Week 5

"A Berlin Romance" by Wolfgang Kohlhaase was the film we screened this week. It was a nice East German take on the Hollywood romance genre. Even without the narration the socialist undertones to this movie appeared obvious to me. The Western Sector, as the narrator refers to it as, seemed completely run down and had an attitude that was completely uncaring and superficial. That seemed very overexaggerated.

That actually leads me to question how much action DEFA put forth to censor the way Kohlhaase originally envisioned it. It makes me wonder why he chose to produce movies for the East instead of West Germany. From the readings it says he was a pretty ardent socialist but I don't see why he didn't go with a Western film studio to express his ideas. Maybe their his work would have been more censored in the West than it was in the East. For "A Berlin Romance" it seems like the narration is the main force pushing the SED party line which makes me wonder if it was even supposed to be so pro-socialism in the first place.

In Thorsten's class he was kind enough to give a very detailed history of the reasons for the rise of the Nazi Party. He gave historical reasons for the basis of anti-semitism in Germany which made sense. I'm not sure his explanation of the events was complete, however. The popularity of the Nazis was not because of their anti-semitism. The Nazis offered Germany economic stability at a time when unemployment was ridiculously high and there were a series of banking crises. The communists offered similar things and were also got a decent amount of votes. The Nazis came to power by political maneuvering. The Nazi party then instituted a plan that capped wages which made the unemployment rate plummet. I think that had a lot to do with people allowing and in many cases agreeing with anti-semitism. The Nazi party got people back to work and so they were more open to their ideas. Plus you have the fact that Jews were largely affluent compared to other groups in the country. I did find it interesting that Jews were painted as both ultra capitalists and communists. I really wonder how the hell the Nazis sold that contradiction to the public.

One fact that Thorsten mentioned that kind of sickened me was the change in the orders given to troops on the front line. Initially they were told to shoot Jewish adult males because they might cause insurrection. I can almost see a valid reason for that. But what I can't see is how anybody followed the later orders. The troops were later ordered to shoot all Jews on the front line including women, children, and even babies. That's one thing I don't think I could ever understand. That actually reminded me of a story in the book Night by Elie Wiesel where he had heard a story of Nazis coming into one of the towns closest to his. When they got hold of a Jewish baby they would throw them up into the air and use them as target practice. The people in his town didn't believe it because it seemed so absurd. It does seem absurd but unfortunately it was probably true.

We went around to several parks for shooting this week. We got great shots of a couple playing ping pong in Volkspark. I'm not sure them playing ping pong in the park will fit with the premise of our film but it never hurts to have more footage. We even got a short interview from both of them because they seemed interested in just what the hell we were filming them for. They gave us a tip that there is a bar in Friedrichshain that is pretty big with ping pong so we'll have to check it out.

A few of us attempted to go to some of the parks near Karl-Mark Allee but our camera wasn't cooperating. On our trip there we thought it'd be a great idea to get sounds from the U-Bahn for our acoustic movie so we closed the lens and let the mic roll. While we were on the U-Bahn we got an error message from the camera and the LCD screen was only displaying white. We decided to stop filming for the day so there wouldn't be a possibility of us screwing it up more. Luckily later in the day it started working perfectly normal but by that time the Sun had started to go down.