Abstract
Through the Veil: Cinema Time-Machine In Klaus Schlesinger's 1975 novel Old Movies [Alte Filme], Kotte spends his evenings with his wife, watching old German movies on television. Sometimes, an elderly neighbor joins them. During one silent film, she reveals that she is (or was) the young actress on screen, dancing to unheard music, lifting a transparent veil, revealing a sparsely clad body and a pure, beautiful face.2 Haunted by this transient beauty, by cinema's ability to unite two layers of time, Kotte plunges into midlife crisis. Films hover at the edge of his consciousness, giving daily life a new irreality. He catches himself imitating films he has seen. And he walks through East Berlin, everything appears as through a veil: houses, people, trees (68). Old Movies implicitly criticizes GDR television film programming. As Uwe Johnson noted in 1964, during a stint a West Berlin critic of GDR
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