A baby to save their marriage: Little Alexander (1981) as USSR-GDR ‘family therapy’ by way of historical wish fulfilment

Abstract

ABSTRACT In sustaining the myth of the GDR as a people’s democracy resulting from the anti-fascist war of liberation led by the Red Army and supported by local communists, Soviet internationalist ideology effectively appropriated the scriptural idea of mercy towards ‘the foreigner, the fatherless, and the widow’ as a shared basis for the German and Soviet nations’ cultural unconscious. Using film as a medium of historical wish fulfilment, this ideology strove to conceptualise ‘we-ness’ as a response to the external imperialist threat, and a counterpoint to the likewise archetypal attitude towards ‘women and little ones as spoils and plunder’. This article centres on the joint Soviet-GDR film Little Alexander (1981), set in 1945, but clearly intended to convince Germans in 1981 of the advantages of remaining within Soviet-style socialism. In the film, orphanhood and surrogate parenthood reinforce – via the evocation of transnational biblical and mythological storylines – the GDR’s origin myth, retroactively resolving the issue of post-war German national identity via the Soviets’ ‘adoption’ of and ‘cohabitation’ with East Germany. But this unavoidably evokes a comorbidity of issues related to the flailing 30-year USSR-GDR ‘marriage’ that no ‘family therapy’ would repair.