [What’s more, death was also running rampant on other Californian streets] (24)� Intertwining actual deaths during the race riots with the metaphorical death of capitalistic America, the narrative incorporates facts merely to guide readers’ judgement about America� Such forms of reader manipulation continue throughout the book� Visually, the book comes across as a modern narrative for young people with a pop-cultural design that conveys a feeling of freedom. The visual level also connects with the anti-American message, for example in a collage of the White House, violent policemen, and a gunman pitted against youth protesters. In the beginning, the narrative zooms straight into California and begins with the story of Davis’s suspension from UCLA, and later turns to her arrest, imprisonment and parts of her trial, while delving into Davis’s personal and political development and offering vignettes of segregation in America throughout. The An American Icon and the Political Uses of Youth Literature in the GDR 65 first chapter opens with the fictionalized first-person perspectives of UCLA Chancellor Young and California’s Governor Reagan� Taking on this point of view, the text implies that we receive this information directly from the minds of these characters� All characters are presented as merely carrying out evil plans with a certain pleasure in order to secure their own political interests and wealth, while the following chapters praising Angela Davis and the black protest movement build a counterpart� Thus, the narrative structure of the book leads the reader to sympathize with Davis and the movement for black liberation� As in Scheer’s radio play, Davis appears as an active character only towards the end, when the book adopts a first-person perspective. Only here, Davis describes her time in prison and formulates a strong link to the GDR� As in previous examples, the book emphasizes that Davis was highly influenced by the GDR and her visit to East Germany in 1967. This exaggerated claim suggests the importance and attraction of the GDR to young readers: Und eines Tages, es ist der Erste Mai, reist Angela zu den Erben von Marx und Engels, in die DDR. Im Strom der Hunderttausend auf dem Berliner Marx-Engels-Platz sieht sie den Sozialismus demonstrieren, die verwirklichte Gerechtigkeit, Freiheit und Gleichheit und die lebendige internationale Solidarität� (36) [And one day, it is May Day, Angela travels to the heirs of Marx and Engels, to the GDR� In the midst of hundreds of thousands of people at Berlin’s Marx-Engels Square, she witnesses socialism demonstrating, the realization of justice, freedom, and equality and lively international solidarity�] This particular link to East Germany gains even more importance since the book was published shortly before Davis was invited to visit the World Youth Festival ( Weltfestspiele der Jugend ) in 1973 and to speak to the socialistic youth - staged almost as a heroine returning home� However, not all narratives about Angela Davis represented such strong expressions of GDR self-importance� German-Australian author Walter Kaufmann’s novel Unterwegs zu Angela [On My Way To Angela] (1973) differs significantly from the previously discussed narratives� Rather than conveying propagandistic messages, Kaufmann offers a nuanced investigation of U.S. realities. Aiming for an authentic representation of Davis in an American context, Kaufmann places the activist within black liberation movements in the U�S�, while carefully connecting them to international socialism and German history� Without doubt, Kaufmann’s well-rounded and authentic descriptions benefit from his first-hand experiences in the USA� A well-known writer for youth who had published his early books in the GDR with the youth publishing house Verlag Neues Leben , 66 Ada Bieber Kaufmann also worked as a journalist for the Junge Welt � As correspondent in the U�S�, he wrote rather personal and literary weekly reports about Angela Davis between March and June 1972, reports that were specifically targeted at young readers� Still, Verlag Junges Leben decided against publishing the series as a book, possibly because it conflicted with the publication of Lehmann’s novel the year before, which was still selling well with a print run of 35,000� In fact, the fundamental differences in depictions of Angela Davis as well as the USA suggest that there was little interest in marketing the two novels in the same program. The publishing house Verlag der Nation , on the other hand, seized the opportunity to publish the book which promised to be a success with young people shortly before Angela Davis’s visit to the Weltfestspiele . The application of the publishing house for imprimatur argues for the continuing relevance of the subject for young people: Obwohl der größte Teil des eingereichten Manuskripts bereits im vorigen Jahr in der ‘Jungen Welt’ abgedruckt wurde, und obwohl bereits jetzt rund 8 Monate seit dem Freispruch ergangen sind, scheint es dem Verlag […] gerechtfertigt, die Reportagen aus Anlaß der X� Weltfestspiele auch in Buchform herauszugeben� Es steht außer Frage, daß der Titel eine starke bewußtseinsbildende Ausstrahlung hat, und daß er es vor allem jüngeren Lesern erleichtern wird, theoretisches Wissen, das sie über die USA haben, zu festigen und die Bereitschaft zur internationalistischen Solidarität zu fördern (DR 1/ 2405). [Although large parts of the manuscript were already published last year in ‘Junge Welt,’ and it has been 8 months since the acquittal [of Angela Davis], the publishing house sees ongoing relevance to print the reports as a book on the occasion of the 10th world festival. Without doubt, the book has a strong educational effect that will help particularly young readers to deepen their theoretical knowledge about the USA and support the willingness for international solidarity�] Kaufmann, privileged because of his Australian passport which he had received during his time in Australia (1940-57), was a rather atypical GDR writer� Despite having had one of his earlier books censored, which most likely prompted him to leave and distance himself from the socialistic state temporarily, Kaufmann felt at home in the GDR and always returned from his travels back to East Berlin. However, many aspects of his life remained influenced by his experiences abroad� For example, Kaufmann had started his career as a writer in Australia, and he felt most comfortable writing in English. Therefore, he wrote Unterwegs zu Angela in English, which supported his attempts to establish distance to GDR propaganda, 5 allowed him to reconnect with the English-speaking world, and deepen his understanding of the United States� An American Icon and the Political Uses of Youth Literature in the GDR 67 In a way, it even brought him back to his major subject: his own history of escaping fascism and searching for answers in communism� Kaufmann’s adoptive parents had sent him, a teenager at the time, to the UK via a Kindertransport before they perished in Auschwitz� In 1940, he was deported to Australia on the HMT Dunera , along with more than 2,500 Jewish refugees who had fled Nazi Germany to the UK, and now were interned in camps in New South Wales and Victoria (“Dunera Boys”). Strongly influenced by a “communist-dominated group” of writers (Ludewig 144), he became a member of the Australian Communist Party. In 1956, Kaufmann decided to settle in East Germany as a professional writer, but was advised to maintain his Australian passport to ensure certain privileges: He worked as a foreign correspondent for several East German newspapers and magazines and led a very privileged life in the GDR, remaining free to travel outside the tightly controlled borders of his adopted homeland� His travelogues made popular reading in East Germany and their high print runs allowed him to maintain a comfortable existence as a professional author� Kaufmann has published well over 100 books, stories and newspaper articles [for Neues Deutschland, Junge Welt and Berliner Zeitung ] in both German and English (Ludewig 140)� With such freedom at hand, the United States became a major destination for Kaufmann - not only as a “raging reporter” ( rasender Reporter ), but also a politically engaged travel writer� Following in the footsteps of Egon Erwin Kisch - the Austrian-Czech writer and journalist famous for his authentic reports during the Weimar Republic and his exile from Nazi Germany, e�g�, in Australia, Spain, and Mexico - Kaufmann dug deep into American society to uncover various layers of social and political reality by traveling, working, and interviewing average people� Reportages such as Begegnungen mit Amerika heute [Encounters with America Today] (1965) and Hoffnung unter Glas (Hope Under Glass) (1966), for which he received the Heinrich-Mann-Award, made Kaufmann a well-known expert on America� In order to write about Davis, Kaufmann returned to the U�S� in 1972� He traced her life through interviews with family, friends, and associates before attending the trial in California. He had the opportunity to conduct two interviews with Davis and added two of her speeches to his book manuscript� Aiming for an authentic testimony about the U�S�, Kaufmann provides photographs of American cities, juxtaposing their hypermodernity with the poverty of many black neighborhoods. Thus, the author builds a literary mosaic that reveals a complex and polyphonic society, often portraying a country that is divided by race and poverty, but also one that is home to those engaged in the struggle for social equality� Kaufmann also traveled to Alabama, where he got in touch with 68 Ada Bieber the civil rights movement, freedom projects organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and other black movements of the 1960s. His book reveals that his own political understanding of America echoes Davis’s activism: for example, he points to the systematic criminalization of African Americans as a form of political oppression, a subject that later grew strong in Davis’s work� Supported by many photographs that reinforce his words, Kaufmann verbally and visually composes a palimpsest of social, political, and personal layers that form the case of Davis� In particular, racism and racial segregation are striking key subjects with which literary realism in East Germany had not yet sufficiently engaged. Kaufmann explores these topics through personal interaction and field research during his travels to New York City, Alabama, and California; his various meetings with Davis’s family and comrades; and his interviews with strangers he encountered along his way, such as a woman in New York City who collects money for an Angela Davis solidarity campaign� Besides interviews with Davis, the narrative includes various conversations with people who had an interest in the trial� Kaufmann interviews Americans representing a broad spectrum of political viewpoints, from hypocrites and racists to people in the street who sympathize with Davis. Throughout, the support for Davis dominates the narrative, in order to expose the hate and racism smoldering under the surface� Kaufmann also includes a photograph of a sign on a fence that reads “Gas Angela” (58), an image which triggers an immediate link - particularly for German readers - to the gas chambers of Nazi concentration camps� Moreover, Kaufmann compares the prison situation in the United States with Nazi Germany - a strategy we are familiar with from Scheer’s perspective in the radio play I discussed before� During an interview conducted with the incarcerated Davis, Kaufmann implicitly links U�S� prisons to Nazi concentration camps when he states that he only experienced a detention center once, in Nazi Germany, when he visited his mother shortly before she was deported (“Aus dem Gefängnis in San José”). In fact, Kaufmann’s writing on U.S. prisons is buttressed by his visit to San Quentin, where the director of the institution, Mr. O’Brian, gave him a tour. The chapter “Der faire Bericht” [The Fair Report] replicates his report for the Junge Welt (2 June 1972), retaining it as a lampoon of the conditions and methods employed in American prisons. While Mr. O’Brian claims that he believes inmates are entitled to all civil rights and expresses sympathy with Jonathan Jackson and his motives, he emerges as serving an oppressive institution that supports injustice against African Americans and political activists, among others� Responding to the director’s request that he fairly relate his experiences in the San Quentin prison, Kaufmann writes his report as a direct answer to Mr. O’Brian, An American Icon and the Political Uses of Youth Literature in the GDR 69 imitating an ongoing conversation, which allows him to introduce his personal interpretation of what he witnessed inside the prison walls� In the chapter “Der faire Bericht,” the focalizer tends to compare and thus associate Nazi concentration camps with U�S� prisons, for example when Kaufmann details the visit in the gas chamber of the prison ( Unterwegs 90), an apparatus not only used during the Holocaust, but since the mid-1920s in several U�S� states to execute death row inmates� 6 The chapter closes with fundamental questions about the nature of political imprisonment and the conditions in detention centers, particularly for inmates held for political reasons� Kaufmann closes by asking if the death penalty or rather social equality will help to prevent crimes within a society, and in a way, foregrounds major questions Angela Davis poses in her later work� While Kaufmann resents some realities of real-existing socialism in the GDR, a general socialistic worldview informs the narrative without being overly didactic or propagandistic� In fact, the interviews Kaufmann conducted with Davis and her family serve as probably the most authentic testimony of Davis for young readers. Here, Davis confirmed that the expressions of solidarity she received from GDR youth helped her feel confident in her political beliefs and supported her activism (127). Such an interview finds its way into the chapter titled “Warum bist du Kommunistin? ” [Why Are You A Communist? ], which was overtly geared towards the GDR media and praised the GDR’s solidarity with Davis� In fact, Davis’s words pervade the entire narrative of Unterwegs zu Angela , which opens and closes with original speeches that Davis delivered in 1972 in Madison Square Garden and in East Berlin respectively. The epilogue includes many photos and features the entire speech by Davis in Friedrichstadt-Palast on 11 September 1972, in which Davis praises GDR youth as major supporters 7 and promotes proletarian internationalism: “In deutscher Sprache schließt Angela Davis: Es lebe das Volk der DDR! Es lebe der proletarische Internationalismus! ” [Angela Davis closes in German: Long live the people of the GDR! Long live proletarian internationalism! ] (239)� Here, Davis underlines that she will continue fighting for black liberation in America and for equality on an international basis� While “Angelamania” in the GDR had passed its political heyday, Davis was only at the beginning of her political activism� Although she returned to the GDR the following year as special guest of the 10th World Youth Festival, public interest in her diminished� When Davis came back for the World Youth Festival in East Berlin, officials and media were careful to cover up her radical call for activism. The ambiguity of presenting Angela Davis as an idol to youth behind the Iron Curtain while veiling her radical call for freedom reveals an oppressive state’s strategy to misuse an activist for their own ideological advantage. Vis-à-vis the simplistic 70 Ada Bieber government propaganda, one wonders how much of Davis’s political message actually resonated with youth behind the Berlin Wall, where young people had little access to Davis during her visit. When she arrived, young East Germans could briefly meet with her during her arrival and also had the chance to engage with her in a few moderated talks that were part of the official festival program. The youth magazine Neues Leben , which previously advertised strong political messages and images in support of the political struggle of Davis, made an interesting move in 1973� Instead of continuing to portray her as a political activist, former U�S� correspondent Horst Schäfer asks: Was schreibt man über eine so bekannte Frau? […] Wir entscheiden uns, die kleinen Züge einer großen Persönlichkeit zu zeigen und damit die Frage so vieler Interessierter zu beantworten: ‘Wie ist Angela Davis eigentlich privat? ’ (32) [What should one write about such a famous woman? […] We decide to show the small features of a famous personality, and in doing so, to answer the question of so many: ‘What is Angela Davis like in private? ’] Distracting from her political significance even further and also in a stereotypically gendered way, the author goes on by emphasizing her physical features, such as her hands, her voice, and her looks generally (“gesamten äußeren Erscheinung,” 36)� Deliberately, Schäfers largely eclipses the activist’s political work and the trial against her, and focuses on Davis as a young, stylish, and attractive woman complete with stereotypical female attributes such as spontaneity, empathy, and sociability (38)� His male gaze becomes particularly creepy when he remembers Davis wearing hot pants during a private skipping contest with friends: Angela, in schwarzen ‘heißen Höschen,’ hatte ihre Clarks ausgezogen und hüpfte mit den anderen um die Wette, verlor aber schließlich den ‘Contest,’ weil sie vor Lachen nicht mehr springen konnte� (38) [Angela in black ‘hot pants’ [the German expression has connotations which suggest a girl’s panties rather than American hot pants], had slipped out of her Clarks and competed jumping with the others, but she lost in the contest because she couldn’t stop laughing�] Such word choice lets Davis come across not so much as a serious political activist but an attractive young woman from a stereotypical male perspective. This distinct approach to scale down Davis’s importance for young readers curiously met with Schäfer’s desire for self-aggrandizement. After all, he portrays himself as a close friend of Davis, and what is more, he emphasizes Davis’s emotional and habitual closeness to GDR youth culture by stating: An American Icon and the Political Uses of Youth Literature in the GDR 71 [Sie] ist begeistert von der DDR und insbesondere von der Erziehung der Jugend zum Internationalismus, […] liest gern und viel und Marx und Engels im Original, fühlt sich in Cuba so richtig wohl� (38) [She is enthusiastic about the GDR, particularly about the youth education towards proletarian Internationalism, […] she reads a lot, Marx and Engels even in German, and she loves Cuba�] By the end of the article, the reader is easily convinced that Davis is just one of many young socialists who will soon visit the GDR� Her radical call for freedom, her trial, and the attack on the U.S. state vanish into the background. Bummi , a magazine for kindergarten and primary school readers which introduces Davis to the very young ones before the festival, follows the same narrative strategy. Bummi the bear, a fictional character in the stories, visits New York City, which he describes as a big, cold place without trees and green spaces, a metropolis full of traffic and harsh policemen. Here, images of Davis as radical activist are replaced by the stereotypically gendered image of a warm, motherly figure for young black children. Remarkably, the depicted New York City faces