A film is ceremonially screened on the 40th anniversary of the murder of the resistance group around KPD (Communist Party of Germany) functionary Georg Schuman. Present is Horst Schumann, son of the resistance fighter and 1st Secretary of the SED Leipzig District Authority. The filmed document and the documented screening become propaganda accomplices: The GDR present perpetuates the history of NS resistance.

Ingeborg Tölke recaps her filmic biography, explains its elaborate technical conditions and talks about future core themes. She was presumably responsible for several short intermission films for Deutscher Fernsehfunk as well as a commissioned educational film. Until old age, she explored the possibilities of macro shots and time-lapse technology, which became her trademark.

The Russian tricolour is already blowing in the background as Saxony’s Minister President Prof. Dr. Kurt Biedenkopf visits a Soviet armoured regiment on Christmas Eve 1991. Those were truly turbulent times – a few months before, tanks had been rolling across Moscow’s Red Square during the August Coup; only days later, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned.

A mysterious film reel from the “Regional Film Studio Leipzig” holdings: labelled “Sierra Leone”, passed down without sound. After some official speeches, an ensemble from Sierra Leone perform a danced symbolic fight for their GDR hosts. Later, local and international couples sway on the dance floor to live music – non-protocol encounters with independent guests, in both senses of the word.

A formally sophisticated and thoughtful film about the “Below Forest Death March” memorial site: In the late spring of 1945, this wooded area near Wittstock became an improvised temporary camp for inmates of the Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück concentration camps. They eternalized themselves and their fate by carving on the trees. But what does “eternal” mean? The trees grow, change and renew their skin …

A quote by the Soviet futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky about Lenin frames the plot of this film: A dead man who is “more alive than the living” today. On a tour through the Union of Soviet Republics, the film team meet friends “in the full sense of the word” without mentioning their names: encounters with people in the Soviet Union in 1970.

A quote by literary figure Johannes R. Becher, first Minister of Culture of the GDR, supplies the title of this film about the 1982 International Book Art Exhibition. Sensitively composed images embed the IBA in the hustle and bustle of Leipzig. Old and new shots of the city, in black and white and in colour, take us to some of the 82 national booths of this book art contest, accompanied by atmospheric piano music.

This animated film advertises the advantages of the “Buchclub 65” (Book Club 65), a book community founded in 1965. Membership in the community, which existed until 1990, entitled you to regularly buy books at discount prices. The nationwide supply of reading matter to the population of the GDR is emphasised, the club magazine is introduced. And once a year, there is a gift: the main recommendation book.

The GDR’s self-image as a land of books is presented in the style of a reportage, backed by figures and comparisons. Buchhaus Leipzig, the institutional operator of the central mail-order book trade, supplies the Republic with a wide variety of books and also scores with excellent organisation. An insight into distribution logistics, long before the invention of online stores.

Accompanied by fast-paced editing and pop music, a young GDR citizen explains that even in rural areas the latest in literature can be enjoyed without a problem. Shipping is quick and easy, everything can be found in the extensive catalogues of Buchhaus Leipzig! All you need to do is send a postcard … This spot is one of seven films in the “Buchhaus Leipzig” collection at the Leipzig State Archive.

An innovative approach to the subject of National Socialism which uses a composition by Georg Katzer, a GDR pioneer of Neue Musik. The sound level – acoustic distortions and sound bites by leading representatives of the Third Reich – dominates, juxtaposed with minimalist images. A dialogue between viewers and memorial evolves in shots and counter shots.

This pointed montage of contrasts recalls the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, authorised by US President Harry S. Truman, and the devastating consequences: images of Harry in a warm embrace with a girl, images of wounded children in Japan. In September 1945, the island state in the Far East surrendered and the Second World War was officially over.

After the Wehrmacht invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939, the Jewish population was disenfranchised and killed, as this etude, staged at the Terezín Memorial, recalls. The fact that there was successful Jewish resistance even in extermination camps like Sobibór did not fit in with the traditional image of the passive victims that is melodramatically re-enforced by this film.

The well-known illustrator Werner Klemke uses his drawings to teach the youngest bookworms about the value of reading. Taking this as a starting point, Lotte Thiel presents the GDR as a land of books whose capital is Leipzig. Figures and images from the 1971 International Book Art Exhibition underscore the significance accorded to books as a tool for shaping the “socialist personality”.

Commissioned by the German Book Traders’ Association, Lotte Thiel follows the preparations for the 1971 International Book Art Exhibition, prominently supported on screen and on the soundtrack. The tradition of this fair is recalled, from its predecessor BUGRA 1914 to the first IBA in 1927 and the subsequent events that took place every five to six years starting in 1959. Award-winning illustrations can be viewed in detail.

Everyday life in casual street scenes in the Leningrad spring in the 1960s. A taxi driver suddenly remembers his transport missions on the so-called “road of life” during the German Wehrmacht’s 900-day blockade in World War Two. Iconographic images from the time of the Siege of Leningrad offer insights into how the people lived then.