Wolf, Konrad

b. 20 October 1925, Hechingen, Weimar Republic.
d. 7 March 1982, Berlin, German Democratic Republic. 

2025 marks the centennial of Konrad Wolf, one of the most significant German filmmakers of all time (the lack of East is mine and for emphasis). Sadly, Wolf does not occupy such an important place in film history or in film studies curricula due to his lifelong belief in the Communist project and his East German background. Wolf’s films predominantly permeate German Studies curricula across the world concerned with questions of memory, politics, and history, but his work remains largely unexplored by film studies scholars. In a way, this is the case with other important DEFA filmmakers such as Kurt Maetzig, Gerhard Klein, Frank Beyer, Heiner Carow and many more. This lack of engagement is in opposition to revaluations of other New Waves in Eastern/Central Europe such as the Czechoslovak, Hungarian, and Polish New Waves. Obviously, these movements flourished at the time of the thaw following Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953 that led to the relaxation of censorship in the arts. Then again, this was also the case in the former German Democratic Republic, where the DEFA studios produced many worthwhile films that merit to be discussed and analysed beyond the ghetto of German Cultural Studies. 

In Wolf’s case his lifelong commitment to Communism obviously plays its role in his absence from film studies curricula. Certainly, the discipline is keen to engage with directors from the former Eastern bloc so long as there was an indirect critique of Socialism in their works; for filmmakers committed to the idea of Communism, the tendency is to flatten the political implications of their works by simply engaging in formalist analyses that disconnect questions of formal experimentation from radical politics. Studies of the Soviet avant-garde in the anglophone world are good examples in this respect.¹ 

To return to Wolf, let us briefly mention some keywords that can offer a better understanding of his work: Communist internationalism, Jewish modernity, modernism and realism, left-wing melancholy. These are some issues that I will be dealing with in my discussion of the most important films from his oeuvre. But let us begin with some biographical details. The son of the acclaimed playwright Friedrich Wolf, he was born in Germany in 1925. After the Nazis came to power, his whole family had to move to the Soviet Union to avoid persecution, due to their Jewish and Communist background. Wolf joined the Red Army at the age of 17 and he was amongst the Soviet soldiers who entered Berlin following Hitler’s defeat in 1945. The complexity of this experience of him being a man of German descent joining the Red Army to fight fascism is brilliantly captured in his film Ich war neunzehn (I Was Nineteen, 1968). After the war, he studied filmmaking at the famous VGIK – Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography, previously known as the Moscow Film School – which, as Rossen Djagalov has explained, trained filmmakers from almost all the continents of the globe.² Wolf was taught by major figures of Soviet cinema such as Grigori Alexandrov, Sergei Gerasimov, and Mikhail Romm.³ In many ways, he was a legatee of the Soviet avant-garde tradition as clearly shown in his experimentation with sound and image in films such as Lissy (1957), Professor Mamlock (1961), Der geteilte Himmel (The Divided Heaven, 1964), and Goya – oder der arge Weg der Erkenntnis (Goya or the Hard Way to Enlightenment, 1971). 

In the 1950s, Wolf decided to settle in the GDR and his antifascist background gave him some artistic freedom not enjoyed by other filmmakers or artists, with the exception of people like the playwright Heiner Müller, and the authors Anna Seghers and Christa Wolf. He was Chair of the Artists Union, member of the central committee of the SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) and president of the Academy of Arts from 1965 until his death. The international recognition of his work at film festivals across the world made him into a significant cultural ambassador for the GDR. He was, therefore, in a privileged position, but this did not prevent him from making films that addressed complex and uncomfortable questions, including memories from the Nazi past and the Jewish persecutions, the role of artists in society and their obligation to speak out against authoritarianism, the everyday life challenges in the GDR and the missed opportunities for a democratic socialism, and the political consequences of one’s individual choices in periods of historical, social and political turmoil. 

Stars

Schematically we can categorise Wolf’s filmography as follows: his first diploma film Einmal ist Keinmal (Once Does Not Count, 1955) manipulates the conservative Heimat film genre so as to put forward the idea of a socialist Heimat. Genesung (Recovery, 1956), Lissy, Sterne (Stars, 1959), Leute mit Flügeln (People with Wings, 1960), Professor Mamlock, I Was Nineteen and Mama, ich Lebe (Mama, I’m Alive, 1977) engage with the popular East-German genre of antifascism. The first three films are about characters who convert to the antifascist movement, People with Wings focuses on the refusal of a German Communist to accept a highly paid job by the Nazi regime and his resulting persecution; Professor Mamlock – based on the homonymous play by Wolf’s father first adapted on the big screen in the USSR in 1938 by Herbert Rappaport and Adolf Minkin – is about the missed opportunities faced by those who did not realise in time the importance of joining the antifascist resistance against the Nazis. I Was Nineteen and Mama, I’m Alive are also about resistance to fascism and are based on Wolf’s own memories as a Red Army soldier fighting German fascism. Sonnensucher (Sun Seekers, 1958/1972) and The Divided Heaven are Gegenwartsfilme (films about contemporary issues in the late 1950s and 1960s in the GDR). Der nackte Mann auf dem Sportplatz (The Naked Man on the Sports Field, 1974), Goya, Solo Sunny (1980), and Busch singt (Busch Sings, 1981-82 – a TV documentary about the German singer and actor Ernst Busch) – are parts of his artist films tetralogy. Of course, many of these films can be placed in more than one category. For example, Solo Sunny and The Naked Man on the Sports Field can also be seen as Gegenwartsfilme as they also register everyday life challenges faced by people in the GDR. Finally, the made-for-TV Der kleine Prinz (The Little Prince, 1966) is a children’s film based on the homonymous text by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. 