segregation familiar from the Jim Crow South� Young black children are not permitted to sit on a bench, and Angela Davis vaguely promises changes for the future: “Weine nicht� […] Einmal wirst du auch auf den Bänken sitzen dürfen” [Don’t you cry. […] One day, you will be allowed to sit on benches as well.] (“Auf Wiedersehen, Angela” n. pag.). The story increasingly highlights the connection between Davis and the GDR. Simultaneously, it shifts from Davis towards a more generally negative image of the United States emphasizing American crimes in the world such as the Vietnam War: “Was macht man aber mit den bösen Amerikanern, die Bomben auf unsere lieben vietnamesischen Freunde warfen? ” [But what to do about the mean Americans, who threw bombs on our good Vietnamese friends? ] (n� pag�) Again, children and youth are relegated to propaganda instead of engaging in a serious discourse on proletarian internationalism and human rights. The article in Bummi marks the end of literature for youth about Angela Davis, and although the readers are reminded that Davis will visit the GDR that summer, her political significance in the GDR had already faded� Considered together, East German narratives for youth portraying Angela Davis demonstrate that politically motivated literature for youth - like any political literature - cannot be separated from the political landscape in which it appears� Featuring a radical activist such as Davis in literature for youth within a restrictive political system led to misrepresentations of what was actually at stake, namely freedom and human rights for everyone� For a while, Davis served as a perfect ally for the GDR, and the various youth novels reveal how literary 72 Ada Bieber approaches shape national and ideological images that are communicated to youth� Nevertheless, considered more broadly, the activist Angela Davis represented a real threat to any unjust state, and therefore pointed to the question of what other people’s freedom means in the context of one’s own liberty� What is more, her radical call for freedom certainly has influenced people outside the United States to adopt her principles, and it is fair to say that youth behind the Iron Curtain were encouraged to connect the dots between the fight for civil rights in the U�S� and their hope for liberty in the GDR� However, Davis’s remarks about GDR politics are ambiguous at best, and her silence regarding the Berlin Wall appears problematic� Together, they simultaneously give way to a socialistic understanding of the Wall as a necessary rampart against an aggressive West, and insinuate an array of imaginary walls that support the division of people and prevent collective freedom� Paul M� Farber notes that “Davis’s own downplaying of the Berlin Wall exists alongside her wall-heavy discourse” (141), her understanding of walls as symbols of repression, and her general criticism of prison systems. Although her attitude towards the Berlin Wall remains elusive, the fifth chapter of her autobiography is named “Walls” and expands upon “connections across space and time to the politics of the larger society” (Farber 151) in order to mark walls as principles of oppression� To a certain extent, one could argue that Davis allowed the (mis)use of her persona, valuing the personal recognition of a socialistic country over the value of freedom for all� It certainly remains one of Angela Davis’s shortcomings that she did not address the Berlin Wall and the restrictions behind the Iron Curtain in her writings or in speeches. These deficiencies raise questions about the degree to which she profited personally and politically from the Eastern Bloc’s support. Nevertheless, Angela Davis was an important figure in the GDR and especially in youth culture, which gave young people the opportunity to read through various representations of her as an activist in the United States and connect her work with the German past and presence� Notes 1 For example, the Berliner Zeitung provides its readers with important information, such as the addresses in the U�S� for sending their postcards: “Solidaritätsschreiben an Angela Davis, Marin County Courthouse, San Rafael, California - USA,” while the newspaper also called for “Protestschreiben an den Gouverneur Ronald Reagan, State Capitol Sacramento, California — USA” ( Berliner Zeitung 77/ 1971: 5)� 2 All translations in this article are mine� An American Icon and the Political Uses of Youth Literature in the GDR 73 3 In North America, neither fiction nor scholarship in the field of children and young adult literature has yet turned to the perceived gap in “Angela Davis research.” The missing coverage of Davis as a political figure in youth literature reflects a practice of shying away from radical figures, presumably for the same reasons identified by Herbert Marcuse in 1970. He argued that Davis’s case is a “story of a threefold political repression: against a woman, against a militant black woman, against a leftist rebel” (qtd. in Höhn and Klimke 119; see also Marcuse 173)� 4 “Diese Zuchthäuser [in Kalifornien] haben Ähnlichkeit mit Dachau und Buchenwald�” 5 Both the articles in Junge Welt as well as the book appeared in a translation by Olga and Erich Fetter. 6 “Ich sah die Gurte an den zwei Stühlen in dem runden Gebäude aus Stahl und Glas, sah die Öffnungen, aus denen das tödliche Gas strömte…” ( Unterwegs 90)� 7 “Im Haus eines Freundes in San Jose gibt es eine große Garage, die gefüllt ist mit Millionen von Briefen und Karten der Jugend der sozialistischen Länder und besonders von der Jugend der DDR […]� Mit den vielen, vielen Briefen und Karten, die an mich geschrieben wurden, und den Protestschreiben an die Regierung der Vereinigten Staaten, die geschrieben wurden von den Jugendlichen, von Arbeitern und Studenten und von Wissenschaftlern, damit hat das Volk der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik bei der Regierung meines Landes eine nachhaltige Wirkung erzielt�” ( Unterwegs 235) [At a friend’s house in San Jose, there is a huge garage filled with millions of letters and postcards from youth of socialist countries, particularly from youth of the GDR […]. The people of the GDR made quite an impression on the Government of the United States with all the many, many letters and postcards addressed to me, along with the protest letters to the government of the United States written by young people, workers, students, and scholars.] Works Cited “East Germany: St� Angela” Time 3 Apr� 1972: n� pag� “Angela Y� Davis [Interview]�” African-American Philosophers: 17 Conversations � Ed� George Yancy� New York: Routledge, 1998� 13-30� “Auf Wiedersehen, Angela�” Bummi 6 (1973): n� pag� Baldwin, James. “An Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis.” If They Come in the Morning. Voices of Resistance. With a Foreword by Julian Bond � Ed� Angela Y� Davis� New York: The Third Press, 1971. 13-18. 74 Ada Bieber Becher, Johannes R. “Von der Größe unserer Literatur (1956).” Das proletarische Kinderbuch: Dokumente zur Geschichte der sozialistischen deutschen Kinder- und Jugendliteratur. Ed� Manfred Altner� Dresden: VEB Verlag der Kunst, 1988� 154-55� Bieber, Ada. “‘We Shall Overcome’: Fear, Freedom, and the U.S. Civil Rights Movement in GDR Writing for Youth�” Limbus. Australisches Jahrbuch für germanistische Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft/ Australian Yearbook of German Literary and Cultural Studies � Ed� Franz-Josef Deiters, Axel Fliethmann, Birgit Lang, Alison Lewis and Christiane Weller� Vol� 10: Angst � Freiburg: Rombach, 2017� 103-20� Davis, Angela Y� An Autobiography � New York: International Publishers, 1974� DR 1/ 2405� Verlag der Nation� 1973� Including ‘Druckgenehmigungsverfahren’ on Walter Kaufmann, Unterwegs zu Angela. Berlin: Bundesarchiv� DR 1/ 3545� Verlag Neues Leben� 1972� Including ‘Druckgenehmigungsverfahren’ on Werner Lehmann: Schwarze Rose aus Alabama � Berlin: Bundesarchiv� “Dunera Boys.” National Museum Australia Online. National Museum Australia, n.d. Web� 16 June 2018� Ebert, Günter� Ansichten zur Entwicklung der epischen Kinder- und Jugendliteratur in der DDR von 1945 bis 1975. Berlin: Der Kinderbuchverlag, 1976� Emmrich, Christian et al� Literatur für Kinder und Jugendliche in der DDR. Berlin: Der Kinderbuchverlag, 1979� “Enthüllung eines Verbrechens: ‘Der lange Weg nach San Rafael, ein Hörspiel für Angela Davis’ von Maximilian Scheer” [program announcement]� Neues Deutschland 11 January 1971: 5� Ewers, Hans-Heino� Fundamental Concepts of Children’s Literature Research: Literary and Sociological Approaches. New York: Routledge, 2009� Farber, Paul M� Boundaries of Freedom: An American History of the Berlin Wall. Diss� U of Michigan, 2013� Frieden, Freundschaft, Solidarität. Angela Davis in der DDR. Dresden: Verlag Zeit und Bild, 1972� Günther, Harri� Die Sachliteratur für Kinder und Jugendliche in der DDR von 1946 bis 1986. Berlin: Der Kinderbuchverlag, 1988� Hagen, Katrina� “Ambivalence and Desire in the East German ‘Free Angela Davis Campaign’�” Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold World. Ed. Quienn Slobodian. New York: Berghahn, 2015� 157-87� Hell, Julia� Post-Fascist Fantasies: Psychoanalysis, History, and the Literature of East Germany. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997� Höhn, Maria, and Martin Klimke. A Breath of Freedom: The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs, and Germany. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010� Kämpft Angela Davis frei! Ed� Nationalrat der Nationalen Front des demokratischen Deutschland� Friedensrat der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik� Berlin: n�p�, 1971� Kaufmann, Walter� Amerika: Zwischen Präsidentenmord und 11. September: Reportagen aus vier Jahrzehnten � Rostock: BS-Verlag, 2003� An American Icon and the Political Uses of Youth Literature in the GDR 75 —. “Aus dem Gefängnis in San José.” Interview with Angela Davis, 1972. www.mdr.de/ damals/ archiv/ audio334018�html� —� “Unterwegs zu Angela: JW-Reportage über eine Reise durch die USA zum Angela-Davis-Prozeß�” Junge Welt 1-10/ 1972� —� Unterwegs zu Angela: Amerikanische Impressionen. Berlin: Verlag der Nation, 1973� Kendi, Ibram X� Stamped from the Beginning: The Definite History of Racist Ideas in America . London: The Bodley Head, 2016. Lehmann, Werner� Schwarze Rose aus Alabama: Der Fall Angela Davis. Ein Tatsachenbericht. 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Sonnenallee [Sun Alley]� Dir� Leander Haußmann� Boje Buck Produktion, 2000� Steinlein, Rüdiger, Heidi Strobel, and Thomas Kramer, eds. Handbuch zur Kinder- und Jugendliteratur: SBZ/ DDR. Von 1945 bis 1990. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2006. Werner, Anja� “Convenient Partnerships? African American Civil Rights Leaders and the East German Dictatorship�” Anywhere But Here: Black Intellectuals in the Atlantic World and Beyond . Ed. Kendahl Radcliffe, Jennifer Scott and Anja Werner. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2014� 139-64� Weßel, Daisy� Bild und Gegenbild: Die USA in der Belletristik der SBZ und der DDR (bis 1987). Opladen: Leske + Budrich, 1989. “Erlebte Geschichte mit Walter Kaufmann.” Narr. Albert Wiedenhöfer. Erlebte Geschichten. WDR, Cologne, 11 July 2010� Radio� Wierling, Dorothee. “Der Duft der Angela Davis: Politische Jugendkultur in der DDR der frühen 1970er Jahre�” German Zeitgeschichte: Konturen eines Forschungsfeldes. Ed. Thomas Lindenberger and Martin Sabrow. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2016. 265-81� Wiesen, Jonathan S. “On Dachau and Jim Crow.” Als der Holocaust noch keinen Namen hatte/ Before The Holocaust Had Its Name � Early Confrontations of the Nazi Mass Murder of the Jews. Ed� Regina Fritz et al� Wien: New Academia Press, 2016� 111-31� “Es war (noch) einmal”: Grimm Versions of New Fairy Tales in the GDR 77 “Es war (noch) einmal”: Grimm Versions of New Fairy Tales in the GDR Melissa Sheedy and Brandy E� Wilcox University of California - Santa Barbara / University of Wisconsin - Madison Abstract: Irmtraud Morgner’s fairy tale “Bennos erste Geschichte” introduces her famous Trobadora Beatriz, a reimagined Sleeping Beauty who embarks on a magical flight from the patriarchy. Along with tales by Kerstin Hensel and Stefan Heym, Morgner’s story represents a body of new and retold East German fairy tales� As part of the “fairy tale wave” of the 1970s GDR, the production of new fairy tales along with renewed interest in the Grimms marked a renaissance of the Volksmärchen � Couched within seemingly innocuous children’s literature, fairy tales functioned both as state-sanctioned ideological vehicles and as platforms for political critique� Through psychoanalytic and feminist perspectives, this essay explores retellings of familiar tales as well as new creations for children (and adults) of the GDR� In examining three tales by Morgner, Hensel, and Heym, we investigate the role of the fairy tale at the crux between reality and the fantastic, the didactic and diverting, and between children’s and adults’ literatures� Keywords: fairy tales, East German literature, children’s literature, feminist theory Once upon a time, Sleeping Beauty embarks on a centuries-long sleep to escape the capitalistic world of the patriarchy and awakens to find that everything has changed. Once upon a time, a witch lures a brother and sister to her gingerbread house in the woods, but forgets to kill and eat her charges. Once more upon a time, a king is prevailed upon by his wife to resolve the problem of gender inequality in his kingdom, and faces as a result the strange obligation of giving birth himself� In each of these new and retold fairy tales by East German authors, our protagonists have a clear goal: they are in search of a home, a prince, a solution - but will they find it in the GDR? Irmtraud Morgner’s fairy 78 Melissa Sheedy and Brandy E� Wilcox tale “Bennos erste Geschichte” [Benno’s First Story] (1988), a story that also serves as the beginning of her famous montage novel featuring the troubadour Beatriz; 1 Kerstin Hensel’s retelling of the Grimms’ fairy tale “Hänsel and Gretel,” “Da ward gutes Essen aufgetragen” [Good Food Was Set Out] (1989); and Stefan Heym’s “Der kleine König, der ein Kind kriegen mußte” [The Little King Who Had To Have a Baby] (1979) represent a considerable body of new and retold fairy tales produced in the GDR� As part of what Hanne Castein terms the “Märchenwelle” [fairy tale wave] (195) of the 1970s in East Germany, the creation of new tales - along with renewed interest in the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812) - marked a renaissance of the German folk and fairy tale in the socialist state (Castein 195)� Fairy tales represented a type of children’s literature that functioned on the one hand as a state-sanctioned vehicle for ideological instruction, and on the other as a platform for political critique among the authors who conceived new fairy tales or evoked old ones� 2 The historically didactic function of tales that contributed to their acceptance in the GDR was overshadowed by their more subversive elements, which, hidden within simple narratives, were able to slip past censors� Delicately balanced between subversion and education, fairy tales in the GDR of the 1970s became an opportunity for writers and readers to critique the system through literature marketed towards children, but which ultimately reached many adults� The presentation of sophisticated themes through a relatively modest package reflects both the GDR’s serious regard for youth literature as well as the historical development of the genre itself. The concept of childhood as a separate state of being from adulthood did not develop until the seventeenth century, and thus the corresponding need for a differentiation in wardrobe, games, and household articles for adults and children only gradually began to arise. Significantly, one such transformation took place with the symbol of the wooden rocking horse, which had previously held a “ritual function” but which eventually became a specific marker of the children’s world. Zohar Shavit notes in “The Concept of Childhood and Children’s Folktales”: The horse, which had been a primary medium of transportation, lost this function for the adult world at the end of the nineteenth century� It did not disappear from the culture, but rather evolved through a process of reduction and simplification into the wooden horse of the nursery, where it acquired a new function as a toy� Moreover, in addition to this function it became a symbol differentiating the children’s room from the adults’ room, and a sine qua non in nursery furnishings� (Shavit 320) The migration of the symbol of the horse from an element of function to one of diversion illustrates the emerging need for separate symbolic systems between the realms of childhood and adulthood� As the distinct nature of the juvenile “Es war (noch) einmal”: Grimm Versions of New Fairy Tales in the GDR 79 population became evident, there concomitantly evolved a need for a new and separate literature, including fairy tales as a primary literary mode� Both in the time of the Grimms as well as in the GDR, fairy tales served to instill the lessons and morals of adult society, and their new iterations recognized that children were not prepared to go through the necessary trials to learn them from experience� Similarly, Christa Wolf discusses the ability of literature to play out the struggles of life in her work Lesen und Schreiben (1972; The Reader and the Writer , 1977): [Prosa] kann Zeit raffen und Zeit sparen, indem sie die Experimente, vor denen die Menschheit steht, auf dem Papier durchspielt […]� Prosa kann die Grenzen unseres Wissens über uns selbst weiter hinausschieben� Sie hält die Erinnerung an eine Zukunft in uns wach, von der wir uns bei Strafe unseres Untergangs nicht lossagen dürfen ( Lesen 219-20)� [[Prose] can compress and save time by playing through on paper the experiments facing mankind […]� Prose can push the frontiers of our knowledge about ourselves farther forward� It can keep awake in us the memory of the future that we must not abandon on the pain of destruction� ( Reader 212) And Wolf was not alone� In the 1970s, authors in the GDR seized upon this link between literature and real life in their use of fairy tales as subtly seditious tools, capitalizing on the potential of tales as vehicles of indoctrination. This was key in their eventual acceptance within the GDR, and it also formed the basis for the tales’ own subversion� Following a brief overview of the complicated reception of fairy tales in 1970s East Germany, we explore the three texts from Morgner, Hensel, and Heym as retellings of old tales or as new creations for children (and adults) of the GDR� Through the framework of Bruno Bettelheim and Sheldon Cashdan’s psychoanalytic perspectives of the fairy tale, alongside strains of feminist theory, we focus on how these stories provide tantalizing and vivid images of the GDR as seen through the eyes of their authors, their characters, and their audiences� Drawing also on Karen Rowe’s expositions on the fairy tale’s reinforcement of female domestic roles, we consider how these GDR retellings both evoke and subvert reader expectations� We look to the tale not only as a realm of subversion, but also as a means of establishing connections and articulating secret critiques: in examining these new Märchen , we investigate the function of the fairy tale as a boundary between the real and the fantastic, the didactic and diverting, and between children’s and adults’ literatures� The complicated