Vol. 21 · No. 3 · Issue 68 · Fall 2003

Catherine Epstein

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Abstract

How did film challenge official politics in the German Democratic Republic (GDR)? What happened to East German film culture after German unification in 1990? How has film treated the theme of unification? Two excellent studies provide intriguing answers to these and many other questions. In The Triumph of the Ordinary, Joshua Feinstein discusses films produced by the Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA), the official and only East German movie studio. As he demonstrates, DEFA made a variety of films that in one way or another questioned the official ideology of East Germany's ruling communist party, the Socialist Unity Party (SED). In That Was the Wild East, Leonie Naughton tells the sobering story of the dismantling of the eastern German film industry after unification.