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August/September 1998
Listening Up
by Heidi Whitesell
Student voices demanding change is nothing new, but demonstrations in places like Indonesia and Beijing call for distinct bravery. As an undergraduate student in the 1980s I raised my own voice in
a chorus with others protesting my college’s monetary interest in South Africa. The demonstrations were successful in that they contributed to the school’s board choosing to divest. Yet we were in an obvious
position of privilege. Even though the concepts of freedom and democracy drove the initiative, our immediate personal conditions were secure.
Students in Germany, on the other hand, had real reason to protest their unsatisfactory study conditions when they took to the streets last fall. Regrettably underreported here in the United
States, the nationwide student protest hoped to wake up politicians and the larger society and bring attention to student needs that have remained unmet for almost 30 years. As discussed in this issue’s article
about the distressed state of Germany’s universities, it becomes apparent eight months later that skepticism seems to outweigh hope for reforms currently under consideration.
Those thinking in terms of only the 20th century might be surprised to realize that the first modern student movement—the Burschenschaft—seeking to reform campus life as well as
transform national politics, was born in 1815 in what the world knows today as Germany. As the first “national” student union representing various German-speaking universities, the Burschenschaft set important
historical precedents outlined in this issue’s feature on the origin of the German state.
The Burschenschaft continues to exist today, albeit as a mainstay for conservative students. Thus it’s hard to imagine that the now reactionary organization harbors any of the countercultural
sentiments that fueled Germany’s progressive student movement of 1967–72 and even the strikes of last fall.
In considering the current protest-profile of German students, while perusing a resource book on modern Germany, I came across the assertion that during the last couple of decades, “the problems
of finding jobs in an overcrowded market have returned students to a more quietist and careerist stance.” Such a claim becomes harder to make, however, after 40,000 students marched on Bonn demanding reforms.
The American public might question the importance of paying close attention to what some would see as Germany’s internal problems. Yet, universities in trouble reflect a society in trouble. And
especially given today’s interdependent world, that is something in which we all should take interest.
Heidi L. Whitesell, Editor
"Some Special Magic"
The Origins of the German State
By Robert A. Selig
"There must be some special magic in this word 'German.' One can see that each person calls German whatever it suits him and whatever assists his party point of view. Thus the use of the word
changes according to requirements."
Prussian Prime Minister Otto von Bismarck used these words on January 22, 1864, to defend himself against attacks from the Liberal majority in the Landtag in Berlin for pursuing Prussian rather than German interests in the war with Denmark. There was more than a grain of truth in this analysis. In the century preceding Bismarck's cynical remarks, the terms German, Germany, and the German Nation had indeed been used to cover a wide array of political and ideological needs. Bismarck saw no reason not to use them for his own purposes as well.
In the 1760s only a few intellectuals had any concept of Germany as a national entity. Defined as a devotion to a particular nation, nationalism is rooted in broad historical, geographical,
ethnic, religious, linguistic, and cultural circumstances. Yet few of these parameters applied to the Holy Roman Empire of German Nation and the people living in it.
During the late Middle Ages, the Empire had disintegrated into some 1,300 semi-independent entities, eventually ranging from the Kingdom of Prussia and the Habsburg Empire to imperial villages of
a few hundred inhabitants. The principles of early modern statehood—one king, one faith, one law—applied at best to individual states, not to the Empire as a whole. For most people the emperor was no more than a
symbol living in far-away Vienna, while their administrative, political, and cultural center lay a few miles away with the local lord, bishop, count, or baron.
Unlike France or Great Britain, the Empire had no natural boundaries: Central Europe has always been the place where East met West and North met South. For centuries, the settlement boundaries of
Germanic and Slavic peoples shifted eastward with Hungarians, Huns, Vikings, Swedes, and Poles, among others, adding to the central European gene pool. Germany may have sent millions of emigrants abroad, but it
took in millions of immigrants as well.
Since Luther's Reformation, Germany has also lacked a common faith as a means of internal integration. The European south and west are Catholic while Scandinavia is Lutheran; only in the Empire
did the different strands of the Christian faith have to coexist side by side. Millions of German-speaking people in Austria, Switzerland, Alsace, Holstein, Prussia, and the Sudetenland lived outside its
boundaries, while millions of non-German speaking Poles, Czechs, Italians, and the like, lived within the Empire. And while non-German dynasties ruled territories within the Empire, much of Prussia and most of
the Habsburg Empire lay outside.
A free association of rulers, the Empire could not serve as a vehicle for the formation of all-German nationalism. Thus pre-French-revolutionary nationalism in Germany was primarily dynastic,
focused on the ruling house rather than on an impersonal entity called the German Nation. In the 1770s, however, encouraged by the military successes of the francophile Prussian King Frederick II—who held all
things German in utter contempt and who derided German as a language fit for stable boys—some Germans began to reflect upon their Germanness; this they defined in cultural terms, the only common denominator
available.
Lutheran minister Johann Gottfried von Herder was among the first to object to what many considered the excessive dependence of the ruling elites on foreign, i.e. French, culture. Herder believed
that each people or nation, defined as a body of persons sharing a common language, possessed a unique Geist, or genius, which had to be developed in its own way. To be authentic, Herder insisted that
national culture had to arise from the Volk, the common people, and draw its inspiration from them. Herder's nationalism was exclusively cultural in character; he did not concern himself with political
issues nor did he argue that political unification had to accompany such a cultural renaissance. His theory of national development was universally applicable: the peoples of the world differed only in their
stage of development. Nowhere did he intend to imply that German culture was superior.