reception and rehabilitation of fairy tales in the GDR has its origins in the tenuous balance between the tale’s positive ties to the nine- 80 Melissa Sheedy and Brandy E� Wilcox teenth-century humanist tradition and its troubling connections with National Socialism� Fairy tales were initially rejected by the staunchly antifascist state due in part to their associations with Nazi ideology. The National Socialists’ abuses of the fairy tale to promote Aryan and nationalistic ideals left a lasting imprint on the German cultural consciousness, and the publication of the Grimms’ tales was banned by the Allied forces in 1945 on account of the disturbing similarities between the violence in tales and the horrors of the Nazi death camps (Arnds 423). The ideological pollution associated with folk and fairy tales after the war accords with the way in which the German language itself was perceived to have been poisoned by National Socialist propaganda� Nevertheless, authors and filmmakers working after the fall of the Third Reich were able to capitalize on these very associations. From Christa Wolf’s treatment of the individual in post-fascist society in Nachdenken über Christa T. (1968; The Quest for Christa T. , 1970), to works by Günter Grass and Helma Sanders-Brahms, authors exploited fairy tale rhetoric and mechanisms as a way of “speaking the unspeakable” (Arnds 423)� Beyond the fairy tale’s fascist associations, discussion also arose in the GDR about whether the fairy tale as a genre was suited for socialism (Shen 6-7)� With its overtly fantastic and magical elements and its emphasis on social and economic transformations, the tale’s very nature seemed to render it at odds with the sober dictates of socialist realism� In spite of these controversies, the Volksmärchen , or traditional fairy tale, experienced a renaissance of sorts in the GDR during the 1970s, paralleling the development of socialistic fairy tales in the Soviet Union� Fairy tales had begun to be seen more favorably in the 1950s and especially 1960s (Di Napoli 297), a shift that culminated in the so-called Märchenwelle in the decade following� Doubts regarding its suitability for socialism notwithstanding, the fairy tale’s inherent folksiness proved largely appealing with modern audiences and the fairy tale axioms underscoring heroism and progress were considered to indeed be compatible with Marxist philosophy� The wave that followed included the tacit recognition of the Grimms’ tales as an indispensable relic of Germany’s cultural heritage and signaled the production of dozens of new and retold fairy tales by GDR authors (Castein 195)� 3 Fairy tales comprised a significant portion of children’s literature and, once they were sanitized and didacticized for young citizens, became ideal vehicles for ideological propagation (Di Napoli 297). This Märchenwelle was not limited to literature, but of course famously also included the genre of cinema, which yielded over 40 enormously popular feature-length fairy tale films produced by DEFA ( Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft ) (Shen 2)� 4 Despite their grudging and gradual acceptance in the GDR, fairy tales nevertheless continued to possess another, veiled function in the socialist state� Tied “Es war (noch) einmal”: Grimm Versions of New Fairy Tales in the GDR 81 in part to their magical nature, their fascist associations, and to the inherent message reinforcing the individual’s ability to transform his or her own fate, fairy tales would always occupy an uneasy role within the GDR, and in spite of their popularity, their very use signaled subversion� While drawing on the traditions of the tale as part of German cultural heritage, authors were able to employ the Volksmärchen as a vehicle for critique against the system. Thomas Di Napoli suggests in “Thirty Years of Children’s Literature” that authors whose ideals conflicted with state-sanctioned ones more successfully obscured their socio-political expressions within literature for children, an endeavor that might otherwise have been impossible in works intended for adults (294). This subversive function of fairy tales in the GDR reinforces their politicized role, which has existed for as long as the tale itself, but which became more explicit in the early years of the twentieth century (Zipes, Dreams 23)� Authors of new and retold fairy tales in the GDR include Morgner, Hensel, Heym, Peter Hacks, and others, and this trend culminated by the end of the GDR in a wider acceptance of fairy tales, as illustrated in Castein’s 1988 collection Es wird einmal : Märchen für morgen [Once Upon a Future: Fairytales for Tomorrow]. The tendency to incorporate fairy tale mechanisms and elements in German-language texts continues today, with authors such as Hensel, Juli Zeh, Julia Franck, and Emine Sevgi Özdamar� From the 1988 collection Es wird einmal , Irmtraud Morgner’s “Bennos erste Geschichte” is a heavily condensed version of the first chapter from her 1974 novel Leben und Abenteuer der Trobadora Beatriz. Like the novel, “Bennos erste Geschichte” retells the story of Sleeping Beauty� However, unlike the traditional tale of a magic woman’s revenge against a royal’s slight, Morgner presents the story of a young noblewoman, troubadour Beatriz de Dia, who takes control of her own heartache and uses the familiar sleeping spell of the fairy tale to escape the “mittelalterliche Welt der Männer” [men’s world of the Middle Ages] (Morgner 181)� Many recognizable elements from the traditional Märchen remain in place, including the finger prick on the spindle, the castle surrounded by an impenetrable rosebush, and a young “prince” piercing the barrier surrounding the castle� But Morgner transplants the story into the context of a modern, capitalistic world. This new realm is plagued by old and familiar problems, and Beatriz eventually makes her way eastward to the GDR, expecting to find an egalitarian land of miracles. Rather than offering a simple critique of East Germany, Morgner’s tale subverts the roles of gender and patriarchal structures, thereby offering up the ideal of the brighter world possible through socialism. Morgner’s brief tale addresses themes of sacrifice, capitalism, and equality, employing the familiar fairy tale structure in order to transmit a political message. After falling for a philistine from her own time who breaks her heart, 82 Melissa Sheedy and Brandy E� Wilcox Beatriz employs a magic woman to help her escape the world of the patriarchy� For each year of enchanted sleep, Beatriz must “pay” seven talents, and the enormously gifted troubadour earns herself 800 years, whereas the Grimms’ heroine received only 100 years of beauty rest� In order to complete the spell and ultimately reach her goal, Beatriz, like Sleeping Beauty, must prick her finger on a spindle that puts her into a long sleep, a sacrifice of blood and time to ensure her entry into a more enlightened state. The use of the spindle to draw blood represents the concession necessary for Beatriz to eventually reach the GDR, a place where she can escape the capitalistic and patriarchal oppression of the Middle Ages. The carryover of this symbolism still speaks to the simple, black and white moral of the Grimm Brothers’ tale, but it imbues Morgner’s text with a subtler message reinforcing the necessity of sacrifice, a common motif in socialist narratives, to escape capitalism� Like Sleeping Beauty, Beatriz only stirs from her lengthy slumber when the rosebush surrounding her castle is breached� She awakens, however, not in the fairy tale land of her dreams, but instead in France in May 1968, an area rife with civil unrest in violent opposition to capitalism� Further, it is not a prince’s kiss that rouses her, but rather the incensed cursing of an engineer charged with building an interstate through the countryside� In pursuit of capitalistic goals, the engineer endeavors to blast through the hill encasing Beatriz’s castle� Before he can set the blast, however, the rose thorns magically open into a door� While in the throes of dedication to his industrial task, even the miracle of a retreating rosebush fails to impress; he is only concerned with the paperwork and delays heralded by the castle’s sudden emergence� Blinded by his obsession with work, the engineer, mirroring the philistine from Beatriz’s old life, is unable to appreciate the troubadour and her songs� Like Sleeping Beauty, who “makes a blind commitment to the first prince who happens down the highway, penetrates the thorny barriers, and arrives deus ex machina to release her” (Rowe 217), Beatriz also immediately falls in love with the engineer, although, as we will see, her happy ending is not with him� While Morgner’s fairy tale glides over the details, the scene of Beatriz’s discovery in her castle bedroom is less innocent than it may appear at first glance, indeed drawing on a narrative tradition of rape� Following Walter Burkert’s notion of the “Maiden’s Tragedy,” a type of narrative mode that dates back to antiquity and features a female protagonist, a scene of forcible entry and rape constitutes the third stage of the heroine’s journey (71)� In his book Creation of the Sacred (1996), 5 Burkert describes the five stages that comprise this type of “female fairy tale”: her break from home, a period of isolation, the first (often violent) sexual encounter, a time of intense suffering, and finally salvation through the birth of a (male) child (71)� While fairy tales such as “Sleeping “Es war (noch) einmal”: Grimm Versions of New Fairy Tales in the GDR 83 Beauty” and “Rapunzel” do not explicitly narrate the third station of the tale, namely the experience of sexual aggression, Burkert points out that this stage indeed represents a scene of rape (71)� Morgner does not overtly mention Beatriz’s rape in her condensed fairy tale published in 1989, but she does provide an explicit account of rape in her 1974 novel about the troubadour� In a scene shortly after waking in France, Beatriz hitches a ride to the Tarascon commune and is violently attacked by the driver: Da schlug ihr der Mann die Lippen blutig, überwältigte sie mit dem Gewicht seines fetten Leibes, beschimpfte sie unflätig und erleichterte dabei seinen Beutel. Wie man eine Notdurft verrichtet. (Morgner, Abenteuer 27) [At that, the man struck her on the mouth so hard it bled, overpowered her with the weight of his fat body, called her vile names, and emptied his pouch� As if relieving himself� [Morgner, Adventures 14) Through this dehumanizing encounter, Beatriz’s fairy tale progression accords to a certain extent with Sleeping Beauty’s. Yet while the latter’s rape is symbolized both by the prick of the enchanted spindle as well as by the prince’s forced entry through the rose bush, the attack on Beatriz is related in gritty detail. Their stories also differ in their endings: whereas Sleeping Beauty completes these stages and marries her prince, Beatriz grows disenchanted with the engineer, her latest “rescuer,” who, like the philistine of her own time, does not appreciate her talents and refuses to tolerate her voluble singing� She makes the concrete decision to move eastward, despite the threats that await her on her journey� The discrepancy depicted in Morgner’s two narratives, a tale for children and a novel for adults, illustrates the ways in which the fairy tale genre handles mature topics� Morgner draws on the traditions of a tale as a duplicitous literary mode: through it, she speaks to both children and adults, but her message varies according to the symbolic systems recognized by her audience� Adults familiar with the metaphorical equivalents of rape in fairy tales, such as enchanted spindles and poisoned apples, grasp this aspect immediately, whereas a child listener might perceive only the banal interactions between Beatriz and her bumbling interlocuter� Beyond its narration of the protagonist’s narrative progression, Burkert’s “Maiden’s Tragedy” also illustrates the dependence linking the traditional fairy tale heroine to the men in her life, and it casts a contrasting analogue to Morgner’s Beatriz� Unlike the princess who submits to patriarchal norms in order to receive romantic love and both social and financial security, 6 Morgner’s heroine, who had been married centuries ago and found the union wanting, refuses to accept the domestic roles of wifehood and motherhood. The man who wakes 84 Melissa Sheedy and Brandy E� Wilcox her, driven by the same system of capitalism condemned by student protestors in Paris and across Western Europe, endeavors to trap Beatriz in marriage and submission, but her ultimate refusal of him breaks with this fairy tale tradition and leads her down a new path� By granting her protagonist an alternative besides marriage to her aggressor, Morgner suggests a new type of empowerment available to women in societies, more precisely in socialist societies, which allows them to support themselves. By removing the financial fetters of marriage, the narrative allows Beatriz to choose her own path and, in so doing, reach her own kind of freedom� Like the heroines who came before her, Beatriz exemplifies the fairy tale impulse to cross boundaries and discover new lands. The difference in this tale is that it ends not in a marriage or return home, as do traditional tales featuring female heroines, but rather in the breach of a new frontier� It is in fact not only the would-be prince and the domestic roles implicated by his offer of marriage that Beatriz spurns� Indeed, the land, more precisely the capitalist land itself that greets her upon waking, is not what she had dreamed� As in the Middle Ages she left behind, Beatriz finds herself unable to embody the roles required of her within this patriarchal society, and the disenchanted troubadour makes her way toward a land not of princes and princesses, but rather of salt-of-theearth workers who are paid equally, regardless of gender� Her refusal to follow the “Maiden’s Tragedy” progression and her desire to forge a new path indicate not only a changing of the times, but also of society and location� In the GDR, the troubadour is for the first time afforded her own opportunities for financial and social independence, unencumbered by patriarchal influences. In entering this brave new world, Beatriz has overcome what Rowe terms the “heroines’ impotence” (Rowe 211), a phenomenon whereby the romantic heroine relies solely on external agents and is bound to either her father or a husband by the end of her tale� Rowe makes the argument that, for this reason, fairy tales in a modern society “no longer provide mythic validations of desirable female behavior; instead, they seem purely escapist or nostalgic, having lost their potency because of the widening gap between social practice and romantic idealization” (211)� In rejecting the traditional path to the prince, Morgner’s protagonist seems to subvert this escapist reasoning by critically projecting the desirable female behavior of the GDR� When she crosses the border into the East, she at last discovers a land that appears to accord with her ideals: Sie durchquerte ein Land, in dem Frauen, wenn sie die gleiche Arbeit wie Männer verrichten, schlechter bezahlt wurden, und eins, in dem sie für gleiche Arbeit gleichen Lohn erhielten� (Morgner, “Benno” 182) “Es war (noch) einmal”: Grimm Versions of New Fairy Tales in the GDR 85 [She crossed through a land in which women, when they performed the same work as men, were paid worse, and one in which they received the same reward for the same work�] Beatriz finally reaches a realm where she is valued, both as a human being and as a musician� A place where both men and women are paid the same for the same work, the GDR seems to embody perfection, 7 especially in contrast to the violent turmoil of France. Through the episode in 1968 France and the peaceful resolution of Beatriz’s story in the GDR, Morgner reveals the true menace of capitalism. Her narrative suggests that any attempts to change society in a capitalistic country, such as the student movements of the late 1960s, ultimately must fail because of the foundational problems underlying the social context of capitalism itself� 8 In this way, Morgner’s tale hints that true fairy tale endings can only come about in a socialist country: “Denn natürlich war das Land ein Ort des Wunderbaren” [Because of course the land was a realm of wonders] (Morgner, “Benno” 182)� Through Beatriz’s successful entrance into the GDR and through her lack of conformity with Burkert’s “Maiden’s Tragedy” stations, Morgner’s text places emphasis on the significance of equality. Beatriz chooses the GDR based not on its name or even on its purported socialist values, but rather on her ability to find work and receive equal payment. The narrative further embraces the message of equality on a linguistic level� Near the end of the tale, she describes the nearly magical atmosphere of the new land, which, bolstered by Beatriz’s songs, has recovered miraculously from the housing shortage that had plagued Berlin: “Sonnabends ermannten und erweibten sich die Mieter ab und zu” (Morgner, “Benno” 182). The same line appears in Morgner’s novel, translated as: “On Saturdays the tenants would sometimes act like men and women” (Morgner, Adventures 468)� 9 This translation fails to capture the double meaning in Morgner’s wordplay� Expanding upon sich ermannen , to pluck up courage, Morgner creates a new verb - sich erweiben , which contains the obsolete word for woman, weib � The juxtaposition of ermannen and erweiben implies an equalization of the sexes that transcends the physical world and brings it into the very language itself� Significantly, however, Morgner’s use of this kind of language seems to draw more on the rhetoric of West German feminism� According to Sonja Klocke in her chapter “Subversive Creatures from behind the Iron Curtain,” feminism in the West focused on the struggle for equality between the sexes, whereas the ideology of the East articulated class over gender as the foundational category of identity (140)� Under socialism, all citizens were rendered equal and women, as citizens, were automatically included� In spite of the author’s open rejection of West German feminist thought, Morgner’s passage, like other works by female 86 Melissa Sheedy and Brandy E� Wilcox writers in the 1970s GDR, reveals new perspectives from a female heroine, as Karen Achberger points out in her article “GDR Women’s Fiction of the 1970s”: [Women] heroes mediate a utopian quality; they carry the seed for a different future in opposing the established (male) values of the present and offering instead revolutionary (female) alternatives: cooperation instead of competition, nurturance instead of authoritarianism, integration instead of specialization� (217) Moreover, Morgner’s passage draws on a specifically Western language, which allows the tale to speak to a broader audience and perhaps might even suggest underlying similarities between different strains of feminism. Together with the tale’s emphasis on disparities of gender, rather than class, Morgner’s specific exploitation of this kind of language might indicate the continued need in the GDR for the reinforcement of gender-specific equality. 