4 - Reading Helke Misselwitz’s Winter Adé as Multivocal Autobiography

Summary

Filmed during the winter of 1987 AND 1988, Helke Misselwitz’s documentary Winter Adé (Winter Adieu, 116 minutes, 1988) was the director’s first feature-length film. Made in black and white, the film begins in her hometown of Zwickau. Here, the director’s voice tells us, over shots of the town and photographs from her childhood, her mother gave birth to her in an ambulance waiting before a railway crossing. Misselwitz summarizes her own life in a brief, factual manner—marriage, divorce, birth of children—before the film cuts to Zwickau’s train station, where her journey across East Germany begins. Crossing the GDR by train, she will interview and film women of all ages along the way, until she finally reaches the sea in the north. Some of the meetings with her subjects are prearranged, some happenstance, but each has a story to tell: about their past experiences in and prior to the GDR, their hopes and worries for the future, and their private and public lives. The interviews represent links along Misselwitz’s personal train journey, which only ends when she leaves land altogether, bringing closure to the film on the uplifting tones of Gershwin’s Summertime.

The late 1980s marked a period of change for East Germany. Winter Adé was therefore particularly timely in its release. Tackling the issues of women in the East German republic in a way never attempted before, the film simultaneously seeks to draw public attention to the lives of East German women while also breaking through political boundaries. As a structuring device the train journey alludes to the geographical circumstances of her birth, but it also provides a practical means of traveling to prearranged and spontaneous meetings with women along the way, and furthermore functions as a “sign of change in poetic form.” As such, Misselwitz’s prefatory insertion of the story of her own birth at this very railroad crossing in a collection of recounts of life in the GDR constitutes not just one story among many, but it also anticipates and contextualizes the film’s structure. The train journey constantly recalls Misselwitz’s own story and places it in context with those of the women she meets.