1. Introduction

In the two decades since the fall of the Wall, the work of some of the documentary filmmakers of the German Democratic Republic has entered to some extent into the pages of English language documentary film histories. There is a full entry on the German Democratic Republic in the Encylopedia of the Documentary Film published in 2006 where they have been recognized for their development of a distinct aesthetic during the 1970s and 1980s to represent the work and workers of a twentieth century communist state.[1] The more overtly propagandistic compilation films of Andrew and Annelie Thorndike during the 1940s and 1950s had already been described in Erik Barnouw’s history of documentary, together with the anti-Vietnam war films of Heynowski and Scheumann.[2] The new generation of filmmakers working in the 1970s and 1980s, however, are not mentioned in later editions of Barnouw’s overview.

Through the involvement of filmmakers such as Joris Ivens in the early years of DEFA documentary, and the showing of the cinéma verité films of Jean Rouche and the essay films of Chris Marker at the Leipzig documentary film week, DEFA documentary filmmakers can be seen as having developed during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s as much in parallel to documentary filmmakers of Western Europe as of Eastern Europe, continuing aspects of the tradition of British documentary filmmaking as well as being part of the soviet legacy so much celebrated in France. The focus on workers might appear to have been merely duty on the part of filmmakers who were employed to document on film the life of the first “Workers’ and Peasants’ State”, but, as Christoph Kleßmann points out in his book Arbeiter im “Arbeiterstaat” DDR, the representation of the GDR worker was no simple matter:

Das Bild der Arbeiter im “ersten Arbeiter-und-Bauern-Staat” blieb in dessen offizieller Historiographie nicht zufällig völlig unscharf. Denn sozialhistorisch-kritische Fragen wurden nicht gestellt und durften nicht gestellt werden, weil sie das stilisierte Bild arg verkratzt hätten. (Kleßmann: 11)

Kleßmann is no doubt absolutely correct about the specific difficulties of portraying the reality of working life in the GDR and it is clear that the images produced by documentary filmmakers were meant to be part of a larger propaganda campaign, or public motivation programme, which, while interested in asserting a critical concern for the worker’s well-being, was cautious about deeper analysis of the realities of worker’s lives. To assert that DEFA documentaries were propagandistic is not the end of the matter, however. ‘Kunst im Auftrag’, as Günter Jordan aptly describes DEFA documentary filmmaking, is hardly an unusual phenomenon. It is the way in which the GDR documentary filmmakers worked with the opportunities as well as the restrictions and difficulties associated with this position which makes their work retain its interest and value some twenty years later. These qualities, which Günter Jordan points out in his later paper ‘Schatten vergangener Ahnen: Bilder aus der Arbeitswelt: die 60er und 70er Jahre’, are elusive, having to do with point of view, aesthetics, even comradeship. After all the problems of how to understand the nature of the worker and work in the broader economic and political context, and the question of how to document and capture the subjectivity of these concepts in moving images, goes far beyond the specific context of the German Democratic Republic as well as beyond the second half of the twentieth century. The contemporary films of many an anti-globalisation activist or many a Michael Moore today point to the difficulties of getting beyond the factory gates to photograph the reality over there. Jordan quotes Harun Farocki’s words on contemplating the Lumière brothers’ film Workers Leaving the Factory (1895):

Die erste Kamera in der Geschichte des Films war auf eine Fabrik gerichtet. Aber nach hundert Jahren läßt sich sagen, daß die Fabrik den Film kaum angezogen, eher abgestoßen hat. Der Arbeits- oder Arbeiterfilm ist kein Hauptgenre geworden, der Platz vor der Fabrik ist ein Nebenschauplatz geblieben. Die meisten Erzählfilme spielen in einem Leben, das die Arbeit hinter sich gelassen hat. Alles, was die industrielle Produktionsform den anderen überlegen macht: die Zerlegung der Arbeit in kleinste Teilschritte, die beständige Wiederholung, der Organisationgrad, der vom Einzelnen kaum Entscheidungen fordert und ihm kaum Spielraum gibt – all das macht es schwer, erzählungsstiftende Wechselfälle zu erwarten. Darum ist fast alles, was während der letzten hundert Jahre in Fabriken mit Worten, Blicken, Gesten ausgetauscht wurde, der filmischen Aufzeichnung entgangen. (Jordan: 125-6)

Jordan goes on to point out that while the West may have closed its factory doors to filmmakers, the East officially opened wide its doors. Farocki, for his part, however, also overstates the case when he claims that nothing has been caught on film in the West. He leaves out of the picture all the information films, education and training films which, in the Federal Republic of Germany, are particularly numerous and well-loved. The motivation for the representation of work per se in this context is varied and probably has little to do with documentary filmmaking or the creation of critical essay films, but it circles around the process of communicating information about what the work is and how it is carried out providing:

-- information for management (analysis)

-- information for workers (motivation and training)

-- information for clients or customers (advertising)

-- information for exhibition (education/entertainment)

-- information for the public (propaganda)

-- information for anthropological or sociological analysis (science)

In each of these different communicative contexts the nature of work is defined slightly differently as a process, a skill, part of the value of a product, a performance, an achievement, or a cause for concern. As far as documentary filmmaking is concerned different periods have thrown light on different aspects of work as a subject for filmmaking. The British Cooperative Movement, for example, produced short information films on subjects such as the manufacture of soap or margarine, or the production of milk as a healthy drink for children. It called these propaganda films which were used to promote the movement and advertise its products.[3] In the contemporary context there is great interest in the spectacle of mass production, in images of gigantic factories, in particular in China, in which thousands of workers are employed. There is also great interest in Europe in the conditions of workers in emergent economies such as India.