Intellectual giants such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe embraced Herder's definition of the German Nation in terms of culture and gloried in Germany as the country of Dichter und Denker, of
poets and thinkers. In his oft-quoted statement of 1804, Friedrich von Schiller argued that "the German Empire and the German Nation are two different things. The glory of the Germans has never been based
upon the power of its princes." As cosmopolitans they saw no need for nationalist posturing.
Modern nationalism was born in the French Revolution. After 1792, the enfants de la patrie, the "children of the Fatherland" of the Marseillaise, carried the achievements of
1789—liberty, fraternity, equality—across Europe. With them came a mass-based nationalism focused on the nation-state as the vehicle for the realization of the political, economic, and cultural aspirations of a
people. Shaken by the annihilation of Prussia and the dissolution of the Empire in 1806, the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte called upon the Germans to become aware of their national character. In his 1807
Addresses to the German Nation the first rector of the University of Berlin warned his compatriots that "if you continue in your dullness and helplessness, all the evils of serfdom await you...until by the
sacrifice of your nationality and your language, you have purchased for yourselves some subordinate and petty place, and until in this way you gradually die out as a people. If, on the other hand, you bestir
yourselves...You will see...this generation to be the most glorious among all peoples; you will see this nation the regenerator and re-creator of the world."
Fichte's plea fell on deaf ears. There were some isolated acts of resistance, but no popular and sustained anti-French revolt like the one in Spain. The most celebrated hero of anti-Napoleonic
resistance, Andreas Hofer, raised his scythe and threshing flail against Bavarian, not French, troops occupying his beloved Tyrol. Only with French help could Bavaria's King Maximilian I suppress the rebellion,
though Tyrolians will forever blame the French for executing Hofer.
The Germans bestirred themselves only after Napoleon's defeat in the icy Russian winter of 1812/13. The Wars of the Liberation drove the French from German soil. But they were directed from the
cabinets, fought like traditional wars, and won in old-fashioned battles. Even the term Wars of the Liberation was not coined until 1842/3, when Prussian historian Johann Gustav Droysen held a series of lectures
on the Age of the Wars of the Liberation. The much-heralded Landwehr (militia) was of dubious military value. Few soldiers of 1813 shared the romantic longings of student-poets such as Ernst Moritz Arndt or Theodor Körner in Baron Lützow's Freicorps that the crowning achievement of the war would be a German nation-state in Freiheit
und Einheit, in freedom and unity, under a Prussian king. The idealists who had interpreted King Frederick William's manifesto An Mein Volk of March 17, 1813, as a call to fight for “King and German Fatherland” would be severely disappointed.
German nationalism played but a marginal role in these wars since its pre-condition—the territorially defined German nation-state—was still only an idea. After 1803, states such as Bavaria, Baden,
and Württemberg had more than doubled in size and in population, while the acquisition of the Rhineland in 1815 made Prussia the dominant power in northern Germany. A prime goal of these states was to integrate
their newly acquired populations into the core state, to turn them into Bavarians or Prussians—not Germans. Nationalism was to serve the political interests of the various states that had emerged out of the
ruins of the Empire in 1803/06, not the ideal of an all-German nation-state.
Foreign policy stood in the way of a German nation-state as well. When Europe's rulers met at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, none of Germany's neighbors had any interest in creating a potential
military and political giant in the heart of Europe. The Deutsche Bund, or German Confederation—an association of 37 principalities and four free cities agreed upon as the organizational form for Germany
with boundaries identical to those of the old Empire—met the needs and interests of the German dynasties and those of its neighbors. But a nation-state it was not. Three non-German dynasties still ruled in
Germany: Great Britain in Hanover, the King of Denmark in Holstein and Lauenburg, and the King of the Netherlands in Luxembourg. Prussia was home to millions of Poles and Sorbs as well as Germans, while the
Habsburg Empire was as multinational as ever. Prince Clemens von Metternich, chief minister in Vienna, knew all too well that support for German nationalism would encourage the national aspirations of Poles,
Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, Hungarians, Italians, Serbs, and Slovenes within the Empire as well. Still, power politics kept the monarchy from yielding its claims to leadership in Germany to Berlin until forced to
do so in 1866.
The ideals of 1813 survived, if only in marginal elites such as university students. In June 1815 the first group of student-veterans organized itself in Jena into a Burschenschaft, or
student corporation, with national and constitutional goals. From there the idea spread to other German universities and eventually included almost all of the future leadership of the 1848 Revolution. In October
1817 the movement reached its peak in the Wartburgfest, the 300th anniversary of the Reformation and of the Battle of the Nations near Leipzig in 1813. The assassination of Russian diplomat August von Kotzebue
by the student Karl Sand in March 1819 gave Metternich and Frederick William the excuse to reign in the movement. In September 1820, the Karlsbader Beschlüsse (Carlsbad Decrees) outlawed the Burschenschaften, placed universities under supervision, introduced censorship, and initiated decades of persecution. Black-Red-Gold, the colors of the national movement were declared illegal.
If Arndt's question Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland? (What is the German's Fatherland?) and his answer "As far as the German tongue is heard!" worried Germany's neighbors, the
idea of Freiheit, individual freedoms in the tradition of the French and American Revolutions, sounded down-right treasonous particularly in Berlin. Frederick William was determined that "no piece of
paper," in other words a constitution with clearly defined rights and duties of ruler and citizens alike, would ever place itself between his throne and his subjects. Yet with Vienna unable to lead,
nationalists had to look to Berlin in the hope that Frederick William would embark on the "moral conquests" in Germany that Wilhelm von Humboldt had advocated in 1816. Frederick William showed no
interest in such conquests, and when philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel declared obedience to the (Prussian) state the highest duty of the citizen—"Man must therefore venerate the state as a secular
deity.... The march of God in the world, that is what the State is"—(The Philosophy of Right, 1821) south German liberals fearful of Prussia responded by making the protection of individual rights their
supreme goal. As Karl von Rotteck wrote in 1832: "I don't want unity other than with liberty, and would rather have liberty without unity than unity without liberty." Eventually a radical wing formed
within the nationalist movement whose meeting at Hambach in May 1832 drew some 30,000 people demonstrating for a united Germany.
