11 - Animating the Socialist Personality: DEFA Fairy Tale Trickfilme in the Shadow of 1968

Summary

In 1968, a wave of protests and reform movements swept across Europe. While the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was not a focal point of these protests as it was in 1953 and would be again in 1989, the East German state was not immune to their influence as student uprisings changed society in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) to the West and the Polish People’s Republic (PRL) to the East. Coinciding with the student demonstrations against the communist regime in Poland, reform movements in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (ČSSR) proved to be particularly disconcerting for East Germany’s General Secretary Walter Ulbricht and his Socialist Unity Party (SED). Initiated by Alexander Dubček, Chairman of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ), “socialism with a human face” was meant to jumpstart the ČSSR’s economic activity through the relaxation of Stalinist repressions and the alleged democratization and decentralization of society and politics. Of concern to East German leaders was the possibility that these reform movements in Poland and Czechoslovakia would spill into the GDR and influence grass-roots movements in the GDR, the stability of which was always tenuous given the Federal Republic’s immediate proximity as a viable alternative to socialism. As Polish protests were quelled by internal security forces and the ČSSR’s reforms fell to the military invasion of the Warsaw Pact, the SED strengthened its own influence at home. If reform was to appear in the GDR, as happened in limited fashion with subsequent General Secretary Erich Honecker’s “unity of economic and social politics” in 1971, communist hardliners hoped these reforms would be managed by the SED and not pose a threat to the stability of the party or of the socialist state as was the case in both Poland and the ČSSR.

In the aftermath of events and potential reforms in 1968 in Eastern Europe, children’s education and entertainment were reassessed in terms of their ability to generate adequately children’s enthusiasm toward the socialist state and to produce the required socialist personality among those children. Angela Brock suggests this socialist personality was dedicated to the construction of socialism and society, able to act appropriately within the collective, and possessed of the highest socialist morality and scientific worldview.