Workers reconstruct a railway bridge and Eva Fritzsche reconstructs the process behind it – by re-enacting what she couldn’t film, supported by the participants, who re-play themselves. The film sings the praises especially of those whose commitment was held in low esteem: young people who even give up playing football, and women who suddenly find themselves working in the factory. “Women as blacksmiths, what a joke!” a job centre employee sneers. This echoes what Eva Fritzsche herself had to listen to at DEFA: “Women don’t make films!” Yes, she did – and created one of the most impressive testimonies of the years of reconstruction.

Archaeological evidence of medieval Jewish life had barely been discovered during excavation works in Frankfurt am Main when it was to be “built over” again. The civil protest in 1987 spread to the whole of the Federal Republic – and called Peter Nestler to the scene. His film undertakes what the Frankfurt authorities wanted to avoid: a thorough securing and contextualization of the findings. He not “only” places the discovered remains of the Jewish ghetto in the context of urban and German history, but also lays bare the contemporary Federal German insensitivity regarding cultural history and commemorative politics, displaying it as if in a museum cabinet.

Kollwitzplatz, Prenzlauer Berg: Children are playing and climbing all over the monument to Käthe Kollwitz, frowning adults are watching them. What would Gustav Seitz, the creator of the sculpture, say? Christa Mühl has asked him but reveals his answer only when the adults have finally disappeared. Until then, she constructs explosive matter as light as a feather, set to Belgian cembalo jazz and with the perky montage style that characterises her early documentary work. After Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler himself had the most controversial scene cut, the film could be broadcast on television and triggered a lively discussion about the practical value of art.

The people, among them an astonishing number of workers, react with visible anger to the sudden lack of matches – and threaten to go to the barricades. The problem is solved, of course. But does it mean the population’s anger is placated? Puppet animation director Johannes Hempel created this satire based on a draft by Wolfgang Kohlhaase – at the same time as the uprising of 17 June 1953.

“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.

Everything goes downhill. For whom? Marian Cholerek leaves that to the audience. After all, there was no way he could tell his story about a joint action of alleged oppositional forces in 1979 unequivocally. His years of work on animated series for children and his penchant for erotically charged humour, however, are unmistakeable. A cheerfully subversive children’s film for adults.

The core of this most personal of the Thorndikes’ projects are Annelie’s diary entries: Her story is to be the starting point for a kind of all-German ‘Heimatfilm’ that praises the utopian power of the GDR and sharply condemns Federal German wrongs, but finds transcendent beauty on both sides of the wall. Over the course of production, however, the visionary dimension of the project was progressively trimmed down, though it’s still tangible everywhere in the compromised final version: The intensity of its pathos is both oppressive and enchanting; some historical simplifications and ideological twists and bends may be hair-raising, but they still achieve the desired effect.

What happened in the GDR on 17 June 1953? Using a lot of original footage, Norddeutscher Rundfunk looks back on the events in a detailed report marking their 20th anniversary and shows different interpretations and explanations. Agent coup? Workers’ revolt? Popular uprising? The interpretations were controversial, even among contemporary witnesses and Western historians.

“Imminent danger, fear, catastrophe,“ the Austrian-Jewish composer Arnold Schönberg wrote on top of his film score in 1930, to which – except in this collage, swaying like a battered boxer between austere reading document, black film abysses and roaring tempests of images – no film was ever made. Schönberg’s letters articulate the forebodings of the disaster the National Socialists were to bring upon the Jews, describe anti-Semitism that was becoming systematic, marginalization and defamation. Inserted in between, as a look back and forward at historical continuities: bombers approaching Vietnam, the shot Paris Communards in coffins arranged like letter cases.

Róża Berger-Fiedler’s walk through the Jewish Cemetery in Berlin-Weißensee in search of her grandmother’s grave turns into a walk through the chequered Jewish history of the whole city. Interspersed are impressions of Chanukah celebrations at the “Restaurant of Nationalities” Café Moskau in Karl-Marx-Allee in East Berlin, light-drenched and devout. The film artfully interweaves the past and present of active Jewish life with memories of expulsion and annihilation, brings private and historical perspectives together and thus creates a sensitive approach where in the GDR formal distance was long dominant.

Walter Krüttner is considered the only satirist among the signatories of the Oberhausen Manifesto, which was announced at the West German Short Film Festival in 1962. His film begins like those that the Oberhausen group wanted to put a stop to: with ländler music and a quote by regional poet Ganghofer. “Lord, the ones you love you let fall into this land.” Krüttner observes the tourist hustle and bustle at Obersalzberg: tour guides leading Führer travellers through the Nazi buildings. And Krüttner counts the profits West German authorities make by this. He himself profited by winning the “Silberne Lorbeer” (Silver Laurel) of Deutscher Fernsehfunk (German Television Broadcasting), awarded at the International Leipzig Documentary and Short Film Week 1963.

Shortly before the fall of the Wall, tens of thousands of GDR citizens fled to the West, most of them via Hungary. Many ended up stranded in the West German embassies in Prague and Warsaw. Refugees from the GDR were interviewed in Poland, speaking openly and emotionally of their fates. The footage was forgotten and only re-discovered 20 years later.

Karola Hattop juxtaposes the many media images of confident working women and the men who support them with a naïve reporter who finds out that in practice equal rights are often quite a different matter. Somewhat pushy, he seeks out women at the hairdresser’s and in the maternity wear department, joins functionaries in their cars, crashes wedding parties and sneaks into museum tours for children. A revelatory curiosity full of the casually captured mundane drabness that was often revealed more clearly in student films than in comparable DEFA productions.

It’s only after the separation from her husband that another man tells her how valuable she is: the Chladek family, she’s a teacher, he’s a student. The first few years were nothing but quarrels: the Surau family, he’s a plumber, she’s a postal worker. Should she really intend to get further education at evening school, he won’t accept this: the Lehmann family, he’s a locksmith, she’s a lecturer. Three thirtysomething couples live in the Potsdam high-rise behind whose windows Petra Tschörtner looked for her graduation film. Long interviews that pierce the surface at once, equally revealing and oppressive. Promptly awarded a prize at the West German Short Film Festival in Oberhausen.

In works like “Guide Dog Ruepel” (1962), Bärbl Bergmann was the first feature film director in the GDR to portray children in their often pitiless but also honest dealings with each other, something that was almost impossible in the documentary films of that period. But she also managed to sneak lessons on how to pursue educational goals with creative obstinacy into popular science films. Thus her educational piece about two boys who discover that magic, too, requires hard work, despite its rational approach, is far from disenchanting: The protagonists reach their conclusion via detours that take them through mysterious corridors, furtive looks through keyholes and bewitching dreams.

The interviews conducted by Tamara Trampe in a Pankow kindergarten testify to a rare attempt to enter the world of the young interviewees completely, to give their stories a space where reality and fantasy, worries and wishes can mix freely. A space that’s not always provided in the daily life of the kindergarten, as the film casually suggests even after it was toned down by the DEFA censors: toilets without doors, ghastly birthday parties and friendly but unmistakable reprimands when the children let too much dialect slip into the grammar exercise or when their pictures of soldiers are not realistic enough.