Concurrently, economic developments especially in the Prussian Rhineland and in Silesia, demanded the abolition of customs barriers and the creation of a large German trade zone. Paradoxically
enough, Prussia, politically the most backward country, supported the most advanced economic legislation. Many industrialists hoped that the Zollverein (Customs Union), a free trade zone created in 1834 with the exclusion of Austria, could be the first step toward a united Germany, even if it had to be under the politically repressive Prussian crown. There was always hope that the distribution of political power could later be adjusted.
When the first freely elected German parliament met in Frankfurt in the early summer of 1848, that dream seemed within reach. True to the ideals of 1813 and their background in the
Burschenschaften, the mostly south German leadership of the Paulskirche began their task by defining the internal organization, the Freiheit, of the as yet to be created Germany. Only after liberty had been
codified in the Grundrechte (the Bill of Rights) did the debate of who was a German and of the boundaries of Germany begin in October 1848.
The proponents of a Grossdeutschland, or Greater Germany, advocated the inclusion of as many German speakers in the new state as possible. Early in 1848 when it appeared that the Habsburg
Empire might collapse, this solution looked attractive for Austrians as well. But the plan was neither acceptable to pro-Prussian delegates nor to Emperor Francis Joseph in Vienna, who had no intention of giving
up more than half of his Empire to become the ruler of Germany. Heinrich von Gagern, the president of the assembly, floated a compromise plan that would have created a Germany ruled under the kings of Prussia
but joined in a special relationship to Austria. Gagern's plan withered when Metternich's successor Prince Felix von Schwarzenberg demanded the amalgamation of the whole Habsburg Empire—Germans, Hungarians,
Poles, Croats and all—into Germany. Now a Kleindeutschland or Little Germany under the King of Prussia, was the only option available. This dream died in March 1849 when Frederick William IV rejected the German crown offered to him by the National Assembly. Acceptance would have required an oath to the German constitution, and he would brook no limitations on his holy right to rule.
The Frankfurt Assembly had set itself two goals: Liberty and Unity for Germany, based on the will of the German people. It achieved neither, not least because it could not agree as to what a
German was, what the boundaries of Germany should be, and who should lead it. In the 1850s many of its leaders wondered whether they had wanted too much. After 1862, Bismarck offered them unity without liberty
and, following the victorious war of 1866, also without Austria. In 1866, many old 48ers set their animosities aside and joined Bismarck's colors in the hope of resuming the struggle for liberty after unity had
been won. They would never get that chance.
The German Empire proclaimed in Versailles on January 18, 1871, was a nation-state—of sorts. It had no common army, and knew neither German citizenship nor national anthem. Its Bismarck-centered
constitution was a far cry from the political ideals of 1848. Millions of Poles, Danes, Alsatians and Lorrainers, not to mention quite a few Württembergers, Bavarians, Badenese, Hamburgers, and Hanoverians, were
reluctant citizens at best. But it suited Bismarck's "requirements" as to what a German was, what the boundaries of his state should be, and how much liberty was good for a German.
Contributing editor and historian Robert A. Selig writes from Holland,Michigan.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Congratulatory Greetings
Best wishes on completing four years of publication. During the time I have been a subscriber, the magazine has steadily gotten better. In an environment where so many special-interest
magazines start up and then, after a year or two, disappear from the scene, German Life begins to look permanent. I look forward to many years to come.
Jim Mentzer
Via Email
Airlift Gratitude
I would like to congratulate you for the articles on the Berlin Airlift. They are of interest to me because I was there.
One note: Credit should be given to General Curtis LeMay, USAF, as the one at the Air Force top who told Clay that the Airlift could be done. Tunner did it; LeMay probably made it possible. It was
a great effort, and, in memory for some of us, a wonderful time.
Robert Brewer Gillespie
Via Email
The articles referring to the Berlin Airlift brought back strong memories. Not only did the Airlift fly in crucial supplies needed, it also flew out East German refugees, and there were lots of
them at that time because the Berlin Wall did not yet exist. The Allies and West Berlin were doing an outstanding job in taking care of these refugees and getting them to West Germany.
I was close to 14 years old in March 1949 when my parents, brother, and I escaped from East Germany. My dad was working for the Department of Agriculture in Mecklenburg and had been a long time,
very active party member of the Christian Democratic Union. Because of his membership he had been in prison, was harassed and interrogated by the Nazis and after the war by the Communists. Someone, through
underground communications, informed him that he was going to be arrested for good. My mother and I left home at 3:00 a.m. on a Sunday. My dad and brother followed about three hours later, and we all made it to
Berlin. On Monday morning the secret police arrived at my dad’s office and later at our home to arrest him.
Officials in Berlin already knew about my dad’s problems and had been expecting him to escape for some time. We received special treatment, were processed in a short time, and flown to Lübeck,
West Germany.
Alfred Borchert
Eugene, OR
The article about the Berlin Airlift and also the Candy Bomber brought back a lot of memories from my childhood in postwar Germany. I was born in Munich in 1938, but in 1943 my parents sent me to
live with my grandmother in Moosburg to avoid the Allied bombing of the Munich area.
Almost like it was yesterday I can remember the sound of the American tanks as they rolled into Moosburg, and my grandmother and I were “asked” to move out of our house so they could bivouac the
troops. We moved in with neighbors who were permitted to stay in their house. Not too long after that several American military families resided in Moosburg, and I remember that on Saturdays the welcome mat was
out at the America House. I attended many of these gatherings—not just for the cookies and peanut butter sandwiches—but to learn English and different customs.