These reasons for the representation of work in the information film or in the documentary differ significantly from one context to another, and that of GDR filmmakers between 1946 and 1989 of course has its own unique set of parameters. The nature of work itself, however, in particular the nature of factory work, has provided a constant set of questions globally about productivity, specialisation and the subjection of the individual to repetitive, dull labour within working groups.[4] Before discussing these, however, it is worth describing the context of film production in the GDR in order to understand how the justification for resourcing the films might have been at variance with the films that were made.

2. Produktionspropaganda

It is particularly important to see films about work in the GDR as part of the wider context of ‘Produktionspropaganda’. This has been recently usefully defined in Tippach-Schneider’s dictionary of GDR terms relating to advertising:

Produktionspropaganda

Massenhafte Popularisierung von Arbeit, Produktion, Produktionsabläufen, Produktionszielen, Arbeitszeit, Effektivität, Arbeitskraft und Arbeiterergebnissen zur Propagierung zeitgenössischer sozialistischer Vorstellungen von gesellschaftlichem Fortschritt. Die Kampagnen der Produktionspropaganda bezogen sich auf den gesamten produktiven Bereich der Gesellschaft: auf die Arbeitskräftewerbung, die Vertrauenswerbung, die ökonomische --- Agitation, den Arbeitsschutz oder auf geforderte Normerhöhungen. Popularisiert wurden öffentliche Wettbewerbe und ihre Ergebnisse, Neuerungen, Verbesserungsvorschläge und Leistungsschauen (--- MMM) Neben Plakaten, Betriebszeitungen und -funk waren weitere wichtige Medien für die Produktionspropaganda die --- Sichtagitation, Lehrkabinette, Wimpel, Urkunden und Musterausstellungen. Es sollten nicht nur die besten Erfahrungen und Methoden in der Produktion verbreitet, sondern auch die Betriebsangehörigen zu höherer Arbeitsmoral und Disziplin erzogen werden. “Plane mit – arbeite mit –regiere mit!”, “Meine Hand für mein Produkt” und “Wer die Technik nicht ehrt, ist der Prämie nicht wert”, waren typische Slogans der DDR-Produktionspropaganda der sechziger Jahre. Ende der siebziger Jahre wurden aus den propagandistischen Losungen abstrakte Schlagworte wie “Materialökonomie” oder “Nutzeffekt”. (Tippach-Schneider: 2004, 279-80)

The very broad reach of Produktionspropaganda, particularly in terms of its interest in motivating producers more than consumers, meant that films in and about the workplace usually had some connection with the state planning system. The five year plans play a significant conceptual role bringing together different media in the effort to unite and persuade the whole population.

The DEFA studios played a role in the production of advertising and propaganda films commissioned by the VEBs. The studio as a whole produced around 1000 advertising films from 25 seconds to three minutes from 1946 to 1976. (Tippach-Schneider: 62) Documentary film production in DEFA was organised in various ways bringing the function of advertising and propaganda and documentation sometimes closer together and sometimes further apart.

Thus the Abteilung Kulturfilm founded in 1946 had become the Abteilung Kurzfilm by 1948 and by 1952 the DEFA Studio für Populärwissenschaftliche Film, making popular science films, documentary films and training films and advertising films. It made Industriefilme of 6 mins to 35 mins, taking up themes relating to industry, farming, technology and science for public information films, advertising and propaganda. The Industriefilme were well funded by commissions from GDR industry and the export bureau, they were realistically shot, usually in colour to relatively high production standards. At the beginning of the 1950s the DEFA Studio für Populärwissenschaftliche Filme made films about the construction of heavy industry – steelworks and docks. The first proper industry film was Im Dienste des Fortschritts (1964) about the VEB Carl Zeiss Jena. These films were much needed by industry to use at trade exhibitions.They were also popular on television from 1969 on the Tele-Spiegel. (Tippach-Schneider: 148) In 1962 DEFA took over the equipment and personnel of the Studio für Werbefilme DEWAG along with the advertising contract with Deutsche Fernsehfunk. DEFA also created the Gruppe Werbe-Film Arbeitsgruppe der DEFA out of the industry filmmaking unit. Thus DEFA developed through various stages from the Studio für Wochenschau und Dokumentarfilme (1952) to the DEFA Studio für Kurzfilme (1968) to the DEFA Studio für Dokumentarfilme in 1975.

The representation of work in the immediate aftermath of the war in the newsreels of the Augenzeuge and the short films documenting the rebuilding of the cities is part of a process of providing information for the public about a common effort for survival. The work glimpsed is not only the transportation of rubble in buckets down lines of workers or the production and transportation of food but also the organisation of a social and political structure to coordinate this effort. In The Augenzeuge the representation of physical labour is systematically joined to the representations of the political process. Labourers are portrayed as included in the political process in mass meetings, while political speakers are presented as workers, or former workers themselves. The representation of work in the newsreels and short films of the SBZ for the purpose of providing public information has only minimal information to communicate: that it is being efficiently organised and carried out by determined, strong and cooperative workers assisted by fellow workers in the Soviet Union.

