I recently watched two East German movies about World War Two on Kanopy. Here are my initial impressions.

“Star-Crossed Lovers” [Königskinder] (DEFA, 1962), dir. Frank Beyer

This film is about two young men and a young woman, friends since childhood, who are separated in the Nazi era because of their circumstances and choices. The film is well made and interesting, but the scenes that depict the men fleeing the Wehrmacht for the Red Army and being well received strain belief, which interfered with my enjoyment of the story. Granted, the film is expressionist, so believability might be beside the point. For me, there was also precious little character development. Still, the way the piece was shot, including flashbacks and repeating motifs, is interesting.

It also yielded a useful story for its time. Instead of broken men returned after many years of Soviet captivity,¹ we have a Communist German who never compromises his principles. For that he lands in a concentration camp and then on the Eastern Front in a penal battalion. Meanwhile, his childhood sweetheart finds her way to the USSR and into the Red Army. There she gets ready to depart on a clandestine operation in Germany. These two Germans are on the right side of history.

Their other childhood friend takes a different path, joining the SA and ending up as a sergeant tasked with keeping the men of that same penal battalion in line. He appears as a decent sort of guy who made the wrong choices during the time of Hitler’s rise to power, but who remembers the woman’s admonishment to not compromise himself. However unlikely it is that he succeeded, he ends up following his childhood friend to Red Army lines and giving the Soviets the information they need to spare the penal battalion full of German communists during their offensive.

The film’s apparent reconciliation of these childhood friends offered a usable past for viewers in the young German communist state. Of course, this new chapter had to begin in the presence of Soviet soldiers, who defeated the Nazi scourge. This version of antifascism lent legitimacy to the communist order in East Germany.

The presence of women in Red Army uniforms even offered a progressive spin on this connection, albeit one more ambiguous than at first glance. Next to the communist German man’s struggle we see the unwavering loyalty, love, and fearlessness of his self-sacrificing beloved. If her antifascist actions comport with a desirable political mold, the central role of her devotion to her beloved reminds me of the much earlier postwar example of the female protagonist in “The Murderers Are among Us."² That woman put aside her own concentration camp trauma to help restore a doctor, who was suffering from the trauma of witnessing his unit’s mass murder of villagers in the USSR. In this reading, rebuilding Germany was a gendered undertaking, with woman doing everything to support man.

“I was Nineteen” [Ich war neunzehn] (DEFA,1968), dir. Konrad Wolf

This film benefitted from being informed by the director’s own life experience. Both director and protagonist grew up in Moscow, where their German communist parents had fled. And both later served in the Red Army. The young protagonist, a lieutenant, enters the Berlin region as part of a small “agitation” team near war’s end. Initially, though, we see him appointed head of a small town while the larger unit advances further. After he is relieved, his team helps get Germans to surrender in a couple places, one through direct interaction with the defending officers at Spandau, and another by using the megaphone atop their truck to convince fleeing soldiers and officers.

The film conveys a sense of the chaos at the time. It avoids characterizing the Red Army as a vengeful horde, of course, but there are small hints of what happened to women, if the viewer is at all informed about this topic, which many contemporaries would have been. The worst behavior is exhibited by the SS, one group masquerading as drunk Russians run amok and killing other soldiers in the Red Army. Another group of SS fires on the German soldiers who surrendered to the protagonist’s small agitation group. Here the young lieutenant loses a comrade and starts screaming about how these fascists couldn’t stop killing, even though the war was plainly lost for them. But they would get theirs. Justice would be done. This is the only part of the film that takes a strong moralistic tone. The rest is constructed so as to let viewers reach their own conclusions.

In any case, the film’s center seems to lie elsewhere. It too offers a plausible German–Soviet past that could support the new state, but here those two sides are united in the same young character, the lieutenant. When the SS start shooting at the German POWs and their Soviet captors, we see one of the prisoners grab a surrendered weapon to help fire back. He immediately drops the weapon after it is over. A Wehrmacht officer remarks on how strange it is to see the soldier shoot at his own countrymen. That soldier, though, relies on a differently tinged German–German solidarity when he asks the young lieutenant to deliver a letter to his wife in nearby Berlin, and the latter promises to do so.