THE GERMAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC ceased to exist, and with its demise the dreams and demons, hopes and horrors, of those who lived in it began to fade. The best way for film director Herwig Kipping to capture this past was to create an allegorical fairy tale, a “Land beyond the Rainbow.” Then film critic, today head of the DEFA Foundation, Ralf Schenk, writing a review for the (Eastern) Wochenpost in 1991, highlights the success of the director in portraying a particularly aesthetic and nuanced perspective of what had been the GDR. The equally prolific film critic and historian Michael Hanisch of the Eastern Neue Zeit, in his article written in April 1992, echoes these accolades, especially in celebrating Kipping’s intertextual citations from the visual, acoustic, and literary realm of nineteenth-century German Romanticism. He helps to identify the reasons why former East Germans were able to see their own reflections in the film, despite its unconventional structure and its allegorical setting and characters.

Ralf Schenk

The Crucified Grandfather

First Published as “Der gekreutzigte Großvater” in the Wochenpost

(June 26, 1991).

Translated by Troy Byler.

This film is an event. It could become an emblematic point in the history of the German cinema, a milestone on the stony path of renewal that DEFA currently has to tread. Das Land hinter dem Regenbogen (The Land beyond the Rainbow, FRG 1992) bids farewell to realism and dives into the depths of elemental and sensual symbolism, of archaic figures and motifs. It takes this plunge with such speed and such force as to leave one reeling. It is difficult and uncompromising, like its director.

Herwig Kipping, born in 1948, had already caused a stir at the Babelsberg film academy (Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen “Konrad Wolf”) with his graduation film Hommage à Hölderlin (Homage to Hölderlin, GDR 1983). This was a montage of lyrical and mystical scenes from the despair of a man who, seeing his creative ideal threatened, protects it in the philosophical architecture of his thoughts and is thereby declared crazy. Kipping also used the examination of Hölderlin as a means of understanding himself, allowing the essay film to become the mirror of his own soul. Those who knew this film would not be surprised to hear that the director soon afterwards ran into serious trouble.