Once the GDR is formed the purpose of the representation of work changes from convincing the public that it is being done well to convincing the public that they themselves have the responsibility for their new workers’ and peasants’ state, the GDR. The documentary films of the five year plan era become somewhat shrill because they represent a mass training effort. National heroes of work set the example to the whole nation of what it means to own the means of production – not mass luxury but mass hard work. It is also done in the context of a sense of threat, either military or economic, coming from the West in the form of ideology and wealth. Jordan cites a somewhat abstract definition of the documentary film in Jerzy Bossak’s Authentizität und Wahrheit im Dokumentarfilm. Film-Wissenschaftliche Mitteilungen:

Die Hauptaufgabe des Dokumentarfilms (hat) darin zu liegen, Probleme gesellschaftlicher Gruppen zu behandeln, die eine gemeinsame Idee oder der Kampf gegen eine gemeinsame Gefahr vereint. (quoted in Jordan: 104)

The 1950s was the decade in which the Stalinist films of Andrew Thorndike dominated. The compilation films drawing on images of the past put into practice the teleological notion that the GDR was the utopia to compensate for a century of aggression and total war. Love for the GDR and hatred for the Capitalist enemy in the West (or indeed within) characterized the decade. Work and workers in these films are merely historical pawns in the battle for domination, subjugated or seduced, working and living in dire conditions so that the capitalist masters could live in luxury. The propaganda scarcely differs from that of the Nazi era (satirical history):

An die Stelle des Österreichers mit dem Komikerbärtchen war der schnauzbärtige Georgier Josef Schugaschwili getreten. Er machte aus den Verlierern des Krieges Sieger der Geschichte. Die Gedemütigten der Katastrophe von 1945 hatten wieder einen Führer. (Hertle et al: 11)

At the same time, however, Joop Huisken and Karl Gass managed to demonstrate that a more realist and unadorned representation of contemporary work in the GDR could also be used to portray unity of purpose or the united struggle against a common threat. The representation of difficult, physically tough work is a particularly effective way of showing how individual effort organised into collective purpose is productive. In this sense Turbine I (Huisken/Gass, 1953) seems the aesthetic solution to the problem posed by the party officials through the rediscovery of the kino-eye explored by Dziga Vertov in the 1920s and 1930s. The discovery is that the representation of work effectively carried out is congruent with the goal of socialist mass motivation:

Die Arbeiter sind so stark, daß die Filmemacher nicht anders können, als mit der damals noch stummen Kamera genau hinzusehen. (Jordan: 104)

Jordan’s description of Hugo Hermann’s Stahl und Menschen (1957) goes into detail about the sheer appeal of watching skilled, physical, dirty and dangerous organised work:

Die Arbeiter reden in eigener Sache und in ihrer Sprache, die Kamera studiert ihre Handgriffe und Arbeitsvorgänge, ihre Konzentration und ihr Miteinander. Sie sind Beherrscher und Beherrschte zugleich, der Film zeigt es, der Zuschauer erlebt es. (Jordan 105)

Despite the socialist focus of the films they failed to gain recognition from the party officials, the public or the critics. Congruent with socialist ideas they were not necessarily congruent with the political goals of the state – a truth that the ideological campaigns against socialist avant-garde artists such as Vertov in the Stalinist Soviet Union were an early example of. It is perhaps worth turning here to the functions of representation of work put forward above and to ask what the viewer was meant to make of the images presented. They can be seen, and have been analysed, as propaganda films, part of the representation of the worker as the hero of the new state. Huisken and Gass’s Turbine I is clearly linked to the beginning of the five year plan which was launched in 1952, a process of extensive building and development accompanied by Agitpropaganda in the style of the Soviet Union in its foundational phase. In a series of propaganda posters for the five year plan a painting envisaging the vast new Brandenburg steelworks are presented with the slogan: "Aus Stahl wird Brot." (Kleßmann: 457)[5]

Kleßmann writes that the five year plan was not an unusual measure for the period and that plans were in place not only in the planned economies but also in the market economies.

Planung war also keineswegs ein Tabu. Es war eher die besonders lautstarke Erfolgspropaganda, die in der DDR den Kontrast zu den “Mühen der Ebene” schwer erträglich und letzlich auch kontraproduktiv machte. (Kleßmann: 264)

It is precisely this that Jordan laments in the GDR documentary films of the period, thus it is hard to see how any representation of heavy industry from 1952 to 1957 could have been seen as anything other than belonging to that comprehensive attempt to push the population into massive productivity.

3. Beyond Produktionspropaganda

The interpretation of the films as providing a more anthropological or sociological insight into the nature of work comes from an entirely different angle. The documentary film struggles in all contexts to distinguish itself from the industrial film, training film or public information or propaganda film. The idea of a film genre that portrays the life of a community in an anthropological or sociological sense for the sake of portrayal can only make sense in a context where there is a need to communicate the realities of one community to another. In many ways the documentary film comes out of either, the internal specialisation and fragmentation of modern society, or out of the processes of globalisation and increased communication between communities across the world. It is in this sense that comments on the separateness of the people filmed is of particular significance. The documentary filmmaker Jürgen Böttcher wrote, for example:

Ich wollte Filme über Arbeiter machen. Das hat mit meiner Biografie, das hat mit dem Kriegserlebnis, mit dem Nachkrieg zu tun, daß ich, während alle Leute schwer schuften und dafür sorgen, daß man ein paar Klamotten auf dem Leib hat, daß man was zu fressen hat, gewissenmaßen nur Kunst gemacht habe. Ich habe die immer bewundert und mir immer gedacht: Wie halten die das aus, Tag und Nacht schwer zu arbeiten. Ich wollte dem wenigstens huldigend dienen. (Böttcher in Jordan: 107)

This sense of otherness requires the film team to approach their subject through a process of getting ‘them’ to accept ‘us’ and to show ‘us’ as they really are in their natural habitat. Jordan goes on to quote further filmmakers to show they approached their subjects ‘von außen’ – Kurt Tetzlaff, for example:

