In July 2015, A GROUP of scholars including faculty, students, and professionals from outside academia met for the eighth biennial East German Summer Film Institute. Facilitated at Smith College by the DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, this summer workshop—entitled “Sex, Gender, and Videotape: Love, Eroticism, and Romance in East Germany”—took a dedicated and comprehensive look at the ways in which these themes appeared, disappeared, and were avoided or censored in East German film and television. The event included public screenings of material that had not been seen in decades and works that had never been shown outside of Germany. Guiding the discussions were questions surrounding sex, gender, and sexuality in East (and West) Germany and the Eastern Bloc that some scholars had examined especially in the mid- to late 2000s but that had not been posed in relation to visual media, the primary focus for this workshop. The film institute showcased East German portrayals of family life, corporeal pleasure, gendered embodiments of socialist citizenship, socialist married life, sex education, queerness, and the gendering of labor, both public and private, among many other topics.

Taking its cue from the wealth of unexplored or underexplored material introduced at and by that film institute, this volume gathers essays on a sample of televisual works produced in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) but points to the bountiful opportunities for engaging with East German texts while highlighting the need to illuminate and comprehend how sex, gender, and sexuality were implicit and explicit parts of real existierender Sozialismus (real existing socialism). Some of the films analyzed in this volume's contributions have never before been examined in scholarship as far as we can tell (e.g., Zu jeder Stunde in John Lessard's essay), or if so, likely only in German and less available to English-speaking audiences. In this volume's chapters that treat works previously discussed by scholars (e.g., Guten Morgen, du Schöne in Evan Torner's chapter), we find new readings, often experimenting with theoretical approaches that yield innovative interpretations.