THE DOCUMENTARY LEIPZIG IM HERBST by Andreas Voigt, Gerd Kroske, and cinematographer Sebastian Richter depicts Leipzig’s turbulent protest culture leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Individuals from several layers of society shed light on the situation in East Germany at that time. The article “Ende des Schweigens,” published in February 1990 in the West’s Süddeutsche Zeitung, announces the first screening of the film in a West German city. The Wende Flicks retrospective and DVD box set from the DEFA Film Library pair Leipzig im Herbst with Östliche Landschaft, a short essayistic film by Eduard Schreiber and shot by Sebastian Richter. The two films not only share Richter’s camerawork but also maintain dissident ideologies antithetical to pre-Wende DEFA documentary norms. In Leipzig im Herbst, it is the effort to capture the fleeting nature of the GDR’s reform movement that recasts the role of DEFA documentarians; in Östliche Landschaft, it is the critical rendering of GDR landscapes that interrogates the country’s dubious cultural, political, and environmental legacy. Despite the Wende’s reinvigoration of the East’s nonfiction filmmaking, a short statement from 1992 by the (formerly West German) Filmbewertungsstelle Wiesbaden (FBW, today the Deutsche Film- und Medienbewertung), a board for film and media evaluation, reveals the difficulty that such Wende films faced in Germany’s unified film culture. Because the committee did not fully understand Östliche Landschaft’s GDR symbolism, it refused to recognize the film with an official Prädikat as a culturally and aesthetically valuable (wert-voll) or highly valuable (besonders wertvoll) work of German film art.

End of Silence

First published as “Ende des Schweigens” in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (February 20, 1990).

Translated by Peter Blank.

Leipzig im Herbst: Showcasing GDR Documentary Film in Marl.

At the end of November last year, the thirty-second International Leipzig Documentary and Short Film Week, with more than a thousand festival attendees from all over the world, opened with the documentary film Leipzig im Herbst. In the context of the cooperation between the Leipzig DOK Film Festival and the Adolf Grimme Award, this film by Andreas Voigt, Gerd Kroske and Sebastian Richter—three filmmakers from the DEFA Documentary Film Studio in Berlin-Babelsberg—will be showcased for the first time to a West German audience on Wednesday, February 21, 1990, at 7:00 pm, in the large conference room of the Marl City Hall.