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 . 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