Wir haben dort, in dem harten Winter 63, mit den Kumpels an den Gleisanlagen gearbeitet. Als wir dann mit der Kamera kamen, waren sie bereit, sich wirklich so zu geben, wie sie sind. Es gab keine Schau, keine Hemmungen mehr, jeder hatte Kontakt, Vertrauen zum anderen. Das ist überhaupt eine grundlegende Voraussetzung, meine ich, um einen Dokumentarfilm zu realisieren. (Jordan: 108)

It is noticeable how Karl Gass, of an earlier generation, still attempts to use the first person:

Der Wunsch, etwas in dieser Art zu machen, resultierte aus unserer Unzufriedenheit mit dem, was wir früher geschaffen haben, aus der Auflehnung gegen eine nicht genügend wahrhaftige Darstellung unseres Lebens, seiner Probleme und Konflikte. Unser nationales Dokumentarfilmschaffen erlag vielfach der Schönfarberei, ja, der Phrasendrescherei. (Jordan: 108)

As Jordan points out, this change in perspective is what creates the possibility for the achievements of documentary film in the GDR. However, Jordan describes it thus:

Erstmals gelingt es, von der Darstellung in soziologischen Großeinheiten zur Individualisierung überzugehen. Die Themen der Filme werden aus den Stoffen entwickelt und ihnen nicht mehr von außen zugeteilt. Poesie erscheint nicht mehr als Zutat, sondern als Bestandteil von entdeckter Lebenswelt und menschlicher Entfaltung. (Jordan: 109)

We would express this change slightly differently, however, as a change from Produktionspropaganda in which the filmmakers are part of a nationwide attempt to motivate the people to work to Dokumentarfilm which is a genre developed out of anthropology and ethnography which is dedicated to representing the life-world of a particular community.

4. Documentary Films

The films chosen for discussion deal with the subject of work but develop away from propaganda towards documentation and reflect a development within the genre. They focus on workers as humans and question the notion of the worker hero. They do not aim at mass motivation but at the presentation of workers’ ‘real lives’ which determines their approach as the approach of outsiders that look for the genuine characteristics of the filmed object.

The discussion here is limited to documentary films dealing with female workers – two by Jürgen Böttcher, Stars (1963) and Martha (1978), and one episode from Helke Misselwitz’ famous documentary Winter Adé (1987). We have chosen the films as three examples in three decades exemplifying a development in GDR filmmaking as a whole. As films they have been discussed in terms of their representation of gender more than in terms of their representation of work and workers. As films about female workers they opened up the possibility of observing how the largely male directors managed to shift away from clichés of socialist heroism to a different kind of liberation. This shift also creates conditions where the filmmaker may represent the worker as 'other' without exposing the problem of class belonging.

In all three examples the relation between working individual and group or collective on the one hand and the use of poetic images, long takes and original sound on the other hand will be analysed. While the works of Böttcher and Misselwitz mark positions beyond the categories of state ideology, they necessarily also participate in discourses on gender and class. In the discussion, the depiction of gender and class in the films is treated as an element that contributes to the change from propaganda to documentary; it is of particular interest that the development of a counter position to state ideology is bound to a discourse on gender and class that reproduces blind spots in the representation of working-class women.

-- Jürgen Böttcher: Stars (1963)

Dem Unbekannten begegnet man mit viel weniger Voraussetzungen. In derartigen Begegnungen liegt die Chance der größeren Entdeckung. Leichthin wird allgemein behauptet, daß überall “in der Masse” Persönlichkeiten zu finden seien; aber gerade der häufige Gebrauch von Begriffen, wie der kleine Mann, die einfachen Leute, lassen befürchten, daß da zu vieles im Dunkeln bleibt. Entdeckungen auf diesem Gebiet sind für mich das Erregendste an meiner Arbeit. (Böttcher 1974: 24f.)

In this quotation as in the one given above Böttcher defines himself as an outsider and discoverer in the land of the common people. As ‘the people’ and particularly workers were under the close scrutiny of the state and a popular object of (propaganda) filmmaking in the GDR, they are hardly something ‘unknown’ per se. What distinguishes Böttcher’s approach is that he acknowledged workers as the object of official interest in order to then engage with them on the level of discovery and documentation of their ‘real’, their ‘human’ life. In other words, Böttcher looks for a position beyond but not in denial of the official notions of the worker or the working class. Thus in his first and legendary film Ofenbauer (1962), he documents an event that would typically have been treated as a socialist, i.e. economic and political victory with high propaganda value, namely the shifting of a 2000 tonne old furnace in half of the time that the usual procedure of replacing an old furnace with a new one took. This ‘sozialistische Spitzenleistung’ is depicted as such but also as an incredible human achievement made possible by the skill and collective effort of the men. Böttcher’s focus is on the human beauty that reveals itself in the work process; consequently, the typical propaganda of the compiler films of the 1950s, the slogans and pictures of rebuilding the industry, of increased production, of awards, party congresses etc. are missing.

