COMING OUT, DEFA’S FIRST feature film explicitly addressing homosexuality in the East, opened on November 9, the evening the German-German border was opened. Helmut Ullrich’s review was printed the following day in the GDR’s Christian Democratic-aligned Neue Zeit, but though championing the film’s breaking of taboos, the article refers only obliquely to political events and to the larger rupture to the status quo in East German society. Monika Zimmermann, then the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’s GDR correspondent, could, a few weeks later and from a Western perspective, be far more explicit about the significance of the film in a country that had worked so hard to achieve political conformity and to stamp out subcultures. Ironically, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung would buy Neue Zeit in the summer of 1990 and install Zimmermann as its editor-in-chief until publication of the paper ceased in 1994. In the fall of 1989, however, the constraints on journalists in the East are still discernible.

Helmut Ullrich

“Of People Who Are Different from Others”

First published as “Von Menschen, die anders als andere sind” in Neue Zeit (November 10, 1989).

Translated by Adam Blauhut.

Coming Out, a Film by Heiner Carow

At the start of the film we see a hospitalized young man who has tried to commit suicide. When asked about his reasons, he hesitantly replies: “I’m gay—homosexual.” Later, an older man, a regular in a gay bar, describes his life under Hitler, when people with his sexual orientation were locked away in concentration camps—just like the Jews, the gypsies, and the regime’s political opponents.

These are two moving scenes from the DEFA film Coming Out, directed by Heiner Carow and adapted from a book by Wolfram Witt. The first shows the desperation to which a person can be driven because he is different from others. The second portrays the brutality with which such people are treated.

So is Coming Out a film about a topic that some people, or perhaps even many, are inclined to view as controversial? Not at all, or at least not in the sense that it is a well-intentioned educational film intended to promote understanding of a sexual minority. And it is of course not a film that assumes a titillating voyeuristic curiosity about the lives of people who are attracted to the same sex.