Solo Sunny

What stands out in Wolf’s oeuvre is his brilliant capacity to merge the modernist with the realist cinematic tradition, especially in his antifascist, artist and everyday life films. Despite the fact that the official East German cultural policy was Socialist Realism, Wolf’s films departed from this rigid tradition and could bring together diverse modernist influences from the Soviet avant-garde (which he studied at the VGIK), Italian neorealism, and the French New Wave. Wolf’s travelling to film festivals across the globe enabled him to familiarise himself with the new post-war modern European cinemas and be influenced by their anti-heroic portrayal of history and their emphasis on the banal aspects of everyday life.⁴ 

Let us expand on these points by looking at examples from Wolf’s key films from the antifascist film genre. Lissy is based on a novel by Franz Carl Weiskopf, a German-Czech author of Jewish origins. The film centres on Lissy (Sonja Sutter), a working-class woman of socialist politics. After Alfred (Horst Drinda), her husband, loses his job due to the economic crisis in the Weimar years, he joins the Nazi Party. They suddenly both enjoy a sense of luxury and comfort, but Lissy alienates herself from her left-wing parents and many of her previous Communist Party comrades, whom she witnesses being attacked by the Nazis with the consent of the police. Through Lissy’s point of view, Wolf highlights how poverty and unemployment attracted many Germans to fascism. The film captures her gradual realisation of fascism’s antipolitics and concludes with her abandoning the comfort offered by her husband’s Party membership; this act of defiance turns into a gesture of antifascist significance and resistance.

Lissy

The film’s modernist style brings together elements from the tradition of Weimar cinema as well as the Soviet avant-garde. The opening aerial shot of Berlin recalls also the cinematic tradition of city symphony films. The style is episodic, capturing in brief sequences the typicality of life in 1930s Germany before and after the rise of Hitler. In brief sequences, for example, we see the link between escalating unemployment and the growing popularity of the Nazi Party. Characteristic in this respect is a sequence that registers Alfred’s inability to make ends meet as a door-to-door salesman and his slow transformation to a Nazi. The sequence has a fast tempo; the dynamic montage images of newspaper ads for salesmen are superimposed on top of others showing Alfred unsuccessfully trying to make a living as a salesman. Coupled with the extra-diegetic music and the repeated diegetic sounds of the doorbells that produce a sense of dissonance, this combination of images and sounds has dialectical effects that recall the left-wing modernism of the 1920s-30s. A master of temporal ellipsis, Wolf shows Alfred in a later scene looking at himself in the mirror and telling Lissy he will join the Nazi Party; an invisible cut shows his reflection in the mirror dressed in a Nazi uniform. 

The sequence picturing Alfred switching salesman jobs has been discussed by Marc Silberman, Thomas Elsaesser and Michael Wedel as a reference to Slatan Dudow, Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Ottwalt’s famous Weimar classic Kuhle Wampe, oder: Wem gehört die Welt? (Kuhle Wampe or Who Owns the World?, 1932). In the latter film, the rise of unemployment in Weimar Germany was captured by the repetition of sequences registering a group of unemployed men cycling frantically in pursuit of work.⁵ In Lissy, as in Kuhle Wampe, this dialectical portrayal of reality aimed at connecting people’s desperation with the social reality in the Weimar Republic. Following this sequence in Wolf’s film, Alfred embraces fascist ideas and in Kuhle Wampe one of the unemployed decides to end his life. 

The complex dialectics of Wolf’s style prevents the viewer from associating people who joined the Nazis with monstrosity. Instead, Wolf aspires to highlight the social and historical processes that gave rise to fascism and reveal how many people ended up embracing it due to their conditions of vulnerability. This is indeed noteworthy coming from someone who experienced persecution and dislocation after Hitler’s rise to power. Then again, in all of his antifascist films, characters are faced with a key decision. Lissy decides to join those ostracised by the Nazis and abandon her financial, emotional, and social privilege/security. The modernist experimental style is merged with a melodramatic mode that connects Lissy’s private life and decisions with the broader social reality. The fact that the central character is female is in line with the film’s overall political critique that highlights various forms of exploitation in capitalist and then fascist Germany. For instance, we are shown how she experiences forms of sexual abuse in the workplace, and later on something similar occurs in her encounter with a Nazi friend of Alfred. This engagement with women characters and their experiences of abuse is something that will occupy Wolf even in Gegenwartsfilme taking place in the contemporary GDR, such as Sun Seekers and Solo Sunny. 