10 Through her “Benno” tale, Morgner delivers a story of remarkable complexity, but her adherence to fairy tale narrative conventions draws on the traditions of children’s literature and on fairy tales in general as a means of education and indoctrination. The purpose of the folk and fairy tale to guide and instruct children of the GDR was no new phenomenon, 11 but instead represented an evolution in the tale’s function from the time of the Brothers Grimm. Originally intended for adults, the Grimms’ tales underwent a shift toward younger audiences, which resulted in revised and didacticized stories that differed in form and function from earlier versions of their own tales as well as those from other authors, such as the seventeenth-century author Charles Perrault (Shavit 327)� Folktales, despite their early sexual and violent themes, were initially intended for all ages� However, following the evolving purpose of the wooden rocking horse, as children came to be recognized as having different physical, social, and psychological needs than adults, fairy tales eventually became the purview of children (Shavit 322)� 12 As a genre uniquely suited to subversion, however, the fairy tale continued to provide opportunities for authors to speak directly to adults� Perrault’s tales, for example, contain stylistic devices indicative of works for younger audiences, but they also come furnished with “signs” that point to a secret, adult readership (Shavit 324)� This duplicitous nature of tales noted by Shavit also plays a role in fairy tales written and rewritten in the GDR. Morgner’s tale, for example, seems to fulfill its educational role in strong favor of socialism: Morgner’s heroine steps bravely into the new communist frontier and land of wonders, prepared to take part in a nation of equality� Beatriz provides an example for women of the GDR, and by extension their children, to reject the patriarchal ideas of the West and take on the newly desirable female behavior embodied by this dynamic heroine� Whereas the tales of the nineteenth century taught children, and especially girls, the “Es war (noch) einmal”: Grimm Versions of New Fairy Tales in the GDR 87 value and security of domestic roles, Morgner’s narrative instead emphasizes the socialist ideals of egalitarianism and the substantial duty of the worker� 13 However, in spite of this apparent commitment to these principles, Morgner capitalizes on the fairy tale’s unique critical potential in the socialist state, but she does so in order to subvert the conventions of the genre itself� In criticizing the tale’s reinforcement of traditional gender roles and patriarchal structures, rather than offering a simple critique of East Germany, Morgner taps into the tale’s subversion and imagines a brighter world� Like Morgner, Hensel takes advantage of the familiar in her short text “Da ward gutes Essen aufgetragen,” published in the 1989 collection Hallimasch [Honey Colored Agaric]� While Hensel’s text is also not intended for children, she draws on a narrative and a genre with a traditionally juvenile audience and blurs the lines between childhood and maturity, ultimately revealing the protagonists’ failure to grow up� In the story, Hensel presents a new ending for the wayward siblings Hänsel and Gretel from the eponymous fairy tale� Picking up at the point where the children enter the witch’s hut and see the sumptuous feast set out before them, Hensel weaves a vastly different tale in which the children complacently devour all that the witch offers them and become fat and idle during their captivity� As the years go by, Gretel gradually forgets her original thoughts of escape, and their captor becomes old and blind, forgetting entirely her own plans to kill and eat her charges. After the witch’s eventual quiet death in her sleep, the children discover that a light pressure on the door is enough to open their cage, which had been unlocked all along. They wander aimlessly away from the cottage, marveling at the outside world and at each other, and they find that they do not know where to go. 14 Like Morgner’s Beatriz, whose tale ends in the breach of a new frontier, the children discover themselves in an unfamiliar realm, but whereas Morgner’s story culminates in a firm note of hope, Hensel’s seems to falter� Rather than ending with a traditional fairy tale marriage or a return home, her retelling concludes instead with a loss of direction (Marven 233)� Hensel’s parody, which was written during the final years of the GDR and published in 1989, turns the Grimms’ tale on its head and calls for a political reading. The colorful bars that separate the children’s cell from the divinities of the witch’s kitchen resemble a private Wall, one that not only fails in keeping out what might be read as Western influence and excess, but which also renders the captive children more vulnerable to these persuasions� Indeed, Hänsel and Gretel soon forget that the bars exist, appearing to care only for the next influx of lavish foods, and they willingly offer their fingers through the bars for the witch’s consideration� If one reads the children as symbolic captives behind the Wall, then the witch could be seen to represent the socialist state, dependent on 88 Melissa Sheedy and Brandy E� Wilcox a failing system that is slowly becoming blind and toothless� 15 Powerless and inert, the witch has become deaf to the needs of her captives� Her only concern is to wait before killing the children, “denn nichts sei schon fett genug, als daß es nicht besser werden könnte” [because nothing was already fat enough that it couldn’t become better] (Hensel 6), a constant reminder that seems to mirror the path of socialism itself as one of constant progress toward a distant goal. This progress, however, falters as the witch slowly forgets the children and herself� The siblings, as complicit citizens, keep the system afloat until it eventually collapses under its own weight. This destiny of ruin and misdirection contrasts starkly with the traditional fairy tale ending� While evoking the notion of GDR citizens as children of the state, Hensel’s reading also subverts the familiar fairy tale formula and affords her protagonists, and thereby her vision of the GDR itself, a drastically different fate. Hensel’s challenging allegory simultaneously draws on and breaks reader expectations evoked by its familiar structure. The parody capitalizes on the fairy tale as a protagonist’s symbolic path toward adulthood, and it perverts this very progression with a substantial GDR subtext� Moreover, Hensel engages with a literary mode closely associated with children� As a genre with the potential for distinct educational and ideological applications within the GDR, the fairy tale presents a means of inculcating socialist values through simplified morals and repeated constellations of one-dimensional villainous and heroic archetypes� According to Bruno Bettelheim in The Uses of Enchantment , the tale’s purpose was to “carry important messages to the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious mind, on whatever level each is functioning at the time” (6). The fairy tale thus helps the child overcome and understand not only the physical struggles of life but also the psychological. For Bettelheim, the value of the fairy tale to a child is the presentation of dilemmas, both psychological and, we argue, external, in an easily comprehensible manner that allows children to derive underlying values� In this way, the educational value of fairy tales for the next generation comes to light, an aspect of the genre that helped render it acceptable in the GDR� As an ideological vehicle intended to transmit lessons and socialist principles, the fairy tale proved exceedingly useful for the regime� Like Shavit’s rocking horse, the tale allowed for the realities of adult life and issues within the GDR to be portrayed without directly dealing with them� For Hensel’s protagonists, however, the message embedded in the tale has gotten lost, and they fail to find their own way forward. If the fairy tale can indeed be read as a presentation of a child’s internal dilemmas and flaws, as per Bettelheim, then the individual character deficiency that plagues the protagonists is of particular significance in the narrative. In both the Grimms’ original as well as in Hensel’s retelling, the Hänsel and Gre- “Es war (noch) einmal”: Grimm Versions of New Fairy Tales in the GDR 89 tel tale presents the motif of gluttony as an inherent personality flaw. In the Grimms’ story, the balance of lack and luxury comprises the narrative’s driving force: the stepmother banishes the children for want of food, a magical candy house in the woods proves irresistible for the hungry visitors, and the witch, intending to cannibalize the children, is herself shoved into the oven in place of her young victims. Hensel’s version also thematizes gluttony to an extreme degree, opening for instance with a description of the rich banquet set out in the hut. The witch herself even resembles food: “ein Gesicht […] wie ein Apfel und Augen wie Nüsse” [a face like an apple and eyes like nuts] (Hensel 6)� Focalized through the children’s perspective, the narrative thus suggests that the tale’s cannibalistic undertones may not solely be within the purview of the witch: the children, too, are hungry� Moreover, the witch, both as producer of these feasts and as animate analogue to her own cuisine, seems to physically embody the sin of gluttony herself. Indeed, as Sheldon Cashdan argues in his book The Witch Must Die , the character flaws marking the fairy tale protagonist take material form within the witch or wicked stepmother herself (35)� In corporealizing these faults in the form of a (female) villain, the tale is thus able to render her susceptible to defeat by the hero, who by slaying the witch may surmount his or her own internal deficiencies (35). If we follow Bettelheim’s and Cashdan’s assertions that the fairy tale presents both the acknowledgement of their flaws as well as the possibility of overcoming them, then the witch’s passive death in Hensel’s retelling denies the protagonists the confrontation with their own inner nature. The potential of tales to inculcate socialist values wavers as Hensel’s narrative grants the witch not a violent death, but rather a peaceful one, and leads her children protagonists into chaos� While Hensel’s text as a GDR fairy tale was not necessarily intended for children, the narrative demonstrates the potential of fairy tales, new and old, to transfer meaning between the lines, to deliver a secret and powerful language concealed within an innocuous package� Her short and simple narrative reveals both the powerlessness of the ill-fated state as well as hopelessness for the future, which seems grim and uncertain� While the children have in fact become adults in the intervening years, 16 they have failed to recognize their own potential� With their own personal Wall now open (and indeed, it always had been), the narrative presents the siblings as citizens with heretofore unrealized power to change their circumstances� By leaving the doors to the cage long open, Hensel’s tale articulates profound frustration with the complacency of GDR citizens in the 1980s, 17 whose abiding reluctance and inaction stalled the social momentum that eventually lead to the fall of the Wall� Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz (1939), Hänsel and Gretel had possessed the means to escape the whole time, but do not realize this until the end� However, unlike Dorothy and 90 Melissa Sheedy and Brandy E� Wilcox other children’s heroes, they fail to capitalize on this unlocked potential. Their deep-seated flaws of idleness and gluttony have only worsened throughout the years, a dynamic that, as Hensel hints, parodies and parallels the inexorable collapse of the state and the failure of its citizens to act� It is this shortcoming more than any other that ultimately prevents any ingenious escape from the siblings’ dark and directionless fate� While Morgner’s text and Hensel’s retelling both draw on familiar source material, namely the Grimms’ tales “Sleeping Beauty” and “Hänsel and Gretel,” Stefan Heym presents “Der kleine König, der ein Kind kriegen mußte” as a brand-new tale incorporating traditional fairy tale elements. It is also the first tale we discuss published in a collection for children� In the story, a hapless king makes futile plans to enjoy his daily leisure, but each morning over breakfast his wife interrupts his reverie to ask what laws he intends to put into place that day� Reminding him of the unfair advantages enjoyed by the men in the kingdom, Frau Adelheid convinces her husband to write into law the conventionally “female” duties now to be undertaken by husbands and fathers, such as washing, cooking, and sewing� Each day the king readily agrees, but she reminds him: “Worte allein genügen nicht, man muß auch etwas tun” [Words alone are not enough, you also have to do something] (Heym 8). The king himself thus goes about his day completing the work otherwise expected of the women of the land. On the third day, the queen broaches the question of childbirth, and the king suddenly finds himself in a predicament: he must somehow bear a child or suffer the consequence of his own new law. Without overt reference to a particular figure or fairy tale, Heym weaves a narrative from scratch, comprised of familiar fairy tale elements and mechanisms. This composition of fairy tale genre conventions engenders certain expectations on the part of the reader, and the ways in which these expectations are met or broken reveal political and ideological implications in the text� As a tale intended for a juvenile audience, Heym’s narrative taps into the fairy tale as an ideal platform for this kind of political and social critique� In the story, the royal pair’s struggles for equality mirror and parody the socialist endeavor to render all citizens equal, a condition that Morgner’s Beatriz simply assumes to exist. Words do not suffice; the king is obliged to go out and correct these errors himself: washing the dishes, stitching, writing notes, and, of course, he must somehow conceive and bear a child. This last, and ultimately impossible, task reveals the disproportions of theory and praxis within the socialist nation. The queen’s demands are convincingly argued, and even signed into law by the little king, but his endeavor is still not physically possible. In his travels to find a solution, the king reaches out to three pillars of civilization: the wise woman, the doctor, and finally the pastor. The realms of folk medicine, science, and religion “Es war (noch) einmal”: Grimm Versions of New Fairy Tales in the GDR 91 all fail him, but they lead eventually to his answer: a young shepherd girl with the down-to-earth knowledge of the world that the king lacks� With her aid, the king is indeed able to return to his kingdom with a child of his own making� In highlighting the gender dynamic and cultural hierarchy privileging males, Heym points to a significant instance of inequality in the socialist realm while also offering a preposterous solution. The queen aptly calls attention to the unfair situation faced by the women in the kingdom, but her suggested resolution, namely declaring all domestic tasks now to be the purview of men, is equally flawed. Rather than destabilizing the gender roles that had for centuries marginalized and disenfranchised the kingdom’s women, the queen proposes to invert these roles instead, maintaining the same power structures that grant power and agency to one gender and render the other defenseless� In contrast to Morgner’s imagined GDR, posited as a land in which proletarian solidarity and equality overcome the prejudices of its inhabitants and even “die Barriere der Familie” [the barriers of the family] (Morgner, “Benno” 182) itself, Heym’s narrative presents a society still deeply cloven by the male-female duality� Even as fundamental gender roles are reversed on the little king’s orders, the categories of male and female, subject and object remain firmly in place. These artificial binaries lie at the heart of society’s crises, both in the traditional gender roles and also in the queen’s suggested structural improvements. This, of course, presents a dilemma for the king, who quite ably manages the washing and the sewing but cannot himself conceive a child� As a solution, Heym’s narrative introduces the heroic, salt-of-the-earth shepherd girl, who willingly enough agrees to help the king produce a child, though the method of this production is - appropriately for this genre - left unstated. Through this resolution, the tale suggests that true success derives from cooperation between men and women rather than the domination of one over the other� Interestingly, despite this move to abolish power structures between the sexes, the traditional gender and social roles do not change much at the end of the story: the king still maintains authority over his land, while the shepherd girl bears his child and makes his daily breakfast� Nevertheless, the tale’s conclusion reinforces the socialist practice of working together toward a common goal, with the emphasis on the prevailing role of the people as a whole� Unlike Hensel’s story with its evil witch, Heym’s tale lacks a powerful foe to be defeated at the end. As a scheming and ostensibly barren wife, Queen Adelheid plays the role of antagonist, embodying the displeasing characteristics to which young readers should not aspire� Like her villainous fairy tale analogues, she sets herself apart from the innocent maiden and from the story’s target audience� Rowe remarks: “Because cleverness, willpower, and manipulative skill are aligned with vanity, shrewishness, and ugliness, […] odious females hardly 92 Melissa Sheedy and Brandy E� Wilcox recommend themselves as models” (218)� Adelheid does nothing in the tale but speak, and indeed, to her the narrator devotes the last remark: “und wenn sie nicht gestorben ist, redet sie noch heute” [and she talked happily ever after] (Heym 18)� She seems to represent the most disagreeable kind of theorist, the one who talks and talks but herself accomplishes nothing� Her role as a purveyor of empty words places her at odds with the simple farm girl, who, rather than merely talking, instead works to bear the fruit of her physical labor. One can read the figure of Adelheid as a symbol of the GDR’s official position on gender inequality, which, according to Klocke, was claimed to have been handily eliminated under the advent of socialism, in conjunction with the more pressing concerns of class differences (“Subversive Creatures” 143). Constantly speaking instead of acting, Adelheid can be read potentially as a critique of West German feminists who do the same. The queen’s constant flow of words seems to resemble the magical incantations of a witch, but her blank articulations steadily lose their power in the face of the concrete socialist values embodied by the farm girl� Unlike fairy tale witches, who tend to die violently at the tale’s conclusion, Adelheid lives to found her own society where she continues to speak to this day. Nevertheless, Bettelheim’s reading of the fairy tale as the arena for the child reader’s confrontation with inner flaws seems to remain true in Heym’s story: while Adelheid is not defeated in the traditional sense, the king distances himself from her and makes a simple shepherd girl his new queen� Although Adelheid emerges unscathed, she has no place in this new regime now run by her husband� Having realized the foibles of his new legislation, the king embraces the folksy methods which Adelheid had erroneously sought to abolish, and thereby overcomes his own deficiencies, both of character and of state. With the emphasis on the disparity between meaningless speech and consequential action as illustrated by Adelheid’s ineffectuality, Heym’s tale may suggest a critique of