Gendered Border Crossings: The Films of Division in Divided Germany

Abstract

Gendered Border Crossings:The Films of Division in Divided Germany Mark A. Wolfgram (bio) This article uses the respective national cinemas of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the east and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) in the west to access the national discussion of Germany's division. I use cinema as a location for constructing a national narrative within which the defining of distinct East and West German identities took place. The division became not only geopolitical but also cultural, with a clear gendering of the east as female and the west as male. Traditional scholarship on nationalism has largely ignored the role of gender and has instead focused on class, ethnicity, and modernization.1 More recently scholars have begun to take gender into account and the role gender plays in the formation of national identities. For example, Koester looks at the feminine in Icelandic history and how this became a symbolic resource used by feminists in present-day politics. Marakowitz examines the position of women in Finnish society and how the welfare state ideology is tied to feminine identity. The linkages that Marakowitz draws between the welfare state and the feminine in the Finnish state are worth noting, as these feminine images come to represent socialist East Germany in German cinematic culture. More recently, Jeffrey has used the role of prostitution in Thailand and state policies to control its practice as an example of how sexuality and gender are tied to the formation of a Thai national identity. The German case adds to our understanding of how gender can be used to create social divisions and represent national boundaries. As Cold War politics led to the division of an already clearly articulated national community, gender became a powerful symbolic marker with which to define the new German-German border. [End Page 152] In conducting this research, I viewed a wide variety of films that make the division of the country central to the film's narrative. I then compared and contrasted these "films of division" looking for similarities and differences in their narration and representation of the division. Although there have been limited and more extensive treatments of some of the films mentioned here, there is no exclusive study of division as a theme in German cinema covering the entire time of the separation, nor have scholars paid specific attention to the role of gender in these films of division.2 The films of division include those within which the crossing of the border plays a central role. There are certainly other films within which the nation's division played a role, but I am particularly interested in the discussion of the border and attempts by various characters to transcend it, as I discuss further below. The nature of this border changed over time, from one that was highly permeable prior to 1949, at which point German leaders on both sides declared two separate sovereign states, to one which was firmly sealed and controlled after the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961. Although German films continued to discuss east and west differences after the opening of the wall in 1989, I am only interested in the narratives between 1945 and 1989. Although the nature of the border was ambiguous between 1945 and 1949, one can still view in these films an attempt to define east and west, especially in the eastern cinema. Although the social, political, and economic context for film production differed in both halves of Germany, there are a number of similarities in the portrayal of Germany's division, which I discuss below. In the east, the authoritarian-socialist state dominated the film industry through direct ownership of the only film company, DEFA. Although the level of state control over the industry varied over time, with the early postwar years offering the greatest flexibility, state censors eventually had direct oversight of production and distribution. The opportunity for filmmakers to critique socialist society in eastern Germany also changed over time with the door being slammed firmly shut in December 1965 at the Eleventh Plenary of the SED, the communist party. Almost an entire year's production was barred from public showings at that time...