Lissy

The melodramatic mode is something that characterises Wolf’s antifascist/Holocaust drama Stars, which was a DEFA and Bulgarian coproduction. At a time that in West Germany the Holocaust was still a taboo subject, Wolf made this film in 1959; once again, he brings together modernist style with melodrama, years before the New German Cinema filmmakers from West Germany engaged with the country’s history through melodramatic tropes. It is also the first German film (from the East or the West) to engage with the genocide of the European Jews as well as to feature scenes of deportations to Auschwitz. Evidence of how taboo the Holocaust was at the time is that, as noted by Larson Powell, the West German government tried to prevent the film’s circulation in international festivals.⁶ Thomas Elsaesser argues that Stars “caused a diplomatic incident in German-German relations. The film is a historical document, if only because of the fact that a work by a German director could, after an official protest from a German foreign office appealing to the so-called Hallstein Doctrine, only be shown at this international film festival as a Bulgarian, not a German film.”⁷ 

Stars takes place in a small town in Bulgaria, where German soldiers station temporarily groups of Greek Jews, who are destined to be transported to Auschwitz. The main character, Walter (Jürgen Frohriep), is a Wehrmacht officer and disillusioned intellectual and painter, who seems to hold nihilistic viewpoints. When he meets a Jewish woman, Ruth (Sasha Krusharska), he falls for her and tries to organise her escape with support from local members of the Bulgarian resistance. His meeting with Ruth makes him reflect on his role in the Nazi war machine and enables him to find a purpose in life. The film manipulates the melodramatic narrative of too-late-ness as Walter has been fooled about the time of Ruth’s deportation and fails to save her. The story concludes with Walter joining the Bulgarian resistance and follows the same trope as other Wolf films, in which characters are expected to reach an important decision that has political dimensions. 

Stars was well-received across the world and earned Wolf the Prix du Jury at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival. What strikes one when looking at it in the present is again Wolf’s refusal to present many German soldiers as representatives of radical evil. They are instead shown as mere cogs in a wider apparatus of terror. Walter is also a case in point as his nihilism makes him indifferent to the terror that he and his compatriots facilitate, despite him turning a blind eye on the activities of the Bulgarian resistance. The encounter with Ruth becomes a turning point as she forces him to see how his passivity facilitates the perpetuation of war crimes and genocide. 

What stands out in the film is its melancholic tone as accentuated by the opening sequence that fades in to a train. This is followed by a crane shot of the group of Greek Jews who are about to be deported. A series of close-ups of the soldiers and deportees ensue. As the train prepares to depart, a soldier writes on it the word Jew. We realise then that the film starts from the conclusion of its fabula. This scene has serious narrative implications for it does not allow for any sense of catharsis or redemption. This opening sequence already prepares the audience for what is to follow; somehow, the audience’s melodramatic anxiety about Ruth’s fate is invalidated at such an early stage. This sequence can be seen as a metacommentary on cinema’s responsibility when tackling issues of genocide that cannot be addressed using tropes of suspense and individual survival as ways to produce spectatorial redemption. 

Herein lies the importance of the antifascist conversion narrative towards the film’s ending, which does not produce triumphalism or catharsis as melancholy persists. It does, however, privilege narratives of resistance as the only way to envisage hope, rather than narratives of survival that cannot alleviate the pain of genocide. A child of the Enlightenment, antifascism was, as the historian Enzo Traverso notes, “one of the most important currents of European culture.”⁸ It was a political tradition committed to universal emancipation and active resistance to the forces of reaction, something that has been brilliantly summarised in Peter Weiss’ – who was Wolf’s friend – quintessentially antifascist novel Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (Aesthetics of Resistance, 1975–81). The narrative of antifascism was also in line with a tradition of Communist Internationalism – something that resonated with Wolf’s own experiences as an exile in the Soviet Union and then a Red Army soldier in Berlin. It is not accidental that the tradition of antifascism attracted many members of the Jewish modernity. The term Jewish modernity has been introduced by Traverso, who has highlighted the important role played by European people of Jewish origins to the radicalisation of politics and art in the 20th century. The social experiences of marginalisation and discrimination faced by European Jews put them at the forefront of political and cultural radicalism as they sought universal solutions to the impasses of modernity. Key figures of the Jewish modernity include Franz Kafka, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Sergei Eisenstein, Peter Weiss, Gertrude Stein, Anna Seghers, Alfred Döblin and many more. The Jewish intellectual and artistic avant-garde adopted an internationalist stance because it had understood the contradictions of capitalism and the impasses of nationalism especially after the disaster of WWI.⁹ 

Konrad Wolf embodied all the qualities of the typical figure of the Jewish modernity: he grew up in forced exile on account of his Jewish background, was a Communist internationalist intellectual, an antifascist who fought against his own homeland and the Nazis, and an internationalist in terms of aesthetics ready to absorb influences from filmmakers across the world. Perhaps, this is the reason why the narratives of antifascist fight and conversion in his films escape the rigidity of other DEFA productions. The decision to fight against the forces of reaction is pictured as the only possibility for redemption, which is at the same time postponed for the future because the battle against fascism is one amongst the many struggles for universal emancipation. 