West Germany, perceived by the East to bear the heritage of lingering fascism even decades after the end of the War. According to Thomas Ahbe in his chapter “Competing Master Narratives,” both the FRG and the GDR sought to legitimize themselves through their own founding narratives of antifascism following the Second World War, “and each accused the other of continuities with National Socialism” (221). The GDR pointed to the West’s enduring connections with the Third Reich and denounced the capitalist state as “the exclusive successor of National Socialism” (Klocke, Inscription 12)� While both sides claimed a consequential break with the fascist past, the GDR endeavored to position itself as the sole truly antifascist state, articulating the West as an entity whose actions did not match its words. Like Queen Adelheid, the FRG’s claims of denazification reveal the discontinuity between theory and practice, whereas true progress, as Heym’s tale suggests, is only made through socialist “Es war (noch) einmal”: Grimm Versions of New Fairy Tales in the GDR 93 cooperation and achievement. This emphasis on collaboration in the text echoes the push for gender equality in the GDR� Couched in the adjacent impulse toward general emancipation of humankind, this kind of liberation “can only be achieved as a joint effort of both women and men” (Klocke, “Subversive Creatures” 140)� Moreover, this potential critique of the FRG may also extend to the western world’s own brand of feminism, which reinforced differences of gender over those of class� Indeed, Heym’s tale seems to evoke what Klocke describes as “GDR feminism,” a retroactively applied term that sets itself apart from western movements in that it does not endeavor to reverse binary relations, but rather to abolish them (“Subversive Creatures” 142)� While the gender binary remains in place at the end of the story, the queen has failed to redefine it under her own terms, and the king finds success through egalitarian cooperation of the sexes. In traditional folk tales, the stories largely addressed serious themes of starvation, death, violence, and other grim factors of life, palatizing them through the use of humor and metaphors� As a story indeed intended for children of the GDR, Heym’s tale seems to fulfill its educational obligations faultlessly, employing humorous situations and a simplified narrative style to obscure criticism of a complex problem in the socialist state; namely, that of gender equality and roles� As new awareness of a child’s psyche developed, traditional folk tales were rewritten and modified to better suit the child of the nineteenth century. (Zipes, Breaking 18)� In hearing or reading this unfortunate king’s trials and errors, youthful audiences were exposed to folksy values and lessons of cooperation and collaboration, imparting modern values to indoctrinate modern children� However, these didacticized new tales, passed along as bedtime stories, became vital means of reaching not only the children of the GDR, but also the adults� Their ability to sneak through unnoticed and relatively uncensored through the medium of youth literature rendered them especially valuable� In this way, Heym’s and other authors’ messages of subtle, but sharp critique might not have necessarily reached the narrative’s stated audiences, but they possessed the potential to leave lasting imprints on adult GDR citizens: the parents who read these tales to their children� Given the socialist context of Heym’s GDR fairy tale, the protagonist’s role as king is significant. Rather than featuring a common worker or other representative of the people, Heym’s tale focuses instead on a member of the imperial elite� However, Heym’s tale has flipped the traditional gender of the title character. Unlike Sleeping Beauty or Snow White , Heym’s tale puts a male figure in the title role historically occupied by a female royal. The narrative casts the “Little King” as the “damsel in distress” to be rescued, further disrupting the gender roles and imparting another layer of egalitarianism into the tale� Despite this opportunity for gender equality, the use of high-class figures in East German 94 Melissa Sheedy and Brandy E� Wilcox fiction seems an odd choice, as the very idea of royalty was seen as anachronistic in the socialist state, and it seemed to run counter to the antifeudal ideology of the GDR (Shen 20)� However, the use of kings, princesses, and princes was not unusual among the fairy tale adaptations in the GDR, especially in the wellknown DEFA fairy tale films. As Qinna Shen explains in her book The Politics of Magic , the omission of royalty from film versions of well-known fairy tales would have attracted attention, given the well-known role that these figures play in tales, and it would distance these transformations from the beloved and familiar source material (20-21)� Moreover, the conventions associated with the fairy tale genre, including repeated and familiar character roles and constellations, comprised a crucial aspect of these retellings, and they served to foster audience recognition and expectations� Heym consciously capitalizes on this discrepancy� While choosing to leave his protagonist nameless, he conceals the German word for nobility, “Adel,” within the antagonistic queen’s name, “Adelheid�” 18 In Heym’s tale, the implications of the choice to focus on royalty are two-fold: First, through his portrayal of these monarchical figures, especially the queen, the author presents a critique of the government and of those in power, rather than of the worker� 19 Second, the king’s tasks are distinctly domestic, which adds to the humor of his situation but which also, through its absurdity, highlights the fact that authority figures are not held to the same standards and expectations as the majority of the people. The king, who single-handedly possesses the most power in all the land, is in the end rescued by a simple shepherd girl� She solves his dilemma not through magical or even legislative intervention, but rather through common sense and cooperation, an unadulterated celebration of socialist values� Did Morgner’s Sleeping Beauty find her prince in the arms of the socialist GDR? Have Hensel’s Hänsel and Gretel learned from their encounter with the witch and will they take advantage of the freedom they possess? Will Heym’s queen ever put actions to words and follow the example of the shepherd girl? While these tales could be understood through the vista of childhood innocence - the image of an engineer cursing at a magical castle is comical at all ages, and what child has never dreamt of a house built of sugar? - they also offer readings relevant for the problems of the adult world� Following the evolution of the wooden rocking horse from an object of symbolic purpose to one of pleasure, fairy tales have made the journey from utility to diversion, jumping back and forth from the world of children to that of the adults� As the rocking horse was used as a tool for the initiation of children into the adult world, authors in the GDR took advantage of the fairy tale genre to serve as a reintroduction for adults into a child’s context� “Es war (noch) einmal”: Grimm Versions of New Fairy Tales in the GDR 95 Read together, these adaptations show how fairy tales in the GDR exemplify the double-edged sword of ideology: on the one hand, they were used to indoctrinate children, but on the other, they also represented a genre whose ties to German cultural heritage rendered it immune to ideological interference� Morgner, Hensel, and Heym, among others, employ a fairy tale context in their own works in order to convey political messages, signaled both by the subversion inherent in the genre itself as well as by the changes they make to the familiar formula� Morgner’s and Hensel’s transformations both seem to invite and resist political readings, creating a tension that draws in the reader and forces us to engage more closely with the text. Heym’s simple narrative for children offers a rather sharp critique of the discrepancies between the theories of socialism and its often flawed practice in the GDR. At once a positive statement about the power of the people and a cautionary tale, the king’s story transmits a political message to parents, embedded within a seemingly harmless package: the fairy tales they read their children� For GDR authors of new and retold stories for children, the tale’s deceptively simple format serves as an effective veneer for concealing at times deeply political implications, highlighting the fairy tale’s own secret subversion� Notes All translations are our own unless otherwise indicated� 1 Beatriz is the central character of Morgner’s 1974 novel Leben und Abenteuer der Trobadora Beatriz nach Zeugnissen ihrer Spielfrau Laura: Roman in dreizehn Büchern und sieben Intermezzos , which opens with a chapter nearly identical to her 1988 tale “Bennos erste Geschichte.” Jeannette Clausen’s excellent English translation of the novel, The Life and Adventures of Trobadora Beatrice as Chronicled by her Minstrel Laura: A Novel in Thirteen Books and Seven Intermezzos , includes much of the same text as Morgner’s short tale. There does not yet exist an official translation of the 1988 collection containing “Bennos erste Geschichte�” 2 For more information, see the fourth edition of Wolfgang Emmerich’s Kleine Literaturgeschichte der DDR (2009)� 3 See, for instance, Peter Hacks’s Der Schuhu und die fliegende Prinzessin [The Eagle Owl and the Flying Princess] (1964), Franz Fühmann’s Reineke Fuchs [Reynard the Fox] (1966), and Heinz Kahlau’s Der gestiefelte Kater [Puss in Boots] (1967)� 4 Many films, such as Drei Nüsse für Aschenbrödel [Three Hazelnuts for Cinderella] (1974), were in fact co-produced with the Czech film industry and other socialist film studios (Shen 154). These collaborations with victims of 96 Melissa Sheedy and Brandy E� Wilcox the fascist regime may also have contributed to their acceptance within the antifascist state� 5 Burkert’s text was first published as Kulte des Altertums. Biologische Grundlagen der Religion in 1989� 6 See Rowe 217� 7 However, it must be noted that the idea of equality and the perfection promised by the GDR could also be read as romantic idealization that may never come to be. This alternative reading is supported by Morgner’s novel about Beatriz, which breaks with her tale’s hopeful conclusion and instead leads her protagonist into realms of increasing doubt and uncertainty� 8 In Morgner’s novel, the author describes the plight of Italian communists who make similar attempts to enact change in their nation, but they ultimately fail because, despite their beliefs, they are not in a socialist country� 9 Translated by Jeanette Clausen. 10 In her chapter “Subversive Creatures from behind the Iron Curtain,” Sonja Klocke discusses Beatriz’s oscillating loyalties between Western strains of feminism and a specifically East German feminism in Morgner’s novel Leben und Abenteuer der Trobadora Beatriz � Klocke describes Beatriz’s involvement with the so-called “third order,” or “dritte Ordnung” (Morgner, Abenteuer 29) which “strives for the eradication of gender inequality together with class differences and can be considered as representing ‘GDR feminism’” (Klocke, “Subversive Creatures” 149). In the novel, this “dritte Ordnung” is described as neither patriarchal, nor matriarchal, but rather “menschlich,” or humane (Morgner, Abenteuer 29)� Although Morgner’s fairy tale ends with Beatriz’s entry into the GDR and does not detail her adventures afterward, this use of language more characteristic of West German feminism could indicate an interest on the part of the author in fighting against binaries of both class and gender� 11 While youth literature comprises a familiar trend in the German-speaking realm since the nineteenth century, the narrative œuvre intended specifically for children was not taken seriously by governing bodies until the GDR recognized the potential of the genre for the transmission of socialist values (Di Napoli 282)� 12 Shavit points out that the concept of childhood has evolved dramatically since the Middle Ages� Rather than regarding them as humans with different physical, social, psychological, and emotional needs than the adults around them, societies up until the seventeenth century instead treated children as miniature adults� Birth, life, and death, mirroring the phases of nature, comprised the foundational segments of the life cycle� If they survived, juveniles entered the adult world at a very young age, and they “Es war (noch) einmal”: Grimm Versions of New Fairy Tales in the GDR 97 were assumed to possess identical physical and emotional requirements as the adults around them (318-19)� 13 While Morgner’s short tale presents the GDR as the best of both worlds, her novel presents at times strong criticism of the socialist state not present in “Bennos erste Geschichte�” 14 “Und da gingen sie und wußten nicht, wohin” [And they left and did not know where to go] (Hensel 8)� 15 Alternatively, this deep-seated gluttony can also be read as a symbol of capitalism; as long as they get their share of food and wealth, the children have no wish to join the world around them. Their captor, meanwhile, representing the capitalist state, becomes ineffective and obsolete. In this way, Hensel’s text presents a critique of both systems at once alongside a distinct sense of uncertainty for the future� For the purposes of this article, we work with the interpretation linking the witch to socialism� 16 At the tale’s conclusion, the siblings look at one another for the first time in years and remark on each other’s appearance: “[Gretel] sagte, wie fett du geworden bist, Hans, und da sah es auch Hans und sprach, wie dumm du geworden bist, Margarete�” [[Gretel] said, how fat you have become, Hans� And Hans looked at her and said, how dumb you have become, Margarete�] (Hensel 8)� Hänsel and Gretel have become Hans and Margarete, but their progression into adulthood seems to be in name only� 17 For more on the political and social engagement of Hensel’s narratives, see Lyn Marven’s Body and Narrative in Contemporary Literatures in German. Herta Müller, Libuše Moníková, and Kerstin Hensel (2005)� 18 Heym is not the only author to reference nobility in a character’s name� In Hensel’s 2008 novel Lärchenau , the protagonist Adele’s name also contains the German word “Adel�” Beyond this allusion to nobility, Adele’s imagined role as a princess and distinct personal privilege as the wife of an esteemed physician set her apart from the GDR’s purported egalitarianism, and this marker of high social status also evokes the fairy tale genre� 19 These depictions that allowed for thinly veiled critique of power structures within the government played a crucial role in East German literature at large� In Christoph Hein’s Die Ritter der Tafelrunde [The Knights of the Round Table] (1989), for instance, the author thematizes the Arthurian Court as an impotent governing body unable to adapt to the changing political and social climate, a prescient vision of the end of the GDR� 98 Melissa Sheedy and Brandy E� Wilcox Works Cited Achberger, Karen R. “GDR Women’s Fiction of the 1970s: The Emergence of Feminism within Socialism�” East Central Europe/ L’Europe Du Centre-Est 6�1 (1979): 217-31� Ahbe, Thomas. “Competing Master Narratives: Geschichtspolitik and Identity Discourse in Three German Societies.” The GDR Remembered: Representations of the East German State since 1989 � Ed� Nick Hodgin and Caroline Pearce� Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011� 221-49� Arnds, Peter O. “On the Awful German Fairy Tale: Breaking Taboos in Representations of Nazi Euthanasia and the Holocaust in Günter Grass’s ‘Die Blechtrommel,’ Edgar Hilsenrath’s ‘Der Nazi und der Friseur,’ and Anselm Kiefer’s Visual Art�” German Quarterly 75�4 (2002): 422-39� Bascom, William R� “Four Functions of Folklore�” The Journal of American Folklore 67 (1954): 333-49� Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales � New York: Alfred A� Knopf, 1977� Burkert, Walter� Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions � Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1996� Cashdan, Sheldon� The Witch Must Die: How Fairy Tales Shape our Lives � New York: Basic Books, 1999� Castein, Hanne, ed� Es wird einmal: Märchen für Morgen. Moderne Märchen aus der DDR. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1988� Di Napoli, Thomas. “Thirty Years of Children’s Literature in the German Democratic Republic�” German Studies Review 7�2 (1984): 281-300� Emmerich, Wolfgang� Kleine Literaturgeschichte der DDR � Erweiterte Neuausgabe � Berlin: Aufbau Taschenbuch, 2009. Goodman, Robin Truth, ed� Literature and the Development of Feminist Theory � Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2015� Hensel, Kerstin� “Da ward gutes Essen aufgetragen�” Hallimasch. Erzählungen � Halle (Saale): Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 1989. 6-8. —� Hallimasch. Erzählungen. Halle (Saale): Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 1989. —� Lärchenau. Munich: btb Verlag, 2008� Heym, Stefan. “Der kleine König, der ein Kind kriegen mußte.” Der kleine König, der ein King kriegen mußte und andere neue Märchen � Berlin: Morgenbuch Verlag, 1993� 7-18� Klocke, Sonja E� Inscription and Rebellion: Illness and the Symptomatic Body in East German Literature � Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2015� —� “Subversive Creatures from behind the Iron Curtain: Irmtraud Morgner’s The Life and Adventures of Trobadora Beatrice as Chronicled by her Minstrel Laura �” Literature and the Development of Feminist Theory � Ed� Robin Truth Goodman� Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2015� 140-54� Marven, Lyn� Body and Narrative in Contemporary Literatures in German. Herta Müller, Libuše Moníková, and Kerstin Hensel. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005. “Es war (noch) einmal”: Grimm Versions of New Fairy Tales in the GDR 99 Morgner, Irmtraud� “Bennos erste Geschichte�” Es wird einmal: Märchen für Morgen. Moderne Märchen aus der DDR � Ed� Hanne Castein� Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1988� 181-82� —� Leben und Abenteuer der Trobadora Beatriz nach Zeugnissen ihrer Spielfrau Laura: Roman in dreizehn Büchern und sieben Intermezzos . Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1976. —� The Life and Adventures of Trobadora Beatrice as Chronicled by her Minstrel Laura: A Novel in Thirteen Books and Seven Intermezzos . Trans. Jeanette Clausen. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2000� Rowe, Karen E� “Feminism and Fairy Tales�” Don’t Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England � Ed� Jack Zipes� New York: Routledge, 1986� 209-26� Shavit, Zohar. “The Concept of Childhood and Children’s Folktales: Test Case - ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ . ” The Classic Fairy Tales � Ed� Maria Tatar� New York/ London: W�W� Norton, 1999� 317-32� Shen, Qinna� The Politics of Magic. DEFA Fairy-Tale Films. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2015� Wolf, Christa� Lesen und Schreiben. Aufsätze und Prosastücke � Munich: Luchterhand, 1972� —� Nachdenken über Christa T � Munich: Luchterhand, 1968� —� The Quest for Christa T . Trans. Christopher Middleton. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1970� —� The Reader and the Writer. Essays, Sketches, Memories � Trans� Joan Becker� Berlin: Seven Seas Publishers, 1977� Zipes, Jack� Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales. Lexington: The UP of Kentucky, 2002. —� When Dreams Came True: Classical Fairy Tales and their Tradition � New York: Routledge, 1999� “Risen from Ruins”: Berlin, Generations, and Identity in Herrmann Zschoche’s Insel der Schwäne Sonja E� Klocke University of Wisconsin - Madison Abstract: In GDR culture generally, and in DEFA films in particular, buildings, construction sites, and ruins play a substantial role. This article examines the significance of issues of space and architecture in Herrmann Zschoche’s film Insel der Schwäne [Swan Island] (1983), and puts them in context with generational conflicts - another prevalent topic in GDR culture - as well as questions of identity. This approach reveals that Insel der Schwäne , far from simply fossilizing the city/ countryside dichotomy, stages East Berlin as a heterogeneous, enjoyable, progressive socialist universe still in the making. The capital of the GDR emerges as a space in which the teenager Stefan can assert himself - both in the complex space of Marzahn that is challenging because love develops just as readily as conflicts, and vis-à-vis his father, a construction worker of the first GDR generation who emblematically showcases the opportunities as well as the sacrifices implied in building socialism. Unlike later DEFA films, Insel der Schwäne still embraces utopian yearnings for a better, socialist future, and carefully calls for continued efforts to build a socialist state that allows for heterogeneity in its cities as well as among its socialist citizens of all generations� Keywords: Herrmann Zschoche, Insel der Schwäne, Berlin, architecture, generational conflict, identity In GDR culture, the subject of Aufbau [build-up] plays a fundamental role from the very beginning. The national anthem, written by Johannes R. Becher (music by Hanns Eisler) in 1949, declares the GDR a country “risen from ruins and facing the future,” and calls on its citizens to plough, build, learn, and create like never before� 1 Hardly surprising, the image of the house as a symbol for the young GDR is not uncommon in GDR literature and film either. Uwe Kolbe 102 Sonja E� Klocke for example describes socialism as the “Vorstellung, daß man gemeinsam an einem neuen historischen Gebäude arbeitet, und habe es auch seine Mängel und Schwierigkeiten, aber daß es doch das Bessere sei, speziell das bessere Deutschland” [vision that collectively, one works on a new historical building, and even if it has its deficiencies and intricacies, it is still the better, especially the better Germany] (Kolbe, qtd. in Dröscher 16). By the same token, many DEFA films feature construction sites, ruins, and new buildings� When particular architectural sites are combined or juxtaposed - for example, an apartment block characteristic for the GDR and made from prefabricated concrete slabs (the so-called Plattenbau ) with a late nineteenthor an early twentieth-century traditional building - these contrasting realms unfold symbolic and metaphoric potential� Films portraying such houses already comment on the state of the “build-up of socialism” since the Plattenbau is generally linked with socialist progress and set against the historic Altbau associated with obsolete traditions and allegedly vanquished social systems� Movies that - purportedly or deliberately - criticize GDR housing politics were therefore considered an affront against the socialist state. After all, unlike most contemporary Western societies, it was the state in the GDR that took on the responsibility for housing; which means that providing citizens with a roof over their heads was beyond doubt a political concern� The first critiques of Insel der Schwäne [Swan Island] (1983) published in party organs such as the Junge Welt and Neues Deutschland foregrounded an understanding of the film as questioning the efforts made with the gigantic building project in Berlin-Marzahn. Thus, I argue, they laid the foundation for a series of misinterpretations� Following initially positive reviews - Kino DDR even introduced Herrmann Zschoche’s film as their “film of the month” in April 1983 - the publications centering on an alleged criticism of the GDR Plattenbau shaping socialist cities influenced the focus of subsequent readings of the film. 2 In order to avoid replicating such lopsided interpretations which are as inadequate as attempts to construe the film as an omen for the collapse of the GDR in the fall of 1989 (Gersch 194; Blunk 1244), we need to expand our focus beyond simple dichotomies such as village/ city or Altbau/ Plattenbau . Therefore, this article complicates these issues of space and architecture by putting them in context with previously only insufficiently discussed character constellations - particularly between father and son - that represent the generational conflicts highly relevant in GDR film and literature. After all, architecture - especially in the Marxist and Modernist view the GDR’s leading architect Hermann Henselmann propagated - “stands in a close dialectical relationship with the human beings who make and use it” and “reclaims its role as a fundamental means for meeting the material and emotional needs of human communities,” as Curtis Swope emphasizes in his pivotal analysis of built space in GDR literature from “Risen from Ruins”: Herrmann Zschoche’s Insel der Schwäne 103 the 1950s to the 1970s (3-4)� In order to untangle the various facets the Kolbe family’s move from a village to the city of Berlin has above all for Stefan, the teenage protagonist in the film, we need to understand the specificities of different age groups in GDR society as well as their significance for a variety of resulting altercations. Therefore, I consider both the challenges and the opportunities East Berlin with its construction sites and traditional buildings affords particularly the young people who have to stand up for themselves vis-à-vis the parent generation� Based on this analysis I argue that the capital of the GDR does not present an entirely negative counterpart to a wholesome universe in the countryside� Rather, Berlin emerges as a positively connoted city space in which the teenager Stefan can assert himself - both in the complex space of Marzahn that is challenging because love develops just as readily as conflicts, and vis-à-vis his father, a construction worker of the first GDR generation who emblematically showcases the opportunities as well as the sacrifices implied in building socialism� Insel der Schwäne , based on Benno Pludra’s homonymous novel from 1980, highlights the effects the Kolbe family’s move from an idyllic village to Berlin-Marzahn has on their fourteen-year-old son Stefan. The family relocates so they can be with the father, a construction worker in Marzahn� While Herrmann, his wife Anja, and their little daughter Sabine seem to enjoy the comfort of their modern living quarters that offer space and privacy, Stefan misses nature and grieves for his best friend Tasso as well as his beloved grandmother� His feelings find expression in dreamlike sequences that pervade the entire film and feature members of the rock band “Ritter, Tod und Teufel” [Knights, Death, and the Devil], obviously an allusion to Albrecht Dürer’s famous painting from 1513� Inspired by a poster of the band that Tasso gave him as a farewell present, Stefan’s fantasies variably emerge as a source of consolation and call for courage whenever life is particularly daunting; that is, whenever his malicious neighbor “Windjacke” [Windbreaker], a maybe sixteen-year-old teenager who owes his name to his flashy windbreaker from the West and who dazzles clueless adults with ostensibly good manners sets out to terrorize Stefan and his new friend Hubert, a rather timid teen who plays the violin at the request of his parents� The film ends with a kind of showdown between Stefan and Windjacke, in which the younger boy not only fends off the villain who attempts to kill him, but ends up saving the older one’s life, thus validating his moral superiority� This brief summary indicates that the film expressly targeted teenagers. The average viewing figures collected when the film first arrived at movie theaters confirm this assessment: 70 % of all watchers were between thirteen and twenty years of age, and 52 % of the audience were actually pupils - a rather high figure for the GDR where on average only 14 % of those visiting movie theaters attend- 104 Sonja E� Klocke ed school. Thus, Insel der Schwäne was without a doubt a film meant for youth ( Jugendfilm ), and more precisely for teenage students ( Schülerfilm ; Wiedemann 3)� Hardly surprising, the movie became a striking DEFA success particularly among viewers aged thirteen to seventeen, who also represented the majority of the audience (58 %). Of watchers the age of thirteen to fourteen, 99 % considered the film “very good” or “good”; among those aged fifteen to seventeen, 92 % still agreed with that rating. In this context, it seems important to note that - contrary to the common Western and post- Wende emphasis on censorship and indoctrination in the GDR - DEFA and its affiliated institutions conducted careful research on cinema’s actual popularity because the Ministry of Culture was truly interested in knowing whether citizens enjoyed the films and other cultural products it sponsored. In order to calibrate their offerings, they tried to garner considerable amounts of detailed information that would make the rationale for a cultural product’s popularity readily identifiable. With regard to Zschoche’s Insel der Sch wäne, the motives are unambiguous. The film’s esteem and attractiveness predominantly ensue from the protagonist Stefan, whom 95 % of viewers across all age groups considered personable. Since the female protagonists Anja and Rita were also rather popular - 77 % liked Rita and still 66 % found Anja agreeable - it seems reasonable to infer that for the adolescent members of the audience, these three protagonists especially served as figures of identification (Wiedemann 2-5, 13). In this context, the younger spectators’ reasoning for sympathizing with Stefan, Rita and Anja as well as for enjoying the film is enlightening. They were fond of it not because it related to problems associated with the new prefabricated buildings the portrayed youngsters lived in, but because they felt that the film was honest and addressed their concerns. More specifically, the vast majority (55 %) of the interviewed teenagers said: Es geht in erster Linie um die Verdeutlichung der Probleme junger Menschen, die in eine völlig neue Lebenssituation hineingestellt werden, ohne richtig darauf vorbereitet zu sein� (Wiedemann 8) [First and foremost, it is about illustrating the problems of young people who are put in an entirely new situation of their lives without being properly prepared for it�] 3 Without doubt, this entirely new situation in life refers to the living conditions in the city of Berlin and particularly in the Plattenbau environment of Marzahn to which Stefan is unaccustomed. After all, this is the milieu in which the central struggle between Stefan and Windjacke, but also the protagonist’s disputes with his father as well as his first encounters with love come to pass. Given this constellation as well as the aforementioned critiques in Neues Deutschland and Junge Welt , it is hardly astounding that many scholars have commented on the “Risen from Ruins”: Herrmann Zschoche’s Insel der Schwäne 105 role architecture as well as the dichotomy village/ city play in Insel der Schwäne � 4 And unlike Pludra’s novel, which repeatedly returns to the eponymous island of the swans, Ulrich Plenzdorf’s film script undeniably foregrounds the contrast between the comforting realm of the village surrounded by nature and the city, particularly Marzahn in the making� Not quite a tabula rasa, the construction site visibly indicates something that is well underway - just like the building of socialism. The residential area in progress thus points to a future that may be planned out, but that can still be shaped� And while this contemporary urban district is going through growing pains that parallel those of the depicted juveniles, all of Berlin is exciting, a well-lighted space characterized by speed� When the family arrives in Berlin in their moving van, the film deliberately showcases the city’s most impressive buildings and streets, particularly those that represent the GDR and stand for socialist progress� Ablaze with light originating from brightly illuminated display windows and luminous advertising, the famous TV tower on Alexanderplatz and busy streets such as the Karl-Marx- Allee do not fail to impress Stefan and especially his little sister. Significantly, the film’s speed increases dramatically in this scene: While the first section depicting the island of the swans and Stefan’s village takes ninety seconds with very few cuts, the following scenes portraying the family’s drive to Berlin speed up to six cuts per minute; and when they arrive in the GDR capital, the big city exhibits its vibrant life and lights in up to eighteen cuts per minute. Otherwise, the film sustains this cutting rate only during dramaturgically key action scenes that exclusively take place on the construction site of Marzahn� In addition to the increased speed, the camera work accentuates the established contrast between village and city when the Kolbes arrive at the housing block which represents their new home� While many slow horizontal pan shots draw attention to the enormous dimension of the Marzahn building project, the extreme low angle and high angle shots alike emphasize the verticality of the semi-finished new constructions. Such shots offering a multitude of views from below that highlight the sheer height of the houses come into effect, for example, when the youngsters first see the high-rises with their many illuminated windows. The viewers therefore sympathize with overwhelmed little Sabine who fears the buildings could topple over. Supported by the filmic devices the audience, just like Stefan, senses that this huge, unfinished and rather complex space is both frightening as it harbors dangers, and exciting as it offers opportunities for adventure and change� A detailed analysis of the surveys conducted after screenings of Insel der Schwäne reveals that the content played a much more significant role for the audiences’ predilection for the film than cinematic and artistic design (Wiedemann 7-8). Still, the filmic devices employed - particularly speed, light, and careful camera work - no doubt underline that the 106 Sonja E� Klocke Kolbe family have arrived in a place where construction never stops, and even the nights are dedicated to building socialism� Confronted with housing stock much more significantly marked by World War II bombing than in the West, the GDR administration, “rooted in a real desire to better the lot of ordinary people” (49), as Mary Fulbrook stresses, was caught between their ideals and grave fiscal constraints. 5 Yet despite the shortcomings of the economy which was, unlike its West German counterpart, not supported by the Marshall Plan, the GDR made great efforts to provide new residences for GDR citizens� Already in the 1950s and under the auspices of Prime Minister Otto Grotewohl (1949-1960) and General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party’s Central Committee (later First Secretary) Walter Ulbricht (1950-1971), the government prioritized building projects as evidenced in the founding of the Nationales Aufbauwerk , a national initiative calling for voluntary, charitable work to build up the socialist country� In November 1951, the party organ Neues Deutschland called on GDR citizens to step up and offer unpaid work hours in the effort to remove rubble to obtain new building materials, and to start the construction of so-called workers’ palaces ( Arbeiterpaläste )� Dedicated to socialist formats modelled on Soviet architectural styles, East Berlin’s Stalinallee, renamed Karl-Marx-Allee in 1961, is probably the most renowned result of the endeavor. The ensemble famous for its extraordinary, even demiurgic quality was essentially erected within a decade� During the years Erich Honecker was in office (as First Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party’s Central Committee, later General Secretary, 1971-1989; and additionally as the country’s official head of state as Chairman of the State Council, 1976-1989), about 100,000, sometimes even 110,000 new homes were built per year (Statistisches Amt der DDR 51). Berlin-Marzahn, formerly an insignificant village on the fringes of Berlin, became one of the centers of the new building projects� After the Politburo planned it in 1975, the first Plattenbau was started in 1977; in 1979 Marzahn was declared the ninth, new municipality in Berlin; and by 1983, the year Insel der Schwäne appeared in movie theaters, 100,000 people had found a new, comfortable home in Berlin-Marzahn which was to provide space for 200,000 people in an area of 6�6 square kilometers (2�5 square miles) by 1987� 6 It is important to bear in mind that for the majority of GDR citizens, being allotted an apartment in one of the new building projects was synonymous with winning the jackpot. This is hardly surprising if we take into account that for example in Dresden in 1980, only 35 % of young residents who lived in older buildings were satisfied with their housing situation compared to 76 % of those who lived in the new Plattenbauten . After all, apartments in older buildings most often lacked hot water, a bathroom, or an indoor toilet - privations unknown to those who lived in the modern housing blocks� 7 Unsurprisingly then, only a mi- “Risen from Ruins”: Herrmann Zschoche’s Insel der Schwäne 107 nority of viewers foregrounded problems associated with Plattenbauten as a main topic in Insel der Schwäne - despite the critiques in Neues Deutschland and Junge Welt , which quickly shaped audience expectations. Yet first of all, such critical comments were exclusively voiced by older movie-goers (between eighteen and twenty-five years of age), which only accounted for 22 % of the audience; and of these a mere 10 % mentioned problems such as a perceived lack of opportunities to develop creativity in surroundings covered in concrete or the discrepancy they sensed between individuals’ plans for their lives and society’s expectations (Wiedemann 19-21). Thus, the letters to the editor published in the Junge Welt under the heading “Das ist wieder kein DEFA-Film über uns! ” [Again, this is not a DEFA film about us! ] should not simply be dismissed in their entirety. One reader, for example, emphasizes the comforts of the recent buildings and contrasts their eases with the anxieties brought about by life in traditional houses: hell, groß, warm, mit Bad und Innen-Toilette. […] Ich weiß noch, wie ich mich als Kind abends nicht aufs Klo getraut habe, weil ich da über den dunklen Hof mußte … Da bin ich heute noch froh, daß meine Eltern eine Neubauwohnung gekriegt haben� (qtd� in Vogt 675) [light, spacious, warm, with a bathroom and an indoor toilet� […] I remember how I was afraid of going to the bathroom at night when I was a kid because I had to cross the dark courtyard … Still today, I am glad my parents got a newly built apartment� This evaluation of the housing situation in the GDR seems more representative for the majority of East Germans than an outright critique of the Plattenbau � After all, finding a modern apartment presented the most important goal in many GDR citizens’ lives (Fulbrook 53)� 8 At the same time, the older viewers’ approval of the new building projects should not lead us to ignore their implications for children growing up in such surroundings� Insel der Schwäne does not simply accuse a supposedly flawed architectural plan for causing young people’s misery, but explicitly reproaches authoritarian structures prevalent in GDR society� In particular, the children’s and teenagers’ lives are controlled by an evil janitor who also serves as the superintendent presiding over the house community� When he informs Stefan about the rules of the house, both the teenager and the film’s spectators understand this realm to be uninviting for the younger generation: Wir malen nichts an die Fahrstuhlwände, wir malen nichts an Treppen- oder Flurwände, wir malen nichts an die Hauswände, wir malen überhaupt nichts, und wir kleben auch nichts an, wir bauen nichts ab, wir lassen keine fremden Kinder ins Haus, wir spucken nicht auf den Boden, wir melden alle Unregelmäßigkeiten bei mir, der Hausgemeinschaftsleitung. 