Prelude

R“ E-TRO-SPEK-TIVE.” A teenager awkwardly sounds out the word on a film poster in Peter Kahane’s Vorspiel (Prelude/Foreplay, released in English as Ready for Life, GDR 1987) before asking his group of loafing friends what it means. The utterance and question would hardly appear so skeptical were it not for the run-down communal cinema’s ironic name— “Aktivist”—and its narrative function as the place where youngsters routinely relieve their small-town doldrums. The activity of cinematic retrospection would be far more innocuous if one of the boys in the group did not resemble Ernst-Georg Schwill’s pudgy, film-obsessed, and border-crossing “Kohle” from Gerhard Klein and Wolfgang Kohlhaase’s DEFA teen classic Berlin—Ecke Schönhauser (Berlin—Schönhauser Corner, GDR 1957), the film being advertised on the poster, if the massive sea change later recognized as the Wende were not also churning in the quiet Elbian waters of the East German provinces, or if Kahane did not explicitly cite past DEFA footage, including Klein’s film, within his own coming-of-age tale. As Vorspiel’s young people quickly reach the edge of town on their mopeds, and as the parental generation mourns its own youth of socialist Aufbau, the reappearance of the popular 1950s’ film could hardly be neutral. After all, Berlin—Ecke Schönhauser not only reflected a time when East Germans could still travel to West Berlin; it had also been produced in ideological dialogue with the West’s Die Halbstarken (The Hooligans; released in English as Teenage Wolfpack, FRG 1956) and had legitimated the image of young socialist rebels lost amid society’s proscriptions.

DEFA was fond of retrospective glances at its output, and the feature-film studio touted the achievement of its annual production plan, usually just in time for round anniversaries of its 1946 founding. But this periodic return of the state filmography to the East German public sphere also served to reinforce the country’s usable pasts and to demonstrate, via their absence, which histories and aesthetic impulses would be excluded from these official narratives. Employing “critical,” rather than “socialist,” realism in an effort to empathize with the plight of a rowdy postwar generation at the crossroads of two political systems, Berlin—Ecke Schönhauser had famously fallen out of favor at the East’s 1958 Film Conference.