Heynowski’s biographical research in the guise of an exposé film was part of a campaign coordinated by SED functionary Albert Norden to unmask the FRG as a fascist state. Documents and commentaries trace the career of Adenauer’s Chief of Staff of the Chancellery, Hans Globke, who had collaborated in the systematic marking and racist declassification of Jews as a Nazi administrative lawyer and Eichmann confidant. The facts had been on the table for some time, but acquired new propaganda value in view of the impending Eichmann trial. In 1961, “Operation J” was awarded a main prize at the International Leipzig Documentary and Short Film Week.
Why this film document about a street in East Berlin is the way it is, why it conveys an almost touching, basically unformed honesty and perplexity, is due to the specific institution it was made for. The State Film Documentation was founded to provide the GDR with uncensored testimonies of its own reality. Three long-time residents look, through notoriously draughty windows, at the notoriously chilly German-Jewish history: Herr Miegel, former pub owner, Frau Kramp, former cinema employee, Mischket Liebermann, writer and GDR cultural politician. They have been neighbours in their district forever. They will probably remain strangers to each other forever.
The inauguration of the “National Buchenwald Memorial”, the first national memorial of the GDR, took place in 1958. The monumental site was also meant to demonstrate the state-supporting importance of a selective culture of remembrance, commemorating the communist resistance fighters – and omitting the fact that the graves were mainly filled with Jewish victims. In 1961, DEFA completed this “introductory film”, commissioned by the Buchenwald committee, which talks about Goethe, Schiller, Thälmann, but only very marginally about Jews. Every visitor’s memorial tour started with this until 1975. Its scriptwriter and production manager was the playwright Heiner Müller, a fact that was not known until 2004.
“If you want to storm, you use stormer methods”, to quote a direct reference to the infamous anti-Semitic smear sheet of the Nazi era. Set to shrill trumpet sounds, this outraged film pamphlet dissects, or so it seems, the drastic jargon of the “West German monopoly press”, especially the publications of the Springer publishing house, in their coverage of the Six-Day War between Israel and the Arab coalition of Egypt, Jordan and Syria. At the same time, it uses the reviled style for its own argumentation. Under the auspices of the DEFA newsreel editors of “Der Augenzeuge” (The Eyewitness), a sweeping blow against the Bonn Republic arises from news images and superimposed newspaper articles.
After studying at the German Academy of Film Art Potsdam-Babelsberg, Karlheinz Mund made this documentary tour of Jewish cemeteries in Berlin. The gravestones preserve the names of famous and unknown people. They preserve their places of death, where no distinction was made between the famous and the unknown: Auschwitz, Mauthausen. When the West German Short Film Festival invited Mund’s film, the committees in charge enforced one distinction after all: The images of graves defaced with anti-Semitic graffiti taken from the West German press were allowed to remain, footage of the same content filmed in East Berlin had to be removed for the theatrical release in the GDR.