This is presented ex negativo in his adaptation of his father’s play, Professor Mamlock, in which he scolds those who did not take part in antifascist resistance at an early stage. The film makes a bold argument that non-resistance was tantamount to complicity. Mamlock tells the story of an accomplished medical surgeon and Professor (Wolfgang Heinz) at a university hospital. He is a family man of Jewish origin, who believes in Enlightenment ideas of individual freedom, scientific humanism, progress and the rule of law. When the Nazis take power in 1933, he is convinced that this is just a small parenthesis, and he passionately opposes his Communist son’s resistance activities. After being dismissed following the regime’s purges of Jews and political opponents from civil service and government jobs, he finally understands the horror of Nazi anti-politics. His daughter is mocked by her schoolmates for being a Jew, and he is paraded by a delirious crowd in the streets of Berlin mocking him for his Jewry. At the film’s conclusion, he commits suicide fully conscious that his major mistake was that he refused to participate in the resistance movement. Unlike Lissy and Stars, the ending here is not a narrative of antifascist conversion; it is a narrative of too-lateness as Mamlock understands that he should have acted earlier. The film’s key thesis can be summarised as follows: the character’s depoliticisation leads to his own ruin. Mamlock’s “wrong decision” becomes a metaphor for collective inertia at times of political crisis; the personal and the political, the private and the public sphere, are clearly interconnected in Wolf’s bold drama.

Professor Mamlock

The film’s formal and stylistic texture is in keeping both with the lessons of Bertolt Brecht (especially his writings on the separation of elements) as well as with the Soviet avant-garde’s penchant for a “contrapuntal use of sound,” which understood sound not as a secondary element that illustrates the visual material, but as an independent one that could produce montage effects.¹⁰ Music and sound, therefore, both for the Soviet avant-garde and Brecht should not illustrate what is visible or produce predetermined emotional effects. Instead, music and sound should play a political role and complicate the narrative so as to aid the filmmaker in revealing the social processes behind the represented events. 

Typical in this respect is a sequence at the beginning of the film taking place on 31 December 1932. Here Wolf makes use of associative editing and experimental sound bridges to stress the antithesis between Mamlock’s apolitical domesticity and the political tensions in the streets of Berlin between the Communist youth and Nazi thugs. Seconds before the arrival of 1933, the camera initially registers the champagne glasses in Mamlock’s living room and then frames his wife (Ursula Burg) in a close-up. The following shot cuts to Mamlock’s son, Rolf (Hilmar Thate), and other Communist activists who come face to face with a group of brownshirts in the streets. This is followed by an abrupt cut and a close-up of Mamlock accompanied by the diegetic sound of bells announcing the New Year. What follows is a series of fragmented visuals. Images of fireworks are intercepted by a knife presented by a Nazi, cut to another shot in Mamlock’s house showing him clinking champagne with his guests and family, followed by a visual of a turntable in the living room, which is the sound source of a diegetic waltz; this brief scene of domestic festivity is suddenly interrupted by a scene of Rolf and his friends fighting with the Nazis. This is followed by an abrupt close-up of Dr Inge Ruoff (Lissy Tempelhof), Mamlock’s colleague and a Nazi sympathiser, who witnesses the fight between the fascists and the Communists; in the shot that comes immediately after, we see a stylised scene that emphasises the stabbing of Rolf’s friend by the Nazis. Cut to another shot of a Nazi spreading fake news that the trouble on the streets was started by the Communists, which is interrupted by Mamlock dancing a waltz with his wife.

The sequence produces fast audiovisual associations; the intricacy of Wolf’s sonic experiments lies in the fact that the diegetic sound of the waltz produces sound bridges with the other diegetic sounds outside the household, the New Year fireworks, and the sounds from the clashes between the Communist activists and the Nazis in the streets of Berlin. Wolf’s associative arrangement of images and sounds produces montage effects that invite the audience to reflect on the contrast between the sounds in Mamlock’s domestic and apolitical space and those sounds whose source is in the streets of 1930s Berlin. The frenetic aspect of the sequence is in line with the Soviet and Brechtian contrapuntal approach to sound and music and aims at highlighting how the emergence and expansion of fascism cannot be delinked from attitudes of apolitical individualism and social indifference. Wolf explained that in adapting his father’s play, he wanted to reject the approach of photographed theatre; instead, he was committed to an audiovisual experimentation that could highlight the film’s politics in medium-specific ways.¹¹ Commenting on certain films from his antifascist genre, such as Recovery, Lissy, Stars, Men with Wings, and Mamlock, Wolf explains that the characters are called to make class-conscious decisions – class here implies joining the struggle against fascism even if one has to leave their middle-class comfort.¹² This is Mamlock’s mistake and this is the reason he decides to end his life, after realising that adherence to liberal ideas of freedom, family, and the rule of law have little to offer in circumstances like the German 1930s.  