In 1948 I remember that the Americans would drop bags of candy for us even though we were far from Berlin. The collected silk parachutes were used to make more than one confirmation dress,
including my own.
I guess all those contacts with the Americans and learning English were partly responsible for my immigrating to the United States in 1961 and eventually marrying a U.S. Marine. We’ve been married
for 37 years and counting and have two children and one grandson.
Wilhelmine Spitze
Rockville, MD
really enjoyed the article about my home town of Cincinnati, Ohio (June/July ’98). However, while the photo on page 48 is a nice depiction of the city’s skyline, the beautiful
John A. Roebling suspension bridge mentioned in the caption is not one of the two spans shown in the picture.
Regardless of the oversight, I’m sure the story is appreciated by all of us who have ancestors settled in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood in the last century.
R. J. Wieland
Via Email
DEFA Review:
The East German Film Library Survives
By Matthew L. Schuerman
In November 1989 a handful of East Germans slipped into their cinemas to watch the debut of the latest film by Heiner Carow, who had time and again bucked the authorities with his sincere, if
sentimental, portrayals of everyday life in a socialist country. He was the man who had put Flower Power, rock music, and the transforming power of romantic love on East Germany’s big screens, giving those
subjects a legitimacy they never had in the eyes of the state. In 1989 his topic was homosexuality, and the story traced a young man’s choice between the woman who was bearing his child and a man with whom he
had meanwhile fallen in love. “Coming Out” turned out to be a wildly successful film, going on to receive the second-place Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival the following February. But what happened
outside of those theaters would capture the hearts and minds of East Germans much more powerfully, relegating Carow and his colleagues to the purgatory reserved for those who made movies in countries that no
longer exist. That very night, the Wall fell.
Carow is now dead. His colleagues—some of the greatest feature film directors in their time and place—have now turned to commercials, television shows, and documentaries to make a living. Yet
whatever blow German unification dealt their job security, it was perhaps the best development to have happened to the 10,000 or so films made under the Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft, or DEFA, as the
state’s official film studio was known. Freed from the Cold War barriers that kept most of the films in the Eastern Bloc, they are seeping out now and will change anyone’s idea of East Germany. The best of them
are bolder and more irreverent than might be expected for a socialist export, imbued with an understanding of Nazism and socialism that’s outdoing anything seen or heard in the West.
It was the East Germans themselves who embraced the new freedoms that the fallen Wall brought, subtitling eight banned films in three months to show at the Berlinale. After reunification, the
German government got into the game, sending packages of DEFA (pronounced DAY-fa) classics on tours of Goethe Institutes around the world. In university German departments this side of the big pond, East German
film has become the hot topic, as evidenced by the first-ever DEFA conference held last October in Northampton, Massachusetts, and the establishment of a DEFA archive at the University of Massachusetts at
Amherst.
The often grainy and slow-moving feature films are not expected to make a commercial splash in the United States, but video versions of the bigger titles are already available from select
mail-order houses. Charles Hobson of Vanguard Films in New York City has the television and theatrical rights (as the producers representative for Progress) in the United States and Canada and aims at showing
the films. If he is successful, the greater of the East German directors, people like Carow, Konrad Wolf, and Frank Beyer, may in time take their places beside the Pole Andrzej Wajda or the Czech Milos Forman.
The first film license in post-war Berlin went to Die Mörder sind unter uns (The Murderers are Among Us), an eerie film noir about a doctor incapacitated by the guilt of his Nazi past. Wolfgang Staudte, who had himself acted in Nazi films, shopped his script among the Allies first, but got nowhere. The American film officer, Peter van Eyck, reportedly told Staudte that Germans dare not think about making a film in the next 20 years. Only the Soviets expressed interest. They were taking over the film and television studios which lay in their zone, including the UFA studios in suburban Babelsberg, a massive complex that once saw the likes of Fritz Lang and Marlene Dietrich. Accustomed to using media to “educate” the public, the Soviets wanted to “de-Nazify” the German public. Staudte’s script was the perfect vehicle.
One night in September 1945, Staudte met with Alexander Dymschitz, a Russian culture officer, in an office on Jaegerstrasse. “There was no electricity and we negotiated by candlelight,” Staudte
said in an interview recounted in Das zweite Leben der Filmstadt Babelsberg, a history of the studio published by the Filmmuseum Potsdam. “He congratulated me and knew every part of the script in detail.”
The film takes place, as it was filmed, in the rubble of Germany’s capital city after the Nazi defeat. An ex-soldier, a doctor named Mertens (Ernst Wilhelm Borchert), has turned to drink and dissipation,
remembering how his former commander, Ferdinand Brückner (Arno Paulsen) had a few years earlier ruthlessly murdered a group of prisoners one Christmas while on the Eastern Front. Mertens had tried to stop the
massacre but failed. When Mertens runs into Brückner on the street after the war, the doctor contrives to take justice into his own hands. “The Murderers Are Among Us,” filmed in just 31 days, opened to acclaim
in Germany and abroad.
Antifascism would remain a bulwark of both film and nation. When East Germany was formed in 1949, its leaders claimed legitimacy because they had resisted the Nazis as Communists during the war.
“They had been victims to Nazism and didn’t feel they had to apologize to anyone for being harsh if they felt they had to be harsh,” said Barton Byg, a professor of German and director of the DEFA archive at the
University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The socialist leaders’ attitude infected the public as well. “There was really a sense for some people—middle-aged, of the intellectual strata—I think it is [DEFA
screenwriter Wolfgang] Kohlhaase who eventually formulated the phrase, that to attack the leadership would mean to attack the antifascists, or to attack victims.”
In Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust, a good-hearted and clever German can save the lives of thousands of Jewish workers. In DEFA films, good hearts turn bad, and cleverness cannot stretch far
enough. Konrad Wolf’s Professor Mamlock, completed in 1961, traces the fate of a Jewish hospital director forsaken by his gentile friends. In 1983 came Der Aufenhalt (The Turning Point), directed by Frank Beyer and written by Kohlhaase. The film, set in a Polish prison after the war, proves Sartre’s dictum that hell is other people. All of the prisoners claim they are innocent of Nazi crimes. Then “the gas man” turns out to have driven prisoners around in a truck, slowly asphyxiating them with engine exhaust fed into the trailer. The “railroad worker” drove trains to Auschwitz. They slowly turn on a German infantryman, Mark Niebuhr (Sylvester Groth), who really does seem to have no sin.
Beyer, Wolf and others like them were responsible for only a handful of DEFA’s 750 feature films. In addition to their work, DEFA produced another 750 animated films for children; some 2,000
documentaries and shorts; an equal number of weekly newsreels; and 4,000 dubbed versions of foreign films, including American ones, so long as they did not contain too much sex or violence. Most of the output is
considered too spurious or propagandistic to warrant export now, with the possible exception of 12 Indianerfilme, a variation on American Westerns with an American Indian as the hero. The lilt of its
productions no doubt made East Germans view the studio as a sort of heavy-handed joke, a cinematic version of the Trabis. One film, Das Kaninchen bin ich (I Am the Rabbit), makes this clear. In an expression of devotion to a lover, one character vows the ultimate sacrifice: “I would even see a DEFA film with you.”
“I Am the Rabbit,” by Kurt Maetzig, drew fire when it was reviewed by the socialist party’s central committee in December 1965, and not just because of that line. The film follows a 19-year-old
woman who falls for an older judge who came out looking too opportunistic for the party’s taste. At the same meeting, the apparatchiks also stuck another film in the closet: Frank Vogel’s Denk bloss nicht, ich heule (Just Don’t Think I’m Crying). That tale portrayed a teenager short on patriotism and long on integrity. In an official report in the Filmmuseum’s history, the party said the two films “misunderstood the evolutionary path society is supposed to take and belittles the creative qualities that the masses find in their daily jobs. The individual comes across as alienated from co-workers, party cadre and governmental leaders.”
In the next eight months, 10 more films would be banned. One of them, Frank Beyer’s Die Spur der Steine (The Trace of Stones), seemed to be off to a good start when first released. It received a rating of “very worthy” from the Ministry of Culture and was nominated for a Czech film festival. An unmatchedly complex film, Beyer imagines what happens when a socialist politico, Werner Horrath (played by Eberhard Esche) tries to make a construction site work as it should, efficiently and according to progressive principles. He is able to seduce the young engineer Kati Klee (Krystyna Stypulkowska). He is able to convert Hannes Balla (Manfred Krug), the leader of a band of rogue workers. But then he is handed a Faustian choice between the devil and his own downfall. After it played two weeks in the cinemas, party secretary Walter Ulbricht cut its run short. Beyer took a low-profile position at the Dresdner Theater for several years. Years later, he would shoot Jakob
der Lügner (Jacob the Liar), the only DEFA film to get an Oscar nomination, and then “The Turning Point,” about the Polish prison.
How many films were banned in all? Ralf Schenk, a writer and spokesman for Progress Film-Verleih, the company which distributes DEFA films, estimates between 30 and 40, counting animated films and
documentaries. That could be a lot or a little, depending on how you take it. DEFA directors object to the very notion of framing their studio’s history in terms of censorship. Those who have tried to survive in
the current commercial environment see socialism and Hollywood as two sides of the same coin. “Naturally the producer had to approve of the film, but that is the case of every film in the world,” the
screenwriter Kohlhaase says.
What is more, Orwell’s idea that authoritarian states could exert unlimited control over its cultural products does not describe East Germany very well. Each leader had his own views on how
tolerant the state should be, and each man along the way had his own ideas as well. God knows how many eyes supervised a single film’s birth, from the script review board to the Ministry of Culture. Even the
most daredevil work might find an ally somewhere along the way who, if he was high-ranking enough, could pull the right strings.
“There was never the case where something was expressly forbidden. There were discussions. If I were to say that I did something for this or that reason, then they would accept it. Also, I would
accept if they explained their objections in the film,” says Lothar Warneke, a director who, because of his degree in theology, is often considered the moralist in the DEFA pantheon. “For example, if the country
was having political tensions, say, with an African country, and I were to do something in the film that would defame that country, they would say to me, ‘That is very politically harmful.’ Then I would think
about it and say, ‘Must I really have this in my film?’ And then I would say, ‘Good. Let us do something different.’ That is to say that there are things that are unimportant, that do not damage the message of
the film that one can change. And then there are some things that one would not change.”
In 1973, the socialist party was not willing to censor Heiner Carow’s Die Legende von Paul und Paula (The Legend of Paul and Paula), no matter how many risks it took. The film shows a party functionary who commits adultery, mocks the urban renewal taking hold in East Berlin and—horrors!—showed people with long hair listening to rock music. It became the “Love Story” of East Germany, and like Erich Segal’s novel-turned-blockbuster, ends tragically. Paula, the name of the romantic heroine, became the name for newborns. “In a sense, it was revolutionary. Even the rock and roll music. It was a love story: Love mattered above all else,” says the director’s son, Stefan Carow. Although Erich Honecker had written the 1965 report banning subversive films, he was too nervous to ban “The Legend of Paul and Paula.” He had came into power as a progressive, so he resorted to other techniques. “They tried to place people in the audience who would boo the film,” the younger Carow recalls, “but soon it became so popular, it became pointless.”
