The Triumph of the Ordinary: Depictions of Daily Life in the East German Cinema, 1949-1989 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Triumph of the Ordinary: Depictions of Daily Life in the East German Cinema, 1949–1989 Larson Powell (bio) Joshua Feinstein, The Triumph of the Ordinary: Depictions of Daily Life in the East German Cinema, 1949–1989. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xvi + 331 pp. $59.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper). The place of East German cinema within the international film canon is anything but assured. Relative to the moral witness of Polish film, the freshness of Czech New Wave, the rhetoric of classical Soviet cinema or the poetry of Tarkovsky, DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft) has seemed all too provincial, conservative, and conformist. Matters are not helped by the waning of international GDR (German Democratic Republic) studies, evident, for instance, in the end of the long series of New Hampshire Symposia on GDR Culture and Society two years ago, and of the GDR Bulletin published by Washington University. It is as though there were a sudden amnesia both official and popular regarding the GDR and its culture outside its former boundaries. Wolf Biermann, whose concerts and readings were once monumental political and public events, seems to have vanished without a trace from most music stores. In this climate, Joshua Feinstein's new book, based on extensive archival research and taped interviews with a number of important figures from GDR film history, is a welcome contribution. Feinstein's work is a synoptic overview of DEFA from its foundation to its end. It does not, however, claim to be exhaustive, concentrating instead on a selection of films chosen to demonstrate the author's thesis that, contrary to the ruling Socialist Unity Party's utopian demand for "films that affirmed the GDR as a bold new social order rapidly advancing toward the future," DEFA pictures increasingly "tended to achieve the exact opposite," since "they presented East Germany as an essentially ordinary place" (217). Working with André Bazin's neorealist poetics of the everyday, an aesthetic DEFA film borrowed in the 1950s from Italian postwar film, Feinstein argues that this "triumph of the ordinary" constituted both an indirect form of resistance to statist intervention and also a means to achieve an alternative form of GDR self-definition. DEFA directors could thus, in Feinstein's reading, have their cake and eat it too, being both obliquely resistant to officialdom and yet also performing their proper social function as architects of a "civic imaginary" (7), albeit in different ways than those of socialist realism. The ambiguous case of DEFA, as that of the GDR as a whole, indeed asks for nuanced readings: it is not as easy to separate the sheep from the goats as many Catonic judges after 1989 would claim. Yet Feinstein is still taking DEFA directors too much at their own word. His claim that "for better or for worse, DEFA pictures participated in the making of East Germany" (228) is simply tautological, and begs the crucial interpretative question of the films' ultimate aesthetic quality or lack thereof. For all the careful work Feinstein has done, his reading is occasionally hampered by organizational problems (some of the early chapters lack shape, and return continually to the same questions), and also by weakly defined ideas borrowed from cultural studies (such as the omnipresent [End Page 85] and not very helpful "identity," or some blurry use of terms like "symbolic" and "imaginary" in the introduction). One wishes, too, that his editors had pruned out irritating recurrent jargon words such as "contested" or "negotiate." In general, Feinstein tends to be stronger on the historical and social contexts of DEFA film than on close readings of the films themselves. His argument could have been helped by more attention to DEFA's continued difficulty with finding successful genre formulae, or to the peculiar form of star system developed in the GDR, or a more careful look at the relation of film to television. In the epilogue, he notes correctly that DEFA's "technical facilities" were "hopelessly out of date," and also that the studio's overall structure was cumbersome relative to the outsourcing practiced increasingly in the West since 1945 (234). Yet the book fails to address the question of precisely when the...