Böttcher’s interest in the human reality and in the beauty of the everyday discovered in the work process is further developed in Stars, his first film about women at work. A number of elements which first appeared in Ofenbauer are taken further in this second documentary, in particular the depiction of the ‘human collective’. Again, Böttcher chooses a typical socialist sujet for his film only to disappoint expectations fostered by Produktionspropaganda: the women he portrays are a particularly good ‘Brigade’ at the quality control in the NARVA bulb factory; they have been awarded the title ‘Brigade der sozialistischen Arbeit’. Yet as in his first film all further references to the socialist context, political and economic, are missing. Indeed, the commentary explicitly states that the award is not important and that one should not think about the product either but focus only on the women who work at the factory. Böttcher shows a group of women of all ages characterised by friendliness and intense communication evolving around their tiring work and intervals. That Böttcher includes intervals and their privacy and daily-life activities may be seen as a gender issue. Here as in literature and feature film women come to stand for a lost human wholeness reconciling work and private life. By filming the women drinking coffee together, doing each others’ hair, looking out of the window together, smoking, laughing, watering plants, reading, crying and comforting each other Böttcher stresses that friendliness, warmth and communication are rooted in the work-life of the group and not in the political context of that work. The experience of the group is central for the film; the individual seems ‘aufgehoben’. Böttcher includes only events and moments that relate to the women as a group; consequently, he only shoots in places that belong to the group, almost exclusively the workplace, a very narrow room crowded with lined-up workbenches. Although the film does not use the long takes yet that become characteristic of later films by Böttcher and others, the film is already slow compared to the propaganda films that use cuts and quick editing to actually compile the various aspects of the political and economic perspective. The slowing down of Böttcher’s film is partly due to its confinement to one room mostly and one group of people; thus cuts and editing do not bring about a change of location but of perspective within the group – the one interruption in the film is the birth of a baby; here the only other location, a hospital room, comes in. The film allows time to get to know the different aspects and small facets of the group’s life, particularly the forms of communication among the women. We see the women whispering, laughing, telling yesterday’s episodes, crying, discussing etc. In an essay on the film Böttcher explained his intention:

Ich wollte mich bemühen, daß man sie [die Frauen, U.W.] möglichst tief kennenlernt. Die erste Ebene dafür sollte ein Bericht von ihrer täglichen Arbeit sein, wobei mich die möglichen Formen ihres Kontakts dabei – durch Gespräche und Scherze – besonders interessierten. (Böttcher 1964: 2)

The importance of the forms of contact can also be seen from the way the film is shot. Almost throughout the camera seems to be part of the group and of its forms of communication. The impression of the camera’s group participation is due to the dominant use of straight or only slightly higher angle shots in the medium-close range which create the impression of witnessing the women through the ‘eyes’ (technical point of view) of one of them. There is almost no shot in the film which could not have been taken from within the group. This position of the camera is significant not for the sake of a faked authenticity or involvement of the women in the process of shooting as in cinema verité but because it signals an attempt to engage with the women and their lives instead of approaching them from an omnipotent position as Produktionspropaganda did. This attempt is also present in the changed use of commentary and original sound. Except for a few remarks, original sound in the form of discussions and talks among the women dominates.

Es war nicht mehr möglich, mit ein paar Bildern etwas anzudeuten, mit dem Kommentar etwas zu behaupten. Wenn wir Arbeiterinnen wie in "Stars" zeigten, deren Arbeit besonders einförmig, nervtötend war, mußten wir von ihnen auch erfahren, wie sie darüber denken, was sie bei der schweren Arbeit hält usw. […] Wir sind damals mit Christian Lehmann ausgezogen, um unseren Helden Gelegenheit zu geben, sich zu ihrem Leben zu äußern. Nach allem, was wir an Dokumentarfilmen damals kannten, auch an Filmen aus der DDR, schlußfolgerten wir, daß jetzt die Leute sprechen müßten. Die Arbeiter selbst, ihre Gedanken, ihre Art zu sein, ihre Beziehungen zueinander mussten auf die Leinwand. (Böttcher 1974: 25)

The attempt to record the ‘women’s voice’ supports what shots, editing and the film’s approach already aim at: to document not an idealised and functionalised position in the state economy but the actual work-life of the women. Böttcher stresses human qualities such as familiarity, friendliness, and communication. This may be seen a counter model with respect to the hierarchical non-communication in the GDR as represented in Produktionspropaganda where workers were talked about and at the same time as a representation of the utopia of non-alienated life. Yet this position beyond the state ideology is still bound to highly ambivalent political practices. As so many other GDR artists Böttcher located resistance in an idealised notion of the uncorrupted, honest worker.[6] Thus the film may lack a functionalist political or economic dramaturgy, yet it partakes in a discourse on gender and class that without reflection reproduces blind spots in the representation of working-class women.

Böttcher asks his audience to acknowledge and enjoy the human qualities of the women.

Ich wollte, daß man die Frauen kennen und achten lernt (wie wir!), durch das Beispiel der wenigen auch vielleicht die vielen anderen Arbeiterinnen und werktätigen Frauen assoziiert, über das Ich und die Gemeinsamkeit nachzudenken angeregt wird, eventuell die gleichsam alltägliche Solidarität der Frauen erkennt und sich daran freut! (Böttcher 1964: 2f.)

The intention to convey joy, in which the film succeeds, is essentially aesthetic. The utopia depicted by Böttcher and its aesthetic quality, are both decisive for the gender/class concept of the film. Böttcher described himself as a discoverer of the unknown or 'other.' This referred to his new perspective on the so-called ‘common people’; more specifically, he discovered mostly ‘common women’ as in Stars, Martha, Wäscherinnen, and Die Küche. Despite differences between the films they all keep an utopian moment rooted in the ‘heroines’ and their wit, joy, skills, courage, outspokenness, honesty etc.