In 1992, a group of French investors under the name Compagnie Générale des Eaux bought the DEFA property at Babelsberg for $100 million and appointed as managers a French businessman named Pierre
Couveinhes and Werner Schlöndorff, the West German director of “The Tin Drum.” Together, they have rented the studios out to numerous European production companies for everything from soap operas to feature
films.
The thousands of East German hands who used to work at the studio are long gone. DEFA films themselves have become objects of Ostalgie, or nostalgia for the bygone East Germany, more than
respected classics on par with Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" or G. W. Pabst's "Pandora's Box." Publicist Schenck says, "There are people who ask, 'Can I have this film on video?' Now there
are collectors of DEFA films, people who did not care about DEFA films back when they were being made. It has to do with finding the roots of their own lives, the roots of their former lives. People's lives were
destroyed when the Wall came down and now they are looking for their past."
Byg, the director of the UMass archive, asserts that the Northhampton conference could not have taken place in Germany: Young filmmakers object to the notion that the government is paying to
maintain a dubious past while not supporting work detailing the struggle of unification that is still playing out. As for the study of film itself, such a field has not been embraced by German universities, with
their tradition-bound scholars devoted to the canonical literature of Goethe and Schiller. The few German academics who did attend the conference last year actually teach at universities in Oslo or Toronto. They
say there is no room for them at home. Like a true outcast, DEFA is shunned—or at least misunderstood—at home. Indeed, its brightest future may lie abroad.
Matthew L. Schuerman writes from New London, Connecticut.
INFORMATION
The more prominent DEFA titles may be rented mail-order from Facets Multimedia in Chicago. For information, contact Tel.: 1–800–888–0775; or see Web site: www.facets.org
The DEFA archive in Amherst invites educators and researchers to view its collection upon arrangement. Check it out at www.umass.edu/defa/
In the coming months Goethe Institutes across the United States will be hosting DEFA festivals. Schedules may be accessed through the central Web site at www.goethe.de/
The Vienna Coffeehouse: A 300-year-old Way of Life
By John Dornberg
“Coffee,” according to Charles Maurice de Tallyrand-Périgord, the French statesman, “must be hot as hell, black as the devil, pure as an angel, and sweet as love.” Talleyrand allegedly coined that
recipe when he was the French delegate to the 1814–1815 Congress of Vienna. Like other diplomats, he became addicted to the brew and was a habitué of one of the city’s many coffeehouses. The story, like many
told in the Austrian capital, is probably apocryphal, for Austria is a land of make-believe where legend is often preferable to documental historical fact.
But there is no dispute that coffee was the most popular beverage and that coffeehouses abounded in Vienna during Talleyrand’s time. Indeed, the Vienna café, which some literati describe as “a way
of life” or “an entire life philosophy,” has roots going back more than 300 years to the Ottoman Turkish siege of the city in 1683.
When the Turks, under Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa, retreated, they abandoned sacks of unroasted coffee beans that the Viennese mistook as camel fodder. But two men—Georg Franz Kolschitzky, a Pole,
and Johannes Diodato, an Armenian—knew better, for both had served Emperor Leopold as emissaries and spies behind the Turkish lines.
Kolschitzky reputedly summoned the allied armies of Polish King Jan Sobieski and Lorraine’s Duke Charles V to aid Vienna’s 20,000 defenders holding off a Turkish army of 200,000. After the city’s
liberation, town councilors wanted to reward him. As the story goes, he asked only for the abandoned Turkish “camel fodder,” which he roasted, ground, brewed, and served to skeptical Viennese in the House to the
Blue Bottle, a café he opened near Belvedere Palace. A street—Kolschitzkygasse—is named for him.
Legend has it that he even invented the Kipferl, a crescent-shaped roll reminiscent of the Turkish emblem. Standard fare in any coffeehouse, each crisp Kipferl reputedly embodies
one of Mustafa’s janissaries, and munching one supposedly gives you the vicarious pleasure of devouring a Turk and of Christianity’s triumph over Islam.
Alas, the Kolschitzky story was debunked in 1980 by Karl Teply, a Vienna historian, who had spent a decade searching through musty archives and shocked Viennese with the Diodato version of the
origins of coffeehouses. Teply’s most important discovery was the imperial license, signed on January 12, 1685, that gave Diodato a monopoly on brewing and serving the “Turkish drink” and permission to open the
first café, which he did at 14 Rotenturm Strasse, near St. Stephan’s cathedral.
“Kolschitzky did alert the allies but he never engaged in the coffee trade nor did he operate a coffeehouse,” said Teply. “It’s all a legend—even the story of the ‘Blue Bottle,’ which didn’t open
until 1703, nine years after Kolschitzky’s death. It was Diodato, a powerful figure in the Armenian community and a leader of the resistance against the Ottomans, who introduced coffee drinking and the
coffeehouse to Vienna.”
Be that as it may, and all of it is highly controversial in Vienna, coffee became a craze after the defeat of the Turks and the number of cafés multiplied in the early 1700s. By the mid-18th
century the Viennese coffeehouse was well established in its present form: scores of newspapers and journals for patrons to read while sitting there for hours on end; many with chess, card, and billiard tables;
some with afternoon concerts or piano music; a number with garden, terrace, or sidewalk service in summer; a few of them more renowned for their pastries or ices than their ambience; most open 15 and more hours
daily; each is like a private club whose members insist theirs is superior to every other café.
