WHEN NEW GERMAN CINEASTE Volker Schlöndorff, who had overseen the post-Wende transformation of the DEFA Studios into the lucrative Studio Babelsberg, remarked off-handedly in a 2008 interview with Potsdam’s Märkische Allgemeine Zeitung that “DEFA films were terrible,” his comments resurrected old animosities and resentments in Germany’s once divided film industry. In the age of online newspapers, the reactions from readers and bloggers were almost immediate. While the original interview emphasizes, perhaps inordinately, Schlöndorff’s material possessions in his luxurious villa in the formerly East German Potsdam, the responses from Schlöndorff himself, Progress Film-Verleih and the DEFA Foundation, and Eastern journalist Kerstin Decker indicate tensions that still underlie public discussions of the merits of art produced under state socialism. While the organizations and businesses charged with the preservation and dissemination of the GDR’s film heritage sought signatures from the most prominent figures from DEFA’s history, journalists from numerous papers aligned with the former East or West took the opportunity to reexamine the role of public discourse in defining all-German cultural history.

Lars Grote

“At Home: So Many Spokes”

First published as “HAUSBESUCH: So viele Speichen” in the

Märkische Allgemeine Zeitung (December 2, 2008).

Translated by Adam Blauhut.

A Conversation with Volker Schlöndorff on His Sunflower Yellow Sofa While Waiting for an RBB Television Team to Arrive

Potsdam. I ring under “Familie Schlöndorff,” and in no time at all he steps out of his brick villa on Lake Griebnitz in Potsdam, waving and calling out “hello.” It’s rare that an illustrious Oscar winner walks over to a journalist in such good spirits. They usually take to their heels when confronted with too many questions.

Volker Schlöndorff now arrives at the gate. Next to him in the driveway is the magnificent gray Jaguar that he received as a gift from its previous owner, Max Frisch. The two men were friends. In 1990, Schlöndorff filmed Frisch’s novel Homo Faber, and after the shooting (Frisch was stricken by cancer), the Swiss author told the German director: “Take my car. Where I’m going now, I won’t need any automobiles.” Two months later he died.

“I drive it every day,” says Schlöndorff. “It’s the only one I have.” It had a new paint job two years ago, and it’s otherwise in perfect condition, adds the director. Frisch originally bought it in 1967.