WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE GERMAN? In the years following the political unification of East and West Germany, Germans socialized in one or the other state had to reinterpret and redefine that adjective. DEFA-trained filmmakers, too, had to navigate a unified German film industry, one whose federal, regional, and broadcast funding structures were increasingly oriented to the market economy and to the Federal Republic’s Americanized entertainment culture. Peter Welz, a DEFA child actor who later studied at the GDR’s Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen “Konrad Wolf,” combined, in Burning Life, a Hollywood fugitive road movie with distinctly German content: the young women (played by the East’s Anna Thalbach and the West’s Maria Schrader) are on the lam in the East, where they distribute the cash they rob to needy post-Wende Easterners. Reviewers at the time were quick to compare the film to Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise (US 1991), though not always favorably. In his scathing Stuttgarter Zeitung review on the day of the film’s theatrical release, Ruprecht Skasa-Weiß implies that Welz, once the star of the GDR children’s film Ikarus (Icarus, GDR 1975), had overreached and failed in his attempt to construct a German Hollywood film. In an interview with the formerly East German Neues Deutschland, Welz explains that the screenplay for Burning Life preceded the release of Thelma & Louise and thus could not have been modeled specifically on Scott’s film. It was the form, rather than content, of American films that Welz claims to have emulated.

Ruprecht Skasa-Weiß

So Where’s It Burning?

First published as “Wo brennt’s denn?” in the Stuttgarter Zeitung

(November 19, 1994).

Translated by Troy Byler.

Oh, the Good Souls: Burning Life

A terribly German film! One recognizes this, without a doubt, right away in the title, whose excessive American English cheekily seeks to snag some Hollywood glamor. But German remains German, and the target look of our German cinema mixture has long been spread, by word of mouth, even to the farthest reaches of the East: road movie is good, feminist blabber is good, gangster story is good, comedy is good.