HEINER CAROW’S VERFEHLUNG shows that even the most intimate experiences of everyday East German citizens were well within the control of state policies. The action of the film takes place during the last year of the GDR: peace protesters have begun to congregate in churches; the fall of the Berlin Wall is imminent. Yet this post-Wende film foretells not a hopeful, but rather a bleak future and opens with imagery of a lifeless countryside, which is being consumed by the mining machinery of a relentlessly expanding coal pit.

In their respective reviews in the left-leaning Berlin newspaper die tageszeitung and the West German Frankfurter Rundschau, Oksana Bulgakowa, a Russian-born film scholar, and Heike Kühn, a film critic, point out that in Carow’s imagery, the devastated landscape becomes symbolic not just of the decaying East German state but also of the psychological condition of its citizens. Both Bulgakowa and Kühn describe Verfehlung as an “end-times film.” For Bulgakowa, who studied film in Moscow and received her PhD at East Berlin’s Humboldt University, Carow’s dark message (“all for nothing”) extends beyond the boundaries of the film to describe history itself. For Kühn, it is the future that is painted darkly. Like Bulgakowa, she points out the intertextual allusions to Brecht’s Mother Courage, but sees the mothers’ loss of their children as symbolic of a lost future. The word “Verfehlung” extends beyond the concept of a “mistake” that is used for the English title, describing instead “an action that violates a moral principle.

Oksana Bulgakowa

All for Nothing

First published as “Alles umsonst” in the tageszeitung (March 19, 1992).

Translated by Wendy Westphal.

About the Film Verfehlung by Heiner Carow

The dead countryside stands for a dead country; churned-up earth, desolate coal mines, an abandoned house, a prison courtyard. The new film by Heiner Carow begins within such spaces. So heavily does this imagery weigh down on the story of late love that the former soon crushes the latter.

The countryside stands for a destroyed and destructive country that acted against its citizens with incomprehensible severity and, in return, harvested their aggression. The historical drama is packaged in a melodramatic love story. Once upon a time … Angelica Domröse, former star of earlier DEFA films, now plays a grandmother.