Whereas Mamlock is the emblem of apolitical individualism, Gregor (Jaecki Schwarz) in I Was Nineteen is pictured as an exemplary figure of Communist internationalism. Modelled on Wolf himself, who was a 19-year-old Red Army soldier when the Soviets broke the German line, Gregor is a Soviet soldier of German origins who returns to his homeland in the last days of the war. He acts as an interpreter and tries along with other Red Army soldiers to convince the Germans to surrender as the war is approaching its end. The film has strong elements of biography as it is based on Wolf’s own diary entries. Recalling that time of his life, Wolf said in 1975 that he was not hesitant to become ‘Vatterlandsverräter’ (fatherland traitor)  as this was the right decision emanating from his belief in the internationalist socialist project.¹³ Furthermore, in a diary entry dated 18 March 1945, Wolf describes his experience of returning to Germany with the Red Army uniform saying that there is nothing to hold him there, whereas the USSR is his true homeland.¹⁴ In the film, Gregor is presented as a committed Red Army soldier, but at the same time quite confused about his own identity and slightly awkward when dealing with disillusioned Germans. 

I Was Nineteen

The film’s complex themes of belonging, identity, antifascist struggle, and victimhood are underlined by the form. The narrative has an episodic and undramatic style that is in line with the neorealist narrative principles; the long takes and slow pace add an anti-heroic dimension to the story that questions character agency and recalls András Bálint Kovács’ comment on characters in neorealist films: “things happen to them; they don’t make things happen.”¹⁵ Something analogous takes place here as the young Red Army soldiers and the local Germans facing their country’s defeat seem at times quite perplexed, as if they have been thrown into a historical setting rather than being active shapers of it. Wolf captures the banality of the last days of war (including the trivial conversations with the German officials as they negotiate their surrender), as well as the awkward encounters with German civilians. Emblematic in this respect is a sequence when Gregor meets a teenage German girl (Jenny Gröllmann) in Bernau who visits him in the commander’s office to ask for help. Commenting on this sequence, Anke Pinkert notes that it connotes acts of brutal retaliation and rapes on the part of Red Army soldiers in the last days of the war.¹⁶ Things become more complicated when the young woman has a stichomythia with a female Soviet soldier (Galina Polskikh) who aggressively denounces the catastrophe brought about by the Wehrmacht in her USSR hometown. Different memories are placed here side by side to further highlight the consequences of the war, but also the complex situation that Gregor finds himself in. It is through similar everyday, anti-heroic, banal encounters that the film registers the last days of the war in a melancholic style that produces more an aesthetics of mourning rather than celebration, despite Wolf’s firm commitment to antifascism. 

Relevant in this respect is a sequence where Gregor and the other Soviet soldiers come face to face with some concentration camp survivors and invite them to share dinner. This sequence is punctuated by silence as the camera frames both the survivors’ fatigued faces and the awkwardness of the Red Army soldiers who are shocked by this encounter. The prolonged silence is finally interrupted after one of the former camp inmates raises a glass. This aspect of the film, its emphasis on the ordinary, the banal, and the anti-heroic adds a mourning dimension that radically departs from other films focusing on the fall of Hitler. Made in 1968 – following the end of the Jewish modernity after the post-war Jewish persecutions by Stalin, and the reconciliation between Jewish thought and US neoconservatism – the film is a work of mourning for the disappearance of Communist Internationalism and antifascism to which Wolf was a firm believer.  

I Was Nineteen

The melancholic penultimate sequence frames the German landscape in a static shot as Gregor addresses a group of resistant Nazis, telling them indignantly through the megaphone that he will not stop chasing them until there is no place on the planet for fascists; the film concludes with another long static shot capturing the Red Army soldiers in the background leaving with the people who have surrendered. Gregor’s voice-over reads “I am German, I was Nineteen.” The melancholic conclusion is indicative of what Thomas Brasch describes as Wolf’s slow realisation that the existing Socialism of the time did not live up to the expectations of what he and numerous other Communist antifascists fought for.¹⁷ The ending, therefore, communicates a sense of mourning for the past struggles gone by, which were unable to reshape the future in positive ways that would make fascism unwelcome on the planet, as per Gregor’s point. 

This melancholic realisation regarding the corruption of the socialist project is also evident in some of his Gegenwartsfilme such as Sun Seekers and The Divided Heaven. The first film focuses on the stories of two women, a young orphan named Lutz (Ulrike Germer) and Emmi (Manja Behrens), who are picked up by the police during a raid in Berlin to work in the Soviet and East-German Wismut uranium plant. Again, the style stands out for its anti-heroic aspects, while the narrative boldly shows the resentment felt by the East German workers towards the Soviets not just because of the past trauma of the war but also because of the unrealistic production expectations on the part of the latter. The emphasis on these conflicts through an observational cinematic style that captures a variety of social relationships in the plant contradicts the film’s opening intertitles that patronisingly explain to the viewer that the Wismut project started out of the USSR’s commitment to world peace.  

