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The Axe of Wandsbek (Das Beil von Wandsbek) ( 1 95 1 ).
Directed by Falk Harnack.
Distributed in the U.S. by First Run Features.
www.firstrunfeatures.com. Ill min.
Deutsche Film Aktiengesellschaft - abbreviated DEFA - was the lone film production, exhibition and distribution association of the former German Democratic Republic between 1946 and 1992. Contemporary viewers can never experience the DEFA films as they were experienced by their initial authences, nor can they ever truly identify with the frame of mind a director must have constructed working under the ideologicallydriven bureaucracy of the DEFA with its checks, constraints and proscriptions. In the former German Democratic Republic a creator was always one misstep from having his work suppressed and finding himself exiled from his craft. . . or worse. The ideological tethers having long since withered for authences, viewing the films produced by the DEFA is today largely an academic exercise. In order to fully comprehend their significance, one must possess historical familiarity with the post-war period in of both Germanys, with the tensions between the two newly formed states promoting competing ideologies and also, with the dangers of the superpower standoff and its effects on the re-forming of national consciousness, both in the East and the West. In the GDR, this meant a stringent adherence to Socialist orthodoxy in media production. Thus, it is difficult to see many of the DEFA films as more than quaint, provincial, often pretentiously melodramatic artifacts of an insular culture cut off from the comparably more free and diverse artistic practices of the West. This in mind, it nonetheless does not prevent these films from making fascinating viewing, with sundry rewards for the patient viewer and the occasional re -discovered masterpiece, as the fates then and the passing of time now will have it.
The Axe of Wandsbek (Das Beil von Wandsbek), a 1951 film directed by Falk Harnack, considers the role that lower middle class citizens played in Nazi crimes, while at the...