CHILDREN OF THE REVOLUTION: FATHERS AND SONS IN ANTIFASCIST DEFA FILMS

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe article looks at three antifascist films from the 1980s by the East German film company DEFA: Jürgen Brauer's Pugowitza (1981), Egon Schlegel's Die Schüsse der Arche Noah (1983), and Helmut Dziuba's Jan auf der Zille (1986), which during this final decade of the East German state re‐examine an ideologically seminal constellation of the GDR's official antifascism – the relationship between antifascist father and son. Linking generational and political succession, the father‐son relationship helped to legitimise the GDR as a state in which the young continued the antifascist fight of the old communists against the Nazi dictatorship. From the 1950s on, DEFA films contributed to the visualisation of this relationship, codifying it not only as heroic but also as ‘natural’: the assumed innocence of the communist son was meant to naturalise the father's antifascist/communist cause. The 1980s saw this naturalised political succession questioned. By re‐telling the canonised father‐son story, the three films visualise the generational antifascist contract as flawed. Re‐deploying the son's assumed innocence in a critique of the father, they explore new endings to the antifascist story and revive the discussion of categories like ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’.