Introduction

Nearly a decade after the demise of DEFA (Deutsche Film A.G.), East Germany's state-controlled film company, can we begin to think of an “integrative” history of GDR cinema, at once within German film history, and of German film history within the international debates around “national cinema”? After the fall of the wall, the task of “integrating” not only territories and people, but also the arts and cultural life was evident. Equally evident was the danger of simply appropriating them or rewriting their differences. In the area of cinema, the GDR film culture posed special problems, since – compared to the literary life – it had remained terra incognita for the West German and Western public. Where it was considered, it either figured in relation to the old BRD-cinema as representing a parallel “commercial” cinema (under the special conditions of state capitalism), or as a parallel “auteur cinema” (Konrad Wolf, Frank Bayer, Heiner Carow etc. as the “equivalents” of Kluge, Reitz, Herzog, Fassbinder, etc.). The result were rather skewed symmetries. Nor was it really feasible to conceive of East German cinema as a “counter-cinema” in the sense that the political cinema of Jean-Luc Godard in the 1970s, the films of Glauber Rocha, or the New Brazilian cinema were once referred to as counter-cinemas.

Thus, the exact “placing” of GDR cinema must remain an open issue, one that this essay will not be able to accomplish. When looking at how the mapping of GDR cinema has been explicitly or implicitly tackled, one notices that in a number of (traditional) film histories the approach tends to be “paratactic,” which is to say, the DEFA/GDR cinema is “added to” to the existing cinema(s) of the Federal Republic, as if the problem was one of “filling in” the blanks and “white areas” on the cinematic and cultural map. But such a map is no more than the guide to a minefield as soon as someone steps into the territory itself. It is a minefield of contending discourses, normative judgments and prescriptive debates. We cannot presume to do more here than state this fact, but our paper wants to affirm the necessity of opening a new agenda.