5 - Political Affects: Antifascism and the Second World War in Frank Beyer and Konrad Wolf

Summary

LOOKING AT THE MANY FILMS and television series on the Third Reich and Second World War produced since German unification, we might easily arrive at two conclusions. First, the Second World War has joined, if not replaced, the Third Reich as the unifying myth of German postwar identity. Second, German unification has created the political conditions necessary for the recognition of Germans as victims rather than only as perpetrators. The resultant preoccupation with German wartime suffering can be found across the entire range of cultural practices, from historical exhibitions, book publishing, and scholarly debates to the audiovisual practices discussed in this volume. However, for reasons that have to do with the asymmetries of unification, the discourse on German wartime suffering has been organized around a dominant Western narrative, especially in the representation of the home front and the possibility of resistance. Here the exclusive emphasis on individual experiences has marginalized the collective voices that made antifascism the foundational narrative of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and turned it into a powerful, if increasingly hollow rhetoric in the making of a socialist imaginary and historical legacy. Furthermore, the privileging of suffering and victimization and the focus on trauma, memory, and postmemory has elided political categories, beginning with the analysis of nationalism, militarism, and capitalism that dominated the discourse of antifascism from the late 1940s to the late 1980s and that aligned East German approaches to the Second World War with urgent contemporary concerns about the future of socialism.

In the following pages I will take a closer look at the antifascist films made by DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft), the stateowned East German film studio, and consider their contribution to the filmic representation of the Second World War during the 1960s and 1970s. The convergence of the antifascist narrative and the war narrative, I contend, allowed filmmakers to remap the affective landscape of antifascism, reassess its historical status, and reaffirm its meaning for the present. Directors Frank Beyer and Konrad Wolf played a key role in revisiting the discourse of antifascism from the perspective of the Second World War: Beyer through what are now considered antifascist classics, Fünf Patronenhülsen (Five Cartridges, 1960) and Nackt unter Wölfen (Naked among Wolves, 1963), and Wolf through two autobiographical war films, Ich war neunzehn (I Was Nineteen, 1968) and Mama, ich lebe (Mama, I Am Alive, 1977).