2 - Genesung (1956)

Summary

GENESUNG(RECOVERY , 1956) Wolf's second film, was based on a Hörspiel (radio play). It tells an antifascist conversion narrative, that of the happy-go-lucky Friedel Walter, a popular entertainment musician during the Third Reich, who is gradually drawn in to the anti-Nazi resistance, in part through his love for Irene Schorn (played by Karla Runkehl, who had already had an important role in Kurt Maetzig's Schlösser und Katen [Castles and Cottages, 1957]). However, when Friedel finally finds Irene again after the war, she is already married to an older (and handicapped) antifascist, Max Kerster (Wilhelm Koch-Hooge), and Friedel must renounce his love, having only a bright professional future under socialism: he can become the doctor he only falsely claimed to be during the war, under an assumed name. The end of the film gives him amnesty for this deception and sends him off to his future prospects. Genesung thus reverses the roles often given to male and female protagonists in Wolf: the role of self-sacrificing idealist, who must renounce love in return for a happier or truer future, will be the lot of Lissy at the close of her film, Lutz at the end of Sonnensucher, and Rita at that of Der geteilte Himmel (and perhaps Sunny in the last scene of her film, although there the future is no longer political). This melodramatic close is familiar from Hollywood models such as Stella Dallas (dir. King Vidor, 1937, with Barbara Stanwyck) or Now, Voyager (dir. Irving Rapper, 1942, with Bette Davis); here, however, the sacrificial role is for a man. Friedel is, in his softness and passivity, hardly a traditional male lead in any case. The plot idea of a doctor working without proper qualifications had been tried out in West Germany in Rolf Hansen's Die grosse Versuchung (The Great Temptation, 1952), starring Dieter Borsche and Ruth Leuwerik, as one GDR reviewer noted (Leipziger Volkszeitung, March 23 1956). Wolf himself was quoted in another GDR paper as saying his film did not belong to the doctors’ genre (“kein Kittelfilm,” Lausitzer Rundschau, February 25, 1956).