This depiction of working-class contradicts ideological representations as much as the images of women by the entertainment industry; the actual title, Stars, is an allusion to the female star cult. Yet it can nevertheless be seen as wishful thinking. Böttcher stated that the discovery of the unknown is exciting because one sees it with less prejudice – and less knowledge one could add. As much as Böttcher tries to meet the women on their own terms and give them a voice, as the 'other' they are, in respect to social reality, a blank for Böttcher and thus suitable as a screen for his own fantasies.

The films that follow take innovations such as use of original sound, reduced editing and cuts on the way to the long take, and poetic pictures further and at the same time engage with them critically. The aspect that remains at the centre for documentary filmmakers such as Böttcher, Koepp, and Misselwitz is the curiosity and respect for everyday life of ‘common women’ and the attempt to document it in its peculiarity and complexity beyond the demands and representations of the state or the entertainment industry. What changes most notably is the focus on collectives and the notion of the ‘positive heroine’. Where bigger groups are still portrayed, they are no longer depicted as a community. Instead, in Böttcher’s later films such as Martha the collective, even though it is still present, becomes more ambivalent and conditional. With the dissolution of the collective as a secure place, the female individual moves into the centre of attention where its vulnerability, failings and sorrows become gradually visible.

-- Jürgen Böttcher: Martha (1978)

Martha is the portrayal of a 68 year old woman who works at the rubble dump Rummelsburger Kippe. The film is still slower than Stars giving all the time needed to Martha’s way of talking, explaining, gesturing, interacting with her colleagues, and working. It is concerned with the characteristics of the individual which it explores in the confined location of the dump. With the focus on the individual in a specific work situation, elements such as sound and take length are developed further into the direction discussed. Thus a commentary by a narrator has almost completely disappeared except for three introductory sentences: “Das ist Martha Bieler, 68 Jahre alt. Sie ist eine der letzten legendären Trümmerfrauen. Martha kommentiert.” From then on the audience listens to Martha on and off screen. As so much stress is given to the original speech of the person portrayed the camera has become almost static, takes have become long, and cuts rare; they often only forward in time but do not signal change of situation, perspective or place.

R.L.: Die Einstellungen wurden länger, die Montagemöglichkeiten weniger frei – man sah ein, daß die lebendige Rede, der Originalton, nicht zerstückelt werden durfte, sollte sie lebendig bleiben und den Sprecher charakterisieren.

[…]

R.L.: Fast bei jedem Menschen kann man nach und nach eine Vielschichtigkeit entdecken. Und wenn ein Film mir das gestattet, dann gehe ich so weit, zu sagen, daß ich beim Beobachten nicht durch Zwischenschnitte unterbrochen werden möchte. Selbst neutrale Bildhintergründe können ihr Gutes haben, weil sie den Beobachter ganz auf den Gestus des Menschen, der in die Kamera spricht, konzentrieren. Außerdem ist der Reichtum der Alltagssprache, die der Film fixieren und sogar analysieren kann, in unseren Filmen noch längst nicht aufgeschlossen, obwohl das Wort von diesem Reichtum schon zum Gemeinplatz geworden ist. Mir ist es angenehm, einen Menschen sehr lange zu sehen und seinen Habitus und seine Ausdrucksweise in Ruhe studieren zu können.

Ich nehme an, daß diese Fragen im Gespräch bleiben, besonders wenn wir eine Kunst des Porträtfilms schaffen wollen, in der ich eine Perspektive des Dokumentarfilms sehe. (Kamera im Dokumentarfilm 1968: 270f.)

Following the appeal for portrait film, Martha does not get its dramaturgy from outside but attempts to discover it within. It follows the daily rhythm of work and intervals; in the end, when Martha retires, the film documents her farewell party in the shed where she and her colleagues spent their breaks. This is another attempt to engage with a working-class woman on her own terms which now results in a more complex and ambivalent representation of the woman – despite the fact, that Martha is still a typical Böttcher heroine and as such a screen for the director’s fantasies. The increased ambivalence of the representation, interestingly, is not due to forms of analysis – investigation, questioning, or argument. Indeed, Böttcher’s role as interviewer-director remains very reserved. However, the portrait documentary is a film focused on original speech in original time and as such allows critical moments to develop. Thus it is not editing or questions on the side of the film team but silence and the avoidance of topics on the side of Martha that indicate blind spots and suppressed experiences and that become ‘visible’ due to the duration of the filming and motionlessness of the camera. This adds a critical dimension to the picture of a woman who is otherwise quick witted, outspoken, and able to cope with a hard work-life and who is genuinely loveable. Another ambivalence that is revealed in the passing of filming time is the relation between Martha and her colleagues. While at first they seem to get along well, joking around and expressing appreciation for Martha, the farewell party brings a taste of sadness when none of Martha’s colleagues has a present for her or gives a speech. Instead, the younger colleagues talk about Martha’s generosity and speculate about a second farewell party.

A third level of comments is the composition of the pictures and here, likewise, ambivalence becomes palpable. Extreme wide and low angle shots show the mountains of rubble as huge and Martha on top as a tiny, fragile figure. This may be understood as an example of the sublime but simultaneously indicates vulnerability and ‘Verlorenheit’. Similarly, Martha standing at the conveyor belt under a spotlight surrounded by darkness may be seen as a picture of security or loneliness. And the contrast between the dump and the new high-rise housing estates in the background suggests the new better life that comes out of Martha’s work as much as it suggests an unproductive cycle of building and tearing down, or the process of obliteration by building new, faceless houses on the ground of the erased past.

