When Joachim Hasler’s campy East German musical turned cult classic Heißer Sommer (Hot Summer) was released in June of 1968, it was intended (in somewhat of a self-contradiction) both as a pleasant distraction from the contemporary political climate and as a celebration of socialist ideology. As Andrea Rinke summarizes what seems to be the general scholarly perception of the film, which follows two groups of carefree young adults (ten boys, eleven girls) on a summer trip to a Baltic beach, “during the highly politicized period [of] the 1968 Prague Spring the apparently ideology-free depiction of youngsters having a good time must have come as a welcome moment of escapism to contemporary viewers. … it invited East German viewers to feel pride in the beauty of their Heimat, the homeland GDR [German Democratic Republic], and in the achievements of their young state.”In other words, the very escapism of the movie, examined more closely, may be revealed to have an ideology all its own.

An overt attempt to attract larger audiences through an imitation of the West German Schlagerfilm (fluffy romantic comedies organized around catchy, inoffensive pop songs), Heißer Sommer delicately negotiates the need to entice young moviegoers while simultaneously taming and appeasing an increasingly rebellious youth culture, to toe a strict party line espousing socialist values without completely sacrificing sex appeal. Attuned to these tensions, criticism of this atypically cheerful East German blockbuster has therefore tended to situate the film somewhere on a spectrum between uncomplicated diversion and rather straightforward socialist propaganda—as a shrewd if not always subtle effort at ideological indoctrination in the guise of a lighthearted entertainment film.

But perhaps this perspective too readily dismisses the unruly emancipatory potential of a youth film like Heißer Sommer—a potential that the film must first tap into and then struggle to contain. Shifting the discussion of Heißer Sommer from one generic category to another, from the musical to the travel narrative, here I would like to home in on the hidden traces of a youth rebellion both repressed and ultimately even coopted by the surface socialist ideology. After all, in a state with rigidly enforced borders, any travel is a fundamentally political act; as Christopher Görlich contends in his study of East German tourism: “Vacation in the GDR was never free of politics or nonpolitical.”