8 - Resistance of the Heart: Female Suffering and Victimhood in DEFA’s Antifascist Films

Summary

LONG BEFORE NATHAN STOLTZFUS coined the phrase “resistance of the heart,” making reference to the successful protest of the women of the Rosentrasse in Berlin’s Jewish quarter in 1943, whose intervention may have saved their interned Jewish husbands from deportation, and more than twenty years before the West German filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta paid tribute to these courageous women in her film Die Frauen von der Rosentraße (The Women of Rosenstrasse, 2003), East German cinema emotionalized the representation of resistance by focusing on women in two antifascist films of the 1980s: Die Verlobte (The Fiancée, Günter Reisch 1980) and Die Schauspielerin (The Actress, Siegfried Kühn 1988). These two films belong to the small number of antifascist films with female protagonists produced by DEFA (Deutsche Film Aktiengesellschaft), as the GDR’s state-owned production company was called. Antifascism through a female prism results, as I shall argue, in a perspective that emphasizes the emotional motivations for joining the resistance rather than the ideological ones. In this respect, Reisch and Kühn’s films signal a new departure for DEFA’s antifascist genre, which I shall consider in the broader context of the critical reappraisal of the GDR’s foundational narrative of antifascism during the 1980s.

Framing DEFA’s antifascist genre in terms of gender, this chapter explores how these two films construct and deconstruct gender stereotypes, including the intersection of race and gender in the image of the feminized Jew. How do the films’ protagonists Hella Lindau and Maria Rheine compare to women in earlier antifascist films? What do these antifascist heroines, if we may refer to them in such terms, have in common with the socialist women featuring prominently in DEFA’s Gegenwartsfilme (films about contemporary society), another significant genre of East German film production? And finally, to what extent do these two East German films about female resistance, suffering, and victimhood anticipate the discourse on wartime suffering that has dominated German cinema since unification?

DEFA’s Antifascist Films

In East Germany’s nationalized film industry, antifascism was a perennial theme. From its very first feature film, Die Mörder sind unter uns (The Murderers Are Among Us, Wolfgang Staudte, 1946), until 1992, when DEFA ceased to exist, around one hundred antifascist feature films were produced.