Character portrayal is one of the film’s noticeable dramaturgical aspects. Not only does the story include multiple protagonists in a Tolstoyan manner, framing different episodes in the plant from different perspectives, but most of the characters – perhaps with the exception of Lutz and Emmi, who are presented as complex figures rather than just positive heroes – are portrayed in negative terms. The characters carry the war trauma in their shoulders while Wolf highlights the commonality of the sexual abuse of female workers in the plant. The complexity of the social relationships within the microcosm of the plant is further complicated by the fact that many German workers had in the war fought against their Soviet colleagues. Wolf’s film suggests that the renewal to be brought about by socialism is a complex one that cannot necessarily guarantee positive results. Again, it is through the study of minor details in the dialogue and the sequences that one gets to understand this. In one scene, we learn that the USSR’s demand for increasing production has led to many working accidents, while the constant pressure to increase productivity is not well received by the workers. These details contradict many of the GDR and USSR pro-worker narratives – registered in the film as we see posters reading “people and workers first” in the Party secretariat’s office. Furthermore, the film accumulates new meaning today, as the registration of the backbreaking work in the mines and the belief in uranium production as a way to post-war socialist renewal sound passé at a time that Anthropocene questions preoccupy the public sphere. If anything, revisiting the film raises further questions about the failures of the socialist project when it comes to environmental issues. Wolf had to wait until 1972 for an official release of Sun Seekers; under pressure from the Soviet authorities, the film was not released in 1958 and was shelved for 14 years. 

Sun Seekers

The Divided Heaven is perhaps Wolf’s most radical film in terms of form and style and is one of the most discussed DEFA films as it deals with a love story that begins just before the erection of the Berlin Wall. Certainly his most accomplished Gegenwartsfilm, The Divided Heaven is an adaptation of Christa Wolf’s – a major figure of German-speaking literature – homonymous novel. Benefitting from the thaw following the death of Stalin, the film’s formal and stylistic texture is visibly influenced by post-war modernist cinema in Western Europe and particularly by the work of Alain Resnais. The experiments with sound that Wolf had started in Lissy and Mamlock have been pushed even further here; similar though to these films, The Divided Heaven seeks to place an individual story within a wider social and historical context so as to explore the interconnection between private life and history. In this respect, the film precedes many film experiments from West Germany – and particularly the New German Cinema.

The story centres on a couple: Rita (Renate Blume), a rural girl studying to become a teacher who also works at the Waggonbau Ammendorf factory as part of her training, and Manfred (Eberhard Esche), a chemist of urban background. Rita lives with Manfred and his parents in Halle and experiences at first hand the difficulties in building a socialist society both during her teaching training sessions as well in her job at the factory that produces parts for the railway. Manfred, who comes from a more privileged background, decides to move to West Berlin after losing financial support for one of his engineering projects. Rita visits him hoping to persuade him to return but refuses to accept his proposal to relocate in West Germany. The film manipulates the motif of what John Orr calls “the modernist anti-hero,”¹⁸ whose movement into the urban landscape raises questions of alienation; here, alienation is a significant aspect in the portrayal of both characters. Rita’s decision to stay in East Berlin does not guarantee any sense of closure and catharsis, but leaves the narrative open-ended.

The opening of the film – capturing Berlin from a crane shot coupled with a voice-over talking about the summer of 1961 – recalls again the city symphony film tradition. The frenetic rhythm of the film’s opening combined with the stream of consciousness voice-over has a defamiliarising effect. The camera frames Rita from unusual angles as she returns from work and then suddenly, she is shown collapsing on the street. As in Stars, the temporal order of the film is non-linear, as Rita’s collapse in the opening sequence is the outcome of events taking place at the end of the film’s fabula. Following the unfolding of the credits, the film shows her being nursed at her family’s house in the village. Wolf here deploys the split screen, placing on the left of the frame the sick Rita while on the right side of the frame, memories from her past life with Manfred are visualised. The film’s abrupt style constantly complicates the temporal order, while fast cuts produce temporal ellipses that further complicate the boundaries between the past and the present so as to show how the private lives of the characters intersect with the historical reality of the German division. 

As with other Wolf films, contradictions emerge in his portrayal of the GDR – such as the productivity pressures faced by the workers in the factory where Rita works, as well as in the manner it registers the social pressures faced by individuals related to people who have moved to the West. At the same time, the portrayal of West Berlin as a place where everything, according to Rita, “revolves around eating and drinking, getting depressed, and then going to bed”, highlights the different Weltanschauungen (world views) between the two societies. Commenting on the film’s style that merges Rita’s internal monologue with first-person and third-person narration, Wolf argued that conventional dramaturgy and ready-made formulas cannot deal with the complexity of the times. He went on to continue that this is a major challenge when trying to capture the contradictions of the historical present rather than do a film about the past.¹⁹ The film received mixed reviews in the GDR but some commentators praised its stylistic experimentation; one reviewer tried to follow the Party line and nonsensically argued that the film is more in line with the GDR socialist realist tradition rather than with a modernist epic one.²⁰ Other reviewers complained that the politics was lost and not made concrete because of the style.²¹ This point indirectly addresses the story’s ambiguity, which aside from Rita’s decision to return to the GDR, does not resort to clear-cut binaries; the division of Berlin is registered as a traumatic event that is not easy to overcome. Overall, The Divided Heaven is a post-war modernist masterpiece that has not received the attention it deserves from scholars of post-war European modernist cinema.

