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Divided Heaven (Der geteilte Himmel, 1964)
Directed by Konrad Wolf
Distributed in the U.S. by First Run Features
www.firstrunfeatures.com; 109 minutes
Stars (Steme/Zvezdy, 1959)
Directed by Konrad Wolf
Distributed in the U.S. by DEFA Film Library
University of Massachusetts Amherst; www.umass.edu/defa; 88 minutes
Two films released in the past year from the DEFA Film Library at UMass Amherst merit particular attention from film enthusiasts as they represent two high points of the DEFA catalogue. Divided Heaven and Stars (both directed by the highly acclaimed director Konrad Wolf) are unique early films of post-war socialist cinema. Both films signified important developments in East German cinema as it became competitive on the international film circuit.
In each East Germany confronts the destructiveness of recent history as it grapples with a new national identity.
Divided Heaven is such a beautiful film with such appealing characters and empathetic and tender portrayals of romantic conflict it is easy to forget that it was produced just three years after the construction of the Berlin Wall. Based on Christa Wolfs breakthrough novel published in 1963, it quickly became one of the most celebrated German novels of the post-war era and as an exemplar for quality writing from the GDR that is both representative of its unique politics and dramatically accessible. To this day, as the GDR fades further into the past, the novel continues to enjoy a place on reading lists for students of German literature. Its enduring international appeal, one can figure, lies not in the de rigueur socialist polemic (which would have been necessary for any work to make it to the presses, never mind past the border, in those days) but in the availability of a first person narrative of an young, astute woman in the GDR and, perhaps more so, the popular appeal of the domestic and melodramatic elements of the romance, conventional though it may be.
Surely it was this last point that inspired the swift filmization of...