-- Helke Misselwitz, Winter Adé (1987)

The features described for Martha are yet taken further in Helke Misselwitz’ portrait of the worker Christine Schiele, one of the two portraits of workers in her film Winter Adé. While hard work in Böttcher’s films is always also a source of human values, in Misselwitz’ episode the hardship of the work does not provide ground for a strong, quick witted individual or a community anymore. Misselwitz’ Christine Schiele still manages her daily routine but suffering and privation are the basis facts of her life. After a childhood full of hard work and after a failed marriage, Christine is a single mother of two children, one of whom is disabled; Christine works three shifts as an apparently unskilled worker in a briquette factory where she checks the pipes with a sledgehammer in order to prevent them from being blocked by coal dust. As in Böttcher’s films, the use of a narrator’s commentary is scarce; the film allows Christine the time she needs to describe her life. Unlike Martha Christine clearly wants to talk about her experiences despite the pain that this causes her. The documentation of communication typical for Böttcher’s films, is here replaced by Christine’s need to communicate. This is supported by the discreet questions of Misselwitz, the focus on original speech and the long takes that provide continuity, time, and concentration. While the camera’s (non)movements are motivated by the needs of Christine and the portrait situation, they can also be read as a poetic interpretation of Christine’s state.

The episode is shot in two locations – the factory and the kitchen of the home of Christine and her parents. The way both settings are filmed intensifies the feeling of loneliness, isolation and privation that Christine talks about. The factory is presented as a massive, hard rock or mountain with a few cracks and tunnels in which life exists but does not thrive.[7] In the kitchen the camera rests almost throughout on Christine only twice panning slightly to catch the shut window through which the parents are seen working and the shut door behind which her daughter can be heard shouting.

Also, the episode is framed by images that allude to the Redemption. The first image is that of the coal factory bathed in streaks of sunlight which associates the pouring of the Holy Spirit and the sudden understanding of all languages. The second image of redemption towards the end of the episode is one of water splashing and running over the factory floor which associates cleaning and purity. However, these images do not assert redemption but rather pose as a contrast highlighting the isolation and silence around Christine. The very last shot of the episode is a long, medium close-up take of Christine (16 seconds) showing her face; she is not speaking, only looking into the camera – not aggressively, not accusingly, not asking for pity, but like someone who has told a terrible story and has enough confidence not to hide or be ashamed afterwards. It is the audience which feels unsettled, uncomfortable and challenged.

Misselwitz clearly takes a different stance on gender and class concepts. Her interviewee is not suitable as a screen for fantasies. The image of working-class women as a source of an incorruptible humanity and of courage, strength and solidarity is replaced by an image that makes visible those realities that Böttcher’s representations of low paid, and low qualified women and a family life at the lower strata of society obliterates. Instead of serving as a screen, the Christine episode, with its poetic dramaturgy, is an attempt to screen Christine.

5. Conclusion

The aim of this paper has been to see whether it is possible to go beyond the question of how subversive or supportive of the state films about workers in the GDR were, and to discuss the films as examples of documentary film investigations into the nature of working life in the 20th century. The close readings of the three film texts offered here attempt to understand how they might, as well as fulfilling the requirements of production propaganda or the self critical analysis of the community, also go beyond this by using techniques which are more characteristic of the broader category of documentary filmmaking, with its roots in ethnographic and social observation, and its use of poetic and symbolic material alongside the factual.

Our argument has been, that by observing the workers, here in particular women, as ‘other’ the filmmakers create a separation between film crew and workers which does not fit neatly into the ideology of the GDR and its many attempts to eradicate the class differences between workers and artists. Perhaps because the subjects of the films are women, this process of separation is not immediately apparent on a political level as it is obscured by the patriarchal nature of GDR society. Nevertheless, as a consequence the films offer a level of insight into the nature of work and the lived lives of workers that goes beyond the representation of the vague idealised images described above by Christoph Kleßmann.

Jürgen Böttchers’ development of his documentary technique towards observational cinema, the empowerment of his subjects in allowing them to express themselves without commentary, his admiration of his subjects as workers engaged in difficult and exhausting work, opens up the space between the dominant presence of the film crew and the subjugated space of the subject filmed. This is the space inhabited by documentary film when it manages to record for posterity aspects of the history of human life as it is lived.

In a celebratory text to mark Böttcher’s sixtieth birthday, Misselwitz acknowledged his influence on her filmmaking, emphasising in particular the quality of distance: “Durch Böttcher erfahre ich, daß man Liebe und Distanz braucht, um zärtlich zu sein.” (Misselwitz, 1991: 61)

Misselwitz ’s film Winter adé, benefitting from the process of perestroika, was able to move away from the propagandised work space into the private sphere, and in so doing joined the general tendency of documentary examinations of worker’s lives in their focus on the personal rather than the working life itself. Her film demonstrates the restricted viewpoint of the workplace film with its failure to acknowledge the fact that the world outside work does not consist merely of rest, leisure, and relaxation with the family. Her film captured not only the depressed and depressing state of the GDR economy, but also a truth about the lives of working women that is relevant for all European states in the 20th century.

Films made in the former GDR Bundesländer after unification, by filmmakers such as Volker Koepp, following on from his own workplace observations of women in the GDR, tended to go into the private sphere as the protagonists lost their jobs. This entirely new context, however, marked not only the need for a different approach to documentary film, but also the beginning of a change in the role and status of work and the worker for a whole (former) nation. Before this happened, however, it might be argued that the observational documentary as practised in the GDR by filmmakers such as Böttcher, and developed further by the next generation of GDR documentary filmmakers, offered both an ideal solution for the time and place, and a body of filmmaking that deserves extensive study for the social and historical insights it has to offer.

Works cited

Ian Aitken, ED: Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film. Oxford: Taylor and Francis, 2006. Print.

