12 - Performing the GDR: The Last DEFA Generation and the Tradition of Theatricality

Summary

Overture: Post-DEFA Performance

DEFA MAY HAVE BEEN DISMANTLED officially in 1992, but there are numerous ways to trace its afterlives. We might look to the physical plant of the DEFA Studios, which remains in operation a century after its founding in Babelsberg. We might consider institutional legacies such as the DEFA Foundation, or marketing and distribution strategies spearheaded by companies such as Icestorm. We could trace the legacy of DEFA in terms of film pedagogy at the Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen “Konrad Wolf” (HFF). Or we could certainly trace the careers of DEFA personnel through the dissolution of the GDR and into the Berlin Republic—from the venerable Kurt Maetzig, the éminence grise who continued to receive journalists and pilgrims in his Mecklenburg home until his death in 2012, to the “last generations” of DEFA. The latter include directors such as Herwig Kipping, Jörg Foth, and Evelyn Schmidt, born in the early years of the GDR, who came to study film in the 1970s and 1980s, but whose careers had hardly taken off by the time DEFA wound down after the Wende. They were succeeded by the “very last” generation (“die ‘allerletzte DEFA-Generation’”) of directors, who were still young enough to weather the momentous changes of 1989 and establish themselves in the profession—whether directing mainly for television, like Peter Kahane, himself one of the elders of this cohort; making a name for themselves as teachers while directing films, like Andreas Kleinert; or by compiling an auteurist portfolio like Andreas Dresen, by many accounts the most notable of this group.

Viewers at the 2010 Berlin International Film Festival would have had the opportunity to contemplate these continuities in two films by the latter two directors: Andreas Dresen’s Whisky mit Wodka (Whiskey with Vodka, FRG 2009) was screened as part of the “German Cinema” section, while Andreas Kleinert’s Barriere (Boundaries, FRG 2010) premiered in the “Panorama” category. The two films are vastly different, to be sure.

Whisky mit Wodka is shot in color at a seaside rfesort, half period piece harking back to the 1920s, half contemporary farce; Barriere, by contrast, is kept in black and white, an ensemble piece that takes place in a remote village and ends in tragedy. But the two films share a number of features as well.