108 Sonja E� Klocke [We do not paint the walls of the elevator, we do not paint the walls of the staircases or the hallways, we do not paint the exterior walls of the house, we do not paint anything at all, and we also do not post anything, we do not dismantle anything, we do not allow unknown children into the house, we do not spit on the floor, we do report all irregularities to me, the superintendent for the house community�] Here the superintendent, abiding by authoritarian structures while simultaneously exerting authority especially over the weakest elements in society, personifies state control characteristic for the GDR on the lowest level. When the youngest inhabitants post an unauthorized note on the building block’s bulletin board declaring “Wir wollen keinen Spielplatz aus Betong [sic]! Wir wollen einen Tunnel und kleine Wisen [sic]! ” [We do not want a concrete playground! We want tunnels and little meadows! ], they clash not only with the superintendent, but also with other adults� Atypical for this generation that did not rebel (Ahbe and Gries 553), the teenagers support the children’s little revolt because they assume that in this in-between, not-yet-fully-developed space different rules apply than in “normal” life (Scharnowski 78)� Consequently, they try to participate in fashioning this realm: taking advantage of some of the scarce building materials they mustered, the young ones manufacture tunnels underneath their self-declared “playground” and thus literally undercut both the ground on which the construction site is located and the actual building efforts. For a short time, this realm emerges as a space for subversion and anarchistic freedom. The little ponds and tunnels fashioned by the children are unsafe for play, but they emerge as even more hazardous for the authority figures on the construction site: both the superintendent and Stefan’s father, Herrmann, who stands for authority on the construction site with which he identifies entirely. When the latter discovers the tunnels, he declares them perilous, and forces the teenagers to help him destroy the “playground�” When Herrmann fails to come through with his promise that in exchange for their support in demolishing the hazardous dens, the children will receive a new playground with safe tunnels suitable for play, the youngsters turn to revolt: upon finding the playground freshly covered with concrete, they engage in a brief, anarchistic fest. Significantly encouraged by the previously timid Hubert, who overcomes his inhibitions when he tries to turn the boring concrete surface into a work of art by planting a watering can right in the middle, everyone joins in this creative, yet for the construction efforts destructive activity. Full of joy, the juveniles place all kinds of objects, even a toilet bowl on the concrete. Yet the mood shifts on a dime when some children start to wrench the young, fragile trees from the soil in order to “plant” them on the concrete� Reminiscent of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies , Insel der Schwäne depicts the limitations of children’s ability to “Risen from Ruins”: Herrmann Zschoche’s Insel der Schwäne 109 judge and the dangers implied in a lack of adult guidance� It takes the reasonable Stefan, unlike the city kids in touch with nature and equipped with socialist virtues such as solidarity and sincerity, to stop the destruction� Reliable and in a way more mature than the adults who fail to keep promises, Stefan takes charge and ends the senseless annihilation of the plants� Using the example of the playground, Insel der Schwäne thus does much more than condemn the Marzahn environment: it criticizes a state that is unwilling to listen to and place any trust in its youngest generation - which is distinctly characterized as a mistake given Stefan’s mature behavior� 9 Notably, Herrmann’s fib signifies the moment in the film when the father-son relationship reverses� Despite occasional tensions, Herrmann largely emerges as a compassionate father who comes to the rescue whenever his teenage son gets in trouble� He stays calm when Stefan allegedly opened a hydrant in their building’s hallway, which caused a veritable flood and necessitated the service of the fire department. Unaware that his son merely took the blame to protect Herbert, whose parents, the film implies, corporally punish their son, Herrmann is angry but also plays the part of the socialist hero who manages to close the hydrant and stop the water� In other words, Herrmann does what needs to be done - but he never gets to the actual roots of the quandary because he does not effectively communicate with his son. The portrayed lack of communication between father and son indicates that Insel der Schwäne is chiefly concerned with generational problems prevalent in GDR society in the 1980s. In their study on GDR generations, Thomas Ahbe and Rainer Gries demonstrate that in a socialist society, where affiliation with a certain social class, milieu, ethnic group, or gender is of little significance when it comes to individual opportunities for advancement, belonging to a specific generation is crucial (476, 487-88)� In his mid-to-late thirties in 1983, Herrmann belongs to the demographic Ahbe and Gries identify as the “funktionierende Generation” [functioning generation]: citizens born between the mid-1930s and the late 1940s and old enough to have experienced the postwar period� 10 As children they were involved in ensuring their families’ survival by “organizing” food and coal on the black market (520)� As Ahbe and Gries show, the children most affected by the confusion of the war and the postwar period - for example, by bombings, displacement, loss of one or both parents, and settlement in a hostile environment - grew up in East Germany (520). Their psychologically and physically overstrained mothers, often war widows, covered up their grief, heartaches, and desperation; the children, in emulating their mothers and fulfilling the expectations of their social environment, similarly did not display any emotions� Herrmann’s generation thus learned by example to cover up 110 Sonja E� Klocke their feelings and to remain silent - a behavioral pattern they pass on to their children� As Ahbe and Gries emphasize, Was den nun zu Müttern und Vätern gewordenen ehemaligen Kriegskindern in ihrer Kindheit versagt geblieben war - herzliche Aufmerksamkeit und Zärtlichkeit […] -, konnten sie wiederum ihren Kindern kaum weitergeben� Die einstigen Kriegskinder aus der funktionierenden Generation, die unter dem Gebot aufgewachsen waren, ‘nicht unnötig’ Gefühle zu zeigen, “blieben auch als Erwachsene stumm”, stellt der Psychotherapeut Hartmut Radebold fest� (549) [The sincere attentiveness and tenderness […] the former war children now turned mothers and fathers were denied in their childhood they could in turn not pass on to their children. The former war children from the functioning generation who grew up with the imperative not to display ‘unnecessary’ feelings “remained silent also as adults,” the psychotherapist Hartmut Radebold observes�] Herrmann is thus a typical representative of his generation: as a parent, he is unable to articulate his emotional bond to his son adequately; instead he believes that by providing material goods such as a room of his own in the new building should demonstrate his affection sufficiently. As a result, Stefan, a member of the “entgrenzte Generation” [generation beyond borders] (Ahbe and Gries 545) also only indirectly communicates his feelings to others, for example when he takes Hubert under his wing to protect the weak friend from both his parents and Windjacke� Characterizing those who, like Stefan, were born in the 1960s and early 1970s, Ahbe and Gries describe the members of the generation beyond borders as young people whose values and ideas moved beyond the horizon of the GDR (547)� Interested in diversion and consumption (Gensicke 1266-83), they lack the austere pragmatism that distinguished their parents who, as the members also of the first GDR generation, grew up with the sincere feeling that they were responsible for the future of their country� Born between the mid-1930s and the late 1940s, they were raised largely free of fascist contamination, even though they emerged from a collective fascist past� Unlike the Hitler Youth generation, they were considered to consist of the so-called “weiße Jahrgänge” [white age group] devoid of skeletons in the closet and too young to have been brainwashed by Nazi ideology (Ahbe and Gries 504)� Moreover, its members had learned to function as expected by parents and teachers post-1945: they adapted swiftly to the new social and political environment and supported their families even as children� As a result, they were prepared to quickly adjust to yet another political environment in 1949� Pragmatically internalizing the maxims of the socialist state, which corresponded with the experiences during and after the war that had taught them “Risen from Ruins”: Herrmann Zschoche’s Insel der Schwäne 111 to take care of others while fighting obstacles in quotidian life and suppressing sentimentalities, they accepted life as a battle in which one had to fulfill society’s expectations (Ahbe and Gries 522-23). Thus, it emerges as characteristic for somebody like Herrmann to make sacrifices and help out whenever he can - not only when he closes the hydrant, but also when Windjacke and his friends chase Stefan and Herbert further and further up an unfinished building, clearly with the intention of potentially killing them there� Here, too, it is Herrmann who rescues them when he unexpectedly appears on the construction site on a Sunday� A hero of the build-up of the workers’ state, Herrmann uses the weekend to check out the advancements on the building site and decides to return to work the next day even though he still suffers from severe back pain brought about by his work� Just like his predecessor in Pludra’s novel, who literally carries the burden of building socialism as expressed in his words “Mein Kreuz […] Mein Kreuz mal wieder” [My back/ cross/ burden […] My back/ cross/ burden once again] (Pludra 66), Zschoche and Plenzdorf’s Herrmann is portrayed as living a life devoted to advancing socialism. This dedication implies incessantly meeting society’s standards, not openly admitting to feelings of overextension or defeat, and being entirely ruthless against oneself - one’s body as well as one’s soul� Probably inspired by the novel which supports the portrayal of the silently suffering father with a drawing of him standing in agony in front of a window that features the famous Plattenbau in the background (Pludra 67), Zschoche and Plenzdorf employ Herrmann’s back pain as a leitmotif that runs through the entire film. 11 This motif indicates how the pressure never to disappoint those who fight for the development of the new state can be overwhelming. Thus, Herrmann’s body emerges as a place of cultural inscription, or more precisely a “symptomatic body”: a powerful socio-aesthetic construct in East German fictional texts that indicates problems in society and challenges GDR norms regarding sickness� 12 Repeatedly, Insel der Schwäne portrays Herrmann in agony or entirely exhausted on the couch� Still, this socialist hero would never openly admit that his poor health may limit his ability to contribute to the build-up of the new state - a behavioral pattern that initially seems astounding. Yet confessing illness was generally problematic in the GDR, which can be attributed to Lenin’s idea that health presented “ein wertvolles Staatseigentum” [a valuable asset of the state] because it preserved the state’s interest in utilizing each citizen’s productivity for the building of socialism (qtd� in Stein 244)� Individual bodies came to be regarded as an asset of the GDR - and as capable of standing in symbolically for the state and its socialist values� Herrmann’s body - both a possession and a metonymic representation of the socialist state - suffering from severe back 112 Sonja E� Klocke pain that at times immobilizes him thus equals an assault against state property since his body refuses to participate in the build-up of socialism� At the same time, Herrmann’s poor physical constitution asks us to search for the source of the disease. Given his belonging to the first GDR generation, his agony points to the specific historical constellation that led to the development of the functioning generation - the aftermath of Germany’s Nazi past and World War II as well as the demands to build socialism. Thus, this body functions as a seismograph of crises underlying the GDR, predicaments the socialist state inherited from Nazi Germany, but must nevertheless cope with� This father figure literally embodies the exhausting efforts of building socialism, and like the symbolic father GDR, he is prepared to act reasonably and protect his son - and in fact all children and teens - whenever necessary� The film thus builds on the model prevalent in GDR culture from the start: the portrayal of social relations as family relations centered around the figure of the father engaged in shaping the socialist state, even if that causes him to suffer physically. Julia Hell examined this model in detail and explains that already the earliest fictional texts, the “ foundational narratives of antifascism ” as she puts it, create fictional surrogate families (Hell 17; italics in original). They are organized around ideal communists who assume the role of symbolic parental figures whom the sons and daughters in the narrative can admire, and with whom young recipients are solicited to identify (Hell 107)� Under fascist torture, the antifascist heroes suffered indescribable pain, which is inscribed in the body and at the same time leads to purification. Later fictional texts of the GDR such as Insel der Schwäne similarly feature this “body-in-pain” (Hell 33) at their center: here, we no longer see the bodies of the martyrs of socialism who had risked their lives in the struggle against fascism, but of true believers in the socialist state who respect the former fighters who now represent the GDR at its top. These newer bodies-in-pain belong to GDR citizens such as Herrmann: members of the first generation to benefit from social and educational reforms as well as building projects such as Marzahn, all of which contributed to making issues of class increasingly less significant. As a result, citizens such as Herrmann who evidently comes from a less privileged background strongly identify with the socialist idea of building a future that will combine technological with social progress (Wierling 209). They grew up with high expectations and were simultaneously expected to accept responsibility for the socialist future and exercise solidarity� Their children, who came of age in relative prosperity thanks to Honecker’s politics (Ahbe and Gries 549), however, no longer accepted the state’s demands� They increasingly felt that the structural elements prevalent in the GDR’s educational system were adopted from the military, which resulted in a commu- “Risen from Ruins”: Herrmann Zschoche’s Insel der Schwäne 113 nication style that was anachronistic, hierarchical, and ideological (550)� Next to calling the roll, agitation, and distinctions, children and teenagers in the GDR experienced public critiques� In Insel der Schwäne , we become privy to such a situation of public accusation and criticism when Stefan takes on the blame for allegedly having opened the hydrant when confronted with the issue in school� Scenes such as this one reveal the image of the truly benevolent paternal socialist state as a myth� Authoritarian and allegedly caring, this state ensures the social and cultural order that protects citizens even when they fail to realize that they need to be watched over - at the cost of keeping them in a prolonged state of childhood, a state in which they unmistakably lack a voice� 13 This paternal state as well as Herrmann, a member of this state’s first generation, fail to understand the children, and this deficiency emerges as the foundation for tensions� When the father does not keep his promise to build a playground for the kids according to their ideas, needs, and desires, Stefan feels betrayed. Their conflict peaks, 14 and this apparently private relationship turns political: Herrmann, the ideal socialist father and citizen turned liar because of the constraints imposed by the situation on the construction site, cannot serve as a role model any longer� When the son confronts him because the teenager understands the young ones’ need to creatively shape their environment, Stefan emerges as the true protagonist� Trying to overcome what Ahbe and Gries term the “Simulation einer Diskussion” [simulation of a discussion] typical for the communication strategies the functioning generation demanded from the members of the generation beyond borders, Stefan postulates authenticity and honest debate� He wants to mediate between the children’s, the parents’, and society’s needs, and calls for solidarity particularly with the weaker elements of society as well as intergenerational dialogue� Morally superior, the teenager insists on his interpretation of socialist values� He acts like a responsible adult who no longer depends on his father and his protection at the end of the film, when the conflict between him and Windjacke peaks. Only at first sight and to a limited degree, this climax as well as the antagonistic relationship between Stefan and Windjacke echo traditions associated with the American Western� 15 Binaries that pervade Insel der Schwäne - such as good/ evil, strong/ weak, civilization/ wilderness, and position within/ outside society - may have added to that classification. Accordingly, party officials despised the film as bourgeois for its portrayal of social constellations in a broken world that allegedly had been overcome in socialist society� 16 They obviously failed to see that in this contest between a villain associated with the capitalist West - both because of his brutality and his eponymous jacket that could only be bought with Western currency - and a hero equipped with socialist virtues such as honesty, reliability, sincerity, and above all solidarity, the tradition of the 114 Sonja E� Klocke Western reverberates only subtly� Stefan, the advocate for the powerless, does not simply come out victorious in the end. He not only fends off Windjacke when the villain wants to kill him by poking him into an empty elevator shaft, but actually saves Windjacke’s life when the older teenager is in danger of dying in the same elevator shaft