DEFA WAS FOUNDED with a Soviet license and was a budget-financed film studio. It was given a certain amount of money to produce a certain number of films. The films did not need to earn back their production costs, which would hardly have been possible in a country as small as the German Democratic Republic. Just think of how an opera house is financed: money is spent on culture with little expectation of financial gain.

From the start, DEFA defined itself politically and artistically as a kind of anti-Ufa. After the war and the end of the Nazi period—and given the peculiarities of both German history and the history of its film industry—this was the only conceivable option.

The physical and intellectual world of German audiences was in tatters. Understanding who bore the blame for what had happened—and who was complicit—was essential. We not only needed the clarity of education but also hoped it would shed light on social processes. In the Western occupation zones, the term was “reeducation.”

The labor movement’s desire for a type of art that would further the cause of political emancipation had a different background. “Knowledge is power” was the rallying cry of nineteenth-century Social Democrats. “Art is a weapon” was the narrower, more radical slogan of the Communists. This was an easy idea to put across as long as your party was in the opposition or being persecuted. This conception of art did not, however, work so well when the same party suddenly found itself in power and faced with the many art forms of an entire country. Or with film production as a whole. Only slowly did the young people at the time—myself included— realize that this was an old debate.

GDR filmmakers, like politicians, were interested in reality. When cinematic images were at odds with political ideals, conflicts ensued. These conflicts occasionally led to banned films and long discussions that ultimately never clarified anything.

Censorship was not exercised by an office but existed as a permanent state of mind. Yet some still managed to make films that showed the place, the times, the people, and their lives as they really were. In such a small country, these films had a large audience. People do not go to the movies to learn, but to discover something about themselves and others.