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- Title
EAST OR WEST, RODINA IS BEST: SHAPING A SOCIALIST 'HEIMAT' IN GERMAN AND SOVIET FILM OF THE OCCUPATION PERIOD.
- Authors
Kostetskaya, Anastasia
- Abstract
This essay examines how films of the occupation period encode the gradual consolidation of a post-war national identity for East Germans in the emerging GDR. For this purpose, this article offers a comparative analysis of the two films Irgendwo in Berlin (1946) by Gerhardt Lamprecht and U nikh est' rodina (1949) by Aleksandr Fainzimmer, translated into German as Sie haben eine Heimat. I focus on how the films employ images of children in order to foreground and illuminate the culturally specific but overlapping concepts of homeland - 'Heimat' and rodina - as essential for the ideas of nation and belonging. Both films provide ideological commentary on the post-war occupation of Germany through the theme of the family fragmented by the war and the need for familial restoration. Hence a child-parent paradigm becomes central to the exposition of the opposing perspectives: those of the infantilised occupied and the paternalistic occupier. My discussion uncovers cross-cultural, historical continuity between the films. It demonstrates that the Soviet film provides 'solutions' to the problems of German post-war identity posed in Irgendwo in Berlin, while the concept of 'Heimat' offers a viable framework for the appropriation of Soviet-style socialism by the GDR.
- Subjects
GERMANY (East); ALLIED occupation of Germany, 1945-1955; NATIONAL character; IRGENDWO in Berlin (Film); U nikh est' rodina (Film); NATIONALISM in motion pictures; SOVIET films; GERMAN films
- Publication
German Life & Letters, 2016, Vol 69, Issue 4, p519
- ISSN
0016-8777
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/glal.12134