Negotiating Dominant State Ideology and Individualist Desires: The Cinematic Public Sphere of the German Democratic Republic
Negotiating Dominant State Ideology and Individualist Desires: The Cinematic Public Sphere of the German Democratic Republic

Summary/Abstract: Any film art and history survey class runs straight into the looming original sin of American cinema: D.W. Griffith’s 1915 The Birth of a Nation, a horrifyingly racist revisionist reimagining of the Civil War and a massive blockbuster which helped reimagine the entire film industry in the first half of the 20th century. At a time when the Charlottesville white supremacist rallies, the Black Lives Matters protests, and the structural inequalities re-surfaced by the COVID-19 pandemic have brought the continuing legacy of slavery and the Jim Crow era to the forefront of our collective consciousness, figuring out how to teach the place of this film in our culture without further exposing students to traumatizing representations of African-Americans has become a continuously evolving challenge. At one of the most diverse campuses in the United States, we have been experimenting with trauma-informed collaborative models which grant students agency while still equipping them with the tools to understand the artistic, technical, historical, social, political, and business contexts and implications of Griffith’s work.Common perceptions of the former Eastern Bloc often characterize the socialist societies as overly oppressive, where stringent political censorship categorically denied freedom of expression. Nevertheless, a closer examination of the socialist public sphere reveals more nuanced patterns. This essay examines how cinema functioned as a unique space where citizens of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) could critically reflect on their everyday experiences in manners that departed from the dominant ideology prescribed by the state. I start by critiquing models of the socialist public sphere previously proposed by David Bathrick and Michael Meyen and offer an alternative model in which popular cinema plays an indispensable role in articulating authentic daily experiences of ordinary GDR citizens. Through an analysis of Heiner Carow’s cult film “The Legend of Paul and Paula” (“Die Legende von Paul und Paula,” 1973), I argue that the East German state studio DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft) offered filmmakers a certain degree of artistic license despite frameworks of limitation, and that the film serves as a space for discussion where individualist desires find expression despite official constraints on the fulfillment of such wishes.

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