In his artist films, Wolf explores questions dealing with the relationship between art and power. The Naked Man on the Sports Field does this as it simultaneously explores questions of trauma and memory. It tells the story of Herbert Kemmel (Kurt Böwe), an artist uncomfortable with the official artistic doctrine in the GDR. Kemmel is a sculptor who is pictured as alienated from his social environment, while he seems to be burdened by the fact that people do not understand his work. One of his bas-reliefs, for example, which captures the historic land reforms in the Soviet Occupied Zone in 1945-46, is shelved, as district officials criticise it for “lacking energy and optimism.” Another example occurs when he visits his home village and volunteers to make a statue for the local athletic field. The locals seem to have a different conception of the sculpture, not matched by the naked runner he has sculpted.

The Naked Man on the Sports Field

Kemmel’s discomfort is also relevant in his artistic pursuits. He wants to sculpt the head of a worker but cannot find the right model. When he finds someone whom he considers ideal, the construction site foreman Hannes (Martin Trettau) refuses. Finally, after convincing Hannes to sit for him several times, Kemmel is dissatisfied with his own work. Kemmel’s alienation is social, but it also has to do with his obsession with the historical traumas of the past. This is expressed in the film’s subtle references to the Buchenwald and Ravensbrück concentration camps and memorial sites, as well as to events in Babi Yar, a ravine outside Kiev where the German army and Ukrainian collaborators executed more than 30,000 Jews and other Ukrainians civilians. Kemmel is haunted by the past, even though he himself did not experience the horror of the camps. 

The character in the film functions as the director’s double—as Wolf never stopped searching for novel ways to represent the historical traumas of the 20th century.²² Kemmel’s constant obsession with a picture from Buchenwald and his inability to understand the proximity between the visualised natural idyll of the landscape and the horror of the camps demonstrates Wolf’s familiarity with the post-war debates surrounding the unrepresentability of the Holocaust and in particular with Alain Resnais’ Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955); in this film, Resnais reflects on the contradiction between environmental beauty and the horror of the camps and his work can be seen as a metacommentary on the need to invent more complex cinematic forms when dealing with issues of genocide. 

In Goya or the Hard Way to Enlightenment, Wolf’s biopic has echoes of Bertolt Brecht’s Leben des Galilei (Life of Galileo, 1939) and addresses questions related to the role of the artist in moments of social and political crisis. Goya (Donatas Banionis) is a painter who benefits from the support of the king and the Church, but simultaneously believes in freedom of thought and loves his compatriots. These qualities of his character bring him eventually into conflict with the Church and the royal establishment. The film observes the eventual transformation of the artist’s gaze; the harmless portraits of his early days are followed by grotesque paintings that capture the historical horror of the time. The film’s sonic and musical experiments recall Wolf’s earlier aesthetic ventures in films such as Lissy and Professor Mamlock, where the influence of the Soviet avant-garde is visible. Not unlike the other films in Wolf’s oeuvre, the engagement with the past is evidence of the desire to connect it with the history of the 20th century. For instance, the sequences where the Inquisition condemns certain artists and thinkers for their heretic views have indirect references to the 1949 László Rajk trial in Hungary and the 1952 Slánský trial in Czechoslovakia; both were show trials that purged key members of the Hungarian and the Czechoslovak Communist Parties on the grounds of fabricated charges of espionage.²³ The oblique suggestion that the Catholic Inquisition had similar dogmatic views like the Stalinists is another evidence of Wolf’s melancholy for socialism’s shift from a narrative of liberation to a rigid form of bureaucratic governance and oppression.

Solo Sunny, co-directed with Wolfgang Kohlhaase, is perhaps Wolf’s boldest artist film as it combines themes relevant to the other ones, while also focusing on a woman’s struggle for artistic expression and self-realisation in a patriarchal world; Sunny’s (Renate Krössner) search for meaning is simultaneously a quest for artistic and sexual independence as well as for a more fulfilling social role. She is a former factory worker who sings for a pop band called The Tornadoes. As it focuses on Sunny’s desire to gain independence as an artist and a woman, the film registers both the East Berlin night life and its urban spaces including the run-down apartment and public buildings. Sunny’s refusal to sleep with the band’s saxophone player Norbert (Klaus Brasch) makes her an outcast in the group, and she is eventually forced to leave. She also suffers from the advances of an uncharismatic taxi driver, Harry (Dieter Montag), but her motto in life is that she should sleep with whomever she wants. She falls for Ralph (Alexander Lang), an amateur saxophonist and philosopher, but he is not committed to her. The failure of her first solo performance in a Berlin bar and her unfulfilled romance with Ralph lead her to a suicide attempt. She manages to overcome her crisis and thanks to the solidarity of a former colleague she gets back on her feet. 

