Unwanted landscape: Motifs of Lower Silesia and the lost East in East German cinematography

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to analyze the representation of the motifs of Lower Silesia and the lost East in East German cinematography. In the Soviet occupation zone and later in the GDR, there was a ban on public mention of the lost Heimat practically until 1989. This was due to the new state’s need to accept the Yalta–Potsdam agreements, as well as its obligations to the USSR. The socialist government sought to make the displaced people “new citizens” and use their potential to build a new regime. In doing so, it focused public attention on the circumstances surrounding the socialist reconstruction of the homeland to divert attention from the uncomfortable past. The landscape of the East as an object of nostalgic references arousing emotional associations, carrying the potential to raise the level of social frustrations, from the point of view of the authorities seemed not only disturbing, but also politically dangerous. Therefore, on the silver screen it was entirely replaced by a vision that could be described as a landscape of socialist modernization, encompassed by the key processes of land reform and collectivization of the countryside in the socialist economy. The intention of this study is to take a critical approach leading to the recognition of how film landscapes function as vehicles of collective memory, how they reveal remembering/forgetting mechanisms, and what settlement topos and migration myths they contain. The main hypothesis is that feature films about forced displacement, in addition to historical politics, reveal anthropological experiences: the trauma of losing one’s home, the conflicts accompanying the familiar and the foreign, the difficulties of cultural adaptation, the problem of lost identity etc. The subjects of the analysis are the feature films: Free Country (Freies Land, Soviet occupation zone, 1946, dir. M. Harbich); The Bridge (Die Brücke, Soviet occupation zone, 1949, dir. A. Pohl); Palaces and Huts (Schlösser und Katen, 1956/1957) and The Girl from the House of Correction (Vergeßt mir meine Traudel nicht, GDR, 1957, dir. K. Maetzig); Childhood (Kindheit, GDR, 1986, dir. S. Kühn).