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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2018
BY REVISITING A selected body of East and West German films, this book has traced the cinematic developments that paralleled the recovering and the renewed flourishing of the fashion industry during a string of postwar crisis periods in Germany: from the end of Second World War to the early postwar years, through the Berlin Blockade, the founding of the two German states, and to the early phase of the Cold War. Reexamination of these films, along with the relevant fashion media reports, offers critical and often alternative reflection on this relatively short time span, in which democratization, recovery, and rebuilding after the war took place. The immediate postwar period, a span of only about ten years, was marked by such a rapid process of normalization in everyday life and in real and vicarious consumption and entertainment that by the mid-1950s the events of the previous decade seemed like distant history. Retrospective, self-congratulatory narratives of the quick progress made in the course of that period abounded on film and in the printed media, in the East and the West. In this process the media often chose fashion-related themes and the spectacular display of the women's changing styles to express visually the dramatic advances taking place, especially in women's lives.
In 1953, a small movie company in Wiesbaden, Trans-Rhein-Film, released a series of five short documentaries (Kurz-Dokumentarfilme), each one twelve to fifteen minutes long, that were distributed by United Artists Co. GmbH and shown in theaters before the main feature. The five films were all titled “A Short Trip through Time” (“Kleine Reise durch die Zeit”) and had different topics and main protagonists exemplifying a typical development of the recent years. Each documentary featured a humorously rhymed voice-over narration, musical accompaniment by the popular cabaret performer Peter Igelhoff, a fictional main character played by a nonprofessional, and a visual narrative based on a mix of documentary footage and scenes filmed on a set. Of the five short documentaries, the one most interested in incorporating a variety of historical footage and in shedding light of the life of women after the war is Kleine Reise durch die Zeit mit Ursula (A Short Trip through Time with Ursula, 1953, directed by Wolfgang Kiepenheuer).
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