Alan Burton: The British Co-operative Movement Film Catalogue. Trowbridge: Flicks Books,1997. Print.

Jürgen Böttcher. "Bemerkungen zu meinem Film Stars." Filmwissenschaftliche Beiträge 1 (1964): 1-12.Print

Jürgen Böttcher." … Vom Leben der Arbeit Bericht geben." Film & Fernsehen 11 (1974): 20-27. Print

Petra Clemens. “'Betriebsgeschehen' im VEB Forster Tuchfabriken – in Fotos und beim Fotografieren." Die DDR im Bild: Zum Gebrauch der Fotografie im anderen deutschen Staat, Karin Hartewig and Alf Lüdtke, ED. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2004:169-186. Print.

Rolf Liebmann. "Kamera im Dokumentarfilm. Meinungen der Dokumentarfilm-Kameraleute Hans-Eberhard Leupold, Christian Lehmann, Werner Kohlert." Filmwissenschaftliche Beiträge 1(1968): 260-284. Print.

Karin Hartewig and Alf Lüdtke: Die DDR im Bild: Zum Gebrauch der Fotografie im anderen deutschen Staat. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2004. Print

Hans-Hermann Hertle, Stefan Wolle: Damals in der DDR: Der Alltag im Arbeiter- und Bauernstaat. München: Bertelsmann, 2004. Print.

Günter Jordan, Ralf Schenk, ED: Schwarzweiß und Farbe: DEFA-Dokumentarfilme 1946-92. Berlin: Filmmuseum Potsdam and Jovis,1996. Print.

Günter Jordan. "Schatten vergangener Ahnen: Bilder aus der Arbeitswelt: die 60er und 70er Jahre." Der geteilte Himmel: Arbeit, Alltag und Geschichte im ost- und westdeutschen Film. Peter Zimmermann, Gebhard Moldenhauer, ED. Konstanz: UVKMedien, 2000: 103-131. Print.

Christoph Kleßmann: Arbeiter im “Arbeiterstaat” DDR: Deutsche Traditionen, sowjetisches Modell, westdeutsches Magnetfeld (1945 bis 1971). Bonn: Dietz, 2007. Print.

Helke Misselwitz et al: "Böttcher und Strawalde werden 60." Film & Fernsehen 6/7 (1991): 60-61. Print.

Erika Richter. "Frauenbilder im ost- und westdeutschen Dokumentarfilm: Fragmentarische Anmerkungen." Der geteilte Himmel: Arbeit, Alltag und Geschichte im ost- und westdeutschen Film. Peter Zimmermann, Gebhard Moldenhauer, ED. Konstanz: UVKMedien, 2000:133-142. Print.

Elke Scheiber. "Frauenschicksale." Film & Fernsehen 7 (1989a): 6-9. Print.

Elke Scheiber. "Paradies auf Erden." Film & Fernsehen (1989b):10, 11-15. Print.

Simone Tippach-Schneider: Das grosse Lexikon der DDR-Werbung: Kampagnen und Werbesprache, Macher und Produkte, Marken und Warenzeichen. Second edition. Berlin: Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, 2004. Print

Peter Zimmermann. "Zur Ikonographie der Arbeiterklasse in den Dokumentarfilmen der DEFA." Der geteilte Himmel: Arbeit, Alltag und Geschichte im ost- und westdeutschen Film. Peter Zimmermann, Gebhard Moldenhauer, ED. Konstanz: UVKMedien, 2000: 303-320. Print.

Peter Zimmermann: Deutschlandbilder Ost: Dokumentarfilme der DEFA von der Nachkriegszeit bis zur Wiedervereinigung. Konstanz: Ölschläger, 1995. Print

Notes

1 See the entry on the "German Democratic Republic" by Ralf Schenk in Aitkin (2006). 469-474, for example. However, there is a tendency not to include references to German documentary in anglophone histories such as Jack C. Ellis and Betsy A.McLane’s A New History of Documentary Film, (New York, London: Continuum) - aside from the films of Leni Riefenstahl.

2 Barnouw (1993) second edition, first published in 1974, pp.175-178. Barnouw also refers to the filmmakers Heynowski and Scheumann, in particular their film about the engagement of American soldiers in Vietnam, Pilots in Pyjamas, p.275.

3 Burton (1997).

4 Richard Donkin’s Blood, Sweat and Tears: The Evolution of Work (2001) provides a very readable account of the development of the management of labour (London and New York: Texere). Keith Thomas (ed.) (1999) The Oxford Book of Work (Oxford: OUP) is a compilation of literary references to the nature of work from the Greeks to the present day.

5 Kleßmann gives the following source: "Bauten des Fünfjahrplanes: Stahlwerk Brandenburg – Aus Stahl wird Brot." Quelle: Archiv der sozialen Demokratie.

6 "Die Haltungen der Arbeiter sind drastisch, imponierend, die große Kollektivität elementar, d.h. im Arbeitsvorgang bewundernswürdig präzis funktionierend. So bändigen sie Tag für Tag Tonnen flüssigen Eisens (Ofenbauer). Sie schreien sich Flüche zu und Witze im Lärm, sind freundlich, brüderlich. Sie nehmen kein Blatt vor’n Mund. Sie sind stolz. Kriechen vor niemandem. Biedern sich nicht an. Sie werden in jeder Schicht dreckig (noch), das spülen sie nach jeder Schicht wieder ab – so sind sie sauberer als manch andere Leute." (Böttcher 1974: 24)

7 The images are reminiscent of photographs of workers in industrial settings by Gundula Schulze El Dowy.