And despite a few setbacks caused by historical, political, and economic vicissitudes, the institution grew and flourished. It is impossible to think of Vienna’s immense impact on world culture
without also thinking of its coffeehouses. Countless are the novels and plays written, the symphonies and operas composed, and the wars and revolutions plotted at the little marble-topped tables or in the
plush-upholstery booths of Viennese cafés.
Mozart frequented the Café Eisvogel. Franz Schubert, a coffee addict who had his own grinder, the monotonous sound of which, he claimed, inspired his D-minor quartet, was a billiard regular at the
Café Bogner. Both are long gone. But the Café Frauenhuber, where Beethoven occasionally performed new piano sonatas for friends and customers, still exists at No. 6 Himmelpfortgasse. Johann Strauss, Sr.,
frequented the Silberness Kaffeehaus, famous for its solid silver cups, mugs, plates, trays, candelabras, and coat hooks. His son Johann, Jr., the “Waltz King,” debuted as a violinist in 1844 at Café Dommayer,
an 18th-century establishment still at No. 1 Dommayergasse in Hietzing, the leafy, tree-shaded 13th district, just west of Schönbrunn Palace. Composers Gustav Mahler, Franz Lehar, and the writer Franz Werfel
were regulars at the Café Sperl, No. 11 Gumpendorfer Strasse, opened in 1880 and totally unchanged since then except for a long overdue renovation in 1983.
But unless one is engaged in animated conversation or energizing intellectual pursuits, the ambience of Vienna cafés can be more somniferous than stimulating: Johannes Brahms always took his
afternoon naps at the former Café Heinrichshof. The soporific atmosphere of many coffeehouses may also be why a huge clock is a central piece of furnishing in most of them.
Still, hungry writers rarely fell asleep in a coffeehouse. Dramatist Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the librettist of many Richard Strauss operas, did most of their work
in the Café Griensteidl at No. 1 Michaelerplatz, a late-19th-century literary mecca. So did Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism. He drafted his pamphlet Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), the movement’s platform and manifesto, there.
And there was, and is again since 1983, the Café Central, No. 14 Herrengasse, erstwhile hangout of such chess and tarok playing luminaries of literature and history as Stefan Zweig, Karl Kraus,
Egon Erwin Kisch, and one Lev Dadvidovich Bronstein a.k.a. Leon Trotsky. That Trotsky was also plotting the Russian Revolution while contemplating chess moves and sipping Melange, was known to everyone in
Vienna. But no one took him seriously.
The Trotsky case raises an interesting and important point about life in Vienna’s coffeehouses. Many towering figures used—and use—them not only as their studies, studios, libraries, and offices,
but even as their permanent—and only—postal addresses.
Though Vienna is no longer the capital of an empire and much less the navel of Europe’s literary, artistic, and musical world, the coffeehouse lifestyle continues. The Vienna phonebook lists more
than 1,900 coffeehouses of varying style.
Some are seedy neighborhood spots, comparable to and serving the role of corner taverns. There the dust has coagulated to what only starry-eyed romantics call “patina,” the wallpaper is a dark
nicotine shade, the bentwood Michael Thonet chairs are precariously rickety, and your posterior can count every broken spring in the threadbare red-plush benches of the booths.
Others have famous pedigrees, such as the Frauenhuber where Beethoven played, or the Museum Café, No. 6 Friedrichstrasse, with its Art Nouveau interiors designed by Adolf Loos. It was a hangout of
Vienna Secession artists Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Joseph Olbrich, and Josef Hoffmann.
A number, such as the Central, Sperl, Café Landtmann (No. 4 Karl-Lueger-Ring), and Konzertcafé Schwarzenberg (No. 17 Kärntner Ring), are under national landmark protection and were splendidly
renovated for the 1983 tricentennial. The restoration bill for the Café Landtmann, a favorite hangout of government ministers and stars from the nearby Burgtheater, was nearly $500,000.
To be sure, some things have changed. The coffee served in all but the best of them is no longer brewed or filtered in the kitchen but comes from an espresso machine. Also gone is Kaffee à la
carte, a card of enamel color spots, each one numbered, ranging from black through all shades of brown and gold to pale blond. Each shade denoted exactly how much Obers—cream—was to be added to the coffee in the
kitchen.
But far more has remained the same. A Vienna café is still characterized by “four C’s”—coffee, culture, communication, conviviality. It is where people go to meet—or perhaps escape—their friends,
business associates, spouses, lovers, or bill collectors; to relax, create, contemplate, philosophize, sleep, read, and also to flee the jangling office phone. But alas, I noticed with horror on a recent visit
that the lace-curtained, taffeta-wallpapered Café Dommayer now has a public address system over which regulars can be roused from their ruminations, naps, newspaper perusings, or games of tarok by their bosses
or secretaries, and that—even worse—mobile cellular phones were in use at the Central.
Tuxedo-wearing waiters—you address a waiter as Herr Ober, which stands for Oberkellner (head waiter), unless you know his name—are still demigods demanding to be beckoned down from Mount Olympus, and most of them respond to your call in slow motion. Keeping customers waiting is a practiced art in Vienna.
One of the vital facts to remember about Viennese coffeehouses is that coffee is both the most and the least important thing in them. That uniquely Viennese contradiction needs to be explained. It
is “least important” because drinking coffee is the least reason for going to a café. You go—and stay, all day if you wish—for the amenities, newspapers, games, and ambience a coffeehouse provides. Ordering
coffee (or a piece of pastry or other things cafés now offer) is the admission price to this unique institution, and there is no other fee. As actor Orson Welles noted: “A Vienna café is the only place in where
you can sit unmolested for eight hours or longer, drink a single cup of coffee, and still be treated like a king.” The only attention the waiter will pay you, without being beckoned from his Olympus, is to
refill the little glass of water that is served, spoon atop its rim, along with the coffee on a silver or nickel tray. The act of refilling—in pricey spots it is replaced—is not a hint to order more or that you
are wearing out your welcome but part of the ritual, a vital element of coffeehouse etiquette.
