War Trauma and Crisis of Masculinity in Early DEFA Film英文学习资料.pdfVIP

Can Melodrama Cure? War Trauma and Crisis of Masculinity in Early DEFA Film ANKE PINKERT University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign After the end of the Second World War, the reconstruction of an antifascist-democratic society in Eastern Germany required the political and moral transformation of people who had lived under the Third Reich into new antifascist citizens. This process was an enormous challenge, especially with respect to the prisoners of war returning from the Soviet Union. Frank Biess describes them as “mostly loyal and ideologically committed soldiers in the racial war of extermination on the eastern front where, as recent research indicates, many of them had also become bystanders, accomplices, and perpetrators of genocidal warfare” (144; cf. also Bartov; Heer and Naumann). As Biess shows, in remaking the returnees into the “Pioneers of a New Germany,” the Socialist Unity Party (SED) privileged a pseudoreligious model of confession, conversion, and rebirth. Public and collective demonstrations of this radical transformation implied that the past of the returning soldiers who had served in the fascist Wehrmacht had to be relegated to a previous life that had to be left behind, if not forgotten (Biess 160). The fi lm company DEFA, licensed by the Soviet Military Administration in 1946 – and evolving into a German-Soviet joint-stock company in 1947 and an East German, state-owned company in 1953 – played a crucial public role in this process. Speaking at the inaugural ceremony, Colonel Tulpanov, an offi cial of the Soviet military administration, remarked that DEFA faced the important task of removing all vestiges of fascist and militarist ideology from the minds of the German people (Allan and Sandford 3). Consequently, the fi rst fi lms produced by DEFA, the so-called rubble fi lms, attempted to develop a fi lm language that was strong enough to confront the recent