Documenting Socialism

Seán Allan is Professor of German at the University of St Andrews and holds a Joint Research Professorship in Neuere Deutsche Literaturwissenschaft at the University of Bonn. His publications include Re-Imagining DEFA: East German Cinema in its National and Transnational Contexts (co-edited with Sebastian Heiduschke, Berghahn Books, 2016), Screening Art: Modernism and the Socialist Imaginary in East German Cinema (Berghahn Books, 2019), and Inspiration Bonaparte: German Culture under Napoleonic Occupation (Camden House, 2021).

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements



Introduction: Documenting Socialism

Seán Allan and Sebastian Heiduschke



Part I: Studios, Systems and Networks



Chapter 1. ‘Mountains of Material’: Gerhard Scheumann and the Cinéma Vérité Debate in the GDR

Matthew Bauman



Chapter 2. The DEFA ‘Foreign Ministry Films’: Presenting the German Democratic Republic to the World, 1962-1990

Thomas Maulucci       



Chapter 3. Diary of the Ordinary Reinventing the Newsreel: DEFA Kinobox, 1981–1990

Reinhild Steingröver



Part II: Documentary Auteurs



Chapter 4. The Archives Testify: The Compilation Films of Annelie and Andrew Thorndike

Helen Hughes



Chapter 5. ‘How Far Can You Go?’ Everyday Lives in the Films of Kurt Tetzlaff

Nick Hodgin



Chapter 6. Peter Voigt: Socialist Documentary and the Legacy of Brecht

Seán Allan



Chapter 7. Critical Truths: Documenting Disillusionment in the Films of Helke Misselwitz, Petra Tschörtner, and Angelika Andrees

Jennifer L. Creech



Part III: Transnational Documentary



Chapter 8. East German Documentary Films by and about Sorbs

Andy Räder



Chapter 9. ‘Are These Pictures a Deception?’ Socialist Self-Reflexivity in the Cambodia Trilogy of Studio H&S

Martin Brady



Chapter 10. Polycentric Images of Africa in East German Documentary Film

Sebastian Heiduschke



Chapter 11. East Germany’s Anti-Racist Politics and Black Abjection in Documentary Film

Priscilla Layne



Part IV: Documenting Alterity



Chapter 12. Ein Tagebuch für Anne Frank [A Diary for Anne Frank, 1958]: The GDR’s answer to Alain Resnais’s Nuit et Brouillard [Night and Fog, 1956]

Elizabeth M. Ward



Chapter 13. A Woman’s Work? Women Soldiers, Masculinities and Binary Panic in Documentaries of the East German Army

Tom Smith



Chapter 14. The Queer Cipher in East German Documentary: In Sachen H. und acht anderer [In the Matter of H. and Eight Others] and Queer Activist Super 8 Films

Kyle Frackman



Part V: The Presence of the Past. Reconstructing the Socialist Imaginary



Chapter 15. The Socialist City and Utopian Temporality in Halle-Neustadt Documentaries

Stephan Ehrig



Chapter 16. The Rubble of History. Searching for the German Past in a European Present in Andreas Voigt’s Ostpreußenland [Tales of East Prussia, 1995] and Volker Koepp’s Kalte Heimat [Cold Homeland, 1995]

Jason Doerre



Filmography

Index