Yet coffee is also the “most important thing” because ordering and drinking it entails knowledge of a pseudo-science and a mysterious language that non-Viennese are unlikely to master.
The hurdle, even if your German is fluent, begins with the fact that “coffee” or “ein Kaffee” is never what you order. That will elicit merely a blank stare from the Herr Ober. One must ask for a specific
variety of coffee, and at last count there were 28.
For example: if you prefer black coffee, ask for a kleiner or grosser Schwarzer (small or large black one). Small is a demitasse, large a normal cup. If you want that weaker than the norm, add “verlängert”
(stretched), and if you prefer it stronger, say “gekürzt” (shortened).
A Brauner (gross or klein) is coffee with cream, which is not served separately at the table unless one specifically asks for a Kaffee Creme. A Schale Gold is coffee mixed with Obers in such a fashion that it attains a golden color, making it lighter than a Brauner. A Melange is equal parts coffee with hot milk, and if you ask for it mit Haut (with skin) the milk will have been boiled. A Verkehrter (a reversed one) is Melange with more milk than coffee.
Having mastered these variations on the basic theme, try some more exotic concoctions, of which the most popular is the Einspänner, which translates literally as a “one horse carriage” and
derives its name from the coachmen who used to drink it at sidewalk cafés while waiting for fares. Because they held their horses with one hand and the coffee with the other, it is always served in a glass with
a handle. An Einspänner is black coffee topped by a huge dollop of freshly whipped cream (Schlag or Schlagobers: never say Schlagsahne, the German term, in Austria) and sugared to taste. A Kaiser-Melange is coffee stirred with an egg yolk instead of milk, sweetened with honey, and spiked, if your are curing a hangover, with a shot of brandy.
Coffee-alcohol combinations are considered more important than the brew itself, and there is a dazzling array. A Margiloman is mocha with a shot of Cognac; with rum it becomes Mocca Gespritzt. A Pharisäer resembles
an Einspänner but is spiked with rum. A Maria Theresa, allegedly invented by the empress, is a “lengthened” Schwarzer with a shot of orange liqueur and topped with Schlag. And if you mistakenly ask for a
Menu, instead of the Speisekarte the Herr Ober will bring a large Schwarzer laced with a double shot of pear brandy.
To complement any of the coffee preparations there are innumerable Viennese pastries, the Mehlspeisen, which begin with the simple Kipferl, usually displayed in a nickel bowl near the café
entrance. Mainstays such as Apfelstrudel are included. And the pastry selection reaches dreamy, calorific heights in such memorable creations as Esterhazy Torte or Mohr-im-Hemd, a chocolate
soufflé, covered with melted chocolate and a huge mound of whipped cream.
For pastry at its finest, Café Demel, No. 14 Kohlmarkt, has no equal. Here each piece is not merely a tidbit of heaven on the palate but a feast for the eyes, a work of art almost too beautiful to
eat. Demel’s has a 200-year-old pedigree as official confectioner to the imperial court, caterer to state banquets and diplomatic receptions. Over the centuries its guests have included Beethoven, Prince
Metternich, Emperor Franz Josef, Lenin, and, more recently, Queen Elizabeth II, Maria Callas, Bing Crosby, Henry Kissinger and Presidents Kennedy, Nixon, and Carter.
In 1857 the Dehne brothers sold the café to their pastry chef, Charles Demel, who gave it the present name. Demel moved from the front of the Hofburg to a site on the Kohlmarkt in 1887. There, in
all its mahogany-paneled, mirrored, and crystal-chandeliered splendor, it still stands. Nothing has changed. The building, interior design, furnishings, and even the ovens in the pastry kitchen, are under
historical landmark protection.
The most striking antithesis to Demel’s glittering ambience is the Café Hawelka, No. 6 Dorotheergasse. Though many of the coffeehouses serve as professional clubs, with stockbrokers congregating
in their favorite, dentists in another, government bureaucrats in a third, traditionally one café has played the role of literary and intellectual salon. Since the end of World War II and the Third Reich, when
literary and intellectual life resumed in Vienna, that has been the Hawelka, thanks to the “mom and pop” atmosphere created by Leopold and Josefina Hawelka, and now their son Günther.
The interior is a catastrophe and seedily bohemian—a conglomeration of styles, furnishings, and collected memorabilia. Theater, concert, lecture, art show posters, and book reviews cover one wall.
Paintings, etchings, sketches, and aquarelles, some from artists who paid for their Melange “in kind,” hang from others. Hundreds of newspapers from dozens of countries in a score of languages are piled on the
tables. From when it opens at 8 a.m. until the chairs are put up at 2 a.m. it is crowded like a New York subway at rush hour.
Some of the regulars, it is said, have spent more hours of their lives in the Hawelka than anywhere else. Among them have been some of the leading figures of modern literature, art, and music:
Henry Miller, Arthur Miller, Elias Canetti, Günther Grass, Heimito von Doderer, Pavel Kohout, Hilde Spiel, Andy Warhol, André Heller, Herbert von Karajan. It has become an institution since the Hawelkas started
it more than 50 years ago.
Of Vienna’s coffeehouses, the novelist Stefan Zweig once wrote: “They are the best educational establishments for all that is new.” Three centuries after the Turks abandoned their “camel fodder”
at the city walls, Vienna’s most comfortable “schools” are still open for classes.
Contributing editor John Dornberg writes from Munich.
For information about visiting Vienna’s coffeehouses, contact the Austrian National Tourist Office at Tel.: (212) 944–6880.
Web: www.anto.com
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