The history of communism as the story of its crises: The two authors Ralph Giordano and Hans-Ulrich Barth take up various uprisings and protests to demonstrate the discrepancy between the claim to power and the reality in “socialist imperialism.” A more nuanced light is shed on individual uprisings, while at the same time feeding into stereotypical Cold War images of the enemy.
Long walks through almost deserted cityscapes which even in the late 1970s still bear the distinct scars of the Second World War: a Belgian filmmaker encounters West Berlin. She tries to re-adjust in this terrain saturated with European history and films this transformation in the first person singular. The images of twilight captured on grainy 16mm footage make Berlin look like a city that lies deep in the East, even though it sees itself as a Western city. But Annik Leroy mistrusts the mirror images: they don’t help if you want to see things more clearly.
On 29 April 1959, Hessian Broadcasting transmitted an alarming survey of the Federal German school system. The first of three parts of the report “Focus on Our Youth” investigates the question of what has stuck in the minds of higher form students about Hitler’s and Ulbricht’s Germanies. Hesse under Polish administration? Hitler sold badges to come to power? At least they are about right concerning the number of murdered Jews – that is, the third who could think of anything to say about this at all. One television critic rightly pointed out that this represented the sum total of all parental table talk. But were these parents watching television on 29 April 1959?
One of many commemoration ceremonies, eleven years after the GDR uprising. The report combines a Saarland politician’s thoughtful speech with idyllic shots of a high-spirited population: at open air swimming pools, playing cards or on camping sites. “Do you know what we commemorate today?” the reporter asks. The answers are deeply irritating.
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.
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.
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.
Designed as a travelogue about Israel, Herbert Viktor emphasizes similarities to the FRG of the economic miracle years in his film: clean, neat, busy, enterprising. Haifa, for example, is described as having evolved from a “meeting place for Arabic caravans and robber bands” to the most modern port of the Levant. Viktor also pays tribute to the welcoming culture for the persecuted of the world, but omits to elucidate on the fates that lie behind them. The film, spiced up by staged intermezzi to become a statement of sympathy, was released in Federal German cinemas in 1959 under the patronage of Willy Brandt. It was not allowed on Israeli screens before 1962, when the death sentence against Adolf Eichmann had been upheld by the court of appeal.
Prague in July 1968. The West German television magazine Panorama reports on the situation in the ČSSR, drawing parallels to the developments in Budapest in 1956. Curious and sceptical at the same time, the feature explores the possibilities of an independent reform movement, but also soberly concludes that the Soviet Union will not tolerate this. The tanks are already waiting at the border.
A look back on Hungarian history ends in the bloody present of October 1956: The suppression of the uprising in Budapest, filmed from the point of view of those affected. The material was smuggled abroad and assembled there by refugee filmmakers. A direct contemporary document which at the end reflects the powerlessness of the West: Nobody came to help.