Solo Sunny

As Larson Powell rightly notes, the film’s style combines the melodramatic mode with an episodic/epic style that brings together disparate episodes from Sunny’s life.²⁴ The depiction of Sunny has a queer dimension as she is given androgynous characteristics, while the character has a punk-inspired appearance. The depiction of her everyday fight against social conformist patterns of behaviour, her desire for freedom, and her dissatisfaction with patriarchal oppression point to unresolved contradictions in the GDR, whose state ideology allegedly supported gender equality. But there is something else in the film’s combination of melodramatic moments – as mainly captured in the musical sequences and the mise-en-scène – and the registration of everyday life. The portrayal of the run-down apartment buildings and the urban infrastructure as we follow Sunny’s movement in the city communicates a wider social fatigue of a society stuck into the narratives of the past and unable to move on and provide a fresh narrative that can motivate its citizens. Most of the people Sunny encounters exhibit blasé and cynical behaviours that are indices of everyday alienation; meanwhile, Sunny’s desire for stardom and recognition as an antidote to alienation is portrayed critically, showing how social patterns of individualism and atomization cannot adequately respond to social alienation. The film’s melancholy seems to acknowledge the eclipse of past utopias, to which Wolf was committed to the very end, and an attachment to a present time that cannot offer a new collective vision of the future.

This sense of left-wing melancholy permeates Wolf’s entire filmography. My understanding of left-wing melancholy emanates from Enzo Traverso’s writings and his suggestion that left melancholy comes at a time that past utopias of social and collective emancipation have lost their purchase. For Traverso, left melancholy is a key characteristic of neoliberal societies due to their inability to offer an egalitarian vision of the future. Left-wing melancholy emanates also from the historical defeat of socialism and the understanding of it as a scientific project of hope and emancipation. It leads to a “culture of defeat” that “takes the form of a melancholic retreat into meditation and introspection.” Yet Traverso cautions that without utopias societies cannot move on. As he notes:

Left-wing melancholy does not mean to abandon the idea of socialism or the hope for a better future; it means to rethink socialism in a time in which its memory is lost, hidden, and forgotten and needs to be redeemed. This melancholia does not mean lamenting a lost utopia, but rather rethinking a revolutionary project in a nonrevolutionary age. This is a fruitful melancholia that, one could say with Judith Butler, implies the “transformative effect of loss.”²⁵ 

Wolf’s films were also made in a nonrevolutionary age as the existing socialism of the time had lost its radical purchase and turned into a bureaucratic and oppressive monstrosity. Yet most of his films – either the antifascist ones or the Gegenwartsfilme, and the artist ones – register multiple defeats and losses: the loss of Jewish modernity and Communist Internationalism following the Holocaust and Stalinism, the loss of the radical vision of the left-wing avant-garde and its desire to connect art with social life, and the loss of a future narrative of emancipation. Still, his best films discussed in this article invite ways to think about questions of social responsibility and citizenry action, the need to use memories of the traumatic past to offer a transformation of the future, and how artistic autonomy is not tantamount to solipsism and individualism. Wolf’s filmography is part of the wider tradition of world socialist cinema, a term introduced by Masha Salazkina in her seminal study to describe the filmic output of diverse filmmakers from all continents inspired by the ideas of socialism. In a passage that merits to be quoted, she argues that world socialist cinema offers us a document of past victories, mistakes and defeats as well as “a record that we can turn to in our ongoing collective task of making sense of this past—as we continue to seek new alliances, affinities, and solidarities of the global present.”²⁶ Wolf’s films need to be rediscovered, as they can be part of that project envisioned by Salazkina.

Filmography:

• Einmal ist keinmal (Once Does Not Count, 1955).  
• Genesung (Recovery, 1956). 
• Lissy (1957). 
• Sonnensucher (Sun Seekers, 1958/1972).  
• Sterne (Stars, 1959).  
• Leute mit Flügeln (People with Wings, 1960). 
• Professor Mamlock (1961). 
• Der geteilte Himmel (The Divided Heaven, 1964).
• Der kleine Prinz (The Little Prince – TV film – 1966). 
• Ich war neunzehn (I Was Nineteen, 1968).
• Goya – oder der arge Weg der Erkenntnis (Goya or the Hard Way to Enlightenment, 1971).
• Der nackte Mann auf dem Sportplatz (The Naked Man on the Sports Field, 1974). 
• Mama, ich Lebe (Mama, I’m Alive, 1979).
• Solo Sunny (1979). 
• Busch singt (Busch Sings, 1981-1982). 

Bibliography on Konrad Wolf in English

The DEFA film library has complied an English bibliography on the filmmaker here.

Endnotes