
East German Film and the Holocaust by Elizabeth Ward
Elizabeth Ward's fascinating consideration of how the understudied question of how East German film engaged with the persecution of the Jews under National Socialism is a highly valuable addition to the field of Holocaust Studies that demonstrates clearly how the representation of the Jew has been shaped by historical conditions.
Like much scholarship on the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Ward's monograph based on her dissertation, follows what will be a familiar trajectory to readers versed in the history of the cultural politics of that era. The chapters are organized according to the expected historical caesuras—taking two films from each period from the initial postwar phase to the founding of the state in 1949; from 1949 to 1961, with the building of the Berlin Wall; from the cultural freeze of 1965 to the post-Ulbricht 'thaw' of 1972; and finally through to the periods of stagnation and ultimate collapse of the East German state and with it DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft), the state-funded film company, whose room for maneuver Ward illustrates through her sustained archival research.
With the likely exception of Frank Beyer's still-striking Jacob the Liar (1975)—which was of course remade by Peter Kassovitz with Robin Williams in the lead role for a global audience in 1999, Ward's corpus deals with films [End Page 303] that will be largely unfamiliar (and frequently not accessible even in this age of streaming) to viewers without German. These films form a suitably representative selection, from Kurt Maetzig's internationally successful Marriage in the Shadows (1947), through key Konrad Wolf films of the early period, including Professor Mamlock (1961), to Siegfried Kühn's The Actress (1988). Ward does an excellent job of considering the strategies directors used to represent the Jewish experience under the restrictions of East German cultural policy that often had consequences for their productions but also for their future careers (as was the case with Beyer in particular). Indeed, thanks to the detailed archival research that the exceptional demise of the GDR has made possible, Ward deftly shows how, in certain cases, there was relative autonomy for cultural producers in eluding the prescriptions of the state in seeking to provide more nuanced explorations of the persecution of the Jews under National Socialism.
Ward's work gestures toward broader comparative questions, particularly in the later chapters dealing with the 1980s and 1990s when the loosening of state restrictions allowed for a transnational convergence in Holocaust representation to become evident. Nevertheless, the study is necessarily circumscribed by the fact that its corpus consists of films produced in the relatively restricted environment of the East German state, one which throughout its existence privileged Communist and anti-fascist heroism over Jewish victimhood and German perpetration. That said, there is something very interesting in the way in which the study demonstrates how representation is always shaped by, and negotiates with, what are ultimately conventions of genre (albeit in an East German context).
Already in 1978, writing on the representation of the Jew in Holocaust film, Judith Doneson identified the narrative codification of "the Jew as a weak character […] being protected by a strong [male] Christian-gentile."1 Ward adds nuance to this by showing how, for example, in the history of German representation of Jewish experience, East German film remained indebted to certain conceptions of assimilated Jews and their relationship to a "valid" German cultural tradition (i.e., Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Heinrich Heine) that also finds parallels in West Germany. Strikingly, none of the cultural producers discussed here are Jewish, with the prominent exception of Jurek Becker, childhood concentration camp survivor at Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen, and author of the screenplay and novel, Jacob the Liar, the text [End Page 304] that offers the most ethically complex and still affecting representation of Jewish experience in the ghettos.
Ward is also sensitive to the way in which certain historical films in the 1980s, simply by reversing the binary coding of German and Jew established by the National Socialist regime, fail to satisfactorily interrogate questions of identity. Indeed, throughout the book, Ward does an excellent job of marrying deep archival research with an understanding of cinematic form in producing nuanced readings of films where one might have imagined that they would simply require ideological decoding.
Because the GDR ended when it did, at a point when cultural memory was beginning to transmit aspects of the past to a generation who had not experienced it first-hand, it would be difficult and indeed inappropriate for the author to apply more recent theorizations of contemporary memory culture (such as Michael Rothberg's "multidirectional memory"2) to these cultural texts. This does not, however, detract from the ways in which Ward makes an important contribution to what has been up to now a largely neglected dimension of the history of the representation of the Holocaust.
Notes
1. Judith E. Doneson, "The Jew as a Female Figure in Holocaust Film," Shoah: A Review of Holocaust Studies and Commemorations 1(1) (1978): pp.11–13, 18.
2. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. 2009. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.