after Stefan managed to escape with a swift, clever leap� Physically weaker but intellectually and morally superior, Stefan and his actions rise above the Western: they indicate that there is a possibility for a socialist future in which the good forces will prevail, and where even the villains associated with capitalism can be overcome by integrating them into society� This final success is achieved in the Plattenbau environment of Marzahn, which once again emerges as a complex universe in which tensions and controversies not only between generations, but also among different social groups raise to the surface. However, this is also the space were such fights and arguments can be resolved, and teenagers such as Stefan can assert themselves� It is here, too, that Stefan discovers romantic feelings, particularly for Anja. The Berlin girl used to live in Prenzlauer Berg, and she introduces Stefan not only to her old neighborhood, but to the capital with all its facades� We observe the teenagers exploring the urban landscape of Berlin, enjoying the river Spree with its picturesque bridges, the Berlin state library with its paternoster elevators, and the breathtaking views from Berlin roofs. These vistas include both old buildings and construction sites, and thus point to the possibilities of gaining new perspectives in this city. The more traditional spaces are complemented by settings that point to the most recent socialist achievements such as a car wash and the ice-skating rink located in the SEZ/ Sport- und Erholungszentrum [Sport and Wellness Center] in Friedrichshain, a center for sports and entertainment that when it was opened in March 1981 was unique in the world for its size and versatility� 17 Accompanied by a song that superimposes Anja’s love for Stefan with her love for Berlin, the teenagers’ tour de Berlin leaves no doubt that the capital of the GDR is worth living in: Das ist die Stadt, das ist die Stadt, die alle Lichter hat, in der es alles gibt� Wir sind in dich verliebt, ich bin in dich verliebt. Stadt ist so tief, so tief wie Wald, sie duftet nach Asphalt� Sie nimmt dich mit Gewalt� Wir sind in dich verknallt, ich bin in dich verknallt� Du musst sie nur, sie nur berühren, mich nur berühren, dann spürst du sie vibrieren� Wir sind mit dir geboren, wir sind mit dir verloren, du musst mich nur berühren, du musst mich nur berühren� [This is the city, this is the city that has all the lights, in which everything exists. We are in love with you, I am in love with you. The city is deep, as deep as the woods, sweet with the scent of asphalt. It sweeps you off your feet. We are smitten with you, I am smitten with you. You merely have to touch it, merely have to touch me, then you “Risen from Ruins”: Herrmann Zschoche’s Insel der Schwäne 115 will feel it vibrating� We are born with you, we are lost with you, you merely need to touch me, you merely need to touch me�] In the song as well as the accompanying shots, the symbolically charged landscape of East Berlin with its historical buildings that serve as reminders of the (fascist) past as well as the new ones that point to a bright socialist future is turned into a living, fragrant creature that can be touched, experienced, and loved. In this film sequence, the teenagers view, enjoy, and record their city which is clearly under construction, yet just like the ideal socialist state, it already provides everything one needs. The children’s choir presenting the lyrics underscores this impression as it creates a sense of basic trust typical for babies and small children, a sense of belonging to the paternalistic state that unambiguously links the generation beyond borders with the new socialist space into which they were born� Raised not only in, but literally with this growing city in the making, they are doomed if East Berlin goes down precisely because it is their space� Built on the ruins of World War II and incorporating traditions, it is nevertheless characterized by places like Marzahn and the Sport- und Erholungszentrum in Friedrichshain - precisely the areas that only developed in socialism and that offer the comfort and amenities the youngest GDR generation desires. Yet unlike Heiner Carow’s 1973 film Die Legende von Paul and Paula , which portrayed the symbolic act of blasting an old building to create distance to a historical tradition that otherwise could not be articulated, Insel der Schwäne integrates the old buildings in the city center while pointing to the challenges of providing homes for thousands after World War II by means of Plattenbauten � The film highlights that not only Anja’s previous, now empty and desolate apartment, but also the ones that are still occupied look rather miserable� While clearly not in line with the official propaganda that praised the new housing program, the film’s rather long scene depicting timeworn buildings that are evidently no longer inhabitable emphasizes the need to provide modern apartments for everyone (Schittly 271; Dahlke 463). As Birgit Dahlke emphasizes, the film refrains from taking sides: Plenzdorf entzieht sich jedoch einer Entscheidung zwischen beiden Polen [Altbau oder Plattenbau], er stellt sie aus, läßt den Gegensatz aber stehen. Eine Denunziation des Wohnungsbauprogramms ist genauso wenig in seiner Absicht wie eine Verklärung der Hinterhofarchitektur� (463) [Yet Plenzdorf evades deciding between the two poles [old building or Plattenbau], he exhibits them, but he allows the opposition to remain� He neither intends to denounce the building program nor to romanticize backyard architecture�] 116 Sonja E� Klocke If we look at the film in detail, Insel der Schwäne portrays East Berlin as a heterogeneous city that combines historic buildings and modern ones� Intertwined with a discourse on generations which was significant in the GDR, it is especially Zschoche’s staging of the teenagers’ urban voyage that turns Berlin places into a subject matter of the film. Here, the city emerges as an enjoyable, progressive socialist universe still in the making� In fact, this is a perfect space precisely for those young people who are themselves “still in the making,” teenagers who are struggling to assert themselves in their social environment and to move into adulthood - not free of generational and social conflicts. Thus, Insel der Schwäne builds on films such as Jürgen Böttcher’s Jahrgang ’45 [Born in ’45] (1966/ 1990), which highlights the implications of belonging to a specific generation even in its title. As Anke Pinkert points out when she emphasizes that Jahrgang ’45 was the first DEFA film to replace “the conventional focus on historical transmission and sequential time with a new emphasis on space, place, and movement” (188), the discourse on generations intertwines with the significance space carries already in this 1960s film. Peter Kahane’s Die Architekten [Architects] (1990) can be considered as being on the other end of the trajectory. One of the last DEFA films to employ the motif of city development to engage with its actual topic which Reinhild Steingröver has identified as “the defiant struggles of the last generation which nevertheless was doomed from the start” (208), this film is less concerned with obscuring the deeper, less accessible levels of meaning than its predecessors� 18 If put in such context, Insel der Schwäne emerges as part of a larger DEFA convention to utilize Berlin’s palimpsestic qualities in film. Unlike Kahane’s late DEFA film which “does indeed cast a critical look at the all-important building policies in the GDR and thus symbolically declares the former utopian aspirations for building a better German state bankrupt” (Steingröver 209), Insel der Schwäne still embraces precisely these utopian yearnings for a better, socialist future, and carefully calls for continued efforts to build a socialist state that allows for heterogeneity in its cities as well as among its socialist citizens of all generations� Notes 1 The GDR national anthem starts out with the words “Auferstanden aus Ruinen und der Zukunft zugewandt” and in the last stanza, it calls on its citizens: “Lasst uns pflügen, lasst uns bauen, lernt und schafft wie nie zuvor” [Let us plough, let us build, learn and create like never before]� See Grau and Würz� Unlike mentioned otherwise, all translations in this article are the author’s� 2 See Vogt 673-74; Schenk 29� Vogt lists examples for initially positive critiques in Kino DDR , the film journal Film und Fernsehen , the newspapers “Risen from Ruins”: Herrmann Zschoche’s Insel der Schwäne 117 Neue Zeit , Die Union , and Der Morgen , and the union paper Tribüne � Helmut Ullrich in die Neue Zeit wrote: “‘Insel der Schwäne’ - ein Film über die Jugend und für die Jugend, und dafür ist auch der richtige Stil gefunden. Mit einer Sicht auf die Welt, wie sie eben Jugendliche haben� Mit realistisch genauen Beobachtungen aus ihrer Lebenssphäre und mit phantasievollen Überhöhungen, mit ihren Liedern und ihrer Musik (Peter Gotthardt) und mit einem Grundton der Aufsässigkeit und mit ihrem Blick auf die Erwachsenen� Vielleicht gehört dazu sogar die krasse dramatische Zuspitzung, daß es am Ende, anders als in der literarischen Vorlage, fast zu einem tödlichen Sturz in einen offenen Fahrstuhlschacht kommt, mit Rettung im allerletzten Moment - ein grelles Warn-, aber auch Hoffnungssignal.” [‘Swan Island’ - a film about youth and for youth, and for that purpose, the appropriate style was found� With a view of the world such young people just have� With realistically accurate observations from their sphere of life and with imaginative exaltations, with their songs and their music (Peter Gotthard) and with a fundamental tone of rebelliousness and with their view of the adults� Maybe even the stark dramatic intensification belongs to it. Towards the end, differing from the literary model, we observe a nearly fatal fall into an open elevator shaft, with rescue coming only in the very last moment - a loud warning signal, but also one for hope�] In Neues Deutschland , on the other hand, Horst Knietzsch wrote: “Was für jeden normalen Menschen ein frohstimmendes Ereignis ist, der Umzug in eine neue Wohnung, wird bei dieser, man ist versucht zu sagen, neurotischen Betrachtungsweise zu einem Konflikt hoch- oder besser herunterstilisiert, der für den jungen Helden des Films zu einer Sache von Leben und Tod wird� Positive, sympathische und hilfreiche Gestalten des Buches von Pludra sind in dem Film dem Kahlschlag gegen die typischen sozialistischen Züge unseres Lebens zum Opfer gefallen. So wurde aus der möglichen Identifikationsfigur des Jungen Stefan ein Außenseiter in einer ‘kaputten’, unwirklichen, kinderfeindlichen Welt. Einer Welt, die nicht die unsere ist�” [What would signify a cheerful event for every normal human being, the move into a new apartment, is talked up or rather down into a conflict in this, one is tempted to say, neurotic perspective; a conflict that becomes a matter of life and death for the young protagonist of the film. Positive, likeable and helpful characters of Pludra’s book have fallen prey to eradication of the typical socialist traits of our lives in this film. Thus, the possible figure of identification, the boy Stefan, is turned into an outsider in a ‘kaputt,’ unreal, child-unfriendly world. A world that is not ours�] Similarly, the Junge Welt published letters to the editor under the heading, “Das ist wieder kein DEFA-Film über uns! ” [Again, this is not a DEFA film about us! ] 118 Sonja E� Klocke 3 Similarly interesting, 59 % of all viewers stated that the film was “insgesamt ehrlich” [overall honest], and 55 % found that it portrayed the problems of Stefan and his family “offen und ehrlich” [openly and honestly]. See Wiedemann 9� 4 See especially Schapow who highlights the significance of countryside and city in Insel der Schwäne � Also see Dahlke; Scharnowski; and Vogt� 5 “Around two thirds of the housing stock in large cities [in the Soviet occupied zone in the East of Germany] had been destroyed� Major cities such as Berlin and Dresden had been bombed out of all recognition” (Fulbrook 51)� 6 “Wir hatten nie Probleme durch Überfluß” 264. 7 These numbers were gathered by the Zentralinstitut für Jugendforschung Leipzig , which scientifically collected data about the GDR youth, their life, predominant attitudes, behavior patterns, problems, and desires during the years 1966 to 1990� See ZIJ, F80/ 84, “Jugend der Stadt Dresden” (March 1980): 21; and ZIJ, F84/ 16, “Jugend in der Stadt Leipzig (III)” (Oct. 1984). Qtd. in Fulbrook 303� 8 Gwyneth Cliver’s article, “ Ostalgie Revisited: The Musealization of Halle-Neustadt” offers an interesting take on efforts to musealize Halle-Neustadt in the 2000s by displaying the socialist design - which commonly has a bad reputation in post- Wende Germany - as a “desired object of observation and encouraging new creative activity” (615)� 9 As a result of the GDR’s attitude towards this generation, about three quarters of all teenagers interviewed in a survey conducted in 1989 declared that they felt that they were not needed for developing the GDR, and that they had no influence to shape their lives in the GDR. (Ahbe and Gries 553) 10 Apart from the “funktionierende Generation” (518-31), Ahbe and Gries identify the “Generation der mißtrauischen Patriarchen” [generation of the suspicious patriarchs] (492-502); the “Aufbau-Generation” [build-up generation] (502-18); the “integrierte Generation” [integrated generation] (531- 45); the “entgrenzte Generation” [generation beyond borders] (545-56); and the “Wende-Kinder” [children of the turning point] (556-69)� 11 In Pludra’s novel, the indication that the father’s back pain - through the word choice of “Kreuz” which indicates simultaneously back pain, a burden, and literally carrying a cross - results from his efforts of building socialism is even more explicit than in the film: “Kann aber auch sein, ich hab da oben eine Platte falsch erwischt. Man muß sie richtig zu fassen kriegen, und der Kran muß genau sein� Wenn das nicht hinhaut, verdrehst du dir das Kreuz� Man ist ja auch nicht mehr der Jüngste�” [Could be that I caught one of the slabs the wrong way up there. One has to get hold of them the right way, “Risen from Ruins”: Herrmann Zschoche’s Insel der Schwäne 119 and the crane must be precise� If that does not work well, you twist the back� And one isn’t a spring chicken any more either�] (Pludra 68) 12 For a detailed description of the symptomatic body see Klocke 9-11, 20-23� 13 Early examples analyzing this situation after the end of the GDR include Henrich; Maaz� 14 See Schapow 7� Interesting enough, Stefan’s mother who is largely absent and his female class teacher who is sympathetic to Stefan but plays a rather minor role receive much higher approval rates by the audience than the father: 76 % of all viewers find Stefan’s teacher personable or very personable, and 70 % agree with that when it comes to Stefan’s mother. On the other hand, only 28 % find Stefan’s father likable or very likable, and among the thirteento fourteen-year-old viewers, the figure is as low as 15 %. See Wiedemann 13-14� 15 In Ulrich Plenzdorf’s words, “Wenn man so will, ist der ganze Film eigentlich nach einem Western-Modell geschrieben.” [If you want, the entire film is actually written according to the model of the Western.] (“Das kommt davon”)� For a scene-by-scene analysis of Insel der Schwäne as a Western see Albers. For criticism to Albers’ approach of reading the film as a Western, particularly because it is not applicable for the figure of Herrmann, see Erika Richter’s and Edith Gaida’s contributions to “Diskussion: Genrewissen kontra Rezeptionserfahrung�” 16 Presseauswertung zum Film ‘Insel der Schwäne’, Hauptverwaltung Film, Abt. Wissenschaft und Information, 12. Mai 1983, HV-Unterlage 74 A+B, Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv, Berlin� 17 Planned by Swedish architects and built by a special construction team under the direction of Erhard Gißke, the Sport- und Erholungszentrum in Berlin-Friedrichshain was opened on March 20, 1981� Extremely modern and inviting, the building welcomed about 22,000 visitors a day� For many East Berliners, the SEZ was as important as the Palace of the Republic� 18 It is crucial to note that Kahane, like many of his colleagues, addressed the “precise and direct dissection of generational struggle […] in all his previous films,” too, as Steingröver demonstrates in her analysis (209). Works Cited Ahbe, Thomas, and Rainer Gries. “Gesellschaftsgeschichte als Generationengeschichte: Theoretische und methodologische Überlegungen zum Beispiel DDR.” Die DDR aus generationengeschichtlicher Perspektive: Eine Inventur . Ed. Annegret Schüle, Thomas Ahbe and Rainer Gries� Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2006� 475-571� 120 Sonja E� Klocke Albers, Margret� “Shane und Django�” Zwischen Bluejeans und Blauhemden. Jugendfilm in Ost und West . Ed. Ingelore König, Dieter Wiedemann and Lothar Wolf. Leipzig: Henschel, 1995� 155-63� Blunk, Harry� “Der DDR-Film�” Medienwissenschaft. Ein Handbuch zur Entwicklung der Medien und Kommunikationsformen. Vol� 2� Ed� Joachim-Felix Leonhard� Berlin: De Gruyter, 2001� 1237-45� Cliver, Gwyneth� “ Ostalgie Revisited: The Musealization of Halle-Neustadt.” German Studies Review 37�3 (2014): 615-36� Dahlke, Birgit� “Berlin - Frontstadt, Mauerstadt, Metropole? 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Fulbrook, Mary� The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker � New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2005� Gensicke, Thomas. “Mentalitätswandel und Revolution: Wie sich die DDR-Bürger von ihrem System abwandten�” Deutschland Archiv 25�2 (1992): 1266-83� Gersch, Wolfgang� Szenen eines Landes: Die DDR und ihre Filme . Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 2006� Grau, Andreas, and Markus Würz� “Entstehung der DDR: Gesamtdeutscher Anspruch�” Lebendiges Museum Online: Stiftung Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland . LEMO, 13 Sept. 2014. Web. 24 June 2016. 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Forschungsbericht: der Film “Insel der Schwäne” und sein Publikum . Leipzig: Zentralinstitut für Jugendforschung, 1983. Wierling, Dorothee. “How Do the 1929ers and the 1949ers Differ? ” Power and Society in the GDR, 1961-1979: The ‘Normalisation of Rule’? Ed� Mary Fulbrook� New York/ Oxford: Berghahn, 2009. 204-19. “‘Wir hatten nie Probleme durch Überfluß’: Spiegel-Report über Architektur und Städtebau in der DDR�” Der Spiegel 39 (1983): 254-71� Verzeichnis der Autorinnen und Autoren Dr. Ada Bieber Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin Institut für deutsche Literatur Unter den Linden 6 10099 Berlin Germany ada�bieber@hu-berlin�de Dr. Benita Blessing Oregon State University World Languages and Cultures Kidder Hall 210 Corvallis, OR 97331 benita�blessing@oregonstate�edu Dr. Sonja E. Klocke Associate Professor of German Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic University of Wisconsin - Madison 844 Van Hise Hall Madison, WI 53705 sklocke@wisc�edu Dr. Melissa Sheedy Lecturer of German Germanic and Slavic Studies University of California, Santa Barbara Phelps Hall 6326 Santa Barbara, CA 93106 melissasheedy@ucsb�edu Dr. Faye Stewart Dept. of World Languages & Cultures Georgia State University P.O. Box 3970 Atlanta, GA 30302-3970 fayestewart@gsu�edu Brandy E. Wilcox, M.A. Ph�D� Candidate, German Program Monatshefte Editorial Assistant Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic University of Wisconsin - Madison 1220 Linden Dr� Madison, WI 53706 brandy�wilcox@wisc�edu