“The GDR [German Democratic Republic] was always in the 1970s,” the East German theater-director-turned-filmmaker Leander Haußmann stated, challenging the prevailing post-1990 historiography, which had dwarfed the East German experiment into “a footnote,” or aberration, of history.Explaining his collapsed country’s politics and culture in terms of preeminent Western movements, Haußmann argued that, indeed, they corresponded with many of the paradigm-changing trends in Western discourses with the focal date of 1968.

I would like to test Haußmann’s assertion by probing East German cinema, whose economics and communicative practice, more than that of any other mass medium, entails the larger socio-political sphere. While scholarly approaches subsume East German cinema under its monopolistic studio system or tacitly treat it as an auteurist art, I argue that it is in fact both, namely a hybrid in which auteurs and the studio, and a third entity, the state, find a common denominator in the revolutionary stance and educational impetus of Third Cinema.

You Say You Want a Revolution: East Germany in Its Own Write2

East Germany’s core project was a revolution. From 1946 onwards, the GDR translated its postwar anti-capitalist bias into socio-economic structures that anticipated—and institutionalized—the greater equality and the rigorously understood democratization defining the goals of the global 1968 movements.But whereas this impetus opposed the established order in the West, it was literally the raison d’état in the East. According to its ideology, the GDR was a special purpose vehicle for a complete economic, social, and cultural overhaul aimed at equalizing access to power and emancipating the political subject.As an intermediate stage to a truly classless society, it had to change toward that aspiration in order to fulfill its promise.

The term for this intermediary, “socialism,” was confusing. On the one hand, it referenced the theoretical construct; on the other hand, it designated the status quo as “real existierender Sozialismus” (really existing socialism). While many, if not most, East Germans could subscribe to the theory, really existing socialism—a highly politicized construct rendering the supposedly real—raised questions regarding the ruling party’s strategy and the project’s legitimacy, turning the term into a highly contested topography. Both need to be differentiated from yet a third, that is, the socialism—or the socialisms—Easterners actually experienced.